Abstract:Recently, economic integration of lower-skill immigrants in Western countries has become the most researched area in ethnic studies. Traditional studies have highlighted the influences of immigration policy and economic structure in the host society. This paradigm perceives immigrants as a passive actor in the economic integration process. Recently, more studies have paid attention to the active influence of lower-skill immigrants (e.g., informality, social and human capital accumulation, ethnic economy), presenting an academic transformation from passive to active economic integration. However, this transformation is disputed as the lower-skill immigrants' active integration behavior does not affirmatively represent successful economic integration. Moreover, inspired by the "three-way approach" model, whether lower-skill immigrants could successfully integrate may also depend on actors beyond the natives and lower-skill immigrants (e.g., visitors). In this sense, two questions remain uncertain: (1) In the process of an active economic integration, what are the roles played by the two traditionally highlighted actors? (2) Enlightened by the "three-way approach" model, is there a third or fourth actor exerting influences in the active economic integration process? To answer these questions, from a food ethnic economy perspective, we analyzed how actors play roles in the Turkish immigrants' economic integration process in Mitte, Berlin. Through our fieldwork observations and interviews, we concluded that (1) there are four actors in total (e.g., Turkish immigrants, Germans, non-Turkish immigrants, and transnational visitors) in the Turkish integration process, presenting a multiplayer model distinct from the traditional bi-player research framework; (2) Turkish immigrants launched the Turkish food ethnic economy through actively adjusting their ethnic food's eating forms; (3) Germans promote the economic integration of Turkish immigrants by providing a larger market for Turkish ethnic food; and (4) non-Turkish immigrants and transnational visitors also promote the integration process through consumption.
In the era of the Internet and globalisation, more and more international academics focus their attention on how city governments compete for talent, capital, and technology through website marketing to promote their economy and global status. However, 1) present research generally overlooks the importance of different types of elements in different marketing themes, 2) the combinations of marketing themes are still unknown, and 3) the presumption that the emphasised elements and specific combination of marketing themes on official websites differentiates cities requires more cases to be understood. In light of this background, this study collects homepage elements of 49 Alpha world cities' official websites and quantitatively analyses the frequency of different types of elements, the marketing content themes, and the dissimilarity of content of Chinese Alpha world cities. The results indicate that comprehensiveness and locality appear in the process of city marketing throughout official city websites. Overall, we make the following conclusions. 1) The importance of different kinds of elements significantly differs between 49 Alpha world cities. 2) Based on various combinations of elements, the marketing contents of Alpha world cities through official websites can be categorised into six themes of history and culture, government and information, construction and environment, government and living, construction and living, and general compound. 3) The marketing elements of five Chinese Alpha world cities, including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Guangzhou, are different than the other 44 Alpha world cities, and Chinese cities prefer to advertise their history and culture but rarely market citizens' activities. Moreover, Chinese cities' marketing mostly targets natives while the other 44 Alpha cities target external groups, and the locality of world cities' website marketing is reinforced especially on a native language edition website. This study ultimately finds that the Chinese edition websites of five Chinese cities place more focus on introducing local historical buildings, administrative services, and internal business information than the English edition websites do.
Against the background of globalisation and state rescaling, promoting decentralisation and enhancing local governance capacity have become prioritised objectives of transnational city-to-city partnerships mainly between developed and developing countries. However, considering the critical debates on Global East’s uniqueness, two questions emerge when studying the transnational partnerships of Chinese cities. (1) Are Chinese cities’ partnership establishments and objectives remarkably different from the existing international body of knowledge? (2) In China, whether decentralisation and local governance are promoted by city-to-city transnational partnerships as well? To cope with the questions, this paper examines 28 Chinese world cities’ partnership establishments and objectives and reaches two conclusions. (1) With the objective of economic development, Chinese cities have consistently maintained strong connections with cities in both the developed and developing countries. (2) Chinese cities’ transnational partnerships do not observably promote decentralisation, and China’s political decentralisation is much more unstable than its economic decentralisation. Overall, both the binary partnership establishments and the dual-track decentralisation in political and economic aspects are highly embedded in China’s interstitial and transitional position as a Global East country.
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