If the Theory Fits: A Tale of Academic Self-Delusion and Policy-Makers’ Expediency

BERYL NICHOLSON

At the beginning of his essay ‘Thick description’, Clifford Geertz quotes Susanne Langer’s remark that when certain ideas which promise to resolve many fundamental problems appear, they are embraced almost to the exclusion of all others. Later, as they become part of the general stock of theoretical concepts, they come to be regarded in a more modest perspective and are applied to a more limited range of problems (Geertz, 1975:. 3-4). This is another way of stating a common view of the development of knowledge, that ideas are proposed, tested and refined (or rejected), and it is to this process they owe their legitimacy. However, while that may be true of some ideas, there are many others which follow a different course. Far from being put into perspective over time, they are uncritically accepted, and continue to exert an influence whenever they appear to offer an explanation, or to suggest a solution for a practical problem.

Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration

One such idea concerns the nature of migratory movements which result in increased urbanization. According to this idea, movement from the countryside to cities is conceived as consisting of many moves over short distances which, together, result in a considerable shift of population. This idea is invoked both to explain the course of urbanization, and to legitimate solutions to problems perceived to have followed in its wake. It is commonly associated with E.G. Ravenstein, and a much-cited article he published in the Journal ofthe Statistical Society in 1885 (Ravenstein, 1885). Though Ravenstein is often considered to be the originator of this conception of migration, his article was clearly an outgrowth of preoccupations which were shared by his contemporaries. His most influential ideas were foreshadowed in a paper read to the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1859 (Danson and Welton, 1859). Still earlier, accounts of movement towards towns in Scotland had been couched in similar terms (MacDonald, (1937) 1978: 27, 30, 38, 64; Redford, (1926) 1976: 65). He himself had published an earlier version of his famous paper almost 10 years before (Ravenstein, 1876), and in 1889 he presented a sequel (Ravenstein, 1889) in which he discussed movement in a number of other countries, but which otherwise added little to his 1885 paper.

The significance of Ravenstein’s contribution was that he drew together a number of ideas about movement to towns with which he formulated a series of more or less coherent propositions under the title of the ‘Laws of Migration’. It is perhaps not least this title which has assured the renown of the article. When in the discussion of the paper exception

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was taken to his use of the term ‘law’ as being rather loose (Ravenstein, 1885: 233), he conceded he had used it because he could not find another term. What he meant was that ‘migration went on according to certain rules’ (ibid.: 235).

The ‘laws’, what we would now term a model, were not derived from empirical observations of actual migration. Such data did not exist. Rather, on the basis of the birthplace tables in the 1881 census, Ravenstein offered an explanation which was both imaginative and ingenious, of how the observed patterns of distribution of people born in each county might have come about. He made further suggestions of additional types of migration which he assumed took place, though they were barely hinted at by the data. He also showed a greater critical awareness of the shortcomings of his material (ibid.: 187) than have some of his readers.

Using graphic imagery, which itself has influenced subsequent thinking,’ he described migration as a series of ‘great currents’ containing a large number of moves over relatively short distances which brought about the overall displacement of population: ‘The more distant from the fountain head which feeds them, the less swiftly do these currents flow; and whilst they sweep along with them many of the natives of the counties through which they pass, they deposit, in their progress, many of the migrants which have joined them at their origin’ (ibid.: 191). Thus ‘gaps’ created by movement of its natives out of a county are ‘filled up’ by in-migration from a neighbouring one, ‘this inflow’ being ‘most considerable across that border which lies furthest away from the great centres of absorption’ (ibid.), that is to say the growing towns, notably London. It is this vision which informs the first of the laws of migration set out on pages 198 and 199 in the article, and which forms the basis for the model as a whole.

The laws listed on these two pages are often taken to be a summary of the discussions in the article (for example by Lee, 1966: 47-8). However, they omit some of the propositions found in the body of the text and include others barely supported by the evidence which precedes and follows. These latter include the most frequently cited of all the laws. This is the second law of migration, in which Ravenstein describes ‘the natural outcome of this movement of migration’ in the following terms: ‘The inhabitants of the country immediately surrounding a town of rapid growth, flock into it; the gaps thus left in the rural population are filled up by migrants from more remote districts, until the attractive force of one of our rapidly growing cities makes its influence felt, step by step, to the most remote corner of the kingdom’ (ibid.: 199).

