Citizenship and inequality in a global age

Although the notion of national citizenship has long held the promise of equal membership, it has proved less useful in a world of circulating cultures, people, and loyalties through money, media, and migration. The increasing mobility of capital and people across national borders compels us to conceptualize welfare and inequality at the global level. Although the enforcement of citizen rights remains within the purview of the nation‐state, the source of these rights can no longer be firmly placed within the national framework. From cosmopolitan imaginations to postnational research, contemporary configurations of citizenship trace their legitimacy to global discourses that increasingly challenge the national order of citizenship. Yet current transformations in citizenship also point to the possibility of new inequalities, particularly, when nation‐states are increasingly able to modulate the rights they make available to immigrants, and differentiate among refugees, professionals, and investors among many other categories of people.     

Global Mobility and Penal Order: Criminalizing Migration,A View from Europe

Globalization has increased the flow of people across Europe, bringing economic expansion and ethnic diversity. Open political borders have enhanced European integration and interdependence, creating a cosmopolitan European Union full of transnational citizens. Alongside this increased mobility, state coercion has been quietly on the rise. Since 1990, nearly every European democracy has increased incarceration, locking up common criminals and those perceived to be outsiders. Foreign nationals are overrepresented in nearly every European prison, making up over 50 percent of the prison population in Greece, 35 percent in Spain and Italy, for example, or 28 percent in Sweden. At the same time, the intensification of border control – the regulation of both territory and group membership – has subjected a growing number of people to detention and expulsion, as immigration itself has become, in part, criminalized. The controversial expulsion of the Roma, EU citizens, from France in the summer of 2010 and the large scale detention of North African migrants in Lampedusa, Italy during the Arab Spring of 2011, among other events, graphically illustrate the rise of state coercion, directed particularly against those perceived to be foreigners and mobile. This article analyzes the current state of the literature that brings us closer to understanding how and why European democracies resort to the criminal law and penal sanctioning to resolve broader conflicts over globalization, national identity, and economic restructuring by excluding others and by desperately trying to control and contain mobility.     

Cosmopolitan pathways from the Global South: How non-middle-class students become desirable Fulbright applicants

International student mobility (ISM) is largely interpreted as a global middle-class capital accumulation strategy. Cosmopolitanism, which is the named outcome and effect of these mobile forms of social and cultural capital, is therefore disproportionately available to already privileged students. This study moves beyond this prevailing interpretation by examining how students from working- or lower-middle-class families with limited resources in Global South countries combine bottom-up cosmopolitanism with educational mobility to get selected into highly competitive spaces, such as the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the most prestigious educational and cultural program in the United States. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with successful Fulbright applicants and participant observation, my findings suggest that working- and lower-middle-class applicants are largely successful because of their cosmopolitan dispositions which they cultivate in creative and agentive ways. This article adds texture and complexity to existing discussions on middle-class hegemony in ISM and cosmopolitan subject-making.     

Cosmopolitanism and the relevance of ‘zombie concepts’: the case of anomic suicide amongst Alevi Kurd youth

Against Beck's claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim's theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second‐generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a ‘new rainbow underclass’, as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation.     

Empirical Considerations on the Problem of Social Integration*

The present study analyzes differences in perception of neighborhood and residential mobility as related to formal and informal participation. Results show that perceived similarity is related to neighborhood participation, while residential mobility is related to formal group membership. These relationships, with very few exceptions, seem to persist even in the presence of other control variables like age, education and religion. A significant proportion of the urban community participates frequently with neighbors and belongs to church and other formal groups. These activities are generally high in the suburb and low in the inner city regardless of differences in perception of neighborhood and residential mobility except for membership in organizational groups: the high membership in the suburb occurs under conditions of perceived similarity. The theoretical implications suggest a re-evaluation of the mode of life in the modern urban community and emphasize the significance of taking the perceptual as well as the behavioral context into account in sociological analysis.     

What if gender became an essential,standard element of Vulnerability Assessments?

