Transnational political practices and the receiving state: Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands

This article examines how the social and political contexts in receiving countries affect the transnational political practices of migrants and refugees, such as their mobilization around political events in their homeland. The case study explores the political participation of Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands in its full complexity, that is in both the immigration country and in homeland politics. The findings suggest that transnational political practices should not be reduced to a function of the political opportunity structures of particular receiving countries for two main reasons: (a) more inclusive political structures, which provide for more participation and co‐operation on immigrant political issues, may at the same time, and for that very reason, serve to exclude dialogue on homeland politics; (b) homeland political movements may draw on a different range of resources than their immigrant political counterparts, including those outside the local political institutional context.     

Contemporary NGO–Journalist Relations: Reviewing and Evaluating an Emergent Area of Research

Long recognized as key players in international politics, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly assume important roles in the provision of news. By hiring photographers, staffing online departments and funding reporting trips, NGOs act in ways that overlap with the actions of professional journalists. This article reviews and evaluates an emerging area of research – the study of NGO–journalist relations – that analyzes these developments. It proceeds in four parts: First, it overviews changes in the NGO and journalism sectors that drive growing scholarly interest in the topic. Second, it summarizes the findings of the available research. Third, it suggests some of the ways in which this research connects with concerns in the sociology of media and communication. Fourth, it evaluates the findings in light of various normative frameworks of public discourse. It concludes by suggesting that NGO–journalism scholarship can benefit from further attention by sociologists working in the areas of media and communication.     

Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

Self-Employment and Immigrants' Incorporation: The Case of Turks in Germany

This essay discusses the impact of self-employment on immigrants' incorporation in the host society. It focuses on empirical material coming from Turkish migrants' business activities in Germany. After introducing the main features of contemporary German-Turkish entrepreneurship, the essay presents its socio-economic and cultural consequences for the Turkish minority. Relying on the numerous debates that can be found in the literature, it argues that this impact is ambivalent. In some cases, business ownership may constitute a way of achieving upward social mobility and a path towards a harmonious and pluralistic integration. But it is also frequently a reaction to disadvantage that fosters immigrants' socio-professional vulnerability and that may then lead to ghettoization. The essay then attempts to understand the reasons behind these divergent interpretations and suggests that they lie in the intermediary nature of trade, which is an activity that may connect people from different backgrounds but only in a limited way. Ethnographic observations and the concept of 'plural societies' are used to address this aspect of business. The conclusion suggests that, given the globally inferior position of Turkish immigrants, business might not be enough to enable them to catch up.     

Feminist Politics in Contemporary Turkey: Neoliberal Attacks,Feminist Claims to the Public

This article aims to offer a critical reading of the feminist claims to the public sphere in Turkey in the 2000s when there was transformation in the way public and private spheres are defined. We try to link the feminist claims to the public with the shifts in the patriarchal regime of the country in the decade. The main argument of the article is that feminist politics of the 2000s had the potential for an alternative imagination of the public and that they also faced the risk of assimilation into the de-/re-publicization process of the same period. The article starts with a brief outline of the post-1980 period, which hosted both the emergence of independent feminist organizing and the neoliberal restructuration of Turkey’s politics. It continues with the analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s terms in government, as the consolidation of neoliberal restructuration process. We conclude with the (possible) feminist interventions to the new mode of patriarchy that emerges out of this process.     

Self-Employment and Immigrants' Incorporation: The Case of Turks in Germany

This essay discusses the impact of self-employment on immigrants' incorporation in the host society. It focuses on empirical material coming from Turkish migrants' business activities in Germany. After introducing the main features of contemporary German-Turkish entrepreneurship, the essay presents its socio-economic and cultural consequences for the Turkish minority. Relying on the numerous debates that can be found in the literature, it argues that this impact is ambivalent. In some cases, business ownership may constitute a way of achieving upward social mobility and a path towards a harmonious and pluralistic integration. But it is also frequently a reaction to disadvantage that fosters immigrants' socio-professional vulnerability and that may then lead to ghettoization. The essay then attempts to understand the reasons behind these divergent interpretations and suggests that they lie in the intermediary nature of trade, which is an activity that may connect people from different backgrounds but only in a limited way. Ethnographic observations and the concept of ‘plural societies’ are used to address this aspect of business. The conclusion suggests that, given the globally inferior position of Turkish immigrants, business might not be enough to enable them to catch up.     