Stepwise migration It is in assertions about the ‘step by step’ nature of movements from ‘the most remote corner(s) of the kingdom’, that the laws have been most frequently invoked. By stepwise movement Ravenstein meant a sequence of replacement moves, each constituting a ‘step’, made by a different individual. However, the article contains no direct evidence to support this law. ‘If our census returns enabled us to analyse the inhabitants of each parish or registrar’s district according to birth places’, he wrote, but which they did not, ‘we should find that the bulk of migrants had journeyed but a very little distance’ (ibid.: 182). The basis for this assumption appears to be the county data, ‘our personal experience’ (ibid.: 181), and estimates of movement within counties derived from birthplace data in the Dutch census of 1879 (ibid.: 182-3). These, he said, ‘prove that the bulk of migrants consists of what, for want of a better term, I designate as short-journey migrants.’ That is to say, he considered the case had been ‘proved’ in the nineteenth-century sense, by logical argument. He had shown what on the basis of the available evidence could be, but not conclusively demonstrated what was.

1 . Ravenstein is credited with the introduction of the term ‘stream’ into the migration literature (Shryock, Siegel, 1976: 379 , though he more often used the term ‘current’.

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Stage migration The pattern of replacement moves described in the second law of migration is paralleled by ‘migration by stages’, which is included in the body of the article in a typology of migrants (ibid.: 183), but does not appear in the list of laws on pages 198 and 199. This omission probably explains the confusion found in some of the literature between the two types of movement (see for example, Lee, 1966).

Migration by stages, according to Ravenstein’s usage, refers to a sequence of moves in the direction of an eventual destination made by one and the same person. There is no evidence for migration by stages in the data presented. It was apparently inferred from the custom of the time that people in search of work wandered from parish to parish (Llewellyn-Smith, (1889) 1904: 75; Ravenstein, 1885: 167, 183; Redford, (1926) 1976: 12 1). Ravenstein gave examples of the routes he supposed were taken by Irish immigrants to London, clearly linking such movement to the growth of bigger towns. He gave no evidence that these moves were in fact unidirectional, but merely assumed they were. The assumption was not shared by other writers of the period, who considered that movers of this type did not have defined goals (Llewellyn-Smith, (1889) 1904: 68), nor is it by a more recent authority, who has contrasted this movement with ‘normal’ migrations (Hobsbawm, (1964) 1968: 38).

It is clear from a major contemporary review of nineteenth-century urbanization that ideas similar to those Ravenstein had done so much to publicize were current elsewhere in Europe and North America, and that his article had become quite widely known (see Weber, (1899) 1963: 260, 267, 270). It was not long before the idea of urbanization proceeding as a result of stepwise or stage migration was being cited as established fact, as in the introduction to Marshall (1923: 7-8), who saw it as the means by which wages were equalized over a wide area. The idea became further entrenched after the publication of Arthur Redford’s Labour migration in England 1800-1850. This study, citing Ravenstein and Marshall in support, came to similar conclusions to Ravenstein on the basis of inferences from birthplace data for an earlier period. It also contributed considerable confusion to the literature by, following Marshall, using the terms ‘step’ and ‘stage’ in opposite senses to those used by Ravenstein (Redford, (1926) 1976: 183, 186, 190). From then on the idea was cited by sociologists and social historians (e.g. Banks, 1973: 117; Lynd and Lynd, 1929: 37-38; Moore, 1938: 32, 33; Thomas, 1941: 298, 307), and in major works in economics (e.g. Cairncross, (1953) 1975: 68,79). It was quoted in popular social histories for the general reader as a virtually incontrovertible fact (Ashton, 1948: 123-4), and continues to appear in student texts (e.g. Johnson, 1990: 36-7) and compendia of established wisdom (e.g. United Nations, 1974: 31). Occasionally authors have cautioned that this interpretation of migration patterns is speculative (Deane and Cole, 1962: 122), but they are rare exceptions.

