Globalization,Class,and Immigration: An Intersectional Analysis of the New East End

Abstract

The discussion paper is presented to be read in three simultaneous and different modalities. At one level, it is first a study of a repeat study from 1957 and 2006, examining the disconnection between history and methodology in locating the British Bangladeshi communities’ past social story in today’s shifting landscape. At another level it intervenes; asserting globalization, as spatial-temporal phenomena under a neo liberal consensus, has produced an uneven distribution of common diversity. Permeating into every facet of social life, the construct of community and constructions of belongingness, finally apprehending the pitfalls of research without direct engagement of subjects.

Introduction

This discussion paper is a critical review of the case study titled “The New East End” carried out by the authors Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young, published in 2006. The article, in revisiting the study, aimed to critically evaluate the fixed units of the study in yielding an improved understanding of the complex social science story behind the qualitative research by critically exploring the robustness and consistency of the research report and its validity in today’s evolving social world.

The argument to be defended throughout the article is segmented into five parts and begins with an overview of the case study and its key findings. The second part of the discussion in applying Yin’s (2003) criteria for quality in case study research, focuses on the methods of analysis. Underscoring the disconnection between the methodology deployed in framing the Sylheti-speaking British Bangladeshis of the east London borough of Tower Hamlets under analysis and argues spatial-temporal changes have altered the authors’ findings on the cognitive aspects of belongingness and identity construction within the framework of globalization.

The third part broadens the discussion to a global context through the application of both mainstream Giddensian and opposing Marxist/neo-Marxist theoretical frameworks in tandem. The discussion, in provisionally appending the major contrasting forces of both frameworks, aims to render a non-sedentary reading on how the forces of globalization as phenomena has shaped and patterned some of the experiences discussed by the authors as local phenomena. The conception of globalization has been discoursed by applying the cognitive, spatial-temporal, and material aspects of globalization as an overarching tripartite constellation and critical lens to extrapolate and decode some of the enmeshed constructs of globalization embedded in the case study (Held et al., 1999). The fourth part of the discussion asserts the argument that macrolevel experiences deliberated by the authors in the case study are the remnants of both time and space and a historically ordered set of events, which have shaped indigenous understandings within the milieu.

The fifth part in recruiting Healy and Perry’s (2000) criteria for judging qualitative research focuses on possible alternative perspectives, which could have illuminated the findings of the case study further and concludes with the assertion that globalization through the pervasion of class power at a global and aggregate microeconomic level has benefited the dominant capitalist societies. The discussion asserts the argument that the Bourgeoisie classes through symbolic repression and structural violence have historically organized both labor and resources at a global level to maximize surplus value through mechanization, automation, and exportation of the modes of production, which has become the social by-product facilitated in part by globalization and permeated into the local and individual (Escobar, 1995).

The Case Study

The study commissioned in 1992, and conducted over a decade by the Young Foundation based in Bethnal Green, was co-authored by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young. The objectives, as the authors claim, were to repeat an earlier study of the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, carried out by one of the original co-authors, Michael Young, who first wrote a research paper called “For Richer, For Poorer” for the Labour Party Research Department in 1951. The source material provided the main thesis of the first study co-written with Peter Willmott called “Family and Kinship in East London” (Young & Willmott, 1957). The original aimed to investigate the impact of housing relocation from the old Bethnal Green area of the east end of London to greater London but eventually finished by focusing on family ties and kinship among the working class within the east end of London.

The research, written in a lucid fashion, with the same research tools and methodology of the earlier study, charts the impact of the inflows of economic immigration of Sylheti-speaking South Asian workers and their families on the social structures of the working class and the changing demographic makeup of Tower Hamlets. By contrasting against the original 1953 study, the research mirrors some of the current political and public discourse and preoccupation surrounding immigration concerns, work, and welfare entitlement in 2020. The study furthermore focuses on the racial conflict that transpired in the borough as well as government policies from previous administrations and its subsequent impact on communities.

The Case Study Methodology

The repeat study extended beyond the original study of the old Bethnal Green expanse and encompassed the entire borough, replicating the same research methodology as the original enquiry; the study involved the collation of existing secondary data from reports. A random sample of 799 adults were interviewed with an age range between 18 and 94 years of age as well as data collected on 2,565 people living in the family households selected and their relatives living outside of the borough over a period of 12 years. The cross-language methodology also involved an intensive subsampling of 51 respondents. Interviews undertaken consisted of 33 White working-class and 18 first-generation Bangladeshi parents with additional sociolinguistically competent Bangladeshi informants consisting mainly of young women recruited to bridge the authors’ social separation from the Sylheti social system.

Although the authors claimed the study is a replication of an earlier study from 1957, the findings of the research, beginning from the first chapter, suggests a seismic departure from the themes of the original study and toward a scrutiny of one of Britain’s largest south Asian Muslim population, the Sylheti-speaking Bangladeshi community.

