Migration policy objectives for European East-West international migration

The study contains selected results of Delphi research (subjective judgements concerning the future on a collective expert basis) on international migration between Central/Eastern (C/EEc) and Western European countries. Taking part in the research were 109 scholars and officers (70 in the first Delphi round and 39 in the second round) from all over Europe – mainly sociologists, economists, geographers and demographers dealing with the topic of migration.
Results indicate growing problems and tensions in societies, the division of Europe into two parts, and the triggering rather than pacifying of further antagonisms and hostile anti-immigrant attitudes on the Western side. As predicted, it seems that the West will further try to curb immigration by applying tighter restrictive measures. Regarding competition between Eastern Europeans and Third World immigrants in Western Europe, the preferred opinion is that "the C/EE immigrants will not significantly affect the activities of the Third World immigrants in the West because they will attempt to gain posts/jobs at higher levels of the social ladder."
Concerning policy objectives, the two most important general aims were how to contribute to migration stabilization in the East, and how to maintain and further develop stable democratic order and promote economic development.
Policy objectives devoted to specific migration issues indicate that more international cooperation, more information and more democracy/tolerance is necessary. Shared objectives should be: (1) to intensify mutual contacts; (2) disseminate information on rules and regulations regarding international migration as well as to tackle the issue of harmonizing the given migration controlling systems and statistics within Europe; and (3) provide further support for temporary labour contracts for Eastern professionals and manual workers in the West.     

When David met goliath: Research collaboration in the context of changing political realities

This article examines the dimensions of research collaboration between researchers from EU and Central and East European countries in the post‐communist period. The discussion draws on experience of two initiatives for research co‐operation, COST and EUREKA. Following an analysis of the formal levels of participation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in COST and EUREKA, the quality of exchange during the collaborative projects and the networks that have been established, some benefits from and barriers to East‐West co‐operation in research and technology are considered. Although the collaborative arrangements have been overall successful the different groups of participants display diverging and even sometimes conflicting expectations and perceptions of benefits. Two extreme positions view the collaborative links in terms of ‘master’ and ‘student’ and as relationships between partners of equal standing. By far the most serious barriers to successful East‐West research co‐operation stem from broad cultural differences and from a tendency to assume that lack of information means lack of development. The benefits from research co‐operation can increase many‐fold, it is suggested, if the relationships are seen as a symmetrical exchange rather than as a meeting between David and Goliath.     

Privileged Japanese transnational families in Hawaii as lifestyle migrants

This study of privileged Japanese families in Hawaii revisits the claim that East Asian transnational families relocate overseas either to improve their well‐being or to enhance their status through their children's international education. Existing scholarship has focused mainly on the second pattern of status‐seeking migration, conceptualized as ‘education migration’. By employing Benson and O'Reilly's concept of ‘lifestyle migration’, I consider the less widely studied case of migration strategies designed to increase well‐being. The central difference between the two types of migrants lies in the way that migrant women construct their gendered identity through their transnational split‐household arrangement – a freer self (lifestyle migrants) or a sacrificial self (education migrants). In conclusion, I call for further research on this neglected topic and propose an important dimension to facilitate lifestyle migration, gender.     

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post‐socialist period (by which time class‐resistant post‐subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)‐socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people’s lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates – often stymied in arguments over nomenclature (‘subculture’, ‘postsubculture’, ‘neo‐tribe’) – by shifting the focus of study from ‘form’ (‘subculture’ etc.) to ‘substance’ (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the ‘whole’ rather than ‘subcultural’ lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.     

Defining Nations in Asia and Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Ethnic Return Migration Policy1

We argue that regional comparison of East Asian and European ethnic return migration policy offers important new perspectives on nationhood, nondiscrimination norms, and trans‐nationality. We find that despite international nondiscrimination norms, preferential ethnic return policy is common in both regions. These policies at least implicitly define the nation as existing across borders. However, there are significant regional differences. East Asian states use co‐ethnic preferences instrumentally for economic goals and also offer preferential treatment of co‐ethnic foreign investors. European states offer preferences to coethnics to protect these populations or express symbolic ties, sometimes at great expense. Thus, in Europe the state has an obligation to assist coethnics abroad, but in Asia, foreign coethnics assist the state.     

