Forced child marriages as a form of child trafficking

Child trafficking and child marriages have been condemned globally as practices which are harmful to girls' health and which violate their rights. The significance of child trafficking and child marriages for a range of development outcomes explains why both are prohibited by law and given recognition as major policy issues in many countries. Despite international conventions and corresponding regional conventions and national legislations and the efforts of numerous non-governmental, faith-based and international organisations, many girls (especially in developing countries) are still trafficked and/or subjected to forced and early marriages and the measurement of this practice remains relatively unsophisticated. This paper demonstrates that some child marriages have slave-like characteristics similar to those of child trafficking and can thus be argued to be a form of child trafficking. This is because children in forced marriages coerced into these unions and are made to engage in acts similar to victims of sex and labour trafficking.     

Rethinking motivational challenges amongst young adults on the margin

This article is concerned with how motivation to take an education can be stimulated in young adults who are on the margins of the labour market and educational system. It is widely accepted that young adults in such a position have motivational problems regarding education because of negative schooling experiences, interrupted education, absenteeism, etc. Despite this, in Europe, education is commonly proposed as the solution to the problem of the high proportion of 15–29 year-olds who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). This paradox of having to motivate young adults under pressure is the focus of the article. The article argues that there is a need to theoretically redefine motivation as a phenomenon linked to the individual to a more contextually embedded understanding of motivation as the result of a process between the young and their surroundings, opportunities and perspectives. The article presents a model with five motivational orientations suggesting a new perspective on re-motivating young adults on the margin of the labour market and educational system, while it also discusses the challenges connected to promoting a focus on motivation at a time when the liberalisation of education is increasingly central to the welfare state strategy.     

Labour,Legality and shifts in the Public/Private divide

This article discusses the changing role that work performed in private homes has played, and continues to play, in migration law in the Netherlands and at the EU level. It explores to what degree work performed in the home is defined as (exploitative) contractual labour or as inherent to family life, and what this means for claims to residence rights as a precursor to citizenship. It does this by reviewing case law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and of the European Court of Human Rights (EctHR) against the background of the Dutch case. It reveals tension between how citizenship is constructed and reproduced at the national level and how it is constructed and reproduced at the EU level. Following Adam McKeown, this article concludes that different perspectives on (reproductive) labour as a qualification for citizenship may reflect different perspectives on (reproductive) labour and the quality of citizenship.

Policy Implications

• Third Country Nationals must be allowed to reside in the EU with their EU children, to ensure the latter's effective enjoyment of fundamental rights.
• Policies to combat trafficking of domestic workers must respect family life.
• Family migration policies must allow individual family members enough scope to resist exploitation within families.
• Policies concerning labour protection, social protection and migration should no longer take the breadwinner‐citizen as point of departure, but the current reality of flexible labour relations in which the distinctions between home and work, and between employment and self‐employment, are no longer sharply defined.

     

Stitching-up the labour market

In mainstream International Political Economy (IPE) writings on globalization, the multinational corporation (MNC) is placed at the centre of the emergence of a global market economy. Allied to this view is the normative position that these firms will have a positive, developmental impact on the states that they invest in. This article presents a gendered political economy perspective on the process of foreign direct investment (FDI), arguing that liberal IPE has failed to understand adequately the impact of the MNC on host states because of its attachment to ideas of rational action and modernization, and its assumption that the market is a gender-neutral space. By contrast, in this article, I argue that by looking at the gendered nature of recruitment practices within an MNC we are forced to confront the way in which firms work with existing inequalities embedded in the economy of the host state in order to secure a supply of low cost labour. The article presents case study research from an MNC operating in Malaysia, focusing on how company recruitment intersects with local social divisions based upon gender, ethnicity as well as age, rural–urban divides, class and education. I suggest that via its recruitment strategies, the firm plays a role in the construction of gendered and racialized inequalities. I argue that the MNC needs to be investigated as a site for the active construction of gendered identities across globalizing production lines, thus moving away from the traditional focus of feminist analysis of East Asian development on the experiences of the workers themselves.     

‘Why Do All the Women Disappear?’ Gendering Processes in a Political Science Department

The article provides an in‐depth analysis of the gendering processes among PhD candidates in a political science department. It uses Joan Acker's theory of gendered organizations operating through four dimensions: the gendered division of labour, gendered interaction, gendered symbols and gendered interpretations of one's position in the organization. The article combines this approach with theories of hidden discrimination. The key theoretical aim is to contribute to gendered organizational theory by examining the ways in which hidden discrimination and the gendered organization work together. This generates detailed and differentiated knowledge about the mechanisms of hidden discrimination that produce gender inequalities in the department. The findings presented in this article point to the role of gendered division of labour and the lack of information about departmental practices. PhD supervision by men is a particularly strong structural barrier for women because of the gendered nature of interaction in supervision and the difficulties that female PhD students have in a male‐dominated environment. The article further contributes to debates on gendered organizations by focusing upon the gendered symbols of expertise in political science. These symbols reproduce the man as the political scientist norm and result in women interpreting their own position as marginal or as outsiders.     

