Demographic Cycle Effects on Migration Timing and the Delayed Mobility Phenomenon

This paper examines the effect of a cohort's size and position in the demographic cycle on the timing of migration during the young, labor force years. Previous literature has shown that demographic cycles are highly influential in determining the level of migration: migration propensities of young adults tend to be lower for large cohorts due to competitive labor markets and depressed job opportunities. This study argues that demographic cycles can also influence the timing of migration, and proposes a methodology that separates the examination of migration levels from that of migration timing. Analyses using Current Population Survey data show that members of small cohorts tend to move earlier on in their life cycle than members of large cohorts. Reconstructed age-schedules of migration for large and small cohorts support the existence of “delayed mobility” among baby boomers.     

Assessing the Impact of Location on Women's Labor Market Outcomes: A Methodological Exploration

Location and the nature of locally available employment opportunities is believed to shape labor force participation, job type, and wages. Analysts investigating this issue have encountered problems in operationalizing the concept of “locally available employment opportunities.” We first review the grounds for expecting a relationship between local context and employment outcomes for women and then critically assess the methods and measures that analysts have used to explore the relationship. Finally, we describe a new approach for measuring local employment context that consists of a fine-scaled measure individually tailored for each woman in the sample. Using discriminant analysis we ask whether the spatial variables measuring local employment context are important determinants of women's employment in female-dominated occupations. The results suggest that for most groups of women (defined by city or suburban residence and by sociodemographics) the spatial variables are not important. For well-educated, part-time employed women with young children, however, living in an area rich in female-dominated job opportunities increases the likelihood of having a job in a gender-typical occupation; for these women, the local employment context does affect labor market outcomes.     

Eating, Cooking, and Shanghai's "Less-than-Manly Men”: The Social Consequences of Food Rationing and Economic Reforms

This study examines some social consequences of food rationing and economic reforms in Shanghai by considering the notion of “Shanghai little men” (a broader translation of which is “Shanghai less-than-manly men”). Male Shanghainese are notorious for doing household labor and being obedient to their wives, which has earned them the nickname Shanghai little men. This study indicates that their grocery shopping and cooking were first inspired by fundamental changes in food distribution and the power structure during the 1950s and 1960s. It treats Shanghai little men as both a special group and a symbol of certain changes in gender roles at home and the redefining of gender norms in the larger society. It examines the shifting discourse concerning Shanghai little men in the era of economic reforms and analyzes a recent popular discourse about “seeking real men” and “being real women.” Finally, it deconstructs the current cultural nostalgia for traditional gender-defined divisions of labor, reflecting a parallel developmen—the “transnational business masculinity” that one sees in China.     

The Post‐Industrial “Shop Floor”: Emerging Forms of Gentrification in San Francisco's Innovation Economy

The San Francisco Bay Area in California is undergoing a technology‐driven wave of growth arguably more thoroughgoing than the first “dot‐com” bubble, fueling hypertrophic gentrification and tales of a deeply class‐divided, “Blade Runner kind of society”. While Silicon Valley is still the industry's employment center, San Francisco is seeing faster tech firm growth, and is transforming its downtown to become more “livable” and promoting public space as key to innovation. In this context, this paper offers a reading of urban public space not just as a consumption amenity but also as the “shop floor” of a labor process that goes beyond the walls of the firm to mobilize the social itself in the production of privately appropriated value. With innovation now the watchword of gentrification, the stakes of this shift oscillate between the total commodification of urban vitality and the recognition of the social process of value production itself.     

Iranian Youth in Times of Economic Crisis

Young people play an important role in shaping Iran's politics but have only a marginal role in its economy. Youth (ages 15–29) are more than one-third of the country's population and are better educated than the generation they are replacing, while accounting for more than two-thirds of the unemployed. Demographics have thrown the marriage market out of balance, with a “shortage of men” of about 25 percent, while economic pressures have reduced the ability of youth to get married and form families. The higher education system has expanded to absorb ever greater numbers of youth but because education quality is low this has not helped in reducing unemployment. The demographic pressures have amplified since 2008 when the economy entered a period of stagnation. The economic crisis has hit Iran's youth particularly hard, especially those from lower economic backgrounds because the country's rigid formal labor market preserves jobs for older workers. The record number of youth entering the labor market has to wait longer for a regular job or has to take up part-time and informal jobs. In either case, their difficulties in marriage and family formation are intensified.     

“Brain Drain” or “Brain Gain”? Students’ Loyalty to their Student Town: Field Evidence from Norway

In the global economy regions fight a two-front “war” to attract young people. On the one hand, they compete against more urban areas because young people leave home to study and do not return to their home region (“brain drain”). On the other hand, they struggle to attract new residents, students and entrepreneurs to their local region (“brain gain”). The context is a student town of a strong industrial region characterized by a net export of young people and an increasing demand for highly qualified labour. The purpose is to gain insight into how student loyalty to a student town may be enhanced. A partial least square path modelling approach is used to estimate a structural equation model of student town loyalty. One finding is that the creation of student town satisfaction has more influence on student town loyalty than reputation building. “Social activity” is the most important loyalty driver. This antecedent is mediated through student town satisfaction and reputation, as well as university college reputation. The town municipalities and the university college should thus be coordinated in their effort to increase student town loyalty to bring down the “brain drain” and increase the “brain gain” in the region.     

