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.     

Offshoring in the core: Russian software firms onshoring in the USA

Offshoring and outsourcing have become the buzzwords of the IT community and the popular media discourse about the current era of globalization in services. Acknowledging the geographic perspective expressed in these dominant terms, in this article I examine the processes and activities that are oriented in the opposite direction. Capturing this inversion, I develop the concept of ‘onshoring’ and use research material from fieldwork conducted with IT firms in St Petersburg, Russia and their affiliates, agents and clients in the USA to provide an empirical case study. Onshoring encompasses the corporeal, representational, material and legal practices of offshore firms developing a presence onshore, with Russia as offshore and the USA as onshore in this case. The lack of an established Russian professional diaspora in the USA created a context in which developing a recognizable onshore presence was necessary for firms based in Russia. By explicitly recognizing that the efforts, risk‐taking and experimental strategies of offshore firms to create connections, networks and contacts onshore in the USA are a constitutive part of offshore outsourcing, I document and examine the less acknowledged complex flows and practices of onshoring. I argue that although these actors and processes may seem marginal to the widely recognized narrative of offshore outsourcing, in fact, they are creative and strategic compensations that reveal how the globalization of services is enacted at the micro‐level.     

Transnational childrearing and the preservation of transnational identity in Brazzaville,Congo

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at two ends of an intra‐Africa migration flow (Mali and the Republic of Congo), in this article I examine the role of childrearing practices in the maintenance of transnationalism. I consider different approaches to transnational childrearing by migrant parents and their reasons for adopting them, and delineate three common modes. The most widespread and socially validated approach is to send children home from Congo to their parents’ places of origin, where child fostering is widespread, to be raised by relatives for long periods; this approach increases the durability of transnational ties. I use childrearing approaches as an analytical lens to demonstrate the complementarity of multiple forms of domestic organization, mobility and settlement in the inter‐generational production and transmission of durable transnational identities. By arguing for greater focus on phenomena such as transnational childrearing, I seek to promote a broader conceptualization of transnationalism.     

German seafarers,anti‐fascism and the anti‐Stalinist left: the ‘Antwerp Group’ and Edo Fimmen's International Transport Workers' Federation, 1933–40

Between the mid‐1930s and the beginning of the Second World War, a group of German seamen based in Antwerp combined with Amsterdam‐based Edo Fimmen, secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation, to wage a campaign against the Nazi government among the sailors of the German merchant fleet. They organized cells of supporters on German ships, encouraged informal resistance, circulated propaganda and planned sabotage. The Antwerp Group was a breakaway from the Comintern‐aligned International of Seafarers and Harbour Workers (ISH). The Antwerp men were reacting against the ineffectiveness of the response of the German communist leadership to Hitler's takeover of power, and against the growing subordination of the ISH to Soviet interests. By highlighting the role of anti‐Stalinist militants in the anti‐fascism of the 1930s, the article contributes to the recent scholarship on anti‐fascism – a scholarship that has tended to emphasize the transnationalism and ideological diversity of anti‐fascism, rather than seeing it in national terms, or as a monolithic entity controlled by Moscow.     

Beyond deportation: researching the control of outward mobility using a space of flows logic

Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).     

湖南省1997年卫生总费用影响因素的主成分分析

目的 :为探寻卫生总费用的主要影响因素 ,对湖南省 1 997年筹资来源法测算卫生总费用的影响因素进行了调查和分析。方法 :采用主成分分析法分析数据。结果 :1、1 997年湖南省筹资来源法测算的卫生总费用为 1 ,0 38,877.35万元 ,占国民经济总产值 (GDP)的比例为 3 .47%。2、主成分分析从 76个影响因素中提取了 6个主成分 ,方差累积贡献率为 82 .42 9%。结论 :对卫生总费用产生作用的因素主要有 :国内生产总值、医疗费用和职工、高校在编学生人数、中医事业费和基层医疗机构的基本状况、居民的消费支出和医疗保健支出等     

