Russell King

Return migration and tertiary development: a Calabrian case study

The impact of return migration to Southern Europe is examined using the example of the coastal town of Amantea in Calabria Italy. The authors demonstrate that returning migrants capital and initiative have led to the development of a thriving tourist industry. Problems of this industrys conflicts with agriculture and with the poorest sector of the community are considered. (ANNOTATION)

Land fragmentation and consolidation in Cyprus: A descriptive evaluation

Fragmentation is an important aspect of farm structure in many parts of the world. It generally results from population pressures and partible inheritance. Fragmentation data for Cyprus are examined, drawing especially on the 1946 and 1977 Agricultural Censuses. The main attempt to deal with this problem is the Cypriot Land Consolidation Law of 1969. The objectives of the law are set out and the administrative machinery and procedures for carrying out consolidation are described. There is, in practice, a close tie-up between consolidation and irrigation plans, especially in the five first-phase projects, completed in 1974. Second-phase projects embrace larger areas and extend into unirrigated regions. In the consolidated villages, structural and land-use changes are considerable, but the procedure is costly and laborious. It is difficult to create properly viable holdings and some people, unwilling to part with their land in a consolidation scheme, remain dissatisfied. Refragmentation of consolidated land threatens the viability of the whole programme.

Structural change in agriculture: the geography of land consolidation

This paper is a sequel to our earlier review of land fragmentation published in a recent issue of this journal (King and Burton, 1982). There we pointed out that fragmentation, defined as the spatial scattering of farmholdings into many noncontiguous plots, was an aspect of agrarian structure that afflicted farmers in many countries of the world. Although it could have a rational basis, for example in subsistence agriculture and in areas of alpine farming where environmental heterogeneity within the farm is essential to its proper functioning, in general fragmentation is regarded as a disadvantage because of the waste of time and effort that it entails for moving labour, animals, machinery and harvested crops, and the diffi-

The urban dimension of European return migration: the case of Bari southern Italy

Amongst a growing literature on intra-European return migration there has been little attention paid to urban settlements. This paper, based on 211 interviews of returned migrants in the south Italian city of Bari, aims to rectify this deficiency. A number of hypotheses concerning the distinctiveness of urban return are put forward and tested using official migration statistics and the questionnaire information, including data from a control sample of 415 rural returnees. As an example of an urban area in an emigration region, Bari is found to experience less emigration and more return migration, than its surrounding rural areas. Its returnees have been to a wider range of destination countries, and for longer periods, than the rural control group. They are also a more diverse group in their employment patterns, both before, during and after migration, and have different attitudes towards migration and return and different priorities and opportunities for the use of migrant savings.

How shall they be judged? Notes and sources on assessment

Abstract Various obstacles to changing assessment procedures are built in to the structure of many higher education institutions. Three views of examinations are: radical (wanting to see the current system abolished), conservative (wanting to see it preserved), and liberal (wanting to see it reformed). In considering how examinations can be changed, five dimensions of assessment are presented: complexity, weighting, time allowed, task distribution over time and predictability. It is important to specify objectives, for only then can assessment have logical meaning, but they should not be too rigid, trivial or over‐constraining. Students should be more involved in the assessment procedure. Profile assessment seems a good idea.

Book Review: The Myth of Return: Pakistanis in BritainThe Myth of Return: Pakistanis in Britain. By AnwarMuhammadLondon:Heinemann, 1979. Pp. 278.

drawn from Race, Community and Conflict were in some ways optimistic, the conclusions from the present volume are not. In the earlier volume immigrants were expected to make their way through the housing class system; in the present volume they are seen as a permanent underclass in a permanent underclass location in the city. Rex and Tomlinson argue that the creation of a black underclass in Britain can be seen in the three fields of employment, housing and education. Evidence for this is produced in three chapters of empirical research. On top of this, however, they establish the theoretical argument that there is a structural rather than a qualitative difference between the situations of blacks and whites. Conflict is seen as triumphing over community. In some marxist analyses of the immigrant situation, immigrants are seen as failing through false consciousness to form a common cause with the working class. Rex and Tomlinson reverse this view and see the British working class forming a common cause with the employers to keep the immigrants out. This false consciousness of the British working class is explained in this way: the suggestions we would make is that the two parts of the system, metropolitan and colonial, have been separated from each other by a castelike barrier, and that, despite the class struggle which goes on between classes in the metropolitan sector, these classes unite in exploitation of. and in defense against, any threat from segments or groups with or from colonial society (p. 13). Not only is false consciousness thrust onto the British working class, but Rex and Tomlinson recognize ethnic identity and ethnic selfreliance as being true consciousness for the immigrant groups. A crucial burden is thrown by Rex and Tomlinson on the fact of colonialism in explaining racial discrimination, yet the amount of evidence which they devote to the justification of this view is small. One is left with the impression of assertion rather than demonstration. Rex and Tomlinsons book needs to be read carefully because its conclusions are powerfully and clearly expressed and it is more likely that the conclusions than the evidence will be quoted. For a book of such big ideas it seems sad that its references should appear almost hermetically sealed off from the literature on segregation of immigrant groups in Birmingham. The work of Philip Jones and Robert Woods is not mentioned in the bibliography that runs to nine pages. The absence of Woods work is particularly notable since he measures segregation levels between groups and attempts to partial out the class contribution to immigrant clustering. Rex and Tomlinson recognize differences between West Indians and Asians, but there is little recognition of intra-Asian differentiation. Asians are treated as a homogeneous groupdoubtless fused already with the revolutionary underclass. As may be seen, this reviewer has reservations about the thesis advanced, but Rex and Tomlinsons book is essential reading for anyone interested in British race relations.