Social security as a multi-referential concept

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2009), social security is defined as a "state-run system providing financial support for people who are unemployed, sick, retired, or otherwise

23 _{There are exceptions, for example, in the realm of finance where risk-taking is constructed as a common,}

in need" or as the "money paid out under such a system" (unpaginated). As these definitions suggest, social security is commonly understood as referring to institutionalized forms of support, i.e. social measures, programmes, and services provided by the state (Sabates- Wheeler and Waite 2003, p. 5). This conceptualisation of social security is based on an 'institutionalist' approach which is dominant in social policy research. From this perspective, it is the state, conceived of in terms of concrete institutions, that acts as the main regulator and provider of social security and protection to persons who are deemed to be in social and economic distress. Such a notion of social security is what underpinned the great majority of empirical studies on migrants from the A8 countries that I have reviewed above; for example, in macro-economic studies of migrants' fiscal impact on the UK, the focus was on pecuniary benefits and other welfare offered by the British state; locality-based studies of 'A8 migrants' mostly looked at access to social services and potential issues with existing state-provided support and people's entitlements to the former. More recently emerging studies of Polish migrants' social networks, on the other hand, exemplified a methodology and perspective that brought to the fore how migrants coped with problems and adversities in informal ways through their social relationships. However, this strand in the literature in turn displayed a tendency to bracket out institutionally provided forms of support.

The conceptualisation of social security originally proposed by anthropologists Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1994) offers a perspective that can bridge these hitherto separate literatures. The von Benda-Beckmanns provided new theoretical impetus to the notion of social security through their critique of 'institutionalist' concepts of social security as ethnocentric. Their reconceptualisation of social security drew on empirical research conducted in rural populations in so-called developing countries in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period social security was high on the international development agenda, as 'traditional' forms of support in non-western societies came under attack from (Western) economists and policy-makers. The latter argued that local, kinship- and community-based sources of assistance and protection were inadequate for shielding rural communities from poverty and hardship and thus should be replaced by 'modern' social security institutions. What was particularly notable about these debates, as von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda- Beckmann point out, was the extent to which they were framed in terms of modern/traditional, formal/informal binaries; the existing 'traditional' systems were portrayed in a negative light as

problematic, 'outdated', and inhibiting economic growth (1994, p. 24-25). However, studies conducted in rural areas of Indonesia, Mali, Cameroon, and Swaziland showed that these so- called traditional systems were valued by the rural population and constituted important resources for their negotiations of insecurities. In this sense, studies inquiring into non-western societies have argued that the absence or weakness of institutionalised forms of social security do not necessarily mean that people are left insecure; instead, they have shown how people draw on various resources and relationships which extend beyond state-provided security in order to negotiate securities for themselves and their families (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1994; 2007). Read and Thelen (2007), for example, suggested that in post- socialist societies the provision of and access to care are incorporated in broader practices and relationships transgressing institutionalised forms of support. Importantly, von Benda- Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann (1994) argued that the very notion of 'formal' or institutionalised forms of support, i.e. the idea that social security should somehow be the sole responsibility of the state, was in itself problematic. As they pointed out, this was a Western construct that had initially emerged in the United States with the US government's introduction of the Social Security Act in 1935 as part of the New Deal policy (pp. 18-19) and was then consolidated in Western Europe with the establishment of welfare states in the aftermath of WWII. Thus, the authors considered state-provided support systems not as social security par excellence, but as one specific form of protection amongst others; and this applied not only to countries without state-centred social welfare but also to industrialised western societies, where informal practices continue to play a role alongside/intertwined with formalised ways of providing/'receiving' social security (pp. 43-44).

Social security, then, comprises not only material support provided by institutions and actors of the state but also informal and immaterial forms of support and care in varied assemblages. Broadly speaking, social security refers to a plurality of

efforts of individuals, groups of individuals and organizations to overcome insecurities related to their existence, that is, concerning food and water, shelter, care and physical and mental health, education and income, to the extent that the contingencies are not considered a purely individual responsibility, as well as the intended and unintended consequences of these efforts. (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2007, p. 36).

