Theory and Society, 43(5)

Theory and Society, September 2014: Volume 43, Issue 5

The politics of cross-border engagement: Mexican emigrants and the Mexican state
Roger Waldinger

Reacting to migrants’ many, ongoing involvements with their home communities, sending states have increasingly adopted policies designed to resolve the problems of citizens living abroad and to respond to expatriates’ search for engagement, doing so in ways that best meet home state leaders’ goals. This article seeks to understand the factors shaping this interaction between sending states and emigrants abroad by studying two contrasting aspects of the Mexican experience—expatriate voting, a relatively new development, and provision of the matrícula consular, a long-standing component of traditional consular services, though one that has recently been transformed. Focusing on the complex set of interactions linking migrants, sending states, and receiving states, the article identifies the key differences and similarities between these two policies. Both policies suffered from a capacity deficit inherent in sending state efforts to connect with nationals living in a territory that the home country cannot control; both also generated conflict over membership and rights. Nonetheless, Mexico’s efforts to resolve the immigrants’ identification problems in the receiving society proved useful to millions; by contrast, a tiny proportion of emigrants took advantage of the first opportunity to vote from abroad. These diverging experiences demonstrate that sending states can exercise influence when intervening on the receiving society side, where the embeddedness of the immigrant population provides a source of leverage. By contrast, the search to re-engage the emigrants back home encounters greater difficulties and yields poorer results, as the emigrants’ extra-territorial status impedes the effort to sustain the connection to the people and places left behind. In the end, the article shows that extension to the territory of another state yields far more constraints than those found on home soil as well as unpredictable reactions from receiving states and their peoples, not to speak of nationals who no longer perceive the migrants as full members of the society they left.

Grievances do matter in mobilization
Erica Simmons

This article proposes that by studying grievances as not only materially but also ideationally constituted claims, scholars can gain analytical leverage on puzzles of social movement emergence and development. This meaning-laden approach to grievances recognizes that the ideas with which some claims are imbued might be more conducive to motivating political resistance than others. The approach is inherently grounded in context—scholars begin by understanding the meanings that grievances take on in particular times and places. But it is also potentially generalizable; as scholars uncover the ways in which apparently different grievances may index similar ideas across time and place, those grievances can be categorized similarly and their potential relationship to social mobilization explored. Drawing on evidence from the 2000 Bolivian water wars, the article proposes that market driven threats to subsistence resources offer one such potential categorization.

Relational ethnography
Matthew Desmond

All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process—the selection of the basic object of analysis—and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality.

Interpretations and critiques of modernity
Atle Møen

Peter Wagner has been one of the foremost theoretical sociologist for more than two decades. In particular, he has outlined an innovative way of linking social philosophy, political philosophy, and normative concerns to comparative- historical sociology. His overall goal is to describe modernity as different interpretations of modernity as an alternative to an institutional analysis of modernity. Wagner also draws heavily upon Boltanski's and Thevenot's sociology of critical capacities, in which members of society create institutions through disputes, evaluations, and everyday critiques of problematic experiences; therefore social critique is immanent in all modern institutions.