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In 1985, the influential American anthropologist Clifford Geertz delivered one of the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The purpose of his lecture, entitled “The Uses of Diversity,” was to address not just certain globally changing empirical conditions, but also the ways that those conditions are conceived. The set of changes that Geertz described was that the world was increasingly becoming more connected and more mobile (still a rather novel notion in the 1980s), and hence “cultures” could not be situated in specific places (if they ever could be). Another, related point of his lecture was that any idea of social difference that was based on fixed and bounded identity categories was changing too. Geertz emphasized that these trends do not stop people from ill-treating others based on ethnocentrism and crude stereotypes. What’s needed in light of these matters, he urged, is a conceptual re-orientation to social difference that might, quite literally and thoroughly, change our minds. “It is in this,” Geertz (1986: 274) said, “strengthening the power of our imaginations to grasp what is in front of us, that the uses of diversity, and of the study of diversity, lie.”
The global trends that Geertz spoke of in the 1980s have continued through the present day, albeit with different speeds, shapes, factors and outcomes from place to place. Societies around the world are diversifying profoundly. This takes many forms, manners, and courses – indeed, we might best talk of many overlapping, entangled and mutually determining diversifications – from the skewed globalization of neoliberal practices and spread of consumer goods, popular media, and modes of communication, through the diffusion of ideas, policies and social movements, to the multiplication of lifestyles, family structures, identities, moral codes, and social practices. Global migration is a key component of diversification processes. Most obviously, this is because migrants tend to bring newness to their societies of arrival, influencing the nature of social categories such as race, ethnicity and nationality, contributing to the corpus of cultural forms including styles, cuisines, and artistic expressions, expanding sets of linguistic and semiotic practices, enlarging the array and expressions of religious traditions, and extending or initiating social and political initiatives. Diversification is also inherently bound up with many kinds of inequalities, too. Who or what changes by way of diversification is both determined by and a determinant of patterns of social stratification. Diversification is thus one of the foremost social processes of our age. As we consider the future, impacted profoundly by climate change, it is clear that diversification will continue to shape societies the world over – again in uneven and unfair ways as some people, depending on their combination of characteristics, will suffer climate impacts far more than others.
Superdiversity is a concept coined to convey the multidimensional nature of diversification processes and how these condition social patterns and stratification. It was conceived by me, and is still largely invoked by others, as a way to think about and approach research concerning contemporary migration processes and outcomes. The concept of superdiversity also offers a way to consider other concurrent modes of diversification. Superdiversity and diversification are notions pointing to the ongoing creation of ever more complex societies. What is considered in the idea of superdiversity, what is entailed in processes of diversification, and how can we understand the rise of new forms of social complexity? These are among the main questions engaged by this book.
What’s at stake?
Diversification entails a fundamental mode of social transformation. With this statement, I draw upon important academic works on the idea of social transformation to indicate a kind and degree of change that cuts across economic, political, social and cultural terrains as well as macro- to micro-scales (see Smelser 1998; Wiltshire 2001; Castles 2001, 2010; Rosenau 2003). When we speak of social transformation, we are talking about extensive shifts in the ways societies are organized and in the ways we think about them. As societies diversify across a range of scales, from the national, urban, and neighbourhood to the classroom, workplace and local park, inherent features of the social are subject to change. This includes the ways we conceptually categorize one another, the attitudes we have towards those deemed however “different,” the interactions and practices that arise or are reproduced by encounters with others, and the social positions or statuses that both underpin and develop out of all of these. Diversification and evolving dynamics of diversity affect changes at the core of social structure and social relations. For these reasons, following Geertz, the study of diversification and diversity must be one of the most fundamental areas of social science inquiry. It involves the attempt to understand how we live, how we can live and how we are going to live together as intrinsically distinctive people.
