The Spatial Structure of Transnational Human Activity

Starting from conflictive predictions of hitherto disconnected debates in the natural and social sciences, this article examines the spatial structure of transnational human activity (THA) worldwide (a) across eight types of mobility and communication and (b) in its development over time. It is shown that the spatial structure of THA is similar to that of animal displacements and local-scale human motion in that it can be approximated by Lévy flights with heavy tails that obey power laws. Scaling exponent and power-law fit differ by type of THA, being highest in refuge-seeking and tourism and lowest in student exchange. Variance in the availability of resources and opportunities for satisfying associated needs appears to explain these differences. Over time (1960-2010), the Lévy-flight pattern remains intact and remarkably stable, contradicting the popular notion that socio-technological trends lead to a "death of distance." Humans have not become more "global" over time, they rather became more mobile in general, i.e. they move and communicate more at all distances. Hence, it would be more adequate to speak of "mobilization" than of "globalization." Longitudinal change occurs only in some types of THA and predominantly at short distances, indicating regional rather than global shifts.

[1]  Steffen Mau.  Social Transnationalism: Lifeworlds Beyond The Nation-State , 2010 .

[2]  Wei Liu.  CURVEFIT: Stata module to produces curve estimation regression statistics and related plots between two variables for alternative curve estimation regression models , 2013 .

[3]  G. Barnett,et al.  The international student exchange network: 1970 & 1989 , 1995 .

[4]  P. Neal Ritchey,et al.  Spatial Distribution of Opportunities and Magnitude of Migration , 1985 .

[5]  Robert I. McDonald,et al.  The distance decay of similarity in ecological communities , 2007 .

[6]  Young Hee Choi,et al.  The effect of social and physical distance on the global communication networks , 1995 .

[7]  Adéla Souralová.  Helma Lutz: The New Maids. Transnational Women and the Care Economy London, New York: Zed Books 2011, 241 s. (recenze) , 2012 .

[8]  N. Schiller,et al.  Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences , 2002, Sociology of Power.

[9]  D. Isaacs.  Asylum seekers , 2013, Journal of paediatrics and child health.

[10]  E. Deutschmann.  Regionalization and Globalization in Networks of Transnational Human Mobility, 2000-2010 , 2015 .

[11]  Barry Wellman,et al.  Geography of Twitter networks , 2012, Soc. Networks.

[12]  Sheena Bell,et al.  Global education digest 2011: Comparing education statistics across the world , 2011 .

[13]  E. Recchi.  Mobile Europe: The Theory and Practice of Free Movement in the EU , 2015 .

[14]  Edward E. Leamer,et al.  International Trade Theory: The Evidence , 1994 .

[15]  K. Head,et al.  The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade , 2004, The Review of Economics and Statistics.

[16]  J. Delhey,et al.  Measuring the Europeanization of Everyday Life: Three New Indices and an Empirical Application , 2014 .

[17]  W. Shaw,et al.  South-South Migration and Remittances , 2007 .

[18]  Min Zhou.  Intensification of geo-cultural homophily in global trade: Evidence from the gravity model , 2011 .

[19]  E. Deutschmann.  Between Collaboration and Disobedience: The Behavior of the Guantánamo Detainees and its Consequences , 2013 .

[20]  Desa.  Role of the International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics 2008 , 2017 .

[21]  John Allen,et al.  A shrinking world? : global unevenness and inequality , 1995 .

[22]  K. Deutsch,et al.  A note on a generalized concept of effective distance , 2007 .

[23]  J. Levinsohn,et al.  Chapter 26 International trade theory: The evidence , 1995 .

[24]  Jeffrey S. Pitblado,et al.  From the Help Desk: Local Polynomial Regression and Stata Plugins , 2003 .

[25]  Kyumin Lee,et al.  Exploring Millions of Footprints in Location Sharing Services , 2011, ICWSM.

[26]  J. Gottmann,et al.  Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography , 1993 .

[27]  Chaoming Song,et al.  Modelling the scaling properties of human mobility , 2010, 1010.0436.

[28]  J. Sempsey.  The death of distance: How the communications revolution will change our lives , 1998 .

[29]  Michael Biggs.  Strikes as Forest Fires: Chicago and Paris in the Late Nineteenth Century1 , 2005, American Journal of Sociology.

[30]  Peter Nijkamp,et al.  The Death of Distance Revisited: Cyber‐Place, Physical and Relational Proximities , 2012 .

[31]  Jon Crowcroft,et al.  Planet-scale human mobility measurement , 2009, HotPlanet '10.

[32]  S. Stouffer.  Intervening opportunities: a theory relating mobility and distance , 1940 .

[33]  Thomas Faist.  Towards Transnational Studies: World Theories, Transnationalisation and Changing Institutions , 2010 .

[34]  Frances Cairncross.  The death of distance : how the communications revolution will change our lives , 1997 .

[35]  Victoria Reyes.  The structure of globalized travel: A relational country-pair analysis , 2013 .

[37]  Nicolas E. Humphries,et al.  Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour , 2008, Nature.

