Global Networks-A Journal of Transnational Affairs最新文献

International student migration (ISM) is one of the fastest growing categories of migrants in Canada. Drawing on the narratives of 30 international students at a Canadian university, this paper investigates international students’ decisions to study overseas and the roles of social networks in shaping mobility. We find that international students negotiate information while embedded in multiple social networks consisting of family, friends, ethnocultural and religious communities, and professional relations in origin and settlement countries. These social networks exceed typical knowledge and connection functions; they act as informal migration agents, providing transnational care and guidance, and ‘do’ family in ways that shape mobility decisions and settlement. The information provided through these networks, however, can be inaccurate or incomplete, requiring the strategic mobilization of new networks to support migration. We conclude that international student mobility relies on building transnational networks to support knowledge transfer, provide care and offer tangible supports. Furthermore, we argue that these fluctuating local and transnational social networks should be more fully recognized in the theorizing of ISM and in strategies implemented for supporting international students.

Although Easterners are assumed to have a high-context culture, Yamashina found that Japanese believe the Chinese to engage in a low-context cultural communication style. We interpreted her results as follows: the Chinese whom Japanese know are likely to engage in intercultural communication that is used in low-context cultural situations (code-switching). To test this interpretation, we used a 17-item online questionnaire on context dependency for participants (Japanese university students, Chinese university students, and Chinese international students living and studying in Japan) to score the self, average Japanese, and average Chinese. Hence, the design was 3 (culture) by 3 (object). The results showed that both Japanese and Chinese students rated people in their counterpart countries as having a low-context communication style, supporting our interpretation. However, this effect was not evident among Chinese international students. These results confirmed that low-context cultural situations may arise when people engage in intercultural communication.

In the last two decades, forced removals have been the main feature of U.S. migration policy toward Latin America. In this research, we explore whether this policy has had implications in terms of Latin Americans’ public opinion toward their northern neighbor. We argue that deportations breed anti-Americanism by cutting off the flow of information and money associated with emigration, which has proven to be a source of better dispositions toward the United States. Using public opinion data and municipal data on deportations in El Salvador, we show that these perceptions have worsened over time and that rates of deportation are related to this trend. By using public opinion data on Latin America and deportation rates in the region, we also show that this pattern holds beyond our case study. We call attention to destination migration policies as a source of resentment among domestic audiences, which can be capitalized by new populisms in the region.

Power is central to GVC research, but the concept is usually restricted to ‘direct’ market power that generates rents. This paper examines ‘diffuse’ conceptualizations of power in GVCs that focus on social construction, arguing that they exist along a continuum from ‘fractured’ to ‘encompassing’. Then, empirically, it shows how different types of power intermix in telecommunications standard-setting from 1999 to 2021, using a comprehensive dataset of every finalized work item in 3GPP. Given powerful network effects in telecommunications, the industry is ripe for monopolistic rents and unequal value capture on a global scale. However, these are attenuated by a layering of power relations, and particularly, an intermediary form of social construction – legitimacy – which is the primary driver of telecommunications standard-setting, and a new type of constitutive power in GVCs, alongside governmentality and hegemony. This is illustrated by focusing on two major shifts in legitimacy in 3GPP – the rise of Huawei and network operators. The paper shows how power becomes layered with collective forms of power partially neutralizing inter-firm forms of dyadic power, which attenuates monopolistic value capture.

How do civil society organizations (CSOs) use state-backed supranational institutions to call multinational enterprises (MNEs) to account? There are few studies of precisely how CSOs—union and other—use institutional power in global value chain (GVC) governance or the impact of institutional change on actor behaviour. To address this gap, we assess the impact of changes in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on CSO engagement with MNEs, comparing complaints lodged by CSOs before and after the Guidelines were revised in June 2011 to accommodate the rise in global prominence of the human rights and business frame. In our analysis, we focus on how constitutive and institutional power plays out in GVC governance, with special attention to the impact of institutional change on actor behaviour. Our analysis reveals that this state-backed mechanism provides CSOs with a structure through which to address human rights violations in some MNEs’ supply chains but also that, despite its high degree of reflexivity, ongoing design flaws limit its capacity to address the uneven distribution of power not only between CSOs and MNEs, but among CSOs themselves. In doing so, we draw attention to the need for further research on the dynamic multilevel interactions between the configuration and adjustment of supranational institutions and how these mediate CSO and MNE interactions.