The study of diversification and diversity itself is certainly not new, nor of course is the phenomenon of highly diverse societies. Since ancient times, most societies and certainly empires in the past were highly diverse linguistically, religiously, and in terms of what we now describe as ethnicity (see among others, Grillo 1998, Greatrex and Mitchell 2000; Hoerder 2002; Heather 2010; McInerney 2014; Blanton 2015; Vertovec 2015). The distinguished historian William McNeill (1986) famously asserted that “polyethnicity” was the condition describing practically all societies throughout history. Further, he noted, the idea of societies being actually or ideally “homogeneous” (ethnically and racially, linguistically and religiously) was something that arose as a kind of historical aberration, based on modernist nation-building pursuits especially in Western Europe since about 1750. However, such a presumption of homogeneity-as-norm and diversity-as-exception has long shaped not only national narratives and policies, but social scientific paradigms as well (coinciding with the “container model” of nation states upon which “methodological nationalism” is based; cf. Beck 2000, 2002, 2004; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Accordingly, we have had numerous sociological studies of what diversity, arguably seen as a deviation from an ideal state, “does” to societies. This includes well known (and criticized) studies of diversity as: a threat to social cohesion (Putnam 2007), a hindrance to political and economic development (Alesina and Ferrara 2005), or a significant if not problematic factor in the redistribution of public goods (Singh and Vom Hau 2016). This is countered by more positive views, still based on a kind of diversity-as-exception premise, such as that the introduction of diversity is a key to stimulating creativity and innovation in urban settings (Florida 2002) and similarly to building more effective, problem-solving management teams (Page 2007). For a long time – but seemingly exacerbated more recently – the belief that diversification is a threat to homogeneous nation-states underlays much right-wing nationalism as well.
While few societies have actually ever been “homogeneous,” the idea of the homogeneous nation has without a doubt played a central role in creating hierarchical social structures and systems of inequality, greatly affecting those who have been categorized as outside the homogenous norm. Thus, it also provides the basis of most national discourses and policies concerning social “integration” (Favell 2022). This is a key reason why it is essential to consider dynamics of social categorization when seeking to understand how societies (again, right down to micro-scales) are organized and reproduced. It is particularly essential during times, such as the present, when diversifications of many kinds are proceeding, if not increasing, apace.
For some years at the University of Oxford, I taught a postgraduate course on the Anthropology of Cultural Complexity. This included critical reviews of thinking about historical and cross-cultural forms of social organization, through to considering what phenomena and processes are at play in so-called plural societies, border cultures, syncretism and creolization, global-local relations, diasporas and transnationalism. As my students and I examined a wide assortment of relevant literature, it became clearer each term that whatever we consider to be social and cultural complexity entails not just structures of power and sets of social relations, but inherently the ways people construct and implement conceptions about the nature of groups and identities. It is both social organization and social categories that combine to produce ever more complex social dynamics, as well as modes of stratification. This view runs through the book and is the focus of theoretical development in the last chapters.
Once again, now is a vital time to study diversification and forms of diversity. In the 21st century, “The world is much more diverse on multiple dimensions and at many levels, typified by the salience of differences and their dynamic intersections” (Jones and Dovidio 2018: 45). The reasons for this are numerous, including the facts that:
worldwide, societies are diversifying – ethnically/racially, linguistically, religiously, and along several other characteristics – considerably through migration;
- in many countries, even apart from migration, populations are also diversifying through natural demographic growth within a range of existing categories, along with a marked rise in the number of people identifying with “mixed” backgrounds;
- there is more evidence and public concern about growing social and economic inequalities – disparities surrounding resources, opportunities, material outcomes, representation and relative social status – and the ways in which these are disproportionately distributed in relation to categories of social “difference”;
- rapid diversification is known to stimulate support for populist right-wing parties, while significantly at the same time, as measured in academic studies and public opinion surveys, pro-diversity attitudes remain high and stable. Such divergent trends and patterns of attitudes contribute to growing social and political fragmentation of societies; and
- while an escalating number of cities around the world are becoming what some, correctly or incorrectly, term “majority-minority,” everyday urban exposure to complex forms of diversity is now often considered commonplace or “normal.”