Vulnerability Assessments (VAs) can be useful tools for providing key insights for non-government organisations and other development actors, including governments. Not only can they provide an extensive, ‘landscape-wide’ understanding of vulnerability and its underlying causes in a specific context, but this understanding can be jointly owned by all participants. They can thus be used for designing risk reduction and resilience-building measures, programmes, or projects that affect specific groups within a community or the landscape. Beyond that, VAs can provide a platform that promotes interaction among otherwise disconnected stakeholders, as well as the evidence and argumentation for community groups to engage in advocacy with local and municipal/district authorities. This article draws on our combined experience as development practitioners, and considers what we have learnt about the importance of integrating gender issues into VAs.     

Geographic Mobility and Spatial Assimilation among U. S. Latino Immigrants1

Although the spatial assimilation of immigrants to the United States has important implications for social theory and social policy, few studies have explored the atterns and determinants of interneighborhood geographic mobility that lead to immigrants’residential proximity to the white, non‐Hispanic majority. We explore this issue by merging data from three different sources ‐ the Latino National Political Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and tract‐level census data ‐ to begin unraveling causal relationships among indicators of socioeconomic, social, cultural, segmented, and spatial assimilation. Our longitudinal analysis of 700 Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants followed from 1990 to 1995 finds broad support for hypotheses derived from the classical account of minority assimilation. High income, English language use, and embeddedness in Anglo social contexts increase Latino immigrants’geographic mobility into Anglo neighborhoods. U. S. citizenship and years spent in the United Stares are ppsidvely associated with geographic mobility into more Anglo neighbor oods, and coethnic contact is inversely associated with this form of mobility, but these associations operate largely through other redictors. Prior experiences of ethnic discrimination increase and residence in public housing decreases the likelihood that Latino immigrants will move from their origin neighborhoods, while residing in metropolitan areas with large Latino populations leads to geographic moves into “less Anglo” census tracts.     

SOME FACTORS AFFECTING MOBILITY IN THE LABOR MARKET FOR ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS

This study examines the effects of publication, geographic preferences, and institutional preferences on the mobility of academic economists during the period 1955-69. Using a sample of 3813 economists who published at least one article during this period, the analysis indicates that publications do promote upward mobility but to a limited extent. The number of publications rather than their quality promotes mobility, but movement occurs primarily within well-defined geographic regions. The market for academic economists appears to be strongly segmented along geographic lines. Moves within geographic regions tend to be to departments of equal or lesser prestige than the department from which the individual has moved.     

Gender discourses in academic mobility

Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine differences in language that create differing realities with regards to gender and obligations of care in academic mobility decisions. The findings reveal how academic mobility is discursively formulated as ‘essential’ to successful academic careers, with the need for frequent travel justified despite advances in virtual communication technologies. Heteronormative discourses are shown to disrupt and fragment the opportunities female academics have to engage in academic mobility. However, we also uncover ways in which these discourses are resisted, wherein fathers articulate emotional strain associated with academic mobility. The article shows how discourse works to constitute the essentialization of academic mobility, and the uneven gendered practices associated with it, whilst also giving voice to gender inequities in academic mobility from the southern hemisphere.     

The effect of geographic mobility on male labor-force participants in the United States

We use both fixed-effects and random-effects regression models to measure the effect of geographic mobility on earnings of labor-force participants in the United States. The results support the humancapital hypothesis: six years after moving, real earnings of male labor-force participants are about 20 percent higher than they would have been had the move not occurred. Men younger than 40, and men with family-unit incomes no more than five times the poverty line, experience even larger benefits from moving. The geographic mobility that is characteristic of the United States’ flexible labor market, in general, is beneficial to the movers. Support for this research was provided by the United States Department of Agriculture, a research grant from the Faculty of Commerce, University of Wollongong, and a grant from the Labor Market and Regional Studies Center, University of Wollongong.     

Social mobility in Scotland since the middle of the twentieth century

Extensive mobility between class of origin and class of destination has been a characteristic feature of societies in Europe and North America since the middle of the twentieth century. Most mobility has been upward, and most of that has been explicable by occupational change – by the rise in the proportion of the labour force which works in service‐class jobs and the decline in the proportion in manual jobs. This pattern may now be changing, because parents of younger cohorts (people born since the 1960s) have themselves benefited from upward mobility and so there is less scope for further upward movement by their offspring. The paper uses a large new data source for Scotland to investigate these topics. It finds that there is still a great deal of mobility, and that, although upward mobility still predominates, its amount is lower in younger cohorts than in older. Nevertheless, relative mobility has not changed as upward mobility has declined, just as in earlier studies it was found not to have changed as upward mobility rose. These patterns are similar for men and women.     