The Whitening Hypothesis Challenged: Biculturalism in Latino and Non‐Hispanic White Intermarriage

Assimilation theory holds that intermarriage between minorities and non‐Hispanic whites is a gauge of integration and assumes that minorities jettison their ethnic identification in favor of whiteness. Drawing on race relations theory to argue that intermarriage is potentially transformative for non‐Hispanic whites as well as Latinos, this article challenges assimilation theory's bias that minorities (should) undergo cultural change and that non‐Hispanic whites remain unmoved. This article uses in‐depth interviews with Latino and non‐Hispanic white married couples to assess the consequences of ethnic intermarriage from the perspectives of both partners. Interethnic partners engaged in four “ideal types” of biculturalism, running largely contrary to assimilation theory's social whitening hypothesis. Due to boundary blurring, exemplified by affiliative ethnic identity, non‐Hispanic whites can migrate into Latino culture.     

Self-insurance and consumption risk-sharing between birth-year cohorts in Turkey

This paper tests the empirical validity of the consumption risk-sharing hypothesis across urban and rural regions in Turkey. For this purpose, I analyze fourteen consecutive waves of the TURKSTAT Household Budget Surveys from 2003 to 2016 and prepare a pseudo-panel data set for birth-year cohorts. The empirical analysis shows that there is imperfect consumption risk-sharing between birth-year cohorts in Turkey. We observe that the growth of cohort consumption is positively and significantly associated with both the growth of cohort income and the growth of aggregate consumption. Finally, we find that cohorts would have sacrificed modest amounts to insure their consumption.     

试论当代叙土关系

叙利亚与土耳其同属伊斯兰国家,互为邻国,是中东地区具有重要政治影响力的国家.由于叙土政治地缘的重要性,在历史的各个时期都成为被争夺、拉拢或打压的对象,客观上引发了两国之间的各种矛盾.当代叙土关系一直紧张,双方在许多问题上的争斗不断.但是随着海湾战争的爆发,尤其是美英军事占领伊拉克之后,两国为了维护根本利益,开始从互相猜忌走向互相信任.两国关系呈现出的健康和稳定发展势头.     

Separability between own food production and consumption in Turkey

Complete markets imply the separation of food production and consumption decisions such that they can be modeled to occur sequentially and can be studied independently. Separation is very often assumed implicitly in empirical studies of food demand. If there is such separation, then food sourced within the household should not have any influence upon the budget share of each food group. Using this insight, this paper first develops a procedure to test for the separation of household food production and consumption decisions. Furthermore, it incorporates the testing procedure into the Almost Ideal Demand Systems model and utilizes survey data from 2003 for Turkey for empirical testing. It concludes that the separation assumption is unwarranted for Turkey. Next, it investigates the extent of bias in elasticity estimates when the separation assumption is unwarranted. It concludes that ignoring the nonseparation of consumption and production decisions in rural areas leads to significant overestimation of food expenditure elasticity for dairy products and eggs and own-price elasticity for bread and cereals.     

Relations between strangers: cycles of structure and meaning in tourist systems

Tourism is a paradoxical human activity–a supposedly ‘smokeless industry’ that produces littered beaches, a cornucopia to local economics that gives rise to inflation and embittered natives, a profitable enterprise that often requires governmental subsidy. It is also a major social and economic phenomenon: witness 280 million international tourists and 180 billion dollars in expenditures in 1979 (Waters, 1979). For the population of many societies, it is a primary source of work; for others it is a primary outlet for leisure. An understanding of the modern era is incomplete without understanding the social processes of tourism. This paper speculates about cycles of structure and myth in tourism development. The goal is an integrated theory of tourism, based on empirical evidence, amenable to test, and permitting the prediction of future behaviour. The paper is divided into several sections. First, we briefly review some earlier analytic frameworks used for understanding tourism. We draw upon these frameworks to develop an integrated explanation of the behaviour of tourists, the evolution of the tourist industry, and the consequences of tourism for host and guest populations. Second, our attention is devoted to structural and symbolic factors shaping relations between strangers. Such relations, we argue, are the engine of change in tourism. Third, we present a typology of the social cycles involved in tourism. We attempt to describe which elements of the social order are likely to respond in predictable patterns to tourism development; speculate on the form these responses might take and provide a set of hypothetical curves for potential indicator measures. We close by suggesting some theoretical and practical implications of our discussion.     

