移民与社会变迁：亚历杭德罗·波特斯的一些概念反思：考察移民与社会变迁相关的多种方式是一项艰巨的任务。首先，它需要定义什么是社会变化，其次，将分析范围界定为某些类型的迁移而不是其他类型。我在这个企业中设想的最大危险是，首先迷失在“社会变迁的共性是普遍存在的”，第二试图覆盖如此多的地形，以至于忽视分析优先级和专业，而不是次要的因果联系。我想先讨论社会变革的概念来避免这些危险，第二个是确定要考虑的迁移类型，第三个是检查相互联系的主要因素。 我在论文中总结了四个理论和方法上的考虑因素，可以指导该领域未来的工作。
Migration and Social Change: Some Conceptual Reflections Alejandro Portes Examining the multiple ways in which migration relates to social change is a daunting task. It requires, first of all, defining what social change is and, secondarily, delimiting the scope of analysis to certain types of migration and not others. The greatest dangers that I envision in this enterprise are, first, getting lost in generalities of the ‘social change is ubiquitous’ kind and, second, attempting to cover so much terrain as to lose sight of analytic priorities and of major, as opposed to secondary, causal linkages. I seek to avoid these dangers by first discussing the concept of social change, second identifying the types of migration to be considered, and third examining the major factors that link one to another. I conclude the paper with four theoretical and methodological considerations that may guide future work in this field.
The Concept of Social Change Since time immemorial, thinkers and writers on social affairs have fairly well divided betweeen those who focused on stability and order and those who privileged transformation. Among the Greeks, Parmenides and the Eleatics denied the possibility of movement and stressed the permanence and unity of beings, while Heraclitus’ famous metaphor of the never-the-same river illustrated being as eternal becoming (Maritain 1960, 1963). Medieval scholars were of one voice in envisioning the terrestrial social order as a reflection of the immutable heavens and, hence, of a natural hierarchy in which everyone was born with a defined place and calling and in which every humanly created disruption of time-sanctioned norms and patterns of conduct was to be condemned as a violation of the divine will. The only possible society was that which Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Portes already existed (Balmes 1961; Maritain 1963; Phelan 1969). It was necessary for thinkers of the Enlightenment to toss off the one-to-one correspondence between heavenly and earthly societies*a major intellectual achievement at the time*in order to begin to contemplate the possibility that other ways of organising social life could be possible. The French Revolution, arguably the defining event of modern times, put these ideas into practice by showing how this could be done, confining divine rights to the dustbin of history (Dobb [1947] 1963; Ortega y Gasset 1958). The French Revolution shifted the course of Western social thought from stasis to change. The discipline of Sociology, a child of the Enlightenment, was to make its business to trace the process by which European societies had shifted from Theological and Philosophical Thought to Scientific Thought (Comte); from Mechanic to Organic Solidarity (Durkheim); from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (To¨nnies); and from Tradition to Modernity (Simmel; Spencer). Philosophy and later Political Economy underwent a parallel re-orientation with the difference that, in addition to describing the stages of societal evolution as most sociologists were doing, they sought to uncover the master principle that accounted for historical change (Mandel 1978; Maritain 1960; Ortega y Gasset 1958). Philosophers found the key in the concept of dialectics where the dominant Idea did battle with a rising Anti-thesis, with the struggle eventually giving way to a new Synthesis that, in turn, became hegemonic provoking a new opposite antithesis ad infinitum. Trained as a philosopher, Marx adopted this Hegelian master-concept but then proceeded to turn his master ‘on his head’ by arguing that it was not ideas, but material forces of production that clashed re
