From Social Capital to Inequality: Migrant Networks in Different Stages of Labor Incorporation

How does social capital vary in the distinct stages (prehiring, hiring, and posthiring) of labor incorporation? Based on interviews with 71 Latino migrant workers engaged in residential construction in Las Vegas, Nevada, and 30 transnational migrants who returned to Mexico after working in the United States, I examined two primary issues: first, the structural labor mechanisms that create hyperexploitation, and second, how, in turn, such processes shape social capital. I discovered, at the prehiring phase, social networks connected to subcontractors and those who attempt to form a labor crew function as social capital, despite what may appear to be bonded labor. At the hiring stage, social capital continues to play a role, yet posthiring labor structures create hyperexploitation and immigrants experience inequality in social capital. In such contexts, undocumented Latinos are unable to retain their social capital as U.S. labor structures such as subcontracting and piece‐rate compensation lead to the subjugation of workers, who can become “ghost workers” and bonded laborers. I conclude that in the posthiring stage, such labor structures create what Lin (2000, 2001) refers to as capital deficit and return deficit in social capital that greatly limit the economic incorporation of Latino immigrants.     

“Tel Aviv Is Not Foreign to You”: Urban Incorporation Policy on Labor Migrants in Israel1

This article addresses the growing disjuncture between urban and national policies regarding the incorporation of labor migrants in Israel. Drawing on fieldwork, in‐depth interviews with Tel Aviv municipal officials, and archive analysis of Tel Aviv municipality minutes, we argue that urban migrant‐directed policy elicits new understandings of membership and participation, other than those envisaged by national parameters, which bear important, even if unintended, consequences for the de facto incorporation of non‐Jewish labor migrants. The crux of the Tel Aviv case is that its migrant‐directed policy bears especially on undocumented labor migrants, who make up approximately 16 percent of the city's population and who are the most problematic category of resident from the state's point of view. In demanding recognition for the rights of migrant workers in the name of a territorial category of “residence,” and by activating channels of participation for migrant communities, local authorities in Tel Aviv are introducing definitions of “urban membership” for noncitizens which conflict sharply with the hegemonic ethnonational policy. We suggest that the disjuncture between urban and national incorporation policies on labor migrants in Israel is part of a general process of political realignment between the urban and the national taking place within a globalized context of labor migration.     

“Castaway Categories”: Examining the Re-Emergence of the “Underclass” in the UK

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, discussion of poverty often incorporated references to a so-called underclass and its purported welfare dependency. This largely disparaging keyword now seems to have reappeared; recent uncritical references have been seeping into social work’s academic literature. Dwelling primarily on the United Kingdom, this article reveals that the “underclass” notion seems to have been reignited around the time of the economic crisis that began in 2007. This coincided with public concerns about child-protection services. It was, however, the English riots (August 6 to 11, 2011) that multiplied the use of the appellation underclass in media and political discourses. However, disparaging designations of those who are unemployed or low-waged have been present across centuries; the troubled family is the most recent construction. In this context, Loïc Wacquant furnishes a useful analytical framework to conceptualise how underclass stereotypes and other castaway categories are described, contained, and managed.     

De‐Romanticizing Black Intergenerational Support: The Questionable Expectations of Welfare Reform

Past research suggests that despite the substantial strengths of Black kin networks, they are not always up to the task of supporting young mothers. This study is an analysis of potential barriers to women‐centered kin support for present‐day urban Black teen mothers and possible implications for kin support mandates specified in the 1996 federal welfare reforms. In‐depth interviews with African American midlife women, who themselves were teen mothers, shed light on their attitudes and perceptions about Black kinship systems and teen childbearing. Study results suggest that these women perceive governmental intervention, age‐condensation among urban Black families, and urban “underclass” culture to have undermined traditional Black intergenerational support.     

Community Media Studies: An Overview

This essay provides an overview of the field of community media studies. Like the study of “alternative media,” “citizens' media,” “independent,” and “radical” media – to mention but a few of the terms applied to participatory communication projects – academic inquiry into the structures, forms, and practices of community media has surged in recent years. While scholars often use these labels interchangeably, this essay focuses on academic and practitioner perspectives that explicitly and purposefully employ the term “community media.” The overview identifies and briefly considers three prominent conceptual frameworks – media democratization, civil society, and the symbolic construction of community – which shape and inform this vibrant field of study. This overview concludes with some thoughts on the limits and possibilities of community media theory, and practice, in the new millennium.     

