Social Transformation and Migration

National and Local Experiences in South Korea, Turkey, Mexico and Australia

S. Castles, D. Ozkul, M. Cubas, S. Castles, D. Ozkul, M. Cubas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137474940
• eBook ISBN: 9781137474957
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines theories and specific experiences of international migration and social transformation, with special reference to the effects of neo-liberal globalization on four societies with vastly different historical and cultural characteristics: South Korea, Australia, Turkey and Mexico.

Part I

Methodological Challenges

2

Towards a Multi-scalar Methodology: The Challenges of Studying Social Transformation and International Migration

Rebecca Williamson

Introduction

Reconceptualizing the dynamics of international migration from the perspective of social transformation is a challenging methodological project. This is not only because the processes involved are extremely complex but also because they have been dominated by macro-level or quantitative analysis, which provides limited scope for understanding the nuanced relationship between migration trends and the changing realities of everyday life. This chapter focuses on the possibilities inherent in a multi-scalar approach to migration that is sensitive to the interconnectedness and complexity of migration processes enacted across multiple sites and scales, and involving multiple agents. Such a perspective explores migration across different socio-spatial levels, and seeks to problematize conceptual frameworks that theorize migration as the outcome of global forces and their local effects. It also challenges the tendency to reify another scalar construction – the nation-state – by identifying issues of methodological nationalism prevalent in migration research. Contemporary scholars of migration have argued that approaches to migration based only on the analysis of ‘push and pull’ factors, or which regard migrants narrowly as rational economic actors (using a neoclassical lens), are ill-equipped to deal with the complex spatialities and temporalities of contemporary migration processes, which are increasingly temporary, non-linear and multi-sited and which may implicate new forms of transnational and multiple belonging (Castles et al., 2013; Collins, 2013; Vasta, 2013). The chapter reflects on the challenge of conceptualizing and applying a multi-scalar research approach in the Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century (STIM) Project, conducted in 2010–14 and based at the University of Sydney. This interdisciplinary, collaborative research project aims to re-embed migration research in social theory, and examines the link between migration and social transformations in the era of neoliberal globalization in case-study localities in four countries: Mexico, South Korea, Turkey and Australia.

The following discussion outlines the STIM project and its aims before providing some background information about the case-study locality which informs this chapter. I then outline how the idea of multi-scalarity has been employed in the field of migration studies both methodologically and analytically – particularly in relation to the challenge of methodological nationalism – and how geographical notions of scale might be relevant to a conceptualization of the dynamics of human mobility. I then turn to a discussion of how one might ‘operationalize’ multi-scalar methods, using the example of the research methods employed in the STIM project, before sketching briefly some of the analytical insights that can be gleaned from one of our fieldwork sites. Drawing on this empirical work, I reflect on the potentialities and limitations of a multi-scalar approach for migration research.

The STIM project

The multi-disciplinary STIM project examines international migration in the twenty-first century, drawing on theories of social transformation and exploring how political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of change in society are interwoven with human mobility. Of particular interest is Karl Polanyi’s (2001) thesis of the ‘great transformation’ of European societies linked to the market liberalism of the nineteenth century, and its role in the subsequent upheavals of the early twentieth century. Transformation in this context is framed as a structural change – a significant ‘step-change’ – that goes beyond the everyday, incremental processes of change, which constitute the dynamics of any society (Castles, 2010). The project reflects on Polanyi’s observations of the social consequences of attempts to dis-embed the economy through the myth of a self-regulating market – that is, the counter-movements that sought to redress this imbalance in both progressive and reactionary ways. The project is premised on the idea that a similar step-change has occurred in global society through processes of neoliberal globalization, and that migration needs to be understood as part and parcel of this transformation. This approach takes a holistic perspective that views migration, the global political economy, civil society, social movements and micro-level cultural and social changes as mutually constituted and thus part of the dynamics of social transformation (Castles, 2010; Castles et al., 2011). In so doing, it starts with a challenge to the sedentary logics that frame migration as abnormal or problematic. The starting point was a locality in each country that magnified certain transformational aspects of migration: in Australia, the locality of study was Fairfield (Sydney); in South Korea it was Ansan; in Turkey, Fatih (Istanbul) and, in Mexico, Casa Blanca (Zacatecas).1 We sought to better understand how these localities were embedded within processes of neoliberal globalization and international migration unfolding across macro, meso and micro levels or scales.

Several methodological challenges – such as issues of representativeness and comparability across different cultural contexts, and the ongoing challenge of remaining reflexive about our positionality in the context of northern-centric migration scholarship – became apparent during the formulation of the project. Another methodological issue was that of studying migration across multiple socio-spatial levels or scales. The project was based on the assumption that migration is shaped and given meaning at different ‘levels’, which can be clustered around processes at the ‘macro level’ (for example, the deregulation of global labour markets), at the ‘meso level’ (for example, national migration and migrant incorporation policies) and at the ‘micro level’ (for example, migrants’ subjectivities and the impact of migration on individual bodies or on local communities). The project explores how these ‘levels’ are interwoven in each of the four case-study countries. One dilemma was to develop a conceptual approach that provided more analytical depth than studying migration across ‘levels’, a concept which involves a taken-for-granted assumption about how the local, the national and the global are hierarchically ordered. Instead, the aim was to make clear how migration involves relations of power between levels of governance whose fields of influence can be variable and contested.

