Leveraging symbolic capital: the use of blat networks across transnational spaces

In this article, we contribute to debates on how social networks sustain migrants' entrepreneurial activities. By reporting on 31 interviews with Eastern European migrants in the UK, we provide a critical lens on the tendency to assume that migrants have ready‐made social networks in the host country embedded in co‐ethnic communities. We extend this limited perspective by demonstrating how Eastern European migrants working in the UK transform blat social networks, formulated in the cultural and political contours of Soviet society, in their everyday lived experiences. Our findings highlight not only the monetarization of such networks but also the continuing embedded nature of trust existing within these networks, which cut across transnational spaces. We show how forms of social capital based on Russian language use and legacies of a shared Soviet past, are just as important as the role of ‘co‐ethnics’ and ‘co‐migrants’ in facilitating business development. In doing so, we present a more nuanced understanding of the role that symbolic capital plays in migrant entrepreneurial journeys and its multifaceted nature.     

Contested Concepts in Violence Against Women: ‘Intimate’, ‘Domestic’ or ‘Torture’?

Abstract

Ritualistic, overwhelmingly violent bikie gang or cult-inflicted abuse of women, entrenched by co-opting third party cult or gang members, has been referred to as ‘domestic violence’, ‘intimate violence’ or ‘intimate partner violence’. The present article questions the aptitude of these terms to convey the realities of this violence, in light of the experiences of women attending a South Australian domestic violence service, all of whom were escaping violent partners who were members or associates of bikie gangs and cults. The paper asks, ‘is torture an appropriate term for such violence?’ and discusses the impact of social, legal, organisational and human rights parallel states that collaborate to make it almost impossible for these women to escape this violence and make it difficult for social workers to work effectively with them. The paper concludes that the State needs to adopt a human rights rather than legal focus when addressing the issue of violence against women.     

Family Support as a Gang Reduction Measure

Recent public concern about youth gangs in Britain has prompted a narrow, almost stereotypical, range of US‐derived policy responses. This paper argues that family support is an unexplored but potentially effective gang reduction tool, but in order to overcome persistent concerns regarding misidentification, stigmatic labelling and policy misdirection, programmes must not only be ‘good science’ but also be non‐punitive, acceptable to families and context‐sensitive. Beginning with a discussion of the grounds for intervention, the paper identifies likely barriers from the point of view of the parents of gang members, and from these, derives necessary standards for effective support. The paper describes some promising (‘public health oriented’) and unpromising (‘criminal justice oriented’) programmes, and argues for more ‘gang‐sensitive’ family support and a related research agenda.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

‘Going viral’ and ‘Going country’: the expressive and instrumental activities of street gangs on social media

Based on social media content analysis and focus groups with young people, the current study explores expressive and instrumental uses of the internet among street gangs. ‘Trap rap’ videos posted on YouTube and orientated around life as a drug dealer are identified as the ultimate cultural artefact for denoting London, UK, gang culture. These videos serve an expressive purpose in terms of reputation building, but also shed light on the instrumental business of gangs – specifically, illicit drugs sales via ‘country lines’. Looking beyond the artefact toward how these videos are created, disseminated, and consumed, reveals the instrumental organisation of gangs and how social rules and behaviours within them are monitored and enforced. The current study thus contributes to gang research from the UK, and the growing body of literature on gang and gang member use of the Internet, with implications for research and practice.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.     

A state of limbo: the politics of waiting in neo‐liberal Latvia

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post‐Soviet context. While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo‐liberal governmental technology and its application in post‐socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state‐run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between ‘neo‐liberal’ and ‘Soviet’ regimes, we should understand the double‐move of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo‐liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorizations of the temporal politics of neo‐liberalism.     

Intimate circuits: modernity,migration and marriage among post‐Soviet women in Turkey

The study of migration too often ignores the ways that labour migrants' emotional entanglements and complicated personal relationships factor into their experiences of being people on the move. In examining post‐Soviet migrant women's relationships with Turkish men and the ways these are regulated in Turkey, in this article I consider how intimate practices of marriage and performances of ‘love’ have emerged as key aspects of transnational mobility. These intimate practices both enable long‐term transnational circuits between post‐Soviet homelands and Turkey, and attest to the way global capitalism is redefining personal lives.     

