This introductory article defines the concept of transnationalism, provides a typology of this heterogeneous set of activities, and reviews some of the pitfalls in establishing and validating the topic as a novel research field. A set of guidelines to orient research in this field is presented and justified. Instances of immigrant political and economic transnationalism have existed in the past. We review some of the most prominent examples, but point to the distinct features that make the contemporary emergence of these activities across multiple national borders worthy of attention. The contents of this Special Issue and their bearing on the present understanding of this phenomenon and its practical implications are summarized.

The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field

Community ties with friends and relatives are a principal means by which people and households get supportive resources. Quantitative and qualitative data from the second East York study are used to evaluate six potential explanations of why different types of ties provide different kinds of supportive resources: tie strength, contact, group processes, kinship,network members' characteristics, and similarities and dissimilarities between network members in such characteristics. Most relatioships provide specialized support. The kinds of support provided are related more to characteristics of the relationship than to characteristics of the network members themselves. Strong ties provide emotional aid, small services, and companionship. Parents and adult children exchange financial aid, emotional aid, large services, and small services. Physically accessible ties provide services. Women provide emotional aid. Friends, neighbors, and siblings make up about half of all supportive relationships. The ensemble o...

Different Strokes from Different Folks: Community Ties and Social Support

In this innovative book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the founding editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber argues that gender is wholly a product of socialization, subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation, and that it is a social institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize positions of power.

Paradoxes of gender

A provocative and disturbing look at the ways new economic facts are shaping our personal and social values. The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life-how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls "the specter of uselessness" haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an "iron cage." Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of "reform."

The Culture of the New Capitalism

The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

"Moving forward from the premise that poverty is not simply a lack of resources, but in fact at the same time a relation through which the poor come directly under the control of the State, Roberts (2012) explores the place of Cash Transfer Programs (CCTs) such as Mexico's Oportunidades Programme in the evolution of social policy and citizenship in Latin America, assessing the impact of these programmes in terms of poor peoples' perceptions of their rights and the quality of their civic participation. In the industrialized world, poverty reduction policy was initially strongly influenced by concern that schemes intended to help poor people might in fact have the ultimate effect of generating disincentives among the poor to engage in paid work. It was only later, and in developing countries particularly, that policy discourse began to focus on building poor peoples' capabilities, in broad terms, as a means toward breaking the vicious cycle of poverty."(?)

From Universalism to Targeting and Back Again: Conditional Cash Transfers and the Development of Social Citizenship

Comments on John Friedmann's ‘The dialectic of reason’

In this volume, we present studies of the emerging pattern of socioeconomic segregation in seven major cities of Latin America and, for interregional contrast, one in the United States. Our aim is twofold: One is to contribute to the understanding of contemporary urbanization in Latin America by highlighting contemporary processes of socioeconomic segregation in major Latin American cities through comparable data and measures; the other is to explore the challenges that these emergent patterns of segregation entail for urban government, for equity in access to services, and for the life chances of the urban population.

Residential Segregation and Governance in the Americas: An Overview

This volume pioneers in the study of immigrant transnational organizations by including eighteen different immigrant nationalities with organizations in the US and Europe. The case studies follow a...

The uncertain future of immigrant transnational organization

The New Urban Populations: Case Studies and Analysis@@@Urban Reform in Revolutionary Cuba@@@Men in a Developing Society: Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico@@@Politics and Privilege in a Mexican City@@@Lima en 1900: Estudio Critico y Antologia@@@Parana: Social Boundaries in an Argentine City@@@Organizing Strangers: Poor Families in Guatemala City

Bryan R. Roberts

Papers

From Universalism to Targeting and Back Again: Conditional Cash Transfers and the Development of Social Citizenship

Comments on John Friedmann's ‘The dialectic of reason’

Residential Segregation and Governance in the Americas: An Overview

The uncertain future of immigrant transnational organization