1
Communities Conference
Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds
18-20 September 2003
Community, Social Capital and Identification
in the Multi-ethnic Inner City :
Reflections on the violent urban protest
in the north of the UK in 2001
Max Farrar
School of Cultural Studies
LeedsMetropolitanUniversity
Farrar, Max (2003) 'Community, Social Capital and Identification in the Multi-ethnic Inner City: Reflections on the violent urban protest in the north of the UK in 2001' Paper delivered to the Communities Conference, Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds, 18-20 September 2003
PART 1
Introduction
This talk has the following aims:
- To critique the application of the concept of social capital in the British government’s current policy statements on ‘community cohesion’, which arose out of the so-called riots in 2001.
- To show how a radical sociology of community and identification provides a more useful approach to the problems and potentials of the multi-ethnic, inner city areas of the UK.
Since the government’s community cohesion strategy arises out of very particular circumstances, and since memories are short, we should briefly remind ourselves that a spasm of events which the media called ‘riots’ took place in several cities in the north of England in the summer of 2001. Two of the towns affected (Burnley (see Clarke 2001) and Oldham (see Ritchie 2001)) responded by setting up official enquiries, another (Bradford, see Ouseley 2001)) already had one under way, while the fourth (Leeds) responded with a deafening silence. The government in its turn set up an independent enquiry with a more general remit, which included visits to Leicester, Southall and Birmingham, as well as the affected towns, but which again steered clear of Leeds. It titled its report ‘Community Cohesion’ (Cantle 2001). Soon afterwards, the report of an inter-governmental team of Ministers, titled ‘Building Cohesive Communities’ was published (Denham 2002). What was so alarming about these ‘riots’ that they provoked such a flurry of investigations? You will note the scare quotes around the word ‘riots’. In another paper, I have argued that the term ‘riot’ should be replaced by the concept of violent urban protest, and that is the terminology I shall use from now on (Farrar 2002). I see this as complementing the analyses made of these events by Kundnani (2001) and Amin (2003). Amin, for instance, writes of the young Asians who:
went on the rampage to protest against a long history of economic deprivation and hopelessness, white racist threat and violence, police intrusion and incursion, public sector neglect, and failed ethnic leadership (Amin 2003 p. 461)
(Despite this trenchant analysis of the provocations experienced by these young people, Amin uses the word ‘riots’ in the title of his article, and includes ‘rampage’ in the quote above.)
Violent urban protest took place in Oldham, in Lancashire, in the north of England, at the end of May, 2001 (Saturday 26th to Tuesday 29th). Over four days and nights, violence took place in several parts of Oldham with high populations of residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Two days after, there was a firebombing of the home of the British Asian Deputy Mayor, Councillor Riaz Ahmad, on Friday 1st June. Councillor Ahmad’s house was extensively damaged and he, and his family, narrowly escaped with their lives (Ritchie 2001, p. 71). Just over a month later, over the night of 5th June, violent protest took place in the Harehills area of Leeds, in West Yorkshire (Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 June 2001). Harehills is an inner city area which has a high proportion of residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Just over two weeks after this, violent protests took place on three successive days and nights in Burnley, Lancashire (23rd – 25th June) (Clarke, Summary Report 2001 p. 5). After about another fortnight, urban violence took place on the afternoon and evening of 7th July, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, mainly in the inner city area, where there is a high proportion of people of Pakistani origin (Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 July 2001). (See Bagguley and Hussain (2003) for more detail on these events.) Since 1975, when the first violent urban protest of British Caribbean youth took place in Leeds, England has witnessed similar events of much greater extent in 1981 and much greater ferocity in 1985 (see Table 1, Farrar 2002), but it seems probable that the protests in the summer of 2001 received such attention for the following reasons. One is that it was the first time (at least in the media’s limited knowledge) that British Asians had taken to the streets with petrol bombs, and thus they inherited the weight of fear and dread under which British Caribbean youth had suffered for the previous three decades. Secondly, New Labour (unlike the Conservatives, under whose government the 1981 and 1985 protests took place) were already committed to inner-city regeneration and social inclusion policies. Thus it was ideologically prepared to accept that there might be real social and economic problems behind events. The government would, nevertheless, use the label ‘serious disorder’ or ‘violent community disorder’ (Denham 2002), while the other reports would continue to be sprinkled with the word ‘riot’.
Social capital
As Bagguley and Hussain (2003) point out the major concept used by the government to explain these events is the absence of ‘social cohesion’ in the towns which erupted in the summer of 2001. I seek here merely to outline its derivation from Bourdieu’s concept of social capital, and to show how the government’s appropriation of it not only rides roughshod over its major cited source, the work of Ray Forrest and Ade Kearns, but also strips it of the radical implications of Bourdieu’s original formulation.
