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Archaeological evidence from the prehistoric Spondylus industry of coastal Ecuador is analyzed here to clarify how craft production was structured and the role that it played in the rise of social complexity. Many models of social development propose that elite cooption of specialized craft production can be a useful avenue through which aspiring elites can gain differential status. Contrary to the expectations of these models, data from coastal Ecuador indicates that craft production of sumptuary goods was an activity primarily carried out by household units for the benefit of the domestic economy. Increased trafficking with northern Peruvian states at ca. 750 seems to have promoted local social stratification by attracting large numbers of households to the restricted locales where they could exploit these resources, which in turn prompted a strengthening of the kinds of political conditions that facilitate orderly interaction and minimize internal social conflict.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the ascent of Metropolitan Washington from an area with low levels of immigration to a major U.S. destination.

Methodology/approach – Drawing on a growing body of research on immigration to Washington, DC, and data from the American Community Survey (ACS), trends are examined in detail to illustrate how this immigrant gateway fits into the national historical picture.

Findings – The findings analyze the historical comparative settlement patterns of immigrants to the United States to demonstrate how Washington has emerged as the seventh largest immigrant gateway. The paper further analyzes metropolitan-level data on country of origin and residence to show the diversity of the immigrant population and their disbursal to suburban areas from the central core over the past four decades.

Social implications – The paper also highlights some conflict in new suburban destinations within metropolitan Washington, which experienced fast and recent growth. But immigrant incorporation has worked well in the past and Washington can continue to work to be a model of immigrant integration as local organizations, governments, and communities continue to confront the challenges of immigration in productive and sustainable ways.

Originality/value of paper – This paper combines the historical settlement of immigrants across the United States with the in-depth examination of one of the newest and largest immigrant gateways, the U.S. capitol region, Washington, DC.

Since the widespread adoption of the concept, transnational theorizing has attended to inequalities with regard to legal status, education, travel, and access to capital to understand the experience of migrant populations. This issue has become especially pertinent in recent years, as a growing body of journalistic and scholarly attention has been devoted to a new group of transnationals who work as entrepreneurs, professionals, and financiers involved in high tech and other cutting-edge economic activities. Regarded as among the world’s most powerful engines of economic growth and innovation, these entrepreneurs enjoy unprecedented levels of income, state-granted privileges (including permission to work), and access to elite institutions. Because of their level of resources, some observers contend that this group represents a fundamentally new category of immigrants distinct not only from labor migrants but also from merchants, professionals, and technicians.

To better understand their experience, this chapter draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to compare two groups of Israeli immigrants living in Western societies: high-tech entrepreneurs and enclave entrepreneurs. Focusing on their economic and collective lives, it identifies similarities and differences among the two.

Conclusions suggest that the mostly male high-tech migrants do enjoy incomes, contacts, and access to travel that far exceed those available to labor and skilled migrants. Moreover, infotech immigrants are not dependent upon contacts with local co-ethnics that are vital for the survival of most other migrant populations. However, the communal, identity-related and familial concerns of infotech migrants are not completely amenable to their considerable resources. Accordingly, as they address these matters, their experience reveals significant similarities to those of migrants bearing a less privileged status.

Collective, familial and identificational issues play central roles in shaping patterns of work and travel among high-tech transnational entrepreneurs. As such, these issues deserve continued attention in studies of global migration and work.

Research is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of Israeli enclave and infotech entrepreneurs.

To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I deconstruct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements – logic, setting, obligations, and resources – in order to show how state grants of land to individuals and corporations (notably railroad companies) constituted patrimonial practices embedded within modern structures. “Modern state patrimonialism” had its origins in royal patrimonialism. Monopolization of resources – by a state rather than an absolutist ruler – continued to offer the basis for patrimonial practice, but state patrimonial resource distribution became less personalistic and more connected to public goals (financing the state, rewarding state service, settlement of territory, development of a national economy, and construction of a transportation system). Recipients of patrimonial distributions often gained considerable control over disposition of resources that they received. In these patrimonialist practices, economic action was constructed in logics of action that occurred outside of “market” transactions. Future research should analyze patrimonial dynamics during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by identifying state monopolizations of scarce and desirable resources (mineral rights; city water systems; electrical systems; telephone systems; radio, television, and other airwave bandwidth; the internet), and analyzing how the distribution of those resources are entailed, controlled, licensed, or otherwise managed. A research program in the study of modern patrimonialism helps build out an institutionalist sociology of the economy.