The superdiversity concept
Multiculturalism, interculturalism, and “diversity” itself, as a normative concept and policy term, have been notions in play across the public sphere for many years. They have done much work, not least by way of providing a view onto the representation of “difference” in society. Further, these terms have been operationalized in social policies and institutional practices to variable effect. Inherent to each – or at least within prominent interpretations of each – is a kind of premise that social difference is something that can or should be “managed,” usually from the top down (i.e., arranged by a state agency or public organization). A common critique follows, namely that each of these terms tends to be based on, or at least replicate, a rather flat, homogenizing or unidimensional view of difference: that is, that every person belongs to one or another group that can be represented by the presence of a single individual in an organization or activity. This is well encapsulated in the critical words of one British civil servant, who said: “If you think that adding me to your Board creates diversity, you’d be wrong. I am middle aged, in senior management and Oxbridge educated. The fact that I am Asian does not make any difference. On a charity Board I am just more of the same” (in Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010: 25). Such approaches to difference may tend to equalize categories: race is treated as equivalent to gender which is equivalent to sexuality or disability, etc. Questions of dissimilar social positions and power relations might also often be sidelined in these approaches to difference as well. Debates over the pros and cons of multiculturalism, interculturalism, and “diversity” very much continue in both academic and institutional domains (see for instance, Vertovec 2012; Meer et al. 2016; Grillo 2018; Carlsson and Pijpers 2021; Loh 2022).
In fundamental ways, the concept of superdiversity arose as a critique of British multiculturalism specifically. For many years before I developed the superdiversity concept, I had written about a range of problems associated with notions of multiculturalism (including Vertovec 1996, 1998). These critiques resonated with those of many colleagues at the time, who also thought that multiculturalist frameworks tended to foster rather staid, essentialist and bounded ideas of ethnic groups and cultures, created a kind of internal colonialism if not system inter-ethnic competition, and didn’t adequately address inequality. Moreover, multiculturalist views of British society completely ignored real changes that were taking place regarding new, non-British populations. That is, British public discussions of multiculturalism centred almost entirely on Asian (here, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) and West Indian (largely Jamaican but also Trinidadian, Barbadian, Guyanese and other small Caribbean) categories. For decades these categories certainly pertained to the largest segments of post-migration populations. However, by the early 2000s, significant changes to migration and population were underway.
An important stimulus for developing the superdiversity concept came when I saw a small graphic in The Economist in the early 2000s. This depicted migrant inflows to the UK between 1993 and 2002 by way of the broad country of origin categories of: UK (for return migrants), EU (essentially free movement of workers), Old Commonwealth (particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand), New Commonwealth (countries that became independent after WWII, especially India, Pakistan and several Caribbean nations), and “Other” (residually relating to the rest of the world). From the 1950s to 1970s, immigration to Britain was dominated by New Commonwealth origin; thereafter, most immigration in this category has been by way of family reunification channels. The Economist graphic depicted relatively stable and equivalent numbers in the early to mid-1990s, specifically 20–30,000 people per year arriving in each category. But from around 1997, the “Other” category grew massively, amounting to some 200,000 immigrants by 2002. It was clear to me that the conventional understanding of British social diversity needed to be re-addressed. I was intrigued, and sought to research the questions: who are these “Other,” what is shaping their migration, what are their characteristics, what are the effects of this migration shift on British society, and how might it challenge the way that migrants and ethnicity are conceived? This research entailed the data presented in a Working Paper (Vertovec 2006), which led eventually to a journal article (Vertovec 2007, reproduced here as Chapter 2).
Boiled down to its basics, the concept of superdiversity provides a way to think about multidimensionality or intersectionality with regard to new patterns of migration. Firstly, I point to increasing movements of people from more varied backgrounds represented by more differentiated categories. Not only are there more, smaller cohorts of people from a wider range of origin countries, but I point to shifting flows of people with wide-ranging nationalities, ethnicities, languages, religions, gender balances, age ratios, human capital, transnational practices and, especially, migration channels and legal statuses. Secondly, I emphasize the shifting combinations of these backgrounds and categories, such that entire cohorts of migrants become characterized by particular intersections. Examples include the fact that (at the time of writing the 2007 article) 71% of Filipinos in the UK were young women with visas to work in the health service, while 71% of Algerians were older males who were mostly asylum-seekers prohibited from working. The inadequacy of thinking of multiculturalism and diversity solely in terms of ethnic groups seemed clear. One of the main reasons for stressing a multidimensional approach has been to stress that difference and diversity needs to be understood via “a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants” (Vertovec 2007: 1024)
The concept of superdiversity was created for purposes of denoting these kinds of important shifts in migration patterns and social outcomes. In itself it does not offer explanations for why these have occurred, but rather prompts the quest for explanations (see Chapter 3). As I have written elsewhere:
I must first stress that super-diversity is not a theory. I regard theory as providing an account of how-things-work (inherent relations or causalities). Nor is it a hypothesis (or to-be-tested theory). As its author (Vertovec 2007), I always intended super-diversity to be first and foremost a descriptive concept, constructed for a special purpose in order to tie together a set of observed, co-occurring phenomena that supersede phenomena that were previously evident (hence the “super-” prefix). For this purpose, super-diversity was coined to draw attention to complex – and arguably new – patterns in migration phenomena over the past three decades or so.