From theory to policy

The transformation of the idea of stepwise or stage migration from a description of a process into a theory which was seen to have a policy application dates from the mid-1950s. In addition to the familiar problem of population loss in rural areas, population pressure in major cities was coming to be seen as excessive, and was therefore also perceived as a problem. The theory of stepwise or stage migration linked the two. It therefore seemed to offer a means of finding solutions to both.

The theory gained considerable legitimacy from the existence of a number of other compatible theories, including those which were being developed at the same time to tackle the problems of regions which were less developed economically. These were problems which were analogous, even related, to problems of population distribution. Various features of these other theories came to be associated with the idea of stepwise and stage migration,

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so that the model, as it became distanced from its origins, came to be understood in a number of different ways. A degree of ambiguity was also introduced due to a failure to distinguish clearly between gross movement, which is what the model refers to, and net population shift, which in its original formulation it does not.

Among the more influential economic theories were centre-periphery theory and growth pole theory. The former included the assumption of migration to the centre from the periphery as one of the ‘backwash effects’ (Myrdal, 1957: 27), and speculation that eventually ‘spread effects’ would stimulate economic activity in centres in the periphery, and thus presumably population growth (ibid.: 31). It may be of significance that one of the theory’s proponents, Gunnar Myrdal, had given his name in the 1930s to the so- called ‘Myrdal group’ of Swedish and American scholars, including Thomas avd Moore cited above (p. 399), engaged in the study of urbanward migration in Sweden (Akerman, 1975: 149), who had been influenced by ideas of stepwise and stage migration. Growth pole theory in its later versions (initially it was conceived of as an abstract structure (Perroux, 1950: 95)) also included an assumption of population concentration (Perroux, (1955) 1970: 101 -2), without specifying how it would occur.

The combination of the idea of stepwise and stage migration with these theories gave rise to the idea of the growth centre. The growth centre is an empirical concept, not a theory. It consists of an urban core, of variable size, which in specific instances is defined in relation to the problems it is intended to solve. Hence ‘the characteristics of such a centre vary considerably with the nature of the region in which the centre was [sic] to be found (or developed), and the purposes which it was thought likely to serve’ (EFTA, 1968: 21). In other words, whatever the problem, a growth centre would solve it.

One of the purposes a growth centre was intended to serve was to slow down depopulation in the periphery (however defined) and simultaneously ease population pressure in major cities. As Marshall had already argued, it was believed that ‘even a small resistance, if concentrated at one point’ might delay movement greatly (Marshall, 1923: 7) by facilitating stepwise and stage migration. A growth centre was intended to be an alternative destination, one of Ravenstein’s ‘other centres of absorption’ (Ravenstein, 1885: 208), or, in the term introduced by Stouffer, an ‘intervening opportunity’ (Stouffer, 1940).

According to Stouffer’s theory, which owes some of its inspiration to Ravenstein (ibid.: 846), if people moved at all, they moved to the first suitable ‘opportunity’. Unlike most of the other theories, this concept has been operationalized and tested. The test has been criticized for, among other things, its circular reasoning (Anderson, 1955: 28911.). It was also limited in that it confined itself to residential mobility within an urban area. That has, however, proved no obstacle to its acceptance into the vocabulary of planners and policy-makers and its application in other contexts, due perhaps to its usefulness as a label which could be attached to a more general idea they already held.

The concept was also assimilable with another idea which takes several different forms in the social sciences and has widespread popular currency: that is the idea that small or gradual transitions are more easily accommodated than large ones. This belief has informed much thinking on social mobility, that is mobility in a metaphorical sense, as well as the analogous assumption that rural migrants adjust more easily to urban life when they move to smaller, rather than larger, towns, or accomplish the transition to the city by stages. Policy-makers therefore had no difficulty in persuading themselves that a policy which encouraged stepwise or stage migration would benefit the migrants themselves.

