Review symposium: Ethnic minorities in British ...

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20

Review symposium Ethnic minorities in British social science: Three views Roger Penn , Adrian Favell & Malcolm Cross To cite this article: Roger Penn , Adrian Favell & Malcolm Cross (2000) Review symposium Ethnic minorities in British social science: Three views, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 26:2, 357-367, DOI: 10.1080/13691830050022848 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691830050022848

Published online: 04 Aug 2010.

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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 26, No. 2: 357± 367

April 2000

Review symposium Ethnic minorities in British social science: three views

Roger Penn, Adrian Favell and Malcolm Cross T. Modood, R.Berthoud, J. Lakey, James Nazroo, P. Smith, S. Virdee and S. Beishon, Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Diversity and Disadvantage London, Policy Studies Institute, 1997, 420 pp., £17.97 p.b. (ISBN 1-85383-670-2) Modood et al.’s study represents the fourth national analysis of ethnic minorities in Britain. It is certainly well overdue: Brown’s previous third survey was published in 1984 and based on data collected as long ago as 1982. Modood et al.’s study both complements and supersedes Jones’s earlier PSI collection on Britain’s Ethnic Minorities published in 1993. The report is based upon interviews conducted in 1994 with 5196 people from a variety of ethnic minority backgrounds and 2867 white respondents. One unfortunate feature of the 1997 report, unlike its predecessor, is that the questionnaire used has not been reproduced in the text nor is it made clear how it can be obtained. This hinders effective assessment of some of the claims made by Modood and his fellow authors. The study offers a lengthy presentation of descriptive data on a range of themes that include quali® cations, employment, income, housing, health, racial harassment and issues of `culture and identity’. They will be required reading for professional academics, students and policy practitioners for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it has already been used a great deal by undergraduates studying the sociology of ethnicity at Lancaster. Central to the volume is the notion that there is considerable diversity amongst ethnic minority groups in contemporary Britain. Brown’s procrustean dichotomy between `black’ and `white’ is no longer seen as useful for an understanding of the current situation of ethnic minority groups in Britain. Indeed, Modood et al. argue that Chinese and African Asians (predominantly from Kenya and Uganda) have improved their situation to such an extent that in many ways they are doing as well as white people. Furthermore a higher proportion of children from ethnic minority backgrounds remain within fulltime education after the age of 16 than their white counterparts which also suggests that the notion that ethnic minority groups in Britain are universally disadvantaged is problematic. Nonetheless, the report found that most Bangladeshi and Pakistani families in Britain live in poverty: over 80 per cent have incomes below half the national average. This is four times the proportion of white families. African-Asians and Chinese families, however, are on a par with the white average and families of Indian and West Indian origin are reported as fast closing the gap. These income differences are paralleled by signi® cant variations in levels of adult male unemployment. Around 15 per cent of white, Chinese and Indian adult males are unemployed compared with 40 per cent of Pakistani and 1369-183X print/1469± 9451 online/00/020357-11 Ó Carfax Publishing

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Bangladeshi adult males, and 31 per cent of those with origins in the West Indies. Further, only around a ® fth of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women have paid employment outside the home, compared to approximately two-thirds of white women and women from other ethnic minority groups. There are two major limitations to Modood et al.’s report. The ® rst is the almost complete absence of any multivariate analysis. This weakness can be illustrated in several ways and no doubt readers of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies will be able to furnish others of their own. On the issue of differential levels of female economic activity rates, it is evident from the authors’ chapter on `People, Families and Households’ that there are major differences between the average size of families amongst ethnic minority groups. Women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origins have signi® cantly higher levels of fertility. The data cry out for a multivariate analysis that controls for such factors as well as for levels of education and quali® cations. Put simply, are the low levels of economic activity rates amongst such women a function of relatively large families, relatively low levels of education or èthnicity’? The `white’ sample could have acted as a control group here. On a related point, it would have been interesting to see a multivariate analysis that simultaneously assessed the relative weight of ethnicity and social class amongst other explanatory variables in the differentiation of both educational attainment and intergenerational occupational status. The second lacuna within the text is the invisibility of relationships between ethnic minority groups. This is a factor about which most British commentators on issues of ethnicity are notably silent. Despite ® lms like `My Beautiful Launderette’ such issues still seem taboo. Nonetheless, they represent perhaps the next great heuristic challenge for researchers in the ® eld. The demise of the simplistic `black’/`white’ dichotomy, which this text powerfully eschews in favour of a more heterogeneous template, is certainly a major step forward. However, there is still a need to examine the structure of intraethnic relations. These can be seen both within the educational system in relation to current con¯ icts over state-funded Islamic schools and within the sphere of employment in terms of the exploitation of different minority linguistic, national, ethnic and caste groups by employers from different ethnic backgrounds. Nonetheless, Modood et al.’s study will stand as a powerful benchmark and reference book for anyone interested and/or concerned about issues of ethnicity in contemporary Britain. Indeed, it is a `must’ for all readers of this journal. Roger Penn Lancaster University