The application of the case study methodology by the authors suggests an attempt at what Yin (2003) termed as the coverage of the “contextual conditions” of the participants of the research within the locality of Tower Hamlets. Yin (1984, p. 23) defined the case study methodology as an empirical enquiry that “investigates a contemporary phenomenon with its real-life context; when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident; and in which multiple sources of evidence are used” within the realist paradigm. The codas of the research, presented under the rubric of a comparative repeat case study, appears on closer examination to be a 12-year chronological narration of the impact of immigration on the local White working class. A long-term historical study grounded by a synchronic focus on the structural, environmental, and behavioral properties as the main units of analysis under study as social phenomena.

The diachronic crux of the authors’ value-laden analysis placed blame reservedly on the imposition of multiculturalism. Facilitated by policy prescriptions on immigration that has, as the authors claim, eroded the imagined community solidarity of the local working class. Moreover, the Sylheti-speaking Bangladeshi community had an advantage over the local working class. The resultant competition for work and access to scarce public resources subsequently fueled, in part, the authors’ claim, the overt racial hostility toward the Bangladeshis.

Healy and Perry (2000, p. 6) argued that “the social world of realism is not a laboratory” with fixed social units but a changing social system where actors could exercise agency that differed from the way positivism researchers believe. The authors’ formulation and usage of the case study methodology, as a formula to investigate the complex and fluid social units that consist of multiple variables, has resulted in several fundamental dialectical issues arising in the arrangement of the analysis. The frequent flaws are a lack of rigor, reliability, analytic generalization of differentiation, belongingness, and construction of inaccurate story telling fused together by the authors’ own imposition and subjectivity (Schiller & Çağlar, 2011; Yin, 2010). Dench, Gavron, and Young’s portrayal of the working class through its vaguely defined oral histories could be argued, as being a nostalgic romanticism that disregards many of the wider structural elements as well as the sociocultural and socioeconomic issues that would have patterned the perceptions, personal experiences, and agency of its respondents. Cohen (1980, p. 85) pointed out that there was “no actual definition of a working-class community” but a shared experimental world of the working class where the community is in the “innate socialism of workers” (Bourke, 1994, p. 137), generally understood to include “solidarity, close-by family and social networks, shared lifestyles, and limited spatial mobility” (Cohen, 1980, p. 85). Bourke (1994) adds that this shared nostalgic or manufactured conception of the milieu was one which was equally shared and understood by both the young and older generations which served as a defense mechanism against “the power of other classes and a defence against authorities” as well as the changes of the encroaching global forces (Bourke, 1994, p. 137).

Dench, Gavron, and Young’s analysis of the trends in Britain’s Muslim communities was equally problematic to overlook. The authors’ neglect becomes manifestly evident when they wrongly claimed, “the Islam practiced in Bangladesh and in Britain amongst first generation . . . bares traces of local Hinduism and leans towards liberal Sufi tradition” (Dench et al., 2006, p. 96). A terse review of Islamic literature reveals that the Bangladeshi communities in Britain are mainly Sunni Muslims. Belonging to the “second largest faith in the world with over 750 million adherents and subscribe more specifically to the Hanafi school of thought the largest of the orthodox Islamic jurisprudence schools. In Tower Hamlets, the majority of first and second-generation Bangladeshis” subscription to faith is rooted in the Hanafi school of thought. But since the 1990s, set against the backdrop of generational and cultural confusion, there has been a marginal but growing number of second-generation as well as third-generation Bangladeshis whose orientation to faith has moved away from the traditional school of thought, practiced by their parents and more towards a thin simulacrum of Salafism. For many first-generation Sylheti Muslims, their religious instructions were dispensed predominantly through the Qawmi Deoband-aligned madrasa system (Aziz, 2017, pp. 83–84).

The case study, in its analysis of working-class nostalgic romanticism, fails to draw any parallels with the immigrant Bangladeshi population who are no more averse to this manufactured consensus either. As the Bangladeshi community too fostered its own community, solidarity constructed under the global banner of the Ummah an Islamic term that personifies the notions of belongingness to an Islamic community or global Islamic community (Aziz, 2017, p. 90). This religious construction of belongingness examined in detail quickly unfolds as an aspiration entrenched in doubt and ambiguity by many second and third generations of young British born Bangladeshis, because of both national and transnational social conditioning located in both the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of the wider commonplace society (Eade, 1997).

Giddens’ (2000, p. 65) transformationalist view elucidated that the influences of tradition and custom can shrink on a worldwide level and therefore identity and self-identity must be created and recreated and “a sense of self is sustained largely through the stability of the social positions of individuals in the community” (Wessendorf, 2013). Appadurai (1989, p. 89) argued that these primordium constructs of community solidarity are often located at the most rudimentary level to kinship ties; skin color, language, religion, and so on formed the “seedbed of brutal separatism” that can turn the social sphere of the local into a mini system of disjuncture structured by the global flow of labor, technology, and capital which permeate into the local (Aziz, 2017, p. 94).

