This article
In this issue
- New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations
by Malcolm Harrison - Comments on 'New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations' by Malcolm Harrison
by Paul Watt, Ludi Simpson, Harris Beider and A. Sule Özüekren - Jobs for communities: does local economic investment work?
by Lisa Buckner and Karen Escott - Welfare reform and recession: past labour market responses to job losses and the potential impact of Employment Support Allowance
by Paul Sissons - 'Insiderness', 'involvement' and emotions: impacts for methods, 'knowledge' and social research
by Rachael Dobson
New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations
Summary
This ‘debate piece’ discusses issues of equality and diversity in a period of changed circumstances and emergent challenges. The first part notes shifts affecting equal opportunities, the accommodation of ‘difference’, and the position of low-income groups, and reflects on implications. The second reviews issues around labour market migration and social rented housing. The third comments on the rise of particularism. Finally, the closing section refers briefly to a policy path creating space for localised autonomy and ‘consumer insulation’ via social housing. This highlights the potential clash with equal opportunities that is implicit within particularism as manifested in the idea of localism. Underpinning the commentary throughout the paper is a view that certain assumptions and apparent certainties in equal opportunities and ethnic relations scholarship appear less reliable than previously.
