Sociology

Forced migration - including refugee flows, asylum seekers, internal displacement and development-induced displacement - has increased considerably in volume and political significance since the end of the Cold War. It has become an integral part of North-South relationships and is closely linked to current processes of global social transformation. This makes it as important for sociologists to develop empirical research and analysis on forced migration as it is to include it in their theoretical understandings of contemporary society. The study of forced migration is linked to research on economic migration, but has its own specific research topics, methodological problems and conceptual issues. Forced migration needs to be analysed as a social process in which human agency and social networks play a major part. It gives rise to fears of loss of state control, especially in the context of recent concerns about migration and security. In this context, it is essential to question earlier sociological approaches, which have been based on the principle of relatively autonomous national societies. The sociology of forced migration must be a transnational and interdisciplinary undertaking.

The way in which migrants are incorporated into society varies according to which society is being examined. The British model is loosely based on notions of multiculturalism. Groups of migrants are considered to constitute a community and, through community leaders, the needs of the group can be conveyed to others. The same model has been used for the incorporation of refugees into society and informs current legislation and policy as well as the work of refugee support agencies. Furthermore, research on refugees often looks at one or more refugee `communities'. More recently, groups of refugees, including Bosnian refugees arriving in Britain as part of the UNHCR programme in December 1992, have been considered as transnational communities or as diasporas, that is, scattered communities. This article looks at the refugees themselves and the community associations that have been established and concludes that the associations exist largely as a result of the benefits that can be obtained through them and that there is no informal Bosnian community. Instead, there is a contingent community: a group of people who will, to some extent, conform to the expectations of the host society in order to gain the advantages of a formal community association, whilst the private face of the group remains unconstituted as a community.

The paper examines, in a comparative way, the situation of refugees settled in Italy and the Netherlands. It examines how refugees themselves perceive their social condition in the two contrasting `models' of integration in Italy and the Netherlands and how they define integration success and develop strategies to achieve their goals. The narratives of refugees explored in this paper documents that integration, as it is perceived and desired by the refugees themselves, is both about its functional aspects and about social participation in the wider community. These aspects of integration consist of sets of overlapping processes that take place differently in various spheres of the receiving society and have various outcomes. It is argued that policy should recognize this complexity and acknowledge refugees as social actors rather than turning them into policy objects in order to facilitate integration in each of these sub-sectors.

Ethnic categories in Kosovo as well as in Italy have been shaped and reshaped according to public politics and local power relations. Focusing on the treatment of the Roma minority, this article examines the complexity of the relationship between labelling and policy in two different contexts: Kosovo and Italy. It highlights the impact that bureaucratic and institutional actors have on the process of identity building of the Roma/Gypsies community. Labels not only contribute actively to the definition of collective identities, but, as instruments of a political system, they express and summarize its structure. The article concludes by emphasizing that labels and policies not only play a role and, in some ways, create the objective of their action, but once they define a group of people as a community, through the allocation of resources, they actually create a community: from `nomads' to nomads.

Studies of the application of research in policy and service delivery suggest that the translation of research findings into practice is not straightforward. Practitioners are criticized for failing to base actions on research evidence, while academic research is sometimes condemned as `irrelevant' to practice. This paper argues that this conflict derives in part from an academic model of research constructed in opposition to practice. Reflections on scientific logocentrism (claims to possess unmediated knowledge of reality) and `transgressive' action research provide a critique of traditional research and suggest an alternative, practice-based research model. Three propositions for generating `practice-based evidence' are identified. Firstly, the pursuit of knowledge should be acknowledged as a local and contingent process. Secondly, research activity should be constitutive of difference, questioning the legitimation and repression of particular aspects of the world. Finally, theory-building should be seen as an adjunct to practical activity. Together, these positions dissolve the researcher/researched and research/practice oppositions in traditional research and supply an ethically and politically engaged research. Practice-based research is explored in terms of four moments in the research process.

The notions of active citizenship and community involvement have become increasingly prominent in political discussions and policy practices within Britain in the past 15 years. This is a significant development as the modus operandi of modern liberal democracies has been a representative mode of government in which the wider citizenry has a passive role. This paper contextualizes active citizenship in terms of the interrelationship between civic society and the political realm. The Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality has made a concerted attempt to examine such issues. Governmentality regards government, not in the conventional sense as the provenance of centralized institutions, where interest groups and ideologies play their part, but as a complex and ever-changing process that forges ways of thinking about governing with a myriad of practices that proliferate throughout society. Whilst it is informative, it is questioned whether this analytic approach can fully explain and illuminate political developments like active citizenship, given its rejection of realist and critical approaches to government. The second half of the paper addresses such concerns. Here, community involvement is regarded as a contested notion and one where the central state has played a prominent role. To highlight these analytical points, the historical development and political configuration of community involvement over the past 20 years is traced. It is shown that central government, through policies influenced by contrasting ideological conceptions of citizenship and political expediency, has played a key role in shaping community involvement.

This paper attempts to retheorize school `choice'; to begin to unpack dominant contemporary misconceptions through an examination of the `choices' available to 454 inner city 10 and 11 year-olds engaging in the process of primary-secondary school transfer in England. The prevalent focus within educational theorizing on `choice' as a form of agency often masks the fact that `choice' is a marker of economic privilege. The more distant subjects are from economic necessity the more `choice' becomes a possibility. In contrast, the majority of children in our research study had no `choice' but to make a virtue out of necessity. They were forced to accept the least bad option. Particularly disadvantaged were the large numbers of refugees in the sample and those children, cutting across class and ethnicity, who chose `against the grain'. We conclude that school `choice' is an issue of power and constraint, of class and racial processes, although the possibilities of `choice' cannot in any straightforward way be seen as conterminous with class positioning, implicating, as it does, both ethnicity and fractions and differences within classes as well as between them.

The paper builds up a conceptual picture of two types of governance - network and organic. In this process it highlights the legitimacies of co-ordination (interior authority and democracy) that lie outside Weber's typology of domination and are relatively neglected in governance literature. The exploration of interior authority, through discussion of identity and substantive liberty, reflects a perspective on human agency that acknowledges the interconnection of the social and non-social and links sociological understanding of agency with political philosophy. It is suggested that this theoretical work gives some necessary content to Weber's concept of inner distance. In turn, this also has implications for our understanding of what is involved in democratizing governance.