Dench, Gavron, and Young’s discussion on education contrasted interestingly against the changing nature of work and the economy. The authors point out that many of the working-class children who left school at the first opportunity and relied on their social capital to secure employment were inherently trapped by the shrinking demand for manual labor. The growth of the knowledge economy and advancements in technology had reduced demand for unskilled manual labor. The digital revolution has transformed the labor market by disembodying the embodied skills and knowledge of the proletariat workers and embedding these skills and knowledge externally into technology and machinery. This transformation coupled in addition with the growth of the service economy in place of manufacturing has led to a proliferation of low-paid work (George & Wilding, 2002). A declining manufacturing industry and subsequent growth in the knowledge economy and the replacement of the manufacturing industry with a service sector economy has further cut demand in manual labor and patterned local labor experiences that have benefited some groups while creating further inequalities for other groups (Boyd & Walter, 2012).

The lack of any human capital certifications conferring the skills and knowledge demanded by the labor market has ultimately fated many of the working class in Tower Hamlets to marginalized positions within the labor market. By contrast, many Bangladeshi families have gradually attuned their children to the benefits of and the importance of an education and its potential in achieving cultural distinction as well as symbolic capital, and access to the growing professional and managerial occupations. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) argued that these qualifications could change their worth as social badges of distinction acquired by different social groups granting admission to dominant positions. This positive consequence of the forces of globalization could, in part, be argued as being a product of the market reforms of pedagogy. A process accelerated by a capitalist economic system of a post-Fordist regime of commodity production which has opened the pedagogic institutions which were once the reserve of the non-working class to meritocratic competition benefiting the next generation of immigrants (Ainley, 1994; Aziz, 2015).

The Globalization Effect

As Moore (2008, p. 352) points out, “it is not possible to write without theory because theory is what enables us to connect the evidence and make a coherent story”. The authors of the case study do not engage directly with theory in the study. Instead, the narrative arc and social tropes of the study appear underpinned by the authors’ own tacit reassertion of Young and Willmott’s (1957) and Young’s (1958) earlier argument from their original study. The study posits the argument that over the past five decades the stranglehold of the dominant paradigm of capitalism and the resurgence of neoliberalism with its orientation toward inequality and economic insecurity have pervaded and reconfigured the private and social aspect of community life. This transformation could be described as a post-industrial global society of neoliberal free market fundamentalism, which appears to have eroded and reshaped the moral economy at a macrolevel and a microlevel by influencing the everyday ethical sentiments and normative values of the working-class communities.

Andrew Sayer (2005) pointed out that these sentiments and norms were the ways in which social groups distinguished themselves and formed the moral differences termed as “moral boundary drawing” (pp. 947–963). Sayer (2005) suggested that the most important questions and concerns people tended to face in their everyday lives were normative ones, concerning what is good or bad, how to act, how they are being treated by others, and about what matters to them. Sennett (1998) argued that this decline in personal values and traits of individuals was a consequence of the alteration in the spatial organization of social relations perpetuated by an impeding capitalist system. Sandel (2013), like Young (1958) and Young and Willmott (1957), also argued that society and civic life has moved from a market economy to a market society, where market norms and market values, which seldom go hand in hand, with social norms and social values have entered the social spheres of everyday life, which were not governed by market values, but other non-market values. Dahrendorf (1958), an ardent skeptic of the globalization thesis, argued that under the intensity of a globalized economy, the attributes of individualism in people would only benefit the bourgeoisie class of society and lead to an erosion of social cohesion.

In a time of constrained global growth that Bakas (2015, p. 6) termed as “Slowbalization”, moreover within the current context of globalization, Polanyi (1957, p. 249) glimpsed this changing relationship between the economy and society and argued “the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organised social life” would lead to a “social dislocation.” Polanyi’s elucidation lamented market norms perceived presence in everyday life, seldom share the same accretion of reason and reality. Polanyi’s work served to underscore a much broader assertion that economies are no more autonomous from society than society is self-governing from the economy. The 2008 global financial crisis further forcibly illustrated Polanyi’s central thesis and framework in the fact that unfettered financial markets cannot self-regulate and left unchecked to market norms and market values can harm the social norms and social values, the social fabric of society. Twelve years later, the global Covid-19 pandemic would go on to deliver an additional shock to globalization with the disruption of global supply chains and stagnation of the world’s major economies, inducing mass unemployment and the collapse of stock markets in early 2020. This watershed moment in globalization with stringent restrictions imposed by governments across the globe to the movement of people, trade, and services and access to shared public spaces would go on to trigger the advent of a global recession not seen since the great depression. While developed economies of Europe and America have been able to shore up with billions to revive their economies and millions on vaccines, the same fiscal and medicinal capacities are not available to the governments of emerging economies that will take decades to recover from the devastation (Bloom, 2020).

Polanyi’s work was coincidentally first published in 1944, at the same time as the Bretton Woods agreement; a post-war preparation plan that would reshape the world’s financial system and reorganize the world’s economy. The creation of the international monetary fund; an agreement on enforceable exchange rates agreed against the U.S. dollar, set a new global framework and commerce of relations that ushered in a new commercial and financial global market among the world’s major industrial states (Held et al., 1999). It could be argued that this global transformation in turn has led to “a reformation of social power relations, with new beneficiaries and victims” and a global struggle between the exploiters and exploited, especially in the marginalized zones of the global political economy (Mittelman, 2000, p. 205).