This article aims to unpack discourses of ‘race’ and racializations associated with White Western foreign residents in China amid pandemic politics. China's proposal to loosen visa regulations for non-citizens during the pandemic (February 2020) sparked many racist and nationalistic sentiments online. Since then, exposés of the ‘special treatment’ foreigners apparently demand during quarantine in China have met significant online backlash. Anti-foreigner sentiments are at a new high and not only against African migrants, who have been the focus of extant studies. COVID-19 hit the world at a time of vast international migration into China and China's growing power, and the revival of existing racializations and the ignition of new ones are intricately linked with these phenomena. This article proposes that understanding the conditioning contexts of Chinese postcoloniality and state-led patriotism can enable valuable insights into the emerging racialization of White Westerners in pandemic-era China.

This article explores filial transnational caregiving from a subjective and emotional perspective. It analyses the relationship between pursuit of personal fulfilment and concern for parental well-being among Peruvian migrants in Switzerland whose parents remain in Peru. Based on in-depth interviews, we analyse the importance assigned to personal goals, the resignification of filial obligations, and how migrants reconcile the desire to be a ‘good’ son or daughter with the desire for self-fulfilment. This process, strongly shaped by gender and social class, involves the negotiation of distinct principles of autonomy and filial obligation prevailing in the country of origin and destination. Turning our attention to less explored emotions, such as pride and a sense of fulfilment, we show how to deal with principles that may be in tension, migrant children construe the pursuit of self-fulfilment and the desire to accomplish family responsibilities as interdependent dynamics in the context of filial transnational caregiving.

In this contribution, we introduce ‘career hubs’ as an alternative to interlocking directorates and propose to study transnational corporate elite networks with this new concept. Career hubs, the most frequent common career organizations, put emphasis on knowledge brokering and allow us to study a larger variety of organizations to understand the form and the spread of elite networks. We use a sample of 1366 firms on the Forbes 2000 list of 2018 and investigate the careers of 16,500 top executives by linking these data to the BoardEx database. We find three types of career hubs: global audit and consulting firms, financial firms participating in a transatlantic banking alliance and large US consumer goods conglomerates – and highlight the mechanisms through which they shape the spatial structures of finance led capitalism. In the conclusion, we consider the implication of our results for the literature on corporate networks and propose a series of future research avenues in the career hub perspective.

Previous research has asked whether European integration leads to the formation of a new kind of ‘transnational class’ or ‘elite’ in and around the European institutions in Brussels. This paper focuses instead on intra-group distinctions and symbolic boundaries between EU professionals from different countries. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of language as a marker of distinction, it argues that language continues to be a resource for symbolic boundary making. Empirically, this paper builds on in-depth interviews with officials of the European Commission, who are at the heart of an emerging transnational elite of EU professionals. It shows that while Commission officials are multilingual and use multilingualism to construct themselves as a transnational group, intra-group symbolic boundaries continue to be drawn based on competence in the Commission’s two main working languages, English and French. Overall, this paper points out the overlooked importance of language differences for transnational professionals’ symbolic boundary making.

Mainstream literature on global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs) has increasingly demonstrated how the state and political conjunctures play a central role in strategic coupling. Nonetheless, scholarly attention still remains on the role of firms and their strategies. By focusing on firms, GVC and GPN scholars often underestimate the influence that non-firm actors such as the state have on strategic coupling, especially concerning its negative development implicationsits “dark side”. To contribute to this literature, this article proposes an approach and research agenda to examine how processes of corporate capture evolve via strategic coupling. This approach is based on the interplay of three variables: the strategic selectivity of states; the strategic action of firms; and states' predominant mode of insertion into GPNs. I argue that corporate capture is much more common and variegated in capitalist states and consequently in strategic coupling than often assumed in mainstream literature.