Social Reproduction Strategies Research Articles

African students consuming the Chinese higher education market: the role of pre-mobility capital(s) in transnational social reproduction strategies

ABSTRACT Despite the sharp growth in numbers and geopolitical significance of African students in China, studies focusing on Sino-African student mobility remain relatively limited. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 self-financed students from five different African countries, we employ Bourdieu’s central concept of capital(s) to explore the decision-making process of student migrants studying at a vocational college in southeast China. Though traditionally elite and upper-ranked universities are endowed with a high level of symbolic value, our study shows that the motivation to study abroad is significantly mediated by access to pre-mobility capitals(s). In considering students as consumers of the Chinese higher education market, the research broadens the mobilities optic within the Global South by documenting the transnational reproduction strategies of the African middle – and working-classes in contemporary times.

Strategies of Social Reproduction: Medical Students from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe from a Centre–Periphery Perspective

Higher education degrees from European Union countries are automatically recognised in other Member States. However, legal recognition does not necessarily translate into symbolic recognition in the profession. This dynamic can be observed in the field of medicine in Germany, where German graduates often face symbolic devaluation when they graduate in certain other countries and return to work in Germany. At the same time, the group of foreign medical students is socially exclusive, and admission to a medical programme in Germany is difficult and unsuccessful for many applicants. Based on the theory of symbolic power and capital and a centre–periphery perspective, this paper reconstructs the means and ways by which privileged students from the centre, Germany, seek social reproduction by studying medicine abroad in the semi-periphery, Hungary, Latvia and Romania. The results show that moving to the semi-periphery is only chosen when other alternatives in the centre are not feasible. Certain symbolic disadvantages of studying abroad were identified, and countermeasures were developed to ensure symbolic legitimacy upon return. The results also show that the semi-periphery is not homogeneous in its symbolic ambivalence from a centre–periphery perspective.

Local labour market segmentation and migrant workers’ experiences: The case of the hotel industry in Venice

Using Venice as a case study, this article seeks to analyse the experience of migrant workers in the hotel industry through a theoretical engagement with the local labour market segmentation approach. The global hotel industry relies on large numbers of migrant workers, who are often in their first job in the host context, as a solution to the problem of cyclical staff shortages. Previous studies have found that low barriers to entry into the sector and high staff turnover are the underlying reasons for this relationship. They have also shown that the same characteristics that make the hotel sector attractive to migrant workers also lead them to leave the industry shortly after entering it. However, this article reveals significant stability in the careers of migrants employed in Venetian hotels as well as heterogeneity in their individual experiences. Through identifying and analysing the factors underpinning the trajectories of these workers, the article emphasises the importance of local characteristics of production, consumption, institutional and welfare regulation patterns, workers’ social stratifications and strategies of social reproduction in shaping the relation between migrant workers and the local hotel industry.

Strategies of social reproduction of domestic units in poor urban sectors. The case of the Plan de Ayala neighborhood in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la construcción de las estrategias de reproducción social de las unidades domésticas en sectores urbanos pobres. Como enfoque teórico se usó la teoría de reproducción social del sociólogo Pierre Bourdieu, la cual propone el análisis del habitus, capitales y estrategias de reproducción, como parte fundamental para comprender las relaciones sociales. Se aborda el problema desde lo espacial y social. La estrategia metodológica fue cuantitativa y cualitativa. Se utilizaron técnicas como la encuesta a través de un guion de cuestionario aplicado a sesenta y seis jefes del hogar y entrevistas semiestructuradas realizadas a un total de seis integrantes de la familia desde la primera hasta la tercera generación a partir de las formas y maneras en las que se reproducen social y espacialmente. Para ello, se tomó como eje de discusión el análisis de las estrategias educativas, sociales, sucesorias, económicas, de calidad de vida y vivienda. Dentro de los principales hallazgos resalta que las condiciones de los habitantes han mejorado en poca medida, sin embargo, dicha mejoría no ha sido suficiente como para satisfacer todas las necesidades básicas a plenitud.

