Culturally tailored workers for specialised destinations: producing Filipino migrant subjects for export

This multi-sited, mixed-methods study in Canada and the Philippines examines how migrant workers are manufactured and deployed to a range of global destinations by the Filipino migration apparatus. Building on scholarship examining how the Filipino state markets, selects and prepares Filipino (labour) migrants from and to the Philippines, I show that beyond seeking to produce a temporary migrant workforce with a ‘comparative advantage’ (including traits like ‘docile’, ‘hardworking’, ‘English-speaking’ and ‘loyal’), the state alongside recruiters and other actors in the migration industry also seek to produce workers with cultural knowledge of norms in receiving destinations. This is another dimension through which the Philippines aims to establish its ‘superiority’ in the international market for temporary labour. This study has implications for how we think about transnational labour brokering under highly saturated conditions, and the role of culture and other mediating factors in configuring ‘ideal’ worker constructions and flows.     

Evidence‐loving rock star chief medical officers: Female leadership amidst COVID‐19 in Canada

This article presents a feminist poststructuralist inquiry perspective on how news and social media discourse around the COVID‐19 pandemic is presenting a potential shift in hegemonic representations of masculine leadership. I am informed by organizational rules and sensemaking theories, and consider how Canadian and international female leaders are showing resilience, emotion and vulnerability as they help lead their countries through these uncertain times. I reflexively ground my observations in my own sensemaking and personal experiences. Despite reservations, I am hopeful. There are indications that the ‘rules of the game’ are starting to be challenged, and feminine frameworks that question traditional gender roles are disrupting conceptions around ‘business as usual’.     

Suspending,settling, sponsoring: the intimate chronomobilities of young Asian migrants in Australia

In this article, I develop the concept of ‘intimate chronomobilities’ to understand some of the intersections between the temporalities of intimate relationships and of migration in the lives of young and ‘middling’ transnational migrants from Asia to Australia. Drawing on in‐depth interview data, I reveal how romantic partnerships are highly significant to experiences of transnational mobility, and how such experiences take place in the context of a governance regime in Australia in which migration has become increasingly transient, transitionary and transitory, and in which sponsored partner and spouse visas can secure migration futures. The analysis explores how the lived and imagined timelines and timings of intimate partnerships play highly significant roles in defining and structuring migrants' mobilities, and reveals how intimate chronomobilities of ‘suspending, settling and sponsoring’ are understood by migrants through lived experiences of sequence, synchronicity and tempo.     

‘It's a Man's World!’: Restructuring Gender Imbalance in the Volvo Truck Company?

The paper seeks to analyse the relationship between teamwork and gender, in particular how far the new technical division of labour associated with teamwork holds out the prospect of lessening gender segregation in the capitalist labour process. Taking Volvo — a company at the forefront of ‘good work’ experiments — as the focus of the research one could reasonably expect that if teamwork was leading to a lessening of gender segregation in blue collar areas it would be in companies such as Volvo. The evidence suggests that in certain areas and under certain conditions teamworking can lead to more women being employed in blue collar environments on the same terms and conditions as men. However, on adding a normative and governance dimension to teamworking, the evidence is more complex and is suggestive of a strategy drawing upon the utilization of stereotypical images of women as a ‘civilizing’ influence over male workers in a de-layered organizational environment lacking direct first line supervision. The paper is divided into three substantive sections. The first section will sketch out the development of work organization in the Volvo organization to be followed in the second by a review of the gender segregation literature. The third section of the paper will, through an analysis of Volvo's Commercial Vehicle Division, assess how far teamwork has challenged traditional forms of gender segregation in the capitalist labour process.     

They are all ‘doing gender’ but are they are all passing? A case study of the appropriation of a sociological concept1

The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman . In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmerman's notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing‘doing gender’– the concept's intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice.     

Return Migration and Transnationalism: How Are the Two Connected?

