Minority ethnic employment in the Scottish social housing sector: evidence scoping review

2. Evidence base

In this section, a summary on the nature of existing literature is presented before detailing the rationale for the terminology selected for use in this report. Limitations of the available literature are considered, in particular: the lack of research specific to Scotland; the inadequacy of study designs which make it possible to differentiate findings between different minority ethnic groups or explore effects of age and gender; and the minimal amount of relevant academic research published after the late 2000s.

2.1 Literature search methodology

This evidence review is intended as a scoping review to provide an overview of the evidence base on the Scottish social rented sector. It is not intended to present an exhaustive systematic review of all evidence on the topic. To explore official data held on employment figures, a search was done of existing official sources including regulatory websites and government surveys used to produce official statistics. To understand more about experiences, an initial informal scoping of the literature was undertaken to explore the extent of evidence of minority ethnic employment in the wider housing system in Scotland in September 2021, and to establish key search terms for a more focussed search. This search found little academic evidence at a Scotland-level, therefore the decision was made to conduct the search using broader search terms in order to better understand the evidence base in which social housing is situated.

This evidence review is primarily based on sources compiled by the Scottish Government library, identified as part of an initial literature search conducted in October 2021 and supplemented with a second search to identify any newer sources published between the initial search date and June 2023. The evidence is drawn from trusted databases the library subscribes to, and from subsequently identified publicly available resources on the internet. It includes both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed content (i.e. grey literature). Additional ad hoc searches were also undertaken to address gaps, primarily focussed on key organisational and other grey websites containing official policies and available evidence/statistics on employment and to explore relevant academic sources outside the search date range. The library database searches aimed to identify research articles published in the UK in English from 2016-2023, in order to find the most relevant and recent sources, and available via K&E, IDOX, Knowledge Network, Policy Commons, ProQuest and Google Advanced Search. To be considered for inclusion the literature had to include the following terminology in the title and/or abstract or summary:

1. “Minority ethnic”, “ethnic minority” OR “BME” or “BAME” OR “race”

2. AND one or more of the following: “employ*” or “jobs” or “employability” or “labour market” or “hiring” and “hous*” or “construction” or “building indust*” or “build*”

Prior to the formal library search based on these terms, a rapid initial scoping of the literature was carried out informally to gain a sense of the available evidence on the topic and refine the search terms; the library search used these search terms focussing on the wider housing system to gain an understanding of the background, then the decision was made to focus the evidence scoping review on the social housing sector. The literature searches conducted by the library returned 129 articles and reports. This was complemented by a general search of third and public sector sites to identify policy initiatives or recommendations made in relation to minority ethnic employment in the social housing sector. The detail of initiatives mentioned in the literature was also checked to determine whether these initiatives remained in operation where possible. The 57 peer-reviewed articles, reports and grey literature sources included in this evidence review were selected by reviewing titles and abstracts for relevance to the Scottish context, however due to a lack of evidence specific to Scotland, material drawn from England is also presented.

2.2 Existing literature

The available literature on minority ethnic employment is predominantly made up of academic studies and reports produced by industry bodies. The ‘housing industry’ encompasses several sectors that draw interest from academic disciplines differently. The construction sector, for instance, features more significantly in economics and labour studies. Literature on minority ethnic employment in housing associations, which was mostly produced between the late 1980s and early 2000s in England, features more strongly in studies that could be classified as urban studies concerned with racial discrimination; discussion of RSLs is more common in social policy studies. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the studies, some sources reviewed in this report had a more sociological approach, whereas others were closer to organisational or management studies.

Due to the absence of robust quantitative data sources for data on minority ethnic employment in different areas of housing, most studies rely on their own small-scale surveys and data from other generalist statistical sources such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey. However, virtually all available studies are qualitative in that they analyse policy outcomes or conduct their own qualitative fieldwork. The latter usually involves interviews and focus groups, although some studies reviewed in this report adopted a mixed-methods approach.

The review also considers grey literature produced by housing and construction industry bodies. These sources provided more recent data which enabled inclusion of some insight quantifying minority ethnic people’s employment.

