The social order of transnational migration markets

The ‘infrastructural turn’ in labour migration studies has shifted attention away from the experiences of migrants to the role of public authorities and private actors in facilitating migrant mobilities. As part of a broader turn towards studying transnational mobilities rather than immigration and settlement, this research shows that the formalization of transnational labour migration has made mobility both freer and more difficult. In this article, I reinterpret mobility infrastructures from a market sociological perspective. Transnational labour migration, I argue, is more clearly conceptualized as the organized ‘making’ of cross‐border labour markets. Moreover, from a market sociological perspective the construction of cross‐border labour exchanges is at the same time a question of how the uncertainties inherent in market exchanges are coordinated by market actors. In its focus on how exchanges across borders are possible at all, a market sociological perspective makes note of the conflicting interests, power imbalances and uncertainties that must be handled for a social order of transnational migration markets to emerge. An important question concerns whether alternatives to the less regulated neo‐liberal market order that is evident in most migration corridors are possible and under what conditions. With reference to the challenges facing the regulation of cross‐border labour markets, in my conclusion, I map an agenda for future research.     

'Another History': Alternative Americas in Paul Auster's Fiction

Abstract

Even though Paul Auster's work has been influenced by European writers, he is also a fundamentally American writer. His settings, many of his literary references, his characters and most of his themes are certainly American. And so is his interest in American history and reality. Moon Palace (1989), for example, deals with the creation of the myth of the American Dream as the country extended its frontier westward. One of the ways for Auster to express his concerns is the creation of parallel fictions like 'Kepler's Blood', a story-within-the-story which fictionally rewrites the origins of the US. Almost two decades later, Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) creates another Western American fiction by moving forward and describing a parallel nineteenth-century North America and a country called 'the Confederation'. Finally, in Man in the Dark (2008), Auster's effort at the creation of alternative Americas reaches the twenty-first century by showing a country where the 2000 election has led to secession and war. This essay analyses the parallel worlds created by Auster to question American myths and archetypes, particularly as they relate to the origins of the myths behind the creation of the United States of America.     

When theory meets methods: the naissance of computer assisted corporate interlock research

In this article, we study the emergence of computer aided network analysis as an example of ‘Mertonian’ multiple discovery. Computer assisted quantitative network analysis emerged around 1970 and small groups of researchers in different universities, who were independent of each other and looking for the right concepts and computer programs to implement graph theory in social analysis, first applied it to corporate interlock networks. We show how mathematical graph theory provided a toolbox for systematic network analysis and that simultaneously in the Netherlands and the United States this toolbox found an application in the study of corporate power. A historical narrative covers the three main centres in which large‐scale corporate network analysis emerged – Amsterdam, California and Stony Brook. For each centre, we provide a sketch of the people involved, the tools they used, and the motivations that brought them to this topic. Our analysis makes clear that one cannot understand the emergence of computer aided network analysis without considering the personal and often political motivations of those who engaged in the first board interlock studies. Insurgent students of political science and sociology pushed for a research agenda on corporate power and found support from scholars who were keen to develop innovative network analysis methods. Hence, corporate network analysis became a legitimate field of research.     

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson,Cavell, 'Experience'

Abstract

This article reads Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 essay 'Experience' as a work of mourning that gives rise to critical reaction in the romantic tradition to specific philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. The author reads this transatlantic interaction in the wider context of journal entries, arguing that the death of Emerson's son is a test to Emerson's philosophy and his literary form, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy and literature could only fail. Moreover, it is the failure of his philosophy to contain his son's death, to express it, that makes Emerson's essay romantic. Defining romanticism as incompletion: the impossibility of a total system which would include, for example, the death of the other (Cavell, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Blanchot). This, the author argues, proposes a 'location' for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critchley's contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not, in fact, romantic.     

The black Atlantic,American studies and the politics of the postcolonial

Abstract

Twelve years of scholarship in the field of black-Atlantic-meets-American studies has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge around the extraterritorial excursions of US subjects and their cultural output. Despite the opportunities that the black Atlantic offered, it has begun to seem that the repositioning of academic perspective it stems from has itself become part of the discursive problems surrounding US American studies. This article suggests that it is time to rethink (black) Atlantic studies in the context of its partial institutionalization within the academy. First, it revisits the methodological and theoretical possibilities the field offered. Second, it examines some of the shortcomings which, in the early stages of the project, it was possible to overlook if not entirely ignore. Third, it looks at developments in the field of postcolonial studies, suggesting some conceptual tensions of relevance to postcolonial, US American, and American studies more generally.     

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian,China

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.     

论《弃儿汤姆·琼斯的历史》的时空体

时空体理论是俄国著名理论家巴赫金的核心理论之一,对理解和分析文学作品的艺术成就有非常重要的指导作用。运用巴赫金的＂希腊传奇教喻小说＂时空体理论,从情节设置、结构框架及人物塑造三个方面分析并探究《弃儿汤姆.琼斯的历史》的时空体,拟从全新的理论视角对菲尔丁的创作技巧作更全面和深刻的探讨。     

《经济管理概论》教学改革研究与实践

《经济管理概论》课程是北京航空航天大学为非经济管理专业学生开设的必修课,也是校级重点课之一。分析了该课程教学中存在的缺乏教材和规范化课件、教学方法单一等情况,提出将该课程作为精品课程建设、编写适宜教材和规范化课件、建立课程网站等建议,并介绍了编制习题集和试题库的课程建设工作,以及在教学中实行＂以学生为中心＂、理论与实际结合、启发式和案例教学法等教学方法改革实践。     

The institutional origins of American literary history

Abstract

This article deals with the importance of institutions in the construction of literary classifications. Following Mary Douglas, the article offers a double-stranded perspective on institutions that stresses both their social and cognitive anchorage. This is applied to one particular case, namely the genealogy connecting Emerson (and the Transcendentalists) to Jonathan Edwards. The article shows how Perry Miller's 'discovery' of that lineage in 1940 has an institutional history that goes as far back as the early beginnings of American literature as an academic discipline. Part of the function of the discipline, the article argues, is to hide this history in order to bring out the continuing relevance of such taxonomies. The concluding paragraph identifies some implications of this view on institutionalization for current discussions about the (post-) nationality of American literature.     

Selling or buying American dreams?: Americanization and Australia's interwar advertising industry

Abstract

During the interwar period, the US industrial and financial sectors expanded at a phenomenal rate. Despite the Depression, America had become an economic, industrial, and cultural powerhouse by the beginning of the Second World War. The advertising industry had been both a beneficiary of this growth and, indeed, a key contributor – spreading the American Dream to national and international audiences, including Australia. An important member of this audience was Australia's advertising industry. Like its American counterpart, the local advertising industry was directly involved in the process of Americanization. However, the Australian advertising industry did not simply ape its American counterparts. By examining the discourse of America in interwar Australian advertising literature, this article argues that the Australian advertising industry was interested in American advertising methods and techniques because they had been devised by the most modern advertising industry in the world. For Australian advertising agents, Americanization was simply viewed as a means to an end – to maximize consumption.