Towards the strategies of modern societies: systems and social processes

While several sociological theories have traditionally dealt with rational action by human actors, little attention has been devoted to the possibilities for rational steering of the entire subsystems of functionally differentiated modern societies in the context of their increasing complexity. Although rational intentional action is clearly limited at the macro-level by the complexity emphasized by Luhmann's social systems theory, strategies are required to approach the normative ideal of active society as defined by Etzioni. Understanding the strategic processes requires micro–macro and agency–structure connections. A possible solution to understanding strategy as a social process in this respect is found in the adaptation of the three-level – individuality, reality and totality – approach of Sztompka's theory of social becoming.     

Care Diamonds and Welfare Regimes in East and South-East Asian Societies: Bridging Family and Welfare Sociology

This paper tries to bridge the micro-level analyses of social networks for "care" provision which have been conducted in the field of family sociology, and the macro-level framework on welfare mix which has been developed in the area of welfare sociology, because the options for creating social networks are given to individuals by society. A group of Asian researchers including the author have conducted comparative research on social networks for childcare and elderly care in six Asian societies, namely Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. To reexamine the results, the author draws diagrams of the care diamonds in each society for each type of care (childcare or elderly care) to show the balance between four sectors (the state, market, family and relatives, and the community) which determines the pattern of welfare mix. The most prevalent pattern in Asian societies today is the pattern with a large family and relatives sector and a large market sector. We can interpret it as a familistic welfare regime combined with liberalism. However, Japan alone shows a pattern close to pure familism because the development of the market sector is restricted by immigration policies prohibiting the employment of foreign domestic workers. Unlike other Asian societies which were exposed to the global market before the family could become a closed organization and marketization of care work took place easily, in Japan, where the modern family system had been established, both socialization and marketization of care work have stagnated.     

Strengthening Data and Research Tools on Migration and Development

This paper reviews available data sources for the study of migration and development through both retrospective and continuous data collection systems. It is argued that much basic data already exists for the study of international migration but that the addition of a relatively small number of simple, although not necessarily cheap measures can be taken to improve existing data. The priority is to generate flow data between countries for recent time periods and the paper makes suggestions how this can be best achieved. The paper goes on to an assessment of the types and availability of data needed to understand better the relationships between migration and development more broadly. Data at several scales, macro and micro, and for a variety of types of migration will be required in order to achieve this objective, particularly if less visible flows, such as those internal to developing countries, or those involving women, are to be better understood. The paper concludes by moving beyond the traditional state‐led data‐gathering systems to examine the potential for civil society organizations to help in strengthening data and research on migration and development.     

The Migration–Development Nexus: Somalia Case Study

The humanitarian disaster in 1992 made the Somalis known throughout the world. The first image that appeared in the Western part of the world was the broadcast of the famine caused by the civil war. This was followed by the international intervention known as UNOSOM, when CNN covered the landing of the American intervention forces in December 1992. The next image was the fatal confrontation between UNOSOM and the local warlord, General Aideed, which resulted in the withdrawal of UNOSOM in 1995. During that period the West also came to know the Somalis more intimately as thousands of them had fled and spread to North America and Northwestern Europe. This encounter was not without problems, and raised issues such as how to integrate Somalis into society, and how and when they could be expected to return to Somalia. Today, this experience has spurred a new policy trend among Western governments that aims at directing aid to the “neighbouring” areas of refugee–generating conflicts to keep the refugees in their region. These debates are unfortunately often full of myths, and tend to suggest policies often lacking a substantial basis. Hence, this article is part of a project that attempts to shed some light on contemporary migration processes and the possible linkages between the diasporas and the social and economic development in their country of origin. The case study describes the main flows of migration in modern Somali history, and how the emerging Somali diaspora maintains links to their kin via inventive remittance systems. The possible impact of remittances on local development in Somalia is addressed in the paper, and it concludes that the linkages between aid and migration–related resource transfers are multidimensional and that development can lead to migration and vice versa. It also concludes that there is a dire need for more knowledge on the issue, which is reflected in the lack of data found for this specific case. The case shows that poverty is not the only factor for the Somali migration history. Rather, the main reason has been the intertwining of political conflict and the search for economic opportunity. Furthermore, the important effect of remittances on socio–economic development correlates with political stability, providing an environment for productive investments. It is also shown that remittances have been far more important for livelihood and survival in Somalia than development and humanitarian aid put together.     

