Syrian Refugees as Seasonal Migrant Workers: Re-Construction of Unequal Power Relations in Turkish Agriculture

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Pelek
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Working And Living Conditions

Abstract This article examines the case of Syrian refugees as seasonal migrant workers in Turkey and critically discusses the working and living conditions fostering their relative vulnerability compared to other workers. Syrian refugees are subject to discriminatory practices in terms of lower wages, longer working hours and improper sheltering conditions. This article explores how unequal power relations between ethnically different groups of workers in the agricultural sector are (re)constructed and the consequences of the emergence of Syrian refugees as a novel class. The essential aim of this study is to unravel the process and practice of ethnically hierarchized agricultural labour market after the entrance of refugees. To that effect, the empirical data was gathered through the ethnographic fieldwork (based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation) carried out in Manisa in August of 2013 and 2014 and in Adana-Mersin in September 2013 and February 2015. This study looks into the ways in which actors on farms (workers, labour intermediaries, land owners, village dwellers and state representatives) have responded to the current situation with regard to three controversial subjects: migrant employment, legal framework and the politics on Syrian refugees. It is argued that externalization of labour force realizes through creating new layers, which necessitates the construction of new ethnic categories such as Syrian refugees.

scholarly journals Not Just How Many but Who is on Shift: The Impact of Workplace Incivility and Bullying on Care Delivery in Nursing Homes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather A Cooke ◽  
Jennifer Baumbusch
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Care Quality ◽  
Workplace Incivility ◽  
Workplace Relationships ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Term Care ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background and Objectives Much of the literature examining the staffing-care quality link in long-term care (LTC) homes focuses on staffing ratios; that is, how many staff are on shift. Far less attention is devoted to exploring the impact of staff members’ workplace relationships, or who is on shift. As part of our work exploring workplace incivility and bullying among residential care aides (RCAs), we examined how RCAs’ workplace relationships are shaped by peer incivility and bullying and the impact on care delivery. Research Design and Methods Using critical ethnography, we conducted 100 hours of participant observation and 33 semi-structured interviews with RCAs, licensed practical nurses, support staff and management in two non-profit LTC homes in British Columbia, Canada. Results Three key themes illustrate the power relations underpinning RCAs’ encounters with incivility and bullying that, in turn, shaped care delivery. Requesting Help highlights how exposure to incivility and bullying made RCAs reluctant to seek help from their co-workers. Receiving Help focuses on how power relations and notions of worthiness and reciprocity impacted RCAs receipt of help from co-workers. Resisting Help/ing outlines how workplace relationships imbued with power relations led some RCAs to refuse assistance from their co-workers, led longer-tenured RCAs to resist helping newer RCAs and dictated the extent to which RCAs provided care to residents for whom another RCA was responsible. Discussion and Implications Findings highlight ‘who’ is on shift warrants as much attention as ‘how many’ are on shift, offering additional insight into the staffing-care quality link.

scholarly journals Student Discipline Management: An Examination of the State Secondary School Principal’s Leadership in Mauritius

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Louis Jinot Belle
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Secondary School Principals ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Visionary Leadership ◽  
Student Discipline ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Leadership Approaches

The purpose of this study was to determine the leadership approaches that state secondary school principals adopt in Mauritius in order to manage student discipline. Semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation were done in this multisite case study. Purposive convenient sampling was used to gather information from 84 participants. It was found that principals use visionary leadership, distributed leadership, learner leadership, inclusive leadership and ethical leadership. This is the result of the political and legal framework, the unwillingness of the educators to assume their professional commitment to discipline students, the complicated protocol to be observed by principals to address indiscipline, and the feeling of disempowerment of the principal to manage student behaviour due to the centralisation of the education system. The study recommends for a mix of leadership approaches to ensure effective student discipline.

