Sport and the Basques: Constructed and Contested Identities, 1876–1936

This article explores relationships between sport and the construction and expression of collective identities in the Basque Country of northern Spain. It focuses on the period between the restoration to the Bourbon monarchy in 1876 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sixty years later, which was transitional in economic, social and political terms, with pockets of rapid industrialization and the rise of Basque nationalism. It identifies three kinds of relevant sporting cultures: the traditional, local and popular; the adaptive traditional which embraced the new worlds of commercialised leisure; and the imported codified sports, whether elite or commercial, from lawn tennis to football. A key conclusion is that, here as perhaps elsewhere, the new sporting cultures did more to divide the Basques than to unite them.     

Immigration,trade and ‘ethnic surplus value’: a critique of Indo–Canadian transnational networks

It is often argued that countries hosting large populations of skilled immigrants might benefit from their cultural and economic competencies in the development of international trade networks. Yet, in so doing, the state can be criticized for fetishizing the ethnic immigrant in market terms in order to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. In this article, I examine these debates empirically in the case of India–Canada immigration and trade using interviews with traders, officials and immigrant entrepreneurs in British Columbia, Canada. Findings suggest that the supposedly positive relationship between trade and immigration is not obvious in the India–Canada case and there is no convincing evidence of the state managing successfully to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. Rather, what appears most compelling is evidence of what can be termed a discourse of regional disadvantage circulated by immigrant and non‐immigrant business actors alike regarding the nature of India–Canada relations. Interview respondents link this discourse of disadvantage to the regional history of Indian immigration to Canada, which has traditionally comprised Sikhs from rural Punjab, and it functions to essentialize Indian immigrant ethnicity spatially within both the Indian and Canadian contexts. I focus on the theme of the extraction of ‘ethnic surplus value’ and regional disadvantage to reveal the limitations of both arguments about the economic nature of immigrant‐led network development. In both cases, I challenge these ideas with a critical emphasis on the role of immigrant agency and offer a more nuanced and complicated reading of the role of the state. As a result, I offer a detailed reading of how socio‐spatial immigrant networks are formed and operate at the regional scale, and how this complicates more abstract theoretical formulations regarding the trade and immigration nexus.     

The Best Interests of the Child

Summary The purpose of this article is to clarify the concept of ‘thebest interests of the child’. It is argued that its usehas often confused rather than helped debates on child careand family work, creating the illusion that ‘the bestinterests of the child’ constitute an objective fact. Different assumptions of ends and means in interpreting the‘best interests of the child’ are discussed followedby an examination of the issues of parental authority and influencein decision making, the rights of the child to have a voicein his or her own future, and the authority of professionalsto weigh and balance all the factors. It is argued that more attention should be given to the complexityof the decision-making processes, that decision making shouldbe shared between children, parents and professionals, and thatviews of ‘the best interest of the child’ are alwayscontingent, depending on the particular position and assumptionsof the person expressing them, as well as the objective circumstances.     

Bus stops,triple wins and two steps: nurse migration in and out of Asia

The migration pathways in which nurses engage are increasingly heterogeneous. In this article, I contrast three types of nurse migration pathway from three country pairs – Vietnam to Germany ‘triple win’ bi‐lateral migration (direct migration); India to Canada two‐step study‐work (multistage) pathway; and ‘bus stop’ multinational migration from the Philippines to Singapore and onwards to other sites. Each pathway is not exclusive to the country pair selected; rather, this occupational and pathway specific analysis permits a comparison of the structures and processes involved – the different kinds of hierarchies that underpin mobility; the migration and border‐control infrastructure that channels mobility; and the differential incorporation of multi‐nationally mobile lives and their gendered/racialized implications. The migration trajectories analysed in this article reveal how multinational and multistage migrations are produced (through state and non‐state intermediaries and policy structures), and how they are productive of new subjectivities and imaginaries (shaped by what is possible and desirable).     

Regulation in Child Protection--Policy Failure?

Correspondence to Mai Walton, Department of Applied Social Studies and Social Work, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG Summary This paper examines child protection policy formulation andimplementation. It suggests that policy has been incrementallyformed in an expedient fashion to suit the political and organizationalstatus quo. It draws upon models of issue ascendancy, policyanalysis and inspection, and argues that child protection policyis regulatory in nature yet lacks the prerequisites normallyfound in regulation. It examines perceived policy failure anddemonstrates that this results from partial policy formulationand lack of clarity in objectives.