This positioning of western society toward neo liberal market values and norms has over the past five decades further enforced some societies with reduced dispositions of the material means of production into unjustified, marginalized social positions. Moreover, an infliction on those societies of the power exclusive of a myth of “mondialization” (Mitrović, 2005, p. 44), in what Bourdieu (1998) denounced as the “neo liberal scourge” (Swartz & Zolberg, 2004, p. 22). These neo liberal expansions Galtung (1969) and Bourdieu (1998) stressed equated to structural dissimilarities in the world in the form of symbolic repression and structural violence where globalization, rather than leading to homogenization, instead reconfigured “the distribution of power and wealth within and between countries” facilitating further the solidification of power and prosperity of the leading nations and their governments (Held & McGrew, 2003, p. 70). Rooted within this complex web of assumptions and obscurantism, all too often, the predisposition of the dominant privileged groups to perceive the social and spiritual practices of marginalized groups as divergent from their own have led cause for unfounded concern and for some to be placed within the lowest stratum as the cultural “other.” Inferred as primitive or undesirable in culture, and in need of civilizing into the dominant western value systems for both, political and ideological purposes, that has served to reinforce the position of the privileged within both racial and ethnic cultural discourse. Consequently, minority groups have suffered the greatest polarization in social ethnic equality (Escobar, 1995).

Held and McGrew (2003) argued that globalization as a spatial-temporal process “can be located on a continuum with the local, national and regional” (p. 67), an inevitable phenomenon that has been historically bringing the markets of the world closer through the exchange and trade of goods, products, knowledge, and jobs. Engels (1848/1963, p. 319) elucidated nearly a century earlier on the formations of the capitalist system and its ability to transform societies and commented that

Large scale industry has brought the peoples of the earth into relations one with another, has transformed the hundred and one small markets into one huge world market, has everywhere introduced civilisation and progress, and has arranged matters in such a way that when anything happens in the civilised countries, the events have their repercussions in all other lands.

This world market, Marx (1867/1990) pointed out, was an extension of the bourgeoisie mode of production that predicated a division of labor and hierarchy of dependency between proletariat nations on the bourgeoisie nations (Kubalkova & Cruickshank, 1980). The proliferation in neo liberal market values and the relaxing of global trade laws have further fostered inequality and opened global labor markets for the bourgeoisie classes to export their proletariat problem abroad. Making workers in the British labor market open to competition and more susceptible to global forces, making the transfer of labor abroad to countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and China easier for large-scale organizations to continue to mobilize the embodied labor power of workers to expropriate greater surplus value for substantially less of what Marx termed as “socially necessary labour time” as well as less pay (Marx, 1885/1992, p. 13).

From a neoclassical economic perspective, it could be suggested that globalization and the deregulation of markets has led not only to an emphasis on greater competition but has also equated to a decline in the functional distribution of income marked by a decline in labor share and a rise in capital share (Wachtel, 1984). As income inequality has increased, social mobility has decreased, with many technical and manufacturing jobs now outsourced to developing economies for a fraction of the labor cost. Advances in technology have generated and also facilitated for organizations to move their operations to developing economies, placing workers in developed economies in direct competition with hundreds of millions of other workers from developing economies. This intense interconnected competition has resulted in declining real wage growth rates and a rise in inequality overall, as companies continue exploiting the ocean of cheap surplus labor power readily available for low-value labor-intensive tasks.

This phenomenon as Friedman (2004) and Standing (2009) pointed out has in part been fueled by the emergence of the two largest labor markets of China and India that have added an additional 2 billion workers to the global labor market. That has also both resigned and relegated those workers to incomes that are comparably a fraction of what workers in the western bourgeoisie economy would expect to earn. Consequently, national incomes have been in decline globally and

inequality worldwide is far greater than inequality within any single country—but in some countries internal inequality continues to grow rapidly. There is perhaps no country where this trend is more pronounced than in the United Kingdom, where the poorest continue to see their benefits and wages fall. (Dorling, 2014, p. 91)

This global trend has patterned the U.K. labor market and shaped how the constructs of inclusion and marginalization are understood. The devaluation of low-paid manual work coupled with increases in the surplus supply of cheap labor has contributed to the highest levels of unemployment experienced by workers seeking manual work. In Britain, over the past 10 years, immigration has accounted for 80% of all low-skilled workers fueling the wage depression (Diamond, 2010).

Dench, Gavron, and Young’s discussion on the tensions created in the community and competition for scarce-shared public resources, that is, access to health services and social housing as well as dwindling manual skilled jobs in Tower Hamlets could be understood in the analysis of the supply of a new source cheap labor. Specifically, through the prism of immigration equated with the arrival of the Sylheti Bangladeshi migrant workers in the borough. Policy prescriptions by past administrations have not only put stresses on limited public resources, which over the past two decades have been severely underfunded, but also challenged the fixed imagined realities and social groupings of the local population. These patterns of employment and community shaped by the forces of globalization could explain in part many of the experiences of the participants under study in the authors’ discussion on work in Chapter 6 of the book.

