Tileaga Cristian

Ȗniversity

Discourse, dominance and power relations Inequality as a social and interactional object

Keywords: action, construction, discursive psychology, dominance, inequality

This article focuses on some of the issues that arise when examin- ing social inequality and similar notions such as dominance or group superiority as participants' concerns. It emphasizes the importance of understanding constructions of inequality in terms of how they are (1) situated, constructed and invoked in talk; and (2) oriented to and part of actions and ideological practices. These concerns are illustrated with an example from an interview with majority group members on ethnic issues. This shows how particular orientations to and descriptions of inequality are constructed and what they might be doing. Implications for the study of the discursive construction and representation of social inequality in talk and the nature of inequality as an object in interaction are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Questions of social inequality (and related notions) have constituted a central subject matter and have been extensively debated in research on social issues and social processes within sociology and social psychology. As some authors argue, traditional social psychology has largely ignored social inequality by choosing to focus on essential and objective group differences rather than on social context or power [START_REF] Hollander | Social Psychological Theories on Social Inequalities[END_REF]. Scholars of ethnicity and politics, sociology and politics have been definitively more attentive to social inequality, but have chosen to focus on the macro, 'structural' aspects of social inequality and broader processes like social division, social stratification and differentiation. The study of inequality has been largely defined as the study of its measurable extent, degree and consequences [START_REF] Schwalbe | Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis[END_REF].

In addition to that, when issues of social inequality arise there is a tendency to frame them around abstract sociological and political debates on ethnicity, minority rights, etc. For the traditional sociology of inequality, the question is why inequality exists and not how inequality is talked about and what are the meanings attached to it. The why is based on a takenfor-granted assumption that inequality exists (only) as an objective entity in society and that, therefore, it is the researcher's task to define its meanings and boundaries. There have been attempts, nevertheless, to go beyond the macro-level theorization of inequality.

Researchers working within the symbolic interactionist tradition have tried to emphasize the ways in which systems of stratification manifest themselves at the micro, interactional level, how people make sense of their world (and others). For instance, [START_REF] Anderson | Inequality and the Self: Exploring Connections from an Interactionist Perspective[END_REF] highlight the potential of the symbolic interactionist perspective to contribute to a more complex understanding of social stratification. In a review of interactionist research on inequality, these authors explore questions related to everyday manifestations of inequality, their consequences, and how people manage and negotiate 'inequality' as they go about their everyday business. In the same vein, [START_REF] Harris | What Can Interactionism Contribute to the Study of Inequality? The Case of Marriage and Beyond[END_REF][START_REF] Harris | Studying Equality/Inequality: Naturalist and Constructionist Approaches to Equality in Marriage[END_REF] points to the necessity of investigating social life in situated social interaction by examining the range of symbolic and interactional manifestations of social inequality.

Micro-cultural sociological approaches like ethnomethodology have chosen to focus on understanding the workings of inequality within a framework that considers social inequality as something managed and accomplished in talk. Sex and gender inequality are a good example of how ethnomethodology has dealt with issues related to power and inequality. West andFenstermaker (1993, 1995) demonstrate the power and inequality associated with sex and gender interaction and comment on the possibilities for social change in forms of such interaction. In terms of accomplishing gender, the idea of accountability is central. That is, members of society take notice of activities and place them in a social framework, as they are regularly 'engaged in descriptive accountings of states of affairs to one another' (Heritage, 1984: 136). These involve both activities that conform to accepted norms and those that might be considered deviant. As West and Zimmerman (1987: 126) put it, 'when we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional, and ultimately, institutional arenas' (see also Fenstermaker and West, 2002).

For instance, 'doing gender consists of creating differences between girls and boys and between men and women -differences that are neither natural nor biological' (West and Fenstermaker, 1993: 159). But once such differences become established, they are often regarded as natural, and are difficult or slow to change. Ethnomethodological work on gender, race and class inequality has advanced a new understanding of 'difference' as an ongoing interactional accomplishment [START_REF] West | Doing Difference[END_REF]West and Zimmermann, 1987). The analysis of 'situated conduct affords the best prospect for understanding how these "objective" properties of social life achieve their ongoing status as such and, hence, how the most fundamental divisions of our society are legitimated and maintained' (West and Fenstermaker, 1995: 33).

The problem for both symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists seems to be the persistent and pervasive assumption in traditional sociology (and social psychology) that inequality, and particularly social inequality, is something that only researchers are in a position to identify and talk about (see [START_REF] Harris | Studying Equality/Inequality: Naturalist and Constructionist Approaches to Equality in Marriage[END_REF]. Following [START_REF] Zimmerman | The Everyday World as a Phenomenon[END_REF], it is argued that what is missing is an approach that treats the concepts of equality/inequality and related notions as a topic rather than a resource, an approach sensitive to the diverse meanings and interpretations of equality/ inequality and to the specific interactional context in which they occur.

What is needed is an approach that cuts across the traditional individual/social dualism, as well as the traditional micro/macro division [START_REF] Potter | Discursive Psychology: Between Method and Paradigm[END_REF], an approach with a focus on the way both psychology and society are 'produced', that is described, invoked, categorized, for action and interaction [START_REF] Potter | Inequality in Action[END_REF]. Drawing on insights from ethnomethodology [START_REF] Garfinkel | Studies in Ethnomethodology[END_REF] and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1995), discursive psychology (henceforth DP) has put forward a way of understanding social inequality and notions such as domination, group superiority and group differentiation that has placed a strong emphasis on discourse, on the discursive practices of participants in particular settings [START_REF] Billig | Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology[END_REF][START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF].

This article tries to illustrate how a DP approach can inform our understanding of the ways in which inequality and dominance are produced and reproduced in talk, both as 'social' and as rhetorically potent devices for the discursive management of category memberships, 'differences' and moral standings in the world.

DP is a broadly constructionist approach associated with a relativist meta-theory rather than a positivist one, which still dominates experimental social psychology [START_REF] Edwards | Death and Furniture: The Rhetoric, Politics and Theology of Bottom Line Arguments Against Relativism[END_REF][START_REF] Gergen | Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction[END_REF]. Discursive social psychology is constructionist in two ways. On the one hand, it starts from the assumption that individuals construct their own reality through the intermediary of the descriptions they use. As Jonathan Potter (1998: 235) argues, reality is not pre-ordered, pre-categorized in a way to being passively accepted, but it is 'constituted in one way or another as people talk it, write it, argue it and undermine it'. On the other hand, these very descriptions and accounts that people use in various situations 'are themselves constructed; that is fabricated in occasions of talk, or in specific texts, from words, metaphors and a range of discursive resources' (Potter, 1998: 235, emphasis in original).

DP treats talk and texts as social practices and, as Derek Edwards (2003: 31) suggests, studies the 'relationships between mind and world, as psychology generally does, but as a discourse topic -as a participant's concern, a matter of talk's business, talk's categories, talk's rhetoric, talk's current interactional concerns'. It focuses on person and event descriptions in talk and text [START_REF] Edwards | Discursive Psychology, Mental States and Descriptions[END_REF]. It examines 'how factual descriptions are assembled, how they are built as solidly grounded or undermined as false, and how they handle the rational accountability (or otherwise) of actors and speakers . . . how people deploy common sense notions of an "external" reality as a kind of setting for, and evidential domain for inferences about, a range of mental states and personal characteristics' (Edwards and Potter, 2005: 243).

The present article approaches a traditional sociological topic, the issue of social inequality, from a DP perspective. In a nutshell, the attempt is to 'respecify' concepts such as social inequality, power and dominance as participants' concerns, in terms of how they are managed, framed and enacted in diverse ways in talk. This 'respecification' is part of DP's general project [START_REF] Edwards | Discourse and Cognition[END_REF][START_REF] Edwards | Discursive Psychology[END_REF]Edwards andPotter, 2001, 2005;[START_REF] Potter | Discursive Psychology: Between Method and Paradigm[END_REF]Potter andEdwards, 2001a, 2001b) and involves the reworking, reframing of topics, such as social inequality, as discourse practices. As Potter has argued, 'constructing the research topic as discourse marks a move from considering language as an abstract system of terms to considering talk and texts as parts of social practices' (Potter, 2003: 785).