Return migration and migrant transnationalism are key phenomena in research on international migration. Here we examine how the two are connected. The article introduces a special section and draws partly upon this selection of papers and partly upon the broader literature. First, we argue that there is often a blurred boundary between mobility as a transnational practice, for instance in the form of return visits, and purportedly permanent or long‐term return migration. Second, we examine the effects of transnationalism on return migration intentions and experiences. Third, we explore how migration trajectories, involving various forms of ‘return’ moves, create different forms of transnationalism. Examples include the ‘reverse transnational’ practices of returnees and the ‘residual transnationalism’ of migrants who have had an unsuccessful return experience and decided to settle permanently abroad. We end by considering how both return migration and transnationalism exist in the interplay between the personal and the social.     

The ‘international dimension’ in social work education: current developments in England

As our awareness of the impact of globalising trends has increased, so too has social work's interest in international issues grown. At the same time, concerns have been raised about what constitutes international social work, and how this ‘international dimension’ might be introduced to social work students as part of their preparation for practice. This paper reports on a recently completed study which explored the different ways in which international issues are being addressed in social work programmes leading to the newly established three-year degree in social work across the UK. Based on an email survey of accredited programmes in England, plus a small number of follow-up interviews, findings are presented on the different approaches and innovations adopted in the development of curriculum with an international perspective. Discussion focuses on possible factors promoting and/or inhibiting the development of an international dimension within the qualifying curriculum. The paper concludes with some observations on how the different understandings of ‘international social work’ can contribute to a greater appreciation of global problems and alternative ways of responding to social needs at local, national and international levels.     

Gendered Perspectives on Integration Discourses and Measures

This article focuses on gendered discourses in integration policy and the problems immigrants pose in the reproduction of inequalities in a number of European countries. There has been little consideration of how gender categories operate in relation to broader political discourses around the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the constitution of national social and political communities and identities. Yet gender issues have become significant in the backlash against multiculturalism and gender and sexual relations have moved to the centre of debates about the necessity to enforce integration, if not assimilation. The first section outlines recent developments in the immigration‐integration nexus in different European states. The second section draws out some of the reasons for the focus on family migration and spouses who are seen as the main importers of the ‘backward’ practices and with ‘doubtful’ parenting practices for future generations of citizens. The third section tackles the shift of current debates about integration of migrant women from the periphery, where they were largely invisible or mere appendages of men, to the centre, where they have acquired in the process a heightened, though not necessarily positive, visibility. Too often, representations of migrant women are based on a homogenised image of uneducated and backward migrants as victims of patriarchal cultures, legitimizing in this way the use of immigration controls to reduce the numbers entering and to tackle broader social issues, as has clearly been the case with forced marriages. Furthermore, the more discourses focus on Muslim women and Islam as inimical to European societies, the more the debate becomes culturalised and marginalises the socio‐economic dimension of integration and the structural inequalities migrants face. Thus pre‐entry tests may have less to do with integration than with a desire to reduce the flow of marriage migrants or to raise their human capital.     

Visiting here,there, and somewhere: Multi-locality and the geographies of transnational family visiting

For transnational families, visits represent an opportunity to temporarily punctuate the geographical distance that separates them from significant others in everyday life. Drawing on data from mapping-interviews conducted with older skilled migrants in Abu Dhabi, the UAE, this paper is concerned with how transnational visiting is harnessed to sustain a sense of family togetherness at a later stage of the life course. The discussion contributes to migration scholarship on return visits and visits by relatives to the migration destination but also draws attention to a third dimension of visiting; family meet-ups in a third space—a location that is neither the country of origin nor the migration destination. Hence, I propose an explicitly spatial, relational conceptualization of transnational family visits, arranged around a multi-local framework: the return visit (‘there’); the receiving of visits in the migration destination (‘here’); and visits in an in-between geographical space (‘somewhere’). In so doing, this paper places the spotlight on the geographies of visiting, drawing attention to the dynamic way in which the practice of transnational family visiting in enacted in later life.     

Bridging the Gap: ‘Doing Gender’, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, and the Educational Troubles of Boys

This article reviews popular and social scientific perspectives on the academic gender gap in education, specifically the finding that boys underperform compared to girls. The article highlights the utility of sociology in analyzing the gender gap and in guiding how educators respond to students’ gender. It suggests that contemporary gender theories ‘doing gender’ and ‘hegemonic masculinity’ offer the best lenses through which to view academic gender differences. These perspectives can frame boys’ academic troubles as an important social problem, but one that is rooted in the social construction of masculinity rather than institutional discrimination against boys.     

Looking for the Holy Grail: Publishing and advertising strategies and contemporary men's magazines

Recent work in gender/queer theory has developed J. L. Austin's notion of performativity to account for the compulsive and repetitive construction of gender as a kind of ‘performance’. This work has failed to examine the role of ‘sound’ in Austin's theory, with important consequences for our understanding of the basis of such an ‘ordinary’ communicative event. This article compares the problems which Austin raises for the securing of communicative events through a concept of sound with the sound experiment in the 1970s pornographic film, The Opening of Misty Beethoven. By linking this complex filmic disruption of the interrelation between desire, sexual performance and sound with a non-Derridean exploration of Austin, this study suggests that theories of the communicative event can be much enriched by examining ideas underlying ‘ordinary sexual intercourse’.     

Privileged Japanese transnational families in Hawaii as lifestyle migrants

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

'Pressed for time'– the differential impacts of a 'time squeeze'

The ‘time squeeze’ is a phrase often used to describe contemporary concerns about a shortage of time and an acceleration of the pace of daily life. This paper reviews analysis of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), 1985 and 1992, and draws upon in‐depth semi‐structured interviews conducted with twenty British suburban households, in order to shed light on ‘senses’ of time squeeze. 75% of HALS respondents felt at least ‘somewhat’ pressed for time, with variables of occupation, gender, age and consumption significantly increasing senses of being ‘pressed for time’. This is not surprising given theories of the ‘time squeeze’. However, identification of variables only offers insights into isolated causal effects and does little to explain how or why so many respondents reported feeling ‘usually pressed for time’. Using interview data to help interpret the HALS findings, this paper identifies three mechanisms associated with the relationship between practices and time (volume, co‐ordination and allocation), suggesting that ‘harriedness’ represents multiple experiences of time (substantive, temporal dis‐organisation, and temporal density). In conclusion, it is argued that when investigating ‘harriedness’ it is necessary to recognise the different mechanisms that generate multiple experiences of time in order for analysis to move beyond one‐dimensional interpretations of the ‘time squeeze’, and in order to account for the relationship between social practices and their conduct within temporalities (or the rhythms of daily life).     

'You've gotta learn how to play the game': homeless women's use of gender performance as a tool for preventing victimization

As a masculinist space, ‘the streets’ present a variety of dangers to homeless women, a fact that has received too little attention within the social science literature. This study utilizes data drawn from interviews with homeless women and service providers in Edinburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, to explore the complex survival strategies that homeless women develop to prevent criminal victimization. Through women's words, we see that gender is understood strategically as performance. Four gender performances are identified and discussed: the ‘femininity simulacrum’, the ‘masculinity simulacrum’, ‘genderlessness’ and ‘passing’. We discussed how each of these performances is employed in the pursuit of safety and security in frequently violent and chaotic social spaces.     

How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration

We argue that social media are not only new communication channels in migration networks, but also that they actively transform the nature of these networks and thereby facilitate migration. Despite some limitations, which stem from the ‘digital divide’ and the lower trustworthiness of virtual ties, qualitative data reveal four relevant ways in which social media facilitate international migration. First, they enhance the possibilities of maintaining strong ties with family and friends. Second, they address weak ties that are relevant to organizing the process of migration and integration. Third, they establish a new infrastructure consisting of latent ties. Fourth, they offer a rich source of insider knowledge on migration that is discrete and unofficial. This makes potential migrants ‘streetwise’ when undertaking migration. Based on these empirical findings we conclude that social media are transforming migration networks and thereby lowering the threshold for migration.     