At the beginning of 18th century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe at 23% and a major source of both revenue and employment for Britain (Tharoor, 2017). Since the 17th century, the global plutocracy of the British bourgeoisie has exploited the delta region known today as Bangladesh and the surrounding states for their “raw materials and goods; as crops which could be grown on its land. By the twentieth century, another resource was beginning to be valued: cheap labour” (Gardner, 1995, p. 39).

A modern Marxist extension of the argument would suggest that the mobilization of the embodied labor power of the proletariat workers has facilitated the world’s capitalist ruling class bourgeoisie to cultivate what dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank (1966) described, as the creation of an “international division of labour” (p. 142), where “the capitalist core was demanding human resources from its dependent peripheries” (Gardner, 1995, p. 45), so as to extract surplus value from those countries which are comparatively underdeveloped (Fine & Saad-Filho, 2012; LittleJohn, 1972).

Neoliberal thinkers, by contrast, reject Marxian conceptions of core and peripheral development, arguing instead the Transformationalists thesis of globalization. Like postmodernists, both views argue that the process of globalization are not one sided and the incompletion of the proliferation of free markets and government intervention in free markets has resulted in the production of social inequalities and underdevelopment in the labor of developing states, hindering global living standards and economic growth (Held & McGrew, 2003; Jones, 2010). The acceleration of globalization facilitated by modernisation has affected not only the mobility of economic immigration but also the global mobility of labor in what neo-Gramscian theorists have called a post-Fordist regime of accumulation typified of increased insecurity in the workplace, an increase in casual work, part-time work, a decline in real wages, and a decline in collective solidarity and union protection as well as the expansion of the informal economy (Scholte, 2005).

Macrolevel Globalization

Considering these changing global structures, a macrolevel application of the major tenets of Wallerstein’s (1989) world systems approach and Bourdieu’s (1984) interpretation of social structures would ensue that many of the territorial complexities highlighted by the authors’ analysis of the local community are the defining characteristics of a new localism shaped by the forces of globalization. Seen in this light, the migrant Bangladeshi workers that arrived from the periphery into Tower Hamlets could be viewed as the global exchange of material labor that has been ascribed no social position and transported to the capitalist core. Underpinning this structural divide has been the phenomenon of population churn where many of the residents with challenging socioeconomic conditions have left the borough, creating space for those more affluent to move into those vacated spaces.

This gradual process of gentrification has also culminated in the polarization of the classes. Sixty-four years on from the original study, the extraordinarily rich reside in their multi-million-pound houses and apartments in the more affluent parts of the borough such as Wapping and the Isle of Dogs alongside the extremely poor who continue to live in largely underfunded and substandard accommodation; a socioeconomic diversity that Vertovec (2007) termed as “superdiversity” (pp. 1024–1054). In contrast, a neoliberal perspective here would reject a Marxian perspective on globalization by asserting that Wallerstein’s thinking is an overly simplistic, reductionist argument based purely on economic relations and the need for state intervention for the equalization of those on the periphery.

The codas of Dench, Gavron, and Young’s 12-year study of Tower Hamlets also ignores what Jones (2010, p. 60) termed as the “social character of time”. The major events would have taken place over the lifetime of the respondents and shaped the respondents’ perception, which would have altered, according to both time and space. Many of the White working-class respondents had already moved out of the borough since the original case study carried out in 1957. Many of the current respondents were never a part of the historical events of the Second World War which the authors hark back toward to construct the study’s nostalgic narrative. The case study also pays little heed to the fact that many of the Bangladeshi respondents had experienced tumultuous changes in their own lives and changes in their national identity.

This occurred during the end of colonial rule and subsequent partition of the British Indian Empire and the 1970 cyclone that killed half a million Bangladeshis followed by a violent 9-month Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 with West Pakistan that affected so many Bangladeshis and which eventually led to East Pakistan becoming the independent state of Bangladesh. To conduce to the point, “in other words, time equates to the sequence in which events happen, and the historically determined way of how this sequence is ordered, constitutes the social character of time” (Jones, 2010, p. 60). What Dench, Gavron, and Young’s case study falls short in is acknowledging that Castells (1991) conception of time and space succinctly points to is that this transformation in both time and space is what has changed social relations between the White working class and the immigrant Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets.

A central organizing concept in globalization is the compression of both time and space because of global modernization, akin to what Giddens (1990, p. 71) termed as “time–space distanciation”. Giddens appreciated components of the global optimists reasoning behind globalization but rejected the notion that globalization could only be understood through economic interactions in contemporary life. Giddens argued that globalization could be understood through the experience of both space and time in a ruptured process he called “time space distanciation,” where social relations are shaped and patterned by transportation, information, communication technology, and the global media. Harvey (1993) explained how the compression of time and space could lead to a diminishing of spatial boundaries and an existential fear of being dis-embedded as well as displaced from the milieu. The application of Gidden’s space–time compression and Harvey’s construct of the erosion of spatial boundaries could be applied as a lens to explain many of the resultant complexities and resentments felt by the local White working-class respondents toward the arriving Bangladeshi community.

