METROPOLIS
First International Conference
Milan, Italy
© Copyright, Fondazione Cariplo - I.S.MU. Milano.
Stampato a Milano nel mese di Agosto 1997
Tipomonza - Via Merano, 18 - Milano
Working group 4
Managing Diversity: Issues of
Access and Equity
Yngve Georg Lithman
IMER, Bergen University, Norway
Introduction
The first Metropolis annual
conference was to a large extent conceived to review state-of-the
art scholarship and arrive at policy conclusions. The conference
was also to provide statements of the insights that are lacking,
and the areas of research that should be given priority. This
document is intended to assist in those goals, and its title, Managing
Diversity: Issues of Access and Equity, fairly represents its
contents. However, the managing dimension is not prominent
in the following pages. The text is an inventory of scholarly
debates and insights concerning those issues that may be, have to
be, or sometimes are intended to be, managed in the political and
administrative spheres of a multi-ethnic/cultural society. There
also must be an explanation of a few additional premises upon
which this document is built. These premises are crucial to an
understanding of the way this document was conceived. One of
these premises concerns the definition of ‘state-of-the-art’ within the social sciences. Another
concerns the relationship between explanations on different
levels of abstraction, and how these relate to more immediate
questions of management. In many fields of science, there is a
clear cumulative dimension to scientific activities. The
introduction of a medical drug is a good example. Over time, the
experiences of its use and its continued testing increasingly
clarify which indications, uses and dosages are most
advantageous. Each new insight expands on previous knowledge, and
serves to sharpen the understanding between scientists and
practitioners. This is seldom the situation in the social
sciences. There is often a fundamental disagreement about the
very premises upon which an inquiry should be pursued. For
example, some scholars would argue that everything or at least
everything of interest in a society should be explained in terms
of material explanations, such as Marxism. Others would argue for
praxeological explanations, where society is seen as the
cumulative result of individuals’ actions. Still others
would argue for culturological explanations, where, for example,
socialising is a major integrative force in society, provided
that its results fit the society in which the individual is
socialised. And there are still other arguments in addition to a
variety of permutations of the ones already mentioned. These
various starting points for an inquiry - paradigms may be a good
designation - do not let themselves be easily combined, if
at all. Instead, they are a-prioristic notions in the specific
inquiry. The researcher has a preference for one or the other,
not deriving from the result of the inquiry to be performed.
Instead, the researcher’s preconceived notions, derived from
the condensed scholarly experience, will have provided the
researcher with paradigmatic preferences, usually fairly well
ingrained. This doesn’t mean that researchers are not
objective, only that there are fundamental disagreements about
basic questions regarding the understanding of society.
Similarly, these paradigms are not really on a level of
abstraction where they can be proved or disproved through
specific inquiries. Instead, preferences with regard to paradigms
relate to the researcher’s opinions about what best fits the
totality of his or her insights. So, in a study of housing
segregation, for example, some will argue that the patterns of
segregation are generated as the outcome of individual choices
with regard to housing, given constraints such as private
economies and availability of housing. Others will maintain that
the segregation patterns will reflect societal class structure,
and that to study segregation patterns as the result of
individual choices is un-interesting at best, since these choices
simply reflect the operation of the class structure. There are
also those who will state that patterns of segregation reflect
psychological, socio-biological, or otherwise explainable needs
and that individuals have to live together with similar people.
Given these observations, one must also realise that some of the
most pertinent writings about phenomena such as housing
segregation, schooling of immigrants, and a host of other
writings are not necessarily the most recent ones. Instead, the
writings that represent the ‘state of the art’ are
those where the various paradigms receive their most
sophisticated treatment. These writings will often be helpful in
understanding a particular feature of society. Social scientists
are pretty good at reinventing the wheel, but the latest
reinvention is not necessarily the best. The Metropolis effort is
in many ways research-driven, but it is also designed to provide
research-based suggestions of value to politicians and
administrators. It would be misleading to interpret what has been
said about paradigms as a statement that scholarly insights are
of limited benefit to policy makers. On the contrary, it is
important to insist that theoretically informed social
science is of fundamental value. While such work operates on a
high level of abstraction, it is also the most helpful in a more
practical sense to policy makers. To use housing segregation as
an example, amassing more of the nuts and bolts of segregation
data, in the sense of percentages and rates, is of very limited
utility to the work being performed in Sweden. Instead, we must
learn what these facts stand for, such as whether the housing
segregation in Sweden is best understood in class terms or in
terms of individual agency and choice. The answer to this
question must be formulated in ways where the end product
reflects both the scholar’s paradigmatic choices,
methodological preferences and the data created in the course of
the project. A final consensual statement is unlikely, but each
good scholarly work will help clarify the issues concerned. This
will make it possible to predict more accurately what results
various administrative and political actions will have, and,
perhaps most importantly, contribute to the civic discussion
about what kind of society we want to strive for. Now and then,
we in the research community will be able to find fields of
inquiry where we will be in general agreement about certain
things and about the effects of different types of intervention.