An overview of Middle East public relations practice,education, and research from isolation to globalization

ABSTRACT

Public relations has a critical role in addressing culture difference and enhancing research outreach. An analysis of practice, education and research in Middle East provides an exemplar of the need to move the discipline’s scholarship from global isolation to cultural inclusivity. A review of current scholarship in the discipline's journals documents the preeminence of “Western” theory. Research with culturally collaborative studies of media, culture, technology, and society is needed to provide global perspectives. The paper argues five initiatives are needed next steps for the discipline to achieve global inclusivity: * Enhance research collaboration – Culturally collaborative studies of media, culture, technology, and society are needed to provide global perspectives in our discipline. *Address bilingual scholarship – Public relations theory needs to acknowledge varied traditions and methodologies. Research journals need Middle Eastern faculty editorial board members and need to explore translation options. *Align research with the profession – Globally, public relations research needs qualitative understanding. Cultural differences often regress quantitative analysis to meaningless implications for both theory and practice. *Assess curriculum globalization – Educators need to increase cultural content in courses. Textbooks are needed that reflect the globalization of the field from multiple perspectives. *Develop international accreditation standards – An accreditation model based on bilingual, global, and contemporary careers in the discipline is needed. International accreditation site teams must include bilingual members.     

THE INFLUENCE OF HOLISTIC AND ANALYTIC COGNITIVE STYLES ON ONLINE INFORMATION DESIGN: Toward a communication theory of cultural cognitive design

Although studies have linked culture to online user preferences and performance, few communication researchers have recognized the impact of culture on online information design and usability. It is important to ask if people are better able to use and prefer Web sites created by designers from their own culture. We propose that to improve computer-mediated communication, Web site design should accommodate culturally diverse user groups. First, a body of research is presented that aligns East Asian cultures with more holistic cognitive styles and Western cultures with more analytical cognitive styles. Building on this contrast, a theory of cultural cognitive design is proposed as a means of understanding how cognitive styles that develop under the influence of culture lead to different ways of designing and organizing information for the Web.     

Eléments pour une sociologie des études féministes en Europe centrale et orientale

Women's/gender studies were established in the Eastern European post-communist countries during the 1990s, as a new field of academic research and higher education. Works produced in this framework are often used as expert studies and aim to contribute to the improvement of the condition of women in that region, being at the core of the social and political reconstitution programs during the post-communist era. They were established by agents who were simultaneously active in different social spheres (scientific space, civil society associations, or institutionalized politics) and who exemplarily personify the multisituated feminism of the globalization era. These studies criss-cross national and international levels as well as scientific and militant logics. Hence they seem a pertinent entry to study the reconstruction of social sciences, the emergence of new academic topics, the international circulation and the importation of scientific questions and, finally, the recomposition of the academic elites within the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The article begins with a general point about the East-European context of the 1990s, when the socio-economic degradation of women's condition met a widely-spread rejection of feminist ideas due to their ideological manipulation by the socialist regimes. Then a zoom on the Romanian case allows us a reflection on the construction of the ‘women's issue’ during the post-communist transition, when several types of agents involved in the democratization reforms make theirs the transnational concern for women's rights. Finally, on the basis of these preliminary ideas, some research axes and working hypotheses are presented, such as: the sociology of gender studies as a new academic discipline, in a perspective inspired by the social history of social sciences; the sociology of the international circulation of feminist ideas and of the dynamics of East–West intellectual debates on the topic of women's condition in the post-communist countries; the analysis of the multiplying bureaucratic uses of ‘gender’ consequences.     

Convergence or divergence? A comparative analysis of CSR communication by leading firms in Asia,Europe, and North America

Through the lens of the communicative institutionalism and an extensive content analysis of corporate websites, this study compared corporate social responsibility (CSR) institutional messages by firms across three macro regions. The findings show that Asian firms do not present significant differences in how they expose their orientation to sustainability (i.e. “CSR identity” messages) than Western counterparts. However, Asian firms seem significantly less inclined to engage in CSR messages concerning “organization and management”, messages on “CSR interactivity” and those regarding “CSR as business case” compared with European firms. The difference between Asian and North American firms mostly concerns the former’s less salient use of “business case” messages for CSR. The comparative study sheds light on the pattern of CSR crossvergence across the West and East, reflecting hybridized CSR expressions across forms of CSR institutional messages.     

Negotiating cultural boundaries: Confucianism and trans/national identity in Korea 1

Abstract

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea.     

Recession and Migration: A New Era for Labor Migration?