What Dench, Gavron, and Young’s epistemology fails to postulate correctly, as Les (2009, p. 16) points out, is that ‘London’s social fabric is woven through global interconnections that are threaded through the local community’. Community relations are subject to global influences and challenge the generalized statements of the notions of community; factors such as migration can change the spatial boundaries and meanings attributed to the local or community. Over the past 30 years, globalization and immigration has transformed parts of London. In the 1980s, British unemployment was soaring. The overall population of London fell below 7 million people: fewer than in the post war years. Large numbers of homes in the east end of London were derelict with neighborhoods deteriorating and populated with unemployed working-class workers. Through global economic integration and immigration, London became a cosmopolitan outward looking economic city that it is now (Avent, 2016). London, especially the east end of London, remains the economic sphere of national prosperity generating almost as much tax as the next 37 cities combined and relies on globalization to generate a quarter of the wealth of the United Kingdom and maintain its global appeal in the labor market (Albrow et al., 1994; Jenkins, 2016). The potency of the British economy to maintain its dominance in the global labor market has relied on many parts of the economy. Especially, the London and south east workforce from farm workers, factory workers, domestic helpers, car washers, and National Health Service workers, immigration has facilitated and attracted workers into more humble, low-skilled jobs that many lower skilled indigenous workers have hitherto been reluctant to compete with immigrants to deploy their labor power.

Throughout history, “the mobility of people has always been an inherent part of colonialism and industrialisation” (Castles & Davidson, 2000, p. 8). It is not coincidence that has brought many of the Bangladeshi immigrants to Tower Hamlets and further afield but a sequence of historically determined events, which has shaped the social make up, and events that have transpired within the borough. The historical link between Tower Hamlets and Sylhet, where over 90% of the immigrant population originate from, can be traced back to the 141,000 laborers who arrived from the surrounding states from the period of 1890 and 1900 (Rizvi, 1975), setting the foundations for the next generation of laborers that would go on to steadily shape the east London borough of Tower Hamlets and beyond.

The earliest immigrants were predominantly lascars (Indian seaman) that did not return home but found work in what is now called the docklands (Adams, 1994). Through organized legal immigration, the number of Bangladeshi immigrants arriving by the 1960s and 1970s had swelled. These populations settled mostly around Aldgate, occupied houses and professions previously held by the Jewish population many of whom by now had moved away from east London (Kerrigan, 1982). The invisible thread that binds time and history together here could be argued as being the remnants of the material base of imperialism and the rise of capitalism. “Imperialism was an integral element in the development of capitalism and helped shape its economic, political, social and cultural characteristics” (Munck, 2002, p. 39), which have facilitated, through policy prescriptions on immigration, the mobility of Bangladeshis as British subjects to cross national borders from the former colonies in search of better economic, social, and educational standards. These standards were not guaranteed by the former colonies but only to those who possess the acculturation and identity conferred by British citizenship (Finch et al., 2010).

Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Forces

Tower Hamlets has historically been a transnational gateway for generations of migrants, refugees, and laborers that have defined the changing demographical contexts of both being and belonging in the social space of the borough. Beginning with the 50,000 Huguenot refugees in the 17th century, Protestants fleeing religious persecution in France were followed by Jewish settlers that set up the rag trade in Brick lane among the other industries that were followed by the Bangladeshis. Today, the Bangladeshis occupy the previously disorganized social spaces left behind by the successive migrant groups that have since vacated the borough. All these groups have historically been the subject of unjustified abuse, scapegoated, and apportioned blame for the historical and current ills of the host society, despite contributing little to the perceived problems of the host society and often living in abject poverty (Glynn, 2014; Kerrigan, 1982; Rashid, 2019; Thornton, 1983).

In Britain, the print media has aggressively pushed and reorganized the debate on anti-immigration populism and permanently imprinted a series of straw men, a distorted discourse disconnected from reality. Most economists and academics now concede in the current global climate, the emerging picture of globalization remains opaque. On June 23, 2016, the fifth largest economy in the world and its citizens, the British public, voted in a referendum to leave the European union of 28 countries with 17.4 million of Britain’s population rejecting the idea of the free movement of people and liberal multiculturalism.

Amid austerity, in a move some academics have labeled a “21st century peasants’ revolt without the pitchforks,” socioeconomic and sociocultural forces converged and played a pivotal part in Britain’s decision to exit the European single market and retreat back to its borders and nationalism. With the educated, apportioning blame on the less educated, the young blaming the old and with the elite blaming the poor (Letts, 2016, p. 1). The absent discourse from these global proceedings was seldom highlighted, that is, the rights of workers in Britain. The self-ejection of Britain on January 31, 2020, from the single largest goods and trade market has meant that it is now able to unsubscribe and replace the Human Rights Bill with its own interpretation of human rights: a British bill of rights, effectively diminishing the 15 protected rights of every individual, from inequality and injustice, from government and large corporations that was introduced in 1998 by the previous Labour administration. For many immigrant workers and minority groups such as the Windrush generation that arrived in Britain from 1948 to 1973, these changes mean the prospect of equal access to shared public resources such as housing and jobs remain dire under more recent policy changes.