Of the many glowing comments on the cover of the new PSI report, two of the most striking concern the relation of this report to current European-wide concerns about immigration and integration. Malcolm Cross argues that the report will become à model for social research in this important ® eld for the rest of Europe’. Another senior ® gure, Michael Banton, remarks: `No other country in Europe has research that summarises the present and projects the future so well as this’. In this short commentary, I aim to explore the accuracy of these remarks, and ask how the PSI report may serve as a comparative contribution to the wider European research agenda on these topics.

Review symposium: ethnic minorities in British social science

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This question is important because past attempts by British research to put the country’s experience with race relations and multiculturalism in a European context have invariably not done justice to the comparative question. To take an example: even a very sober and extensive comparative study on antidiscrimination provisions such as the Measure For Measure report for the Employment Department (Forbes and Mead 1992), builds its conclusions by transposing without adaptation the structure of Britain’s race relations and anti-discrimination laws on to European countries, before concluding that Britain’s institutions are more advanced, and should act as a positive role model. British policy activists have always taken a similar line, selling to Europe the virtues of its race relations framework and multicultural diversity, without asking what the rest of Europe might teach them. When they look at EU proposals, the reaction is usually to condemn them as downgrading British provisions. On this at least, the Home Of® ce, the CRE and antiracist activists agree. In part the fear is a genuine one: by associating British ethnic minorities with the place of new migrants and non-nationals across Europe, Britains’s blacks and Asians may indeed lose the privileged place they have been given in the peculiar post-colonial arrangements fashioned in postwar Britain (see Favell 1998b). Malcolm Cross suggests the PSI report could be a `model’ for others. In a literal sense, it is dif® cult to see how. The report is based on the new 1991 British census categories, which differ dramatically to the dominant practice of census gathering about minorities across Europe, where it is common to look at ancestral national origin rather than at the choice of ethnic identi® cation. Moreover, the choices offered in Britain’s census are sui generis post-colonial classi® cations, that only make sense as management techniques for the speci® cally British mix of Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Òther’ groups. The report’s main focus, rightly, is in teasing out the statistical and psychological realities behind the rhetoric of black and white British racial politics. This is ® ne, insofar as local political priorities count most: in charting British ethnic achievements, inter-relations and self-perceptions, and restating the importance of hard facts over rhetorical postures in anti-discrimination campaigning. However, Cross’s suggestion is about furthering social scienti® c research in the ® eld of race and ethnicity. What is missing from this perspective is any sense of comparative method in this research. The authors do not ask how the ® ndings of their research would be located in the context of other national cases. That is, how these ® ndings might contribute to develop generally valid methods and theories by which what goes in Britain ± say, in terms of racial harassment or academic achievement ± is but one variable example in a series of different national cases, set alongside one another in comparable terms. The givens of the British context ± the policy agenda, activist struggles, and of® cial sources of information such as the census Ð mean that the research questions have not been set up in that way, however.1 This might not matter if Michael Banton’s comment about the uniqueness of this British research were literally true. It is not. There are countless examples of very high quality, government-commissioned works of this kind across European countries. One good example is the Tribalat report, De l’immigration aÁ l’assimilation: enqueÃte sur la population d’origine eÂtrangeÁre en France, published by the French Institut national d’eÂtudes deÂmographiques (INED) in 1996. This work was every bit as extensive, expensive, and politically signi® cant as the PSI report. It