A Davis-Bacon musicale: Symphony orchestras as migrant labor

One of the original arguments in support of the Davis-Bacon Act was that local construction labor would be protected from wage-busting on federal projects by “ruthless non-local contractors” using low-wage, itinerant labor. A related, current claim is that Davis-Bacon prevents lower quality non-local firms from winning contracts by underbidding local labor; thus, Davis-Bacon helps to ensure the quality of construction. This paper first evaluates whether the use of itinerant non-local firmsnecessarily results in lower quality output. Using the “traveling” symphony orchestra as an analogy, the answer is clearly “no.” Second, if higher quality output may be produced by non-local firms, is this likely to happen in construction? Third, does a Davis-Bacon type of wage floor ensure that local projects will be built by local firms or crews?     

When is the State's Gaze Focused? British Royal Commissions and the Bureaucratization of Conflict

Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state‐centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national‐level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly‐engaged and “objective” explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19^th and early 20^th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict – involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations – were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields – prisons and labor – achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance.     

Of Riots and Racism: Fifty Years Since the Best Laid Schemes of the Kerner Commission (1968–2018)

“What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” Voiced less that one week after the July 1967 race riots in Detroit, Michigan, Lyndon B. Johnson spoke these words as he ordered the establishment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Seven months later, on March 1, 1968, the Commission's account—known as the Kerner Commission Report—was a scathing appraisal of riots and racism in the United States. While it included bold language about the linkage between rioting and racism, it is rife with paradoxical assumptions and findings. Moreover, the report's failure to define sociological concepts, coupled with a reliance on individualism and cognitive attitudes via psycho‐analytic and pop‐psychological conjecture, together beckon scholars to wrestle with how this state‐issued report reflected and reproduced dominant assumptions about the “race” concept, violence, and human nature. Employing a critical content analysis of the report, I ask: How does the Kerner Commission Report define and use the concept of “riots” and “racism,” and what are the logics employed in the production of that knowledge?     

Poor People in Poor Places: Local Opportunity Structures and Household Poverty*

Abstract Accounts of poverty generally fall into either “individualist” or “structuralist” camps. Often these are seen as irreconcilable and incompatible competing perspectives. This paper integrates individualist and structuralist accounts of poverty by examining the relationship between “person poverty” and “place poverty” in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan labor markets, using a multilevel framework. I fashion a general model of poverty production and allocation, drawing on the labor market ecology perspective. After a discussion of this perspective, I develop a multilevel framework for analyzing data from the 1990 Census PUMS‐L sample, STF‐3c, and other sources to show how compositional and contextual factors affect households' likelihoods of being in poverty. These multilevel models also allow us to estimate the degree to which labor market conditions influence the magnitude of household labor supply characteristics. Results suggest that both compositional and contextual factors contribute to the metro‐nonmetro difference in poverty rates, and that the effects of employment vary in accordance with labor market characteristics.     

Bringing the “Moral Charge” Home: Fair Trade within the North and within the South*

Abstract Fair trade is typically understood as an alternative market system that aims to right historically inequitable terms of trade between the geopolitical North and South and foster more direct producer/consumer linkages. We suggest that a more expansive application of the term “fair trade” to encompass agro‐food initiatives within the North and South has considerable analytic and practical utility. We profile five such initiatives in the United States and two in Mexico. The U.S. undertakings are best understood as “proto‐” fair trade projects that frame their work principally as an effort to preserve “family farming” rather than as an exercise to achieve fairness in the marketplace. The Mexican initiatives more explicitly embrace the certification‐criteria‐labeling model of international fair trade. Both, we conclude, hold potential to harness fair trade's “moral charge” to improve conditions for small producers and laborers in North and South experiencing most directly the negative effects of economic globalization.     

Over the Hill,Under Siege: Labor Force Graying,Labor Market Pushes,and Consequences for Life Chances

Interest in older workers has recently expanded due to concerns over labor force “graying.” Research and policy on aging adults' labor market participation have, thus far, framed the decision to labor as one shaped solely by the desires and capacities of older workers themselves. This perspective fails to recognize how multiple employer‐side barriers play a large role in defining – and limiting – available choices. In this review, I synthesize the multi‐disciplinary literature on employer‐side barriers to older workers' labor market participation. In particular, I identify and discuss individual‐, meso‐, and social structural‐level barriers that uniquely affect this group, noting where gaps in understanding remain. I consider older workers primarily as a whole to demonstrate how age operates as a distinct, important identity; however, I also reflect on how age overlaps with both other identities and cohort membership. Next, I briefly consider the relationship between these employer‐side barriers and aging adults' life chances, particularly in an era of austerity. Although I focus on the United States case, I also note key cross‐national similarities and differences. Finally, reflecting upon the foregoing review, I suggest that a redirection of public policy is necessary to effectively respond to this contemporary demographic shift.     