Despite national resentment toward immigration, London and the southeast comparably have a more tolerant attitude toward globalization. The authors’ study of the Bangladeshi population of east London has a misplaced psychological footing in that it ignores many of the structural problems that were coinciding with the arrival and surge of immigrant Bengali workers. As Goodhart (2013) points out, in many of the cities in Britain, the industrial decline had already eroded away the sentiments and social capital that had promoted White working-class solidarity. Social and economic changes would have swept aside the working class even if there were slight or nil immigration. Fifteen years on since the publication of the study, the social character of the borough has changed. The White working class does not exist the way the study has presented them, and scapegoating or apportioning blame on immigrants and minority groups on the strength of a handful of anecdotes and minor facts, does not constitute empirical data required to render a reading on immigration. The dialectical relationship between national, local, and transnational scales have become more complicated in space and time where the local rather than the national has become the contesting ground for the reconceptualization of identity and group membership (Schiller & Çağlar, 2011).

Alternative Perspective

The authors did not directly engage with the working-class population in Tower Hamlets or with the diasporic community. Separating from the world they were studying, the authors relied on teams of researchers, and in the case of the Bangladeshi community, on a team of translators and informants to extrapolate the data for construct validity. The authors deliberately reformatted the original questionnaire to include questions which narrowed the focus away from the central themes and invited preformed responses concerning race. Judged by its own criterion for consistency, this would clearly allow the authors to detract from its central claim of conducting a repeat case study and instead choose very carefully what data to include and what data to exclude to construct a narrative arc for the study (Healy & Perry, 2000).

The authors’ analysis failed to recognize diasporic communities such as the Bangladeshi community have deeply interpenetrated networks that run along complex patriarchal ties. Any informant selected would be all too aware of the need for a sanitized and sympathetic portrayal of the community, as misrepresentation of the community could be easily traced back to the informant and their family. As monolingual qualitative researchers, the authors’ inability to speak Sylheti Bengali created a methodological language barrier, hindering their ability to fully interpret and define the Bangladeshi community’s Islamic cultural mode of communal organization and Sylheti social conduct.

A more direct spoken engagement with the respondents by the authors would have revealed a richer construct of the borough’s complex Bengali sociology that did not rely on the mastery of translated interview transcripts alone and limited secondary literature searches. As a case in point, Dr. Roseanna Pollen’s constructivism approach with her field work with the Bangladeshi community and her ability to speak in the correct native Sylheti dialect allowed her what Max Weber’s sociology characteristically would have defined as a verstehen engagement with her Bengali respondent’s. Thus, ensuring a dialogical trust that facilitated an immediate respect for cultural propriety and awareness of Bengali Islamic macro social conventions without the need for explanation of the embedded private axiological norms. Dr. Pollen’s immersion and close contact with the community both as a family doctor (GP) with a practice in Florida Street, Bethnal Green since 1984 and as an academic researcher since 1994 has allowed her to sensitively shape her questions and research methodology with the Sylheti-speaking Bangladeshis and brought to fruition one of the most penetrative, authentic, and faithful accounts recorded of the Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets (Pollen, 2002; Weber, 1947/2012).

In contrast, Dench, Gavron, and Young’s manipulation of their interview questionnaires and reliance on perspectives of other researchers and informants has resulted in the authors never meeting many of the respondents, despite having a none-governmental think tank research institute for decades in 18 Victoria Park Square in Bethnal Green. As an alternative, the authors chose to look toward words to construct their case-based research. This process has its limitations, as Finnegan (1992, p. 233) points out “looking to words on their own is too narrow” as the interview process when word verbatim transcribed does not succinctly capture the “kinesics and proxemics; accent, intonation and emphasis; acoustic and visual elements; transcription and interpretation: all are at play in this ethnography of speaking” (Finnegan, 1992, p. 42). This would explain why the authors failed to clearly describe the respondents or the level of engagement of the respondents within the locality, the uneven microlevel focus of local opinions which focused on the highly racialized views of the resentful White working class who felt threatened by the processes of globalization. As an alternative approach, greater direct involvement in the interview process could have aided the authors in constructing a more methodologically reliable and focused study.

