Complexity Of Social Integration

2.1.1 The Complexity of Social and Cultural Integration

Within the framework regarding the topic of research, integration is reflected on as a multidimensional process that not only reflects the components of structure and agency, but as well has various other factors involved within. Thus, integration is further understood as being a complex phenomenon. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2007), a Professor of Social Anthropology, there are three kinds of complexity in the social sciences:

1. “Complexity amounts to a great number of relationships, mutually influencing each other”

2. “Complexity is an irreducible property of the human world”

3. “Complexity is the outcome of the way of looking at the world”

He states that it is not just a uniform process, but one that includes two dimensions: cultural integration and social integration. These concepts are developed on with examples of relations behind both cultural and social components. Eriksen, on the one hand, defines cultural integration to be “symbolic universes of mutual intelligibility and shared references” (Eriksen, 2007, p. 1062), and is focused on community practices with mentioned factors for cultural identities including spoken language, religious symbols, and ethnicity. Social integration, on the other hand, is listed as “activities, statuses (roles) and institutions” (ibid) and is generally fixed within the realm of structural society. Additionally, a highlighted facet involved in social integration is education. This has led us to an affirmative of how both dimensions are of importance when analysing the process of integration of ethnic minorities within Danish kindergartens, as there are multiple factors of both social and cultural components that take part in integration. These notions are utilized within the analysis with cultural integration being understood as a form of agency, while social integration is applied as a mode of

In fact, it acknowledges that the individual possesses features that cannot be changed, thus the goal being equality between both parts (ibid).

Finally, the formal integration, “formel integration” (Schousboe, 1989, p. 24) is merely a way of claiming integration, rather than practising it. Its aim is limited and diffused, and purely sets out that the focus is integration, rather than segregation or other processes (ibid). This kind seems rather superficial, and only beneficial for political statements to support the ideal of pursuing integration.

Although these four types of integration are being distinguished by their definition and goal, one might suggest, as Camilla Wessman points out, that they are all being combined in practice when managing the integration process (Wessman, 2004, p.13). It is important to acknowledge the variants of the concepts, mainly because it provides an in-depth understanding of it, yet it is pertinent to say that they function hand-in-hand in real life situations, across the different branches of the