Pathik Pathak

Ethopolitics and the financial citizen

While personal debt has been the subject of intense research activity over the past decade, in particular from think tanks and government bodies, it remains relatively undertheorized and neglected in general by the social sciences. This article offers a novel theoretical frame for the analysis of personal debt – and personal overindebtedness in particular – by highlighting the construction of deviance from financial behavioural normativities. Using Nikolas Roses concept of ‘ethopolitics’ to describe the relocation of government from questions of rational administration to those of everyday morality and ethics, this article presents two characterizations of deviance from an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship: irresponsibility and incapability. From this framework, the article explores the nature of the state sponsored normalization of indebtedness and the stigmatization of overindebtedness as a corollary of ‘delinquent’ dispositions and dependencies. This article suggests that UK government policy concerning financial responsibility has been shaped by an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship which is based upon a skewed understanding of structure and agency which has its parallel in the attribution of unemployment to ‘worklessness’.

The future of multicultural Britain: confronting the progressive dilemma

Global politics are deeply affected by issues surrounding cultural identity. Profound cultural diversity has made national majorities increasingly anxious and democratic governments are under pressure to address those anxieties. Multiculturalism - once heralded as the insignia of a tolerant society - is now blamed for encouraging segregation and harbouring extremism. Pathik Pathak makes a convincing case for a new progressive politics that confronts these concerns. Drawing on fascinating comparisons between Britain and India, he shows how the global Left has been hamstrung by a compulsion for insular identity politics and a stubborn attachment to cultural indifference. He argues that to combat this, cultural identity must be placed at the centre of the political system

From New Labour to New Conservatism: the changing dynamics of citizenship as self-government

This article examines the shift in discourses of citizenship from Britain from notions of entitlement and obligation to those of self-government, and the reciprocity between the responsibilisation of individual and collective citizen-subjectivities. Against the backdrop of debates about society as the telos of government, this article will interrogate the claim that New Conservatisms ‘Big Society’ represents a unique rationality of government and an alternative formula of advanced liberal rule. By doing so, the article will extend our understanding of ‘post-welfare regimes of the social’ and illustrate precisely how they operate in contemporary Britain.

Complexities of cultural difference in social care work in England

ABSTRACT The ageing of the ethnic minority population in Britain has led to a more ethnically diverse older client group for social care services than has ever been the case. This article focuses on the issue of how social care staff in England experience working across differences of culture, ethnicity, religion, and language. First, the article critically discusses the concept of cultural competence. Then, it reports on the perspectives of social care staff on their attempts to work in a culturally competent way. Individual in-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with 39 social care practitioners, and thematically analysed. Themes related to professional competence, appropriate behaviour, and training needs. Some practitioners felt unable to perform to their accustomed skill level when working across diversity, which has implications for the quality of care provided and job satisfaction. Other practitioners were confident in working across diversity. The key difference between these practitioners was a degree of cultural reflexivity. Recommendations for training are provided.

Problems with measuring satisfaction with social care

The measurement of customer satisfaction has become widespread in both healthcare and social care services, and is informative for performance monitoring and service development. Satisfaction with social care services is routinely measured with a single question on overall satisfaction with care, comprising part of the Adult Social Care Survey. The measurement of satisfaction has been problematised, and existing satisfaction measures are known to be under-theorised. In this article, the process of making an evaluation of satisfaction with social care services is first informed by a literature review of the theoretical background, and second examined through qualitative interviews conducted in 2012-2013 with 82 service users and family carers in Hampshire, Portsmouth and Southampton. Participants in this study were from white British and South Asian backgrounds, and the influence of ethnicity in the process of satisfaction evaluation is discussed. The findings show that the majority of participants selected a positive satisfaction rating even though both positive and negative experiences with services were described in their narratives. It is recommended that surveys provide opportunity for service users and family carers to elaborate on their satisfaction ratings. This addition will provide more scope for services to review their strengths and weaknesses.

Book review. Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: a civic idea, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, 160 pp., £12.99 (pb)

There are books on national identity written to put the English on trial for their misdemeanours, or to show how far they have fallen short of human rights, or to say that their version of the nation-state is breaking up anyway. And there are books on national identity written to say not very much at all except to show how it is made by interacting with other identities, and those with other identities, and so on. And there are other books written to show national identity as a condition of permanent interaction with ‘Otherness’ a doctrine which, along with other postmodern doctrines of fragmentation and fissure, is coded to say that identities which are mainstream and ‘constructed’ by elites are more oppressive than those which are marginal and ‘deconstructed’ by intellectuals, who are also (usually) elites. This is the current orthodoxy: otherness, marginality, deconstruction, good; sameness, centrality, construction, bad. Much of it comes out of university departments of cultural or ‘subaltern’ studies which do not attend to, or are not aware of, older traditions of history writing that celebrated modern nations as part of a process of becoming, intended to promote equality and unity, not inequality and discord. Moreover, many of the older national identities, including the English versions, survived for so long only because they were broadly acceptable expressions of the people, to the people, if not often by the people, and this aspect only grew in an age of democracy. In other words, to grow into a national identity you had to be tough, smart, sensitive and street-wise. You had to match experience in some convincing way. You did not get there by failing to recognize the world as most people found it, or by sticking with reactionary and unrepresentative castes, or by building untenable and unwanted political structures, or by simply blinking away at the ‘Other’ on the other side of the self. Above all, national identities if they were indeed national identities went on. They are not to be judged on grounds of contemporary morality. Their main reason for existence is to go on and, in the English case they have gone on for a very long time. We are living in an era of academic identity glut and Professor Aughey is the hard man which the subject needed. It never occurs to him to swap serious scholarship and practicality for soft tropes or pointless positions. If he is aware of identity as a set of historical relationships, he is also aware of it as a necessary political activity. And this is important to the way he writes, which is pin sharp, and the way he judges politics, which is on its merits. He has not got time for glutinous prose. He has no time for bolted-on ideologies. He has no time for the patterns of alterity. He has no patience for the speculatively theoretical. He has no choice. He is a politics professor from Ulster. Here he is in characteristic style putting Tom Nairn and friends to rights: