Sin Coyote Ni Patrón: Why the “Migrant Network” Fails to Explain International Migration

The “migrant network” concept cannot explain large‐scale international migratory flows. This article goes beyond a critique of its a historical and post factum nature. First, I argue that restrictions on its composition and functions also render the migrant network unable to explain why such migratory flows continue or expand even further. Second, a review of five studies illustrates why this concept, the propositions on which it rests, the methods it employs, and the conclusions that it imparts must be reconsidered. Third, the network analysis literature, along with my research data from the Mexico‐U.S. case, suggest an alternative approach. “International migration networks” include those from the labor‐sending hometowns who are emphasized in migrant network studies, as well as a variety of other actors based in the militarized border zone and the labor‐receiving regions. I conclude that accurate studies of migration must include the employers that demand new immigrant workers, as well as the labor smugglers and all other actors that respond to this demand. Immigration studies that fail to do so provide erroneous analyses which camouflage the activities of many network actors, and furnish an academic fig leaf behind which unintended, counterproductive, and even lethal public policies have been implemented.     

Variétés de capitalisme ou entrepreneurs institutionnels? Une application aux cas de la sous‐traitance et de la formation de la main‐d'œuvre au Québec

Based on the theory of institutional entrepreneurs, this article examines the coexistence of different forms of governance within a given economic space. Since the approach based on models of capitalism does not make it possible to account for this institutional diversity on the same territory, a theoretical perspective centred on the innovative action of social actors has been used to explain such a phenomenon. Our demonstration is based on a comparative analysis of two recent cases of transformation of public labour policies in Quebec: outsourcing and labour force training. These two major contemporary employment relations issues which are part of the same environment, have brought into play the same social actors in very similar institutional frameworks and have nevertheless led to contrasting dynamics and results. The actor's autonomy, more than a model, allows us to understand the different institutional trajectories that have thus been adopted.     

Le bon,la brute et le migrant ? Le rôle négocié des acteurs religieux dans un dispositif policier d’enfermement des étrangers en Allemagne

Contrary to the French model, the German detention and deportation centre for irregular migrants that has been studied here does not allow for any third parties other than chaplains. However, their scope of action goes far beyond spiritual assistance and extends to the defence of detained aliens’ rights and political contestation of the confinement regime. The detention centre therefore brings together two professional groups, chaplains and police officers, whose goals are a priori irreconcilable. After explaining the origins of this unique juxtaposition, I will analyse here the impact of the presence of religious actors within the state confinement regime on the construction, by each group of actors, of its professional legitimacy and on the practices of assistance and control that go along with it.     

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839

This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.     

La « perruque » en usine : approche d’une pratique marginale, illégale et fuyante

A “homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews conducted mostly with retirees from a French aeronautics plant are used to show that this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. Homers shed light on a high degree of “complicity” between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Since the factory’s institutional framework has little room for this complicity, the silence surrounding homers is a sign probably of an inability to talk about them rather than of their marginality or illegality.     

Les professionnels du droit comme acteurs du politique : revue critique de la littérature nord-américaine et enjeux pour une importation en Europe continentale

For many years, North-American social sciences have been analyzing legal professionals as political actors, while in Continental Europe the relationship among law, politics, and society has remained under-examined. At the moment, a central project for US sociolegal studies is exporting to other political and legal contexts hypotheses previously tested inside US borders, raising the question of the generalizability and/or the globalization of US socio-legal analyses. After briefly describing why social sciences have been focusing on law and social changes in the United States, this article aims to determine what prerequisites are necessary for exporting sociolegal studies outside the US, devoting particular attention to historically contingent —and nationally-distinct— relations between law, political power and the social sciences.     