Discourse of Foreign Farmworkers

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Bauder
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Provincial Government ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Safety Protection ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Fact Finding ◽  
Working And Living Conditions

In 1995, the Ontario provincial government, under conservative premier Mike Harris, repealed legislation put in place the year before by the former central-left government of Bob Rae that protected Ontario’s agricultural workers under the province’s labor code. Migrant workers were also affected by this legislation. In late April 2001, Mexican workers staged a two-day strike in a Leamington greenhouse, and in May 2001, approximately 100 Mexican offshore farmworkers protested in Leamington against substandard working and living conditions, including the lack of safety protection against pesticides, overcrowded living spaces, long working hours, no overtime pay, insufficient medical care, unfair government paycheck deductions, and threats of deportation to their home countries. After these events, some of the protesters were dismissed from the offshore program and sent back to Mexico. The media reports on these protests varied widely. Reports were either sympathetic to the workers’ concerns, or they condemned the protests as unjustified nagging by a small minority of angry workers. Several of the newspaper reports that were sympathetic to the protesting workers (e.g., Kitchener-Waterloo [Ontario] Record 2001; St. Catharines [Ontario] Standard 2001) presented the same quote from an anonymous migrant worker who criticizes the unfair treatment of foreign migrant workers by Canadian employers: “What I’ve realized here in Canada is that employers don’t hire us as human beings. They think we’re animals. . . . The first threat that they always make is that if you don’t like it, you can go back to Mexico.” In a report about the same protests, the Windsor (Ontario) Star quoted farmworkers who articulated similar concerns: “‘Growers don’t care whether you’re injured or not, they only care when you’re healthy,’” and “[the grower] said, ‘If you don’t work faster, you’ll be sent back to Mexico’” (Welch 2001). Other articles gave the events a different spin. A fact-finding mission after the protests uncovered that only a few migrant workers filed formal complaints against their employers. The lack of complaints was interpreted as assurance that workers were satisfied with their employment circumstances.

scholarly journals Working Time and New Organizational Values as an Indicator of Acceleration of the Serbian Society During the Second Decade of the 21st Century: Anthropological Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-458
Author(s):  
Bogdan Dražeta ◽  
◽  
Ljubica Milosavljević ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Business Community ◽  
Multinational Company ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Structured Interviews

Based on the results of anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2016, the paper aims to review the employees’ experience regarding the process of the acceleration of time in the office of one multinational company in Belgrade. The scientific focus is placed on working hours and certain temporal boundaries that characterize it. The most significant outcome is that the experience of a given phenomenon is the result of the fact that time spent during the work increasingly pushes the private time of interlocutors to the point of complete usurpation. The process of the acceleration of time was analyzed at three levels based on the statements of fifty-six respondents. The methods used in this study were structured interviews, observation of daily activities and practices in the company’s office, participant observation, survey on the demographic and socio-economic profiles of the interlocutors, and a field diary. The first level involved an analysis of business hours esteem; the second one was oriented towards studying the process and period of employees’ adjustment to foreign colleagues; while the third level of analysis aimed to instruct employees’ relationship to working hours before and after the experience of worink with foreign colleagues. This research design turned out to be the most appropriate if we keep in mind that the results of this study lean on the results of anthropological research from 2005, which aimed to review the experiences, strategies and expectations of 30 employed Belgraders of different work positions, work orientations and the length of careers in terms of working hours. Amonog these 30 respondents the blurring of the differences between business and private sphere of life has been detected due to the experience of working in a changed socio-economic and political context since 2000 and the beginning of the reform process within EU integration process, accompanied by the specific social acceleration. The continuation of these processes, with certain features that come as a result of another change in the country’s political climate in 2012, therefore, are the key pathways through which the phenomenon of the acceleration of time in the modern Serbian society was observed on the example of a specific work/business community. Consequently, the acceleration of the Serbian society during the second decade of the 21st century, on the example of employees in the office of one multinational company in Belgrade, showed that the experience of working hours and certain temporal boundaries that characterize it among employees is such that private time is almost completely usurped by work time. This can be read through working hours, which practically cease to have clearly defined temporal boundaries in life of most respondents. The performance of work tasks is placed in the service of merging the spheres of business and private life into one, within the wokring hours.

scholarly journals A Critical Ethnography of Myanmar Migrants’ Grassroots Multilingualism at a Chinese Massage Parlour

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Zhijuan Ni
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Critical Ethnography ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Language Management ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Language Policy Theory

