Sociology

Labour protection has become a dominant agenda in global migration governance, particularly for sending countries whose diasporic citizens are denied political rights in host states. Despite having limited authority to arbitrate extraterritorial disputes, sending countries like Indonesia have deployed novel techniques of statecraft to improve migrant protection. Through the prism of the professional competence exam and pre-departure orientation seminar, this article investigates the Indonesian state's regulatory practices that focus on migrant conduct. Although outbound domestic workers are subject to a prolonged process of skill formation, other Indonesian contract workers pursue emigration upon acquiring basic legal knowledge without undergoing accreditation. While both programs are designed to inculcate migrant capabilities for self-protection, the state's professionalization of domestic workers constitutes a liberal strategy of exclusion that is predicated on their master status as "vulnerable victims" in public discourse. To understand Indonesia's increasingly mediated migration infrastructure, then, requires attention to the liberal rationality of protection that involves the transformation of migrants into self-regulating subjects.

From Singapore and Tel Aviv to Rome and Vancouver, Filipina domestic
workers have captured the hearts of international employers, thanks to
their English proficiency, educational attainment, and cosmopolitan outlook. Though confined to indentured servitude in nearly every country,
Filipinas trot the world scouring for higher salaries, job security, and even
pathways to citizenship. Their Indonesian counterparts likewise undertake multinational journeys, beginning in neighboring Malaysia and concluding in high-wage economies like Taiwan. But while Filipinas view
employment in newly industrial economies as a springboard for the West, Indonesians display limited interest in settlement outside origin communities, content as they are with circular migration within Asia. How Filipina and Indonesian domestics attain material welfare through incremental migration projects forms the subject of Anju Paul’s Multinational Maids: Stepwise Migration in a Global Labor Market. Juxtaposing the constraints and opportunities created by the global demand for reproductive labor, and tracing women’s spatial mobility across variegated national landscapes, this book is a refreshing rejoinder to scholarship that overemphasizes the structural forces that disempower migrant agency.

Gender and Power in Indonesian Islam contributes to a burgeoning body of literature on the subject formation of women leaders in Islam—a line of inquiry that has been fruitfully opened up by postcolonial scholarship in reaction to Orientalist thinking that has long denied agency to Muslim women. The essays contained in this edited volume demonstrate that in Indonesia, female leadership has, in fact, placed important limits on the patriarchal structures of Islamic institutions. The essays, moreover, show that the Salafi movement—a fundamentalist movement associated with literal, puritanical interpretations of Islam—that emerged in Indonesia in recent decades has had to accommodate locally specific patterns of gender relations and cultural meanings. Rapid economic development, democratization, foreign aid intervention, political conflict, and other social changes have nonetheless affected female autonomy in contradictory ways: while gender mainstreaming and women’s empowerment have become the buzzwords of the post-Suharto era, fundamentalist Islamist forces have gained some traction in civil society and have even risen to power in local governments. The deepening conservatism associated with this rise of Islamist forces is encapsulated in control over women’s sexuality, ideologies in favor of polygamy and child marriage, and restrictions on women’s leadership in institutions of religious learning (pesantren). Yet, as Smith and Woodward point out, the rise of Salafism has also reinvigorated societal debates about gender equity and the position of women in Islam, introducing spiritual pluralism to a region that had been the hotbed of Sufism—Islamic mysticism—for centuries. At the forefront of the struggle to promote gender equity are Muslim women and their male allies in the pesantren—actors who accommodate religious norms legitimating male tutelage, even as they strive to enhance authority for women in the public sphere.

This study examines how state and commercial actors construct gender, occupation, and nationality hierarchies in guest worker programs by comparing the migratory procedures for female domestic workers and male industrial operators from Indonesia. Based on 19 months of multi-sited ethnography and 86 interviews in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Singapore, I introduce the notion of multilateralism to theorize the stratification of global migration processes. In multilateral labor markets, governments, brokers, employers, and migrants in multiple countries contend for labor and employment. The homecare market is governed under the rubric of “selling a resume,” whereby Indonesian regulators and labor suppliers pass on recruitment costs to employers, in a context where migrant domestics possess myriad destination options due to their reputation fostered by a government-organized credentialing program. By contrast, Indonesian factory workers expend upfront payment to “buy a job” from destination b...

This article challenges the widely held view that populist mobilization and participatory democracy are incompatible. Ethnographic data from Chávez-era Venezuela show that while populist mobilization cannot directly generate participatory democracy, it can set in motion a process that indirectly leads to this result: By creating but failing to fulfill expectations for participatory democracy and falling short in other ways, a poorly performing local populist regime can precipitate a grassroots backlash that, under certain circumstances, can lead to the election of a post-populist regime with the interest and ability to successfully implement participatory reform. My data show that this can occur in municipalities led by the Left or Center-Right, complicating the idea that successful participatory democracy requires a Left party.

