New Transnational Social Spaces

International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-First Century

Ludger Pries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415237369
• eBook ISBN: 9781134559336
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent terms such as globalisation, virtual reality, and cyberspace indicate that the traditional notion of the geographic and the social space is changing. New Transnational Social Spaces illustrates the contemporary relationship between the social and the spatial which has emerged with new communication and transportation technologies, alongside the massive transnational movement of people.

Part I
Introduction

1 The approach of transnational social spaces

Responding to new configurations of the social and the spatial

Ludger Pries

Moving in small social bands through unmarked geographic spaces is the way of living of less than 0.01 percent of the current world population, but hunting and gathering stands for more than 99 percent of the history of mankind. Thinking social living in terms of nation-state-bounded containers will result as a short episode in the development of the social-spatial practices of humanity — even if we do not know yet the kinds of social bindings that will replace them.

The weakening of nations and the emergence of transnational social spaces

The turn of a century and also of a millennium invites general reflections on long-term social development. One of the more general patterns of social change we are currently witnessing seems to be a fundamental rearrangement of the relation between geographic and social spaces. For centuries the mutual embeddedness of social practices, symbols and artifacts in uni-local geographic “containers” have predominated. Today this complete conjunction of the social and the spatial is questionable in two ways. “Stacked” social spaces could exist in a single geographic space, and social spaces could extend over more than one of the coherent geographic container spaces of different national societies. This volume focuses on the latter possibility: the emergence of pluri-locally spanned transnational social spaces as social realities and entities that grow up either from the grassroots by international migration or through a complex top-down and bottom-up process brought about by international business companies. To understand the ongoing changes in social-spatial relations it is worth looking at the past.

The history of mankind has always been, in addition, the history of emerging and changing combinations of social and geographic space. Geographic or spatial entities with frontiers and borders only exist as human constructs. They are conditions for, and results of, social action and everyday life. The social configuring of geographic space, continuously evolving, is one main reason for conflicts and war. The tendency to perceive social reality in terms of geographically coherent and sovereign politico-cultural entities began on the European continent with the famous Peace of Westphalia of October 10, 1648. This agreement between the European empires put an end to one-and-a-half centuries of severe political and religious battles. The Peace of Westphalia confirmed the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which was summarized in the slogan, cuius regio, eius religio (subjects must follow the religion of their ruler).

In effect, it has taken us nearly half a millennium to recognize the territory of princes and then of nations as the ultimate geographic unit for the legitimate, public regulation of “social space.”. This did not mean that there were no more wars or violent conflicts between sovereign empires and nation-states. But, to a growing extent, these conflicts concerned only the boundaries of territories — not the principle of territorial sovereignty, which Max Weber defined as the monopoly of the use of “legitimate physical force.”. The coinciding of geographic and social-political space as reflected in the principle of territorial sovereignty was the major rationale of the emerging nation-states. Whether seen as a liberal-democratic model based on a contract between autonomous individuals, à la Hobbes, or as the outcome and precondition of war, à la Foucault, in recent centuries the nation-state has increasingly been projected and accepted as the mutual embeddedness of geographic space and social space: in one geographic space (the state) there exists one single social space (the nation), and each social space (nation) has and needs just one geographic space (state).

After World War I and World War II the League of Nations and the United Nations were born, and a new set of universal “human rights” was defined. New international organizations such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were also established and became increasingly involved in defining the rules and mechanisms of interchange and interaction between the ever-growing number of sovereign nation-states and national societies. Independently of ethnic, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity, the basic idea of geographic spaces as territorial “containers” for the sovereign regulation of social spaces was not questioned, and was only strengthened by the anti-colonial process of nation-building in Africa, Asia and Latin America during the twentieth century.

