Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore examines the role of mobile communication in the acculturation of South Asian labor migrants to Singapore, adopting a mobile phone appropriation model and following a pluralistic-typological approach. While presenting data from a questionnaire survey and interviews with low-skilled migrants from Bangladesh and India in Singapore, it explores how their specific social conditions, including their transient status and low entitlements in their host country, influenced their mobile phone appropriation. It considers the links these migrants established and retained with their countries of origin and residence to identify several types of appropriation and acculturation types among the various populations.

Reviews

This is important, ground-breaking research on migrant workers use of mobile phones to acculturate into their host countries. Well written and so timely, the book contributes to our understanding of the role of mobile communication to potentially bridge intercultural divides. A must read! -- Robert Shuter, Marquette University
The communication practices of migrants are crucial for their successful adaptation and well-being. Through insightful fieldwork and theoretically-informed analysis, this pithy volume sheds light on the burdens and gratifications migrants experience when engaging in mobile communication to maintain ties with family as they negotiate uncharted territory. -- Sun Sun Lim, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Author Bio

Rajiv Aricat is research fellow at the School of Social Sciences, NTU, Singapore. Rich Ling is Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and adjunct at the University of Michigan.