Social Work and Minorities

European Perspectives

R.D. Johnson Mark, Haluk Soydan, Charlotte Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134700738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Social Work and Minorities examines the new challenges presented to Social Workers throughout Europe by the complex problems occasioned by increased migration and settlement and the growing awareness of the specific needs of refugees and asylum seekers.
Contributors use illustrative examples from throughout Europe to examine key concepts such as: globalization, assimilation, visibility, multi-culturalism, racism, marginalization and social exclusion.
Social Work and Minorities will be an essential resource for social work students, practitioners and educators working with migrant communities throughout Europe.

Part I

The dimensions of social work and ‘minority’ discourse

Professional work and everyday activities of social workers are conditioned by a web of factors that are functioning on different levels in a society. Some factors are closer to and others are more remote from the professional performance of social workers in their daily work. Nevertheless, these activities are framed by micro- as well as macro-level conditions. Social work with minority clients has generic as well as specific characteristics and it is a field of the social work profession that exists at the interface of social work practice and ethnic encounters.

The aim of Part I of the book is to describe and give an understanding of cardinal factors which we believe strongly impact on social work with minorities. Social work methods, practices and everyday encounters between social workers and minority clients are all in one way or another preconditioned by demographic, economic, political, sociological, legal, professional and educational factors. This part is an attempt to give a structure to this complex and intertwined set of factors dominated by issues of migration, globalisation, minoritisation and power.

First, a number of key concepts are explored and introduced with the purpose of demonstrating the complexity of the issues and concepts faced by many of us, that is as students of social work theory and practice as well as practitioners. The concepts of minority and ethnicity, race and racism, tolerance and discrimination, citizenship and nation are discussed from a European perspective.

Second, migration as a fundamental element of modern society is analysed. It is suggested that migration is a problem-solving as well as a problem-generating mechanism at the heart of the globalised society. The diversity of the peoples have also led to development of intervention ‘paradigms’. The problem-solving and problem-generating typology is connected to three prominent models of response to the issues of disadvantage and discrimination: the model of categorical diversity, the model of transactional diversity and the model of universal diversity.

Some of the issues that are described and discussed in the first two chapters are elaborated further in the third chapter, where a critical position is taken in terms of some social work practice with subordinated ethnic minority groups. At the same time there is an air of optimism suggested by the challenging of social workers to play a significant role in working with excluded people and to contribute to the creation of a non-racist society.

This part is concluded by an account of the legal framework within which migration to and within Europe takes place and bureaucracies record identity. The political development during the last two decades in Europe has also changed the legal framework of the member states of the European Union. Thus, the issues of in-migration, settlement, citizenship and political and social participation have been and are being reshaped.

Models of understanding of ethnic diversity are presented. The European context of the issue is spelled out. Legal aspects of migration to and within Europe are presented.

Thus, this part with its five chapters offers a theoretical as well as an empirical frame of reference which contextualises the understanding of social work with minority clients.

Chapter 1

Exploring concepts

Haluk Soydan and Charlotte Williams

INTRODUCTION

One of the key considerations in the development of perspectives on social work with minorities in Europe is the issue of terminology. Identifying a shared language for use in these debates, for literature and research, is notoriously difficult given that specific terms can carry a variety of meanings within and across different contexts. Further, terms in use are constantly changing as ideas change and words which have previously had much currency become the subject of debate and criticism. The language we use to mark out difference between indigenous and immigrant peoples is highly salient and words such as ‘foreigner’, ‘stranger’, ‘alien’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘settler’ carry specific connotations in different contexts. Language in use reflects particular theories, values, political ideologies and popular thinking of the day and should therefore properly be the subject of constant review and clarification. It is necessary to analyse the terms in which reality is constructed because the selection of particular concepts reflects what it is we are choosing to take into account and what we are choosing to conceal or omitting to consider.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical introductory analysis of some of the key concepts in use in this book and to consider associated debates about their applications in pubic policy making and practice. The aim is to explore the problematic nature of some of the terminology and point to its complexity and not to provide absolute definitions.