Violent ethnic conflicts and “wars of low intensity” in the last decade of the past century, such as those in Somalia, Iraq, and the Balkans, revealed nation-states as only “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) that could consist of patchworks of very different ethnic groups and social spaces. Nations as socio-spatial “containers” became more and more “perforated” and “punctured” — both empirically and as a matter of perception. On the one hand, the nation-state and the national society is weakened “from below”, as a result of strengthened local and micro-regional authority, as in the case of the tax boycott of the Belo Horizonte state in Brazil or the new Scottish parliament. On the other hand, nations are weakened “from above”, through the development of macro-regional and global networks and federations, such as the European Union. Not until the end of the twentieth century did international intervention in national conflicts, as in Africa or the former Yugoslavia, challenge directly the relation between the principles of national sovereignty and of global human rights. Politically, one of the most important ideas of the last two centuries — the notion of sovereign nation-states and national societies — is going to be questioned and differentiated amongst local, micro-regional, national, macro-regional and global authorities (Habermas 1999).

The mutual embeddedness of geographic space and social space in the concept of “national container-societies” is challenged not only at a political level, but also by economic, ecological and cultural globalization. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the international flows of goods and capital increasingly broke down the notion of sovereign nation-states. Chernobyl made clear that ecological risks — even if originating at a regional or national level — could affect people globally. The term McDonaldization pointed at modes of consumption (of food, movies, and TV) spread all over the world.

The leading idea of this volume is that, besides the political, economic, ecological and cultural weakening of the nation-state and the national society there are genuine social relations and social spaces that cross national borders. In general terms, we understand social spaces as relatively dense and durable configurations of social practices, systems of symbols and artifacts.¹ As Sassen (1998 and in this volume) has emphasized, there are no transnational economic transactions that exist independently of social relations or transnational social networks, that establish trust, security, and certainty. The same is true in the case of the globalization of political networks and social movements (see, for example, Keck and Sikkink 1998). Transnational social spaces are preconditions for and, at the same time, sedimented outcomes of, the globalization process. Therefore we have to analyse the development of transnational social relations and the changing relationship between “geographic space” and “social space” within a historical context.

At the turn of the millennium we are witnessing a dialectic disembedding of geographic and social space. On the one hand, very different social spaces that formerly were mutually exclusive in geographic terms can now become “stacked” within one and the same geographic space. Of course, different social spheres, such as the different estates (Stände) in feudal structures or social classes, could always be distinguished within a single specific geographic space, but these social spheres were always directly linked to each other within one and the same social space, through shared world views or religious and cultural practices. In contrast, in global cities, for example, there is no single social sphere that is unified by shared world views or religious and cultural practices (Sassen 1991; Eade 1997). A global city is an agglomeration of distinct social spaces existing within the same geographic area. These “stacked” social spaces do not necessarily interact intensively with each other, nor do they structure or define themselves by referring to each other (for example ethnically and culturally distinct groups of migrant labourers). These social spaces could have stronger ties with social spaces in geographic spaces other than their own. Therefore, in addition to different social spaces being “stacked” within the same geographic space, a social space can also expand over several geographic spaces. New forms of international migration and the intensified activities of international companies, amongst other causes, can thus bring about the establishment of transnational social spaces. Such spaces have a multipolar geographic orientation, rather than one limited exclusively to a single coherent geographic space.

Historically, such pluri-locally integrated entities, composed of artifacts, modes of social interaction, and symbolic systems are certainly nothing new. The Catholic Church, for example, is an internationally active organization that has possessed a pluri-local social structure and set of dynamics for almost two thousand years. But the argument is that at the turn of the century the existence of pluri-local transnational social spaces is no longer a marginal characteristic of a few very special people and groups. Due to the push of new communication and transportation technologies and the pull of globalized movements of people, artifacts, and symbolic systems, the pluri-local expansion of social spaces and the stacking of different social spaces in the same geographic space are becoming mass phenomena. The congruence of geographic and social spaces has begun to diminish greatly. Transnational migration and globally operating enterprises are not the only forces leading to the emergence of transnational social spaces, but they are probably the most important.

In the following sections we will first give some examples of phenomena which we can only understand and explain adequately with reference to durable transnational social relations and transnational social spaces. Then we will discuss transnational social spaces with reference to three important concepts; the world system theory, the world society theory, and the globalization approach. This leads us to the discussion of our underlying understandings of “social space” and “geographic space.”. Finally, we will define in more detail the nature of transnational social spaces and discuss the tasks pending for the future.

Why do we need to focus on transnational social spaces?