Training research-minded social workers: experience from Estonia*

ABSTRACT

Social work education in its modern sense started to develop after Estonia regained independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. The aim of this article is to introduce good practices of teaching research-mindedness, this being one of the main principles in teaching social workers-to-be in the University of Tartu in Estonia. We have been inspired by the academic tradition of university teaching in general, the new international definition of social work and, not least, the realisation of social workers in practice of not being able to apply academic knowledge to everyday social work practices. This article revisits the term research-mindedness and examines how it has been integrated into the university level teaching process. Our purpose is to discuss the methods students of bachelor’s and master’s programmes can learn to ‘translate’ social issues into research questions, critically appraise the findings and ‘translate’ them back as new research evidence for social work practice.     

Cultural production and the politics of identity: On the strategic use of ‘multiculturalism’ in two Austrian cities

This article is a résumé of the findings of an empirical study carried out by the ICCR Vienna between July 1993 and July 1994. The study investigated the images of ‘foreigners’ as members of immigrant minorities that emerge out of the interaction between the cultural administration, organizers of cultural events, cultural agents and ‘ethnic minority’ artists, and how these images and the discourse on ‘foreigners’ relates to practices of inclusion and exclusion. Specifically examined were artistic productions and initiatives of the low‐profit and non‐profit sector of theatrical and musical performances in Vienna and Graz. Qualitative interviews with the main actors were supported and enriched through non‐standardized participant observation, action research and a modest social experiment. The article argues that the Austrian variant of the discourse on ‘multiculturalism’ serves as a tool to formulate social order, whereby social inequality is transformed into cultural difference. The emancipatory dimension of culture as a way of life is used to construct homogeneous cultural ( = ’ethnic') collectives. In this construction immigrant artists serve as the representatives of the collective culture of the ‘others’.     

Revisiting 'communities in Britain'

In this article I re‐examine Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain (1966) and his use of a ‘morphological continuum’ within his analysis. This analysis is itself a re‐assessment of some influential community studies conducted within the British Isles. I look at some particular ideas within the more theoretical part of this book, especially the ideas of ‘social redundancy’ and the distinction between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. I then consider some themes arising from some more recent studies. These themes include identity, networks and social capital and time and I argue that Frankenberg's analysis can still provide the reader with useful tools to think through the ideas and practices of community.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Having the wrong kind of money. A qualitative analysis of new forms of financial, social and moral exclusion in consumerist Scandinavia

Consumerism not only promotes discourses emphasizing individualized consumer choices, but it also introduces new electronic, invisible and symbolic forms of money. The present article analyses social exclusion in contemporary Scandinavian society by focusing on patterns of consumption and the social meaning of money in low‐income households in Denmark and Sweden. Drawing on recent sociological theory on money and budgeting ( Pahl, 1999, 2002 ; Singh, 1997, 1999 ; Zelizer, 1997, 2005 ) and recent critiques of consumption studies ( Edgell, Hetherington and Warde 1996 ; Gronow and Warde, 2001 ; Lodziak, 2002 ), it argues that experiences of social and financial exclusion in consumerist society must be related to the amount of money available within the household, the social position that the household occupies, and the social form that this money takes. Pahl (1999 ) shows that the development of electronic money seems to alter and further constrain access to consumption for the ‘credit poor’ and ‘information poor’. To this ‘technological filter’, a ‘social filter’ may be added, as the results suggest that consumption patterns and the social meaning of money in low‐income families are largely incompatible with prevailing neo‐liberalist ideas of money and consumption in contemporary society.     