The Bangladeshi population is not the only minority group that can be found in Tower Hamlets. Although for many communities 9/11 ushered the end of multiculturalism. The influx of immigration in the borough has led to a new urban diversity: a “diversity turn” grounded locally but devoid of the cultural essentialisms found in the study (Berg & Sigona, 2013, pp. 347–360). Fifteen years since the publication of the case study, the borough’s social geography has altered beyond the ethnographical account of the research. Shifts in working-class families have resulted in more women working than two decades ago. Policy changes in welfare dependency and job training have resulted with more people in work and rising property prices have locked out some low-income groups while enabling others. The borough has a strong Polish, Greek, Turkish, African, and second-generation Jewish population. A discussion on the arrival of the next generation of workers from Europe and afar would have illuminated the case study further. The case study largely ignored the emerging and culturally perceptive artisanal middle classes that were settling in the borough at the time of the study and have since transformed the old undesirable working-class jobs in the borough into up scaled hybrid forms of manual and digital knowledge work in what has become known as the urban hipster culture (Ocejo, 2017). Wessendorf (2013, pp. 407–422) termed these social trends as the “common place diversity” in the borough’s growing rich diversity of culture. As an alternative perspective, a discussion on the multiple faiths and multiple festivals that bind the urban economy and cultural ecosystem and cut across cultural differences would have further enlightened the study.

For many millions of people in Bangladesh, the process of globalization has led to small steps in modernization and facilitated the support and fruition of macro and micro economies in the most rural parts of the country. This transformation was not a product of policy but remittances from first-generation immigrants working in the Middle East and Britain. Sylhet has had five decades of remittance cash flow into the city from Britain’s first generation of Bangladeshi immigrants. The second and third generations of British born Bangladeshis, who are socially conditioned by western values with fewer ties to the construct of homeland, also have less of an obligation to follow such practices (Saunders, 2010). As an alternative test case, a discussion on the dwindling flow of remittance from second- and third-generation Bangladeshis to Sylhet would have made for an interesting discussion and how these British-driven microeconomies are finding alternative means of self-sufficiency.

Conclusion

Globalization under a neo liberal consensus has further distributed more of the world’s wealth to those who are already wealthy with fewer of the benefits going to the poor in what could be described as a later day extension of the bourgeoisie mode of production. A broad global perspective suggests globalization has developed in an uneven way and contributed to a surge in income inequality. Modernization in today’s changing economy has resulted in increases in productivity that has been de-coupled from increases in employment and income. This transformation has led to Bourgeoisie countries becoming even wealthier and the companies owned by them becoming even more efficient, but workers’ income have not risen accordingly and advancements in technology have replaced people with machines resulting in fewer jobs being created.

We now live in a knowledge-based economy, a digital revolution where economic performance depends more on the skills of fewer exceptional people. The defining feature then of growth and globalization under the current epoch is a return to inequality. The real challenge facing today’s economy and society is whether a knowledge-based economy can be organized to provide fair paid work for the section of the working-class population when they currently lack the education and skills needed to compete in what is now a global labor market and digital labor market (Scholz, 2017). These uneven global changes have permeated into every facet of social life and governed changes in the construct of community and belongingness, “those living and working within the east London borough of Tower Hamlets have experienced, in the most acute form, the economic and social impact of international and global forces” (Eade, 1997, p. 129). Modernization has facilitated the exportation of manual labor work abroad and created sharp disparities in wages and living standards and these changes have forced working-class communities such as those in Tower Hamlets into marginalized positions within the labor market. The absence of a university education, changes in the economy, and a surplus supply of manual labor within the borough have further created job polarization for the working-class community that had equally trapped the first-generation Bangladeshi immigrants in the same position.

Young and Willmott’s (1957) original study was carried out at a time when the people of Tower Hamlets were experiencing social and structural changes with post war acute shortages of labor, inflows of immigration tailored to fill those shortages, and a shared sense of sanguinity. Nearly a half century later and 10 years into their follow-up study, Michael Young passed away in 2002 leaving co-authors Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron to continue his work and publish their follow-up research in 2006 and qualify Young’s assertion that global forces, market norm, and market values would erode social norms and social values that formed much of the social glue in unifying the people of the east end. The authors argued that state policy prescriptions when filtered down would have local implications disconnected from its often positively prescribed inception.

Marx (1897/2005, p. 27) famously marked that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” At the close of 2020, the year of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the end of the Brexit transition period and a Conservative government, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, and Michael Young’s study still mirrors past social stories in today’s social landscape. The most salient being the declining support of the working class for the Labour party throughout the 1980s and early 1990s which the authors documented in their study that today in 2021 have strikingly similarities with the 2019 general election, with labour losing support in traditional areas made up of working-class voters. Competition for scarce public resources remains high with deep government cuts in both public spending overall and cuts in council housing budgets, which have circumscribed the availability of subsidized social housing further with more than 18,000 in housing waiting lists and a further 2,000 homeless families living in temporary accommodation in Tower Hamlets (Homelessness Strategy Outline, 2016).

Moreover, in closing, immigration is and remains a staple feature of globalization and is a part of modernism and economics. Both the original and follow-up studies have featured as staple syllabus texts in British sociological studies, but spatial-temporal changes have widened the disconnection between the methodology deployed and the framing of the subjects under analysis. Today, the nature of immigration is vastly different with completely different groups with diverging stories arriving in Tower Hamlets. The Sylheti-speaking Bangladeshi groups that arrived in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and put down roots in Tower Hamlets have agency and have moved beyond the discussions of the research as immigrants and as such are settled citizens of the cultural mosaic of Tower Hamlets.