Good Governance as Managerialism: Rationalisation and International Donors in Vietnam's Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Donors’ appreciation of their relationship with Vietnam as a ‘mature development partnership’ requires explanation. Drawing on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation policy, the article argues that the success of donor collaboration with Vietnam is based on Vietnamese political culture coincidentally aligning with a managerialist ‘world culture’, presently extant in the form of neoliberal ‘good governance’ development orthodoxy. The article shows that Vietnam ‘delivers’ rationalised development policy to international donors through its system of state administration and planning, the implementation of target‐oriented planning and the role of statistics in the policy process. The strength of the ‘darling’ partnership is explained in relation to this cultural dimension of legitimacy creation through the performance of rational development planning and administration.     

Not only men but also migrants in non-traditional occupations

Domestic labour is considered a typical female job, and due to the arrival of large migration flows to Italy it has experienced a massive ethnicized connotation, peculiar of this sector. This paper focuses on how a double and subaltern condition of belonging to a ‘minority group’ affects gender perceptions of male migrant domestic workers and how they construct their masculinity.

This research is based on a comparison between 54 interviews with male and female migrant domestic workers, drawing on an intersectional approach based on gender and nationality. It shows how moving across borders, living in a host society, and working in a non-traditional job can reshape male immigrants' gender division perceptions, often in contradictory and unexpected ways. It also emerges how the ‘racial glass escalator’ allows reaffirmation of characteristics tied to the privileges of masculinity and furnishes an important and useful framework in which to analyse the experience of men in ‘female’ occupations.     

Exit or Voice? The Recent Drivers of Kosovar Out‐migration

A remarkable out‐migration from Kosovo occurred after the winter 2014/15, raising urgent questions about its underlying drivers and implications for both Kosovo and the destination countries. This article aims at providing a better understanding of key migration triggers and some particularities of the phenomenon. We link our empirically found migration drivers to Hirschman's ( 1970 ) famous exit, voice or loyalty scheme by asking in how far the exit must be understood as the explicit alternative to voicing dissatisfaction with the current situation in the country. According to our results, the recent Kosovar out‐migration is a clear response to weak governance and thus goes beyond the widespread ‘migration‐cum‐remittances’ livelihood practice. In this sense it could be interpreted as a revolt against the political system. With view to policy implications for destination countries, we point at legal travel and migration opportunities as the better solution to channel both voice and exit.     

What’s on the Line?: Exploring the Significance of Gendered Everyday Resistance Within the Transnational Call Center Workplace

Abstract

Recent efforts on the part of International Political Economy (IPE) scholars to place an emphasis on the importance of everyday spaces and actors in analyses of the global political economy have largely tended to overlook the significance of gender. However, gender and other intersecting factors serve to inform everyday actions, which—as ‘everyday IPE’ scholars suggest—impact the international. Therefore I present a feminist everyday politics of the global economy (or FEPGE) approach that aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between gender, everyday actions (in particular, resistance), and the international. Drawing on data from interviews with former transnational call center workers in Ontario, Canada, this approach is used to explore the significance of gendered everyday acts of worker resistance. I argue that along with the ‘feminization of labor’ within the industry, it may also be necessary to discuss the ‘feminization of resistance’.     

Data Sets on International Migration

International migration figures prominently on the agenda of the United Nations. Solid migration data are crucial for supporting this global debate. This article describes the international migration data sets produced by the Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations. The Population Division’s Migration Section produces migrant stock estimates for the world’s countries by sex and, more recently, by age. The Section also produces a database containing annual data on inflows, outflows, and net flows of international migrants by country of origin for major destination countries. The Section maintains the Global Migration Database, containing the world’s most complete set of empirical statistics on the international migrant stock by country of birth, citizenship, sex, and age for more than 200 countries and territories for recent decades. The data and associated publications are available from the Migration Section’s Web site at http://www.unmigration.org .