Rather than seeing, for example, statements about inequality as reflections of what people carry around in their heads or as mere reality reports, participants are shown to flexibly and artfully work up or formulate the nature of actions, events and, ultimately, their own accountability through ways of talking [START_REF] Edwards | Discourse and Cognition[END_REF]. As discursive psychologists have argued, these ways of talking are constructive and action oriented. They are constructive in the sense that they offer a particular version of things, rather than any other from other available versions. They are also action-oriented in the sense that they are constructed in ways that perform actions in and for the occasion of their telling [START_REF] Edwards | Discursive Psychology[END_REF].

The aim of respecification is not a matter of finding ready-made (traditional) psychological and sociological topics and trying to respecify them. As Edwards (2005: 261) points out, it works, rather, the other way around. One starts with discourse and, in analysing it, one finds participants doing things for which psychology (and sociology, for that matter) has developed not only a technical vocabulary, but also explanations. For instance, very often, one might find people expressing opinions, offering causal explanations and justifications for their positions. In examining all these issues, DP has developed understandings that often go against how all these things are theorized in psychology (or sociology). For example, the issue of factual description and factual discourse is a closely relevant topic that psychology (or sociology) ignores, but which DP has taken seriously as a topic of enquiry in its own right when one analyses, for instance, attitudetalk, or the way causality, agency and accountability are managed and made relevant in talk when handling a range of psychological business [START_REF] Potter | Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction[END_REF][START_REF] Potter | Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices[END_REF].

DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL INEQUALIT Y

The discursive psychological study of social inequality and notions such as power, dominance and exploitation has incorporated the main features of social constructionism. The questioning of commonsense understandings, the anti-essentialist and anti-realist stance, the focus on language as a form of social action, the focus on interaction and social practices (Burr, 1995: 5-8; see also [START_REF] Potter | Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction[END_REF] are all concerns that DP has placed at the core of its empirical approach to social inequality. As an approach allied to social constructionism [START_REF] Edwards | Discursive Psychology[END_REF][START_REF] Potter | Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction[END_REF][START_REF] Potter | Discursive Social Psychology: From Attitudes to Evaluative Practices[END_REF][START_REF] Potter | Discursive Psychology: Between Method and Paradigm[END_REF], DP rejects the notion that the study of social inequality (or other social phenomena such as social change) are a matter of uncovering and ultimately altering the underlying structures of social life through the use of a grand theory or meta-narrative.

Rather, different discourses are seen as constructing social phenomena in different ways entailing different possibilities for social action. This epistemological move raises the issue of (unequal) power relations, and dominance, as a way of representing and constructing the 'social' (and the social actors) that may have an oppressive effect (within and) upon some groups in society.

What one is studying in approaching issues that come under the umbrella term of 'social inequality' are discursive practices of various kinds and of various content, ways of talking that reproduce dominance and unequal relations of power. These can only exist in social interaction, as people are constructing and account for (equal/unequal) states of affairs. The discursive turn in social psychology (see [START_REF] Harré | The Discursive Turn in Social Psychology[END_REF] for a recent account), with its attention to discourse, has been accomplished through a shift from the inner world of mental states and cognitive abstractions to the outer world of outward processes of language (in) use. This shift has wider implications for the analysis of social inequality and for the issue of what social inequality is. An analysis of social inequality from a discursive perspective should follow the same movement, from the study of the inner realm of cognitions and emotions of the individual towards the study of the outward understandings of inequality, of the public and accountable ways in which equal/unequal social relations are constructed and talked about, the study of social and discursive practices that constitute, enact and reproduce social inequality. This shift should be accompanied not only by the awareness of the importance of discourse for the study of social inequality, but also of the social, political consequences of different ways of accounting.

DP views social inequality as both interactive and communicative, located within the cultural and discursive practices of society. It is through everyday language practices that relations of power, dominance and exploitation become reproduced and legitimated [START_REF] Augoustinos | Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations[END_REF][START_REF] Augoustinos | New Racism, Meritocracy and Individualism: Constraining Affirmative Action in Education[END_REF]LeCouteur et al., 2001;[START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF]. When one is concentrating on action and discourse one starts to think about the ways in which constructions of 'inequality' can be used to do things [START_REF] Potter | Inequality in Action[END_REF].

A large body of discursive psychological studies have demonstrated how various discursive resources and rhetorical arguments are flexibly used and put together to construct notions of disadvantage and inequality in order to justify and legitimate current social practices. For instance, one of the first attempts to apply discourse analysis to the issue of social inequality was Wetherell et al.'s (1987) study of discourses concerning gender and employment opportunities in university students' talk. The notion of 'unequal egalitarianism' that the authors have put forward points to a dilemmatic discourse [START_REF] Billig | Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking[END_REF] of egalitarianism, one which accommodates contradictory interpretative repertoires (endorsing the principle of equal opportunities for men and women alongside practical constraints in realizing equitable gender relations and predominantly individualistic and psychological accounts of gender inequities) when accounting for work and career.

Analysing broadcasters' accounts on inequality in radio, [START_REF] Gill | Ideology and Popular Radio: A Discourse Analytic Investigation of Disc Jockey's Talk[END_REF][START_REF] Gill | Justifying Injustice: Broadcasters' Accounts on Inequality in Radio[END_REF]) has documented the flexible and effective ways in which injustice in the workplace is justified and the status quo maintained. Among the justifications offered, the scarcity of women in the radio industry was warranted by suggesting women would not really want such work. Directing attention to psychological concepts such as desire, responsibility for (in)equality is seen to rest with women themselves, rather than prejudiced individuals or social institutions and practices. As Gill (1993: 78) argues, 'the idea that oppressed groups do not "really" want to change their position is one frequently drawn on by members of dominant groups in order to justify their actions or inaction'. This kind of accounting has the effect of rendering existing power relations (and presenting them as) natural and inevitable. Similar ways of masking oppression by rendering existing power relations natural and inevitable were found in other studies. For instance, [START_REF] Gough | Men and the Discursive Reproduction of Sexism: Repertoires of Difference and Equality[END_REF], in a paper on men and the discursive reproduction of sexism, has identified similar broad patterns of accounting that reproduced male superiorityappeals to gender difference/dominance and egalitarian ideals. The construction of gender difference was grounded in socialization, biology or the psychology of women repertoires. [START_REF] Riley | Constructions of Equality and Discrimination in Professional Men's Talk[END_REF] analysis of professional men's constructions of equality and discrimination showed that equality was largely defined, in a rather 'idealistic' way, in terms of treating everyone the same, regardless of social category membership. Accounts of equality were based upon repertoires of 'interchangeability', 'individual ability' and 'pragmatism' that allowed the construction of a dichotomy between individualist-equality and structuralist-discrimination, minimized the gendered nature of men and women's experiences and negated the use of context in favour of the principle of individualism.

One of the most important contributions of DP to the study of social inequality was the study of racism, prejudice and discrimination in talk about 'others'. In their seminal analysis of 'race' discourse in New Zealand, [START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF] found that white majority group members (Pakeha) were skilful users of a range of liberal and egalitarian arguments that drew on principles such as freedom, fairness, individual rights and equal opportunity in their talk on (Indigenous) Maori-Pakeha relations. Their analysis detailed how the discursive resources expressive of a liberal and humanist ideology of 'difference' were flexibly organized in Pakeha talk so as to legitimate existing unequal social relations and to justify racist and discriminatory practices.