In the USA, the UK and elsewhere, community unionism appears a potentially fruitful strategy for organizing the growing numbers of workers holding precarious employment. In the USA there is increasing interest in a form of community unionism that may gain traction in the UK: union-worker centre collaborations. Unions and worker centres have struggled to collaborate, however, because of their structural, cultural and ideological differences. This article examines a rare case of successful union-worker centre collaboration, asking why this collaboration emerged, what challenges it has faced, and why it has succeeded. Data show this collaboration emerged due to organizational crises, linked to broader economic changes, and individual learning following semi-successful organizing campaigns. The collaboration overcame challenges stemming from the differences between unions and worker centres through intra- and inter-organizational learning. Two conditions facilitated this outcome: bridge...

Research shows that some agricultural cooperatives implement development projects in their local communities. What remains to be explained is why certain cooperatives pursue local development while others do not. Through a comparison of coffee cooperatives in two regions of Peru, this study examines the implications of a regional cooperative for local development. The creation of a regional cooperative leads to a concentration of resources and a decrease in the need and ability of local cooperatives to pursue independent development projects. At the same time, it allows for more equal access to those resources and to the benefits of cooperative-led development projects. D'après les résultats de recherches, certaines coopératives agricoles mettent en oeuvre des projets de développement au sein de leurs communautés locales. Ce qu'il reste à expliquer, c'est pourquoi certaines coopératives se consacrent au développement local, et pas d'autres. En comparant des coopératives caféières dans deux régions du Pérou, cette étude examine les conséquences des activités d'une coopérative régionale pour le développement local. La création d'une coopérative régionale entraîne une concentration des ressources et une diminution du besoin et de l'aptitude des coopératives locales de se consacrer à des projets de développement indépendants. Dans le même temps, elle permet un accès plus égal à ces ressources et aux avantages des projets de développement menés par des coopératives. Según varias investigaciones, algunas cooperativas agrícolas impulsan proyectos de desarrollo en sus comunidades locales. Sin embargo, aún resta explicar las razones por las cuales algunas cooperativas promueven el desarrollo local mientras que otras no lo hacen. Realizando un análisis comparativo de cooperativas cafetaleras de Perú, el presente estudio examina las implicaciones que conlleva el establecimiento de una cooperativa regional para el desarrollo local. Si bien la presencia de una cooperativa regional favorece la concentración de recursos, disminuye la necesidad y la posibilidad de que las cooperativas locales impulsen sus propios proyectos de desarrollo de manera independiente. Paralelamente, facilita un acceso más equitativo a los recursos y a los beneficios derivados de los proyectos de desarrollo impulsados por las cooperativas.

Why does civil society in some cases become a tool of elite organization and domination of non-elites, and in others a sphere for non-elite self-organization and self-determination? To answer this question, this article compares the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century divergent developments of civil society in two regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Russian-ruled Congress Poland, with a focus on the Warsaw Governorate (1815–1915), and Austrian-ruled western-Galicia, concentrating on the Grand Duchy of Krakow (1846–1914). This analysis of variation in elite domination of civil society shifts the focus of civil society debates away from the market and the state and toward elites. It argues that while imperial policies of regional integration and socioeconomic changes spurred by the transition from feudalism shaped the potential paths of civil society's development in both regions, their effects on civil society's relative autonomy in each were mediated, and thus steered, by the interests and conflicts of local elites.

Why do claims of cultural belonging promote institutional transformation by expanding community boundaries in some instances and constricting them in others? To address this question, I introduce an elite-capital conflict approach, which synthesizes Bourdieu's concept of capital with elite-conflict theories. I argue that this approach is valuable for understanding key aspects of mass mobilization such as the conditions under which marginalized elites will attempt to mobilize non-elites through appeals of cultural similarity; the factors which shape the cultural boundaries that these appeals propose; and when non-elites are likely to answer an elites' call to mobilize. Drawing on historical analysis of 19th-century nationalism in Congress Poland, I show that the degree of capital concentration in the hands of Polish elites and conversion rates between different types of capital determined whether, and how, Polish elites utilized appeals to shared beliefs and practices as grounds for mobilization of non-elites. Whether appeals to shared cultural practices became a successful basis of widespread mobilization, however, depended on the benefits for non-elites of the reconceptualization or re-valuation of Polish culture and its boundaries that Polish elites were proposing.