Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article:
JANET GOLDEN, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle.
INGEBORG MARSHALL, A History and Ethnography of the BEOTHUK     

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article:
MARC AUGÉ, Oblivion.
AAFKE E. KOMTER, Social Solidarity and the Gift.
IAN McKAY, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History.
ALAN SEARS, A Good Book, In Theory: A Guide to Theoretical Thinking.     

Understanding the Role of Immigrant Families' Cultural and Structural Mechanisms in Immigrant Children's Experiences beyond High School: Lessons for Social Work Practitioners

The destinies of the contemporary immigrant generation are challenged by the profound reshaping of the U.S. economy and the increasing diversity of new immigrant communities from the Latin American and Asian regions. Family represents a key link between immigrant children's social adjustment beyond high school and relationships with mainstream society. Placing an emphasis on culture and social structure, this article reviews contemporary literature and provides a framework for knowledge that helps social work practitioners and policy planners explore the distinguishing features of immigrant families that confer an advantage within their children's post-secondary education or labor market participation. Also considered is how culture and social structure overlap and interact to exert a significant influence on the future economic prospects of immigrant children.     

Culture,Intermarriage, and Immigrant Women's Labor Supply

We examine the impact of culture on the work behaviour of second‐generation immigrant women in Canada. We contribute to the literature by analysing the role of intermarriage in intergenerational transmission of culture and its effect on labour market outcomes. Using female labour force participation and total fertility rates in the country of ancestry as cultural proxies, we find that culture affects the female labour supply. Cultural proxies are significant in explaining number of hours worked by second‐generation women with immigrant parents. The impact of culture is significantly larger for women with immigrant parents who share the same ethnic background than for those with intermarried parents. The weaker effect of culture for women raised in intermarried families stresses the importance of intermarriage in assimilation process. Our findings imply that government policies targeting women's labour supply may have differential effects on the labour market behaviour of immigrant women of different ancestries.

Policy Implications

• The result that culture has statistically significant impact on second‐generation immigrant women's labour supply has policy implications in terms of the government programmes and benefits that target the labour supply of women and immigration policies in general.
• Our findings imply that government policies targeting women's labour supply may have differential influence on the labour market behaviour of second‐generation immigrant women of different ancestries.

     

Health Insurance,from a Child Language Broker's Perspective

In the midst of dramatic changes to American health care law there is need to understand the challenges that vulnerable populations encounter in obtaining and managing health insurance. Research has found that child language brokers, children who mediate language and culture for their immigrant families, assist with health‐related matters. We report on focus groups with 17 language brokers living in Central Los Angeles. In this article we detail their experiences language brokering for health insurance and their knowledge of health insurance and policies that apply to their immigrant families. We illuminate some barriers immigrant families face as well as how they navigate them. We conclude with policy implications, particularly in relation to making health insurance more accessible to non‐English speaking and immigrant populations.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: CULTURAL RESISTANCE: Challenging beliefs about Men, Women and Therapy . Edited by Kathy Weingarten. CONSTRUCTING THE SELF, CONSTRUCTING AMERICA: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy . Philip Cushman. CUCKOO FOREVER MORE . Leonard K. Szymczak.     

The Jewish dead in the great war as an indicator for the location,size and social structure of Anglo‐Jewry in 1914

Use of statistics of Jewish war dead from the Great War throws some light on the Jewish community in Great Britain at a time when the mass immigration from Eastern Europe had more or less run its course. The statistics show some discrepancies with commonly quoted figures from the ‘Jewish Year Book’, as Year Book data outside the smaller immigrant communities were often little more than guesses and had sharp underestimates for more anglicized communities. The picture at 1916 shows a similar distribution to the Jewish population today.     

Racialization and Black multiplicity: Generative paradigms for understanding Black immigrants

Black immigrants occupy a liminal space on the race ethnicity spectrum that defies traditional assimilation theories. The social distancing paradigm has emerged as one of the most influential theories to address this shortcoming in the field and explain the incorporation of Black immigrants. However, because this paradigm implicitly rests on an analogy to White immigrants, the articulation of Black ethnic options can often times be more derivative than generative. As a result, accounts of Black immigrant racialization reify provincialized notions of Blackness by relying on problematic comparisons to African American culture and outcomes. In this paper, I argue that moving away from these provincialized characterizations of Blackness requires building on theories of immigrant racialization that take Black multiplicities as its starting point. This review takes up that perspective in analyzing how narratives of Blackness emerge in segmented, classic, canonical, and neoclassical theories of assimilation. I then map out some theoretical and empirical trends that emerge across three waves of Black immigrant research agendas and outline the need to move beyond the White immigrant analogy in order to more aptly redefine Black immigrants for future research.     