More recently, Augoustinos et al.'s (2005) paper on talk about disadvantage and affirmative action in student focus group discussions on 'race' relations in Australia has documented the rhetorical and discursive resources available to majority group members when they discuss Indigenous disadvantage and affirmative action. Drawing on previous discursive research on social inequality, the authors have shown how liberal principles such as individualism, merit and egalitarianism were recurrently drawn upon in order to justify and legitimate opposition to affirmative action in education. A self-sufficient, pervasive meritocratic discourse was identified, one which considers individual merit as the most important principle determining entry into (tertiary) education. The discursive features of a meritocratic and individualist discourse on equality/inequality and access to education are framed by the inherent ideological dilemmas and ambivalence that are produced by the contradictory (ideological) tension between the ideals of egalitarianism, on the one hand, and individualism, on the other hand. Nevertheless, as Augoustinos et al. (2005: 337) comment, 'despite these alternative accounts and internal contradictions the principles of individual achievement and meritocracy were recurrently mobilized by participants as bottom line arguments to oppose social programmes that sought to redress existing group inequities'.

This kind of research has shown how arguments about fairness, social justice and individual rights act as commonplaces defining the contours of a liberal-individualist ideology that is central to Western democracies. Liberal principles, such as 'everybody should be treated equally' or 'you have to be practical' can be mobilized flexibly and in contradictory ways to do important rhetorical work: in some contexts, they can be invoked to justify change in redressing disadvantage and improving a group's status, while in other contexts they can be used to justify and legitimate existing social relations (see [START_REF] Augoustinos | New Racism, Meritocracy and Individualism: Constraining Affirmative Action in Education[END_REF]. The flexible combination of liberal principles for illiberal ends permits the production of a range of ideological dilemmas for members of any liberal democratic society as they discuss and debate notions of fairness, equality and justice [START_REF] Augoustinos | Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations[END_REF][START_REF] Billig | Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking[END_REF][START_REF] Potter | Fragmented Ideologies: Accounts of Educational Failure and Positive Discrimination[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Accounting for Ethnic Discrimination: A Discursive Study among Minority and Majority Group Members[END_REF][START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF].

All these findings point to the pervasiveness of the contradictory and ambivalent nature of everyday sense-making practices around sensitive issues such as social inequality, disadvantage, racism and prejudice [START_REF] Edwards | Analysing Racial Discourse: A View from Discursive Psychology[END_REF]Tileaga ˘, 2005aTileaga ˘, , 2005b;;[START_REF] Verkuyten | Abnormalization" of Ethnic Minorities in Conversation[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Discourses about Ethnic Group (De-)Essentialism: Oppressive and Progressive Aspects[END_REF] and their social, political and ideological effects [START_REF] Tileaga | Representing the "Other": A Discursive Analysis of Prejudice and Moral Exclusion in Talk about Romanies[END_REF][START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF].

Discursive psychologists have also examined the discursive processes through which ethnic minorities are represented and made real in actual talk [START_REF] Verkuyten | Personhood and Accounting for Racism in Conversation[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Abnormalization" of Ethnic Minorities in Conversation[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Similarities in Anti-Racist and Racist Discourse: Dutch Local Residents Talking about Ethnic Minorities[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | The Construction of Ethnic Categories: Discourses of Ethnicity in the Netherlands[END_REF][START_REF] Wetherell | Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation[END_REF]. A number of discursive psychological studies of racism have highlighted the way in which concerns about being heard as speaking from a prejudiced position are managed by constructing evaluations as mere factual descriptions, unmotivated by an inner psychology of ethnic or racial hatred [START_REF] Edwards | Analysing Racial Discourse: A View from Discursive Psychology[END_REF]LeCouteur and Augoustinos, 2001;LeCouteur et al., 2001). Constructions of an unbiased, egalitarian, tolerant identity and denials of feelings of prejudice are part of the common identity work of contemporary racist discourse (Blommaert andVerschueren, 1993, 1998;[START_REF] Lecouteur | On Saying Sorry: Repertoires of Apologising to Australia's Stolen Generations[END_REF]LeCouteur and Augoustinos, 2001;[START_REF] Rapley | Just an Ordinary Australian": Self-Categorisation and the Discursive Construction of Facticity in "Racist" Political Rhetoric[END_REF][START_REF] Rapley | How to do X Without Doing Y": Accomplishing Discrimination without "Being Racist" -"Doing Equity[END_REF]. For instance, in a contribution on the language of prejudice and racism in political rhetoric, Mark [START_REF] Rapley | How to do X Without Doing Y": Accomplishing Discrimination without "Being Racist" -"Doing Equity[END_REF] points to the diverse rhetorical manoeuvres used in accomplishing discrimination without 'being racist'. The author describes what he calls 'doing equity' ('doing X without doing Y' -accomplishing discrimination without 'being racist') as a means of promoting discriminatory (prejudiced) positions, promoting a version of 'racism' by managing its absence.

Social inequality is a nice example of how, in everyday talk (and also in interview and focus group talk), members (participants) are pervasively attentive to topics that are also the business or interest of academic psychologists [START_REF] Edwards | Analysing Racial Discourse: A View from Discursive Psychology[END_REF][START_REF] Rapley | How to do X Without Doing Y": Accomplishing Discrimination without "Being Racist" -"Doing Equity[END_REF]. DP does not aim to offer definitive statements about what 'real' inequality is or looks like. Social inequality is examined as an everyday phenomenon produced by members in talkin-interaction; how participants bring off inequality as a social action. It aims to examine society's conversations about social inequality 'as actionperformative social objects' (Rapley, 2001: 232). Inequality is seen not as something preordained, whose contours are already established, selfevident and ready to be measured, but rather as an effect of discourses. At the same time, one should also mention that the sorts of social actions that can be seen as claiming membership in the category of those describable as 'doing inequality' are local, but also historical and imbued ideologically. The boundaries of these categories and social actions are routinely produced, reproduced, contested, reworked in discourses of equality/inequality. Discursive research has tried to map the themes and theories speakers use to structure and formulate a worldview when accounting for social inequality, in terms of a set of shared resources available to them and the ideological effects of using some organizations of discourse rather than others. People engaged in conversation with others construct and negotiate meanings and the 'reality' that they are talking about. The main focus of a range of discursive studies has been (social) inequality as a problematic, social inequality as a to-be-accounted-for phenomenon.

Social inequality is approached analytically as something that may be attended to, in various ways, in talk itself. Speakers' orientations, definitions, reactions are used as the main ground for determining meaning. Nevertheless, the discursive psychological study of social inequality should not be limited to describe and analyse what social inequality represents for the members of society, but should also include an 'investigation of the social and political consequences of discursive patterning' (Wetherell, 1998: 405).

The notion of ideology (or ideologies) plays a very important role in the discursive constitution and reproduction of social and political 'realities' [START_REF] Fairclough | Critical Discourse Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Van Leeuwen | Legitimising Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Approach[END_REF]. For discursive psychologists taking a critical stance to the analysis of the discourse of racism, ideology is located in argument, in the process of argumentation, in the intricacies of discourse about social issues such as prejudice (or what it means to be prejudiced), discrimination or inequality, in the seemingly factual descriptions about 'others' [START_REF] Augoustinos | The Construction of Stereotypes within Social Psychology: From Social Cognition to Ideology[END_REF][START_REF] Billig | Henri Tajfel's "Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice" and The Psychology of Bigotry[END_REF][START_REF] Rapley | How to do X Without Doing Y": Accomplishing Discrimination without "Being Racist" -"Doing Equity[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Abnormalization" of Ethnic Minorities in Conversation[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Discourses about Ethnic Group (De-)Essentialism: Oppressive and Progressive Aspects[END_REF][START_REF] Wetherell | Racism and the Analysis of Cultural Resources in Interviews[END_REF].

Understanding how specific representations of social inequality, and the issues of accountability linked to it, are constructed and sustained can provide clues for 'reconstructing' the existing 'ideological' representations pertaining to unequal power relations, the social and ideological consequences of specific discursive patternings, such as maintenance of the status quo, and the reproduction, naturalization and legitimation of dominance. The ideological content or import of a discourse is 'measured' by its effects. Discourses that categorize the world in ways that legitimate, maintain and perpetuate social inequality patterns and unequal relations of power are said to function ideologically. The focus is on both the discursive practices that construct representations of the world, social actors and social relations and the role that these discursive practices play in protecting and reproducing the interests of particular social groups.