Vertovec (2017: 1575)
The multidimensional aspect is crucial, not least to avoid a misunderstanding that has often subsequently arisen. That is, superdiversity does not suggest a kind of threshold. I have often been asked, “At what point does diversity become superdiversity?” As I describe in Chapter 3, many people have simply assumed that superdiversity merely means “more ethnicity” within a national or urban population. This misconstrual is what Ralph Grillo (2015) calls “Superdiversity Lite.” It is in contrast to “Superdiversity Heavy,” which is the original meaning relating to new, complex configurations of multiple categories concerning migrants. So the diversity-superdiversity distinction is not a matter of quantity, but of the co-occurrence and mutual influence of a number of classifications.
Following the growing interest in superdiversity, at least one similar notion has been proposed by scholars, that is “hyperdiversity.” This was the central organizing concept for the EU-funded DiverCities project, initiated by the late Ronald van Kempen, which explored ways that urban diversity can be harnessed as an asset to foster social cohesion and economic development. The project team engaged the concept of superdiversity and used it as a springboard for their work (Oosterlynck et al. 2019). In order to shift attention from superdiversity’s concern with migration-driven diversification, they proposed the term “hyper-diversity” to describe urban developments not just with respect to ethnicity, but also in terms of general social lifestyles, attitudes and activities (Taşan-Kok et al. 2017). The project was certainly interesting and produced many valuable findings. However, I remain sceptical of their central concept. This scepticism (not solely of the DiverCities project, but also towards others who have talked of “hyperdiversity”) was voiced by Fran Meissner and me in this way:
In some spheres, commentators speak of the growth of “hyperdiversity” (or use this term interchangeably with super-diversity). We suggest that this is not helpful for two reasons. The first is that hyperdiversity tends to convey the idea that we are merely faced with “more diversity” in terms of ethnicity. This is a unidimensional model that misses the main point argued by super-diversity (again, that several dimensions of migration flows have been changing at once). The second reason why hyperdiversity is an unfortunate term is that “hyper-” can inherently suggest that something is overexcited, out of control and therefore generally negative or undesirable (like hyperactivity or hyperinflation). Again, “super-” is our preferred modifier in order to emphasize the sense of superseding, or addressing what is “above and beyond” what was previously there.
Meissner and Vertovec (2015: 5)
Thus, while I continue to somewhat distance myself from “hyperdiversity” and remain grounded in superdiversity as a core concept and approach, I do share with the DiverCities team a common concern. That is, we need to recognize that all people do not have a single identity but belong to diverse categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity, all of which intersect and interact in a variety of ways and with various effects. Such a common perspective is part of what we might call the “long arm of anti-essentialism.”
