Exclusion In Britain Research Articles

Financial inclusion and social financialisation: Britain in a European context

Purpose – The article aims to discuss findings from a knowledge exchange review of financial inclusion in Britain and compare these to key features of financial exclusion evident from European analyses. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on an innovative knowledge exchange project. Rapid research reviews analysed evidence on financial exclusion in Britain in relation to access to banking services; to credit; to household insurance; personal savings and assets; money advice provision; and financial capability. The findings from these reviews were discussed by stakeholders representing the private, government, community and civil society sectors in a series of evidence review forums. The results of these discussions were summarised and reconsidered at a national knowledge exchange conference. Throughout the project, stakeholders exchange opinions about the state of financial exclusion knowledge through an online discussion forum. Findings – The research identified agreement among British stakeholders over several aspects of financial exclusion, in particular continuing problems of access to mainstream banking services for low income customers and a lack of appropriate and affordable credit provision. Areas of controversy included whether banks denied services to lower income customers or were withdrawing from deprived communities, and the necessity for further regulation of mainstream financial services. Originality/value – Comparing these findings to research from other European countries raises questions about how financial inclusion should be defined, and whether existing indicators capture this adequately across contrasting social, institutional and regulatory contexts. The research raises challenges for policy transfer between countries.

The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective

This article (1) examines the social distribution of cultural practices in Australia, and (2) compares this with similar data for the UK in order to identify where and in what respects the social articulations of Australian cultural practices are distinctive. The article draws on the statistical data produced by the Australian Research Council-funded inquiry into Australian Everyday Cultures in the late 1990s and the data produced by the UK’s 2003–6 Economic and Social Research Council inquiry into the relations between cultural capital and social exclusion in Britain. It reports the findings of a comparison of multiple correspondence analyses of the survey data for these two projects. The two spaces of lifestyle produced by these procedures show strong similarities with regard to their relations to class, age and gender as the three most significant axes of differentiation. There are, however, differences in the roles that specific cultural fields (the music, literary and media fields, for example) play relative to one another in the two national contexts. Class culture divisions also appear more attenuated in the Australian than in the British case, with a significant clustering of classes in the middle of the space of lifestyles. However, working-class tastes and those of professionals appear strongly polarised in Australia while managers and professionals are more distinctive in their cultural practices than are their British counterparts.

Views and experiences of men who have sex with men on the ban on blood donation: a cross sectional survey with qualitative interviews

Objective To explore compliance with the UK blood services’ criterion that excludes men who have had penetrative sex with a man from donating blood, and to assess the possible effects...

Friends Provident Foundation: What do we know about financial exclusion in Britain?

Friends Provident Foundation: What do we know about financial exclusion in Britain?

Re‐presentation and resistance in the context of school exclusion: reasons to be critical

AbstractIn this article an examination of how we, in the everyday, develop critical engagement with the shifting relations of power and oppression around us is presented. The article explores the role of representations in maintaining the racialized patterns of school exclusion in Britain. Social representations theory is used to investigate how racializing re‐presentations pervade and create institutionalized practices, how these re‐presentations invade young people's sense of self and ultimately how young people collaborate to resist and reject oppressive relations. The material presented here, from interviews with young people excluded from school, and parents, teachers and others involved in school exclusion, illustrates how young people problematize and critique racializing re‐presentations while participating in the conditions of oppression and resistance that pervade their experiences of school. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first examines the institutionalization of stigmatizing representations, visible in social practices. The second section looks at the role of re‐presentation in the social construction of ‘Black pupils’. The concluding section explores the possibilities of resistance and critical engagement in the everyday. As a whole this reveals how young people develop critical engagement with the re‐presentations that filter into and so constitute their realities. This enables an analysis of the role of resistance and contestation in social re‐presentation, highlights the importance of participation and community and so invites a critical version of social representations theory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How Has The Notion of Social Exclusion Developed In The European Discourse?

AbstractThis paper reflects on the development of the idea of social exclusion in European and particularly in British discourses. When it first emerged, social exclusion seemed to add to little to poverty and in some guises carried a great deal of behaviourist ideological baggage, or blamed the poor. Over time, however, experience in the UK has shown that social exclusion has broadened the research agenda and opened up new possibilities for policy. This paper contributes to these debates by presenting new estimates of poverty and exclusion in Britain using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. The estimates confirm that poverty and exclusion are related, but distinct concepts. There remains the question of whether social exclusion has not entered official discussions in Australia as a result of a ‘Howard effect’ or because of some more fundamental resistance in the Australian political — and academic — culture.

Who Is the Enemy? The Nationalist Dilemma of Inclusion and Exclusion in Britain During the First World War

The First World War polarised British society. The British 'nation' needed a definition of the external enemy to generate internal cohesion as much as the production of modern hostility presupposed the existence of nationalism. Apparently, hostility which is nationalistically motivated is of functional importance for the cohesion of a society in war. But the construction of the nation along the lines of the dialectic structure of exclusion and inclusion implies that even its founding act encourages national splits. The manner in which nationalism generates social cohesion by excluding non-members at the same time always turns it into the expression of and the reason for internal conflicts. First and foremost, however, it was the co-existence of a whole host of concepts of the nation competing with each other for supremacy which turned nationalism into a disintegrative power in society. The co-existing national concepts by and large reflected the political factions and camps in the belligerent society. This article tries to outline the various ways in which the borderlines between the internal and the external enemy, between the hostile part of one's own society and a hostile foreign society converged under the circumstances of the exceptional burden of the First World War. At the end the hostility which was motivated and legitimised nationalistically both split and integrated British society.

The Evolution of Active Welfare Policies as a Solution to Social Exclusion in Britain

Since the election of the new Labour government in 1997, there has been a concerted effort in the UK to promote social inclusion. To achieve this, numerous work and welfare policies have been introduced. Their central tenet is to insert people into employment based upon the belief employment equals social inclusion and unemployment equates with social exclusion. Informal work, meanwhile, is already seen to be successfully operating as a mechanism for promoting social inclusion. This paper, however, evaluates critically this belief-system in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, it examines the fastest growing type of employment in the UK ‐ part-time work ‐ and evaluates critically whether and how this flexible form of employment leads to social inclusion for its participants. On the other hand, it reveals that informal work is currently reinforcing, rather than mitigating, the plight of those excluded from employment in terms of their social inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Britain. Based on these findings, the paper argues for a range of complementary social inclusion policies to be adopted to tackle the forms of inclusion/exclusion beyond employment.

Political Constructions and Social Realities of Exclusion in Urban Leisure: the case of elderly women in Stoke-on-Trent, England

This paper explores some of the tensions between the political constructions of social exclusion in Britain and personal experiences of the problem as reflected in selected patterns of urban leisure. To highlight what we argue are wider incidences of exclusion, the paper draws on a case study of the leisure patterns of elderly women in contrasting urban neighbourhoods in a British city. Using Johnson's (1986) concept of a circuit of culture, the paper suggests that political representations of exclusion produce only a selective definition of the problem and, consequently, a relatively narrow range of policy responses. Using focus groups as a method of enquiry, the study reveals a diverse range of exclusions from leisure sites in the city centre. Problems of identity, accessibility, affordability and fears over personal safety help to define a population that is clearly ‘excluded’, yet as the paper argues, constitute a group that lies outside governmental definitions of exclusion. The paper concludes by suggesting that a more theoretical understanding of the concept of exclusion—such as is offered by the circuit of culture—will encourage more nuanced constructions of the problem. Further, we argue that political responses need to work at local levels if the social realities of exclusion are to be adequately addressed.