Time, (im)mobility and social reproduction: self-development of Chinese migrant women workers in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article uses time as an analytical frame to examine low-wage migrants’ aspirations and strategies in negotiating social mobility and reproduction under temporary migration regimes. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chinese migrant women factory workers who actively pursue self-development during their sojourns in Singapore, this article demonstrates that time is central to understanding migrant women’s mobility aspirations and social reproduction strategies as well as the structural conditions that propel them to embark on self-development. It underscores the diversity of migrants’ experiences of time and the rhythms of their personal and family lives and how they are inextricably linked to temporal processes of migration and production. Through the temporal lens, the article also sheds light on the workings of temporary migration regimes under neoliberalism. It points out the contradiction between state attempts to constitute low-wage migrants as immobile labouring subjects and the temporal nature of migrant subject-making and skills development. It also shows how migrants’ pursuit of self-development and enactment of agency paradoxically play into the dominant ideology and become a site for surplus value extraction. The article contributes to the temporal approach to the intersection of migration, mobility and social reproduction.

“If we don't do it, who will?” Strategies of social reproduction at the margins

AbstractMigrant domestic workers (MDW) in Lebanon suffer grave human rights abuses as highly exploited social reproduction laborers under the kafala, or visa sponsorship system. Amidst the current economic and political crises in Lebanon, compounded by the spread of COVID‐19, MDW find themselves in an even more precarious situation. As funding from international and local nongovernment organizations is unable to keep up with the increasing demands for support, MDW community leaders and activists have shifted their labor in order to support some of the most marginalized members of this community of workers. To do this, these workers strategically use their often‐minimal personal sources of social reproduction resources to create this network of support. In so doing, the grassroots work of these MDW become yet another “fix” to capital's continuing crises and equally challenge their construction as a class of workers whose social reproduction needs can be disregarded.

The long reach of commodity frontiers: social reproduction and food procurement strategies among migrant workers in Kenya’s flower farms

ABSTRACT Conceptualizing global floriculture as a commodity frontier, this article explores rural-urban transfers and in loco production and exchange of food by migrant workers at Naivasha flower farms in Kenya. It highlights how food procurement strategies are central to the reproduction of a cheap labour force and are supported by multi-local family networks. Distant livelihoods and rural ecologies are thus tied to the frontier's interests and are embedded into global chains of cut flowers. We argue that considering reproductive labour strategies is critical to understand the functioning and expansion of commodity frontiers and their impact on peasant families and food circulation.

Whose money? Digital remittances, mobile money and fintech in Ghana

ABSTRACT This articles explores the intertwining of the digitalisation of remittances with the behavioural turn in development and, more specifically, the advancement of digital financial inclusion. It sheds light on the intricate ways in which state, civil society and private sector actors seek to leverage digital remittances as a way to expand financial inclusion. Drawing upon qualitative field research undertaken in Ghana, this paper traces the emergence and take up of digital financial services – including digital remittances – and argues that the advancement of digital financial inclusion runs the risk of increasing the capacity of commercial and financial institutions to curtail migrants’ and remittance recipients’ essential strategies of social reproduction. By providing a grounded account of the concerted efforts that must be made in order for the ‘behavioural turn’ in international development to materialise, this article contributes to the development of a geography of marketisation framework that is attuned to this behavioural shift. It also advances a burgeoning literature that critically unpacks the often-celebrated turn to fintech and digital financial inclusion in international development.

Global pressures, household social reproduction strategies and compound inequality

ABSTRACT We contribute to the literature on social reproduction and the International Political Economy of the everyday. We focus on how the global economy rests on domestic foundations not just including state institutions but micro-social structures such as households and families. We employ data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study exploring the way different types of household (using proxies for social class) parent – as one aspect of their social reproduction strategies. We argue that under conditions of increased global competitiveness, the UK state has successfully embedded a politics of competitiveness at the household scale. Households of all types are aspirational for their children and invest parental time in helping their children with educational activities. However, parents in middle-class occupations, with higher levels of qualifications and higher income have advantageous informational, cultural and financial resources and use these in a variety of ways to support their social reproduction strategies. The result is that agential responses to competitiveness result in ‘compound inequalities’. We theorise this by demonstrating variegation across different household social reproduction strategies and the violence of social reproduction, even where this is unintended. We speculate that compound inequality may be causing a breakdown in the stable reproduction of society.

Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

Many people in the Global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. Although geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work travels home and affects left-behind family members. This scholarship, however, tends to assume that precarity arises primarily in the spaces of production. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Cambodia, we argue that precarity simultaneously emerges from the challenges of social reproduction faced by kin in rural communities. As such, we further develop the concept of translocal precarity to capture the fragility of social reproduction strategies that migrant households employ across space. Translocal precarity is the looming threat that family members’ efforts to support one another might fall apart due to the instability of urban labor markets in tandem with a lack of sustaining infrastructures in rural areas. Our argument advances geographic scholarship on precarity by explaining how it is experienced across the translocal relations that connect the productive and reproductive labor of household members living in different locations.

ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНАЯ РЕПУТАЦИЯ КАК РЕСУРС МЕДИЦИНСКИХ ДИНАСТИЙ

Objective of the study is to present the characteristics of reputation as a resource of medical dynasties, as well as to identify its role in regulating the labor activity of dynastic doctors. The methodological basis of the research are the concept of social and symbolic capital, the theory of social reproduction by P. Bourdieu. Reputation is considered as "a social representation shared by the majority, having a temporary and local character, associated with a certain name and based on more or less influential and formalized social assessments".       The empirical basis of the work is the materials of an empirical study conducted in 2020-2021 using the methods of autobiographical narrative interviews with representatives of medical dynasties, a mass questionnaire survey of the medical community and the method of in-depth interviews with doctors interacting with colleagues - representatives of dynasties.   Research results. Professional dynasties in medicine act as transfers of reputation, which is an element of symbolic capital, significant for the strategies of social reproduction of the family. Reputation transfers, acting, as a rule, from older generations to younger ones, create a resource for securing a young specialist in the professional community and gaining the trust of patients through informal communication channels (word-of-mouth marketing) and patient expectations based on experience of consulting an ancestor-professional. At the same time, the reputation of the family acts as a mechanism for social control of the medical profession, and maintaining a positive reputation serves as a guide in the professional development of the successors of the dynasty.   Prospects of the study is further sociological analysis of the constructive and destructive potential of professional dynasties in Russian society.  

Post-growth, post-democracy, post-Memoranda: What can the ‘post-growth’ debate learn from Greece and vice versa?

The crisis in Greece in the last decade has led to a wide economic transition, raising the question of whether Greece can be understood as a kind of a ‘post-growth’ society. The article has two aims. First, it examines how the Greek crisis has been discussed within the post-growth debate and focuses on three views: Greece as a post-growth anti-paradigm, Greece as an opportunity for democratic post-growth and austerity in Greece as a path for anti-Keynesian degrowth. Second, the article examines how ideas and projects with a post-growth orientation have influenced specific social initiatives born out of the crisis period in Greece. Some of these initiatives are reviewed (self-organized social and economic collectives, grassroots initiatives for solidarity, solidarity economy actions, etc.). As further discussed in the article, these initiatives were part of a broader ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi), and they faded together with other forms of labour and social protest, in accordance with events at the central political scene, and especially SYRIZA’s adoption of Memoranda politics. It is observed that in the post-Memoranda era in Greece, although past strategies of social reproduction are either unavailable (the pre-crisis finance-led growth model) or no longer equally effective (the familistic social model) and fiscal discipline remains, the search for other alternatives, including social initiatives with a post-growth orientation, did not actually extend as was expected, due to some new growth opportunities, e.g. in the field of tourism. It is finally concluded that, although they constituted an important part of the Greek countermovement, born as responses to the crisis, these social initiatives did not manage to consolidate more permanent structures of social action that could successfully challenge the neoliberal agenda.