While China is broadening its gateway into South Asia and Southeast Asia, millions of foreign migrant workers cross the border and seek their transnational fortune in China’s border provinces. However, within the existing literature in migrant workers in China, language is rarely a research target in itself. As one of the important social actors language plays a key role shaping migrant workers’ life trajectories. Adopting Spolsky’s language policy theory and following the critical ethnography with migrant workers (Han, 2013; Mathews, 2011), this study explores the interplay of national polices of massage parlour management at a macro level, employers’ stipulations of managing Myanmar migrants at a meso level and Myanmar migrants’ language practices at micro level. Grounded upon critical sociolinguistic ethnography, data is collected from a China’s massage parlour at border town through the participant observation in and out of massage parlour, field notes, semi-structured interviews and documents. The study probes into how Chinese geopolitics of the wider process of regional development facilitates or constrains Myanmar migrants, how they mobilize social resources to expand their multilingual repertoires and how Chinese employer manages Myanmar migrants in language and life aspects. Findings reveal that there is no specific language policy at the recruitment stage. However, when Myanmar migrant workers start to work, language emerges as implicit but powerful medium streaming the likelihood of upward mobility. Other social factors, such as gender, nationality, religion and class also influence their mobility and integration into China’s local society. The study expands the understanding of language management and grassroots multilingualism in the context of globalization from below. Also the study provides implications on language policy making, migrants integration and education for migrants of multilingual backgrounds.

scholarly journals Who Benefits? How Interest-Convergence Shapes Benefit-Sharing and Indigenous Rights to Sustainable Livelihoods in Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9025
Author(s):  
Maria S. Tysiachniouk ◽  
Laura A. Henry ◽  
Svetlana A. Tulaeva ◽  
Leah S. Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Benefit Sharing ◽  
Reindeer Herding ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Interest Convergence ◽  
Oil Companies ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Legal Processes

The paper examines interactions of oil companies and reindeer herders in the tundra of the Russian Arctic. We focus on governance arrangements that have an impact on the sustainability of oil production and reindeer herding. We analyze a shift in benefit-sharing arrangements between oil companies and Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders in Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO), Russia, as an evolution of the herders’ rights, defined as the intertwined co-production of legal processes, ideologies, and power relations. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis demonstrate that in NAO, benefit-sharing shifted from paternalism (dependent on herders’ negotiation skills) to company-centered social responsibility (formalized compensation rules). This shift was enabled by the adoption of a formal methodology for calculating income lost due to extractive projects and facilitated by the regional government’s efforts to develop reindeer-herding. While laws per se did not change, herders’ ability to access compensation and markets increased. This paper shows that even when ideologies of indigeneity are not influential, the use of existing laws and convergence of the government’s and Indigenous groups’ economic interests may shift legal processes and power relations toward greater rights for Indigenous groups.

Commons as Demanding Social Constructions: The Case of Aquifers in Rural Karnataka

2020 ◽  
pp. 097300522094542
Author(s):  
Frédéric Landy ◽  
Laurent Ruiz ◽  
Julie Jacquet ◽  
Audrey Richard-Ferroudji ◽  
M. Sekhar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Aquifer Management ◽  
Interdisciplinary Project ◽  
Vested Interests

It is only recently that research on Indian groundwater has considered a perspective in terms of commons. ATCHA, an interdisciplinary project that includes among others hydrology, crop modelling and remote sensing analysis, includes such a lens in its study of the Berambadi watershed, Karnataka, India. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups have shown that the local aquifers are not managed as a commons, and brought into light several factors hindering collective action. In this paper, these factors are reconsidered, in particular through Ostrom’s criteria. The national policy is currently trying to define a new legal framework for more sustainable management of the resource, but this new law is not known to users and it seems difficult to implement because it calls into question too many vested interests. We argue for aquifer management committees, which could be an intermediary between national policy orientations and users who are (rationally) not endorsing collective action.

scholarly journals Опыт трудовой миграции сельских жителей Калмыкии (по результатам глубинных интервью)

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 688-695
Author(s):  
Nogan V. Badmaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Labor Migrants ◽  
Family And Marriage ◽  
The Republic