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contained a comparable mix of quantitative and qualitative study. Its terms of reference (its census methods, its policy conclusions) and the debates it has impacted on, however, are completely different. The difference lies in the political context which, like in Britain, has a long and complicated history of struggle and adaptation, between the goals of the state and the wishes of ethnic groups and representative associations. French work of this kind turns invariably on establishing the criteria for charting the cultural and political integration of immigrants into an ideal-type French citizenry. To suggest that Modood and company could hop over on the Eurostar and repeat their work unproblematically in the banlieues of Paris, Lyon or Marseilles would be an absurdity. The French enjeux of immigration and inteÂgration are a whole different ball game to British multicultural race relations, structured by different normative and epistemological presuppositions (see Simon 1997; Favell 1997, 1998a). The French at INED and INSEE surely do have a lot to learn from the British research, its methods and its ® ndings. As a matter of fact, European researchers on the whole do tend to be highly aware of current British research (although the French sometimes mirror the British in their insularity). But the same is not true in reverse: partly because of linguistic barriers, but partly also because of the illusion of scienti® c self-suf® ciency that that the historical earliness, boundedness and particularity of the British postwar experience with immigration has given to British researchers. What nobody yet has come up with is a convincing comparative template by which two methods of quantitiative research as diverse as the French and British could be translated into one another; although sensitive conceptual and qualitative comparisons can be pointed to.2 To call the PSI report a `model’, then, is not quite right, if by model we mean blueprint. It is an example, and a very valuable one at that. There is of course another way in which comparative method can be brought to bear: by controlling for other non-racial, non-ethnic factors in the outcomes charted by the survey’s results. Here the scienti® c substance of the ® ndings run against the policy packaging. As a contribution to ongoing racial and ethnic politics, researchers are duty bound to continue to stress the importance of race and discrimination in British society. Yet many of the ® ndings here ± and in the themes of their individual work (especially Modood 1992, 1997) ± suggest that race and ethnicity is Britain is of declining signi® cance in explaining social phenomenon such as achievement and poverty, when cross-referenced with other class and social factors; just as has been found in the very best social scienti® c work elsewhere (such as the work of William Julius Wilson 1980, 1987). For example, the report focuses on racial harassment as a litmus test for British society; a subject which almost inevitability stresses the centrality of race. But very little research has been done on evaluating the absolute salience of race in British politics (an exception is Saggar 1997) in relation to other policy issues, which in comparative terms is very low, despite what is always misleadingly said about the `race card’. It would have been good to see this report control explicitly for these dimensions of the subject. All this said, many of the issues raised by this report ± its attitude and approach, and its relation to the academic ® eld of race and ethnicity ± are not scienti® c, but political. The book ± and the comments by Cross and Banton ± have been enunciated at a time when there is a battle going on for intellectual hegemony at the European level over anti-discrimination and research in this ® eld. This has become clear in the context of the widely-publicised European


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Year Against Racism, and the achievement of a concrete anti-discriminatory clause in the Amsterdam Treaty of June 1997. The British have ® nally become involved in the policy agenda struggle at the EU level on these questions, and the PSI report can be seen as a valuable weapon in this ® ght. This is a far cry from the situation under the previous government. The EU’s central attempt to set up a representative Forum for Migrants was vehemently contested by British activists, who instead opted out and set up SCORE (Standard Conference on Racial Equality in Europe) to push for British-style policies at the EU level. Moreover, their efforts were focused on radicalised, scaremongering studies of `racist’ and `fascist’ Europe, across the sea from the relatively harmonious multicultural Britain, where the ¯ ame of the BNP has long been dimmed (Ford 1992). The Forum for Migrants’ `citizenship’ agenda ± voting rights for non-nationals, and other guarantees for non-nationals to match European citizenship provisions on free movement and so on for full national citizens ± were seen to be irrelevant to British ethnic minorities. It was rather smugly claimed that all this only went to prove how advanced the British really were: British ethnic minorities, they said, having enjoyed full citizenship rights, ever since the 1950s and 1960s. This is true, although it might also be said that the rights that British minorities enjoy are much less constitutionally anchored, that social and economic rights, and rights of association ± including those for non-national legal residents ± are often better in many other European countries, and most importantly, other European countries do not have the island-bound luxury of opting out of cooperation such as the Schengen agreement, the reason why certain `post-national’ citizenship questions have become central. So much British thinking on this subject is still enmired in the nationally self-suf® cent illusion that international migration questions in the 1990s can be dealt with the same old mix of tight border controls and post-colonial management techniques, tailored to the few ethnic groups deemed to Britain’s special responsibility (see Spencer 1994). This attitude denies the sizable presence of other migrant groups in Britain, and the irrelevance of race relations categories to them; moreover, it is closely related to Britain’s poor record on asylum and refugees relative to many other European countries. Perhaps partly because of the initial opt-out of the èxperienced’ British, the Forum for Migrants has had an unhappy history as a representative body. Undoubtedly, this is also due to the paternalistic way in which it was created and dominated by well-meaning European Commission objectives. In the last year or so, the original citizenship agenda ± stalled by the reluctance of nations to relinquish sovereignty over the management of non-nationals ± has given way to more productive anti-racist concerns. Leading campaign groups in Brussels, such as the Starting Line Group, do not recognise any tension between the two channels, and have been singularly successful in creating a networking centre which translates all the different national NGO efforts into euro-friendly terms. They have been encouraged by the change in tone across the Channel. The Labour Party giving the green light to the new Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, has also encouraged CRE and Runnymede activists to drop their long-standing enmity towards European developments, and begin to ® ght for their own corner and piece of the euro-pie. In these developments ± and in particular the formulation of Vienna’s research agenda ± the PSI report will undoubtedly be an important text, as the very best that British research can offer. But it is also to be hoped that advocates of this