INEQUALIT Y IN ACTION

The question is how one should approach 'inequality' in ideological discourses. One way to do that is by looking at how speakers construct and invoke inequalities in their talk while being aware of the idea that constructions of inequality are part of actions. This can also be achieved by taking a closer look at the practices in which inequality constructions are employed, how specific descriptions of unequal social relations are constructed and used and what they might be doing, not only within a specific interactional context, but also within the broader political and ideological context.

The example that I focus on is taken from a corpus of 38 recorded semistructured discussion/interviews with middle-class Romanian professionals (collected in the year 2001), both male and female, selected to cover a variety of social backgrounds in the region of Transylvania (northwestern part of Romania). This is part of a wider project aiming to compare and contrast the way Romanians talk about the Hungarian minority with the way they talk about the Romany minority, a discursive analysis of prejudice and moral exclusion in talk of nationhood, difference and 'others' (for more details see Tileaga ˘, 2005aTileaga ˘, , 2005b)). But before going any further, let me offer some context.

One of the defining elements of the Romanian political 'transition' was represented by the political appeals and counter-appeals of Romanian and Hungarian nationalism, which has increasingly saturated Romania's political field (until 2001 at least) [START_REF] Gallagher | Democracy and Nationalism in Romania: 1989-1998[END_REF][START_REF] Tisma ˘neanu | Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe[END_REF]. Much of this nationalistic debate has been centred on competing sociopolitical and economic claims in relation to the cultural and national status of the Hungarian minority (Mungiu-Pippidi, 1999). One other very important element was constituted by the widespread anti-Roma/Gypsy sentiment, which has had a very strong discriminatory character and was accompanied by outbursts of extreme violence (see ERRC, 1996ERRC, , 2001)). Issues such as the (contested) existence of prejudice and discrimination against the Hungarians, and respectively the Romanies, the issue of interethnic conflict, the issue of minority rights and other general issues related to politics, prejudice and culture were at the centre of public and political debate.

Prejudiced and discriminatory discourse against the Hungarian and Romany minorities has not only come from political, right-wing extremists, but also from across the whole Romanian civic and political spectrum [START_REF] Hockenos | Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe[END_REF]. There is nevertheless a difference between prejudiced and discriminatory discourses directed against the Hungarian minority and against the Romanies. As previous research has demonstrated [START_REF] Tileaga | A Discursive Analysis of Prejudice and Moral Exclusion: Romanian Talk of Nationhood, Difference and "Others[END_REF], the Hungarian minority is being positioned as a rational rival, actively involved in a political project with 'national' connotations. Insofar as Romanies are concerned, one can identify a different type of prejudiced and discriminatory discourse, one which does not place the Romanies on the same moral footing (and being part of the same symbolic moral order) as other groups in society, as they are being cast beyond difference, nationhood and comparison. As some authors have noted (see, for example, Mungiu-Pippidi, 1999), the presence of Romanies is an issue for Romanians and Hungarians alike, who are often united in their resentment and contempt for them, and share the same basic negative stereotypes. A recent Gallup poll has found that around 80 percent of Romanian respondents (including members of the Hungarian minority) believe that the vast majority of Romanies break the law. A large number of respondents would not want the state to support the growth of Roma communities, while others would forbid the access of Roma to places like bars, restaurants or shops [START_REF] Ipp/Gallup | Intolerantt ' a ˘, discriminare s ' i autoritarism în opinia publica ˘[END_REF].

The interviews discussed generally 'controversial' issues regarding prejudice and prejudice-related issues in Romanian society. This empirical case considers the views of Valeria, a 25-year-old teacher, answering a question dealing with the problem of extending the rights and privileges of the ethnic and national minorities.

Excerpt (talking about minority rights): 360 Chris:

Credet ' i ca ˘drepturile (.) privilegiile minorita ˘t ' ilor nat ' ionale s ' i 361 etnice ar trebui extinse? (.) 362 Valeria: Drepturile lor? (.) daca ˘ar mai trebui sa ˘fie extinse? (1.8) n:::u 363 cred 364 Chris: °Gândit ' i-va ˘s ' i la maghiari, s ' i la germani, s ' i la t ' igani°(.) s ' i pe 365 ei (.) 366 Valeria: Pa ˘i, tocmai asta este. (.) ca ˘(1) daca ˘(.) s ' i din punctul lor de 367 vedere se observa ˘o (.) o dorint ' a ˘de a ameliora situat ' ia, atunci 368 da (.) hai (.) sa ˘; le extindem, n-are nimeni problema ˘, 369 atâta vreme cât asta nu duce la (.) conflicte, de exemplu, cum a 370 fost atunci (.) Deci (.) ma ˘refer de exemplu acuma la t ' igani, 371 ma ˘gândesc ca ˘ei practic nu au atâtea drepturi câte au (.) 372 câte au germanii, câte au maghiarii (0.7) Dar (.) nefiind nici 373 civilizat ' i, ei nu s ' tiu sa ˘(.) sa ˘aiba ˘pretent ' ia 374 Chris: Sa ˘profite de asta (.) 375 Valeria: Da, nu s ' tiu nici sa ˘profite (.) pentru ca ˘ei se complac în situat ' ia 376 respectiva ˘(.) fiind as ' a cum sunt (.) [. . .] 381 Valeria: S ' i daca ˘le oferi un loc de munca ˘, vine cât vine, dupa ˘aia nu 382 mai vine, prefera ˘sa ˘stea pe strada ˘s ' i sa ˘cers ' easca 383 s ' i sa ˘acuze, ca ˘uite el as ' a e pentru ca ˘n-are de lucru (.) 487 384 decât sa ˘traga ˘put ' in s ' i sa ˘ajunga ˘pâna ˘la urma ˘totus ' i undeva (.) 385

Sunt foarte mult ' i români ca ˘rora le merge poate mai ra ˘u decât 386 t ' iganilor, dar n-au ce sa ˘faca ˘, asta e situat ' ia (.) 387 mai trag as ' a cum pot (.) s ' i asta este (.) Dar (.) nu (.) nu au 388 (.) felul lor de a fi (mm) 360 Chris: Do you think that the rights (.) the privileges of national and 361 ethnic minorities should be extended? (.) 362 Valeria: Their rights? (.) If they should be extended more? (1.8) I do::nt 363 think so 364 Chris:

Think of the Hungarians, the Germans and the Gypsies (.) they are 365 too (.) 366 Valeria: Well, this is the point (.) that ( 1) if (.) even from their point of 367 view one can notice a (.) a desire to ameliorate the situation, then 368 yes (.) okay (.) let's extend them (.) nobody has a problem with it, 369 as long as this doesn't lead to (.) conflicts, for example, as there 370 werethen (.) So (.) I am talking for example now about the Gypsies, 371 I am thinking that they practically do not have as many rights as 372 (.) as the Germans, as the Hungarians (0.7) But (.) not being 373 civilized, they don't know how to (.) to have pretences (.) 374 Chris:

To take advantage of this (.) 375 Valeria: Yes,theydon'tevenknowhowtotakeadvantage(.)becausethey are 376 complacent in that situation (.) being the way they are (.) [. . .] 381 Valeria: And if you offer them a job, he comes for a while, after that he 382 does not come anymore, he prefers to stay on the street and to beg 383 and to accuse (.) that he is like that because he doesn't have a job 384 (.) instead to try a little and to get eventually somewhere (.) 385

There are a lot of Romanians who are less well off than the 386

Gypsies, but there is nothing they can do, this is the situation (.) 387 they try as they can (.) and that's it (.) But (.) no (.) they don't 388 (.) have their way of being (mm)

In the first lines of this extract, one can see the interviewer framing the issue of social inequality (specifically the issue of minority rights) as a matter of public debate and as a matter of controversy on which one is expected to hold opinions. As Pomerantz and Zemel (2003: 225) have recently argued, 'an interviewer's framing of the issue as a matter of public debate may be an attempt to be even-handed with respect to the various positions within the debate'. Note also that the question, instead of being phrased in a general way, asks Valeria about her personal 'view' on the topic of minority rights.