MINORITY

The concept of minority is far more complex than may first appear. On a simple level ‘minority’ refers to any group which is smaller in number than another group or other groups in a given society. In modern social work literature as well as in everyday descriptions the concept is frequently used to refer to groups such as immigrants, people with disabilities, gay and lesbian people, older people, members of certain political, linguistic or religious groupings and is sometimes even applied to women. However, as Norbert Rouland (1991) suggests:

There are no minorities as such, they are defined only structurally. Minorities are groups which are in a minority position as a result of the balance of power and of law, which subjects them to other groups within a society as a whole, whose interests are the responsibility of a state which perpetuates discrimination, either by means of unequal legal status (apartheid policies), or by means of civil equality principles (by depriving communities with special social and economic status of specific rights, civil equality can create or perpetuate de facto inequalities).

(1991:224)

A crucial dimension, therefore, is power, which overshadows the issue of number and focuses attention on the relationships between minority and majority groups. In any society power is the main determinant of relationships of domination and subordination and of oppression and discrimination directed towards the minority group (Noel 1994).

Whilst the concepts ‘minority’ and ‘oppression’ often go together, that is, minority groups are assumed to be (or objectively are) oppressed or discriminated against, this is not always the case. There are examples of minorities (as groups numerically smaller than other groups) who are able to oppress and discriminate against majority groups. A contemporary and somewhat (in)famous example of a white minority oppressing a large black majority is South Africa, though there are numerous other examples of political minorities oppressing majorities. Further, Rex (1996) points out that a modern state may be the product of a laterally organised minority group imposing its domination over other groups as in the former Yugoslavia. In other European countries, no single group dominates the nation state but several groups share the privilege of governing, as in Belgium and Switzerland.

The notion of ‘minority’ is not therefore univocal or static but mediated by power. Power itself is a complex concept, which is dynamic and cannot be permanently owned (Lukes 1986). Power is often mobilised transiently by particular groupings within specific contexts, at specific times (Gaventa 1982; Lukes 1974). Therefore the relationship between minorities and majorities is constantly open to change. Contemporary relationships between minority and majority groups in a given society may be the result of historically generated configurations of interaction between these groups but these are not immutable. Mutual valuing and scoring between groups generate specific contextual positions. A few examples of such relationships are the colonised minorities in Europe such as the Basques in Spain, Bretons in France, Welsh in Great Britain and the Lapps in Sweden. Historically, these ethnic groups were colonised in the sense that they are politically, culturally and economically controlled by another group which penetrated their territories. Thus they are accorded ethnic minority status. They continue to be ethnic minorities as long as the power relationship between them and their respective majority group continues to be asymmetric.

Yet the boundaries between groups are fluid and constantly changing. In turn it is possible for individuals at one and the same time to be members of minority groups and majority groups as factors of class, gender, age, race and ethnicity may be intimately intertwined and overlapping to produce an individual patterning of membership across a variety of groups. Being of one community does not preclude the individual’s membership of other groups which may complement or be in conflictual relationships. The minority community is therefore much more fragmented, diversified and internally subject to change than may be generally recognised.

Whilst there are both individual and collective considerations built into the concept of minority, an understanding of minority status as used within social work has most frequently come to be grounded in the objective factors of exposure to discrimination and oppression and the consequent factors of inequality.