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research do not approach it with an imperialistic or evangelical attitude, but rather seek to see how it can be moulded and transformed into categories that do justice to the range of issues thrown up by the new migration phenomena of the 1990s. Anti-discriminatory clauses are, relatively speaking, much less dif® cult to get into European treaties than citizenship voting rights for non-nationals. Moreover, there is no way British post-colonial race categories ± and its censusbased methods ± are going to apply across European problems without being watered down. And, in the context of European constitutional legal structures, it is hard to see how Britain’s incremental private law structure ± that has allowed race relations legislation to be such an efective and widely used legal recourse ± could ever be meaningfully translated. That said, there is another way in which the PSI report could be highly signi® cant for European research in the ® eld of race and ethnicity. That is, in the direct repercussions it may have on the discipline as it is dominantly practised back home in Britain. This is a ® eld which, since the rise of black cultural studies in the 1980s, has been dominated by the study and teaching of a highly politicised, and highly theorised, anti-racist ìdentity politics’. In a Bourdieusian structural sense (see Bourdieu 1984), this ® eld has come to dominantly re¯ ect these concerns, because of the ease in which autonomous scienti® c work can be warped to instead articulate the agenda of local city politics, and activist anti-racist and feminist campaigning, which the academics themselves are often simultaneously involved in. The cross-over potential has long been recognised by publishing houses who invest heavily in marketing theoretical texts for a non-academic market in preference to dreary sociological treatises. This process has been abetted by the commodi® cation of the curriculum in British universities, in which sociology has to now cater for middle class urban students who would rather choose hip courses in race and identity or race and communications studies, rather than plough through the Chicago School, Glazer and Moynihan, Rex or Wilson. At PhD level the tendency is perhaps even more dramatic: with so many British sociology students encouraged to take the decentred self- and identitypolitcs seriously, and write works whose central research problematic seems to be answering the question `who am I?’ (possible title: ª Diasporic situatedness and multiple locationality: My life as a queer black Muslim acid-head in the drum `n’ bass clubs of North Londonº ). And, of course, exponents of black cultural studies, like everyone in British academia, have been furiously trying to Europeanise themselves, often without the slightest consciousness of the linguistic and symbolic violence being enacted on their European èxamples’, when the terms of their British black activist politics of identity are transposed on to the situation of Algerians in France or Turks and Yugoslavs in Germany (see Neveu 1994). Their conclusions, at least, are familiar: Europe is white racist Europe, fortress Europe, fascist Europe; all of which are factually incorrect exaggerations, and gross generalisations about a vast range of countries every bit as differentiated and diverse as Britain. Unfortunately, there are plenty of European researchers, in¯ uenced by current British race and ethnicity research, who have also fallen into these rhetorical holes. While British cultural studies may be sociologically and comparatively incompetent, its penetration into European research has been made easier by the hegemonic ubiquity of the English language and English publishing houses; and the relative lack of dissemination for the many examples of top quality sociological research coming out of France, Germany, Scandinavia, Netherlands and elsewhere.