Microbusiness, household and class dynamics: the embedding of minority ethnic petty commerce

Microbusinesses are embedded in wider social processes, and it is the nature of this social embeddedness that is the principal focus of the article. In particular,‘domestic embedding’ of petty commerce is crucial, and involves a mixture of competition, domination, negotiation, and custom (Wheelock and Mariussen, 1997). Furthermore, as a socio‐economic group, petty traders and producers occupy an ambivalent position in the class structure, as they are vulnerable both to upward and downward social mobility. While the petty capital class has the advantage of possessing property assets, many members lack significant symbolic and cultural assets. Nonetheless, property assets offer the most robust bases for class formation (Savage et al., 1992). In addition, the embedding of petty commerce can be both ‘identity‐sensitive’ and ‘identity‐neutral’(Sayer, 1995; 2000; Fraser, 1995). Extra‐ethnic factors are significant in this process. The research uses formal interviews and ‘quasi‐ethnographic’ methodology to explore the different contexts in which restaurateurs and market traders operated in Birmingham, UK. The article draws critically on several literatures on industrial organisation, economic sociology, family businesses and minority ethnic businesses. One aim is to give the rather indifferent concept of ‘embedding’ substantive content, and in this way to make an empirically informed contribution to ‘new economic sociology’.     

Time,Space and Gender: Understanding ‘Problem’ Behaviour in Young Children

The following article reports on a small‐scale, exploratory study of aggressive and ‘problem’ behaviour in pre‐school children. This project was conceived in the wider context of anxieties about childhood and New Labour’s policy focus on ‘anti‐social’ behaviour in children. Based on interviews with nursery staff and parents in addition to participant observation undertaken in nursery playrooms, this article examines the relevance of time, space and gender for understanding problem behaviour in young children. Taking a social constructionist perspective and drawing on Foucault's ideas in particular, it examines the social processes which regulate and normalise behaviour in young children. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

Labour Migration Policy in Russia: Considerations on Governmentality

The authors argue that Russian migration policy reflects the functioning of contemporary Russia's entire bureaucratic machine. The bureaucracy's Soviet‐era governance techniques on the one hand and the material interests of particular pressure groups on the other, shape the manipulation of immigration regulation that has occurred since the early 2000s. Therefore, attempts to liberalize migration regulation, i.e., to simplify the legalization of foreign workers, have always been incoherent, accompanied by reservations and limitations. Additionally, Russian actions are riddled with conflict between ‘geopolitical’ and domestic policy rationales. The authorities’ occasional attempts to use immigration regulation as a foreign policy tool acquire primarily symbolic value in the ‘domestic political market’ rather than serving any instrumental purpose. The effort to enhance Russian influence in the post‐Soviet space through the ‘reintegration project’ (Eurasian Economic Union) collides with the goal of national labour market protection, since integration entails the removal of barriers to labour movement.     

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.     

Developmental States in Africa? A Review of Ongoing Debates and Buzzwords

This article reviews the literature concerning the emergence of developmental states in Africa and gives an overview of debates on the usefulness of the ‘East Asian model’ for sub‐Saharan Africa. The conclusion highlights how historic developmental states were often the product of trial and error rather than a grand plan; the concept of a developmental state therefore often works less as a model and more as a ‘buzzword’ with its own uses and effects.     

On ‘flip‐flopping’: Branded stance‐taking in U.S. electoral politics1

This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactants, but is largely interdiscursive in character. ‘Conviction’ and its opposite, ‘flip‐flopping,’ suggest further how stance‐taking itself has been an object of typification in the agonistic dynamics of candidate branding and counter‐branding. In moving from epistemic stance‐taking in discourse to models of the stance‐taker as a social type, this article addresses questions about the units and levels of analysis needed to study stance in contemporary political discourse.     

Ctrl+ALT-RIGHT: reinterpreting our knowledge of white supremacy groups through the lens of street gangs

For the last 30 years, gang scholars have explicitly disregarded white youth who are active in groups with overt or implicit ties to neo-Nazi/skinhead or white power ideologies from street gang research. This article argues that this decision to keep these two groups separate stems from a misinterpretation of the realities of these groups and this decision has had a long-standing impact on how researchers, law enforcement and policymakers understand and interact with youth active in these groups. The coining of the term ‘Alt-Right,’ and the re-emergence of white power youth in the international dialogue, underscores how the lack of systematic research severely limits our knowledge about youth involved in gangs with white power leanings. Based on these concerns, this article challenges the current understanding of both skinheads and their troublesome youth groups/gangs. By orienting the limited research on skinhead gangs within key street gang domains, this article draws attention to disconnects in the literature that have influenced how researchers approach the study of skinhead youth. This study’s conclusions support the purposeful inclusion of skinhead youth in future street gang research.