The Impact of a Customs Union with the European Union on Internal Migration in Turkey

Abstract The impact of the recent Customs Union (CU) agreement between Turkey and the European Union on internal migration is studied using an intra‐industry trade Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with intersectoral capital mobility under two alternative specifications for the labor market: the traditional Harris‐Todaro approach and the existence of a “wage curve” in the urban sector. Under both specifications, the numerical results show that the CU is welfare enhancing and causes a reduction of the urban‐rural wage gap as suggested by theoretical studies. At the same time, it leads to rural‐to‐urban migration and raises the capital rent, results that are counter intuitive with respect to the dual economy literature. Furthermore, the rise in formal labor demand and the migration response to the CU have not resulted in an increase in urban unemployment (i.e. the “Todaro paradox”), but rather to a fall in the unemployment pool. The study also shows that the Bhagwati‐Srinivasan proposal of maximizing welfare by uniformly subsidizing the entire labor market is impracticable, especially if the high wage union sector can negotiate employment conditions.     

Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy

This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that: ?Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities. ?Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups. ?The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous. ?Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market. ?The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.     

The Global Economic Crisis and Unemployment in China

Two noted academic specialists on labor economics and population statistics of China examine the impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 on the job security of urban workers, and the ensuing repercussions for the Chinese society and economy. More specifically, they probe and determine the magnitude of urban unemployment in China in 2008 and 2009 as it appears to be reported in different segments of the country's immense labor market. A particular focus of the paper is on differences in unemployment among two groups of workers (those with urban hukou vis-à-vis rural migrant workers) with significantly different sets of rights and privileges, as well as levels of job security. The authors also provide an estimate of the urban unemployment rate in 2009 that differs from the official rate. They argue that measures toward further integration of rural and urban labor markets and reducing natural unemployment are ultimately more beneficial than short-term interventions to adjust cyclical joblessness stemming from the global economic crisis and recession.     

Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?

Abstract: Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class, nowtopians are different from “drop‐outs” in general, or surplus populations that constitute the necessary “outside” to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial “nowtopian” communities, largely grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open‐source communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization of modern life. While facing the threat of corruption via re‐integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post‐capitalist, post‐petroleum future.     

Human capital sorting: The “when” and “who” of the sorting of educated workers to urban regions

The sorting of high‐ability workers is often advanced as one source of spatial disparities in economic outcomes. There are still few papers that analyze when human capital sorting occurs and whom it involves. Using data on 16 cohorts of university graduates in Sweden, we demonstrate significant sorting to urban regions on high school grades and education levels of parents, i.e., two attributes typically associated with latent abilities that are valued in the labor market. A large part of this sorting has already occurred in deciding where to study, because the top universities in Sweden are predominantly located in urban regions. The largest part of directed sorting on ability indicators occurs in the decision of where to study. Even after controlling for sorting prior to labor market entry, the “best and brightest” are still more likely to start working in urban regions. However, this effect appears to be driven by Sweden's main metropolitan region, Stockholm. We find no influence of our ability indicators on the probability of starting to work in urban regions after graduation when Stockholm is excluded. Studies of human capital sorting need to account for selection processes to and from universities, because neglecting mobility prior to labor market entry is likely to lead to an underestimation of the extent of the sorting to urban regions.     

Who goes to Russia? Understanding gendered migration patterns

Because of its relatively recent emergence as an international migrant destination, the Russian Federation provides an interesting context to examine when and how migrant flows “masculinize” or “feminize.” While recent migration to Russia appears to be male-dominated, the sex composition of registered migrant flows has varied substantially throughout the post-Soviet period, and there is significant variation in the sex composition of flows from different origin countries. I use multiple origin- and destination-based data-sets to identify gender differences in both the number and characteristics of migrants to Russia from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Vietnam. These data show that labor migration from Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and probably Georgia is male-dominated, with women coming as tied migrants, while men and women are equally likely to be labor migrants coming from Ukraine and Vietnam. In addition, high levels of human capital are an important motivating factor for women’s migration in the former Soviet Union. These findings highlight the importance of considering both origin and destination factors to understand the gender dynamics of migrant flows.     

The cultural practices of Europeans

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in “atypical”, precarious forms of employment in all European Union states, and the political significance of the issue of “employment in the cultural sector” has increased noticeably. There are several reasons for this. One is the change from a post-industrial economy to a cultural economy and a forced process of economisation of societal welfare-state fields such as health, education and culture. The “marketisation” of culture and the “culturalisation” of the market means that on the one hand “high” culture is becoming increasingly commercial and, on the other, cultural content is increasingly shaping commodity production. These processes run concurrently and are part of a general trend in post-modern society.

