Abstract

The Idea of Social Inclusion

Ruth Levitas
University of Bristol

The concept of ‘social inclusion’ has become central to social policy in many countries. This is a more positive twist on an agenda of combating social exclusion that developed in the European Union in the 1980s and 1990s. While social inclusion has become an important mobilising idea, uniting different political agendas behind combating exclusion or promoting inclusion, this consensus often depends on a lack of clarity about what inclusion/exclusion actually means.

Three distinct discourses around the idea of social exclusion can be detected in the 1990s. The first is concerned with questions of redistribution (hence RED), and with the elimination of poverty, and is present in work on poverty by Peter Townsend and others. The second, which became dominant in the EU in the mid 1990s, is primarily concerned with labour market attachment, and is a discourse of social integration (SID). The third is a version of the underclass thesis typified by Charles Murray, and attributes problems of exclusion to the behaviour and attitudes of the poor themselves; this is a moral underclass discourse, or MUD. In Britain, therefore, the ‘Social Exclusion Unit’ set up by Blair in 1997 was primarily concerned with ‘problem groups’ such as rough sleepers, truants and teenage parents. The three discourses differ in what the poor/excluded are seen to lack: In RED, they have no money; in SID they have no (paid) work; in MUD they have no morals.

Since 2001, all EU member states have been required to produce National Plans for Social Inclusion. The framework these are required to address combines issues of distribution and poverty reduction with the issue of labour market integration, thus combining RED and SID. But most of the funding available in the EU for the reduction of exclusion is directed at labour market programmes, favouring SID.

The danger of an exclusion/inclusion approach applied in this way is that it provides a dichotomous model of society. there are insiders and outsiders, and only the very marginal are a problem: inequalities between insiders are then not addressed.

Most people actually understand the positive value of inclusion more widely than this. Factors that might be seen as part of an inclusion agenda include for example such as discrimination on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, disability, age, religion, sexuality. In the EU such issues are dealt with by what is called the ‘Equalities’ agenda. This addresses not equality in a distributive sense, but equal opportunities.

One role for social policy might be to continue to collect information and develop policies on both the distributive, labour market and discriminatory aspects of inclusion. One would have to add to the list above questions of language, region and class – and doubtless others.

The idea of inclusion can, however, give a greater coherence to these various policy areas. ‘Social inclusion’ is not the simple obverse of ‘social exclusion’. Whereas ‘social exclusion’ represses the question of the kind of society into which people are to be included, the positive formulation of ‘social inclusion’ at least potentially makes the nature of that society central. The idea of an inclusive society is potentially utopian in the sense that it forces onto the agenda the larger question of what kind of society we want to live in.

What that also means is that ‘social policy’ as traditionally conceived is too limited a vehicle for delivering social inclusion. ALL government policy has a bearing on this. So too has ‘policy’ beyond the nation-state itself. The questions of this conference - ‘what do we know’ and ‘where do we go’ in the delivery of an inclusive society - take us into questions of global futures and demand a form of thinking that is more radical and more holistic than the conventional field of ‘social policy’ permits.

Back to Papers

For more information about the conference, contact:
 
Sarah Zgraggen
The Willow Group
Tel: (613) 722-8796;
Fax: (613) 729-6206;
e-mail: szgraggen@thewillowgroup.com