White Papers shown below can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking on the links.
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• In this paper top demographer Ceri Peach looks at the contrasting patterns in where ethnic minorities live on the two sides of the Atlantic.

• In this analysis (coming soon) quantitative sociologist Yaojun Li compares the way British and American minorities work.

• Here Ed Fieldhouse and David Cutts analyse how diversity affects community life on the two sides of the Atlantic

• Dan Hopkins explores how political debate and media coverage shape this effect on communities?

• And Mary Waters provides a background analysis of how race and migration in Britain and the US

The charts underpinning our political analysis are also available here. The chapter from the book which explains them is available here.

Social Change: a Harvard-Manchester Initiative (SCHMi) is a collaboration of Harvard University and the University of Manchester that seeks to understand the complex consequences of big societal changes, like the Industrial Revolution or the civil rights revolution, which require careful inter-disciplinary research to identify ways to maximize social benefits and minimize social costs. Much as the sharp declines in life expectancy in the train of the Industrial Revolution in the later 1800s spawned empirical research that uncovered the importance of clean water and sanitation and ultimately reversed the adverse health effects, so too SCHMi aims to spur careful research on large-scale social issues today and thus to foster social progress. Transatlantic comparison and transatlantic learning have long been pivotal to such efforts.

One objective of the SCHMi collaboration is to produce annually a book or report for the informed public, comparing and contrasting the US and UK experiences on some major social issue. The first project, nearing now completion, is on diversity/immigration. We anticipate future reports on religion and public life, and on inequality. The fourth and final topic has not yet been determined, but will likely be either the social consequences of technology or the changing workplace.

Diversity is a critically important subject. In the opening decade of the 21st century immigration and racial diversity are high on both countries’ agendas, for both are undergoing rapid demographic change. But their starting points and trajectories are different, and the policy debates, while intertwined transatlantically, are also different. The Age of Obama (to come out in Fall 2009) compares the social, economic, demographic, and political consequences of immigration and racial diversity in the US and the UK. The work is unusually timely because many are now wondering whether there could be a British Obama.

The Age of Obama is written by Tom Clark, an experienced writer for The Guardian, and builds on substantive contributions from Professors Waters (Harvard), Fieldhouse (Manchester), Peach (Manchester-Oxford), Yaojun Li (Manchester), Daniel Hopkins (post-doc, Harvard Govt. Dept.), and Rob Ford (post-doc, Manchester sociology) with overall project direction being provided by Robert Putnam.

• The underlying chapters will be:
  
  1. Comparing Immigrant Integration in the US and the UK (based on research by Mary Waters)
  
  2. Ethnic and Racial Segregation in the US and Britain (based on research by Ceri Peach)
  
  3. Immigration and neighborhood diversity in the U.K. and the U.S. - Does diversity damage social capital? (based on research by Ed Fieldhouse and David Cutts)
  
  4. Socio-economic integration of immigrants in the US and UK (based on research by Yaojun Li)
  
  5. How levels of neighborhood immigration influence attitudes towards immigration in the U.S and the U.K and generational changes in the US and UK in attitudes toward race (based on research by Dan Hopkins and Rob Ford).

The Harvard-Manchester effort is headed by the distinguished professor Robert D. Putnam. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, visiting professor at University of Manchester, and founder of the Saguaro Seminar, a program dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America. He has authored or coauthored a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. His Making Democracy Work was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber." Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century. Putnam consults regularly with government leaders in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere and was named in 2006 as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by The Guardian, a judgment confirmed in 2007 and 2008 in a global survey by Prospect.