Social and spatial networks: Kinship distance and dwelling unit proximity in rural Thailand

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals’ dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship networks of all individuals living in 51 agricultural villages. After presenting arguments for a relationship between individuals’ dwelling unit locations and their kinship relations as well as the particulars of our case study, we introduce the data and describe our analytic approach. We analyze how kinship – considered as both a system linking collections of individuals in an extended kinship network and as dyadic links between pairs of individuals – patterns the proximity of dwelling units in rural villages. The results show that in general, extended kin live closer to one another than do unrelated individuals. Further, the degree of relatedness between kin correlates with the distance between their dwelling units. Close kin are more likely to co-reside, a fact which drives much of the relationship between kinship relatedness and dwelling unit proximity within villages. There is nevertheless suggestive evidence of a relationship between kinship association and dwelling unit proximity among kin who do not live together.     

Alienation of the outsider: the plight of migrants

This paper compares the plight of international migrants with those from rural to urban areas, examining specifically the migration of Turks into Europe and into Turkish metropolitan centers. This allows comparison of migrant groups with the same point of origin in terms of national, ethnic, cultural, religious, and social characteristics, as well as the same traditional family culture. Economic factors are the main reasons for immigration into Europe. The migrant worker and his family often become marginal to both the country of origin and the country of sojourn. The migrant family must be flexible in dividing or reconstructing itself in various ways to accommodate time, space, and money requirements and to protect ties with the home country requiring intensive geographical mobility, resulting in structural instability and even fragmentation. For the 2nd generation, poor school performance decreases self-esteem and hinders the development of cultural identity; the higher the aspirations for the future and the perception of marginality, the greater is the child's orientation toward the home country. In Turkey, rapid change in traditional agricultural production and rapid population growth caused the movement of population from rural to urban areas. Through rural-urban migration and international migration millions become uprooted populations and become "outsiders." The distinction between 1st and 2nd generation is one of degree, based on the retention of the traditional culture and identity. Factors which interfere with the integration of the migrant population into the dominant society include 1) the unicultural nature of the dominant society and 2) the degree of similarity (or dissimilarity) between the 2. In Turkey, as well as in many other developing countries, the "traditional" family interaction pattern is characterized by relatedness and interdependence among individuals and between generations. Turkish rural to urban migrants are in a more favorable situation than immigrants to Europe to utilize the informal affiliations of family, kin, and community. Extended communal networks are recreated through congested slum living conditions and through friendship sometimes replacing family and kin; traditional identities are reaffirmed through strengthened religious and national sentiments and informal groupings.     

Migration,Poverty, and Risk of HIV Infection: An Application of Social Capital Theory

A majority of current HIV/AIDS interventions are designed primarily after individual-based public health models and pay little attention to the socioeconomic environment in which HIV transmission occurs. This article focuses on outlining how migration acts as a conduit for disease transmission in South Africa and then proposes a macro-level prevention model based on social capital theory, thus then supplementing current prevention literature. It is based on the argument that social disruption and stresses from migration lead to sexual interactions during the migration periods that amplify the risk of HIV transmission among migrants.     

The discourse and dimensions of irregularity in post-apartheid South Africa

South Africa's migration policy since 1994 has been described as contradictory and confused. Indeed, there are profound differences of opinion within government and civil society over the best means to deal with what is believed to be a massive and threatening increase in clandestine migration and irregular employment.
Clarity of thought and policy debate has been hampered by an inflammatory discourse which fixates on the issue of numbers, and views all migrants as a problem and threat. Partly this reflects fundamental inadequacies in systems of data collection and analysis, and partly a poor understanding of the causes and character of cross-border migration in Southern Africa.
As a corrective, this article presents an overview of the causes and spatial/sectoral distribution of irregular employment in post-apartheid South Africa, drawing on recent research. It then critically examines efforts to ascertain the dimensions of undocumented migration to South Africa, concluding that the results are fundamentally flawed by the methodologies used. The article then disaggregates irregular migration and assesses current knowledge about each subcategory.
In conclusion, the article argues for a comprehensive labour market survey as the foundation for a coordinated and rational approach to the challenges of irregular migration and employment.     

New approaches to the estimation of migration flows from census and administrative data sources

Census data represent an important source of information about migration flows. However, existing estimation procedures based on intercensal projection are often inconvenient to apply and are sensitive to even quite small changes in enumeration completeness. 2 new estimation procedures applicable to data from 2 censuses are developed and illustrated using US data. The 1st method is essentially a modification of traditional intercensal projection techniques, but as a result of working with age groups rather than cohorts, it is simpler to apply and allows mortality of the migrants to be incorporated over the intercensal period. The 2nd method also uses information from 2 censuses, but also uses independent information on the age pattern of migration from administrative sources or from other census questions. The method uses the fact that the age pattern of recent migration is likely to be different from the age distribution of the overall population to distinguish between intercensal change due to migration and apparent intercensal change due to changes in enumeration completeness. If the method's assumptions are met, it is possible to estimate the relative coverage of the 2 censuses as well as the scale of the independent age pattern of migration relative to the coverage of 1 or other of the censuses. The illustrative applications of the methods to US data suggest that both can work reasonably well.     

Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building,migration and the social sciences

Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation–state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ‘transnational communities’— the last phase in this process — was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.     

Consanguineous Marriage in Turkish Families in Turkey and in Western Europe

The paper compares the prevalence and development of consanguineous marriages between Turkish migrants in Western Europe and stayers from the same regions of origin in Turkey. Analyses draw from three‐generational family data of the 2000 Families study. Findings suggest a decline of kin marriage over generations and time in both groups, but a higher prevalence of kin marriage among migrants. Parental impact was influential, but effects of transmission were lower among migrants. Kin marriage was strongly linked with cross‐border partner choice. The results support previous findings and indicate the specific effect of migration on seemingly traditional patterns of marriage.     

Portraits of emigration: sour milk and honey in the promised land

This article analyzes the moral tones of public emigration stories through an exploratory analysis of newspaper stories published between 1990 and 1993 in a region in Poland with a century-old tradition of out-migration. Media stories are fertile ground for examining values and myths because they negotiate between the micro-level process of individuals constructing meanings and the macro-level process of political economies producing meanings. I identified two sets of contradictory stories: (1) stories about the sending country cast emigrants as either home builders or home wreckers, and (2) stories about the receiving country depicted America as either Horatio Alger's land of possibility or a morally degenerate place where greed corrupts the soul. To explain these contradictions, I compare the institution of migration to (post)modern culture and note that both contribute to social diversity and structural differentiation which lead to value inconsistencies.     

Changes in core network size in Japan: Comparisons between the 1990s and 2010s

Few studies have examined changes in network size during the past 20 years in Japan despite changes in many other aspects of Japanese society that could affect Japanese social relationships. I conducted a time-series cross-sectional survey to investigate changes in network size for married Japanese people from 1993 to 2014. Results follow: 1) core network sizes decreased slightly; 2) the number of married males with no core network outside their households increased slightly; 3) kin and neighbour network sizes decreased and friend network size increased among married females; 4) kin network size decreased among married males; and 5) the probability of younger married males having no network friends increased. Overall, changes in network sizes were small, and we cannot conclude that serious social decay occurs among married Japanese people.     

Of Enlightenment and Alaska Early Moderns

This article examines transformations of status-capital in the modern history of the Alaska Native Alutiiq. I redevelop Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital and habitus to analyze how Alutiiq elites stay on course during massive changes in their social structure. By drawing attention to citizenship statuses of the nineteenth century Russian and American colonial periods, I explore how local structural inequalities emerge in Alaska, yet with leaders of the same Alaska Native kin groups moving into the new privileged positions as Russian Imperial citizen, then later as American citizen. The study identifies citizenship as a key technology of group identification in Alaska and, in particular, how civilizing processes associated with citizenship create marked objective differences among the Alutiiq. Alaska Native society's articulation with the Russian and, later, American cultural-political orders creates new kinds of local structural inequalities. By possessing the requisite cultural capital to comprehend structural shifts in politics and the economy, Alaska Native elites strategically fit into new legal and ideological regimes of belonging. What develops is an example of the durability of an Alaska Native ruling elite by means of the transformation of prestige.     

The consequences of international migration for the status of women: a Turkish study

As part of a larger inquiry into the consequences of international migration for those who remain in the country of origin, 234 adults in four Turkish provinces were interviewed concerning matters (mostly opinions) pertaining to the status of women. Three migrant-status categories were defined; (a) Returned migrants, (b) Non-migrant close kin or friends of migrants, and, as a control group, (c) All others. Controlling for age, sex, urban-rural residence, and schooling, group (a) was the most likely to express "non-traditional" views, and group (c) the least. Group (b) was in between.
Of the two possible explanations for such a pattern – recruitment and socialization – we found recruitment highly significant. The evidence for socialization, however, was decidedly mixed. Some of the considerable diversity of viewpoints pertaining to the status of women found in this inquiry are doubtless causally associated with the experience of migration, whether direct or indirect. But there is also evidence here of a society in the process of rapid change; and it is these more general social changes, not migration as such, that would appear to be more likely to affect the status of women.
There is little support for the contention that the type of international migration that has involved so many Turks these past three decades – migration that has for the most part been temporary and economically motivated and has consisted of movements from relatively poor agricultural or but slightly industrialized areas to rich, highly industrialized ones characterized by marked differences in language, religion, and overall culture – is going to result in moving the status of women from a more to a less "traditional" plane.     

Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives

This introduction to a special issue of the journal explores not only the role of memory and narratives in understanding gender and transnational families, but suggests how such families use and understand their memories to construct coherent narratives of the self and kin. In common with renewed thinking about the multifaceted nature of migration, the complexities of the process, and the continuing dialogue that migration establishes between the old and the new, the past and the present, those who engage with oral history/life story methods are increasingly aware that such data provide a ‘value added’ to rich empirical detail. These methods reveal the use of memory and its role in the continuing emotional adjustments in which most transnational experience is embroiled. They show how the multi‐layering of memory, language and narratives are indicators of the ways in which culture shapes recall and recounting. Families themselves become sites of belonging, part of the imaginary unity through which a transnational family may seek its identity. Equally, oral histories can tease out ways in which gender differences impact on, or are impacted by, transnational lives. The introduction situates the subsequent articles within a brief overview of oral history and migration.     

The politics of contraband: The honor economies of the warez scene

Lodged within the Internet’s increasingly commercialized webs there exists a thriving subculture that has developed an economy all its own. Specifically, a modern gift economy, a consistent and internally rational structure of actively anti-economic behavior that presents an interesting juxtaposition to our contemporary notions of economy. Based on an extended ethnography, this subculture is analyzed as a society ordered by agonistic play and gift-giving as economy. The contribution can best be described as adding ethnographic data from the post-industrial phase in Western economic development to the discussion of gift economies, a discourse that has usually dealt only with archaic communities.     

Emigration dynamics: the Indian context

This report on emigration dynamics in India opens by providing background on short- and long-distance migration to and from India in response to such events as the formation of Pakistan as well as to the policies of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Section 2 discusses India's demographic and sociocultural setting in terms of population growth, urbanization, patterns of internal migration, growth of the labor force, economic growth, poverty alleviation, health, and education. The third section describes the lack of data on international migration. Some data are available on emigrants, but the only information on return migration is that gleaned from surveys in Kerala. Section 4 considers emigration to industrialized countries and notes that it is almost exclusively permanent and largely composed of individuals with professional, technical, or managerial skills. The resulting brain drain is described as is the incidence of illegal migration. India does not create conditions from which citizens must seek asylum, rather the country has absorbed flows of refugees from Pakistan, Tibet, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka. Available data on the characteristics of emigrants and return migrants are reviewed in the next two sections, and section 7 looks at the data on financial flows gathered from macro-level estimates of remittances. Section 8 is devoted to the community, family, and individual factors which influence emigration including the networks that facilitate migration and means of meeting migration costs. The ninth section summarizes the political setting with an emphasis on the adverse reaction of Nepal to population movement from India. The final section of the report projects future population movements. It is noted that if there were no restrictions on migration, millions of Indians would emigrate to the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Whereas poverty, unemployment, and population growth will likely erode living conditions in India, the government has no policy to encourage emigration. Labor migration to the Gulf countries will likely continue.     

Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State

Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation‐state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way that is not transformative, but sustaining of the status quo. Examining Lebanon, this paper explores how domestic actors extend their struggles to vie over and through kin abroad. Three realms of competition are paramount: demography, votes, and money. The resulting transnational outreach reproduces a politics in which both expatriates and the state function as resources as much as actors.     

An overview of present and future emigration dynamics in South Asia

The author presents preliminary findings on selected aspects of the dynamics which govern emigration from and within the South Asian region comprised of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The paper attempts to identify some of the major reasons for observed migration flows and how the future may be envisaged especially in view of government programs, policies, and priorities. Contract labor migration is given special attention since it has become the predominant type of migration in the region. Sections consider a possible conceptual framework; measuring emigration pressure or potential; data and data problems; the volume of emigration since 1970; South Asian migrant workers; macro-level determinants of emigration; community, family, and individual factors; and sending country policies. The consequences of emigration are discussed in terms of the impacts upon the labor force and non-economic consequences. Observations for the future conclude the paper. Analysis of the dynamics of emigration from South Asia indicate an urgent need to improve data on various forms of emigration, that relevant officials in countries of origin have a longstanding concern about the exploitation of workers in sending as well as receiving countries, and the need to better understand the linkages between various factors relevant to the emigration process. An understanding of such linkages would allow for more realistic policies and planning for future emigration.