In lines 362-363, after echoing the interviewer's question and marking a 1.8 pause, Valeria offers a rather straightforward answer: 'I do::nt think so'. In line 364, the interviewer is offering further orientation to the matter under discussion. This can be seen as a sign that the interviewer treats Valeria's answer as unsatisfactory. He invites Valeria to think not just in general terms, but also in specific terms related to specific ethnic groups: the Hungarians, the Germans and the Gypsies. The list that the interviewer offers seems to invite a comparison and also to imply that there might be some kind of differences between the listed groups insofar as the issue brought up in the question is concerned. One can see how issues around equality/inequality and offering justifications for it are brought forward by the initial question and the subsequent follow-up (lines 364-365).

Mentioning the Gypsies as the third element of the list (lines 364-365) seems to trigger an immediate reaction. After a short preface (lines 366-370), which sees Valeria talking about extending the rights of the Gypsies with the provision that they show 'a desire to ameliorate the situation' (line 367), Valeria concedes that 'practically' Gypsies 'do not have as many rights as (.) as the Germans, as the Hungarians (0.7)' (lines 371-372). At this point, one could say that by comparing the rights of the Gypsies with the rights of some other ethnic groups (the Germans, the Hungarians) Valeria could be seen as displaying reasonableness and understanding insofar as the Romanies are concerned. But, as the subsequent analysis shows, the 'problem' for Valeria is not to support the idea that Gypsies have fewer rights than the other ethnic minorities, but to demonstrate, in a rhetorical and discursive move of 'blaming the victim' [START_REF] Van Dijk | Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk[END_REF][START_REF] Van Dijk | Discourse and The Denial of Racism[END_REF], why they have fewer rights.

One can see that Valeria's remarks in lines 366-370 are nevertheless being qualified and this is part and parcel of a display of reasonableness. There is an oscillation between sympathy and blame, which is not used to build a seemingly even-handed and reasonable picture of the Romanies, but to allow for making the Romanies nevertheless accountable for their situation. An implicit 'differentiation' from the other mentioned ethnic groups is the backdrop against which conclusions are drawn. The issue of rights for the Romanies is being reframed as something that pertains to their 'culture' and their 'way of being': 'But (.) not being civilized, they don't know how to (.) to have pretences (.)' (lines 372-373) In lines 375-376, Valeria takes on board the interviewer's continuation of her previous statement: 'they don't even know how to take advantage (.) because they are complacent in that situation (.) being the way they are (.)'.

Their implied backwardness, which comes as a consequence of 'not being civilized', is invoked in order to put together a verbal portrait of Romany character and 'mentality'. Valeria is constructing an image of Romanies through a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit 'differentiation' from other ethnic minority groups. The backdrop of this 'differentiation' is the implicit reference to a normative moral order, which generates its unadaptable, uncivilized, beyond the moral order antithesis. In doing so, the psychological (and social) distance between the Romanies and other ethnic groups is maximized, as is the distance between Romanies and the normative moral order represented by those groups. It is a process of drawing moral boundaries that rests on an assumption of (complete and 'extreme') difference embedded within an 'essentialist' discourse: 'they don't even know how to take advantage (.) because they are complacent in that situation (.) being the way they are (.)' (lines 375-376).

The formulation: 'being the way they are' is very important in this context. One can read this as a rather extreme comment, which can be seen as an essentialist 'theoretical rationalization' [START_REF] Van Leeuwen | Legitimising Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Approach[END_REF]. The focus is on the Romanies themselves, rather than on the activities they are involved in. Romanies do the things they do (in this case, they are not doing the things that they are supposed to do) because that is the way they are. This leads to a number of inferences regarding, on the one hand, the way the Romanies are and, on the other hand, what Romanies do. It is not just the characteristics of Romanies that are essentialized, but also their ontological 'being in the world'. They are reduced to the essence of their essence.

In a nutshell, this can be seen as an argument about what this Romany 'essence' permits. The implicit (general) conclusion is that it is not conducive to 'civilization', nor to 'adaptation' or 'assimilation', it is, essentially, a backward 'essence'. This is a very important element of the ideological representation of Romanies, as it is part of an imagining that excludes the Romanies from membership in the category 'civilized' and casts them beyond what is 'reasonable' in contemporary society, together with blaming 'them' for the way things stand.

There is another instance of this 'essentializing' process embedded in the rhetorical use of a 'comparison'/'differentiation' strategy, further on in the same interview. This time there is an explicit contrast between the Romanians and the Romanies on a social and implicit economic dimension. Again, a discourse of 'culture' as a way of being in the world intertwined with an 'essentialist' discourse is used to make the case for inter-group differences and cast the Romanies beyond the moral order. Valeria concedes that it might be that there are some similarities between Romanians and Gypsies insofar as their economic status is concerned. She even argues that 'there are a lot of Romanians who are less well off than the Gypsies' (lines 385-386). But there is also a very important difference to which she wants to draw attention: the idea that these Romanians might be poor (or very poor), very much like the Gypsies are, but 'they don't (.) have their way of being (mm)' (lines 387-388). As the previously analysed 'essentializing' description, it does not appear alone and it is more insidious and denigratory, as it is part (and outcome) of a comparison/differentiation pair.

The two kinds of 'essentialist' conclusions of Valeria's arguments (lines 375-376 and lines 387-388, respectively) not only work to justify and normalize the moral implications of the 'local' discriminatory policies directed towards the Romanies, but could also be read as being located within a broader moral space with general ideological consequences. In order to understand the full implications of these kinds of accounts, one ought to look at the ideological position from which these accounts are spoken, the position from which the presence of Romanies is considered (see [START_REF] Dixon | Displacing Place Identity: A Discursive Approach to Locating Self and Other[END_REF]. One notices that the voice is that of an 'insider', someone who speaks, not necessarily from within 'her' (Romanian) community, but from within the universal community of the 'civilized', the 'settled', the 'normal' and the 'reasonable'. In this particular extract, this is done through explicitly enlisting other ethnic groups (and 'us') in order to make a point regarding what Romanies are and do.

In so doing, Valeria has constructed and put forward a perspective that is not only 'local', but which is that of the 'universally' civilized. The message that can be drawn from here is clear: it is not only that Romanies are unlike 'us', but they are also unlike any other 'foreigners' (they are also unlike any other nation). The modus existendi of Romanies is the antithesis of a possible modus coexistendi. All this works to prescribe an ideological position for Romanies, one that places them beyond the 'reasonable' bounds of society, beyond difference and comparison.

The process of 'differentiation' 1 of which Romanies are made part is not established on the premises of equal footing. The Romanies are the marked members in this process, the 'them' to be set apart from the reasonable and civilized 'we'. 'Abnormality', deviation, non-conformism is attributed to the 'other' as an essential property (see [START_REF] Blommaert | Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance[END_REF][START_REF] Verkuyten | Abnormalization" of Ethnic Minorities in Conversation[END_REF]. The social relations and social formations of which the Romanies (with their intrinsic characteristics) are said to be part of are unequal relations of power. The 'differentiating power', to use Bauman's apt term, that drives this process gives way to 'extreme inequality', which is brought to the fore by the participants' use of a rhetoric of 'comparison' and 'differentiation'. The relations between the Romanies and the 'others' (a category that includes 'us'[Romanians] alongside other minority groups) are relations based on a Manichean logic. The Romanies and 'others' are the essential polar pairs of 'us' vs 'them', 'civilized' vs 'uncivilized', etc., which, ultimately, gives rise to the enactment of an 'extreme' discourse of difference.

The 'comparison/differentiation' pair constitutes a powerful rhetorical resource used not necessarily to accomplish a social diagnostic insofar as Romanies are concerned, but rather to pass a moral verdict (see [START_REF] Mccarthy | Far From the Madding Crowd: Psychiatric Diagnosis as the Management of Moral Accountability[END_REF]. Thus, the only possible result of this ideological positioning is moral and social exclusion.