What we see depends on the lens through which we view it; we may see a lawn, trees, and some holes in the ground, but not the golf course to which these parts belong. Changing social reality forces us to develop new theoretical concepts and empirical research focusing on frameworks of social practices, symbols and artifacts that, on the one hand, supersede the national container societies and, on the other hand, do not dissolve into the empty air. Most of traditional paradigms and ways of doing research are unable to detect transnational social realities as pluri-local social spaces. As Portes and Landolt (1999) point out, we first have to “establish the phenomenon.”. They speak of transnationalism, and in the same volume of Ethnic and Racial Studies Vertovec (1999) distinguishes six notions of 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 (re)construction of “place” or locality. We prefer the term “transnational social space” and will develop this concept by “doing the rounds” of empirical descriptions and theoretical reflections. The following examples of our own research give some empirical hints on what is the phenomenon to establish (see Macias and Herrera 1997; Pries 1996, 1998 and 1999a).

What if a migrant from Mexico five or ten times in his or her life moves to work in the USA, and not for seasonal periods of weeks or months but for some years at a time? What if half of this migrant's family lives on the Mexican side of the border and the other half lives “on the other side”? How do we explain such a scenario by using traditional theories of emigration or immigration? What if, some years after having analysed the structure of a family of migrants for the first time, we find that half of the members continue to live in Mexico, and half of them in the USA, but that individual family members have relocated from one country to the other (without a clear and unidirectional movement from Mexico to the USA)? Would it make sense to refer to this family as a family of immigrants (or emigrants), or is the term “transnational family” more appropriate?

If not only the “objective” work trajectories and life-cycles, as sequences of occupational, family and residential positions, but also the “subjective” life planning and biographical projects of individuals and social groups span places and locales in different nation-states, how can we explain these phenomena within the framework of national container-societies? What if a family's primary means of social positioning, and its set of values and orientations, are based on a multi-dimensional framework with roots in more than one national society? How can we develop an appropriate research method that will take into account nationally bounded social structures and means of social mobility as well as transnational arrangements of social practices, and symbols?

How should we explain the existence of material artifacts such as high-tech telegraph stations in isolated Mexican deserts, the large number of money-order offices on Amsterdam Avenue in New York, and the fax and video equipment in Mexican migrant households in the USA and Mexico? More importantly, how can we explain the existence of such material artifacts without having an idea of the everyday transnational social practices that give meanings to these material objects? Obviously there are a lot of “things” that could serve as indicators of transnational social practices and that, vice versa, could only be explained adequately in a context of transnational practices. But not every travel agent who communicates all day long with colleagues in other countries is part of a strong and highly institutionalized transnational social space. His or her family may have lived in the same town for many generations, and his or her peer group, frame of reference, and lifestyle is probably locally bound. In the case of a travel agent, there are transnational social practices in play, but there is also only a minimal amount of understanding of or empathy for foreign co-workers or business partners. Therefore, not every transnational social practice or framework of artifacts indicates the existence of densified transnational social spaces. But (as we will see later on) transnational migration — especially in the US-Mexican migration case — is very propulsive in the generation and strengthening of transnational social spaces.

But it is not only migration that works as a driving force in the emergence of transnational social spaces. What if the top managers of the new DaimlerChrysler company declare one part of their income in Germany and the other part in the USA? What if the new DaimlerChrysler consortium tries to homogenize its global structures of leadership, its global portfolio of status positions a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Transnationalism
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• 1 The approach of transnational social spaces: responding to new configurations of the social and the spatial
• Part II International migration and transnational social spaces
• 2 Comparing local-level Swedish and Mexican transnational life: an essay in historical retrieval
• 3 Disaggregating transnational social spaces: gender, place and citizenship in Mexico—US transnational spaces
• 4 Transnational families: institutions of transnational social space
• 5 Shifting spaces: complex identities in Turkish—German migration
• Part III International companies and transnational social spaces
• 6 Pluri-local social spaces by telecooperation in international corporations?
• 7 Pluri-local social spaces in global operating German companies
• 8 The transnationalization of companies and their industrial relations
• 9 Go-ordination and control in transnational business and non-profit organizations
• Part IV The future of transnational social spaces
• 10 Gracked casings: notes towards an analytics for studying transnational processes
• Index