Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion

Margaret Wetherell, Michelynn Lafleche, Robert Berkeley, Margaret Wetherell, Michelynn Lafleche, Robert Berkeley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412946179, 9781412946162
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

What is meant by community? Is there a balance between equality, integration and diversity? Does the idea of identity undermine community cohesion?

Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion considers these questions and explores the concept of identity and how its different meanings and interpretations impact upon community policy. The book brings together the ideas and perspectives of leading academics, policymakers, think-tank representatives, and community workers, offering a cutting-edge and interprofessional approach to the key debates.

Other key features include:

- strong links between theory, practice and policy

- up-to-date analysis of contemporary policy issues

- author commentaries, ?reflections? on key themes, and case studies that illustrate the relevance of research to ?real life?

- a leading group of editors and authors - the ESRC Identities Programme and the Runnymede Trust represent a wealth of research and policymaking experience.

This original and innovative book makes a distinctive contribution to debates about identity, ethnicity and community cohesion. It is of interest to those studying social policy, community studies, politics and sociology as well as being relevant for policymakers, researchers and those working in the public sector.

Margaret Wetherell is Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University and Director of the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme. Michelynn Laflèche, Director of the Runnymede Trust, has headed the Trust?s work programme and strategic policy direction since 2001. Robert Berkeley, a sociologist with a PhD from Trinity College, Oxford, is Deputy Director of the Runnymede Trust.

1

Introduction

Community Cohesion and Identity Dynamics: Dilemmas and Challenges

Margaret Wetherell

ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme

This book reports from various front-lines of the ‘cohesive community’, from those engaged in developing, implementing and evaluating community cohesion policies, those researching communities and identities, and from those living in communities targeted by cohesion interventions. The concept of community cohesion has been one of the UK Labour government’s most durable frameworks for thinking through issues of ethnic diversity and conflict. It is increasingly proposed as a remedy also for declining levels of political participation and civic involvement. Yet at the heart of the idea of community cohesion remain some profound puzzles about the dynamics of group identities, the tensions between common values and respect for ethnic differences and confusion over what exactly needs to cohere and what a cohesive community might achieve.

The starting point for this book and for our exploration of these questions was a roundtable held at the Royal Geographical Society in the autumn of 2005 organized by the ESRC Programme on Identities and Social Action and the Runnymede Trust. This roundtable brought together academics, policymakers and community workers to debate the connections between identity, ethnic diversity and community cohesion, in the wake of a turbulent summer dominated by the suicide bombings on London tube trains and the Iraq war. We were meeting in a climate where calls from some commentators that the UK should follow France’s more assimilationist path had given way to Anglo schadenfreude and bemusement as the situation in France then itself deteriorated into prolonged riots and civil unrest. Early public responses to the bombings had opened out into major re-examinations of the principles of multiculturalism, leading many politicians to revive older, more assimilationist, readings of integration. And there was renewed interest, too, in British national identity as a potential super-glue for diverse and divided communities. These embryonic policy themes intensified in 2006 and form the basis for current debate.

Our aim in this book is to try and understand what is at stake in these discussions and consider the ramifications. The first part of the book presents position statements on community cohesion from four different policy standpoints. We hear from Henry Tam, Deputy Director, Local Democracy (Community Empowerment) at the Department for Communities and Local Government. Tam presents his own personal views but his account is informed by his experiences of the challenges facing governments. We hear, too, from Nick Johnson, Policy and Public Sector Director for the Commission for Racial Equality. The CRE took a controversial line in response to the events of 2005 arguing that the UK was sleep-walking into a North American-style ghetto society. Johnson contextualizes this concern and outlines the CRE viewpoint. Part One includes also a statement from Dilwar Hussain, Head of Policy Research at the Islamic Foundation. Hussain describes the development of local community cohesion initiatives for Muslim communities and he reflects on the broad project of community cohesion from the standpoint of a group at the heart of the current policy maelstrom. Finally, Omar Khan outlines the position of the Runnymede Trust, a charity campaigning against social injustice and racial discrimination and committed to building bridges across communities. Khan’s concern is with race equality and how community cohesion and associated identity dynamics can be mobilized to that end. These position statements come then from different sources with different interests but sum up some of the main nodes in contemporary policy thinking.

