[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate ofdomestic migration appears to be on the rise.And Europe is experiencing a wave ofinternational mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II.Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except inEngland) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from theMediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey.Every Friday afternoon 1000 Turkish workers in Istanbul clamber aboard a train headingnorth toward the promised lands.The cavernous rail terminal in Munich has become adebarkation point for many of them, and Munich now has its own Turkish-languagenewspaper.In Cologne, at the huge Ford factory, fully one-quarter of the workers are Turks.Other foreigners have fanned out through Switzerland, France, England, Denmark and as farnorth as Sweden.Not long ago, in the twelfth-century town of Pangbourne in England, mywife and I were served by Spanish waiters.And in Stockholm we visited the Vivel, adowntown restaurant that has become a meeting place for transplanted Spaniards who hungerfor flamenco music with their dinner.There were no Swedes present; with the exception of afew Algerians and ourselves, everyone spoke Spanish.It was no surprise therefore to findthat Swedish sociologists today are torn by debate over whether foreign worker populationsshould be assimilated into Swedish culture or encouraged to retain their own culturaltraditions precisely the same "melting pot" argument that excited American social scientistsduring the great period of open immigration in the United States.MIGRATION TO THE FUTURE There are, however, important differences between the kind of people who are on the move inthe United States and those caught up in the European migrations.In Europe most of the newmobility can be attributed to the continuing transition from agriculture to industry; from thepast to the present, as it were.Only a small part is as yet associated with the transition fromindustrialism to super-industrialism.In the United States, by contrast, the continuingredistribution of population is no longer primarily caused by the decline of agriculturalemployment.It grows, instead, out of the spread of automation and the new way of lifeassociated with super-industrial society, the way of life of the future.This becomes plain if we look at who is doing the moving in the United States.It is truethat some technologically backward and disadvantaged groups, such as urban Negroes, arecharacterized by high rates of geographical mobility, usually within the same neighborhoodor county.But these groups form only a relatively small slice of the total population, and itwould be a serious mistake to assume that high rates of geographical mobility correlate onlywith poverty, unemployment or ignorance.In fact, we find that men with at least one year ofcollege education (an ever increasing group) move more, and further, than those without.Thus we find that the professional and technical populations are among the most mobile of allAmericans.And we find an increasing number of affluent executives who move far andfrequently.(It is a house joke among executives of the International Business MachineCorporation that IBM stands for "I've Been Moved.") In the emerging super-industrialism itis precisely these groups professional, technical and managerial who increase in bothabsolute number and as a proportion of the total work force.They also give the society itscharacteristic flavor, as the denim-clad factory worker did in the past.Just as millions of poverty-stricken and unemployed rural workers are flowing from theagricultural past into the industrial present in Europe, so thousands of European scientists,engineers and technicians are flowing into the United States and Canada, the most super-industrial of nations.In West Germany, Professor Rudolf Mossbauer, a Nobel prizewinner inphysics, announces that he is thinking of migrating to America because of disagreementsover administrative and budgetary policies at home.Europe's political ministers, worried overthe "technology gap," have looked on helplessly as Westinghouse, Allied Chemical, DouglasAircraft, General Dynamics and other major American corporations sent talent scouts toLondon or Stockholm to lure away everyone from astrophysicists to turbine engineers.But there is a simultaneous "brain-drain" inside the United States, with thousands ofscientists and engineers moving back and forth like particles in an atom.There are, in fact,well recognized patterns of movement.Two major streams, one from the North and the otherfrom the South, both converge in California and the other Pacific Coast states, with a waystation at Denver.Another major stream flows up from the South toward Chicago andCambridge, Princeton and Long Island.A counter-stream carries men back to the space andelectronics industries in Florida.A typical young space engineer of my acquaintance quit his job with RCA at Princetonto go to work for General Electric.The house he had purchased only two years before wassold; his family moved into a rented house just outside Philadelphia, while a new one wasbuilt for them.They will move into this new house the fourth in about five years providedhe is not transferred or offered a better job elsewhere.And all the time, California beckons.There is a less obvious geographical pattern to the movement of management men, but,if anything, the turnover is heavier.A decade ago William Whyte, in The Organization Man,declared that "The man who leaves home is not the exception in American society but the keyto it.Almost by definition, the organization man is a man who left home and.kept ongoing." His characterization, correct then, is even truer today.The Wall Street Journal refersto "corporate gypsies" in an article headlined "How Executive Family Adapts to Incessant Moving About Country." It describes the life of M.E.Jacobson, an executive with theMontgomery Ward retail chain.He and his wife, both forty-six at the time the story appeared,had moved twenty-eight times in twenty-six years of married life."I almost feel like we'rejust camping," his wife tells her visitors.While their case is atypical, thousands like themmove on the average of once every two years, and their numbers multiply.This is true notmerely because corporate needs are constantly shifting, but also because top managementregards frequent relocation of its potential successors as a necessary step in their training.This moving of executives from house to house as if they were life-size chessmen on acontinent-sized board has led one psychologist to propose facetiously a money-saving systemcalled "The Modular Family." Under this scheme, the executive not only leaves his housebehind, but his family as well.The company then finds him a matching family (personalitycharacteristics carefully selected to duplicate those of the wife and children left behind) at thenew site.Some other itinerant executive then "plugs into" the family left behind.No oneappears to have taken the idea seriously yet
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]