Social capital does not find its way into Bourdieu’s original statement of his sociological theory, Outline of a Theory of Practice, first published in French in 1972 and in English in 1977. He initially explained the concept in work published in France in 1979 and 1980, and it first appeared in English in an obscure American text on education in 1985 (Portes, 1998, p. 3). Bourdieu’s definition is quite straightforward. Social capital is ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network or more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu 1985 cited in Portes 1998 p. 3). In one of the books about Bourdieu, Bridget Fowler rather truncates this definition into ‘power gained by the sheer number of family members, retainers or networks of supporters’ (Fowler 1997 p. 31). The key point for a radical sociology lies in Bourdieu’s point about ‘actual or potential resources’ which can be mobilized via mutually affirming social networks, a point which Fowler might be glossing under the concept of ‘power’. Further, as both Portes and Fowler point out, Bourdieu invariably deployed his three other formulations of capital (economic, cultural, and symbolic) simultaneously with his notion of social capital. Thus, for Bourdieu, the resources to which these social relationships provide access include money, goods, brainpower, knowledge, integrity, and status.
When we examine the government’s deployment of ‘community cohesion’ it is apparent that it has stripped out most of those features of social capital which, if deployed in Bourdieu’s terms, would quickly refer us to the gross inequalities of access to material, intellectual and symbolic resources among population groups in the UK today. Ted Cantle’s report, adopted by the government, offers a definition of community cohesion which includes ‘social networks and social capital’ as one of its five dimensions. The definition of social capital offered here is ‘High degree of social interaction within communities and families. Civic engagement and associational activity. Easy resolution of collective action problems’ (Cantle 2002 p. 13). This is derived from a paper delivered by Forrest and Kearns at an ESRC colloquium in June 2000 and published in the journal Urban Studies the following year (Forrest and Kearns 2001). It is this notion of social capital as social interaction and harmonious participation in local life which has become the common understanding of the concept in social policy circles. Its link to Bourdieu’s initial definition is tenuous. The Cantle/Forrest and Kearns full definition of community cohesion includes four other elements:
Common values and a common culture
Social order and social control
Social solidarity and reductions in wealth disparities
Place attachment and identity
(Cantle 2001 p. 13, Forrest and Kearns 2001, p 2129)
Only one of these picks up Bourdieu’s reference to material resources: ‘reductions in wealth disparities’. This is then further described as ‘redistribution of public finances and of opportunities’ and ‘equal access to services and welfare benefits’. Forrest and Kearns however, thoughtfully challenge the presumption that there actually is a crisis in social cohesion; recognise that, where cohesion is tight, exclusionary activity is also likely to be prevalent; point to the class-based differentials in ‘community spirit’; and explicitly invoke Bourdieu’s point that ‘social capital [is] underpinned by economic capital’ (Forrest and Kearns 2001 p. 2138). None of this finds its way into Cantle’s report, which, like the Denham report which constitutes the government’s response, takes for granted that social cohesion has broken down, at least in the areas where dark and white skinned people live in close proximity, and argues that the major issues that must be addressed are social, not material. But Forrest and Kearns have paved the way for this response by redefining Bourdieu’s materialist emphasis in his concept of social capital. This is particularly evident in their elaborate statement of the ‘domains of social capital’ referred to in the appendix of the Cantle report. These are: empowerment, participation, associational activity and common purpose, supporting networks and reciprocity, collective values and norms, trust, safety and belonging (Cantle 2001 pp. 73-4, Forrest and Kearns 2001 p. 2140). Here, the economic, cultural and symbolic resources which are to be mobilised by social capital, in Bourdieu’s formulation, are entirely absent.
The Home Office’s current guidance on community cohesion has translated even the small reference to the material dimension of social capital in Cantle (2001) into the notion of ‘similar life opportunities’. Its web-site announces that:
The broad working definition is that 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 in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods.
(Home Office 2003)
The re-coding of ethnicity and economics in this definition should be examined carefully. The government seems to recommend that we speak of ‘different backgrounds’, rather than the cultural differences that have been racialised in post-imperial Britain. It no longer speaks of ‘equal’ opportunity – which itself was a diluted code for equal access to material resources – but ‘similar’ life opportunities. The real weight of the definition is on the social dimensions, particularly ‘common vision’ and positive valuation of difference. Given the emphasis on the economic factors in the Ritchie and Clarke reports into the violent urban protest in Burnley and Oldham, and their recommendations for changes in the material infrastructure of those towns, it is even more significant that this guidance gives such priority to the social, rather than material, dimension of life in the towns that erupted in the summer of 2001. Radical sociology disputes this emphasis, arguing that real changes in social relationships will only take place if they go hand in hand with will major changes in the material fabric of people’s lives.
PART 2
Reformulating Community and Identity
My aim in this part of the paper is
To show how a radical sociology of community and identification provides a more useful approach to the problems and potentials of the multi-ethnic, inner city areas of the UK.
I will use the violent urban protest in Harehills as an exemplar of my approach.
