Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion

Promoting Social Justice in Social Work

John H. Pierson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415742986
• eBook ISBN: 9781317803065
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

In our highly unequal Britain poverty and social exclusion continue to dominate the lives of users of social work and social care services. At the same time, spending cuts and welfare reform have changed the context within which services are delivered. The third edition of this unique textbook seeks to capture the complexity and diversity of practice relating to social exclusion as social workers adapt to this challenging environment.

Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion prepares practitioners to engage directly with the social and personal circumstances facing excluded individuals and their families. The volume:

• Explains the development of the concept of social exclusion as a framework for understanding the impact of poverty and other deprivations on users' lives and outlines five building blocks for combating exclusion in practice;

• Locates practice within social work values of fairness and social justice while acknowledging the many challenges to those values;

• Includes individual chapters on excluded children and families, young people and adults -- with chapters also on practice in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and rural communities;

• Discusses inclusionary practice in relation to racism as well as refugees and asylum seekers.

Throughout, the book encourages students and practitioners to think through the range of approaches, perspectives and value choices they face. To facilitate engagement each chapter includes up-to-date practice examples, case studies and specific questions for readers to reflect on.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT SOCIAL EXCLUSION MEANS

THIS CHAPTER COVERS

Evolution of social exclusion as a concept.

The components of exclusion: poverty, failure in the job market, poorly performing social networks, living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, and exclusion from services.

An understanding of what social exclusion means for social work practice and why tackling it is a key task in the pursuit of a fairer society.

Social exclusion, as a concept, captures the process through which people’s lives are shaped by multiple disadvantages without the material and social resources most of us take for granted. While we can roughly estimate the number of people socially excluded – and particularly whether that number is increasing or decreasing – that is not the major purpose of the concept for social workers. Rather it enables social workers to understand how need, deprivation, loneliness, poverty and poor health combine in ways that affect individuals, families and neighbourhoods both materially and psychologically. In a profession overly prone to assigning people to separate categories according to eligibility criteria, social exclusion requires us to look at a person or family as a product of social and economic forces as well as of individual motivation, upbringing and culture. While social work theory has long stressed the ‘person in their environment’, social exclusion gives us a concrete account of how this happens – uncovering processes and categories that link the thinking and behaviour of users to their social conditions.

How and why people are excluded is a sharply contested question with views running across a spectrum. At one end are those who see the exclusion of the individual as entirely their own responsibility – and therefore solutions are to do with correcting individual behaviour and beliefs. At the other end are those who regard the behaviour of excluded individuals as a product of large-scale economic structures and social forces over which they have little control. Of course a substantial middle part of the spectrum blends together some ideas from each of these extremes, while social policy of central government bends first one way and then the other. This debate, which has been with us in one form or another since the dawn of industrialisation in the early 1800s, continues to impact on social policy and on social work.

EVOLUTION OF A CONCEPT

Social exclusion has been succinctly defined as ‘chronic, multidimensional disadvantage resulting in a catastrophic detachment from society’ (Burchardt et al. 1999). It affects key domains of family and community life – health, child development, educational attainment, nutrition, parenting skills, household income and participation in the labour market. The concept helps us identify and investigate these separate dimensions and then to see how they reinforce each other in the lives of those social workers mainly work with.

Despite the various meanings that social exclusion has acquired in recent years in Britain, the concept itself arose in a specific context in France in the 1970s. There it was used to describe the condition of certain groups on the margins of society who were cut off both from regular sources of employment and the income safety nets of the welfare state. Les exclus lacked the substantial rights of les citoyens, either in practice, because they were victims of discrimination such as disabled people, or because they were not citizens of the state, such as immigrants. Nor did they have access to or connections with those powerful institutions that might have helped them gain voice such as the trade unions or residents’ associations.

It is important to remember that the concept of social exclusion arose in France and not in Britain or the United States, both of which have substantially different political cultures in which there is a higher tolerance for inequality and the expansion of the free market in delivering public services. The idea of social ‘solidarity’ from which social exclusion emerged was and remains an important element in the French Republican ideal and very different from the tradition of investigation begun by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree on the poverty line and numbers falling below it. Drawing on this ideal was the means by which the French state could repair the rupture of the social fabric rather than through sociological analysis of the incidence of poverty. Social solidarity required an emphasis on citizenship and social cohesion, reflecting a strong state with a commitment to providing a social safety net for those outside the labour market (Paugam 1993).

