Sociology Department Masters Theses Collection

China’s New Generation Migrant Workers

Wang, Lie — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:56:29 PST

About 45% of China’s roughly 145 million floating migrant population works in the manufacturing industry, and the majority of them were born after 1980. This was a landmark year for the country as it transform from a socialist, centralized and planned economy to a more or less market-oriented economy with so-called “Chinese characteristics.” The intersection of this new generation of migrant workers and the global market through the medium of manufacturing has become a subject of great interest to people around the world and in China, who seek to understand their unique personal and work arenas.

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of the young migrant workers’ work and lives in a factory setting based on survey and in-depth interview data collected in a medium-size Shenzhen-based electronics factory in May 2010. It explores their social expectations and suffering; their satisfactions and dissatisfactions as production-line workers; and their future goals. The findings show that the new generation migrant workers migrate more out of individual preferences than family needs. They are primarily leaving home to seek independence more than economic returns, and they perceive factory work as the first stop on a long journey of establishing themselves in society.

If Leaving, Remitting and Returning are the three key words that categorize the old generation of migrant workers who were born before 1980, then Leaving, Searching and Becoming are the main themes for the new generation who were born after 1980. Like their parents’ generation, they are transient in nature, but more in the sense of juggling between career choices rather than round-tripping between rural home and urban work.

Ripped from the Land, Shipped Away and Reborn: Unthinking the Conceptual and Socio-Geo-Historical Dimensions of the Massacre of Bellavista

Vergara Figueroa, Aurora — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:14:02 PDT

The monograph Ripped from the land, shipped away, and reborn introduces the concept Destierro-which translates as uprooting, deracination, exile, exodus, and banishment- to unthink the intellectual, political, and legal categories used by prevailing intellectual models to narrate/explain the 2002 massacre, occurred at the community of Bellavista-Bojayá-Chocó-Colombia. This thesis offers a critical prospect of the event. It highlights ethno-historical analytics to deconstruct the concepts of forced displacement, and forced migration. I study the racial, class, gender, generational, and regional dimensions undergirding this phenomenon to propose an Afrodiasporic Decolonial Critique of the field of Forced Migration. Single-axis explanations of this event and phenomenon have failed to move forward a complex analytical framework to fully explain the joint effect of multiple systems of oppression at play in events of land dispossession. Variables such as race, place, gender, and class; historical processes such as colonialism, the development of capitalism, contemporary place-based ethno-territorial social mobilization, and neoliberal multiculturalism intersect in this massacre. Accordingly, it is an imperative for critical historical sociological research to craft theories, and concepts to understand these crossroads. The basic argument I develop is that the concepts of forced displacement, and forced migration are formulas for historical erasure, and therefore limited to contribute to the demands for reparation of the affected populations. Territories are socio-geo-historical formations that can only be understood within the context in which they are conceived, produced, re-produced, and unproduced. Likewise, the categories used to name and study land dispossession need to be contextually and historically grounded to capture both complex local specificities, and global linkages. I advocate for concepts that can be used as categories of analysis, social mobilization, and reparation; to unveil the historical roots of the current constellation of processes, which are generating a new cycle of Diaspora of the Afrocolombian population, and similar contexts in the world-system in which this phenomenon is observable. In this vein, unthinking/deconstructing the concepts of forced displacement, and forced migration, as well as the massacre of Bellavista as an event of forced displacement, is an attempt to write stories that can repair the broken dignity of those that have been, and still are continually exploited.

Connections in Care: The Relationship Between Complementary, Alternative and Conventional Medicine

Loomis, Amy — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:13:05 PDT

Medical sociologists and healthcare scholars have documented an upward trend in the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the United States in recent decades. This study is focused on CAM use as it relates to the conventional U.S. healthcare system. The aim of this work is to differentiate CAM modalities functionally and to situate peoples’ CAM use in their structural location in the conventional healthcare system and their interactions with conventional medicine practitioners. Using the Household Component of the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey of 1998 two samples are considered. In a sample of combined CAM-users and non-users, comparisons are made between significant predictors of CAM use when CAM is treated as a uniform phenomenon to those when CAM is broken up into individual modalities for analysis. In a sample of respondents who used one of eleven CAM therapies in 1998, interactions with physicians and access to CAM modalities are compared between each of the modalities. The two indexes of variables, which are influence of MD interactions (measured by visits to an MD, discussing CAM use with MD and being referred to CAM by MD) and patients’ location within the structure of healthcare (measured by health insurance status, CAM insurance, and urban MSA code), are shown to have explanatory power on different CAM modalities’ use. These finding support the argument that CAM use should not be studied as a uniform phenomenon and that patients’ location in the larger healthcare system and interactions with medical doctors should be considered in research on complementary and alternative medicine’s use.

