What We Have Learned About Social Integration: Conclusion

This chapter concludes the special issue on social integration and makes three additional contributions. First, we discuss how the featured articles employ the concept of social integration that we have proposed in the introduction. We find clear references to the four ingredients of social integration that we have suggested: consensus, trust, conformity and cooperation. Many articles also agree with the multi-level nature of social integration. Second, we synthesise the answers that the featured articles provide for the open questions we have posed: how social integration is generated and how it is linked to societal outcomes, both normatively desirable and undesirable. Although most authors in this special issue start from the premise that social integration is inherently desirable, our conceptual lens also brings in the “dark side” of social integration. Third, we identify two further aspects that deserve more attention in future research: a rigorous analysis of how the mechanisms of social integration operate on the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society; and more attention to the transnational interdependencies in which national modes of social integration are embedded.