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article:
IAN McINTOSH (ed.), Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader.
Thomas M. Kemple University of British Columbia
LINDA PERTUSATI, In Defense of Mohawk Land. Ethno-Political Conflict in Native North America.
RONALD RUDIN. Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec.     

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus

Book reviewed in this article:
ROLF knight, Indians At Work: An Informal History Of Native Indian Labour In British Columbia, 1858–1930
FRANS, J. SCHRYER, The Rancheros of Pisaflores: the History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico
RICHARD BORSHAY LEE, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society
Judith Nagata, Malaysian Mosaic: Perspectives from a Poly-Ethnic Society
DENISE HELLY, Idéologie et ethniciré: Les Chinois Macao a Cuba (1897–1886 )
JUNE NASH, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines     

Cultural Influences on Immigrant Women's Labor Force Participation: The Arab‐American Case1

Research on the economic activity of immigrant women has flourished in recent years. The current study extends this literature to examine the labor force activity of Arab‐American women, a group whose labor market experiences provide an exception to hitherto accepted theoretical explanations. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native‐born Arab‐American women resemble those of U.S.‐born white women. This study examines potential explanations for these differences using data from the U.S. Census and a national mail survey of Arab‐American women. Contrary to findings for other immigrant groups, differences among Arab‐American women cannot be explained by their human capital characteristics or family resources, but are almost entirely due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity, and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. This study concludes by underscoring the need for additional research on the impact of culture on immigrant women's employment.     

Source country culture and labor market assimilation of immigrant women in Sweden: evidence from longitudinal data

This paper analyzes the role of source country culture on gender roles for labor market assimilation of immigrant women in Sweden. Sweden ranks as one of the world’s most gender-equal countries and at the same time a recipient of many immigrants from countries with more traditional views on gender roles and gender equality. I find that the labor force participation of immigrant women in Sweden is related to their source country culture, in the sense that women from countries where women’s labor market participation is low (high) also have low (high) participation in the Swedish labor market. However, all immigrant women assimilate towards, but do not reach parity with, the participation rate of native women, and the difference between women from high- and low-participation countries diminishes with length of residence in Sweden. This indicates that source country culture on gender roles does not have a persistent effect on immigrant women’s labor market participation in Sweden. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of taking into account unobservable time-constant individual and source country factors when estimating the relationship between source country culture and immigrants’ labor market outcomes. Neglecting to control for these factors could lead researchers to misrepresent the rate of assimilation and overstate the effect of source country culture.     

Social worker and immigrant client experiences in multicultural service provision: Educational implications

Social work education, while committed to preparing students for anti-oppressive practice with immigrants and refugees, has not always been successful in achieving this goal. Student knowledge about and interest in cross-cultural practice, as evidenced in Canadian and US studies, often remains superficial and marginalized. This may in part be due to a lack of inclusion of practice wisdom and lived experiences of front-line practitioners and their clients. To remedy this deficit, 13 Canadian social workers of varied cultural backgrounds providing services in inner-city schools and 19 immigrant clients were interviewed in-depth to ascertain their perceptions of central elements of anti-oppressive practice with immigrant populations. Results yielded two major themes: Multifaceted Perception of Self and Other , which pertained to a recognition that culture was multifaceted, complex, and defined interactively; and Proactive Service Delivery , which pertained to active worker involvement in cultural bridging, brokering and advocacy. Implications for anti-oppressive social work education include a focus on multifaceted definition of culture, and admissions policies that promote multilingual, multicultural competencies.     

