SOCIAL EXCLUSION: A CONCEPT IN NEED OF DEFINITION?

• Author: Peace, Robin

Abstract

"Social exclusion" is a contested term. Not only is it used to refer to a wide range of phenomena and processes related to poverty, deprivation and hardship, but it is also used in relation to a wide range of categories of excluded people and places of exclusion. This presentation offers some evidence for the elusive and challenging nature of the concept both in the European Union and in New Zealand.

INTRODUCTION

"Social exclusion" -- what do these two words mean? Why have they become popular in policy discourse in parts of the English-speaking world? How and in what ways are they a contested concept? Arguably, they signify a new concept somehow related to notions of poverty, hardship, deprivation and marginalisation, but the contexts in which the concept appears are often ambiguous and contradictory. Despite over 20 years of use in the European Union (especially France) and in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, there is debate about what the concept signifies and how it is best used in rhetorical and policy contexts. Notwithstanding the level of debate, the concept is widely used and seems to be profoundly attractive to the producers of social policy discourse.

Although there is much that could and has been said about social exclusion, this paper focuses on only four things. First, I give a brief reconstruction of the history of the concept -- where it came from and my understanding of why it was used in particular ways to particular effect in the European setting. Second, I introduce some of the "things" that social exclusion refers to -- kinds of exclusion and categories of excluded people -- that make their appearance in the discourse of social exclusion. Third, I lay out some of the definitions of social exclusion in current circulation and identify the key differences between them. Fourth, and finally, I suggest some of the other implications, the perverse consequences and unanticipated outcomes, that inhere in the "exclusion" discourse.

HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT

Debates over social exclusion as a concept often begin with its history. Who used it first, why was it chosen as a policy term rather than the more familiar concepts of "poverty" or "deprivation" or "hardship", what did it mean in its earliest incarnation? In English-language policy documents produced in Europe, North America and Oceania in the 1970s, researchers would be hard pressed to find texts that included the phrase. However, by the mid-1980s "social exclusion" had not only made its appearance in European Union documents but had also appeared in academic discourse emanating from the so-called "less-industrialised" world (Rodgers et al. 1995). It has been used even more frequently since the 1990s. The concept of "social exclusion" has become a core concept in the European Union and a foundational policy concept in Tony Blair's New Labour Government in the UK. It has surfaced briefly (though not persuasively) in Australia in 1999 as an umbrella concept for a large social policy conference, and most recently has appeared in Aotearoa/New Zealand as part of the project of rethinking the direction of social policy. There is, however, no clear record of how the term came into use in English-language policy contexts. My own version of this history, however, and one that is backed up by a number of scholars, suggests that the concept of social exclusion, as a policy term, made its English-language debut in the European Union Poverty Programmes in the 1980s.

French and English were the mandatory official languages for all European-Union-wide policy initiatives in the 1980s and a recognisably similar term existed in the French in the form of "exclusion sociale". As the European policy makers struggled to find a term for innovative social policy that avoided the stigma of concepts such as "poverty" and "deprivation", "exclusion sociale" or "social exclusion" as it neatly translated, offered a fresh alternative. It was mutually recognisable in both languages, it avoided conceptual stigma and it was indeed "shiny and new". In a sense, it was used as a "branding" exercise for the European Union's highly controversial Poverty Programmes. The Poverty Programmes were controversial for two reasons. Firstly, they appeared to compromise the principle of subsidiarity, that the Union, or the Community as it was then, would not generate policies that were more properly the responsibility of individual member states. Secondly, they publicised "poverty" and thus seemed to offend the language of decency. "Exclusion" was a less blatant and more malleable concept. The "war on poverty" was out and the "fight against social exclusion" was in.

"Social exclusion" was rapidly disseminated in English-language versions of European policies and the shift in meaning entailed in the translation from its old (French) meaning and its new manifestations was barely remarked outside of academic discourse.

The French Policy Milieu

In the French policy milieu, for at least a decade prior to the European Union Poverty Programmes, "exclusion sociale" had been a term used to refer to a very select set of categories of people who were excluded from the provision of social insurance in France. According to Hilary Silver (1995), an American commentator on European Union exclusion policies, a French social policy analyst, Paul Lenoir, in 1974, identified ten categories or groups who came under the "uninsured" umbrella. These were the physically and mentally handicapped, those who were "suicidal", aged invalids, abused children, substance abusers, delinquents, single parents (notably sole mothers), multi-problem households (where more than one of the factors existed at any one time), "marginals", "asocials" and "social misfits".

Several of these terms -- especially the last three -- may also be terms that have suffered in the translation from the French, but the picture is nevertheless clear. Successive French Governments produced policies that only offered social insurance to those who were in paid work or who were legally married to someone in paid work. The inevitable outcome of policies that excluded people on the basis of their capacity to engage in paid work was an eclectic range and growing number of people who were left in the hands of church-based and private charity, but for quite different reasons.

The European Union Context

In view of what happened in the European Union in relation to "social exclusion" policy frameworks, this starting place is significant. To understand this requires an understanding of the policy mandate of the European Union. I will not go into this in any great depth. Suffice it to say that the European Union represents a primarily economic relationship between the 15 member states and it has proved extremely difficult to rationalise the inclusion of social policy initiatives into the broader mandate of European Union policy. Thus, wherever "anti-poverty" initiatives could be coupled to "employment" initiatives, there was greater acceptance of them by the member states. Over the 20 years of the Poverty Programmes (the policy initiatives that were the key carriers of the "social exclusion" discourse into member states) a significant "discursive shift" (where "discursive" refers to the ways in which poverty and exclusion were talked about and written about) occurred.

The discursive shift in European Union social policy entailed a shift from a focus on "poverty" to a focus on "social exclusion" and has attracted a great deal of (English-language) commentary, especially since the mid-1990s(2). The substance of this commentary is that the concept of social exclusion now has an accepted currency in European Union policy discourse. Not only has it taken over the discursive space, the language, of "poverty" in the European Union policy milieu, but also its use has increasingly encouraged a conflation with the idea of "exclusion from employment" and simultaneously encouraged a shift away from the idea of extreme marginalisation.

Thus, for many researchers, analysts and commentators who saw "social exclusion" as a new and shiny term -- perhaps even a Trojan horse -- that would encourage a rethinking of social issues and problems away from the tired and limited concepts of poverty and deprivation, disappointment was not long in coming. Paradoxically it seemed that the policies deriving from the new discourse of "social exclusion" were capable of ensuring that some groups and individuals were being excluded even from the discourse of exclusion.

The Shift from Verb to Noun

There are a number of possible reasons for the conflations and slippages entailed in the development of European Union policies. They are beyond the scope of this paper. The significant lesson to draw, however, is that it is important to understand what a person or group is excluded from and by whom. In the case of "exclusion sociale" the agency was clear. The French Government made policies that excluded particular groups from receiving social insurance on the basis of explicit criteria. If you wanted to be included amongst those who had access to social insurance you found a job, or you got married to someone who had a job. This was inclusion and exclusion in a definable sense.

The "Poverty Programmes" provided, in a sense, a "transformative space" -- a space, that is, where change in the nature and understanding of poverty took place. In this transformative space, the concept of social exclusion underwent a complex linguistic shift that has affected what policy makers now "do" with the concept. The English language has a "trick" (called, in semantic terms, "nominalisation") whereby strong active verbs can be turned into nouns. This happens whenever, for example, the phrase "to ruminate" that refers to the actions of a cow engaged in digesting its food becomes the subject of our "rumination" or our slow and deliberative thinking on any matter other than cows'...