Social Cohesion in Another Way: Calling Back Diversity and Minority Perspectives

Abstract

Despite the fact that it offers clarification, the available literature on social cohesion is crowded with conceptual confusion due to its position at the crossroads of scientific empiricism and political idealism. We intend to review empirically established components of social cohesion to scrutinize theoretical underpinnings of the concept in relation to diversity, focusing particularly on European societies where minorities struggle to have an influence in every facet of social and political life. Informed predominantly by social psychological accounts, we argue that the assumption of incompatibility between diversity and social cohesion is not well grounded, either theoretically or empirically. Rather, scientific efforts to maximize the coherence of operational definition of the concept exclude one crucial aspect of the phenomenon, namely the social dimension that corresponds to the multiplicity of perspectives in society. In our endeavor to critically review the operationalization of social cohesion, we highlight this social dimension of the concept and discuss pitfalls and dangers of available definitions relating to people, communities, and society in general.