What Makes an Entrepreneur and Does it Pay? Native Men,Turks, and Other Migrants in Germany

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavours of immigrants' and natives in Germany, concentrating on Turks, Germany's largest immigrant group and one under‐studied in the literature. Self‐employed Turks in Germany represent about 70 per cent of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the European Union. We use data from the German Socio‐economic Panel to study patterns of self‐employment. First, we identify the characteristics of the self‐employed individuals and understand their underlying drive into self‐employment. Next we investigate how immigrant entrepreneurs fare in the labour market and compare their earnings to those of the natives. It is important for decision makers to understand entrepreneurial patterns so that they can shape policy that better fosters entrepreneurial activities. This paper presents several findings that can inform better policymaking. First, our investigation indicates that education is not decisive in determining whether one will choose self‐employment over salaried work nor in explaining earnings. The estimated age‐earnings profiles are the same for natives and immigrants, while the proclivity to become self‐employed is concave with respect to age for both groups. Immigrants' start with a higher probability to work than natives but have a slower increase in the self‐employment probabilities thereafter. The earnings of self‐employed immigrants' are higher initially, but their earnings path crosses eventually that of the natives. Second, we find some suggestion of ethnic entrepreneurial spirit. Turks are 70 per cent more likely to be self‐employed than any other immigrant group, although they do not necessarily earn more. These patterns should be further explored.     

The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures

Abstract

This article advocates that inter-ethnic contact and cross-cultural traffic condition the possibilities of imagining Asian American and Chicana/o identities, respectively, in early Asian American and Chicana/o novels. Using Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as my primary examples, I demonstrate how early Asian American and Chicana/o literatures that have been critiqued almost exclusively within binary analytic paradigms articulate identity within a diverse field of racial and cultural differences. I argue that, in order to regard properly the inter-ethnic trends of recent US fiction and to liberate foundational minority texts from ethnic specific enclaves within US institutions, scholars need to recognize how negotiating a diverse spectrum of racial and cultural distinctions is a critical element of the early Asian American and Chicana/o literary imagination.     

(Un)becoming Dayak: Intermarriage and the Dynamics of Identity and Belonging in East Kalimantan

Much of the ethnographic literature on East Kalimantan has assumed relatively stable group identities. Intermarriage between different Dayak groups has been frequent, but is usually perceived as leading to swift cultural assimilation of the in-marrying party. Similarly, Dayak-Malay intermarriages have been understood in terms of socio-religious assimilation (masuk Islam). This article suggests that a number of socio-historical developments, including Christian mission work, the spread of formal education and recent advances in regional political autonomy, have resulted in high cultural adaptability among East Kalimantan's ‘Dayaks’, leading to hybrid identity formation. Simultaneously, people of mixed ancestry are confronted with ethno-nationalist revitalisation and often face a problematic lack of belonging, challenging them to become—or un-become—‘Dayak’. This article explores the marital histories and social networks of two extended families in the urban and semi-urban centres of the province. It suggests that children of mixed parentage have cultivated various modes of adaptation to the expectations of Dayak indigenism, often involving the strategic invocation of essentialised ethnic labels (suku).     

Silenced Reality: Power Relations between Marital Blueprints in Israeli Marriages

In this study we examined the effect of job insecurity on couples' relationships in the context of recent macro‐level economic changes in Israel. Based on Hajer's discourse interaction approach, we conceptualized marital relationships and particularly the marital conversation as contested terrain reflecting power relations between social forces and their related discourses. We interviewed seventeen couples in which at least one of the partners suffered from job insecurity in order to trace forms of emotion work and silence in their marital interaction. We found that couples experienced a decreased ability to speak with each other. In their accounts of this experience, gendered “story lines” that we interpreted as “new” to the relationship emerged. Women's emotion work was indicative and halted change‐directed marital negotiation. The possibility that authoritative gendered relationships are reinforced in Israeli marriages during times of job insecurity is thus supported.