From France the term gained wide currency in the social policy of the European Union, particularly in the Maastricht Treaty of 1996. Conservatives on the right supported it because it did not necessarily focus only on poverty and income, while the social democratic left saw it as a way of promoting inclusion and social justice.

Tackling exclusion and promoting inclusion gained wide appeal across the political spectrum. For the political left it suggested a greater push toward equality with a focus on tackling deprivation and the lack of rights, while for the right it suggested shaping a more cohesive, unified society uniting behind a strong national regime. For the right, wanting to back away from the anti-poverty strategies of the 1960s and 1970s that had focused on improving welfare benefits, the concept gave government room to look more closely at individual attributes such as resilience, motivation, work discipline and parenting skills as among the causes of poverty. This was indeed one of its attractions as a policy tool – it enabled politicians and policy makers to move from focusing only on income to the interaction between behaviour and economic necessity.

When the Labour Party came to power in the UK in 1997 it swiftly adopted the concept as its own, framing a range of social policy objectives in terms of reducing social exclusion. It set up the Social Exclusion Unit in the Cabinet Office to ensure that all departments coordinated their efforts in tackling exclusion. This in turn was replaced in 2004 by the Social Exclusion Task Force, still within the Cabinet Office, as government recognised that it had to restructure its inclusion policies to focus on chronically excluded adults and multi-problem families.

In its transition from continental Europe to the UK, social exclusion became more flexible as a policy vehicle, incorporating earlier strands of welfare policy in the UK, such as raising levels of benefits, along with newer elements such as placing some conditions on receiving those benefits. Yet the importance of what was new should not be underestimated. Using social exclusion as the focal point for policy marked a profound break with government philosophy of the two decades from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. During this period Britain not only saw a large rise in the proportion of its people living in poverty, particularly children, but had the fastest rate of rising inequality in the world, with the exception of New Zealand. Even so, Conservative ministers had from time to time suggested there was no such thing as poverty in Britain. From 1997 on, the British government at least recognised that exclusion undermined social and individual wellbeing to an unacceptable degree and announced its intention to do something about it.

That social exclusion means different things to different people is part of its appeal and effectiveness in formulating policy and practice. But its multiple meanings also present conceptual difficulty for as soon as a discussion of social exclusion gets underway, contentious issues arise, principally because people with different points of view find different meanings in the concept. At stake are deeply held values about society and the causes of social problems. Some of the differing viewpoints include:

• As a concept social exclusion is overly vague and appeals to those who would prefer not to think about poverty. The European Union has used it for this reason – it allows governments to reconcile a bland notion of social justice with high levels of inequality and dispossession.

• People exclude themselves from mainstream society. They do this through their own irresponsible choices and lack of willingness to participate in the labour market, and hence become dependent on benefits.

• Work is the most effective way of overcoming social exclusion because it provides social connections and higher levels of income than benefits. Welfare policy therefore should contain forceful encouragement and even compulsion for all on benefits – including disabled people and lone mothers – to take on paid employment.

• Focusing on poverty means only looking at income as the basis for quality of life; social exclusion by contrast focuses more on social relations and the extent to which people are able to participate in social affairs and attain sufficient power to influence decisions that affect them.

Each of the above points has those who agree and disagree with it. For example, on the third point, disabled people and their advocates and representatives strongly contest the fact that they are compelled to attend medical examinations which find them ‘work ready’, with the attendant pressure that they should find a job, when in fact they face discrimination and barriers to the workplace. The problem, they argue, lies not with disabled people but in the labour market, which is dominated by exclusionary practices in relation to people with disability and workplaces with poor access. They argue that many of the forces of exclusion lie outside the individual’s capacity to act. Those who argue for the second point, that social exclusion is a consequence of individual habits and personality, maintain that overcoming exclusion lies in the individual’s capacity to change.

It is difficult to resolve these questions one way or another, simply because they call on different and opposing sets of values. Even so, as practitioners accumulate experience they will begin to develop their own understanding of the causes of exclusion, of what the experience of exclusion is like, what defines it and the ways in which they may be able to counter it.

MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION

Since the late nineteenth century social investigators have regarded poverty as an objective, quantifiable condition, one that can be measured against a calculated standard: the poverty line. Largely developed within an Anglo-American tradition of empiricism the concept of the poverty line was used to determine eligibility for poor relief and as a prod for social policy to do more. Poverty was no longer seen as a natural phenomenon but could be explained and reduced by rational policies (O’Connor 2001: 14). Alongside this approach however was a contrary one, more deeply embedded in governments and in the popular mind, that poverty is a product of dysfunction, deviance or the self-perpetuating ‘tangle of pathology’. In this account, poverty is a product of individual character and behaviour, of psychological and cultural practices that are resistant to, and even take advantage of, state-provided poverty relief programmes.

Social exclusion, as a concept, can best be understood as trying to bridge the gap between these two contrary approaches, at once able to shed light on structural causes of poverty – low wages, economic disorganisation, discrimination – and on its cultural, moral and behavioural sources. Elasticity is built into the concept for this very reason; its objective is to define a number of factors, both individual and familial as well as social and economic, to account for the extent of poverty in a society and the psychological disengagement, alienation, that is its by-product. The kinds of solutions proposed to overcome exclusion are not only economic but seek to re-establish social solidarity, social cohesion.

In an influential text of the late 1990s, Ruth Levitas noted three different political discourses within the concept of social exclusion:

• A redistributionist discourse, which she codenamed RED, that advocated income transfers through tax and benefits from wealthier households to low-income households and neighbourhoods.

• A social integrationist discourse, codenamed SID, that first and foremost sought social cohesion and regarded social exclusion as a divisive force which, if left unchecked, created dangerous divisions within a society.

• A moral underclass discourse, codenamed MUD, that viewed social exclusion as a matter of individual responsibility arising from poor character and poor life choices.

(Levitas 2005)

Levitas neatly summarised the contradictory perspectives that social exclusion embraced at that time. What has changed since then is the balance of influence among these three discourses. Whereas in the early years of New Labour it was possible to say that the redistributionist policies overlapped with social integration policies to form the New Labour project (working families tax credits, Sure Start programmes in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, neighbourhood renewal programmes, Health Action Zones, community cohesion policies – all brought about some transfer of resources to low-income families and neighbourhoods), in the later years of the Labour administration, that balance had begun to change, with greater focus on the behaviour of problem families, tighter conditions for receiving benefits, coaching individuals to become more work ready – policies that leaned more toward the moral underclass perspective.

But that change was small compared to the changing fortunes of the three discourses following the ‘austerity’ election of 2010 when the redistributionist discourse – reducing income inequality through taxes and benefits – lost all its persuasiveness within central government. By contrast, as noted in the introduction to this volume, the underclass discourse, once confined to the extreme right wing throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, thrived at the Department for Work and Pensions and underpinned the radical overhaul of the benefits system under the Coalition and Conservative governments from 2010 on (HM Government 2012).

From its first formulations, then, there was a fundamental ambiguity in the term ‘social exclusion’ which referred to those in poverty and the long-term unemployed but also to those who did not fit into society, with tacit acknowledgement that behaviour was part of the problem. The ambiguities of social exclusion arise precisely because it is a concept that spans a number of domains – the impact of social and economic structures on individuals, families and neighbourhoods as well as the domains of behaviour and cultural and moral values. This is its strength – it potentially offers a holistic conceptualisation of disadvantage as a phenomenon constructed by interlocking forces from within those domains. This is also its weakness – it is a highly elastic concept, vulnerable to specific, ideologically guided interpretations that, while employing the phrase, implicitly leave behind ecological and whole-systems thinking to settle on particular parts of the system: the rigidity of public service bureaucracies for example or the behaviour of ‘hard to reach’ families.

MONITORING SOCIAL EXCLUSION ANNUALLY

The New Policy Institute reviews the extent of social exclusion each year using the same set of indicators to allow year-on-year comparison. These indicators help clarify the kinds of circumstances that contribute to social exclusi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What social exclusion means
• 2 Social work values, poverty and exclusion
• 3 Tackling exclusion in practice
• 4 Working with socially excluded children and families
• 5 Tackling exclusion of young people
• 6 Social care and excluded adults
• 7 Working with disadvantaged neighbourhoods
• 8 Social work and social exclusion in rural areas
• 9 Racism and social exclusion
• 10 Learning in practice
• Bibliography
• Index