A framework which enabled the effect of ‘intervening opportunities’ to be conceptualized in a way compatible with Ravenstein’s scheme was provided by Walter Christaller’s central place theory (Christaller, (1933) 1966). This is not a theory of migration, nor does it contain any assumptions about migration. What it does is present an idealized spatial representation of the pattern formed by the transactional relations between those who offer and those who use services. The location of service provision is determined by the size of population necessary to sustain the various services and the ‘subjective

If the theory fits 40 1

economic distance’ (Christaller, (1933) 1966: 107, 112-13) consumers are willing to travel in order to avail themselves of them. The hierarchy of services, from those which can only be provided in a few specialized centres to local services much in demand, gives rise to a hierarchical system of central places, each with a hinterland, further subdivided into the hinterlands of lower-order centres, which in an idealized case form a pattern of nesting hexagons.

It is the notion of a hierarchy and how it relates to space, rather than its functional basis, which has had greatest influence on subsequent thinking, and it is the spatially organized hierarchy, largely removed from its original context, which has been readily assimilated into the theory of stepwise and stage migration.* Places at different levels of the hierarchy, which are also located at successively greater distances from the centre, fit readily with the idea of the steps or stages by which migrants are supposed to proceed. Indeed, the absence of a developed hierarchy has come to be seen as a defect, and an explanation for, implicitly less than desirable, direct movement from rural areas to big cities (e.g. Balan et al., 1973: 151).

Policy in practice: the case of Norway

Though comprehensive policies incorporating the assumption that movement takes place according to the model proposed by Ravenstein have occasionally been formulated (e.g. Misra, 1972: 157-62), they have never been implemented because existing infrastructure cannot be ignored. Where the model has been invoked is in the legitimation of more limited planning interventions. Thus it has been used to promote the idea that population pressure on major cities can be relieved by expanding small or medium-sized towns and developing satellite towns (e.g. Rondinelli, 1983; Shaw, 1978) to act as a ‘brake’ on migration (St. meld. nr. 29 (1963-64): 44; St. meld, nr. 87 (1966-67): 15).3 The other policy application was in rural areas with falling populations, that is the ‘remote corner(s) of the kingdom’, where promotion of growth in small centres was proposed as a means of arresting decline (EFTA, 1968: 48-9).

One of the countries in which the idea of step and stage migration exercised considerable influence on regional development policy was Norway in the 1960s. Of all the countries of Europe which still had relatively large rural populations, Norway was the one in which that population was most widely dispersed. Even in 1960, almost half the population lived outside towns and villages. Urbanization and industrialization had started late, and movement from the countryside to towns was still taking place on a scale approaching that in Britain in the nineteenth century, when Ravenstein formulated his laws. Problems being experienced at the extremes of the urban hierarchy, of population decline in outlying areas and growing congestion in the capital, Oslo, and one or two larger towns, were attributed to this rapid urbanization (St. meld. nr. 27 (1971-72): 69).

It emerged from the 1960 census that, though in absolute terms the largest cities were growing most in Norway, relatively, population increase was greatest in the smaller and medium-sized places. This pattern clearly lent itself to interpretation in terms of a model of stepwise or stage migration. The same was true at the base of the urban hierarchy. Population redistribution within rural communes, due to net decline in the rural areas and net growth in a village, was readily interpreted as the result of movement from one to the other. It was therefore a short step to the conclusion that policies intended to facilitate

2. Suggestions of a hierarchy of migrants and migration destinations are also found in Ravenstein’s fifth law, that long-distance migrants go to ‘one of the great centres of commerce or industry’ (Ravenstein, 1885: 199), and his assertions that they are of a ‘special class’ (ibid.: 209, 216).

3. St. meld. is the abbreviation for Stortingsmelding, a report to the Norwegian parliament, the equivalent of a White Paper. All translations in the text are mine.

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stepwise or stage migration, namely development of a settlement structure which it was believed would encourage local centralization, would go at least some way towards solving problems perceived to be caused by urbanization.

