Social Capital and Migration: How do Similar Resources Lead to Divergent Outcomes?

This article investigates how migrant social capital differentially influences individuals 'migration and cumulatively generates divergent outcomes for communities. To combine the fragmented findings in the literature, the article proposes a framework that decomposes migrant social capital into resources (information about or assistance with migration), sources (prior migrants), and recipients (potential migrants). Analysis of multilevel and longitudinal data from 22 rural villages in Thailand shows that the probability of internal migration increases with the available resources, yet the magnitude of increase depends on recipients' characteristics and the strength of their ties to sources. Specifically, individuals become more likely to migrate if migrant social capital resources are greater and more accessible. The diversity of resources by occupation increases the likelihood of migration, while diversity by destination inhibits it. Resources from weakly tied sources, such as village members, have a higher effect on migration than resources from strongly tied sources in the household. Finally, the importance of resources for migration declines with recipients' own migration experience. These findings challenge the mainstream account of migrant social capital as a uniform resource that generates similar migration outcomes for different groups of individuals or in different settings. In Nang Rong villages, depending on the configuration of resources, sources, and recipients, migrant social capital leads to differential migration outcomes for individuals and divergent cumulative migration patterns in communities.     

Fluid adaptation of contested citizenship: second-generation migrant Turks in Germany and the United States

This paper explores belonging in the context of legal citizenship for second-generation Turkish immigrants in Berlin and in New York. Fluid adaptation refers to the discursive boundaries of immigrant identity articulations, the contextual and shifting adjustments immigrants make to their sense of belonging. Immigrant belonging, gauged by ‘encounters’ with bureaucracies and participatory expressions, is shaped in large part by the receiving state's legal framework and citizenship status. Belonging is complicated by racialization and exclusion, and affected by intersectionalities of immigrant experience. Limited citizenship models necessitate deployment of fluid and alternative membership models. Alternative forms of belonging underscore the power of the nation-state in delimiting belonging.     

Islamic Migrant Organizations: Little‐Studied Actors in Humanitarian Action

Since 9/11, attention to Islamic migrant organizations within Western countries has grown. However, the humanitarian activities of these organizations have received only limited attention. Hence, it is not yet clear why these organizations engage in humanitarian crises, which specific role Islam plays in their humanitarian engagement and which factors influence the scope of their activities in humanitarian crises. This paper aims to address these research questions by using approaches from sociology of organizations and presenting three empirical case studies from Germany. Particularly, it argues that although all three case studies are active in humanitarian crises the scope of their activities differs due to their differing organizational characteristics, member interests and external expectations.     

Parenting and children’s prosocial and problem behaviors in middle childhood: The role of Turkish mothers’ emotion socialization practices

Mechanisms by which the relations between different parenting behaviors and children’s prosocial and problem behaviors occur are the focus of the current study. Supportive and nonsupportive emotion socialization practices of mothers were considered as potential mediators. Further, the moderator role of gender was explored. Participants were 228 mothers of 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children living in Ankara, Turkey. Scales assessing parenting behaviors (specifically, positive parenting and inconsistent discipline), maternal reactions to children’s negative emotions, and prosocial and problem behaviors of children were completed by the mothers. The results revealed that supportive emotion socialization practices fully mediated the relation between positive parenting behaviors and both boys’ and girls’ prosocial behaviors. In contrast, nonsupportive emotion socialization practices partially mediated the relation between inconsistent parenting behaviors and problem behaviors, but only for girls. Findings indicated that girls were more vulnerable to their mothers’ inconsistent behaviors possibly because mother–daughter dyads are more likely to use emotion‐related language and to discuss emotions than mother–son dyads from a very early age.     

Mothers’ Involuntary Job Loss and Children’s Academic Achievement

Using matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I examine the impact of mothers’ involuntary job loss on children’s academic achievement. Single mothers’ job displacement affects children’s math and reading test scores negatively and statistically significantly in the short run. Displacement of married mothers has no impact on their children’s test scores. The decline in income and a worsening of child’s behavioral problems are two channels through which single mothers’ job loss impacts test scores.     

Revenue Management Through Dynamic Cross Selling in Call Centers

This paper models the cross‐selling problem of a call center as a dynamic service rate control problem. The question of when and to whom to cross sell is explored using this model. The analysis shows that, under the optimal policies, cross‐selling targets may be a function of the operational system state. Sufficient conditions are established for the existence of preferred calls, i.e., calls that will always generate a cross‐sell attempt. These provide guidelines in segment formation for marketing managers, and lead to a static heuristic policy. Numerical analysis establishes the value of different types of information, and different types of automation available for cross selling. Increased staffing for the same call volume is shown to have a positive and increasing return on revenue generation via cross selling, suggesting the need to staff for lower loads in call centers that aim to be revenue generators. The proposed heuristic leads to near optimal performance in a wide range of settings.     

Flexibility Structure and Capacity Design with Human Resource Considerations

Most service systems consist of multidepartmental structures with multiskill agents that can deal with several types of service requests. The design of flexibility in terms of agents' skill sets and assignments of requests is a critical issue for such systems. The objective of this study was to identify preferred flexibility structures when demand is random and capacity is finite. We compare structures recommended by the flexibility literature to structures we observe in practice within call centers. To enable a comparison of flexibility structures under optimal capacity, the capacity optimization problem for this setting is formulated as a two‐stage stochastic optimization problem. A simulation‐based optimization procedure for this problem using sample‐path gradient estimation is proposed and tested, and used in the subsequent comparison of the flexibility structures being studied. The analysis illustrates under what conditions on demand, cost, and human resource considerations, the structures found in practice are preferred.     

The Impact of Migration and Remittances on Wealth Accumulation and Distribution in Rural Thailand

This article studies the impact of internal migration and remittance flows on wealth accumulation and distribution in 51 rural villages in Nang Rong, Thailand. Using data from 5,449 households, the study constructs indices of household productive and consumer assets with principal component analysis. The changes in these indices from 1994 to 2000 are modeled as a function of households’ prior migration and remittance behavior with ordinary least squares, matching, and instrumental variable methods. The findings show that rich households lose productive assets with migration, potentially because of a reduction in the labor force available to maintain local economic activities, while poor households gain productive assets. Regardless of wealth status, households do not gain or lose consumer assets with migration or remittances. These results suggest an equalizing effect of migration and remittances on wealth distribution in rural Thailand.