<i>Transnational Lives in China: Expatriates in a Globalizing City</i>. By Angela Lehmann.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across from Taiwan, in Fujian Province, China, Xiamen’s unprecedented development is spurring new inflows of Westerners who choose to live and work there. Transnational Lives in China: Expatriates in a Globalizing City provides compelling accounts of expatriate relocation and their experiences in this region. This contribution to the sociology of migration and transnational social life is particularly valuable given the volume of reports on European colonial settlers in contrast to the relative paucity of accounts on their contemporary homologues: Western expatriates. Lehmann recognizes that the term ‘expatriate’ is narrowed by the referential framework of corporate/institutional overseas assignments. As such, despite the book’s subtitle, Lehmann favours the concept of ‘middling migrants’ as an umbrella term that includes conventional expats, highly skilled international migrants, and transnational elites. Whilst ‘middling migrants’ is an original attempt at circumscribing the target population, I am not convinced of its added value, considering the widespread use of the term ‘expatriate’ as self-reference by expatriates, including those who don’t fit in the narrow schemas of institutional/business transnational relocation. The research is based on interviews with 35 Westerners from Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The reason for including a Singaporean respondent is not provided, hinting at the larger problem of defining ‘who’ Westerners are. Also, to add to the endnote on participant anonymity, supplementary notes on research parameters could have clarified key research procedures: how participants were recruited and why, how the narrative analysis was structured, or how key themes were identified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".