The idea of stepwise and stage migration was imported into Norway ready-made, from Sweden. The idea had already undergone a degree of modification in the Swedish literature, in that it had been fitted into the framework provided by central place theory (Hagerstrand, 1957: 68-9; Olsson, 1965: 29-32). It was in this form that it entered academic and planning discourses in Norway (e.g. St. meld. nr. 87 (1966-67): 14-15).

From assumption to conviction

As in nineteenth-century Britain, there were no adequate data available in Norway in the 1960s (nor are there now) to show patterns of movement within the boundaries of the smallest local authority areas (kommuner), and thus whether local centres were indeed the destinations of migrants from the surrounding rural areas. Evidence from a scheme to subsidize movement from the most exposed places on the coast, which did record movements within as well as between communes, suggested that some of the families assisted were moving to places which were ‘only slightly more suitable for settlement’ than the places they left (St. meld. nr. 87 (1966-67): 107). The moves were thus consistent with the stepwise migration model, but did not necessarily lead to increased urbanization. Patterns of movement further up the urban hierarchy had to be inferred from statistics of gross movement between communes compiled annually from registrations of change of domicile. Assumptions about patterns of movement were based on these inferences, impressionistic or less than representative observations, and above all, frequent repetition of assertions that population movements conformed to the step or stage model, or would do if the requisite conditions existed.

It was in relation to the smallest places and their hinterlands, ‘the most remote comer(s) of the kingdom’, that ideas of stepwise and stage migration came to exert the greatest influence. Initially, statements about the nature of migration in these areas were rather cautious. A departmental memorandum from 1963 stated: ‘If one assumes there will be some migration’ to a place which is growing, ‘it is precisely the surplus population in the peripheral parts’ of the surrounding area who would be expected to be in-migrants (Kommunal- og arbeidsdepartementet, 1964: 12). Within four years a White Paper was confidently asserting that ‘the commune or district comprises the most important source of migrants’ to small, but growing, places (St. meld. nr. 87 (1966-67): 8). Six years later, the White Paper on a proposed development plan for north Norway (which was not implemented) was in no doubt that: ‘Most of the considerable migratory movement in the post-war years has [my emphasis] taken place within the region, from sparsely populated areas to local villages, which again can have a net migration loss to regional centres and large towns’ (St. meld. nr. 108 (1972-73): 14).

Social scientists and other academics were no less convinced that migration was proceeding according to a stepwise or stage pattern. Growth of small urban centres was ‘the result of local migration to the centre from the surrounding countryside’ (Hansen, 1975: 261). The process had been ‘going on actively in most areas during the post-war period’ (ibid.), for ‘such movements take place on a significant scale in Norway’ (Statistisk sentralbyri, 1977: 223).

This growing conviction was due less to an accumulation of new evidence than to the emergence of the question of the feasibility or not of retention of settlement in the remoter rural areas as a political issue. Stepwise or stage migration was central to the debate which developed, not because there was any dispute about whether it took place or not, but because it was a fundamental premise shared by all the participants that it did.

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Nor was there any dispute about the assumptions that the source of population of local centres would be their own hinterlands and that there would be no in-migration to rural areas, the lowest level of the urban hieratchy (Brox, 1980: 233; Moen et al. , 1979: 89). The dispute was about whether developing a settlement structure conducive to stepwise or stage migration would slow down rural depopulation or hasten it. The debate thus reified and gave prominence to the model, and so played a major role in reinforcing assumptions about migration patterns.

For those who viewed increased urbanization as a necessary concomitant of ‘natural’ change in economic structure, which regional policy should stimulate rather than impede (St. meld. nr. 29 (1963-64): 9), small urban centres in areas which were otherwise losing population were seen as ‘the first bulwark’ (Skrindo, 1966: 296) against depopulation. They were considered ‘a lesser evil’ (Myklebost, 1965: 320) than a much greater degree of concentration in just a small part of the country. According to this, the prevailing, view, rural population loss was inevitable, therefore the aim of planning policy had to be damage limitation. ‘The powerful movement which is taking place in the settlement structure makes it necessary to consciously plan local central places which aim to draw to themselves a large proportion of the natural [sic] migration’ (St. meld. nr. 29 (1963-64): 46).