PRODUCT OFFERING,PRICING, AND MAKE‐TO‐STOCK/MAKE‐TO‐ORDER DECISIONS WITH SHARED CAPACITY

In an era of mass customization, many firms continue to expand their product lines to remain competitive. These broader product lines may help to increase market share and may allow higher prices to be charged, but they also cause challenges associated with diseconomies of scope. To investigate this tradeoff, we considered a monopolist who faces demand curves, which for each of its potential products, decline with both price and response time (time to deliver the product). The firm must decide which products to offer, how to price them, whether each should be make‐to‐stock (mts) or make‐to‐order (mto), and how often to produce them. The offered products share a single manufacturing facility. Setup times introduce disceonomies of scope and setup costs introduce economies of scale. We provide motivating problem scenarios, model the monopolist's problem as a non‐linear, integer programming problem, characterize of the optimal policy, develop near‐optimal procedures, and discuss managerial insights.     

CONSTITUENCIES OF JOURNALS IN PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: IMPLICATIONS ON REACH AND QUALITY*

I analyzed the contributions made by members of the following constituencies in terms of the number of articles published in the Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM), and Production and Operations Management (POM): the top 20 U.S. business schools and the top 7 non‐U.S. business schools as ranked by Business Week or U.S. News and World Report, business and government organizations, U.S. business schools ranked between 21 and 50, non‐U.S. business schools not included above, and U.S. business schools not included above. I also analyzed the contributions made by U.S. business schools with top 10 programs in production and operations management; 9 of which are also in the list of top 20 U.S. business schools. Authors from the schools with top 10 programs in production and operations management contributed 20.2% of the articles published in POM and 3.5% of the articles published in JOM during 1997‐2001. They contributed 24.6% of the articles in the eight issues (from July 2000 through June 2002) of M&SOM. During these periods, authors from the top 27 schools contributed 29.3% of the articles published in POM, 9.4% of the articles published in JOM, and 37.4% of the articles to the eight issues of M&SOM. Also during the same periods, authors from business and government organizations contributed 6.6% of the articles published in POM, 1.9% of the articles published in JOM, and 5.8% of the articles published in the eight issues of M&SOM. The findings reported in this paper reflect the reach of the three journals and the perceptions of various constituencies regarding journal quality. The findings about POM and JOM have a very high degree of validity because both journals are more than 10 years old and have well‐established constituencies. The conclusions about the M&SOM constituencies are tentative because it is about 3 years old, and it is still developing its constituencies.     

Scenarios, Uncertainty and Conditional Forecasts of the World Population

Current official population forecasts differ little from those that Whelpton made 50 years ago either in the cohort–component methodology used or in the arguments used to motivate the assumptions. However, Whelpton produced some of the most erroneous forecasts of this century. This suggests that current forecasters should ensure that they give users an assessment of the uncertainty of their forecasts. We show how simple statistical methods can be combined with expert judgment to arrive at an overall predictive distribution for the future population. We apply the methods to a world population forecast that was made in 1994. Accepting that point forecast, we find that the probability is only about 2% that the world population in the year 2030 will be less than the low scenario of 8317 million. The probability that the world population will exceed the high scenario of 10 736 million is about 13%. Similarly, the probability is only about 51% that the high–low interval of a recent United Nations (UN) forecast will contain the true population in the year 2025. Even if we consider the UN high–low intervals as conditional on the possible future policies of its member states, they appear to have a relatively small probability of encompassing the future population.     

DYNAMIC GRAPHICAL ASSESSMENT OF INTERACTION EFFECTS IN DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

Design of experiments has been and continues to be employed successfully for the robust design of products/processes. A principle contention in these areas of application concerns whether or not interactive effects should be estimated. The arguments, for and against, hinge on an experimenter's understanding of the interaction concept and on the value added that is derived from the increased effort required for assessing such effects. We propose an interactive graphics approach that assesses whether and which interactive effects to estimate. Our methodology yields several additional benefits to the experimenter that include prototype simulation and unique learning opportunities for augmenting process knowledge in post-analysis.