I am interested in the turn towards biography and autobiography in sociology (Roberts 2001), and I am increasingly convinced that sociology, like everyday life, is driven more by the author’s value assumptions than it is by theory or empirical data. It helps to make sense of this part of the paper, I think, to tell you something about how I reached the approach to the concept of community that I am about to offer. By 1974 I was certain, after two years of a PhD grant studying the Chapeltown Community Association, that sociology was a bogus, bourgeois enterprise which had almost nothing useful to say about the multi-cultural inner city, still less could it make any useful contribution to reversing the racism and economic disadvantage which scarred that part of the city of Leeds. I exited from sociology stage left, and didn’t return until the mid 1990s. In reviewing the work on the sociology of community that had annoyed me so much in the 1970s, I found that, at about the same time I was turning my back on the discipline, others, far better read than I, were virtually discarding the concept of community. Apparently Margaret Stacey, in 1969, refused to use the concept at all. Ray Pahl, in 1970 wrote that the word ‘serves more to confuse, rather than illuminate, the situation in Britain’. Bell and Newby, in 1971, summarising the bewildering number of competing definitions of the term, argued that community can only be treated as that which community studies analyse (all cited in Farrar 2002b p. 83). By the mid-1990s, I had spent 25 years engaging in activity that in the early 1970s was called community politics, in the 1980s community development, and in the 1990s community regeneration. Despite the slings and arrows of academic sociology, aided and abetted by economistic Marxists, the term community had resolutely refused to lie down and die. What struck me, and many others working in the multi-ethnic inner city, most forcibly, was the use of the term by ordinary people themselves, when they spoke and wrote about the West Indian, or African Caribbean, or Asian, or Sikh, or Irish community – in fact, ‘the community’ was clearly a rallying call for several important sectors of the local population. The ambiguity of the term and the sophistry in its usage were glaringly apparent, and of course this slipperiness and deceit are picked up in the government’s use of the term ‘community cohesion’, where ‘community’ stands both for these troublesome, particularistic ethnics who keep erupting in riot, and for the aspiration that the various degrees of assumed difference can be reconciled in one big, harmonious community called England.
The intellectual and political problems with the term ‘community’, I want to argue, can be overcome by the new approach that I want to advocate here. It is spelled out in interminable detail in my book, but I shall summarise it very briefly now. We can distinguish two quite different epistemologies in the use of the concept of community: the realist and the idealist. The realist approach epitomised in most community studies and in social policy pronouncements, treats community as a thing that can be measured. Forrest and Kearns (2001) are clearly in this camp, seeking to define community cohesion in terms which allow for empirical investigation and measurement. The idealist position is best exemplified in Anthony Cohen’s work, well summarised in the title of his excellent book The Symbolic Construction of Community (Cohen 1985). It is contained in Benedict Anderson’s (1983) expression ‘imagined communities’, a phrase which has in recent years routinely been used to pour scorn on the realist use of the term. In everyday life, and often in sociology, realist and idealist usage are inextricably mixed together, never more so than in the government’s effort simultaneously to specify what are the components of community and to infuse us with enthusiasm for their idea that people can, and should, live cohesively.
My proposal is to adopt the insight that ‘community’ is a term ‘to think with’, as Cohen (1985 p. 19) puts it, but to reject the assumption (contained I think in the ‘imagined communities’ usage) that the practical implications – the ‘real life’ results of this way of thinking are necessarily politically reactionary. The contempt for thinking and living ‘community’ is contained in Marx’s famous attack on ‘the idiocy’ of life in rural India. Zygmunt Bauman’s warning that ‘community’ might be in contradiction with ‘freedom’ strikes a chord with both right-wing and left-wing libertarians (Bauman 1988 pp. 53-4). There is no doubt that there are nostalgic, conservative and fundamentalist uses to which the term ‘community’ has been put, but the application of the term in political and social life is a matter for empirical investigation, not for a priori assumption. As Bagguley and Hussain (2003) have shown, there is a particular discursive construction of community in the government’s reports on the violent urban protest in 2001. Each time we encounter the term we should unpack the discursive framework in which it is set, and investigate the various meanings it holds for individuals and groups in the field. The way to avoid the pitfall of making the assumption that the term necessarily involves atavistic and reactionary commitments is to treat is as a ‘social imaginary’, as defined by Cornelius Castoriadis: a figure, or form out of which people construct a particular version of reality (Castoriadis 1997 p. 3). The reason why the term won’t disappear, whatever philosophical or political assault it is subjected to, is that the figure of ‘community’ is a repository for humans’ most fundamental needs – for love, security and peace. My argument is that community is a metaphor for human yearning for the fulfilment of these needs, and related ones such as intimacy, dialogue, understanding, friendship and responsibility. The fact that fascists argue that this state of bliss is best achieved under the armed guidance of the Fuhrer, while fundamentalists of all denominations say that only the armed emissaries of God can deliver this paradise on earth, should not distract us from the utopian longing that is carried by the term community.