One can see how an 'inequality of rhetoric', which rests on notions such as (extreme) difference and moral exclusion, is turned into a 'rhetoric of extreme inequality' inextricably linked with issues of a contemporary (society) moral order, (ab)normality and discursive practices of exclusion. This kind of accounting also has an important relation to a broader theme, the social exclusion of Romanies.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

This article has tried to indicate some of the ways in which social inequality and notions such as domination, exploitation, group superiority and group differentiation can be understood as participants' concerns. It has considered, in a rather preliminary way, the means through which inequality-talk is constructed, situated and oriented to action, how speakers construct and orient to inequality in their talk and how constructions of inequality are part of actions with a specific concern for issues such as unequal power relations and domination.

By using an example of talk about ethnic minorities (the Romany minority in Romania), this article has tried particularly to highlight how taking seriously the study of these notions as members' concerns requires the analyst to also take seriously the local and situated practices that they are embedded within. And not only that, but also the wider social and ideological context, as a close attention to situated practices will inevitably bring into focus issues of history, culture, politics of (moral) inclusion/exclusion as these things are reworked and reproduced as part of participants' practices.

As the previous detailed analysis has shown, discourses of equality/ inequality, advantage/disadvantage are part and parcel of a type of discourse, which, among others, disavows forms of community. By comparing and contrasting the Romanies on different social dimensions with other ethnic groups the participants achieve the rhetorical, but also political and ideological effect of presenting Romanies as 'beyond difference', beyond comparison and the moral order. They are not seen as being part of the same (moral) 'community'. The 'community' of the Romanies has no moral and social 'equality' with other 'communities'. By virtue of the social categories and the ideological representation to which they belong, the Romanies cannot acquire the same social and moral footing as other social categories, and particularly not the one of the dominant categories (Lemke, 1995: 149).

One point worth emphasizing is that the analysis undertaken here is non-cognitivist [START_REF] Potter | Discursive Psychology: Between Method and Paradigm[END_REF]. The focus is on discursive constructions and practices, which are understood in relation to actions and ideological effects (Tileaga ˘, 2005a[START_REF] Tileaga | Representing the "Other": A Discursive Analysis of Prejudice and Moral Exclusion in Talk about Romanies[END_REF]. These are not treated as a consequence of inner states or objects, so one would not assume that the speaker has a particular, freestanding, mentally encoded representation of 'social inequality' in general and of the Romanies in particular. Rather, inequality is conceptualized as a social and interactional object [START_REF] Potter | Inequality in Action[END_REF].

The analysis presented was conducted against a backdrop of concerns with issues such as social inequality, group differentiation and domination. It was performed with an interest in critical, political, emancipatory issues.

However, there should be an awareness of the possible 'dangers' of imposing such issues on the material before the actual analysis of instances where people orient to such issues and make them relevant in talk. One could argue that one of the weaknesses of focusing on members' concerns is that it can pull the focus of research away from the very real and important issues that stimulate research on such topics [START_REF] Potter | Inequality in Action[END_REF]. Nevertheless, one major strength of examining members' concerns is that it can lead to novel understandings of representations, actions (representations in action) and what is, both socially and interactionally, relevant when one is approaching issues such as racism, social inequality and the reproduction of dominance. Analysing the ways in which inequality is part of interactional, social and ideological practices can provide clues to change, or at least question, existing views and state of affairs.

All the aforementioned concerns should become central to scholars of ethnicity and politics, scholars of the social (and moral) structure of intergroup relations, in their attempt to understand the social and ideological underpinnings of inequality, dominance and (unequal) power relations.

Appendix: transcription symbols

Note

1 The central feature of this rhetoric of 'differentiation' is not one of 'shifting the onus', of defamation of other groups in order to put one's own social status in a better light, but rather a pattern that goes beyond 'differentiation' itself. It is not about downgrading, downplaying the Romany 'status'. It is about refusing them a place and being in the world.

  seconds. °Encloses speech that is quieter than the surrounding talk. yes Underlining indicates stress or emphasis in the speech. Rea:lly Colons are used to represent drawn out speech.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

CRISTIAN TILEAGA ˘is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of East London. Address: School of Psychology, University of East London, Romford Road, London E15 4LZ, UK. [email: c.tileaga@uel.ac.uk]


June Edmunds

Migration studies: new directions?

In the post-Communist, post-9/11 world, migration and immigration have become an important area of public interest. Since the attack on the World Trade Center and ensuing crises such as the Madrid and London bombings, immigration fears have fused with those over national security. Ageing populations, strained welfare state arrangements and the reawakening of suppressed regional conflicts have sustained this interest. The collapse of the Soviet Union and wars in Bosnia and Kosovo led to a new wave of economic migrants, guest-workers and asylum seekers in Europe. Migrants from the post-Soviet bloc countries, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic among others, who acceded to the European Union (EU) in 2004, continue to face internal restrictions by a number of preenlargement EU members. New ethnic conflicts, creating refugee crises, have concentrated attention on asylum seekers. The murders in the Netherlands of politician Pim Fortuyn and film-maker Theo van Gogh have stirred up popular fears, reinforced by media coverage, that immigration might damage the liberal democracies that tend to attract it -by undermining the social solidarity that permits present citizenship and welfare arrangements (a fear exploited by Fortuyn), or by curtailing free speech (a fear exploited when van Gogh was killed after screening a documentary viewed as critical of Islam). National governments in the 1990s reacted with a range of measures to curb the numbers of refugees coming into their countries.

In Western Europe, politicians vie to find a 'solution' that satisfies competing economic and political demands. Immigration ranked alongside the economy, crime and healthcare as an issue at the 2005 UK general election, with all three main parties proposing specific control policies. In the public domain there is now a consensus that migration needs to be managed and controlled -that unchecked immigration would undermine ethnic harmony and internal social cohesion in host countries. There are echoes of this debate in many parts of the developing world, where unequal rates of progress have caused high rates of regional economic migration (for example from Central and South Asia into the Middle East, sub-Saharan into North and Southern Africa and Central into North America), and where recent conflict has caused unprecedented refugee flows (notably after war and economic collapse in Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan).

This public interest has been paralleled in the social sciences, demonstrated in new titles and the agendas of research funding bodies. Social scientists have been concerned with the nature of new migrant flows, the implications of these for citizenship and national identity, the rise of ethnic politics and multiculturalism, the role of governance and security policies. Social policy research has explored the tensions between economic pressure for enhanced immigration -especially of younger and more educated workers to offset a shrinking labour force -and the social strains commonly thought to be created by that migration. More recently, an interest in social capital is developing, which could potentially bridge the gap between macro-and micro-level processes.

The intellectual preoccupation with globalism has been an important framework for this work. Theorists have argued that social scientists should abandon their traditional analytical focus on the nation-state in favour of one centred on global flows and networks. One aspect of this new orientation is the emphasis on the new global world as one that offers unprecedented opportunities for mobility, migration and travel. National governments may have imagined that the free circulation of goods, services and capital across borders would reduce people's inclination to migrate by allowing them to prosper from wherever they were. However, in reality, the movement of commodities appears to promote rather than stem the movement of people, with telecommunications raising rather than reducing the desire to meet and talk in person.

These three volumes do not restrict themselves only to European empirical confines, offering instead more widely applicable conclusions on an increasingly global problem. Until recently, the study of migration has been dominated by analyses of migration from the poor into the rich world. The books reviewed here illustrate the rapid expansion and integration of migration studies. Under the impact of contemporary trends, attention is now on the developing world as much as the developed world. Reflecting this, these volumes concentrate not just on the US, Germany, France and the UK, but also on North Africa, Turkey, the Asia Pacific, Palestinians, the Irish and indigenous Australians. Moreover, instead of concentrating on economic migration, the focus has broadened to encompass new or neglected types of migrant, including asylum seekers, guest-workers, illegal migrants and new types of professional migrants. However, they are less successful, to differing degrees, at presenting fresh solutions to the divide between global pressures towards increased migration and the sociopolitical aspects of individual motives and experiences.