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? An examination of the varying meaningfulness and commensurability of everyday ‘cosmopolitan’ practices

The literature on cosmopolitanism has mushroomed in the past decade or more as attempts are made to theorise new patterns of mobility, interactions between previously distant social groups and the emergence of institutions to manage these processes. In this paper, I build on the arguments of those who have emphasised the strategic aspects and temporal dimensions of cosmopolitan expressions and practices, by focusing on the resources and constraints that different actors operate with, or under, and, as a result, the varying commitments they have to different ‘others’. Using this type of grounded approach, a number of Illustrative examples from a study of social identities in England are then analysed and used to theorise cosmopolitanism, as a perspective that is periodically articulated, in relation to specific needs, contexts or prompts, rather than being an inherent property of particular individuals, groups or situations.     

The cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization

This paper explores the empirical, conceptual and theoretical gains that can be made using cosmopolitan social theory to think through the urban transformations that scholars have in recent years termed planetary urbanization. Recognizing the global spread of urbanization makes the need for a cosmopolitan urban sociology more pressing than ever. Here, it is suggested that critical urban sociology can be invigorated by focusing upon the disconnect that Henri Lefebvre posits between the planetarization of the urban – which he views as economically and technologically driven – and his dis‐alienated notion of a global urban society. The first aim of this paper is to highlight the benefits of using ‘cosmopolitan’ social theory to understand Lefebvre's urban problematic (and to establish why this is also a cosmopolitan problematic); the second is to identify the core cosmopolitan contradictions of planetary urbanization, tensions that are both actually existing and reproduced in scholarly accounts. The article begins by examining the challenges presented to urban sociology by planetary urbanization, before considering how cosmopolitan sociological theory helps provide an analytical ‘grip’ on the deep lying social realities of contemporary urbanization, especially in relation to questions about difference, culture and history. These insights are used to identify three cosmopolitan contradictions that exist within urbanized (and urbanizing) space; tensions that provide a basis for a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan investigation of planetary urbanization.     

Youth,Mobility, and the Emotional Burdens of youxue (Travel and Study): A Case Study of Chinese Students in Italy

Based on fieldwork in China and Italy, this article examines the affective dimension of middle-class Chinese students’ youxue (travel and study) practices in Italy. With the liberalization of state policy in China’s self-funded study abroad market and the proliferation of educational intermediaries, youxue has become a special type of educational consumption that caters to the middle-class Chinese family’s desire for transnational mobility and cosmopolitan life styles. The blurring of the line between travel and study points to the open-ended and multi-linear nature of transnational student mobility. However, due to the limitations and pitfalls in international education policies in both the sending and the receiving countries, Chinese students’ youxue experiences in Italy are marked by notable contradictions between mobility and immobility, hopes and frustrations, self-appreciation and self-reproach.     

Social Mobility and Participation: The Dissociative and Socialization Hypotheses*

Information on participation with kin, with friends, and in voluntary associations was used to test two competing hypothescs of the effects of social mobility on social relations. The dissociative hypothesis maintains that mobility leads to social isolation, while the socialization hypothesis predicts an adptive outcome to mobility. The relationship is more complex than either position would suggest. Social mobility is associated with isolation from kin and friends, but only for the upwardly mobile. The findings obtained with voluntary associations support the socialization hypothesis in that the level of membership of the socially mobile is intermediate between the two stable groups. Social mobility has maladaptive consequences for more intimate and personal social relations, but it is integrative as far as participation in voluntary associations is concerned.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

Cosmopolitan attitudes through transnational social practices?

Within the scope of the debate surrounding globalization, ever increasing attention is being directed to the growth of border‐crossing social relations and the emergence of transnational social spaces on the micro‐level. In particular, the question of how these border‐crossing interrelations influence the attitudes and values of the people involved causes some controversy. Some assume that the increasing trans‐nationalization of social relations will foster the development of cosmopolitan attitudes, while others warn that renationalization may also be a result. On the empirical level, the relationship between transnationalization and cosmopolitanism has so far only been addressed with regard to certain groups or specific circumstances. However, we assume that on the general level there is a positive relation between the two syndromes and address this question empirically on the level of the entire German population. On the basis of a representative survey of German citizens carried out in 2006, we find that people with border‐crossing experiences and transnational social relations are more likely to adopt cosmopolitan attitudes with respect to foreigners and global governance. The analysis shows that this general interrelation remains stable even when controlling for relevant socio‐economic variables.     

