Beyond Boundaries
Asynchronous Session
Exploring Resource Preservation Dynamics in Portuguese Business Expatriates: The Qualifying Role of Company Policies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joao Coelho
Aiming to expand upon existing knowledge concerning company policies, job-related resource preservation processes and individual willingness to engage with a specific type of international work regime (business expatriations), the present study considers interaction effects, as proposed by the conservation of resources (COR) theory, as lens to understand if company policies are enacted as qualifying resource passageway of expatriate willingness levels, in developing business contexts. A 3-year study, encompassing 24 expatriate cases observed in 5 multinational firms born or located in Portugal. Two techniques of empirical data collection were used: statistical sources and documental analysis, and in-depth interviews. A total of 37 interviews were conducted, both in-person and remotely, of which 13 were with company managers and representatives, and 24 with expatriates (as defined and referred like this by the companies under study). Overall, three profiles of expatriate willingness were considered to mirror different types of employee positioning towards working abroad: conformist expatriates, protean expatriates and disrupted expatriates. For these proposed groupings, different resource process dynamics were observed, ranging from upward resource fluctuation to downward pressure, respectively. Practical implications are provided to further understand individual agency-level effects of dynamic, non-functionalist company expatriate policies, in developing companies and economies.
Featured What Agency Does Air Pollution Leave Us?: Nonviolence in Violent Atmospheres View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session J. Mohorčich
This paper evaluates community-level responses to air pollution. Air pollution is widespread and quite lethal. Moreover, state efforts to reduce it remain uneven and slow. This presents an agency problem for those affected by air pollution: how to respond to this sort of slow violence, deadly but widely-distributed? I argue that, in part because of its physical characteristics, air pollution exposes the limits of civil disobedience as moral communication. I evaluate one nonviolent and one unarmed but violent strategy for collective self-defense against air pollution and make at least two concrete recommendations for engaging in such a defense.
Playful Placemaking: A Scoping Review of Urban Heritage Area Applying Play Strategies for Placemaking View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kanyanat Pornchanthong, Hui Wen Lin
In the context of Bangkok’s urban heritage area, in addition to the growth of the tourism industry those who support the execution of the State-led Gentrification are the “Creative Class” Specifically, the designers, urban architects, and scholars, who came to develop the project in the urban heritage area with the good intention of creative city development, but the result turned out to support the upper middle class's lifestyle while replacing the meaning of place from the original inhabitants, potentially leading to forced displacement of the poor from the area as has happened in many cities around the world. This research is designed to discover the possibility of integrating the characteristics of play and urban play which is the universal language that different people’s needs can express through their playful behavior, plays a crucial role in creating trust, mutual understanding, and shared values between players (Swanson, 2020), and also be able to create new ways of imagining and experiencing the city. (Ackermann et al. 2016) into a placemaking framework to recreate the process of gathering and comprehending the needs of the local people during the pre-production phase of a creative city development project for the placemakers who planned to develop the project in the community. This research employs qualitative methods. Explore the possibility of utilizing the characteristics of urban play in a placemaking framework through a literature review and interview. In addition, action research was conducted to design and evaluate a prototype of a playful placemaking plug-in in the real-world context.
The Politics of Displacement: Loss in New York City Neighborhoods View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luke Gerber, Gloria Vidal
Displacement, physically, involves the moving of an object from its place, and the corresponding volume created by the object’s absence. This paper explores how the state uses displacement—both the removal of an individual and the empty volume the individual leaves behind—as a method of social control in contemporary society, breaking social bonds to reduce community solidarity, cultural transmission, and political action. We argue that, in the United States, the state utilizes displacement as a tactic to suppress Black and Indigenous communities, and low-income communities. While research has documented the impacts of various forms of displacement and the concentration of community loss, this paper examines the political implications of mass displacement. We focus on New York City, drawing on publicly available data to quantify the concentration of displacement within the city, and estimate the effects of increases in displacement on civic and political. We concentrate on three forms of displacement at the community district level: incarceration (adult and child jail admissions, foster care placements), housing disruption (evictions, homeless shelter entries, and residential turnover), and premature mortality (community violence, suicide, and environment-related mortality). We quantify each form of displacement individually and create a cumulative index that shows the concentration of displacement in specific neighborhoods. We model the impact of these forms of displacement on civic engagement (volunteering, community organizations), community trust, and political participation (voter registration, budget requests). Our findings emphasize the use of displacement as a key tactic in the maintenance of the state, structural oppression, and capitalism.
The Effect of Migrations on School Dropout in Italy: A Regional Analysis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Iacopo Odoardi
Migration flows can influence many social aspects of the hosting countries, including their tendency to make investments in human capital. We examine how migrant inflows affect the proportion of students who drop out of school before completing their tertiary education in Italy. The hypothesis is that societies with higher proportions of immigrants tend to have more younger people (born abroad) in school who may have trouble adapting to local educational systems. With a regional analysis (using fixed- and random-effects models), we observe that the relationship exists and a higher percentage of migrants during the period 2003-2021 tends to decrease the dropout rates. The effect is potentially the result of greater interest from policy-makers due to the larger migratory inflows in recent decades, and the larger share of migrants in schools. This has led to greater involvement in specific investments for the benefit of all. We suggest how possible interventions can help the development of human capital and better integration of young migrants.
