How Recent Migrants Develop Trust Through Community Commerce: The Emergence of Sociotechnical Adaptation

Abstract

Trust is key to community commerce or peer-to-peer e-commerce where transactions happen within local communities. Trust is especially vital among migrants who move to new countries and need time to develop trust after arrival. To understand migrants' trust development in community commerce and its potential and challenges for supporting their transition to the United States, we conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with migrants who had lived there for three years or less. We highlight practices embedded in difficulties engaging with technologies in a new place. We identify four forms of migrants' trust and show how their offline experiences with local communities reflect their online trust development in community commerce and vice versa, thereby creating unique challenges in their adaptation to new technologies. We coin the term sociotechnical adaptation to frame migrants' distinctive adjustments to social media technologies in a new country. We conclude with implications for creating community commerce platforms that foster migrants' trust and a reflection on how sociotechnical adaptation may vary among diverse migrant populations.