Session 6: The Normative and the Institutional
Session 6: The Normative and the Institutional
Chair: Felicity Thomas
The Institutional Context of Immigrant Incorporation
Ron Angel
Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA
The massive migration of peoples, both for economic and political reasons, represents a core component of globalization that is redefining the nation state system at the same time that it draws attention to the stark differences in wealth and life chances between rich and poor nations. Calls for secure borders in the United States and Europe and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments and political parties of the far right are part of a changing discourse in which the problem of immigration is framed by populist rhetoric in terms of the threat to security and cultural identity. The phenomenon reaches far beyond the demographics of migration from areas of limited opportunity to those of greater opportunity and even beyond considerations of formal immigration policy. Within the framework of globalization and the international flow of labor as well as capital, institutional theory provides the opportunity to examine the structural context within which migration occurs and the cultural and social change it brings with it. Identities, both of immigrants and longer-term citizens, are formed and maintained within political, religious, cultural, and legal institutions. Group identity and the reflexively created individual self do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they directly reflect beliefs, norms, practices, or symbolic systems of larger collectivities independent of their institutional context.
Culture inheres in institutions, as does the self. Institutions provide opportunities for change at the same time that they constrain individual consciousness and freedom of action. For certain institutional theorists institutions consists of the taken for granted rules of the game or the norms and belief systems that constrain individual actions. For others institutions are the formal arrangements that define a corporate body or formally organized group enterprise. Recent work in institutional theory focuses on the role of ideas, in addition to interests, in determining institutional evolution. Social institutions and their key actors help define and redefine social reality by providing cognitive frames in terms of which social actions are interpreted. Today NGOs and other civil society institutions are part of the process of immigrant incorporation and also part of the attempt to change the image of the immigrant from that of dangerous foreigner to that of a productive addition to society. Their efforts to further a multicultural agenda are in direct opposition to the frames promoted by the far right. What is clear is that discussions of multiculturalism, incorporation, and cultural assimilation are dominated by interested and engaged institutions that embody and institutionalize various political perspectives. Understanding the role of such institutions in the process of migration is essential to understanding how structure and agency interact to determine the direction and content of cultural change, as well as the degree of stigmatization or acceptance that immigrants experience. This paper provides a preliminary theoretical exploration of the institutional context of migration and its consequences for both the immigrant and the receiving society.
The Place of Culture in the University
Andrew Harvey
Deputy Director (Academic), Bendigo Campus, La Trobe University, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Universities are increasingly defined by the culture and values they represent. The need to develop a distinctive institutional culture is motivated by several factors, including an increasingly competitive environment in which contextual differences, such as place, assume greater importance; product convergence driven by demands for commensurability of degrees, which in turn leads to emphases on mode, context and culture of delivery; globalisation, whose impact necessitates close consideration of diversity, social responsibility and global citizenship; and evidence about student demand, which suggests that students are attracted to universities not only for what they offer, but by what they represent. These trends suggest that successful universities of the future will be defined by their culture, including their relationships to local, national and global contexts. Both the content and context of university course offerings will be shaped increasingly by a set of institutional values, themselves informed by the aspirations and beliefs of students. At a time of unparalleled focus on the individual, it is paradoxically the notion of collective identity which is now central to the university mission.
This paper will focus on one element of the development of institutional culture: the relationship of the university to place. Relations to place are in part borne of geographical exigencies, but are also value-laden and attitudinal. Under globalisation, location represents an opportunity for universities to obtain comparative advantage, but geography must be harnessed to culture for this promise to be fulfilled. Place relations can be used in the content and delivery of course offerings to instil broad values such as a commitment to engage students, build social capital, harness diversity, promote social justice, and respect the physical and social environment. By building an institutional identity around these values, universities can develop the concepts of place-based education, community engagement and global citizenship in a consistent, coherent, and pedagogically effective way.
Reaching For My Gun: Why We Shouldn’t Hear the Word “Culture” in Normative Political Theory
Simon Cushing
Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan-Flint, Flint, MI, USA
Culture is a notoriously elusive concept. This fact has done nothing to hinder its popularity in contemporary analytic political philosophy among writers like John Rawls, Will Kymlicka, Michael Walzer, David Miller, Iris Marion Young, Joseph Raz, Avishai Margalit and Bikhu Parekh, among many others. However, this should stop, both for the metaphysical reason that the concept of culture, like that of race, is itself either incoherent or lacking a referent in reality, and for several normative reasons. I focus on the following interconnected points:
1) The vagueness of the term allows a myriad of candidates to claim rights, and typically to the detriment of increased equality (e.g., the claim that homosexual marriage is a “threat to traditional marriage”) and environmental goals (e.g., the polluting rights of the Amish).
2) Cultural capital cannot be regulated in the way that political capital must be regulated without undermining the cultures supposedly being protected. And the possession of cultural capital is almost never democratically regulated. In particular, granting cultures political status creates intergenerational conflict, rewarding the elders and creating incentives to be conservative and restrict cultural mobility of the younger generation.
3) The notion of a group owning “its” culture is conceptually suspect and corrupted by the foregoing points about unequal cultural capital. In defending a group’s right to preserve its culture we do not defend equally the rights of the individuals that make it up (and assuming that the group paying lip service to liberal values overrides culturally ingrained inequities is to ignore the distinctive ways oppression can be realized in different ways of life), and we ignore altogether the rights of those who may be unfairly denied recognition as “members” of the culture (for example, African Americans enslaved by Native Americans but now excluded from nation membership).
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