Shifting Categories of Belonging in the United Kingdom Census: Changing Definitions of Migration, Labour-Market Access and Experience

Abstract

Boundaries are an essential part of definition. Without creating a boundary, what is being defined can never be adequately separated from ‘the rest’, and boundaries are a critical part of how we view the world and ourselves. Yet these boundaries are rarely fixed and finite. Grey areas always exist between defined categories: In geography, regions such as ‘Southern Europe’ or ‘South-east Asia’ are used to reflect fundamental human and physical divisions of the planet but a search for any precise boundary between Southern Europe and North Africa or South-east Asia and Southern China may prove elusive or contested. In the social sciences more broadly, bipolar, ideal-type models of societies and economies such as rural-urban, agricultural-industrial or developing-developed again prove difficult to divide into neat easily classifiable categories, and the idea of a continuum may be seen to provide a more satisfactory approach. However, boundaries do need to be drawn to allow for a meaningful discussion of the process as well as the delineation of the variables used to measure change.