Social Capital Investment and Immigrant Economic Trajectories: A Case Study of Punjabi American Taxi Drivers in New York City

Although the scholarship on social capital and immigrant economic incorporation has sufficiently documented how immigrants mobilize social capital in their search for employment which often leads to the formation of immigrant niches, how social capital is processed after immigrants acquire employment and its significance for the preservation of immigrant employment niches is less well explored. This paper addresses this gap in the literature with a case study of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers in the New York metropolitan area. In particular, this study shows how a group of immigrant Punjabi taxi drivers mobilized social capital via embeddedness in co‐ethnic social networks and improved their working conditions – a process that must be considered in explanations of the Punjabi niche in the taxi industry for more than two decades. The study has implications for the relationship between social capital and the structure of the workplace or industry where immigrants are incorporated and its subsequent impact on immigrant economic trajectories. Further, this study contributes to the debate on the usefulness of ethnic communities for the adaptation of immigrant groups. Additionally, this research is relevant to the scholarship on the economic adaptation of South Asian (a subset of Asian Americans) immigrants, an understudied immigrant group in the United States.     

Nature,Society, History and Social Change

The Nature, Society and History theme is discussed in terms of the conceptual framework of 'biohistory'. Reference is made to its relevance to human health and well-being, societal metabolism and ecological sustainability. The power of human culture as an ecological force is emphasized. The Nature, Society and History paradigm is discussed in the context of the social changes that will be necessary for the achievement of ecological sustainability. It is suggested that it has an essential contribution to make not only in the academic world, but also in the general community.     

IMMIGRANTS AND ETHNICS:

Immigration is both an historical and contemporary phenomenon in the United States. As a result, various ancestral generations coexist. For example, third generation Polish American ethnics share social space with recent Polish immigrants in Chicago. While common ancestry leads immigrants and ethnics to think they ought to work together, dissimilarities between the groups lead to conflict. Two sources of conflict are identified. First, disparate cultural identities emerge because immigrant culture is embedded in the homeland, while ethnic culture is constructed over generations in the context of the host country. Second, immigrants and ethincs have different needs: the newcomers need to learn the culture of the host society, the established ethnics need to maintain an attachment to the culture of the home country. The findings suggest that ancestry does not always function as a basis for solidarity between immigrant and ethnic populations.     

Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants

Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.     

Attitudes of New Immigrant and Veteran-Resident Israeli Divorced Mothers Toward Single Motherhood

The aim of the study is to compare the attitudes of immigrant and veteran-resident divorced mothers toward single motherhood. The comparison focuses on two dimensions: personal attitudes and perceived social attitudes. Respondents included 100 divorced mothers who emigrated from the former Soviet Union after 1989 and 100 long-term Israeli divorced mothers. The immigrant divorced mothers, often having divorced following disagreement over the decision to emigrate, are forced to undergo parallel adjustment processes to a new society and to the new lifestyle inherent in single-parent households. Additionally, they are caught between attitudes toward single parenthood in their culture of origin, where divorce is common, and in Israeli culture, where the family plays a much more stable and central role. Results show that veteran-resident divorcees express significantly more favourable personal attitudes toward single motherhood, while immigrant divorcees perceive social attitudes as being more favourable. Immigration was found to affect personal and perceived social attitudes significantly, above and beyond demographic attributes.     

Hidden school dropout among immigrant students: a cross-sectional study

Actual school dropout among immigrant youth has been addressed in a number of studies, but research on hidden school dropout among immigrant students is rare. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze hidden school dropout among primary school students with an immigrant background. The analyses were performed using survey data of 1186 immigrant students in Swiss primary schools. Our results show that immigrant students’ academic achievement, their attitudes towards school-related values, and the quality of their relationships with classmates and teachers were significant predictors of their disengagement during classes. Moreover, our findings strongly suggest that those predictors that are important for actual school dropout are crucial for hidden school dropout as well. We conclude that low-achieving immigrant youth who do not value school and who have poor relationships with teachers and peers are especially at risk of hidden and, eventually, of actual school dropout.     

Israeli immigrants in the United States: The question of community

Despite their possession of many social advantages such as high levels of education, familiarity with Western, urban culture, Caucasian appearance, relative economic security and ties to an established, co-ethnic community, much literature on Israeli immigrants in the U.S. depicts them as plagued by social and psychological alienation to the extent that they are incapable of creating viable ethnic communities. This paper uses field work and photography collected within the Israeli immigrant population of Los Angeles to critically examine the assertion that Israeli immigrants in the U.S. are much less organized than would be predicted by recent theories on immigrant adaptation and community formation. Based on this research, we argue that while Israelis are ambivalent about their presence in the U.S., they have created a variety of communal activities involving entrepreneurship, religion, culture, politics and leisure.