Bringing in the idea of scale, or a multi-scalar approach, allows for a more flexible conceptualization of the way in which migration is reinforced, contested and made meaningful at various levels of power and in different sites. Scale can be used in two ways. Firstly, scale refers to the everyday spatial categories we use to order and understand our world (Moore, 2008; Soja, 2005), from the body to households, neighbourhoods, cities and so on. Secondly, scale can be used in a more reflexive mode to understand how social constructions of scale are ‘themselves implicated in the constitution of social, economic and political processes’ (Leitner, 1997: 125; Marston, 2000). Others have defined scale simply as the ‘spatial reach of actions’ (Xiang, 2013: 284) or, from the perspective of geography, as a ‘crystallization’ or ‘“real abstraction” of historically and geographically specific social relations’ (Brenner, 2011: 31). Taking a multi-scalar perspective adopts this analytical lens, which problematizes what we mean by the local, the national and the global and asks how migration itself shapes the constitution of these scales in complex ways. But it also offers a methodological dimension – a multi-scalar approach can also frame the way in which we empirically examine migratory systems, as discussed below.

The empirical examples in this chapter are drawn from case-study research in Fairfield, Sydney. Fairfield City2 is one of the most socio-culturally diverse local government areas in Australia. According to figures from the 2011 Census, of a total population of 198,381 residents, 50 per cent are migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds from the postwar migrations of Southern and Eastern Europeans, through ‘waves’ of Lebanese, South American and Vietnamese (forced) migration during the 1970s, to increasing Asian migration in the 1980s and diversifying streams of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and, more recently, Africa. Since the Second World War, overseas migration to Fairfield has been facilitated by a range of factors, including the presence of several migrant hostels and affordable housing, systems of chain migration and a national immigration policy that welcomes workers from an increasingly diverse range of countries. Initially connected to the then-booming peri-urban manufacturing industries that provided a steady source of factory and agricultural work, the area functioned as a key ‘gateway suburb’ for new migrants in Sydney. Migrants were more likely to settle in surrounding areas that were familiar to them, and concentrations of migrant groups have created a networked landscape of migrant services, ethnic businesses, cultural institutions and community organizations that continue to attract migrants today. The decline of the manufacturing industry and other sources of employment during the late 1980s heightened unemployment and precarity in the area, as it has in many of the middle-ring suburbs of Sydney (Randolph and Holloway, 2005). It is characterized by profound socio-economic disadvantage;3 however, this is only one side of a complex story of regeneration, decline and upward social mobility across generations (Gapps, 2010). Fairfield remains prominent in the public imaginary – for better or for worse – as a site of the lived reality of migration, multiculturalism and, more recently, a re-branded global cosmopolitanism (see Koleth in this volume). While we can only briefly touch on it here, the area is situated within the complex social and economic geographies of the global city of Sydney, as well as being connected into regional and global processes of migration, macro-level economic transformation and historical and contemporary crises.

Multi-scalar approaches to migration

That migration is a multi-sited and socially constructed phenomenon is now widely accepted in migration literature. The social significance of human mobility and the actors and institutions involved in it are multiple and contingent, and migrant agency is not only shaped in relation to structural elements operating at the local, national and global levels but also co-produces these structural conditions. The emergence of a multi-scalar approach in migration studies can be traced to several strands of theory. Without attempting an exhaustive review, I briefly outline three genealogies of thought that have integrated scalar thinking into contemporary migration research, drawing on critical globalization theory, sociological and anthropological studies of migration and political geography. I then discuss how this thinking is manifest in methodological approaches to migration.

Theories of globalization were instrumental in the conceptualization of migration as an international or global phenomenon but, in so doing, they tended to over-estimate the extent to which globalization – as the connectedness and global flow of goods, ideas, capital and people – encompassed the whole globe. ‘Second-wave’ critical globalization theorists were more likely to temper this vision by highlighting the unevenness of these processes (see, for example, Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1999; Held et al., 1999; Robertson, 2005; Smith, 2001). The latter body of work was better able to demonstrate how global flows were selectively spread and sought to deconstruct the reification of the concepts of ‘global’ and ‘local’ in the social sciences, to highlight the power relations inherent in the employment of such terms. Thus, critical globalization theories grounded the global and globalized the local – for example, through concepts such as ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 2005), ‘translocality’ (Smith...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Methodological Challenges
• Part II: Case-study Insights: South Korea
• Part III: Case-study Insights: Turkey
• Part IV: Case-study Insights: Mexico
• Part V: Case-study Insights: Australia
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Descriptive Statistics of the Explanatory Variables
• Index