L’accountability à l’épreuve des incertitudes : le mandat des acheteurs d’énergie

Based on a survey of energy buyers in big industries, this article inquires into the different ways of explaining the actions they perform in situations of high, uncontrolled uncertainty. Describing energy buyers’ activities, the uncertainties and contradictions affecting them, shows how hard it is to explain them, make them visible or justify the decisions made. Energy buyers develop two forms of “accountability”: they claim to have been granted decision-making powers and ask to be evaluated on the basis of their results; or else they “socialize” their activities by involving corporate managers in decision-making. It is argued that “accountability” is stabilized in line with a collective learning process where the experience of uncertainty has a key place.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

A “shift in attitude”? Institutional change and sexual and gender-based crimes at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

ABSTRACT

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has been slow to address sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) crimes perpetrated during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. However, there appears to have been a tentative “shift in attitude” at the ECCC toward the investigation and prosecution of these crimes. This article draws on feminist institutionalist theories, first to explain the ECCC’s initial failure to prioritize SGBV and then to explain how and why this may have changed. The article suggests that such change has not arisen from the ECCC’s formal rules. Instead, various actors working with and around these “old rules” have drawn on these provisions, civil society initiatives and international and national gender norms to modify “informal” practices concerning the prosecution of SGBV at the ECCC. Sensitivity to SGBV is particularly important in hybrid, or internationalized, international criminal structures, which may be hindered by prohibitive practices emerging from both the international and national components of the institution.     

Entre « usage contrôlé », invisibilisation et externalisation. Le précariat étranger face au risque chimique en agriculture intensive

Based on the testimonies and career paths of Moroccan workers hired on seasonal contracts through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), this article shows how the governance of chemical risk in agriculture has authorized the circulation of toxic substances in the workplace. By setting up a regulatory framework for exposure, the “controlled use” of pesticides produces “clandestine” contamination and makes it possible to sidestep responsibility for its health effects. This paper explores the question of how the IOM's seasonal immigration process helps organize both the invisibilization of occupational exposure to pesticides and the outsourcing of the pathologies it causes.     

Gouverner l’environnement dans les villes européennes: des configurations d’acteurs restructurées pour la production des politiques urbaines

This article focuses on the evolution of the actors involved in environmental decision-making at the urban scale covering a period from the early eighties up to the present. Through the cases of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Saint-Étienne (France), we aim at showing that the shift in discourse from “local environment” to “sustainable development” lead to a dramatic change in the actors involved in the production of urban environmental policies. This evolution will be explained by a transformation of the sources of legitimacy of local political elites (with the rise of output-oriented legitimacy) and a transformation of the political resources they mobilised. This evolution could be analysed as a stronger investment of urban political elites in the “policies” dimension of their work.     

New Rage,New Perspectives?

The Eurozone crisis has led to a long and remarkable protest wave. Civil society raised its voice against the ever-harsher austerity measures implemented to deal with the crisis. The article focuses on the role of civil society and its potential to contribute new perspectives to the debate. Such a contribution would depend on two preconditions: 1. Civil society actors need to mobilize successfully to make their voices heard. 2. Civil society actors contribute a perspective that differs to the perspectives of actors from institutionalized politics. Both preconditions are analyzed empirically for two countries that are in very different situations in the crisis scenario: Greece and Germany. Greece has been hit most severely by the crisis; Germany is the most prominent country defining the crisis management, and it provides the largest share of credit guarantees for “crisis countries.” Social movement theory is used to explain the differing evolution of protests in the two countries. In the early phase of the crisis, the established landscape of political parties in both countries offered few opportunities for their citizens to vote in opposition to the crisis management, which is conducive to extra-parliamentary protest. Differences in deprivation, discursive opportunities and the resource basis of mobilization structures can explain differences in protest frequency but also to some extent the evolution of protest over time. Taking up Habermas’ argument regarding the specific perspective of civil society actors in the public debate, we then analyze to which extent the arguments of civil society actors deviate from those of more institutionalized actors. A discursive actor attribution analysis unveils that civil society actors are more sensitive to social problems and grand systemic questions. Moreover, civil society actors are less hesitant to blame actors on the EU level and other EU Member States, even though their overall contribution to the crisis debate is rather marginal.     