Sociologia de um grupo familiar administrador de uma escola de elite em São Luis do Maranhão

O presente trabalho propõe uma análise da trajetória social e das estratégias de reprodução social de um grupo familiar fundador de uma “escola de elite” de São Luis. O caso apresentado é um exemplo de como processos de socialização e escolarização de determinados agentes sociais que compõem uma família dirigente de uma escola, são decisivos para o tipo de estratégia de distinção desta num espaço escolar e urbano estratificado, em que o modo como a escola se apresenta e os valores que defende implicam, em atrair ou não, determinadas famílias para o seu empreendimento. Os dados empíricos foram construídos através de entrevista e leitura de documentos escritos pelo próprio agente entrevistado, um dos proprietários da instituição escolar analisada. O discurso dos dirigentes da escola revela uma relação com os discursos da “escola neoliberal” que tem emergido no Brasil e no mundo, desde a década de 1970.

Social reproduction strategies: Understanding compound inequality in the intergenerational transfer of capital, assets and resources

This article focuses on the way that households respond to ‘global pressures’ by adapting their social reproduction strategies (SRS). We understand social reproduction strategies to encapsulate the more or less consciously developed day-to-day and inter-generational responses to the social conditions that households confront and their own motivations and aspirations for the future. Yet, due to a range of extant inequalities of accumulated and dynamic resources – some of which are material and some of which are at once ethereal and embodied in the concrete labouring capacities of individuals – we argue that social reproduction strategies, and capacities to pursue them, differ widely. Differences are conditioned by positionality, access to information and the construction of ‘economic imaginaries’ as well as material resources. By looking at these different expressions of social reproduction strategies, we highlight how they reinforce macro-scale socio-economic pressures, creating what we term ‘compound inequality’ into the future. Compound inequalities result from different behavioural responses to socio-economic conditions, inequality and (perceived or real) insecurity, which have the potential to exaggerate inequality and insecurity into the future. Inequalities do not just arise from formal economic markets then but also from the realm of social reproduction.

Estrategias de reproducción social. El caso de una familia binacional, trasfronteriza y trasnacional en la región México-Guatemala-Estados Unidos

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las estrategias de reproducción social de una familia campesina, binacional, trasfronteriza y trasnacional, cuya trayectoria se ha desarrollado en la región México, Guatemala y Estados Unidos. En esta investigación longitudinal se utilizaron las técnicas de observación no participante y entrevistas a profundidad, para identificar la producción de autoconsumo, el jornalerismo agrícola nacional y trasfronterizo, la pluriactividad y la migración hacia Estados Unidos, como las estrategias principales de reproducción social. Según los resultados, las características de la familia analizada se presentan con regularidad y en generaciones distintas en la mayoría de las que habitan en el ejido Talquián, en Chiapas, por eso se tomó como estudio de caso. Este trabajo aporta un análisis cualitativo a partir de relatos de vida. Se concluye que en los estudios de frontera es fundamental tomar en cuenta una visión trasfronteriza, para explicar las dinámicas que ocurren en ambos lados de la línea geopolítica entre dos países.

Movilidades flexibles, diversificación y tramas sociales: estrategias de reproducción social en Cachirulo, La Pampa (Argentina)