The current recession, the worst in a half century, is likely to affect international migration differently than past recessions. In 1973–1974 and 1981–1982, rising oil prices led to recessions in oil‐importing countries and economic booms in oil‐exporting countries, enabling some migrants to shift from bust to boom areas, as from Europe to the Middle East. The 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis did not spread globally, and was followed by a relatively quick resumption of economic and job growth that attracted migrant workers. The 2008–2009 recession is most severe in countries that had the most severe debt excesses, including the U.S., Spain, and Eastern Europe, and in countries most dependent on trade, including many Asian countries. New deployments of migrants are likely to slow, but what is not yet clear is how many migrants who lose jobs will remain abroad.     

Territoriale Ungleichheiten in der erweiterten Eu

In a multi-level system like the European Union, social interests and conflicts are also defined in territorial categories. In this respect, the considerable regional disparities between Eastern and Western Europe may interfare with attempts at intensifying political cooperation within an enlarged European Union. They may give rise to considerable additional transfer payments or even endanger the further enlargement of the EU. This trilemma of enlargement, increased political cooperation and budgetary neutrality can only be overcome, if a polarization between East and West European interests can be avoided by a quick convergence of Eastern und Western performance levels or by a differentiation of the individual, interregional or international employment and income situation in Central and Eastern Europe. The growth rates of recent years and the economic structure of Central and Eastern Europe do not support the thesis of a quick convergence. However, the capital regions and the Western border regions in Central Europe are developing in a very dynamic way. A relatively permanent prosperity gap between Eastern and Western Europe as well as an increased regional differentiation within Central and Eastern Europe is to be expected. Historical dimensions of the economic and political differences between Eastern and Western Europe are analyzed. The relative stability of the European center-periphery structure does not support the thesis of a “deterritorialization” of social relationships. Instead, there is some evidence for a non-identical, path-dependent reproduction of long-established dependency relationships.     

DESPERATELY SEEKING EAST ASIA AMIDST THE POPULARITY OF SOUTH KOREAN POP CULTURE IN ASIA

This study questions the term ‘East Asia’ by investigating its usage in South Korean mass media and academic discourse about the Korean Wave and by reframing the Korean Wave as a source of new definitions of the cultural geography of East Asia and East Asian sensibilities instead of its current designations as either an empty signifier or a profitable market. Reframing the Korean Wave as a set of seminal iterations of East Asian pop culture includes its multiplicity and historicity, which enables the delineation of the cultural geography of East Asia as neither a unilateral nor fixed topography but rather something that is constantly re-imagined via pan-Asian pop cultures, materialized through actual encounters, and re-invented through shared historic pasts and modernizing desires. Examining East Asian pop culture also helps to illuminate current structures of feeling in East Asia (‘East Asian sensibilities’). The study concludes with suggestions for future collaborative works and theoretical endeavors, which are imperative for the establishment of East Asian pop culture as an object of analysis.     

The impact of EC border policies on the policing of ‘refugees’ in eastern and central Europe

It is increasingly becoming common knowledge that one of the major effects of the Single European Act 1986 will be to increase freedom of movement for some within the internal borders of the 12 European Community member States from 1993, while correspondingly restricting the influx of ‘outsiders’. What is still lacking, however, is informed research on the extent of this ‘exclusion’ and the likely impact of such exclusionist policy on the policing and movement of ‘refugees’ and migrants from South to North and East to West. It is the intention of this paper to address some of these issues. The main rationale behind these restrictionist and exclusionist policies is, on the one hand, a fear concerning floods of refugees invading the West from both the South and the East, due to either internal strife or poverty or simply economic disparity. On the other hand, a ‘tightening‐up’ of the asylum regulations and procedures is felt necessary on the official ground of ‘too many bogus applications’ being made to circumvent visa restrictions. This raises two problems in particular. Firstly, if the EC member States are becoming increasingly exclusionary, what happens to the refugee ‘flood'? Secondly, when is an ‘economic migrant’ not a refugee, or a refugee not a migrant, or even a ‘refugee’ not a suitable case for asylum? Moreover, even though it is realized at the political level that a long‐term strategy for ‘social and economic progress in the home countries represents the most important precondition to give the people in those countries a new professional and social perspective, which will encourage them to stay in their home countries’ it is nevertheless the case, unfortunately, that through Schengen and other EC inter‐governmental structures, the emphasis on control policy would seem to be dominant. Now that Hungary has joined the Council of Europe, has been a party to the 1951 (UN) Geneva Convention and the 1967 New York Protocol since March 1989, and together with Czechoslovakia and Poland has applied to join the EC, one has to wonder whether the ‘Cold War’ border between East and West is being shifted further East to become a ‘Closed ‘ border.     