Botswana’s beef global commodity chain: Explaining the resistance to change

In an era of increasing global agricultural trade, many firms and farms seek to upgrade their agricultural commodity chains to become better integrated into global markets. Utilizing a global commodity chain (GCC) approach, this analysis unravels the challenges to and the potential consequences of upgrading Botswana’s beef commodity chain. Specifically, the argument is made that political, economic, and cultural influences in the GCC contribute to distinctive driving factors that have prevented upgrading or niche marketing of Botswana’s beef. In comparison to two other countries in the region (South Africa and Namibia) that have upgraded their beef GCCs, Botswana’s producer driven GCC has not upgraded due in large part to the existence of three disparate producer groups: commercial feedlot, commercial extensive grazing, and communal producers. The diverse expectations, norms, daily practices and identities of the various actors in Botswana’s beef GCC contribute to contradictory policies and practices. This study reveals that cultural differences in a GCC can affect the capacity of the actors to upgrade the chain. Although culture does not drive or determine the action of actors in a commodity chain, it does shape the meanings associated with particular commodities and influences the ways in which actors think and behave. Moreover, if upgrading strategies are culturally alien or alienating to a significant segment of actors within the chain, upgrading efforts will be resisted by those alienated actors.     

Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue

Over the last 15 years, a set of ideas now referred to as “thinking and working politically” (TWP) has coalesced into a “second orthodoxy” about how to take context into account when implementing development interventions. This approach stresses the importance of obtaining a better understanding of the local context (“thinking politically”) in order to support local actors to bring about sustainable developmental change (“working politically”). However, the evidence base to justify this new approach remains thin, despite a growing number of programmes which purport to be implementing it. Officials in development agencies struggle with putting it into practice and it is unclear how TWP differs—or not—from similar approaches, such as Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Doing Development Differently (DDD). This Special Issue sheds light on what TWP means in practice by examining a set of initiatives undertaken by both development partners and government departments in Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, China and India. This overview article outlines, in brief, each of the Special Issue's four papers and then draws out five lessons—for funders and for practitioners—from across all the papers. Our five lessons are: (1) the fundamental importance of undertaking political economy analysis (PEA) to adapt programmes to their contexts; (2) the importance of having a realistic level of ambition for interventions; (3) the need to support local ownership—not just “agreement ownership” (between a donor agency and government) or local “management ownership” of the programme, but critically “driver ownership” by generating trust with the key local actors driving change; (4) the need for a more effective set of tools for measuring results in complex programmes that attempt to achieve improvements in long‐run governance; and, (5) that although the political economy of donors is often seen as a barrier to applying TWP, the articles show how much can be done with a TWP approach if the analysis takes into account the political economy of donors as well as that of the local context. We conclude with a set of operational recommendations for donors and implementors, as well as suggestions of avenues for further research.     

Neoliberal feminism: The neoliberal rhetoric on feminism by Australian political actors

Feminism seems to be experiencing a resurgence. This research examines an Australian case where this resurgence produces some bizarre outcomes and an uncomfortable mix of moderate and neoliberal feminisms, as conservative women distance themselves from the term feminist and conservative men embrace it. We rhetorically analyse the discourse of four conservative leaders using an ideographic analysis to reveal how political actors evoke ideologically laden terminology to support specific courses of action. For the conservative women, the ideograph feminist was too heavily laden with history. A more feminine‐liberal political discourse allowed them to explain their own success in individual terms and, by substituting support for feminism with a broader gender equality agenda, they could explain the government's policy approach of individualized rather than collective or state support to advance the needs of women. They are articulating a postfeminism sensibility themselves and neoliberal feminist other. For the conservative men, the ideograph feminist did not reflect on their own personal success or careers; they were happy to embrace it for purely political purposes to advance their standing with the voting public and saw no significance in terms of the government's policy approach of neoliberal feminism.     