The Search for Self-Fulfillment: How Individualism Undermines Community Organizing

Rybaczuk, Rachel — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:33:56 PDT

This paper focuses on the role of individualism in community organizing. My case study follows the organizing efforts of the Coalition for Affordable Northampton Neighborhoods (CANN) and residents’ attempts to save an affordable neighborhood from Smith College’s campus expansion. As a resident and co-founder of CANN I was particularly interested in identifying the reasons for our difficulty in organizing residents whose homes would be torn down. While attending community and city meetings, interviewing core activists and activists who left the organizing efforts, I observed individualism undermining community organizing and political involvement. People’s search for self-fulfillment was in conflict with the level of commitment necessary to sustain a social movement. Coupled with the “progressive politics” of a “Paradise City” where indulgent self-care permeates the culture, individualism emerged as an explanation for dwindling numbers of active residents. Identifying individualism as an issue for activists can provide much needed insight and subsequent action to address and solve the problem of erratic, unpredictable participation of individuals in political and community organizing. We can learn how to not only create, but also sustain strong social movements

Effects of Maternal Job Quality on Children's Reading Achievement

Yetis Bayraktar, Ayse — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:54:47 PST

I explore the relationship between quality of maternal employment and children’s reading achievement between six to thirteen years of age using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The hypotheses assert that job quality in terms of level of autonomy, supervisory power, complexity with people, data and things, and family benefits have significant positive effects on children’s reading achievement. The least squares estimates indicate that complexity, power, and autonomy has significant positive effects for children while the effects of family benefits is weak with the exception of the positive effect of union membership for racially disadvantaged groups.

Race and Representation: A Case Study of Racial Diversity in Student Government

Livingstone, Rhys J. — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:53:11 PST

Colleges and universities in the United States have attempted for years to implement policies and procedures to promote racial diversity in their student bodies, as well as to ensure reflective minority representation in student programs at their institutions. I have done an independent evaluation assessment of the necessity and program theory for a policy aimed at assuring diversity of the undergraduate student government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, covering the period 2003-2005. The policy in effect during those years was a system which guaranteed minority representation reasonably mirroring the known minority population of the undergraduate student body by reserving 13 percent of Senator positions in the Student Government Association for students affiliated with the African, Latino/a, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American caucus. The policy intent was to achieve campus fair and just minority representation in UMass student government. In reality, however, that policy produced unintended consequences instead – bitter, and sometimes violent racial tensions, and widespread and prolonged charges of reverse and illegal discrimination. As a result of this evaluation of that policy, and its attendant procedures for implementation, in the conclusion I offer recommendations which would allow UMass to replace a problematic policy with one which could achieve reflective minority representation in student government acceptable to, and supported by, the majority of the undergraduate population.

Negotiating Discourses on Homoeroticism: The Coming Out and Other Tales by Colombian Immigrant Men in New York City

Marquez, Erika — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:06:53 PDT

This work analyzes the ways in which transnational migration transforms and is transformed by the sexual dimensions of identity. It presents the experience of Colombian homosexual men who have migrated to New York City in the last twenty-five years as a case that illuminates identity transformations in the process of transnational migration. Throughout ethnographic research, this work finds that immigration greatly impacts family arrangements and patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the immigrant's original and recipient society.

Stealing Time and Being There: Fathers, Class and Time

Russell, Carla N. — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:59:54 PST

Although the conflicting demands between work and family have been documented for mothers, much less is known about fathers. Specifically, must less is known about how family and work influence the work hours and schedules of fathers and how these influences might vary by class. In this paper, I use multi-methods to compare a relatively affluent group of professionals (physicians) to a group of working class fathers (emergency medical technicians) in how work and family influence their hours and schedules. I find that, on the one hand, the working-class fathers, while saying that their children are not a great influence on the schedules, are more likely to manipulate their schedules in order to participate in the daily care of their children in response to spouses’ employment, or perform “private fathering.” Physicians, on the other hand, are more likely claim the importance of their children on their schedules, but prioritize work demands and participate with their children through their children’s special events, or practice “public fathering.” These differences are class-related, based on the work and family structures in place for each group of fathers.