ETHNIC MINORITIES AND ETHNICITY

Ethnic minority identifies a minority group by reference to a constellation of factors associated with ethnicity. The notion of ethnicity has been the subject of extensive research and discussion. Lange and Westin (1981), amongst others, offer a comprehensive review of definitions of the concept. In most definitions one or a combination of the following variables are used to denote ethnicity: a common religion, a shared culture or set of cultural attributes, a common national or geographic origin, shared language and common physical or physiological characteristics. Latterly, following the footsteps of Norwegian social scientist Fredrik Barth (1969), many writers have sought more open and constructionist definitions of ethnicity in order to both avoid much of the essentialism associated with specific characteristics and the notion of ethnic boundaries as fixed and static (Rex 1996). At its most general level ethnicity implies some sense or feeling of belonging to a particular group and the sharing of its objective conditions of existence (Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1993). An important dimension of ethnicity is clearly therefore the subjective ‘us’ feeling that can be mobilised for individual and collective group identity. This denotes some notion of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft, to paraphrase the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies), whether the ethnic group be a majority or a minority, co-extensive with a particular nation, a sub-population within a nation, or transcends national boundaries, as in the case of Gypsies. This community comes to be something set apart from the ‘them’ that are external to it and this generates a feeling of an internal belongingness amongst its members. It becomes ethnicised. In this vein Anthias and Yuval-Davies argue that ‘ethnicity is the active face of ethnic consciousness and always involves a political dimension’ (1993:8).

That is to say the mobilisation of ethnic affiliation is necessarily political in that it implies an in-group and an out-group. The sense of ‘us’ does not therefore simply relate to a cultural grouping. There is, for example, following the 1992 Single European Act the emergence of the notion of supra-European identity transcending the identity of the nation states based on being white and Christian and mobilised around exclusion of non-white and non-Christian minorities (Rex 1996; Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1993). What this indicates is that ethnicity and culture are not necessarily synonymous, as such a mega-ethnic identity, ‘white European’, embraces a diversity of language, culture, traditions.

Yet within social work writing considerable attention is focused on the definitions of ethnic groupings as cultural entities. The notion of a shared culture or a set of shared cultural attributes is often seen as the demarcating factor for the identification of ethnic group. In this respect culture is defined as a system of ideas, norms, values, ‘ways of being’ shared by members of a given group. It is the acquired perspective by which members of a group interpret their environment, make sense of their world and adopt particular conventions. It provides the prescribing frame through which the individual mediates what is right and what is wrong, good and bad. Normally, people’s attitude to their own culture is unuttered and often unquestioning.

Migration, however, confronts these cognitive maps in several ways. Migration produces cultural encounters, conflictual or benign. Members of cultural groups have the opportunity to compare cultures and this acts to endorse or challenge ethnocentrism, the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture. As cultures interact they continually and of necessity change and therefore must be understood as dynamic and fluid entities. Both the majority and the minority cultur es are subject to such change. What is often overlooked is the fact that the cultural traditions within immigrant groups have their own modernising elements and these cultural groupings are very often internally divided (Rex 1996). Culture should not therefore be thought of in essentialist terms as unchanging, clearly bounded and homogeneous. This tendency leads to the danger of reifying culture, making it larger than life and in turn inappropriately ethnicising individuals.

Ethnic mobilisation is much more complex than guarding the frontiers of culture and tradition. For example, migrant labourers from very diverse cultural groups may become ethnicised through state legislation and institutional practice or by the ways in which they are identified by the dominant community. Thus ethnic identity may be constructed reactively to particular sets of circumstances as well as being a determinant of such groupings. Ethnic categorisation also significantly cuts across class and gender divisions as well as national boundaries. Gypsies, discussed in Chapter 10 of this book, form an interesting ethnic grouping based on a mixture of ethnic characteristics and they are clearly transnational. Members of other migrant minority ethnic groups may often see themselves in this way as belonging to transnational communities. Rex (1996) argues that this provides the potential for at least three forms of ethnic mobilisation:

• the maintenance of points of reference and connections with a homeland (imagined or real);
• the collective striving for recognition and against inferiorisation in the land of settlement;
• the possibility of onward migration to new countries of settlement given the existence of ethnic boundary markers (Rex 1996).

The mobilisation of ethnicity is clearly multifaceted on both an individual and a collective level. It also importantly relates to the response of the established society to the presence...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL WORK AND ‘MINORITY’ DISCOURSE
• PART II: CASE STUDIES OF SOME COMMON THEMES
• PART III: ISSUES FOR THE STRUCTURING OF SOCIAL WORK’S FUTURE PRACTICE