Le marché a dit. Intermédiaires financiers et managers dans le secteur électrique

The role played in the electricity industry by finance analysts, consultants and rating agencies has received too little attention in research on the liberalization of technical networks. Three arguments are brought forward. First of all, despite any rational argumentation, these intermediaries must be seen as ordinary actors with their interests, drawbacks and cognitive limits. Secondly, they have played an important part in transforming what used to be a tightly regulated industry. Their power mainly derives from their ability to influence the definition of the “right” policies and the production of information prior to decision-making. It takes the concrete form of an oligopoly power over two basic links in the information flow: big operations in the capital market and the ability to make comparisons between firms, sectors and countries and thus recommend the “right” allocation of resources. Thirdly, this quite real power does not have mechanical effects since it reflects a state of equilibrium within the firm, as the case of Suez proves. The relation between markets and firms is more interactive that it seems at first glance.     

From coherence to coheritization: explaining the rise of policy coherence in EU external policy

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the external policy of the European Commission has become increasingly entangled by the notion of policy coherence. Previously ‘siloed’ policy areas such as trade, agriculture, and development are increasingly approached as challenges only effectively resolved by addressing their positive and negative interlinkages. While the EC is critical of fundamental incoherencies between different policy areas, it simultaneously calls to harness synergies between them. To explain this ambiguous approach, we combine insights from speech act theory and cultural political economy. We aim for methodological triangulation by employing social network analysis, an explanatory narrative, and expert interviews. We argue that the Commission’s approach towards coherence can be understood as a process that reshapes the actor landscape around the discourse on coherence. By gradually pushing out the most outspoken actors, the Commission discursively resolves the inherent contradictions of reconciling free trade and development of the Global South.     

An institutional perspective of public relations practices in the Chinese cultural contexts

To respond to a recent call for a sociological turn to the promotion of institutional thought in public relations research, we propose a novel theoretical framework based on institutional work for studying PR practice in Chinese cultural contexts. Specifically, we attempted to stay away from the functional approach of examining PR outcomes, and focus on how institutional actors “navigate” the existing cultural contexts for institutionalising PR. We used triangulate methods based on 40 semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document collections. We found that PR actors do not passively respond to institutional pressures, but rather creatively and reflexively interpret and incorporate existing cultural aspects, especially guanxi and harmony, to construct and transform their PR practices. These practices offer insights into why and how guanxi, as well as other cultural factors, are integrated and legitimised in PR practice in China.     

Trade union pedagogy and cross‐border action

In this article, we examine the potential of global union pedagogy to address the structural and political challenges of cross‐border trade‐union action. We do so by proposing an analytical framework that draws on labour relations, political sociology and education to explain educational processes and outcomes as responses to the pitfalls of global labour campaigns and the inadequacy of global and local labour institutions. We proceed to assess the value of our framework by elaborating on its different dimensions – framing, synthesizing, connecting and regenerating – in relation to the educational work of a global union federation, namely the International Transport Workers' Federation. We find that an actor‐centred approach that combines top–down, bottom–up as and horizontal processes of collecting knowledge from different contexts and making links between different countries, industries and parts of supply chains can help actors realize that their seemingly diverse concerns are essentially different manifestations of the same problem.     

Explanations of How Love Crosses Class Lines: Cultural Complements and the Case of Cross‐Class Marriages

Sociologists know little about how actors explain their attraction to a partner who grew up in a different social class or why their accounts are likely. This is problematic as one form of social class heterophily is relatively common—heterophily by class origin. Drawing upon data from interviews with college‐educated respondents in heterophilous marriages by class origin (n = 60) as well as interviews with college‐educated respondents in homophilous marriages by class origin (n = 20), this article shows that respondents in heterophilous and homophilous marriages say that they appreciate their spouse for different reasons. Whereas actors in homophilous relationships by class origin explain their appreciation for their spouse in terms of cultural similarities, respondents in heterophilous marriages by class origin explain their appreciation of their spouse in terms of “cultural complements”—the obverse of the dispositions they dislike in themselves and attribute to their own upbringing. The article theorizes that accounts of cultural complements are enabled by the social organization of culture by class.