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It is to be hoped, then, that the PSI report will perhaps represent a decisive blow in the other direction: the begining of the end of the hegemony of British `black’ cultural studies. Its most important ® ndings decisively chart the differentiation of the British ethnic population, their differential scales of achievement, and their widely differing experience of discrimination and identity. With all these differences ± and the many success stories refuting the anti-racist litanies over institutional racism and oppression ± the old rallying call for `black’ solidarity and resistance, central to the mission of black cultural studies, begins to look a tired and dated dogma. As Bhikhu Parekh says in his comment on the book: `No work on the subject that ignores these ® ndings can henceforth be taken seriously’. The challenge to cultural studies that this report poses is not only one of intellectual honesty. It also represents the new breed of social scienti® c work. Outside the British academic scene and the dominant marketing strategies of the publishing houses, the other dominant structuring factor that will increasingly shape research, are the demands and opportunities laid down by policy-makers. Cultural studies will never be of any use to the policy community, which needs credible quantitative and qualitative research, written in jargon-free comprehensible language. The Labour Party in power has elevated the PSI, IPPR and Demos think tanks to the role of advisors to the court. More widely, the major source of funding for social science research in universities desperate for external sources has been the European Union, whose generous research agenda demands extensive cross-national networks, competent comparative frameworks and serious empirical content. In this context, the very possibility of doing cultural studies is likely to decline. We may still see, therefore, the re-emergence of a serious sociology of race and ethnicity in Britain ± which does still exist across Europe ± before it disappears entirely into communications, gender and women’s studies. The PSI report provides a welcome boost in this direction, and European readers will turn to it relieved and impressed, that there is still proof of life in British empirical sociology after all. Adrian Favell University of Sussex There have been plenty of reviews of this welcome and eagerly awaited fourth survey report from the Policy Studies Institute. Most have noted its technical sophistication, wide range of topic areas and central line of interpretation. The last has been to document conclusively the divergence that exists between the fortunes of some groups in British society when compared with others, even though most have similar origins in post-colonial and postwar migration. This places the report centrally in a long line of statistical analyses but clearly separates it from many of the qualitative studies that have emerged from Britain’s `race relations industry’. By and large, these have been perceived as constrained to offer convergent interpretations in order to uphold the centrality of theories based on the universality of racial discrimination. This study will have a long shelf-life as a work of reference but in three important respects it must be regarded as a starting point rather than as a work of de® nitive conclusions. First of all, it contains an implicit and rather unsatisfactory theory of ethnic divergence. If some groups prosper and others lag further and further behind their contemporaries, why is this? The evidence that the

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survey reveals on diversity is that the Chinese, Asians originally from East Africa and many Indians originally from the sub-continent perform at least as well as the native white population on many measures, including educational performance, income and occupational success. The Caribbean-descended population appear to be less well-placed, performing on these measures rather less well than the natives but the Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations are at the very bottom with high unemployment levels, poor educational achievements and extreme levels of poverty and `social exclusion’. While the report notes that origins differ in terms of educational levels, experience of entrepreneurship and levels of wealth, the implicit theory of diversity that is employed is that of `cultural racism’ or systematic preferment on grounds of beliefs, practices, language and religion. In particular, anti-Islamic sentiment is proposed as a major factor in explaining the poverty and exclusion of many Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. It is probable that there is something to this proposal. The pejorative and racist epithet `paki’ is perhaps a symbol of this culturally speci® c rejection. The problem is that the method used by the study makes it impossible to be sure. Survey methods with national samples are of necessity based on a `time-slice’, and they are usually precluded by cost from taking samples that allow for serious analysis of the same groups in different parts of the country. If Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations were distributed in different ways to other Àsian’ populations, and if their migration history was more recent then the simple linear thinking implied by the three-stage model, this might be very misleading. In fact, this appears to be the case. From other evidence, most notably the census, we know that Pakistanis are heavily concentrated in those industrial areas that have been decimated by the decline in manufacturing. Bangladeshis are overwhelmingly located in Tower Hamlets and other boroughs of East London where they are but the most recent victims of concentration in areas of extremely poor housing, schools and opportunities. The test of the `cultural racism’ thesis therefore would be to compare Muslims who are not in these locations, and who have had time to adjust in terms of family size and other indicators of `modernity’, with other Àsian’ groups. If the differences were still very large then support for the ànti-Islam’ thesis would be revealed; if they were little different then it would be confounded. But what of the Caribbean-descended population? The report does not provide a very clear picture. They are shown to be more poorly placed than whites on most variables but better in terms of education, employment, housing and health than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. But time is never systematically included in the analysis. More recent research by one of the authors of the PSI study (Berthoud 1999) using other data sources (largely grouped rounds of the Labour Force Survey) focuses speci® cally on this group and is suggestive in providing a possible answer. What Richard Berthoud ® nds is highly suggestive in rejecting the linear assumption in the main PSI report. The Caribbean-descended population (once separated from those who came from Africa for educational purposes) has experienced downward social mobility since arriving relative to other groups and, second, later arrivals are better placed than earlier ones. Thus any simple linear assumption is confounded. What appears to have happened in mapping diversity is that the population most culturally similar to the majority has suffered from its exposure to white British society, while others ± although divergent in their own cultural origins from each other ± have experienced a gradual (sometimes very gradual) improvement.


