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This chapter deals with labour conditions and discrimination of migrant workers in Italy, with a particular focus on the agricultural sector in two Southern Italian areas: Northern Basilicata and Western Sicily. The first part of the chapter describes the history of migration to Italy and the most relevant transformations occurred over the last years, as well as an overview of the relevant legislation on migration and racial discrimination at work. The second part, on the basis of two ethnographic studies realized by the two authors, analyses the complex intertwinement of structural and symbolic violence in determining the conditions of exploitation and discrimination of migrant seasonal labourers in the two areas. The study focuses on three topics: piecework payment; the ghettoization and segregation of seasonal labourers; the system of informal and illegal labour intermediation called caporalato. It is argued that that the main source of symbolic violence is represented by the brokers called caporali, who are usually of the same nationality of the labourers. If, on a certain extent, migrant workers perceive their ghettoization, discrimination and exploitation as ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’, this is due to the communitarian relationships built and manipulated by the caporali. On the contrary, the State and the local administrations seem to act exclusively as a source of structural violence. The national legislation on migration, as well as the lack of public policies concerning labour intermediation, transport and accommodation for seasonal labourers, appears as the main reason of the vulnerability of migrant workers in the considered areas.

This chapter argues that environmental ethicists commit a serious error when they require that people hold a moral realist metaethical belief in the intrinsic value of non-human living things and non-living natural things in order to be able to behave in an ethically acceptable manner toward the environment.

Environmental ethics regard this position as the mandatory non-anthropocentrism one must first hold in order to be in a proper moral relationship to the environment. The main reason for seeing this requirement as an error is that it is politically unrealistic insofar most people most of the time behave in political contexts on the basis of instrumental and not intrinsic reasons. To claim that people can behave in a morally acceptable manner toward the environment if and only if they first believe in its intrinsic value is not only politically unrealistic, but also actually false.

The chapter looks at recent studies measuring the behavior of political and moral philosophers which shows that they do not behave in any markedly way better than non-moral philosophers. Ethicists, whom one can assume believe in some form or another of the mind-independent reality of moral properties, are not more morally well-behaved for holding such a belief.

Ethicists, especially environmental ethicists, are in no position to require of us to believe in the intrinsic value of the environment in order to behave in more beneficial ways toward it.

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

Purpose: To describe some of the tensions that both unaccompanied and accompanied immigrant children and youth face when reuniting with family members living abroad after years of living apart, separated by borders and anti-immigrant policies are described.

Methods: Fifty-eight interviews with immigrant minors from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and the tensions they reported having after moving in with their biological parents or legal sponsors in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area are drawn upon.

Findings: Youth reported that getting used to cohabitation and in-person relationships with their parents or other sponsor was difficult at first, though it improved over time. Despite the biological, emotional, and financial bonds, minors had to learn how to relate to new authority figures and follow their rules. Many reported feeling lonely and missing grandmothers and other family members and friends left behind in the country of birth.

Research implications: Interviews with counselors and local authorities that interface with these families show that parenting and youth programs in the places of settlement can become effective interventions to improve relations between children and parents recently reunited, which can indeed help with scholastic achievement and socio-economic advancement.

Value: The interview extracts bring a window into intrafamily dynamics, often overlooked in discussions of the integration of immigrant children and youth into their new homes and communities.

This work is keeping with the increasingly frequent studies that take into account a broader context challenging entrepreneurship as high-growth, technology-driven and venture capital-backed process. Addressed comprehensively in the migration studies, Mexicans are examples of those groups who are often ‘invisible’ when attempting to understand the dimension of entrepreneurship, since they are associated more like ‘workers’ than ‘entrepreneurs’. This research presents an exploratory case study of Mexican entrepreneurs in the province of Quebec, Canada context. It is a qualitative analysis using a methodology inspired by the grounded theory. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with Mexican residents of the cities of Montreal, Quebec and Gatineau. The main objective was to initiate a theorisation about the immigrant entrepreneurship phenomenon in a poorly documented group and context. Some conceptual categories were built from the perspective of the migrants themselves. The importance of previous experiences, family support and the reading of the territory to detect business opportunities were relevant. Routes of business entry profiles were detected. In addition, the ethnic positioning category (the social construction that is made in the host society according to the ethnic group to which immigrant entrepreneurs belong) is proposed. This category was a key to shape the structure of opportunity that allows the creation of businesses in the host cities.

This paper examines whether firms choose to source from multinational (MNC) suppliers instead of local suppliers as a means of overcoming weak contract enforcement institutions and as a means of accessing supply chain management capabilities. It uses a unique dataset of international contract manufacturing orders constituting the global supply chains of many of the world’s largest brands in footwear, sportswear, and apparel. It finds strong evidence that buyers are more likely to source from MNC suppliers in countries where contract enforcement is weak and when they have less experience sourcing from a given country. Further, it finds evidence that buyers are more likely to source from MNC suppliers when they source a wider variety of products, have smaller supplier networks, or have smaller order volumes.

This chapter demonstrates how Argentine law court sentences have constructed a “legal truth” regarding the unlawfully appropriated children of people “disappeared” during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). There are two discursive processes involved in the construction of that truth. On one hand, the courts reinterpret the crime of “abduction of minors” to emphasize the damage done to families in the exercise of their rights, and on the other hand, they link illegal appropriation to the military government’s counterinsurgency policies. Lastly, in the construction of this “legal truth,” the sentences employ other discourses, particularly those of genealogy, psychoanalysis, and human rights.