400020 SE Seminar für DissertantInnen: Methoden (2013S)

State category-making for ‘race-ethnic’ groupsthe case of Netherlands’ migrant policies
Date: Monday, 08. July, 2013
Time: 16:30-18:00
Place: Institute for Advanced Studies, seminar room for Sociology, 1st floor
Short summary
Enumerating its population for various purposes, among them social justice goals such as ending discrimination, is a mark of the modern state. To develop indicators that measure policy outcomes (e.g., educational attainment, employment, housing) across time, the groups being counted need to be named and definedi.e., states need to create categories. Category-making and -use construct and sustain shared identity within definitional borders, but in doing so, they commonly lump together, at a high level of aggregation, people who otherwise do not see themselves as sharing an identity. When such lumpy categories do not treat all of the state s residents equivalently, they convey a sense of difference that can leave some feeling that they do not belong. The categories thereby create and reinforce the inequalities they were meant to remedy. This conundrum often lies at the heart of such category-making, between intended social justice goals and policies’ unintended, and at times perverse, impacts: state-created categories can end up institutionalizing the very discrimination they were intended to eradicate.
This talk explores this conundrum in the case of The Netherlands creation and use of categories concerning newcomers [allochthons] and oldcomers [autochthons], as seen in the sorts of everyday registration forms the average resident is asked to fill out. The state has argued that migrants need to adopt its common norms and values, and various programs give voice to an image of Dutch-ness which articulates these values. The ethnicity-related categories used in these registration forms, however, work against this desired ideal of integrationof migrants’ adopting Dutch norms and values. Analysis further shows that, despite Constitutional restrictions on the use of the word race, the forms, in asking explicitly about ethnicity and nationality and in their operational definitions of those terms, are also carrying on a race discourse, albeit largely without using that word. The detailed analysis enables a rare view of the unfolding processes of the social construction of the ideas of Dutch-ness, ethnicity, and race, with clear implications for policy-making.

Organizational Ethnography: Issues and Challenges
Date: Monday, July 11, 2013 Thursday, July 11, 2013
Place: Institute for Advanced Studies, seminar room for Sociology, 1st floor

Here the link:unter http://www.ihs.ac.at/vienna/IHS-Departments-2/Sociology-1/Teaching-2/Courses.htm