GLOBALIZATION AND MIGRATION: THE MACRO LEVEL

At the macro level, then, globalization sets the parameters of these three studies on migration, though in different ways. For Castles and Miller, globalization has undermined the Westphalian nation-state system, and associated patterns of migration are a further source of instability. Global economic integration has weakened national cultures and identity and global markets have started calling the shots for national governments, ending the traditional 'nexus between power and national boundaries' (p. 39). Globalization has generated qualitatively different patterns of migration, both in terms of geographical reach and character, being more internationally encompassing and having greater social, economic and political significance (pp. 278-80). Social networks and transnational links and practices, an inherent feature of global trends, have meant that 'microstructures' (forms of social capital) created to support migrants in vulnerable circumstances have become more important than ever.

Economic migration inevitably intensifies when 'newly industrializing' nations stop being dependent on the early industrializers and gain the technologies and skills that enable them to compete on a more equal footing. Although educated Indians and Latin Americans can earn more than their peers by working locally as software programmers, call centre handlers or car assemblers, their pay is multiplied many more times if they can migrate to do these jobs in old urban centres at first-world wage rates. While economic globalization may have held out the promise of narrowing global inequality, the more usual reality has been continuing discrepancies in pay and conditions, increasing incentives to move. Richer nations are then forced to restrict economic immigration to maintain their supply of imports made cheap by 'offshoring' to lower-wage labour abroad.

In Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice, Jordan and Düvell similarly argue that the newly integrated world economy has created unfamiliar forms of migration. New kinds of economic activity, driven by finance capital that prospers by transcending national borders, have triggered social changes. The new global financial markets depend on mobile labour -recruitment, production and distribution are no longer nationally constrained (p. 9). These changes have produced new forms of migration, raising issues for its management and implications for governance and political liberalism. After summarizing the large literature on 'corporate-driven' globalization, the authors maintain that the challenge of contemporary migration is to find ways of dealing with it that are compatible with global equality, justice and liberal democracy.

In Uprootings/Regroundings, Ahmed et al. adopt a more ambivalent relationship to current thinking on globalization. Although this volume tackles macro-politics by addressing transnationalism and global capitalism, it presents itself as a counterpoint to global discourses and universalizing theories. It sets out a more rooted account of the impact of global capitalism and transnationalism -one that is grounded in feminist and postcolonial theories of difference. Global frameworks are replaced with an emphasis on the particular. The book contests the current trend to see mobility as destabilizing identities (captured, for example, in notions such as 'liquidity' and 'rootlessness'). While transnationalism has changed experiences of belonging, it has not necessarily created rootless identities. Moreover, migration is not just about movement but also about 'staying put' -for example the book looks at the sense of belonging on the part of indigenous communities dispossessed by the migration of others (e.g. indigenous Australians). The four editors and their 10 contributors use the concept of regrounding to show that migration does not simply undermine identities but also creates the (re-)establishment of identity through, for example, the economics and politics of establishing new homes. Despite these differences, all of the books reviewed depart from the 'borderless world' view on globalism by insisting on the continuing importance of boundaries and borders, and the nation-state they help define. In Castles and Miller's The Age of Migration, the state retains a key role in managing migration and selecting the type and numbers of migrants to accept; states remain at the forefront of attempts to deal with the dilemmas arising from the need to accommodate new minorities and simultaneously to protect them from exploitation. While individual agency creates a degree of unpredictability, governmental measures and policy continue to determine who can enter the country, who is allowed to stay, what activities they take up, what social reception they are given, and what civic and economic rights they can acquire. For example, the adoption of assimilationist policies (France) or multicultural ones (Canada, Australia, Sweden) can substantially affect early immigrants' experience, and influence the expectations and choices of later prospective migrants in different ways. State action may, moreover, have counterproductive effects. While the chapter on the state and international migration looks mainly at the stimulus and intended effects of new immigration and asylum policies, the chapter on new ethnic minorities usefully reviews their various unintended consequences: housing subsidies causing ethnic separation of neighbourhoods and school catchment areas in Sweden and France, special linguistic and educational rights inhibiting social and labour market integration in Germany, but a laissezfaire policy producing similar segregation and deprivation in many US cities.

Contrary to what some economists are now saying, Castles and Miller argue that migration is not a solution to the North/South divide or to western demographic problems. By implication, governments will inevitably -and, in their view, with some justice -seek to regulate migration even where shrinking populations and labour forces give them some economic incentive for it. Thus, in relation to migration as a solution to the demographic problems shaping up in the West as a result of ageing populations, the authors argue that the levels of immigration required to solve this problem would be politically unsustainable. Even at times of relatively strong growth, the labour market situation remains generally adverse for immigrants (even when highly skilled). The authors therefore highlight the contradiction between opening borders for the movement of information, commodities and capital and closing borders to people. Controls on migration seem to contradict underlying economic and cultural impulses towards more exchange (pp. 282-4), but they satisfy vested political interests. It is easier to attack the inflow of people than goods and services.

Thus, for Castles and Miller, the solution to the gap between the rich North and the poor South is not large-scale migration. Rather, it is argued that this disparity can be better dealt with by sustainable economic progress in developing countries. While some restrictions (for example on political, employment or residential rights) are, in their view, incompatible with market principles and democratic norms (pp. 280-4), unauthorized migrants are notably vulnerable. Rejecting calls for open migration, they argue instead that immigration controls ensure harmonious relations between migrants and indigenous populations. Regional integration initiatives such as the EU and NAFTA may in part attempt to defuse immigration by improving trade access for poorer countries bordering rich ones, but they also enable stronger, supranationally coordinated responses against these migration flows that are not deterred (pp. 95-114).

In discussing how a liberal democratic response to migration can be forged, Jordan and Düvell insist on the need for an ethical theory to acknowledge the role of boundaries. Coming from a political economy perspective, these authors present justice as being about equal distribution of rights, duties and resources and, when applied to migration, questions of justice cannot be addressed through a model of a borderless world.

However, the problem with existing theories of social justice, they maintain, is that they are influenced by the idea of a social contract (Hobbes, Locke and more recently Rawls), which is based on an abstract idea of boundaryless society. Such a level of abstraction makes it impossible to grasp 'real' issues of mobility and membership. They suggest that existing solutions to the management of migration (characterized as nationalist, globalist, federalist and ethical) are limited: the first calls for stronger national sovereignty and tighter border controls; the second calls for more effective international governance; the third for new, global systems of membership; and the fourth for new solutions to help vulnerable communities. More innovative distributional rules are proposed by the authors, though it is not clear how they could be operationalized. The authors conclude that citizenship needs to be redrawn and the state and international organizations need to cooperate to protect the right to move any vulnerable people.

In their discussion of globalization and transnationalism, Ahmed et al. explicitly set out to oppose theories that underplay the role of the state or borders in constraining or facilitating choice. Their perspective on transnationalism departs from typical approaches in two ways. First, they question the way it hinges on a distinction between disconnected locations, arguing instead that locations are flexible and boundaries between them blurred (encapsulated in the idea of 'borderzones'). Second, they challenge reliance on the concept of cosmopolitanism (defined as a sensitivity to local cultures through more cross-border activities with an openness to globalization) for promoting a utopian perspective on global migration, which is based on the idea of a levelling out of inequality as populations become more mobile. Thus, they claim that their overall project is 'to call into question the romanticization of mobility as travel, transcendence and transformation' (p. 1). Cosmopolitanism fails to acknowledge the salience of nationally structured power relations, illustrated in the way, for example, the transnational Chinese continue to operate according to national principles. Moreover, although the book deals with globalization, it is ultimately most concerned with timeless themes such as the trauma of migration, which may be expressed physically.

Although contributors to Uprootings/Regroundings go on to examine migrant activities and experiences at the micro level, power remains central to their analysis. Ahmed et al. insist that it is not possible to understand migration, or staying put, without an awareness of power relations, which might inhibit or facilitate choices. Power is exerted both by formal institutions (e.g. border police, immigration and employment laws) and by informal attitudes (e.g. racial prejudice and attitudes in the workplace). Migration is a symptom of the 'spatialization' of power relations, which may be growing: it may, for example, be deliberately inflicted when villagers are moved out to make way for dam reservoirs or bomb tests, or accidentally inflicted when nearby industrialization poisons traditional fishing and farming grounds. The notion of unconstrained mobility is, they claim, a myth. It continues to be structured by power relations -'unlimited mobility' is the 'preserve of the privileged white propertied nationals' (p. 243).