Enclosure,writing, and resistance: revisiting the prose of Daniil Kharms

The author argues that discipline – operating through the distribution of individuals by means of enclosure and surveillance – is crucial to understanding Daniil Kharms’s prose of the 1930s. The author focuses on three of his mini-stories, first looking at mechanisms of surveillance in “Dream,” examining their effects upon the psyche that have material impacts on the body of the individual. Then he turns to a trajectory of enclosure that operates from the urban commons (“Trial by Lynching”) to the home (“An Unexpected Drinking Party”). The centripetal trajectory of enclosure ends in all cases at the body as the endpoint of discipline and, ultimately, the site of Kharms’s “grotesque resistance,” challenging the enclosure of the body from the point of its confinement. He also looks to how paper – as theme in and medium of Kharms’s work – operates within these spatial dynamics. He draws upon Harold Innis, who associated the rise of print in the United States with the “space bias” of communication. Reading Foucault and Innis together, Kharms’s short prose works can be understood as a contestation of the space bias of print media in the Stalinist era, prompting Kharms’s retreat to the contours of the body as a site of struggle.     

Of Oil and Agency: Scotland and the Material Conditions of National Imagining

North Sea oil discoveries introduced a qualitative divide that gave rise to at least the prospect of an economically viable Scottish independence, insofar as it made the “Scottish economy” a legitimate point of contestation on constitutional lines. In turn, this problematised the nature of minority nationalism in advanced, developed, post-imperial capitalist regional economies. The research assesses how economic factors – most notably oil – materially affected the prospects of asserting power, and thus the possibilities for imagining collective agency as a national (i.e. Scottish) project. Oil helped shift “New Left” thinking away from assimilationist and modernising projects of assimilating regional consciousness into “national” projects, while also inspiring outright nationalists to define their own project in relation to the earlier phases of nationalism. The study thus contributes to recentring the study of Scotland, with a smaller emphasis on the local dimension and identities, as against the role of national actors in untangling relationships with wider geopolitical and geo-economic forces. The claim is not simply that global forces formed the qualitative divide that made nationalist action possible; but also that these were conscious considerations of actors in the aftermath of North Sea discoveries.     

The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”

This article traces the emergence of a politico-economic project of “transnational business feminism” (TBF) over the past decade. This project – which is being developed by a coalition of states, financial institutions, the UN, corporations, NGOs and others – stresses the “business case” for gender equality by arguing that investments made in women can (and should) be measured in terms of the cost savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate profitability and national competitiveness. This article uses a feminist historical materialist framework to argue that TBF is facilitating the further entrenchment of the power of corporations to create “expert” knowledges about both “gender” and “development.” Using the Nike-led “Girl Effect” campaign as an example, it is argued that TBF is promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of women and gender relations that ignores the historical and structural causes of poverty and gender-based inequality. It is also helping to reproduce the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained gender-based and other forms of oppression via the global feminization of labor, the erosion of support for social reproduction and the splintering of feminist critiques of capitalism.     

Educational Attainments of Immigrant Offspring: Success or Segmented Assimilation?1

In this article, I study the educational attainments of the adult offspring of immigrants, analyzing data from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). Fielded annually since 1993 by Statistics Canada, respondents are asked for the first time in 1996 to report the birthplaces of their parents, making it possible to define and study not only the foreign‐born population (the first generation), but also the second generation (Canadian born to foreign‐born parents) and the third‐plus generation (Canadian born to Canadian‐born parents). The survey also asked respondents to indicate if they are members of a visible minority group, thus permitting a limited assessment of whether or not color conditions educational achievements of immigrant offspring. I find that “1.5” and second generation adults, age 20–64 have more years of schooling and higher percentages completing high school compared with the third‐plus generation. Contrary to the segmented “underclass” assimilation model found in the United States, adult visible minority immigrant offspring in Canada exceed the educational attainments of other not‐visible‐minority groups. Although the analysis is hampered by small sample numbers, the results point to country differences in historical and contemporary race relations, and call for additional national and cross‐national research.     

