Making social integration work

Most of my research, so far, has been related to understanding social inequalities. I started the journey as an academic researcher by looking at political behaviour, attitudes and civil society activities of minority ethnic groups in the UK. At the time, the standard way of assessing the level of integration of immigrant or minority populations was to compare their outcomes in a particular domain to the outcomes of the white British majority, which served as a ‘yardstick’. Such approach is still dominant now; however, there is a clearly noticeable shift in the discourse of integration towards a more holistic approach. This means that more (much needed) attention is given to the question of ‘how integrated we are as a society’ as opposed to the traditional question of ‘how integrated group x or y is’ in comparison to the ‘majority’. The former seems much better at capturing the fact that integration or inequalities are happening on a societal level, and that achieving integration or reducing inequalities requires effort from all sections of the society.

The policy event ‘Social integration and cohesion at a crossroads: where to now?’ hosted by Understanding Society (the largest household panel survey in the UK and worldwide) on the 28 January in London, aimed at bringing together policy makers, practitioners and academics to discuss some of the definitional as well as empirical challenges to ‘successful integration’. As a representative of Understanding Society, I kicked-off the event by summarising the key findings from four research pieces that featured in the Understanding Society annual publication – ‘Insights’. Generally speaking, ‘Insights’ aim at highlighting some of the key academic research that came out in the past year to policy makers and practitioners. This year, the main topic of the ‘Insights’ was ‘social integration’. The four academic papers that featured under the ‘social integration’ theme largely adopted a traditional ‘yardstick’ approach of comparing the outcomes of British ethnic minorities with the white majority although the authors did try their best to look at intersections of different personal characteristics such as gender, age, immigrant generation, education and social class. The highlighted research pieces focused on: a) residential patterns and factors affecting neighbourhood selection among different groups; b) social mobility trajectories of immigrant and British born ethnic minorities; c) partisanship patterns and their determinants among youth; and d) relationship between political and ethnic identities.  I will not attempt to summarize the findings of each of these papers here and refer the interested readers to the ‘Insights’ publication itself, where extensive summaries as well as references to original papers are available. 

In the second part of the event, we heard some interesting discussions on definitional and practical aspects of ‘social integration’ from five panellists: Professor Adrian Favell (University of Leeds); Catherine Anderson (Jo Cox Foundation); Adeeba Malik (QED Foundation, which supports ethnic minority communities); Debbie Weekes Bernard (London’s Deputy Mayor for Social Integration); and our Professor Jenny Phillimore from Birmingham University. All of the panellists seemed to agree that the base for successful social integration lies in our continuous effort towards the reduction of economic disparities. Jenny highlighted the new Home Office (HO) integration framework, which puts the multidimensional understanding of integration at its core. The framework includes fourteen broad domains, all of which serve different functions. Interestingly, the HO framework aims to be universal (that is, not aimed at migrants or refugees only), and includes practical guidance to the available data that can be used to measure progress. Again, instead of summarising the framework, I refer interested readers to the original publication.  Adeeba and Catherine both highlighted inspiring examples of community mobilisation that they witnessed through their work in the third sector. Debbie, the Deputy Mayor, was rather convincing at showing that the London Authority treated social integration as a serious matter and provided real-world examples of how the Mayor’s social integration strategy has been implemented in practice. Another panellist, Adrian Favell, strongly opposed the ‘essentialist’ approach to integration and criticised the existing tendency to focus on ethnicity as the main individual/group characteristic in the integration-related discourse. 

I have to admit that I still have rather mixed feelings about such strong criticism of ethnicity-related research. On the one hand, I completely support the emerging, more holistic way of thinking about integration, especially in relation to defining integration in terms of societal outcomes and intersections of personal characteristics. On the other hand, I believe that every change is a gradual process. Until we have better measures (and data) that enable us to capture intersections of multiple personal characteristics or until we have better ways of capturing inequalities on a societal-level, it is important to keep monitoring the progress using available categories and data, which allow us (at least to some extent) to quantify existing social disparities. 

Having said this, I left the event feeling positive both about our growing ability as researchers to capture the increasing complexity of diversity as well as about the practical action on the ground and the amazing work done by practitioners in super-diverse communities. 

Magda Borkowska