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What kind of theory might account for these phenomena? First of all, societies differ in the degree to which they impose, encourage or seek to sustain separatism. Britain is certainly one country that has done so, sometimes clearly for racist reasons. One should not assume, however, that countries that do not (e.g. France) are thereby less racist. Having opted for a measure of pluralism there is then a distinction commonly made between phenotypical and cultural forms. Britain’s unique colonial experience allowed both to ¯ ourish. In a more modern sense, Britain has mid-Atlantic prejudices; similar to North America in the salience of phenotypical stereotypes and to continental Europe in terms of a propensity for cultural exclusion. The third point is however the most important. Forcing groups back on their own devices works better for those who are genuinely different in cultural terms. It is, of course, very damaging (particularly in terms of racial violence) but it produces the bene® ts of non-integration; namely entrepreneurship, community strength and a determination to harness opportunity for economic success. Those offered the integration option (equal opportunities, anti-discrimination and positive action) generate a small middle class but a large, declining and increasingly segregated mass. A ® nal point relates to the value of the fourth survey as an exemplar for other countries, particularly in Europe. The survey method is, of course, limited as the comments above suggest but it represents a huge advance on the ignorance that prevails in some of Britain’s EU partners. One must not overstate the case. Even in France, where there are powerful prejudices against any recognition of cultural diversity amongst French citizens (Favell 1998a), there are numerous surveys that identify origins in terms of birthplace and some (notably those by the demographer MicheÁlle Tribalat) in ethnic terms (Tribalat et al. 1996). What is missing are not surveys as such but rather systematic (i.e. repeated) investigations based on a modicum of common questions. There are those who will argue that this is not possible. Political scientists in particular, who have a natural tendency to believe that national policies are ingrained in the minds of citizens, will be sceptical. The fact is, however, that this is itself is an empirical question. In 1983, some colleagues and I conducted a survey in the West Midlands that used self-assessed ethnicity when many claimed that this was impossible. We achieved more than 95 per cent unproblematic self-assessments and later this became a standard feature of the British census. Whatever political analysts may say, the same would probably occur in the self-identi® cation of `FrenchAlgerians’ or Ìtalian-Albanians’, although clearly citizenship status may add some internal heterogeneity to each category. It is one thing to argue for the extrapolation of the PSI report on a European stage and quite another to see quite how this could be achieved. The fact is that a European social science research council is still, lamentably, some way off. The institutions which fund European comparative research and data gathering are either rather too weak (e.g. Eurostat), or too new (e.g. the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia) or too preoccupied with short-term political considerations to be capable of strategic thinking (e.g. the European Commission). As social scientists we should celebrate the achievements of the PSI study as a notable worth of reference, as a stimulate to creative thinking and as a spur to enhancing European comparative research. Malcolm Cross Centre for European Migration and Ethnic Studies/CEMES

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Notes 1

2

British researchers typically have a hard time with the idea that examples taken from British society cannot be blithely generalised, with no comparative contextualising, as examples of Western society general. Britain is a small island with an academic production no more intellectually important than many other countries, and signi® cant less important in the ® eld of sociology than many. One amusing incident at the 1996 European Sociological Association at Essex University was indicative of the problem. A panel had been set up to discuss the future of British sociology, but the all-British panellists predominantly interpreted this to mean not what is the future of sociology as a discipline in Britain ± a situation which could be fairly described as parlous ± but how the new and distinctly British forms of `sociology’ (ie. post-structuralist cultural and media studies, and offshoots such as black, gay and feminist studies) might now in¯ uence, transform and liberate other more staid brands of European sociology. The predominantly non-British crowd were bemused by this rather imperialist attitude, and when it was asked about comparative method in all this, the panel went silent, before becoming aggressively defensive. Eg. the work of Catherine Neveu (1993) and Didier Lapeyronnie (1992), Max Silverman (1992) and Alec Hargreaves (1995), and the long-standing interest of Gary Freeman (1979, 1992) in this comparison.

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