2.3 Terminology

The term ‘ethnicity’ is favoured over the term ‘race’ in this report, as the latter is a social construct (Kivisto & Croll 2011) with disproved biological and supremacist roots that solely focus on physical traits such as skin colour. Ethnicity is a much broader term that takes into account people’s shared cultural heritages, experiences, religious beliefs, traditions, language, and national origins.

This report uses the collective term ‘minority ethnic’ to refer to those individuals belonging to ethnic groups that are in a minority in the UK population. This term includes non-visible white minority groups such as Polish or Irish Traveller. It is preferable for the word ‘minority’ in ‘minority ethnic’ to come first as a means to acknowledge that everyone has an ethnicity and that minority ethnic groups in the UK are not necessarily a minority in populations elsewhere around the globe. In addition, whilst the white Scottish/British ethnic group is in the majority at a national level, other groups might be the majority in particular neighbourhoods, towns or cities. Using the term ‘minority ethnic’ is also a means to acknowledge the importance of being aware of diversity and difference in histories, circumstances and identities whilst recognising that it is not always possible to be specific about ethnicity, especially in light of limitations of available data (Robinson et al 2022).

Terms such as ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) and ‘BME’ (Black and minority ethnic) are avoided in this review where possible due to their implicit homogenisation of different ethnicities into a singular, unified identity and the fact that few people actually identify with these terms (Khunti et al 2021 in Robinson et al 2022). Other terms such as ‘people of colour’ or ‘non-white’ are also avoided: the former is mainly an Americanism that groups together people of different identities; the latter defines people in relation to a white majority implying a secondary status. Where these terms appear in this text it is to reflect the wording of the original research publication, much of which is dated and as such uses terms which are now seen as problematic.

This report takes the position that the term ‘minority ethnic’ (individuals and groups) best acknowledges the increasing diversification, ethnically and experientially, of the population in the UK. However, whenever possible, this report refers to individuals by using their specific ethnicity to avoid grouping everyone into one singular term. Discussions around terminology and usage continue to evolve across different policy areas in Scottish Government. The recently published A Fairer Scotland for All: An Anti-Racist Employment Strategy (Scottish Government 2022a) uses the terms racialised minorities or racially minoritised, stemming from the same recognition of race as a social construct and to refer to racialisation and minoritisation as the institutional and social processes resulting from this construct which create racial inequality. Experiences of racial inequality take place within the context of racialised structures and power dynamics within society which shape the experiences of individuals from minority ethnic communities (Menezes et al 2023).

2.4 Limitations

As mentioned above, this evidence review represents a scoping of the literature on this topic. While every attempt has been made to do so robustly, it does not represent an exhaustive or systematic review of the literature, and therefore it is possible that some sources of evidence have been missed.

Within the scoped evidence, the a key limitation to producing definitive findings was the lack of evidence available within the Scottish context. The literature is also scarce in the rest of the UK, although academics at English universities have produced the most research on the topic. Some of this research concerns only England; many pieces deal with the wider UK context without specification. With the exception of a notable recent study from Menezes et al (2023), and perhaps due to the lack of empirical evidence, many studies rely on the knowledge acquired from subjects other than minority ethnic employment in the social housing sector per se, e.g., they draw from sources concerned with general trends in minority ethnic discrimination as a societal issue, or with general trends in the wider UK economy and business practices beyond the dynamics particularly pertaining to the social housing sector. As a result, these studies are rich in social theory that can be broadly applied to the topic but lack concrete social explanations derived directly from social housing. The few academic studies that exist are also dated; most of them were carried out by the same researchers between the late 1990s and mid 2000s and more recent reviews have highlighted the lack of contemporary academic research in this area (Shankley & Finney 2020; Robinson et al 2022).

Regarding data disaggregation, it was not possible to successfully differentiate to the granular levels originally desired (there is better data disaggregation in the literature on the construction industry which is sometimes more specific than literature which focuses on the social housing sector). Most studies speak of ‘minority ethnic groups’ or ‘BAME’ without distinguishing beyond these unifying terms. Other social characteristics such as gender and age are often not present in the data either. Some studies have discussed the experiences of minority ethnic women working in the housing sector due to growing acknowledgement of intersectionality (Caplan & Gilham 2005; Menezes et al 2023).