Social cohesion, commitment and trust

Social cohesion, commitment and trust was one of the topics covered at our 2017 annual conference

Reported by Dr Charlotte Sausman, Department of Politics and International Studies and Sam Cole, PhD student, Institute of Criminology

Chaired by Julia Unwin, former Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, panel members included Tom Hook, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Professor Dominic Abrams, University of Kent, and Dr Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge.

To hear the session in full, please click on the image below:

Discussion was chaired by Julia Unwin, who set the scene by recognising the challenges of better defining the concept of social cohesion, calling for a more nuanced understanding of local community dynamics before the promotion of social cohesion is recommended as a catch-all policy prescription.

The first speaker, Tom Hook, took us through what social cohesion meant for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. The borough has seen its BME population increase from 15% in 2011 to currently more than 50%. There are pressures on affordable housing, and significant changes to the economic status of the borough with the loss of its industrial base in recent years. In the borough, strong familiar social ties have sometimes served to impede young people’s aspirations, with the borough attempting to update ‘nostalgic’ views of cohesion in order to ensure residents are able to compete in a highly mobile job market.

What is the policy challenge here?

The challenge is how to build homes, create jobs, and enact a social cohesion policy in difficult economic circumstances and with a reduced budget. Social cohesion can be defined ‘top down’ using terms including integration, inequality, social capital and trust; it can also be defined ‘bottom up’ through people’s experiences, their sense of connection, well-being and belonging, and can be defined in different ways by different people.

Policy involves addressing questions such as: Do people connect? Do people have experiences of prejudice or discrimination? Through the panel discussions, we also learned how policy makers try to understand the dynamics involved in processes of cohesion and conflict, and how they may be related, rather than viewing them as opposite ends on a spectrum. In terms of countervailing processes, unity from social cohesion can also present problems and be a vehicle for unrest.

How do we combat extremism?

Professor Abrams reported on academic work which empirically demonstrates how communities can become a ‘vehicle for conflict’ in response to certain events, citing the EU referendum as a most recent example which forced individuals into discordant new group mentalities. He also referred to research which identifies practical strategies for recognising and celebrating diversity, in order to break up the negative effects of strong social cohesion. Discussion led on to combating extremism and understanding the forces that might lead to extremism. A question was posed from the floor, ‘is there an innoculation against extremism?’

We heard from academic psychologist Dr Sander van der Linden that the role of education is important, for example in teaching media literacy to combat extremist propaganda - he presented information on the effectiveness of a fake news vaccine which attempts to ensure that between-group conflict is minimised where misinformation is circulated online and he also discussed the (perhaps surprising) finding that groups lead to more extreme positions than individuals.

So, the question became: do we want social cohesion or not? The response from the panel was that some kind of cohesion in various forms tends to occur and is desirable for integration; the question for policy makers is how to understand it, and potentially manage and influence it, in order to achieve desirable outcomes.

Learning from a social science perspective about how to understand these social processes and what lies behind them, leads to an overriding aim of ‘valuing complexity’ and understanding both its positive and negative effects.

The Centre for Science and Policy is planning to host a Policy Workshop on civil society in October 2017.

Thumbnail image: Stephen Cysewski, Flickr

Banner image: Garry Knight, Flickr