More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives. Organizations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non‐humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some non‐human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organizations. More‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organizational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalized others, human and non‐human.     

Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants,Economic Activism and Class Transformations

This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a fluid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women reflect the importance of recognizing migrant workers' multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract workers, as well as the performativity of research and advocacy work.     

Migrant Domestic Workers in Asia: Transnational Variations and Policy Concerns

The labour force of the migrant domestic workers (MDWs) has become one of the significant policy concerns in Asia. Most of the Asian countries are not following (or not to an equal extent) the Domestic Workers Convention 2011 (No. 189) which has been adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO). The objective of this article is to show the transnational variations and policy concerns of the MDWs in Asia. Based on content analysis, the authors found that there are considerable transnational variations of the MDWs in terms of their age and nature of work, legal identity, working hours, and remuneration across Asian countries. These variations have serious policy concerns in a number of areas such as lack of available data of the MDWs, working conditions, exploitations, and gender issues. The findings of the article would be an important guideline for adopting new legislation and labour policy for the MDWs in Asia.     

Emigration and development: the case of a Bangladeshi village

This article examines the developmental consequences of international labour migration in a Bangladeshi village. The data are from Hoglakandi, a village 30 kilometres south-east of Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. A structured questionnaire with both open-ended and closed category questions was used among 50 Singapore returnees, supplemented with additional in-depth interviews. International labour migration has often been seen by many sending countries as a short cut to development because of its role in unemployment relief, balance of payments relief, and capital formation at national level. The study argues that the causes and effects of emigration can better be understood only when the process is placed within its local context, since what may prove to be advantageous at the national level may prove to be detrimental to a household or community or vice-versa. It demonstrates how the contribution of labour migration is merely the transformation of labour into a structural component of the international political economy. The Hoglakandi experience reveals that labour migration does not fuel the local economy from an external pipeline of remittances and skill acquisition, rather it drains local resources that retard the development.     

Policy Implications for Addressing Roma Precarious Migration Through Employment at Home

Roma migration from Romania is often precarious and takes place in circumstances that increase pre‐existent levels of vulnerability. For many, migration is a last resort solution for navigating an insecure economic environment. For others, it has become a source of profit they draw upon, sometimes at the expense of the most vulnerable members of Roma communities. The major challenge this article addresses is how to create the enabling circumstances at home in order to provide alternatives to precarious migration for Roma. Informed by interviews with Roma migrants and with local authorities, this article examines the policy options at local level, addressing Roma precarious migration. It examines the limitations of the current employment policies in relation to Roma in order to identify what seem to work, what sounds promising and what does not work. It advises that job fairs and counselling campaigns are likely to fail, as they do not tackle the structural constraints keeping Roma outside the labour market. Unless linked with realistic employment opportunities, training courses also remain precarious strategies for labour market integration. The article also argues that individualized interventions (including repatriation schemes) are likely to increase community divides. The article supports structural, community‐level measures for tackling unemployment and argues that future policies need to have Roma communities as the ‘unit of intervention’, because the social preconditions for migration are likely to be generated at this level. This policy proposal is grounded in the research finding that an apparently consistent group of Roma migrants, prone to deceitful recruitment and precarious migration, would endorse reasonable and stable economic solutions at home. Yet accepting that circular migration may be inevitable for a number of Roma is an important ingredient when designing policy interventions.     

Preliminary observations on globalisation and the migration of sport labour

Focusing on sport labour migration, several broader issues regarding labour migration and globalisation are highlighted. The observations made, and the connections drawn, will be somewhat preliminary in nature. Several dimensions and issues of sport labour migration and globalisation are examined. A range of sports in different societies and across continents are also considered. This migration must be viewed as part of other global cultural flows. Discussion of these flows precedes the case study that focuses on the role of, and the resistance to, American sport labour migrants in the commodification of English basketball over the past two decades, the paper concludes by drawing together the strands of sport migration and global sport development.     

New Zealand's turbulent waters: the use of forced labour in the fishing industry

In this article, we make an empirical and conceptual contribution to the emerging debate on unfree labour in the context of labour chains and global value chains. We recast an historical view of poor labour practices aboard some foreign charter vessels fishing in New Zealand's waters as something more nefarious. Applying the International Labour Organization (ILO) and European Commission (EC) operational indicators of human trafficking for forced labour to 293 interviews, we evaluate the extent to which we can consider migrant fishing crew aboard South Korean vessels as victims of forced labour. We find that they are indeed victims of forced labour and that there is a need to extend the ILO/EC operational indicators to take into account exit strategies. Specifically, there is insufficient recognition of deception, exploitation and coercion at the point of exit, which can prevent a trafficked victim from exiting the employment relationship. Thus, it is crucial to take account of all stages, from recruitment to exit, to understand fully unfree labour in labour and global value chains.     

