Steven Vertovec

Bio: Steven Vertovec is an academic researcher from Max Planck Society. The author has contributed to research in topics: Diversity (politics) & Multiculturalism. The author has an hindex of 50, co-authored 134 publications receiving 15352 citations. Previous affiliations of Steven Vertovec include European University Institute & University of Warwick.

Super-diversity and its implications

Abstract: Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be. Some thirty years of government policies, social service practices and public perceptions have been framed by a particular understanding of immigration and multicultural diversity. That is, Britain's immigrant and ethnic minority population has conventionally been characterized by large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or formerly colonial territories. Policy frameworks and public understanding – and, indeed, many areas of social science – have not caught up with recently emergent demographic and social patterns. Britain can now be characterized by ‘super-diversity,’ a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically...

Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism

Abstract: A review of recent research across several disciplines not surprisingly finds a wide variety of descriptions surrounding meanings, processes, scales and methods concerning the notion of 'transnationalism'. Here, several clusters or themes are suggested by way of disentangling the term. These include transnationalism as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of 'place' or locality. These and other approaches to transnationalism are being explored in a newly commissioned ESRC research programme on Transnational Communities (see http:// www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk).

Migrant Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation

Abstract: Much of the literature on migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways that specific sociocultural institutions have been modified in the course of being stretched across the globe. Yet migrant transnational practices are involved in more deep-seated patterns of change or structural transformation. Such modes of transformation concern: 1) an enhanced ‘bi-focality’of outlooks underpinning migrant lives lived here-and-there; such dual orientations have considerable influence on transnational family life and may continue to affect identities among subsequent post-migration generations; 2) heightened challenges to ‘identities-borders-orders’stemming from migrants' political affiliations in more than one nation-state; these particularly arise around questions of dual citizenship and nationality; and 3) potentially profound impacts on economic development by way of the sheer scale and evolving means of remittance sending; money transfer services, hometown associations and micro-finance institutions represent three kinds of remittance-related organizations currently undergoing significant forms of adaptation with significant consequences for development. These modes of transformation, and the practices of migrant transnationalism surrounding them, both draw from and contribute to wider processes of globalization.

Transnationalism and identity

Abstract: Transnationalism and identity are concepts that inherently call for juxtaposition. This is so because many peoples' transnational networks of exchange and participation are grounded upon some perception of common identity; conversely, the identities of numerous individuals and groups of people are negotiated within social worlds that span more than one place. In this introductory article, the transnational perspective on migration studies is first discussed, followed by some critiques and outstanding questions. The final section summarises points raised by the contributing authors of the main articles in this themed issue of JEMS, especially with regard to various ways transnational settings and dynamics affect the construction, negotiation and reproduction of identities.

Conceiving cosmopolitanism : theory, context and practice

Abstract: 1. Introduction: conceiving cosmopolitanism PART 1 WINDOWS ON COSMOPOLITANISM 2. Political belonging in a world of multiple identities 3. Middle Eastern experiences of cosmopolitanism 4. Cosmopolitanism and the social experience of cities 5. Building cosmopolitanism for another age PART 2 THEORIES OF COSMOPOLITANISM 6. The cosmopolitan perspective: sociology in the second age of modernity 7. The class consciousness of frequent travellers: towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism 8. Political community beyond the sovereign state, supranational federalism and transnational minorities 9. Four cosmopolitanism moments PART 3 CONTEXTS OF COSMOPOLITANISM 10. Colonial cosmopolitanism 11. Media corporatism and cosmopolitanism 12. Both sides now: culture contact, hybridisation and cosmopolitanism 13. Cosmopolitanism at the local level: the development of transnational neighbourhoods PART 4 PRACTICES OF COSMOPOLITANISM 14. Not universalists, not pluralists: the new cosmopolitans find their own way 15. Interests and identities in cosmopolitan politics 16. Cosmopolitan harm conventions 17. Cosmopolitanism and organised violence

Super-diversity and its implications

Abstract: Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be. Some thirty years of government policies, social service practices and public perceptions have been framed by a particular understanding of immigration and multicultural diversity. That is, Britain's immigrant and ethnic minority population has conventionally been characterized by large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or formerly colonial territories. Policy frameworks and public understanding – and, indeed, many areas of social science – have not caught up with recently emergent demographic and social patterns. Britain can now be characterized by ‘super-diversity,’ a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically...

Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences

Abstract: Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized main- stream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migra- tion. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d'horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation-state building pro- cesses in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of 'transnational communities' - the last phase in this process - was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodo- logical nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory. After the first flurry of confusion about the nature and extent of contemporary pro- cesses of globalization, social scientists moved beyond rhetorical generalities about the decline of the nation-state and began to examine the ways in which nation-states are currently being reconfigured rather than demolished. That nation-states and nationalism are compatible with globalization was made all too obvious. We wit- nessed the flouring of nationalism and the restructuring of a whole range of new states in Eastern Europe along national lines in the midst of growing global interconnec- tions. The concomitance of these processes provides us with an intellectual opening to think about the limitations of our conceptual apparatus. It has become easier to under- stand that it is because we have come to take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states that we see nation-state building and global inter- connections as contradictory. The next step is to analyse how the concept of the nation-state has and still does influence past and current thinking in the social sciences, including our thinking about transnational migration. It is our aim in this article to move in this direction by exploring the intellectual potential of two hypotheses. We demonstrate that nation-state building processes have fundamentally shaped the ways immigration has been perceived and received. These perceptions have in turn influenced, though not completely determined, social science

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

Abstract: The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society

Abstract: This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nationstate. Social scientists have long been interested in how immigrants are incorporated into new countries. In Germany and France, scholars’ expectations that foreigners will assimilate is a central piece of public policy. In the United States, immigration scholars initially argued that to move up the socioeconomic ladder, immigrants would have to abandon their unique customs, language, values, and homeland ties and identities. Even when remaining ethnic became more acceptable, most researchers assumed that the importance of homeland ties would eventually fade. To be Italian American or Irish American would ultimately reflect ethnic pride within a multicultural United States rather than enduring relations to an ancestral land. Now scholars increasingly recognize that some migrants and their descendants remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home country or by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see