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ALUMNI NEWS
As Borders Bend by Xiangming Chen
 Between 1997 and 2000, PBRC supported with a series of grants some twenty-three research projects on the uses (and misuses) of social capital in the policy making process. Xiangming Chen’s new monograph, As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim is one notable offspring of this work, the main body of which first appeared in a special volume of Policy Sciences later reprinted by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001 as John D. Montgomery and Alex Inkeles, eds. Social Capital as a Policy Resource. As Borders Bend appears in the Pacific Formations series edited by Arif Dirlik and published by Rowan & Littlefield. With a PBRC grant in 1999 to study the communal sources of policy in the transborder sub regions of Asia Pacific, Chen found that affiliated groups in these intermediary zones served as a divining rod for competing local, national and global economic forces. Ethically based social networks, Chen found, have both “gluing” and “lubricating” effects on transborder trade and industrial relations, facilitating stronger business-state ties, which in turn have led to more efficient and responsive policy making at the local level. It took a policy regime, Chen shows, willing to recognize the wealth-generating potential of strong, horizontal, and principled social capital to reap the full benefit of this resource. Chen’s work on social capital formation in transnational spaces turned out to play, in the author’s words, “a critical part of the analytical framework for the book.” Saskia Sassen, the author of Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (1996), writes that Chen’s book “produces a whole new research agenda in the increasing complexity of the interactions among borders, transnationalities, and the scattering of state functions.” Xiangming Chen is a professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago.
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