Part Two of the book then turns to the latest social science research on identity and communities. This part presents, in effect, four case-studies. Each case-study is a detailed empirical examination of one context in which issues of community cohesion and identity are particularly salient. Our aim here is not to paint a representative picture of communities in the UK but through detailed work on four contexts to indicate the knot of practical issues around identity and community cohesion which needs to be addressed. This research, funded by the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme, includes Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor’s work on a group of estates in Norwich and an exploration by Coretta Phillips of ethnic relations in prisons. Miles Hewstone and colleagues report from their research in Northern Ireland examining identity, cohesion and neighbourhood segregation. While in the final chapter in Part Two, Simon Clarke, Rosie Gilmour and Steve Garner report some of the findings from a large qualitative study in the South West of England with white middle-class and working-class respondents.

Part Three of the book then focuses on new directions and challenges. For the authors in this section, the preceding chapters form the springboard from which their reflections and responses can give rise to some new thinking about the way ahead. Claire Alexander picks up the tension between equality and diversity, for instance, and develops a critical and sceptical view of community cohesion as yet another in a long series of strategies attempting to manage and contain diversity. Kate Gavron, drawing on her work with white working-class communities, evaluates the challenge of social inclusion. Bhikhu Parekh, Chair of the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (among his many roles) argues for more clarity around what is meant by multiculturalism and explores contemporary possibilities for identity and identification. Finally, Avtar Brah, a leading scholar in research on identity, considers what kinds of understandings and definitions of identity need to inform future work. How do we need to think about identity – about similarity and difference – to make progress in this area?

The rest of this introduction gives some background, first, on the history of community cohesion and the policy debates and, then, on the identity dynamics implicated. My aim is to summarize the ‘argumentative field’ evoked by community cohesion, ethnic diversity and identity and give a stronger flavour of the contribution of each of the chapters in this collection.

Community Cohesion: Concept and Policy

A cohesive community is one where:

• there is a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities;
• the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and positively valued;
• those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities; and
• strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances in the work-place, in schools and within neighbourhoods.

(Local Government Association, 2006, ‘Leading Cohesive Communities’, p. 5)

The concept of community cohesion first gained a high profile in the Cantle and Denham reports responding to the 2001 disturbances in UK towns (see Home Office, 2001). These reports argued that some communities in the UK consisted of ethnic groups effectively leading ‘parallel lives’. They concluded that this segregation was damaging and needed to be tackled by policies guided by an alternative, positive and indeed utopian notion of the cohesive community. The statement above (taken from current guidance to local authorities) indicates something of what was meant by this alternative. Since publication of the report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain – the Parekh Report (CFMEB, 2000) – a cohesive community is defined as having a common vision and shared sense of belonging. It is based on the positive acceptance of diversity and on equality of opportunity. A cohesive community is one where there is extensive contact between groups and large amounts of what sociologists, following Robert Putnam (2000), have called ‘bridging social capital’ or forms of association that connect across groups rather than forms of association that strengthen ties within groups.

In the wake of the Cantle and Denham reports, community cohesion was taken up as a guiding framework by David Blunkett as Home Secretary, within the Home Office, and by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It was developed in association with several, differently inflected, but closely allied notions such as ‘neighbourhood renewal’, ‘civil renewal’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘sustainable communities’. Community cohesion policies became embedded as the practical theory for community workers and community development activities, and they were translated into community plans implemented by Local Strategic Partnerships. In 2006, this agenda was taken over by the newly created Department of Communities and Local Government and Ruth Kelly is the Secretary of State currently responsible for implementing policy. The government recently set up a Commission for Integration and Cohesion chaired by Darra Singh; as we write, we are awaiting this Commission’s report. For a number of years now the concept of community cohesion has been a central plank in policy and it looks set to continue to dominate the political environment.

