Memoir/manuals of South Korean pre‐college study abroad: defending mothers and humanizing children

In this article, we analyse the memoir/manuals of three ‘goose’ families. These are South Koreans whose children participate in pre‐college study abroad (PSA). One parent (typically the mother) accompanies the child while the other (usually the father) remains at home to support the venture. Although many South Koreans aspire to study abroad, both the mothers and children of goose families have attracted wide criticism – the mothers for being narrowly instrumental and too family centred, worried only about social reproduction and mobility and the children for forsaking their nation, foregoing their filial duties and, perhaps, failing abroad. These memoir/manuals defend the goose mother and protect the PSA child against such charges. As memoirs, they depict remarkable people worthy of documentation. As manuals, they offer (at least some) guidance for mothers and families contemplating this particular family strategy. The memoir/manuals open a window to the challenges and anxieties of PSA in South Korea today.     

ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATIVE SCHEDULING POLICIES FOR HOSPITAL NURSES

The persistent shortage of nurses adversely affects the productivity, quality of care, and operating costs in most acute care hospitals. Aggravating the shortage are high nurse turnover rates, approaching 200% in some institutions. Policies to ensure adequate staffing levels and provide more attractive work schedules are alleged to improve nurse retention. However, their cost is seldom discussed. We compared expected nursing expense and workforce requirements to staff eight medical and surgical nursing units of a large hospital for 1 month, under 12 different scheduling policies alleged to improve turnover. Using simulation and an integrated staffing and scheduling methodology, we found that the expected nursing wages and workforce requirements for some policies differed by as much as 33%. In this hospital, the expected labor costs for certain policies could erode the benefits expected from improved retention. In contrast, other policies appear to allow high utilization of nursing resources, enhancing the expected benefits of reduced turnover with significant reductions in expenses for labor, recruiting, training, and fringe benefits.     

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.     

First‐generation migrants become grandparents: how migration backgrounds affect intergenerational relationships

First‐generation migrants are not only reaching the age of retirement, but they are also becoming grandparents in the host society. Through the specific case of Portuguese migrants in Luxembourg, we look at what point their migration background becomes important to their intergenerational relationships. We have acquired the data for this article from biographical narrative interviews with ten older first‐generation grandparents and ten second‐generation parents. On the basis of these findings, we address three important aspects of intergenerational relations: (i) how first‐generation migrants socialize their grandchildren, (ii) grandparental mobility patterns and their embeddedness in practices of socialization and care, and (iii) the challenges produced by language in intergenerational relationships.     

Affects of unease: mother–infant separation among professional Indonesian women working in Singapore

The extent of systemic forms of mother–child separation has received insufficient attention in research on migrant families. In this article, I explore the little‐studied phenomenon of mother–infant separation among professional women migrants. I draw from in‐depth interviews with Indonesian professional women working in Singapore who have lived apart from their infant children to pursue work and education. Narratives of separation illustrate a complex transnational network of care built around an availability of support offered by spouses or extended kin. Women experience unease about separation, which emerges in how they talk about their absent infants. Mothers articulate ambivalence about the potential cost of their decisions, positing infants as able to pass judgement on them, with potential rejection and disengagement causing them potent concerns. The unease of these mothers moderates claims that transnational separation is readily managed and highlights the ambiguity embedded in an increasingly common form of transnational mother–child separation.     

Transnational parenting and the well‐being of Angolan migrant parents in Europe

Studies on the transnational family highlight the emotional difficulties of migrant parents separated from their children through international migration. This article consists of a large‐scale quantitative investigation into the insights of transnational family literature by examining the well‐being of transnational parents compared with that of parents who live with their children in the destination country. Furthermore, through a survey of Angolan migrant parents in both the Netherlands and Portugal, we compare the contexts of two receiving country. Our study shows transnational parents are worse off than their non‐transnational counterparts in terms of four measures of well‐being – health, life satisfaction, happiness, and emotional well‐being. Although studies on migrant well‐being tend to focus exclusively on the characteristics of the receiving countries, our findings suggest that, to understand migrant parents' well‐being, a transnational perspective should also consider the existence of children in the migrant sending country. Finally, comparing the same population in two countries revealed that the receiving country effects the way in which transnational parenting is associated with migrant well‐being.     

Limits to expansion: transnational corporations and territorial embeddedness in the Japanese temporary staffing market

Recent changes to employment legislation have combined with shifting macro‐economic conditions to drive dramatic growth in Japan's temporary staffing industry. Leading transnational staffing agencies have sought to capitalize on this growth as part of their wider globalization strategies but have faced substantial challenges both in entering the market and in their subsequent attempts at expansion. In this article, we explore the ways in which the particularities of the Japanese host market regulatory and institutional environment combine with the inherent characteristics of the temporary staffing business model to challenge the expansionary strategies of these firms. We argue that while transnational firms have sought to adapt their business practices and strategies to the Japanese case, the attributes of the Japanese staffing market mean they have been unable to make significant inroads into the dominant market shares held by their domestic rivals.     

Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: the case of transnational law firms in Italy

In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and practices, and the institution‐related challenges transnational professional service firms and all transnational corporations (TNCs) face. We also reveal the way institutionally generated differences at the level of work practices are managed in transnational law firms through worldwide training programmes designed to ‘govern’ the practices of workers in different parts of the TNC's network. This emphasizes the importance of studying attempts to manage institutional heterogeneity at the level of workplace practices, something often missed in existing mesoscale studies of TNC governance structures. Consequently, we highlight detailed empirical archaeologies that explore the direct links between institutions and practices as an important component of future research on the effects of institutions on TNCs.     

Governing the transnational organic cotton network from Benin

In this article, we attempt to conceptualize the historical development and the governance structure of the transnational organic cotton network from Benin. We aim to discover how the organic cotton production‐consumption network is governed locally and internationally. Existing bodies of literature on international agricultural production networks, in particular the Global Value Chains (GVC) perspective, focus on economic dimensions, but find it difficult to incorporate the sustainability dimension. We favour widening the concept of GVCs beyond economics by acknowledging and including environmental rationalities and the representatives of their interests, not as external elements, but rather as co‐governing or co‐structuring factors (or actors) of sustainable value chains. Our findings reveal that beyond the traditional producer versus buyer dualism, intermediate stakeholders, namely transnational and local environmental NGO networks, are instrumental in the construction, maintenance and transformation of the organic cotton network. It is also apparent that farmers' leaders play an important role in mediating and (re)building trust among organic farmers, though they exert insufficient vertical power in the organic cotton network to control it.