With regard to immigration and immigrant research, such unanimity
can be seen in the fields of language learning. We may also see
an increasing consensus towards the constructionist approach to ethnic
minority formation as opposed to one which emphasises the role of primordial
sentiments. But sciences, and perhaps especially the social sciences, can only
produce provisional truths. Only religion can provide absolute truths.
But scientific work is a type of discussion bounded by a set of
rules governing how we can make our statements. These rules,
universal at that, govern very specifically the ways we may make
statements about what is out there, and the purpose of the
discussion is to arrive at better and better representations of
what indeed is out there. That there are often sharp
disagreements is not necessarily a disadvantage, and testify to
the fact that science is not a church. Nor should such
disagreements suggest that the contribution of science to
politicians and administrators is discounted. Scholarly insights
should be fundamental contributions to a society’s
self-awareness even in the absence of scholarly awareness Spread
throughout the text, under the heading ‘where are we’ at the end of
the treatment of each major topic, there are indications that should concern
scholars, politicians and administrators. This document is structured so that
issues about access and equity are discussed for four different domains:
housing, politics, education and the labour market. A note has
been included on access and equity in the fields of social
services and health. The text concludes with some general
observations. Two additional comments should be made. The text
will undoubtedly reflect a European perspective, if for no other
reason than that is what primarily informs the author. Secondly,
the references have usually been condensed at the end of each
section, rather than spread throughout the section. However, this
should not make it more difficult for the readers. The lists of
references has been kept very short.
Access and Equity: The Larger
Issues
A discussion about access and
equity can be done very technically: these are the rates for this
or that phenomenon for autochthons and these are the rates for
immigrants - are these rates equitable; do immigrants have
appropriate access; and so on. There are a vast number of
inquiries in all the Metropolis countries that attempt to provide
such discussions, and official statistics will often present some
useful material along these lines. However, in order to make
sense of such data, it is necessary to have some grasp of the
significance of the terms access and equity, i.e. the
theoretical space in which they have become most prominently
used. It is also important to provide some discussion of the ways
in which the analysis of phenomena of access and equity
has been conducted. In terms of their epistemological history,
access and equity have been primarily dealt with within a
theoretical framework of methodological individualism, i.e. a
perspective where individual activity is fundamental to the
analysis. When the analysis has had a class perspective, for
example, and the inequities have been seen primarily rooted in
the relationship between classes, concepts like access and equity
have usually not been the primary choice of the writer. They are
also terms that lie very closely to a whole set of understandings
which inform especially US and Canadian jurisprudence, finding
their expression in affirmative action and equity legislation.
The way these concepts inform much discussion about migrants,
access may be said to stand for the ability and methods of people
of different backgrounds to penetrate the surrounding society,
while equity has to do with the fairness or justice that people
meet in their attempts to penetrate the surrounding society, or
the extent to which a society has been able to provide fairness
and justice to all its members. Put this way, access and equity
are, of course, crucial issues in normative discussion about
society, and hence for its political, administrative and judicial
apparatus. Nevertheless, the terms are not primary ones in the
social sciences. The differential distribution of people of
different backgrounds or other social attributes in a society,
i.e. issues related to access and equity, is of course a
necessary descriptive measure in much social science work. In the
analysis of such distributions, however, the vast majority
of scholarly writings tend to search for a contextualising of
such findings in a wider understanding of society. The
distribution, however skewed, is in itself seldom seen as
particularly interesting. Instead, the focus is on society at
large, and on the features in a society that prompt the existence
of the distribution at hand. One consequence is that social
scientists rarely see the skewed distribution itself as the
problem to be explained (and, in their role of citizen, to be
rectified). Instead, the focus is on the larger social reality,
and how this produces the distribution. Inquiries which do not
search for an explanation of the skewed distributions outside the
classroom where the immigrant children fail or the gang where the
delinquent immigrant youth strut their stuff.
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