The principle of community cohesion can be seen as part of a more capacious political philosophy with older communitarian roots characteristic of the current UK Labour government. This broader philosophy seeks to revalue and remobilize civil society (McLaren, 2005). Community cohesion offers, like any policy framework, a particular diagnosis and interpretation of UK society. This is a reading, as we saw, which finds civic alienation, decreasing social interaction and a distintegrating social ‘glue’ and suggests as a solution the rebuilding of solidarity, the re-vitalizing of communities and measures to break down separateness. On a practical level, as Alison Gilchrist has explained, it is about community workers ‘finding ways to mediate conflict, to reduce prejudice and to eliminate discrimination of all kinds’ (2004: 10). Cohesion, she says, is about recognizing people’s attachments, the ways in which people create ‘comfort zones’ but also dispelling myths about other groups outside those comfort zones. It is about fostering those casual exchanges, pleasantries and gossip at the school-gates, in shops and pubs and the regular contacts which reinforce what for many people are the ‘weak ties’ of community based on neighbourhood and place. For Gilchrist, ‘cohesion is not about the absence of conflict, but rather a collective ability to manage the shifting array of tensions and disagreements between diverse communities’ (2004: 6).

While the desired outcomes might be relatively tangible at the local community level (even if the means for achieving these are not so obvious), at the national level the task is much more challenging. Community cohesion has been interpreted as the need to find unifying common ground which will inspire assent across the board. It rests, as we have seen, on the idea of commonality in diversity – common principles which are shared and enacted by all sections of the community. But it is not at all clear what those common principles might be. The commonality which is emphasized might be simply the rule of the law. Commonality might be simply a shared attachment to a locality or a sense of neighbourhood and place. Alternatively, it could be an agreement to deliberate together democratically whenever a conflict of interest arises or a disagreement about future directions. Common principles could involve a particular definition of citizenship and the rights and responsibilities of citizens; they could invoke a specified set of ethical and cultural values conveyed in a shared code of ‘civility’ and ‘decency’. This code might entail, for example, Muslim women not wearing veils to aid social interaction with others. Or, commonality could imply psychological bonds and shared emotions such as patriotism, using British national identity as the adhesive which holds diverse groups together. Commonality, in other words, could either be about form (the ways in which people should meet together) or content (the substance of a shared identity). As Omar Khan points out in his chapter, community cohesion has been interpreted quite differently by different commentators and any policy document tends to contain layers of these sometimes competing understandings.

In line with the range of ways in which commonality could be understood, community cohesion advocacy runs the gamut from ‘hard’ options to ‘softer’ ones. This flexibility is, of course, a useful political resource. Community cohesion could be interpreted as a robust call for an assimilationist version of integration based around publicly enforced allegiance to British values, fearing and rejecting the supposed disruptive power of multiculturalism. ‘Hard’ versions of this kind tend to heighten the emphasis on commonality and weaken the stress on diversity. Claire Alexander in her chapter in Part Three of this book argues that over time government policy and public debate have increasingly moved in this direction. ‘Softer’ versions of community cohesion move in the opposite direction – combining the search for overarching commonalities with more emphasis on removing material and economic inequalities, on anti-racist strategies and on the celebration of diversity.

This debate is played out in this book. Nick Johnson, in a manner reminiscent of ‘harder’ readings of community cohesion, places a great deal of stress on what the CRE perceives as the problem of ethnic segregation. His position statement in Part One pushes the agenda, in other words, further towards commonality and away from diversity. Omar Khan, in contrast, dismisses such trenchant ‘parallel lives’ analyses of British communities. He rejects what could be called the ‘many individuals, many identities but one national community’ argument and maintains a commitment to multiculturalism. Bhikhu Parekh in Part Three returns to this issue arguing that what is required is a dialogical, pluralist and interactive understanding of multiculturalism rather than the static, isolationist and relativist readings which Parekh sees as inimical to the project of a ‘shared life’.

