Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants’ Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore examines the role of mobile communication in the acculturation of South Asian labor migrants to Singapore, adopting a mobile phone appropriation model and following a pluralistic-typological approach. While presenting data from a questionnaire survey and interviews with low-skilled migrants from Bangladesh and India in Singapore, it explores how their specific social conditions, including their transient status and low entitlements in their host country, influenced their mobile phone appropriation. It considers the links these migrants established and retained with their countries of origin and residence to identify several types of appropriation and acculturation types among the various populations.

Includes statistical tables.

Books on intercultural communication are rarely written with an intercultural readership in mind. In contrast, this multinational team of authors has put together an introduction to communicating across cultures that uses examples and case studies from around the world. The book further covers essential new topics, including international conflict, social networking, migration, and the effects technology and mass media play in the globalization of communication. Written to be accessible for international students too, this text situates communication theory in a truly global perspective. Each chapter brings to life the links between theory and practice and between the global and the local, introducing key theories and their practical applications. Along the way, you will be supported with first-rate learning resources, including: • theory corners with concise, boxed-out digests of key theoretical concepts • case illustrations putting the main points of each chapter into context • learning objectives, discussion questions, key terms and further reading framing each chapter and stimulating further discussion • a companion website containing resources for instructors, including multiple choice questions, presentation slides, exercises and activities, and teaching notes. This book will not merely guide you to success in your studies, but will teach you to become a more critical consumer of information and understand the influence of your own culture on how you view yourself and others.

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

"This book presents the latest thinking on the distributed nature of agency: its nature, its causes, its consequences. The book opens up fundamental questions about human agency, and offer answers that are state-of-the-art and interdisciplinary, yet accessible"--

By examining intercultural relations in seventeen societies, this book answers the fundamental question: 'how shall we all live together?'

This open access short reader discusses the emerging patterns of sedentary migration versus mobility of the highly-skilled thereby providing a comprehensive overview of the recent literature on highly-skilled migration. Highly-skilled migrations are arguably the only non-controversial migrant category in political and public discourse. The common perception is that highly-skilled migrants are high-earners with top educational skills and that they are easy to integrate. These perceptions make them a “wanted” migrant. There seems to be however a big divide between the popular perceptions of this migration and its realities uncovered in social research. This publication closes this divide by delving deeper in the variety of experiences, discourses and realities of highly skilled migrants, thereby uncovering the inherent divides between the highly skilled migrants from the North and the South. The reader shows that these divides are constructed realities, shaped by the state policies and underpinned by social imaginary. Written in an accessible language this reader is a perfect read for academics, students and policy makers and all those unfamiliar with the topic.