Thus, it is suggested that the European notion of a borderless space is in fact an invention -the very idea of European identity depends on borders and illegal immigration. Indeed, boundaries are reinforced through the growing industry of illegal migration. Prostitute trafficking from Eastern Europe is not so much about the coercive practices of East European countries as it is about the construction of the EU's borders. It is concluded that 'in current European developments, internal and external frontiers, the local and the global, are co-constitutive and . . . nation-states play a crucial role in this. Rather than declaring the nation state extinct in an age of globalisation . . . it is probably more correct to state that European . . . states are differentially embedded in complex cross-border networks of transnational capital, digital technology, (illegal) migration, and policy making' (p. 243). The emphasis on power is applied also to the new migration industry -uncovered, for example, in the corporate interests behind new surveillance technologies and the money-making potential of the border control 'industry'.

NEW RESEARCH AGENDAS: LINKING MACRO AND MICRO

Castles and Miller's and Jordan and Düvell's analyses are pitched largely at the macro level. However, they raise new areas of research thrown up by contemporary forms of migration that are particularly amenable to microlevel analysis. For example, probe the growth of a new migration industry of labour recruiters, brokers, interpreters, housing agents, lawyers as well as human smugglers involved in transporting migrants illegally and banks that deal with financial remittances, which they see as a feature of the social and transnational linkages that are intrinsic to migration. Motivated by the 'push' of war, poverty and persecution and the 'pull' of lucrative low wage labour and sex trades, human smuggling and trafficking are one of the newest and most disturbing forms of migration in the new global era, now demanding more microlevel research.

Drawing on their own research in London, Berlin and other European cities, Jordan and Düvell warn that strict attempts by high wage countries to regulate entry will merely result in more 'irregular' migration, promoted as much by employers wanting cheaper and more flexible labour as by itinerant employees. Arguing that liberal democracies have always restricted access to the full fruits of citizenship, they explore the alternative approach of combining unrestricted 'cosmopolitan economic membership' for migrants to be rendered compatible with differentiated forms of political rights and citizenship. While implying that this might avoid the charge of 'left wing xenophobia' levelled at those who would attach full citizenship rights to residency but therefore have to restrict this, the authors (p. 96) admit that liberal theory's history of assigning degrees of membership is 'long and dishonourable', having in the recent past justified slavery, women's subjugation, European imperialism, workers' disenfranchisement and forced labour for those without employment. Cosmopolitan liberalism's spectre of a 'citizenship test' that might remove rights from those born into a nation who cannot or will not contribute to its economy, and assign them to those who move into the nation and can do so, leaves Jordan and Düvell (p. 121) noting the need for 'extensive modifications of the rights given to citizens, and the powers of national political communities', without making clear exactly which changes they favour.

It is in the work of Ahmed et al. that the micro-level aspects of migration are most fully investigated. This volume offers a novel theoretical framework that shifts attention away from mobility and instead to the relationship between migration and 'staying at home'. It insists on the need to understand the other side of migration: staying put either through choice or compulsion. For example, freedom to migrate may be curtailed -and the question of who stays behind needs to be considered. Inability to move might be enforced -a fate already experienced by the Palestinians. The book's central theme then is to undermine conventional perspectives on migration, which prioritize movement, and to promote a perspective that hinges on an analysis of the relationship between migration and 'being sedentary', for example, through the effects of migration on grounded communities (e.g. indigenous Australians).

In resisting universalizing assumptions, these authors address micropolitical issues through themes that link migration with the body and the family. Their broadening of the concept to any act of leaving one's home for a new (or rediscovered) one creates space for discussions of 'queer migration', women's role in migrant community-building, and the search for other-country roots by the settled descendants of past economic migrants. All of these themes link up with the idea of social capital or the familial and friendship networks that migrant communities create. The connection between migration and embodiment is most ably carried out in the chapter on contemporary Palestinian art, which convincingly explores the ways migration is expressed in images of the body and the role of power relations in this. Instead of focusing on the national home through the metaphorical lens of 'the motherland', the author concentrates instead on how displacement and dispossession is expressed through the body, citing for example, the work of artist Mona Hatoum whose 1983 Negotiating Table involved her lying on a table covered with guts, bandages and blood.

How successful are these books in delivering on their objectives? In The Age of Migration, Castles and Miller comprehensively cover the major theoretical and empirical approaches to migration. The authors offer wellinformed surveys of the literature, which are an invaluable resource for students and academics. However, they go beyond the textbook by presenting an original angle on themes such as the management of migration and the impact of migration on internal ethnic relations and the host political system. In this vein, for example, the book explores the effect of Islam as a new political force in Western Europe. The arguments and solutions presented are cautious rather than radical, reflecting the book's social policy orientation -readers might feel important themes such as the role of immigration controls are treated conservatively. The treatment of migration and ageing populations could have benefited from a more imaginative consideration of generational turnover.

In Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice, Jordan and Düvell attempt a more ambitious project, combining summaries of modern debates on globalization, migration and liberalism with an attempt to fashion coherent new models out of them. But this results in significant departures from the title -indeed only a small part of the book deals directly with migration -with the authors frequently extrapolating from social welfare to migration. The book also suffers from a tendency to paraphrase and critique various solutions without passing any particular judgement on them and arguments dismissed at the start of the book tend to be partially rehabilitated later. This eclectic approach makes the reader uncertain about what the authors are actually prescribing. While they justify a high level of abstraction -even from their own very diverse research findings -by the desire to find long-term rather than short-term solutions, this results in an approach that could be viewed as utopian, and may not offer much to those politicians, state agencies and charities looking for immediate guidance on how to handle a fast-changing migratory situation.

Ahmed et al.'s Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration is the most original of the three books reviewed, setting out an innovative framework for understanding migration and challenging commonplace assumptions and bringing together a rich and diverse set of case studies. It succeeds in showing the importance of considering migration through the relationship between moving and staying; the micro-level analysis of aspects of migration is often fascinating and the authors convincingly show the need to continue to acknowledge the importance of spatialized power relations. As an edited collection, it necessarily varies in quality -in some of the chapters the language used lapses into jargon (e.g. 'our ontological relationship to land is a condition of our embodied subjectivity' [p. 36]), which could potentially undermine the credibility of postcolonialist and feminist theorizing. One wonders also whether the concept of migration is being stretched so far that it loses analytical value.

CONCLUSION

A key theme that unites these studies is that the new global context demands a fresh look at migration, one that pays attention to its differentiated nature and the emergence of new types of cross-border movement requiring new types of social and policy response. The empirical evidence confirms not only the wide range of motives that lead to (and experiences that follow from) migration, but also the establishment of a new transnational 'migration industry', whose political handling has the potential to provide social protection for migrants as well as expose them to exploitation. They thus make a case for refining both globalization theories' systembased and anthropologists' agency-based assessments of migration, showing that these are only sustainable if accompanied by an analysis of bounded power relations. They suggest that macro-and micro-level analyses need to retain a focus on boundaries, national and regional, as well as supranational institutions and transnational networks and activities.

However, the intellectual difficulty of bridging micro-and macro-level studies is illustrated in the gulf between the first of these titles, which captures most clearly the individual-level politics and pain of migration policies, and the second and third, which are concerned mainly with macrolevel analysis. Castles and Miller skilfully overview the present state of migration studies, while Jordan and Düvell take a bold first step towards sketching new social policy solutions. However, they do more to highlight than to resolve the increasingly visible clash between adoption of a 'flexible' and 'globalized' labour market, dependent on labour movement within and across national boundaries

  , and traditional citizenship/welfare arrangements based on permanent residence. Interesting new angles are more evident in Ahmed et al., who are the most successful in challenging dominant theoretical frameworks and creating new research agendas. JUNE EDMUNDS is a Lecturer in the sociology and politics of development in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Address: Development Studies, University of Cambridge, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, UK. [email: je226@cam.ac.uk]