Critics of the policy argued that, on the contrary, the promotion of local centralization constituted a threat to outlying areas. Local centres would act as stepping stones to more distant places (Brox and Handegird, 1974: 10-11; cf. EFTA, 1968: 49). In their view, by promoting stepwise and stage migration, policies of local centralization would make depopulation inevitable.

Though they did so for opposite reasons, both parties envisaged the prospect of progressive depopulation which would eventually affect the smaller local centres, and they expressed it in terms of the same imagery. ‘The supply of migrants from the less populous countryside cannot be expected to maintain high rates of growth indefinitely in small centres as well as the main cities’ (Myklebost, 1968: 243; see also Brox, 1980: 233; St. meld. nr. 87 (1966-67): 21). The threat was apparently imminent. ‘Many of the rural reservoirs of migrants are empty or drying up now’ (1975), according to an advocate of greater urbanization (Hansen, 1975: 261). A critic agreed that by 1980 the north Norwegian countryside was already ‘drained of its young people’ (Brox, 1980: 232).

And the evidence?

These graphic descriptions notwithstanding, evidence to substantiate them was elusive. The only documentation of moves within communes was of those made under the scheme to subsidize movement from outlying places on the coast (see above, p. 402). The scheme’s high profile had created the impression that the volume of such movement was large and that many outlying places were becoming deserted, but its significance was, in fact, very modest. Between 1950 and 1969 only about 750 households moved under the scheme (St. meld. nr. 108 (1972-73): 47), compared with the 130,000 to 180,000 changes of residence between communes which were registered annually during the same period.

Numerous social scientists did research in outlying rural areas in the 1960s and 1970s, yet they found far fewer migrants, or potential migrants, to local centres than convictions about the importance of such movement had led them to expect. Neither those who asked the people they interviewed about their intentions (e.g. Brox, 1971: IV, 2; Elden, 1975: 67), nor those who investigated how many people had moved from outlying places to villages, or even within the commune as a whole (e.g. Aubert and Karlsen, 1965: 203; Brox, 1971: IV, 22: Nicholson, 1976), were able to identify more than very few such migrants.

404 Beryl Nicholson

To investigate further, a detailed study4 was made in Skjerv~ay, an archetypical peripheral north Norwegian commune with a net migration loss to the rest of the country and net redistribution within its boundaries. If this redistribution was indeed brought about through movement to local villages, then it would be taking place in this commune, but the findings show little evidence of stepwise or stage migration. Between 1946 and 1965 the population of the main village, also called Skjervq, almost doubled to 1400, but only a quarter of this total had come from the surrounding island^.^ These local in-migrants were outnumbered by in-migrants from other parts of the country (excluding return migrants), according to the model, movers in the ‘wrong’ direction. In the neighbouring commune of Nordreisa local in-migrants contributed still less to growth in the central village and incomers correspondingly more (Nicholson, 1991 : 4).

Nor is there much evidence that the village of Skjervq constituted a ‘first bulwark’ against depopulation. On the contrary, between 1946 and 1965 over three times as many of the native inhabitants of the rural parts of the commune left the area altogether as moved to the village of Skjervray. Though its population has continued to increase, the proportion originating in other places in the commune6 has fallen steadily. Yet this fall is not a consequence of a ‘draining’ of the surrounding area. In 1990 the largest neighbouring island, bordering the Arctic Ocean, still had more inhabitants than in 1900 (582, compared with 506), despite a dramatic drop in the birth rate (Statistisk sentralbyri, unpublished).

Indeed, the rural area has also received in-migrants. Of the inhabitants in 1970 who had moved into the commune since 1960, half lived outside the village. There has also been some movement from the village to the surrounding area.’ This pattern is consistent with Ravenstein’s ‘counter-currents’ , movement in the opposite direction from the ‘main’, that is centralizing, currents (Ravenstein, 1885: 187). However, this constitutes a separate law (ibid.: 199), and though ambiguous references are sometimes made to net movement (St. meld. nr. 108 (1972-73): 14, cited on p. 402 above), it has no place in the stepwise and stage model as it is generally understood.