Having spent my post-doctoral and early career in the UK during the 1990s and early 2000s, I was steeped in an intellectual environment dominated by numerous concepts and approaches to migration and social difference that – especially looking back – all inherently shared a methodology based in anti-essentialism. Essentialism was the term (which sometimes turned into a kind of swearword or internecine accusation; see Grillo 1998: 195–200) with reference to depictions of any social category as having hard boundaries and an unchanging, ontological quality or trait – an essence – shared by all deemed to be within it (see Sayer 1997). Critiques of essentialist notions, particularly gender-based, were central in much feminist theory at the time (e.g., Witt 1995; Grillo 1995; also see Mikkola 2017). Anti-essentialism, as a stance against simplistic and unidimensional views of social categories, is inherent to numerous other key concepts that have been developed since the 1990s, including: intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991); segmented assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1993); ethnic options (Waters 1990); postethnicity (Hollinger 1995); hyphenated identities (e.g., Verkuyten 2004); creolization (e.g., Hannerz 1987); hybridity (e.g., Werbner and Modood 1997); Third Space (Bhabha 1994); between two cultures (e.g., Watson 1997); biculturalism or dual identity (e.g., Yamada and Singelis 1999); multiculture (e.g., Gilroy 1993); bright versus blurred social boundaries (Alba 2005); transnationalism (e.g., Glick Schiller et al. 1992); diasporas (e.g., Cohen 1997); and cosmopolitanism (e.g., Vertovec and Cohen 2002). All of these are important forerunners, if not direct stimuli, of the concept of superdiversity. That is, like these coevolving concepts, superdiversity is also built on the perspective that no single category is so bounded and ontological, and that it is not one, but a confluence of several open and ever-changing categories that matters most to people’s lives, their social positions and the social structures around them.
These antecedent, anti-essential concepts helped me in thinking through the changes to global migration flows mentioned earlier. Yet somehow none of them was describing exactly what I wanted to put my finger on. I wanted to acknowledge their insights, but still point to the kinds of transformations that I was seeing in and through the British migration data. I wanted to capture, especially, both an intersectionality of categories (specifically concerning migration, not solely the categories of gender-race-class with which much of the existing literature dealt) and new configurations of features surrounding migrant populations. Superdiversity was coined as a way to capture these processes and phenomena in an attempt to contribute to the corpus of social scientific concepts and literature.The substantial social scientific interest in the concept has not been entirely surprising (while some of its interpretations certainly have been; see Chapter 3). The more we have moved into the 21st Century, the more have scholars observed complexifying trends and searched for ways to describe and theorize them. This was meaningfully pointed out by the late, prominent German sociologist Ulrich Beck. He (2011: 53) saw “the superdiversity of cities and societies of the 21st century” and suggested that their rise is “both inevitable (because of global flows of migration, flows of information, capital, risks, etc.) and politically challenging.” However, he added,
It is in this sense that over the last decades the cultural, social and political landscapes of diversity are changing radically, but we still use old maps to orientate ourselves. In other words, my main thesis is: we do not even have the language through which contemporary superdiversity in the world can be described, conceptualized, understood, explained and researched.
(Ibid., italics in original)
In this way, superdiversity has been a generative concept, stimulating works in a tremendous variety of fields. In June 2022, Google Scholar indicates that the original Ethnic and Racial Studies journal article (Vertovec 2007) has been cited over 7,200 times, while the COMPAS Working Paper on superdiversity (Vertovec 2006), on which the 2007 article is based, has been cited over 850 times. These academic citations are found in journals across a span of disciplines including Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Political Science, Sociolinguistics and History, and particularly in the research fields of Migration Studies and Social Policy. Beyond articles, at least a dozen books on superdiversity have been published, too. These include titles such as On Superdiversity (Ramadan 2011), Superdiversity in the Heart of Europe (Geldof 2016), Diversity and Super-diversity (De Fina et al. 2017) and The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity (Creese and Blackledge 2018a).
Following Beck, much of this profuse scholarly interest and endeavour triggered by the superdiversity concept has represented a kind of search for language and lines of thought to describe ever better various, often interdependent, contemporary and emergent modes and forms of social complexity. As stated by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge (2018b: xxiii), “More than merely describing the diversification of diversity as a result of recent migration, superdiversity has the potential to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on change and complexity in changing social and cultural worlds.” That’s why, as a way of developing the approach and insights offered by the superdiversity concept, this book moves from discussions of the concept and it uses to related forms of diversification, to responses to processes of diversification and superdiversity, to an explicit concern with emergent features of social complexity more broadly. Running through all of these topics are concerns with diversification, categorization and the shaping of multiple categories, mutually conditioning processes,
social stratification and inequality. In these ways, each chapter is intended to add something to our broader understanding of complexification processes within the co-dependent realms of social categorizations and social formations.
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