ABSTRACT
A crucial aspect of current academic and public debates about social exclusion concerns the integration of people who are generally regarded as new minority racial and ethnic communities into wider British society. The interest in this process is sometimes expressed in terms of the amount and quality of social capital that these minorities are said to possess and use: some groups are presumed to have high levels of social capital, while others are said to have too little, the ‘wrong’ kinds, or none at all. The questions which arise from this concern are not, however, new to students of trends in public policy or academic social studies over the past four or so decades. For the better part of this period policy-makers, academics, journalists, and others have been commenting upon the possible futures of community cohesion and integration. These commentators have shared a common methodology of comparing people from vastly different cultures and historical backgrounds, as well as generally focusing on a perhaps too exclusively British national context.