Introduction. Labor migration of Kalmykia’s rural population is a pressing challenge for the region. Permanent nature and endurance of the socioeconomic crisis in the agricultural sector of the republic have been adversely affecting the living standards of ordinary villagers. Lack of work opportunities and low salaries result in that the latter migrate en masse to the regional capital and even further. Goals. The study aims to analyze labor migration experiences of local rural dwellers. Materials and Methods. The paper summarizes a number of in-depth structured interviews. The qualitative research methods employed make it possible to view the issue in the eyes of unrelated actual participants of the migration processes, with certain attention paid to their backgrounds and life paths. Results. The work reveals one of the key economic factors underlying labor migration is the necessity to pay mortgage and consumer loans. And migration waves closely align with individual life cycles, such as marriage, divorce, births and even weddings of children. Some respondents reported their migrations were determined by certain adulthood stages of children. All these aspects give rise a new context of family and marriage relations: there emerge guest marriage patterns and changes in gender roles, e.g., in some families those are women who act as migrant workers. Roles of grandparents experience transformations forcing the latter to assume functions of the absent father of mother. Horizontal social networks come to the fore, including territorial and kindred ties. Such migrant labor experiences become a tool of economic strategies and mobility: people purchase dwellings in the city, and support children funding their plans with the earned money. So, migration of parents definitely serves a landmark for future migrations of their descendants. The results obtained attest to that the social profile of rural labor migrants contains quite a share of active individuals intensely motivated to work, ones who strive for better living standards and can adjust themselves to strenuous living / working conditions staying away from home and family.

Circulating power and in/visibility: layers of educational leadership

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Mifsud
Keyword(s):  
Educational Leadership ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Educational Leaders ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
School Networking

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study circulating power and in/visibility. In the unfolding Maltese education scenario of decentralization and school networking, suffused with entrenched power, with added layers of leadership and more subtle levels of accountability, this paper explores the underlying power relations among the top educational leaders, namely, the College Principal and Heads of School, and among the Heads of School themselves. Design/methodology/approach – Foucault’s theories of power, governmentality and subjectivation are used as “scaffoldings” for the exploration of power relations. This case study research exploring one “college” is carried out through in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation of Council of Heads (CoH) meetings, as well as documentary analysis of the policy mandating this reform, explored through narrative analysis. Findings – Analysis shows that layers of hierarchical leadership do translate into layers of “visibility”, with the Principal being rendered the most “visible” actor according to role designation and policy rhetoric. Struggles in the dynamics between tiers of leaders are a reality. Despite a deeply felt presence of the circulation of power, it is the Principal who has the final say. Originality/value – This is expected to contribute to educational leadership literature with regards to the relationship among top educational leaders. Through its provision of a diverse reading of leadership, it is deemed to be of particular relevance to professional work and learning in areas of leadership, of interest to budding scholars, seasoned Foucauldians and practicing educational leaders.

scholarly journals Kuzey Amerika ve Türkiye’de Tarımsal İş Hukuku

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 1058
Author(s):  
İbrahim Çağan Kaya ◽  
Sema Gün
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Regulations ◽  
Business Relationship ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Agriculture Sector

The concept of labour has come about with the economic activities of some persons or legal entities. The production of a good or service is carried out in accordance with the mutual business relationship. Along with the proletariat, which emerged in particular with the industrial revolution, legal rules have been required for the rights and obligations of workers and employers. This legal business relationship, which is mainly industrial, has doubts about its validity in the agricultural sector. Since the agricultural sector is based on a household labour force, a structure based on business contracts for procurement of goods and services from outside is quite rare. The lack of institutionalization in the agriculture sector, the absence of the agricultural proletariat, the intensification of self-employed households, and the lack of work contracts for seasonal workers have led agricultural employment law to remain a subsidiary of labour law only in developing countries like Turkey. In North America, especially the US and Canada, the agricultural labour law is a special legal entity within the legal system. The United States and Canada are governed by a federal system of governance, with each state having its own legal regulations as well as specific regulations. The aim of the study is to present work on agricultural labour law in the United States and Canada from North American countries and to compare it with agricultural labour law studies in Turkey. In this context, the legal regulations on agricultural wages, seasonal and migrant workers, child labour, social security and occupational health are examined in the United States and Canada and compared with Turkey's existing legislation.

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