Introducing Research into Policy: Lessons from District Studies of Dryland Development in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This article describes the chief findings of research carried out in four African dryland areas to investigate the validity of the authors' ‘Machakos hypothesis’, and to derive lessons on appropriate enabling policies. The findings were subsequently submitted to in‐country validation and dissemination exercises. The lessons learnt from these in regard to introducing research findings into country policy dialogues are set against the background of current discussion of this issue. The article also discusses uptake at the international level, because it tends to be at this level that development paradigms and practices are formulated and promoted into countries through donor and agency actions.     

Is there a moral economy of state formation? Religious minorities and repertoires of regime integration in the Middle East and Western Europe, 600–1614

This article asks how state formation processes informed the normative frameworks of late-Medieval and early-Modern Latin European and Muslim Middle Eastern regimes. The question at hand is not why pre-Modern regimes discriminated against religious minorities (as well as other groups) during the pre-Modern period, but why Western European states consistently engaged in mass expulsions of their non-Christian subjects from the late thirteenth century onward and the neighboring states of the Middle East did not. Rather than addressing these peculiar policies as a function of religion, culture, or law the article adopts a comparative, contextual method. With the aid of Charles Tilly’s theoretical perspectives it isolates critical variables in pre-Modern Middle Eastern state formation. These variables are then used to shed light on the circumstances and relationships that led to Latin Europe’s mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims between 1290 and 1614.     

Social work guanxi: a reflexive account of the social work relationship in the Chinese context

ABSTRACT

In a guanxi-driven acquaintanceship, the worker, the client, and the community are tied together more closely than they are in mutually agreed-upon service contracts. This paper re-examines the contemporary boundaries in the social work relationship, especially in Asian nations such as China, where ‘relationships’ are generally translated and perceived as ‘guanxi’. The indigenisation of social work must be managed with care when translating from West to East. Drawing from the experiences of community development projects in rural Hong Kong, this paper discusses how guanxi among social workers, clients and other stakeholders in Chinese communities might challenge the professionalism of social work and breach the boundaries of social work relationships.     

The earnings of Asian male immigrants in the Canadian labor market

"The earnings of Asian-born immigrants in the Canadian labor market declined relative to the earnings of native-born workers between 1981 and 1986. Analysis of the labor market performance of immigrants from four regions of Asia--Southern Asia, South East Asia, Eastern Asia and Western Asia--shows that Asian immigrants are a heterogeneous group. However, changes in the birthplace composition of Asian immigrants cannot explain the fall in the relative earnings of the Asian aggregate. Attention is drawn to the switch in the distribution of immigrants across the admission classes as a possible explanation of this phenomenon."     

论中东形势对俄罗斯的影响

俄罗斯对中东事态的基本态度是:同情阿拉伯国家反对派、支持国际制裁、反对西方军事干涉、主张政治解决。俄罗斯领导人在决策和表态时,注意维持同世界主要大国,首先是同西方大国和"金砖国家"的平衡,维持同阿拉伯国家和非洲国家的平衡,维持当事国当权派和在野派的平衡。在阿拉伯世界维持适度乱局,既有利于推高油气价格和刺激军火出口,改善俄罗斯国际收支状况;也有利于提升俄罗斯在西方心目中的地位,改善同西方关系。俄罗斯不存在强大的反对派,民众赞同现行发展方针,重稳定甚于重改革,主体民意反西方,不容易受"阿拉伯之春"的影响。     

Migration,development and inequality: Eastern Punjabi transnationalism

Abstract Drawing on original, ethnographic research in India and the UK, in this article we discuss the impact of transnational activity on the Doaba region of East Punjab, India. We argue that some recent studies have underplayed some of the less progressive consequences of Indian transnationalism. In particular, we contend that they have underestimated the extent of division between transnational migrants and Indian non‐migrants and downplayed the relationship between transnationalism and caste inequality. This empirical study of transnationalism, when placed in the context of the dynamic caste relations of East Punjab, supports those who contend that access to international migration is becoming an increasingly significant component of contemporary global social stratification, with the ‘broad’ transnational processes of capitalist globalization driving the ‘narrow’ transnationalism studied here. In this article, we question any straightforwardly progressive relationship between transnationalism and ‘development’ within East Punjab, and suggest that the arguments presented have a resonance beyond northwest India.