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

Rethinking development in Latin America

Peasants and proletarians are key actors in the social changes that produced the modern world. The concepts identify different forms of demographic behavior, social organization and political action. The peasant is locally oriented and defensive politically, yet has contributed to revolutionary change. The proletarian looks to association beyond locality and is the basis of modern class politics, but the political impact of the proletariat has varied with time and place. There are many types of peasantry and many types of proletariat. The categories serve usefully in comparative and historical analysis, but the variations in types and in the social and political context in which they act need to be specified. The orientations to action and the life chances that both categories describe need to be modified to take account of current social and economic changes. In many parts of the world, the peasant disappears in face of the modernization of agriculture or survives by combining agricultural work with nona...

Peasants and Proletarians

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares \"marginality\" as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called \"new poverty\" today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

From the marginality of the 1960s to the "new poverty" of today

This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between contemporary urban organisation and that of the 1960s in Guatemala City and other Latin American cities, mainly using data taken from a re-study of low-income neighbourhoods in Guatemala City. It looks at the impact of sharper patterns of residential segregation, changes in migration patterns, rising levels of crime and violence, and the increase in the relationships of the urban poor with external actors, such as governments and NGOs. Severe inequality persists, but is mediated by an improvement in living standards, by the range of consumer goods accessible to the poor, and by community- and family-based adaptation.

Moving on and moving back: Rethinking inequality and migration in the Latin American City

This article is focused on the intermeshing of the informal sector with the development of social citizenship in Latin America. Since the construction of social citizenship has been strongly influenced by employment, the implications of the latter for the system of stratification and social integration since the end of World War II are discussed, with an analysis of analyzing of their inherent limitations in terms of social exclusion. Finally, in a context of labor market changes and of the minimization of the role of the state, the alternative models of welfare provision that are emerging in the region are assessed.

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Bryan R. Roberts

Papers

Rethinking development in Latin America

Peasants and Proletarians

From the marginality of the 1960s to the "new poverty" of today

Moving on and moving back: Rethinking inequality and migration in the Latin American City

Ciudadanía social y sector informal en América Latina