Cachirulo es un pequeño paraje rural fundado a fines del siglo xix en el departamento de Toay (provincia de La Pampa, Argentina), actualmente poblado por quince familias con rasgos de pobreza estructural. En este artículo se pretende abordar la construcción social de ese espacio junto con las trayectorias de sus pobladores para reconstruir las distintas estrategias de reproducción social generadas que posibilitan la persistencia en el paraje rural. La investigación social, de carácter cualitativo, se enmarca en el paradigma interpretativo. En ese marco se combinaron distintas fuentes primarias y secundarias obtenidas para los años 2011, 2013, 2017 y 2018, con el uso de datos censales, entrevistas a informantes clave, fotografías, datos catastrales e informes previos. Se ha identificado en Cachirulo una combinación de prácticas flexibles de movilidad que articulan lo rural y lo urbano, de diversificación con fuertes grados de informalidad, intensos lazos sociales y un aprovechamiento de recursos naturales del lugar, así como una capitalización de los ingresos públicos como elementos para garantizar la persistencia y expansión del paraje. El caso analizado da cuenta de la combinación de prácticas socioproductivas flexibles y de movilidad que posibilitan el desarrollo de las estrategias de reproducción social.Ideas destacadas: artículo de investigación que aborda las estrategias de reproducción social de familias en condiciones de pobreza estructural que posibilitan la persistencia en un paraje rural ubicado en el centro de Argentina.

Underwater: Resilience, racialized housing, and the national flood insurance program in Canarsie, Brooklyn

Resilience is a pervasive discourse for adapting to environmental risks, and one which the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) uses frequently, yet limited attention has been paid to the operationalization of resilience through environmental governance. This study uses the case of the NFIP's impacts on Canarsie, Brooklyn to ground resilience in the policy mechanisms and programs through which different visions of a resilient coast are enacted, the histories of uneven racial development in which these programs operate, and the impacts these programs have on coastal residents. Proposed expansions of New York City's flood risk maps combined with cuts to NFIP subsidies mean thousands of Canarsie residents who have never previously been required to purchase flood insurance will soon face mandatory premiums of $3000–$6000 per year. The 85% black neighborhood of Canarsie was targeted by more subprime loans in the 2000s than any other neighborhood in New York City, robbing many residents of housing wealth they might have otherwise used to shoulder flood insurance costs. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show that Canarsie residents have subsidized their plundered housing wealth with social reproduction strategies such as renting out their basements, setting up a contradictory situation in which Canarsians' financial resilience relies on spaces the NFIP deems a threat to physical and environmental resilience. The Canarsie case study ultimately demonstrates that the NFIP, by governing through the mechanism of household finances, stands to reproduce and accelerate existing racial inequalities in the housing market.

Doing the Same But With Different Arguments: Matrimonial Dispensations in the Indigenous and Spanish Population of Colonial Charcas

This paper deals with the use of matrimonial dispensations to marry relatives in prohibited degrees by Canon law, mainly among the indigenous peoples of Charcas (present Bolivia) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a source to understand social and religious practices, the dispensations provide a privileged place of observation, insofar as they constitute a gap between the norm and the social practice, and a space of interaction and agency, from the anthropological point of view, since the request for dispensations was part of the social and material reproduction strategies of indigenous groups. Even when, in this sense, the use of this legal recourse does not seem to differ much from what the population of European origin did, which secularly employed the same resource, this paper proposes that the reasoning behind the use of matrimonial dispensations, as well as the arguments employed varied in both socio-ethnic groups. From the vantage point of a global history of law which involves the Tridentine Church, expanded around the globe, dispensations are an example of the accommodation in terms of »time, place and circumstances«. Taking into account that the Council of Trent had extended matrimonial impediments, the granting of dispensations among the indigenous population serves as an example of the paradoxes of the Christianisation of marriage in colonial Hispanic American territories, which frequently forced the Church to dissimulate and make concessions rather than to restrict and discipline.

Generational transition in family business and the distribution of capitals in social reproduction strategies

The paper presents the results of research into the problem of succession in family business in the broader perspective of social reproduction strategies. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical habitus-field framework and strategies of reconversion of capitals, it identifies preconditions for successful succession, the strategies of reconversion applied and the structure of capital transfers along with transgenerational change. The author recognizes habitus as the pivot element of explanation, the specific adequacy of capital structure, individual preferences and aspirations with situational potential, and general structural rules.

Editorial del Nº 15 de la Revista Perspectivas de Políticas Públicas

Editorial del Nº 15 de la Revista Perspectivas de Políticas Públicas