This thesis explores the experiences of transnational agricultural migrant workers in Canada’s guestworker programs. Examined through a gendered lens, it focuses on migrant’s experiences as parents to children whom they must leave behind in their communities of origin when they migrate. Drawing on interview and ethnographic data, this thesis argues that transnational parents, especially mothers, face a unique set of challenges and barriers as participants in these programs. It explores how the injustices that migrants suffer impact parents’ ability to focus on their primary motivation to migrate— their children— thereby limiting their ability to fulfill their roles as parents and hindering their parent-child relationships.

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This study examines the Singapore government's Suzhou Industrial Park project between 1992 and 1999. It argues that the Singapore governments' strategies can be explained as those of a 'transnational entrepreneurial state' participating in the global game of industrial production. As an interventionist government, it sought to realize financial profits in China to supplement economic growth in Singapore. The project involved two strategies designed to enhance the project's competitive advantages. Firstly, it introduced the competitive strategy to supply high quality secondary factors of production - such as industrial infrastructure and bureaucratic administration - to industrial transnational corporations seeking to locate in China. Secondly, it utilized the collaborative strategy to encourage complementary collaboration with the China government and several industrial transnational corporations. During the Construction Phase (1992-1994), both strategies were successfully implemented, enhancing the competitiveness of the Suzhou Industrial Park. During the Take-Off Phase (1994-1996), many industrial transnational corporations had responded positively to these competitive advantages and chose to locate their operations at the Suzhou Industrial Park. During the Adjustment Phase (1997-1998), the Suzhou Industrial Park lost competitiveness because of external factors such as the impact of the Asian Financial Crisis and also because of intense competition from other industrial estates in China. In the Disengagement Phase (1999), the Singapore transnational entrepreneurial state chose to withdraw from the project for economic and political reasons. This study concludes that the Singapore government differed from the archetypal interventionist state because of endogenous and exogenous factors. It became a transnational entrepreneurial state because by its resources and motivations, and its own assessment of its economic and political conditions. This study also found that the outcome of its strategies were not just dependent on how they were implemented but also on the actions of other agents, including collaborators and competitors, and the influence of the external environment.

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Despite a growing literature on transnational couples, little is known about the challenges they face. The aim of this paper is to study these challenges and to identify coping strategies. In order to understand these issues, qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven couples. Responders consisted of partners from different cultural backgrounds and were either married or in a romantic relationship. The paper looked at the cultural changes that lead up to the acceptance and growth in transnational relationships. Furthermore, the study examined how these changes have affected and are still affecting the individual couples. Through the interviews, the research looked at the interpersonal dynamics to identify the role of culture within the relationships. Culture, it was found, still plays a great role in the day-to-day life of the transnational couples, in spite of the shift from traditional to more liberal values identified in the study. The challenges faced by the couples were very different from each other as the study represented couples from different backgrounds together with their partner, a native Swede. However, a common issue among the couples was communication breakdowns and a lack of understanding of the partner’s background.

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Although many anthropologists have studied transnational groups, few consider the way in which social organisation takes place in globalising environments. An examination of the use of symbols of Germanness and cosmopolitanism in the selfpresentation of German businesspeople in London suggests that, in doing so, they are not defining themselves as a solidary group so much as they are engaging in complex negotiations between global and local social entities. Combining Anthony Cohen's theory of the symbolic construction of groups (1985) with Erving Goffman's of strategic self-presentation (1956), I begin by examining Sklair' s (2001) hypothesis that transnational businesspeople form a detached, globalised, solidary "transnational capitalist class." I then consider the ways in which symbols are actually used in transnational business, through a case study focusing around the London branches of two German banks, the Head Office of one of them, and German-focused institutions in the UK. My analysis reveals that not only is transnational businesspeople' s use of symbols more complex than the construction of a single social group, they also use the multivalency of symbols to shift their selfpresentations and affiliations in response to the activities of other actors. I conclude by postulating a new way of looking at transnational social formations, incorporating Sklair's theory, Castells' "Network Society" ( 1996) and Appadurai's "Global Landscapes": the Transnational Capitalist Society model (TCS). This is a theoretical construct comprising all actors engaging in business activity across borders at any given time; it also includes the links between transnational social formations, and local entities inasmuch as they engage in transnational capitalism. An examination of the symbolic self-presentation of German transnational businesspeople thus suggests that, not only are they not a solidary, detached "class," but the complex, shifting nature of their interactions points to the need for a more diffuse, multiply engaged model for considering transnational social formations.

Includes bibliography. / This research study gives a glimpse into the ways in which transnational study complicates students' cultural identity, sense of belonging and homecoming; interweaving their experiences into a new transnational identity and a plural sense of belonging. The study examines a sub-group of elite, highly mobile people referred to as "transnational students" - who in a working definition are students who have travelled to; lived, studied and even sometimes worked in at least two countries during the course of their degree programmes. It draws on their autobiographical narratives in order to demonstrate the way in which they exist in a suspended state of 'temporary permanence' and with time, develop a' contaminated' sense of cultural identity, diluted by their 'foreign exchanges'. The study reveals the mercurial fluidity with which abstract and concrete constructions of home are made by transnational students. It also portrays the ways in which these students navigate their multiplied entities as a result of their cultural exchanges abroad. Finally, it tells a story of (dis)connects and (dis)connections to bring out the challenges faced by these students abroad and at home.

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