Nonprofit mission statement focus and financial performance

Mission statements have been adopted nearly universally in nonprofit organizations. Their ubiquity is based on a presumption that a well‐designed mission statement is linked to better organizational performance because it provides a framework for decision making, influence over staff and volunteer motivation, and a mechanism for signaling organizational legitimacy to stakeholders. Despite collective confidence in mission statement utility, the relationship between mission statements and performance has received minimal attention. In this exploratory study we measured several attributes of mission statements in women's rights nonprofit organizations, with particular attention to the degree to which the statement focuses on organizational purpose and the relationship between focus and several measures of organization financial performance. The findings indicated that mission statements with a more focused geographic scope were associated with lower overhead ratios. In contrast, mission statements that identified more target client groups were associated with larger one‐year increases in contribution. Despite the statistical significance, the relationships were weak, calling into question common assumptions about the importance of the mission statement to a nonprofit organization.     

Cosmopolitanism through mobility: physical‐corporeal or virtual‐imagined?

In the context of increasing cross‐border mobility and the associated interconnections and diversities, ‘cosmopolitanism’ has become a key concept in sociology. Understood as individual real‐world orientation, many authors consider a central cause for cosmopolitanism in physical‐corporeal mobility, in particular transnationally. However, the significance of virtual and imagined mobility, such as via television or the Internet, is increasingly emphasized. Nevertheless, it has so far been little examined how and with which relative strength physical‐corporeal and virtual‐imagined mobility are associated with cosmopolitan orientations. Unlike previous studies, the two forms of mobility are considered simultaneously. On the basis of existing studies and theoretical considerations, it is assumed that the dimension of global orientation is influenced rather by physical‐corporeal than by virtual‐imagined mobility, whereas the dimension of cultural openness is influenced rather by virtual‐imagined than by physical mobility. One reason could be the different potential of the mobility forms to respond to perceived conflicts in the confrontation with the Other. The hypotheses are preliminary tested using data from an online survey that allows both to distinguish locals, (national) shuttles and transnationals, and to query media use. An exploratory principal component analysis confirmed, as in other studies, that global orientation and cultural openness are distinct dimensions. The results of the multivariate analyses largely support the hypotheses and indicate that in investigations of cosmopolitanism, the processes of identity‐related self‐categorization should be distinguished from pure socialization processes.     

Provincial and cosmopolitan: floristic composition of a dryland urban river

High rates of intercontinental exchange of plant species have caused scientists to ask whether floristic areas with similar environments are undergoing global homogenization. We focused on riparian forests of the urban Salt River (Sonoran Desert, USA) to ask: (1) Is the forest dominated by cosmopolitan or provincial elements? (2) Which trees planted in the irrigated cityscape have established along the river? (3) Which types of restoration interventions have favored provincial species? We surveyed tree abundance, size and vigor in belt transects among five reaches that differed in degree of restoration, and obtained data on tree species composition of the urban landscape and pre-development riparian zone. Our results reveal the urban riparian forest to have many cosmopolitan elements, owing in part to spillover of trees from the cultivated cityscape (e.g., Acacia stenophylla, Vitex agnus-castus). Global spread of some regional (Neotropical) riparian taxa (e.g., Parkinsonia aculeata, Prosopis) also has contributed to the cosmopolitan status. Yet, the forests retain a distinct regional signature. Unintentional restoration of winter floods has allowed for regeneration of Salix gooddingii, a vernally-adapted provincial pioneer, although its long-term survivorship is restricted to limited micro-sites (storm drain outfalls). Urbanization-related changes in stream hydrogeomorphology explain increases in some regional species (e.g., Washingtonia spp.) that historically were excluded from the river.

Reaches restored by planting, weeding, watering, and geocountouring had the greatest abundance of provincial species and greatest floristic similarity to historic conditions.