ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the research on the human face of global mobility. Both Social Network Analysis as well as the sociology of inequality provides telling arguments and examples for class-specific forms of cross-border mobility and interaction. The literature on globalisation and transnationalisation highlights the outstanding role of economical, political and social elites. To test the hypothesis of unequal transnationalisation, the empirical part of the chapter makes use of survey data gathered in the spring of 2006 as part of a representative survey of 2,700 German citizens, funded by the German Research Foundation. Analytically, one can distinguish between the perspectives of transnationalisation from above and transnationalisation from below. The issue of social inequality of participation in new forms of border crossing is not self-explanatory. However, a closer look at real networks and cross-border mobility shows that the hypothesis of a global or transnational mobility for the entire population is misleading.