In this sense, the term becomes multireferential in that social security points to both an "abstractly conceived field of problems, and to the actual social phenomena within this field" (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2007, p. 6); it denotes a relative state of an individual's or a group's security or insecurity, the social relationships through which securities are built, as well as normative rules or ideas about "what is a situation of need, who is entitled to receive, and who obliged to provide goods and services" (p. 6) to construct social security. There is also a strong temporal element inherent in the notion of social security: it relates to ideas and evaluations of the past and the future as well as people's sense of in/security in the present, and connects providers and recipients of social security in temporally extended cycles of support (pp. 19-24). Studies following this functional approach may thus consider all kinds of ideas, institutions, and relationships that come to fulfil a social security function; the analysis can look at social security arrangements at different layers of social organisation or the conditions under which certain arrangements emerge, and both ex ante and ex post perspectives of social security negotiations can be explored.

While the von Benda-Beckmanns noted that migration can lead to insecurities as much as it can result in securities for those migrating and those left behind (2007, p. 29), it is somewhat surprising that with regard to the situation of migrants in Western societies, no empirical studies seem to have explicitly built on this perspective. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann's (1991) study of Moluccan migrants living in the Netherlands provided an earlier account that traced changing patterns of social security arrangements within this group of migrants. The study focused on the Moluccan community's social organisation, provision of care in everyday life as well as solidarity amongst members of the community. It showed how care and support in these migrant families were a mutual and shared responsibility amongst kin members and relatives. On the community level, social occasions such as weddings were of great importance for bringing families and the community together and for celebrating and thus keeping Moluccan culture alive in the Netherlands (p. 47).

However, one has to note that the migration of Moluccans from Indonesia to the Netherlands took place under highly specific circumstances: in the aftermath of World War II and amidst Indonesia's struggle for independence, between 1950 and 1951 the Dutch colonial government relocated around 10,000 Moluccans who had served in the Dutch army to the Netherlands as a

temporary measure, as their lives were considered to be at risk in light of a politically volatile situation (p. 39). Initially, these migrants and their families were accommodated together in camps, then later on, the Dutch government re-housed them in villages and a number of neighbourhood areas. According to von Benda-Beckman (1991), while help and support at the community level had been prevalent during the time when the Moluccans lived in close proximity in the camps, this diminished once they became more dispersed. Nevertheless, the author argues that these changes were not fundamental in that they rather represented a shift of "emphasis from a multiplicity of relationships towards an emphasis on the family" (p. 45). The study also saw continuity in these mutual ways of providing support and care, linking back to forms of support among Moluccans in their place of origin, which they maintained in the Netherlands through passing on to the next generations their normative structure in form of customary laws and ways of living.

Given the Moluccan's specific migration history to the Netherlands, they were studied in ways similar to anthropological studies of territorially bound, small-scale communities by looking predominantly at their internal social organisation. In my study of social security negotiations among Czech- and Slovak-migrants living in Glasgow, however, I do not adopt this concept of community - that is, as a specific form of social organisation (relatively) distinct or isolated from other migrant or non-migrant groups - as it runs the risk of reproducing the 'ethnic lens' (Glick Schiller et al. 2006) (see also chapter 2). Nevertheless, the extensive notion of social security suggested by the von Benda-Beckmanns is considered helpful here in various ways: it substantially widens the scope for studying how people negotiate insecurities and risks to include state and non-state actors such as a community, neighbourhood, friends, and family. It enables a shift of emphasis from institutional regulations and policy-makers' perspectives towards people's practices "through which social security is provided, claimed, planned or withheld" (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1994, p. 21). Rather than a priori focusing on migrants' lack of knowledge of or non-membership in the UK social welfare system and thus reproducing 'methodological nationalism' (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002), it provides a conceptual avenue to take as a starting point the routine, ordinary ways of overcoming problems in migrants' everyday life that may stretch temporally and spatially well beyond the migrants' present in the UK and well beyond the local, for example, through

transnational linkages, as studies of migrants' social networks have pointed out.24 Overall, I draw on von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann's perspective in order to put migrants' agency, meaning-making, and experiences of in/securities at the heart of empirical research and to guide my approach to the field of insecurities and risks amongst Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants and the ways in which they negotiate these insecurities in their everyday lives in Glasgow.