The article follows the thesis of a recently published EU study on job potential in the cultural sector [MKW Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH / Österreichische Kulturdokumentation. Internationales Archiv für Kulturanalysen et al., (2001). Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitalisation (Brussels: European Commission DG Employment and Social Affairs) (summary: http://www.kulturdokumentation.org/eversion/rec_proj/potential.html)] which identifies a new type of employer and/or employee—the “entrepreneurial individual” or “entrepreneurial cultural worker”—who no longer fits into previously typical patterns of full-time professions of the European welfare state system.

The former “cultural worker” has been transitioning into a “cultural entrepreneur” or—as others put it—into a “sole service supplier in the professional cultural field”. According to the historian Heinz Bude's argument, western European societies find themselves in a process of “transformation into flexible, digital capitalism, away from the Keynesian welfare state to a Schumpeterian performance state and a ‘variable geometry of individual incentives’”. What is developing here is the guiding concept of the “entrepreneurial individual”, i.e. individuals who do not follow prescribed standards but who (have to) try out their own combinations and assert themselves on the market and in society. In this context, the creative cultural sector is of broader interest for new labour market concepts and strategies. In addition to the general change, new technology is leading to the emergence of new job profiles in the creative cultural sector so that the image of artists and creators is changing fundamentally. The new creative workforce is meant to be young, multiskilled, flexible, psychologically resilient, independent, single and unattached to a particular location. The article stresses the argument that these new realities of work and labour have to be recognised more extensively in up-to-date labour market strategies and cultural policy concepts. Western societies have to learn to cope better with these new general working and living conditions which affect a continuously increasing number of cultural workers/entrepreneurs—people who have to make their living from micro-entrepreneurialism. The article argues that cultural and employment policies should find innovative ways to accommodate the ambivalent efforts and needs of cultural workers/entrepreneurs (without capital). In conclusion, it will point out that the knowledge-based society has also given birth to historically new forms of employment not yet represented in the traditional canon of the political representation system (political parties, interest groups, etc.). Cultural policy-makers should take this into account in thinking about adequate social security schemes for their clientele, and labour policy-makers should be more aware of the major employment potential of the cultural sector on the one hand and, on the other, of the often precarious working and living conditions currently prevailing in it.     

Zopilotes,Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures,Scorpions, and Ants): Animal Metaphors as Organizational Politics in a Nicaraguan Garbage Crisis

While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal ecology became politically salient. At different points, recyclers were compared to ants (hormigas), vultures (zopilotes), and scorpions (alacranes). State officials, NGOs, and recyclers themselves used these animal metaphors to describe the organization of waste collection. Drawing on theories of value from political ecology and economic anthropology, as well as analysis of the deployment of these “organic” metaphors, we outline an “organizational politics” of urban waste.     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.     

URBAN UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF LABOR MARKETS: AN EXAMINATION OF THE “TODARO PARADOX” IN A SPATIAL CONTEXT*

ABSTRACT The Todaro paradox and the effects of job creation in urban areas will be re-examined in our spatial model in which the radius of the labor market is endogenously determined by the rational choices of workers. The travel cost of workers plays a crucial role in the choice between two different types of response, migration or commuting. By considering travel costs, we find that the Todaro paradox can be applied to developed, as well as developing, countries. Job creation in urban areas can produce a paradoxical increase in urban unemployment in developed countries, because the low marginal cost of travel will significantly increase the radius of the urban labor market and create new labor supply without migration.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

A vision of Ireland, 1967: John Montague’s aisling ghéar

More than fifty years after its publication as a broadsheet ballad, John Montague’s “The Rape of the Aisling” (1967) retains its satirical force. Whilst not the first instance in Irish writing to acknowledge sexual abuse of young people by priests (two years earlier John McGahern’s The Dark had been banned partly on the grounds of its rendering of clerical malfeasance), Montague’s rough ballad nonetheless places sexual abuse at the very heart of its assault on the Catholic Church’s baleful influence on a society on the cusp of dramatic social change. By adopting, and radically adapting, that most malleable of literary forms – the aisling or dream-vision poem – Montague seems to suggest that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland it is not the “Saxon occupier” who poses a risk to Republican ideals. Now, it is members of a home-grown patriarchy, the “access-all-areas men in black” who abuse and rape children and young people in their care, who seek to compromise the Proclamation’s promise to cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.     

LARGE PROBLEMS OF A SMALL REGION: MARNEULI RAYON,GEORGIA

The development problems of a largely agricultural rayon directly south of Tbilisi are described. The author cautions against supporting planned urban development in the rayon center (Marneuli) at the expense of rural labor and resources because: (a) agriculture here is by nature labor-intensive and functions relatively effectively in its present form and (b) the problems created by an exodus from the countryside should not be intentionally repeated here. Rather, the use of rural labor from other areas and reverse commuting from Tbilisi is advocated, as is the dispersion of new development more widely across the rayon, within a Marneuli “rural-urban agglomeration.” The proposal seeks both to keep a functional system of agriculture intact and to ensure controlled growth of the rayon center, arguing against a mechanistic approach to spatially concentrating resources and productive potential (translated by Andrew R. Bond).     

Weathering the Ill Wind: The Affective and Embodied Dimensions of Anti-Immigrant Political Discourses on Young African Men in Italy

Using the election of the far-right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti-Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.