[38]  P. Taylor.  The Gutenberg Galaxy , 2013 .

[39]  F. Bartumeus,et al.  Helical Lévy walks: Adjusting searching statistics to resource availability in microzooplankton , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[40]  Eszter Hargittai,et al.  Phone calls and fax machines: The limits to globalization , 1999 .

[41]  H. Larralde,et al.  Lévy walk patterns in the foraging movements of spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) , 2003, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[42]  Torsten Hägerstrand,et al.  Innovation Diffusion As a Spatial Process , 1967 .

[43]  Salvatore Babones,et al.  The Country-Level Income Structure of the World-Economy , 2005 .

[44]  E. Ravenstein.  The Laws of Migration , 1885, Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging.

[45]  Cecilia Mascolo,et al.  A Tale of Many Cities: Universal Patterns in Human Urban Mobility , 2011, PloS one.

[46]  Niklas Luhmann,et al.  Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 1997 .

[47]  D. Harvey,et al.  The Condition of Postmodernity , 2020, The New Social Theory Reader.

[48]  Theresa Kuhn.  Experiencing European Integration: Transnational Lives and European Identity , 2015 .

[49]  A. Warleigh-Lack,et al.  Rethinking EU Studies: The Contribution of Comparative Regionalism , 2010 .

[50]  J. Gerhards,et al.  Zur Transnationalisierung der Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik , 1999 .

[51]  Markus Schroer,et al.  Räume, Orte, Grenzen : auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums , 2006 .

[52]  H. Stanley,et al.  Optimizing the success of random searches , 1999, Nature.

[53]  E. Durkheim.  Suicide: A Study in Sociology , 1897 .

[54]  Edward Miller,et al.  A NOTE ON THE ROLE OF DISTANCE IN MIGRATION: COSTS OF MOBILITY VERSUS INTERVENING OPPORTUNITIES* , 1972 .

[55]  György Jóna,et al.  Global Education Digest 2006, Comparing Education Statistics Across the World , 2007 .

[56]  M. Shlesinger,et al.  Lévy Walks Versus Lévy Flights , 1986 .

[57]  Theresa Kuhn.  Individual transnationalism, globalisation and euroscepticism: An empirical test of Deutsch's transactionalist theory , 2011 .

[58]  C. Ozden,et al.  Where on Earth is Everybody? The Evolution of Global Bilateral Migration 1960-2000 , 2011 .

[59]  T. Kano,et al.  Exaggerated Death of Distance : Revisiting Distance Effects on Regional Price Dispersions Kazuko Kano , 2012 .

[60]  Scott Kirsch,et al.  The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space , 1995 .

[61]  Injong Rhee,et al.  On the levy-walk nature of human mobility , 2011, TNET.

[62]  J. Delhey,et al.  Between ‘class project’ and individualization: The stratification of Europeans’ transnational activities , 2015 .

[63]  Mark J. Miller,et al.  The Age of Migration , 1993 .

[64]  Fabian J. Theis,et al.  Money Circulation, Trackable Items, and the Emergence of Universal Human Mobility Patterns , 2008, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[65]  L. Spångberg.  The world is flat. , 2005, Oral surgery, oral medicine, oral pathology, oral radiology, and endodontics.

[66]  Mark Buchanan,et al.  Ecological modelling: The mathematical mirror to animal nature , 2008, Nature.

[67]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Understanding individual human mobility patterns , 2008, Nature.

[68]  Helma Lutz.  The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy , 2011 .

[69]  E. Deutschmann.  Between Collaboration and Disobedience , 2016 .

[70]  T. Geisel,et al.  The scaling laws of human travel , 2006, Nature.

[71]  J. Nye,et al.  Transnational Relations and World Politics: An Introduction , 1971, International Organization.

[72]  Piotr Sapiezynski,et al.  Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution , 2014, PloS one.

[73]  T. Mayer,et al.  Notes on CEPII’s Distances Measures: The GeoDist Database , 2011 .

[74]  P. Levitt,et al.  The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations , 2007 .

[75]  George Kingsley Zipf,et al.  Human behavior and the principle of least effort , 1949 .

[76]  B. Mckercher,et al.  The Impact of Distance on International Tourist Movements , 2008 .

[77]  A. Appadurai.  Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization , 1996 .

[78]  S. Brams.  Transaction Flows in the International System , 1966, American Political Science Review.

[79]  James N. Rosenau,et al.  Transnational Competence in an Emergent Epoch , 2002 .

[80]  J. Delhey.  European social integration: From convergence of countries to transnational relations between peoples , 2004 .

[81]  Alex R. Piquero,et al.  DISTANCE DECAY REEXAMINED , 1999 .

[82]  W. Tobler.  A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region , 1970 .

[83]  Lars Backstrom,et al.  The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph , 2011, ArXiv.

[84]  Harriet Ritvo.  on the animal turn , 2007, Daedalus.

[85]  Friedrich Engels,et al.  Manifesto of the Communist Party , 2011 .

[86]  Mark E. J. Newman,et al.  Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data , 2007, SIAM Rev..