The aim is to depict the effects of the rural-urban transformation visible in most western societies during the last few decades by examining the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, a geographically divided region kept together by a common language and culture. Everything from the remotely rural to the very central urban is represented here, as well as all possible types of outcomes of the post-industrial urbanization process: growing metropolitan centres, suburbs and commuting areas, declining smaller regional centres, counter-urbanization, and both viable and declining rural areas.

Population mobility may upset the formation (or preservation) of communities, and while these are vital for any sound and well-functioning society, we see a sense of community as especially crucial for the survival of minority populations. The empirical study consists of an overview of demographic trends during the time period from 1980 onwards to 2012, and in parallel, an overview of mobility patterns between urban and rural areas as well as of commuting.

The late modern trend of counter-urbanization is visible in our material, but still, while this does not extend outside the narrow commuting area, counter-urbanization may not be comprehended as a major trend in the Swedish-speaking regions. The main finding is the effect on communities of urbanization and counter-urbanization depicted by the ability to ‘live in Swedish’ in the different types of areas on the rural-urban scale. The study shows that while an area seemingly thrives, with evidence of population growth and in-migration, a high level of mobility may still hurt the prerequisites for community formation.

Purpose – This study examines Hispanic entrepreneurship in the context of global city formation by focusing on metropolitan Washington and the entrepreneurial activities of Bolivian immigrants, a small but significant Latino immigrant population.

Methodology – Employing a mixed methodology of analysis of census data, mapping, and conducting surveys and focus groups, this research highlights the socio-economic characteristics of Bolivians, the spatial patterning of residential settlement and business locations, as well as the network strategies the group employs.

Findings – Metropolitan Washington is the hub for the Bolivian diaspora in the United States. This group distinguishes itself with higher levels of education, income, and self-employment among Hispanics as a whole. Yet despite their economic and educational attainment, they are overly concentrated in certain sectors and experience blocked mobility that manifests itself through greater interest in self-employment and entrepreneurship. The study concludes that by developing businesses that serve both the ethnic community and the larger non-Hispanic population, Bolivians have had certain economic success.

Social implications – Strategies of residential concentration along with well-developed social networks maintain the ethnic community as well as support transnational linkages to towns and villages back in Bolivia.

Consideration needs to be given to the difference [that] the diversity of cities makes to theory.Robinson (2002, p. 549)

South Africa has long been an intriguing subject of study, particularly for scholars from the United States. The intensification and dismantling of the apartheid state offers a wealth of material to political scientists and social movement theorists. As the African country with the highest White population, race relations are always in the foreground, as they are in most studies of U.S. urban (and suburban) policy, while they are only just beginning to be taken as a serious ‘issue’ in European social science. U.S. scholars may occasionally look at South Africa as if it were a distorted mirror.¹ Depending on one's perspective, as well as the focus of the study, South Africa can be taken as a hopeful symbol of reconciliation or as a warning of the great difficulty in overcoming decades of oppression and systemic inequality. This chapter focuses on the generally overlooked aspect of suburbanization in South Africa, which, surprisingly enough, in certain respects looks very much like U.S. suburbanization.

Over the past decade, in Europe the attention of scholars, as well as the focus of the political debate on the ‘urban social cohesion’, has become increasingly oriented to the issue of immigrants’ spatial segregation. This concern has gradually led to the promotion of urban policies oriented to fight against the residential segregation on ethnic basis, although the effects of residential concentration per se and social inclusion are not clearly identified, and minor attention has been devoted to understand and fight against the casual factors leading immigrants to occupy the most residual part of the social and physical urban space. By proposing a comparative analysis of two urban contexts – Copenhagen, Milan – that are different in terms of immigrants’ presence and legal status, as well as labour market integration and general welfare regime, the study explores some mechanisms promoting the social and spatial marginalization of immigrants in Europe. It also analyses the most important urban policies dealing with residential segregation, evaluating their capacity of facing the phenomenon or promoting (unexpected) negative consequences.

The urban heat island is an unintended consequence of humans building upon rural and native landscapes. We hypothesized that variations in vegetation and land use patterns across an urbanizing regional landscape would produce a temperature distribution that was spatially heterogeneous and correlated with the social characteristics of urban neighborhoods. Using biophysical and social data scaled to conform to US census geography, we found that affluent whites were more likely to live in vegetated and less climatically stressed neighborhoods than low-income Latinos in Phoenix, Arizona. Affluent neighborhoods had cooler summer temperatures that reduced exposure to outdoor heat-related health risks, especially during a heat wave period. In addition to being warmer, poorer neighborhoods lacked critical resources in their physical and social environments to help them cope with extreme heat. Increased average temperatures due to climate change are expected to exacerbate the impacts of urban heat islands.