A CROSS-BORDER STUDY

Shaw and His Model in Crime and Social Control in Asia and the Pacific



Abstract

Social disorganization is a social condition that appeared in the early stage of Western industrialization. In the new era of development across Asia and the Pacific, migrants not only move from rural villages to urban centers, but also cross national borders from one country to another. Social disorganization and its resultant victimization therefore take both domestic and international forms. This paper examines migration and its inevitable victims across Asia and the Pacific from the perspective of social disorganization. First is a review of the literature on social disorganization. Followed is an analysis of major social forces and individual factors behind migration. The third part explores different experiences of victimization migration has brought to migrants, migrant families, and local residents who come into contact with migrants and migrant families. The paper as a whole attempts to demonstrate that migration is at the center of social disorganization and that social disorganization manifests itself in various victimization experiences of migrant life.

Shaw and His Model in Crime and Social Control in Asia and the Pacific

Introduction

Social disorganization is a social condition that appeared during the early stage of Western industrialization and urbanization when people flocked from the countryside to the city, transforming the basis of social coherence or integration from mechanical to organic solidarities (Durkheim, 1964; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, 1967). In the new era of development and modernization across Asia and the Pacific, migrants not only move from rural villages to urban centers, but also cross national borders from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, from Thailand to Japan, from Central Asia to Northwestern China, or from China to Australia, Canada, and the United States (Jayasuriya and Sang, 1991; Iredale, Hawksley, and Castle, 2003; Shaw, 2003; Osella and Gardner, 2004; Hugo, 2006; Chan, 2007; Marddent, 2007). Social disorganization and its resultant victimization therefore take both domestic and international forms.

This paper examines migration and its inevitable victims across Asia and the Pacific from the perspective of social disorganization. First is a review of the literature on social disorganization. Followed is an analysis of major social forces and individual factors behind migration. The main part of the paper focuses on various experiences of victimization migration has brought to migrants, migrant families, and local residents who come into contact with migrants and migrant families. Data draw from years of extensive fieldwork the author has been conducting across Asia and the Pacific.

Social Disorganization: A Theoretical Perspective

The idea of social disorganization was conceived at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. Following rapid industrialization and extensive urbanization at the turn of the century, Chicago sociologists were poised to survey and understand omnipresent manifestations of unprecedented changes in the vast landscape of the United States.

W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1920) studied Polish immigrants in America and their relatives in Poland. They found that immigrants have difficulty assimilating the norms and values of their new social environments, while seeing that what used to work ...