Trafficking,Exploitation and Migration on the Thailand‐Burma Border: A Qualitative Study

Migrant workers from Burma 1 often experience exploitation, abuse and violations at various stages of travel to and within Thailand and in workplaces in Thailand. Guided by Zimmerman et al.'s conceptual framework, which identifies the potential risks associated with trafficking process, this article presents findings from in‐depth interviews with 61 migrant workers living and working in and around Mae Sot, Thailand, on the Thailand‐Burma border, to describe the broader context of irregular migration from Burma to Thailand, and trafficking‐related risks in this context. Results demonstrate that use of transporters (“carries”) and brokers in order to travel to Thailand and find employment can enable trafficking. Moreover, migrant workers are exposed to a range of exploitative experiences in workplaces in Thailand, including violence, coercion, and economic exploitation. This article explores dynamics of migration that can enable trafficking in this context, as well as exploitative working conditions consistent with forced labour.     

Ambicultural blending between Eastern and Western paradigms: Fresh perspectives for international management research

East and Southeast Asian worldviews are distinctly different from those of the West. Westerners and Asians construct their environments differently, not least because they construct the notion of ‘self’ very differently. This paper describes and exemplifies distinctions in cognitive and linguistic styles between the East and the West and outlines the implications of these styles for environmental perspectives and research paradigms. Examples from Thailand illustrate the philosophical roots and practical implications of an indigenous Eastern perspective for local business interactions. We explore the privilege afforded in Western, Cartesian paradigms in (Asian) management research and stimulate debate on the benefits of promoting alternative Asian indigenous perspectives for both management research and management practice. We support the idea that Asian management discourse needs more self-confidence and deserves a more prominent place in international research, not least because international management research will greatly benefit from freshly ‘blended’ perspectives that incorporate Eastern and Western perspectives.     

Understanding the use of “twinkie,” “banana,” and “FOB”: Identifying the origin,role, and consequences of internalized racism within Asian America

Where does internalized racism come from? How is it sustained and perpetuated within the Asian American community? What is the role and consequence of internalized racism within the Asian American community? This article reviews the existing literature to map the origin, role, and consequences of internalized racism among Asian Americans. Research on internalized racism must examine more than individual behaviors, otherwise it falls victim to conceiving of individuals as “racial dupes” (i.e., an individual who has been deceived into supporting existing racial hierarchies and systems of racial inequalities). However, the research should also veer away from an over emphasis on individual agency and resistance because doing so ignores the larger structural systems of inequality that exist, via colonial mentality and racialization, which influence individual behaviors. Future research on internalized racism must engage both perspectives to hold accountable the connection between broader racialization processes and everyday interactions driven by internalized racism.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Natural Disasters and Human Trafficking: Do Disasters Affect State Anti‐Trafficking Performance?

Despite the oft noted negative connection between natural disasters and human trafficking, no quantitative study has been performed. Natural disasters, like conflict, can destroy homes and the economic security of individuals forcing them to migrate and making them targets for traffickers. This article tests the link between a state's ability to address trafficking and natural disasters, testing the popular prediction that a state's capabilities will be strained as increased natural disasters occur thus producing a negative effect. The findings though demonstrate that states are actually more likely to perform better in their efforts to confront trafficking. I argue that this is because natural disasters actually strengthen and enhance the state, and particularly its security institutions, in responding to these events. I place these findings in the context of other recent quantitative studies of trafficking that have also produced contradictory results when compared with the field's qualitative studies.     

Turkey's Response to Sex Trafficking of Migrant Women: Is It Efficient Enough?

Human trafficking for sexual exploitation is a serious problem affecting especially women and children. Turkey has been particularly affected by sex trafficking because of the large numbers of female migrants that it receives. This article aims to critically assess the effectiveness of Turkey's current policies against sex trafficking using a feminist theoretical perspective with a particular focus on migrant women. To this end, the scope of the problem in Turkey, the supply and demand sides of sex trafficking, and the existing policies are discussed. Sex trafficking is examined at the intersection of Turkey's migration and prostitution regimes. It is argued that Turkey's response to sex trafficking has been inefficient because it currently focuses only on the economic supply side of the problem, ignoring the patriarchal demand side of it. The article concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations for Turkey that could help reduce sex trafficking in this country.     

Rationalities and Images Underlying Labour Migration from Bangladesh to Malaysia

Most studies of temporary labour migration use economic models or examine the economic rationales of migrants to explain why people are moving. Although in migration research new approaches and perspectives have been introduced lately, temporary labour migration, especially in the global South, is still defined primarily as purely economic in nature. This article concentrates on the migrants and their rationalities for migrating, their networks as well as their perceptions and interpretations of the situation they are confronted with abroad to argue that concentrating solely on economic aspects means to lose sight of the tremendous role images and myths about migration in general and receiving countries in particular do play. Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia, who have contributed to the remarkable economic success of the country during the last decades, are in the focus. The construction of the images and the role networks play within these processes will be analysed using data gathered from field research in both settings. Of special interest in this context is the construction of a Muslim brotherhood between the countries for an understanding of the migration flows. This article intends to broaden the current discussions on temporary labour migration by analysing not only the different motives and rationalities but relating them to the constructed images in the new spaces that temporary labour migration has constituted. This important link is missing so far in studies on this global phenomenon.