The balancing act, however, is not just about commonality and diversity. It is also about the value placed on social justice and equality. Nick Johnson, for example, combines a focus on commonality with a strong call for equality. While Henry Tam, in his chapter, argues that not any solidarity is automatically good per se. What is required in Tam’s view is a ‘progressive solidarity’. This, he says, is not about simple-minded applications of social capital analyses to encourage more people to volunteer, ceasing to ‘bowl alone’, in Robert Putnam’s (2000) terms. It is not about flag-waving, Tam suggests, but about a deep commitment to social justice and removing destructive inequalities in power and wealth. Khan similarly argues (see also Berkeley, 2005) that while the aims of community cohesion and related policies are laudable, they have to be set against a context of significant disadvantage across all sectors for minority ethnic group members and often their white working-class neighbours.

Interestingly, all of these authors are sceptical about definitions of community cohesion based on ‘British values’. Johnson wonders about the extent to which a uniform British national identity could be imposed. Britishness should be, he says, ‘just one part of every citizen’s range of identities’. He re-reads supposedly core British values in more general terms as the premises underpinning everyday citizenship. Parekh similarly argues that it is no use exhorting people to be British. Like Johnson and Khan, he prefers a focus on the demands of citizenship and equal rights rather than appeals to vague senses of ‘Britishness’ as a psychological state or enforced cultural identity.

For those in the policy world, then, the idea of community cohesion evokes difficult territory and complex negotiations between commonality, diversity, equality and the nation. But what does ‘community’ mean for ordinary people? Is community cohesion motivating? In their chapter in Part Two, Simon Clarke, Rosie Gilmour and Steve Garner report on their research in Plymouth and Bristol and describe what community means for white middle-class and working-class British citizens in the South West. Their material suggests that when their sample focus on and talk about the idea of community, they do find it compelling and motivating. Their voices and stories celebrate the idea of community, the importance of its perceived security and social integration and they are nostalgic for lost communities. For them, as for some policymakers, community is a solution and an obvious good. These interviewees echo Henry Tam’s analysis of the causes of the decline of community (greater mobility, more commuting and a more consumerist culture). Interestingly, there are hints too that identification with super-ordinate national identities (British and European) may well be of a different psychological order than investment in local communities – neighbourhood communities may not be inevitably reinforced by an increased focus on nationality.

The narratives from the South West set up such a glowing view of community life that one begins to question the extent of social disintegration hypothesized by some politicians and policymakers. Yet, these accounts also provide evidence for the shadow side of community – the negative ‘bonding’ capital, the possibilities for group persecution of those who don’t conform, the local xenophobias, and the racisms community workers struggle to address in everyday community cohesion activities. The participants in Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor’s Norwich study, as described in their chapter, make similar points. Here again is the emotional charge around the idea of community (what Avtar Brah in her chapter in Part Three calls the ‘homing desire’) and the negative – as one of their participants evocatively expressed it: ‘like living among crabs in a bucket’.

Rogaly and Taylor’s study also raises questions about precisely when community becomes a powerful motivating part of people’s everyday lives. They argue that much of the time people are not ‘thinking community’ albeit, as Clarke et al.’s work suggests, they can ‘talk community’ at any time when requested. The ‘community’ in practice, then, sits at the boundary of fantasy and actuality, idealized life and actual social life. As Clarke et al.’s work shows, it is a very important resource for people to make sense of their situation, an ideal to frame ‘state of the nation’ conversations, but it can bear a confused and confusing relation to lived experiences. Where is the community, who is it and what does it translate into?

Dilwar Hussain makes this point very strongly in his statement in Part One describing the projects the Islamic Foundation is working on in Leicester. He notes that many in Muslim communities also find the idea of community cohesion inspiring and motivating and are engaged in active effort to bring, for example, members of different faiths into shared dialogue. However, he remains sceptical about the boundaries of community. Mus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Information on Editors and Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Policy Standpoints: Agencies and Utterances
• PART II Identities in Community Contexts: Four Case Studies
• PART III Reflections and the Way Ahead: Towards New Dialogues
• Bibliography
• Index