Newcomer Migrant Workers in the Underclass: A Yokohama, Japan Case Study

Abstract  This paper will investigate how some undocumented migrant workers survive in Kotobuki, Yokohama known as the urban underclass. Since the latter half of the 1990s, Kotobuki itself has undergone structural changes. Once a center of day laborers it is now a center of older ex-laborers, mostly surviving on welfare. However, Kotobuki holds positive associations for many Korean and Pilipino migrants, many of whom arrived at the end of the 1980s. They regard the area as a place to earn high wages and as a center for building ethnic networks. Migrants tend to help their ethnic fellows find jobs and exchange information that they may otherwise be unable to acquire given that undocumented migrants are ineligible for public services in Japan. Additionally, ethnic-related self-help activities as well as NGOs play a valuable role in sustaining the livelihood of such migrants who are denied access to public services and assistance. This paper will illustrate the role of self-help among ethnic minority migrant workers. It also aims to demonstrate that contrary to prevailing assumptions, their social status as underclass is not lower than that of their Japanese counterparts.     

Reconsidering “community liberated”: How class and the national context shape personal support networks

The “community liberated” thesis has been influential in describing contemporary social support systems. Specifically, “community liberated” argues that people do not seek support in their immediate neighborhood but rather entertain a network of far-flung ties to support-providing alters. This paper uses personal network data from six countries – Australia, Germany, the US, Austria, Hungary and Italy – to evaluate this argument and shows that the degree of liberation of one's community is strongly linked to one's socioeconomic status – specifically, one's education level. Additionally, we describe strong country-level heterogeneity in the spatial dynamics of personal support networks and find national contexts to be moderating the effect of education on community liberation, especially in Italy and Hungary, thus suggesting network geographic dispersion to be linked to national economic structures and labor markets. The paper thus elucidates the effect of two different, yet related social contexts on personal networks: the class context and the national context.     

The White City: Race and Urban Politics

Urban regime analysis and growth machine theory offer critical tools to study power and inequality in cities. However, the field of urban politics has moved away from critically addressing race. I discuss these theories' potential contributions before suggesting scholars “bring race back” to urban politics in several key areas: studying “White urban regimes” in addition to Black urban regimes; examining how Whiteness factors into growth (and anti‐growth) coalitions; exploring how racial discourse shapes urban regimes; and accounting for the relationship between suburbs and “fringe cities” and the city, including suburban regimes.     

Competition Between Labour‐Sending States and the Branding of National Workforces

Drawing from comparative, international field research examining fast food labour migration from the Philippines and Mexico to western Canada, I contrast the Mexican and Filipino migration apparatuses and the corresponding branding of their citizenry. I show that the Philippines, through its migration apparatus, brands the Philippines as a source of “exceptional” labour, in part by deploying college graduates and those with professional work experience to work in entry‐level occupations. In turn, they outpace other labour‐sending states – like Mexico – who are branded in less desirable terms for interactive occupations. The policy decision to deskill (or not) and to produce (or fail to produce) educated and “exceptional” mobile subjects operates either as a conveyer belt or a migratory wall for distinct states in their ability to send more workers overseas. This has broader implications for global race relations and the branding effects that underlie Temporary Migrant Worker Programs.     

Still a “Stalled Revolution”? Work/Family Experiences,Hegemonic Masculinity,and Moving Toward Gender Equality

Hochschild described the “stalled revolution” in the late 1980s: women made great gains in labor force opportunities, particularly in stereotypically “masculine” fields, yet men did not move comparably into “feminine” roles. This article examines the current “stalls” in the gender equality movement regarding gendered experiences at work and home, including occupations, the gender wage gap, career trajectories, and the division of household labor. This article also discusses efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution. Pop culture solutions on the individual‐level and academic research on structural/cultural barriers often focus on women's access to historically “masculine” roles (e.g. representation in STEM fields). There is far less emphasis on men's involvement in historically “feminine” roles. Gender scholars examine hegemonic masculinity as the narrowly constrained expectations for men's “appropriate” behavior. While efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution focus largely on expanding women's opportunities, this article addresses why the gender revolution will remain incomplete and “stalled” without redefining hegemonic masculinity. Cross‐national research demonstrates that changing views of masculinity are critical for greater gender equality at work and home.