Absent both from the model and from Ravenstein’s data and his laws is any reference to repeated movement in and out of the commune. This consists of back and forth movements of people from the respective communes (Nicholson, 1971; 1975) (of whom Ravenstein was aware (Ravenstein, 1885: 187)), and a still greater number of moves made by people from elsewhere who move in and leave again (Nicholson, 1983: 3, 8; 1991: 7). In this commune, as in the nation as a whole (Nicholson, 1990: 113-14), repeat movement exceeds the volume of more ‘permanent’ migration. This evidence suggests that in Norway in the twentieth century, the stepwise or stage model of migration has not provided an accurate description of patterns of migration or the process of urbanization. It is therefore extremely unlikely to have had the practical policy relevance ascribed to it.

Conclusion

The idea of stepwise and stage migration was, and remains, a hypothesis, yet in both the academic literature and in relation to policy it has long been taken as established fact. Such evidence to support the model as exists is fragmentary and far from conclusive.

4. The discussion of population movements in Skjervey is drawn from research based on both unpublished and published sources of population data. See Nicholson, 1991: 13-14.

5. Even if in-migrants from adjacent areas of neighbouring communes are counted as local migrants, the latter are still outnumbered by in-migrants from further afield.

6 . The commune as defined by its boundaries in 1960. 7. The comparison of 1960 and 1970 are taken from unpublished linked census data kindly made available

to me by Professor Hallstein Myklebost, University of Oslo. Linked census data were compiled by the Norwegian Central Statistical Bureau by linking together the personal records from the 1960 and 1970 censuses of persons enumerated in both.

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Repeated reference to Ravenstein’s article by subsequent authors, who in turn are cited by others, has given it an authority which has counted for more than mere evidence. The rare reservations concerning the limitations of the evidence and its presentation (Ravenstein, 1885: 168, 228-35; Deane and Cole, 1962) are more than outweighed by a widespread readiness to accept the model uncritically. Its very existence has, it would seem, inhibited a search for an alternative. It is taken as the norm against which empirical findings are evaluated. Deviations are explained away (e.g. Balin et al . , 1973), rather than being regarded as reason to doubt the model. After all, when an answer has already been found, why go on asking questions?

The compatibility of the model with other theories has reinforced convictions of its validity and increased its plausibility. It has also resulted in incorporation into the model of selective elements of those theories. This has distanced the model from its original context and given it the appearance of general applicability.

It is as a generally applicable principle that the model has been perceived as offering answers to practical problems, answers which were not forthcoming from other sources. Its application as a policy tool implied that the model had been validated through the normal process of scientific inquiry, that it had been established that migration did indeed follow this pattern. This legitimacy, however, rested on the existence of an ideology of science, not compliance with scientific practice. The process by which the model has evolved, has passed into the stock of conventional wisdom and has become accepted as established fact, has been ‘a combination of repetition and innovation’ - that which characterizes the production of folklore (Febvre, 1939: 154).

The dividing line between science and folklore is not nearly as clear as is often assumed. Scrutiny of the social science literature and the practical application of its ideas would doubtless produce many more examples like this one,8 for the extent and the degree of certainty of scientific knowledge is much less than its practitioners like to admit or those who seek to apply it like to believe. In this case form has been substituted for substance. It has been used to give a spurious authority to ideas which are speculative, and legitimacy which is no less spurious, to the policies they have been used to justify.

Beryl Nicholson, Centre for Scandinavian Studies, 12 Lavender Gardens, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 3DE

Acknowledgements Revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, March 1989. Some of the material was collected in the course of research partly financed by grants from Fondet Nord-Norges Universitet (1 965) and Norges almennvitenskapelige forskningsrad (1983). The assistance of the inter-library loan service of the Central Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, is also acknowledged.

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