Issues Of Social Exclusion Research Articles

Documents and debatesSocial exclusion, sure start and organizational social capital: evaluating inter‐disciplinary multi‐agency working in an education and health work programme

Social policy‐making in the UK under the Labour government has galvanized around the issue of social exclusion, identifying young children (0–4 years) and their families living in areas of high social disadvantage to be particularly at risk. This paper attempts to recover the experiences and views of professionals concerned with the delivery and implementation of a multi‐agency programme tackling the social exclusion of these young children and their families known as Sure Start. The data are based on the analysis of documentation, attendance and observation at meetings, and 32 semi‐structured interviews with members of the inter‐disciplinary team responsible for the Sure Start programme's delivery. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using open coding from grounded theorizing. The paper, in reflecting on the problems and dilemmas of multi‐agency approaches and reported in other research, considers how the preliminary findings from this study suggest the team have managed to accommodate and overcome these potential difficulties, to facilitate an integrated, holistic and user‐centred approach to the programme. The paper concludes by considering the possibility that the team's approach may be conceptually located within an organizational social capital framework as posited by Nahapiet and Ghoshal.

Organizations, coalitions, and movements

This article uses empirical evidence on networks of voluntary organizations mobilizing on ethnic minority, environmental, and social exclusion issues in two British cities, to differentiate between social movement processes and other, cognate collective action dynamics. Social movement processes are identified as the building and reproducing of dense informal networks between a multiplicity of actors, sharing a collective identity, and engaged in social and/or political conflict. They are contrasted to coalitional processes, where alliances to achieve specific goals are not backed by significant identity links, and organizational processes, where collective action takes place mostly in reference to specific organizations rather than broader, looser networks.

Disability, social exclusion and the consequential experience of justiciable problems

In this article, we examine the situation of disabled people in England and Wales with regard to one specific aspect of social exclusion—experience of justiciable problems, and the potential effects such problems can have on their lives. Having defined ‘disability’, we examine how this fits within the wider dialogue on social exclusion issues. By analysing the results of the Legal Services Research Centre's (LSRC) periodic survey of justiciable problems, we find that disabled respondents were not only more likely to experience a problem, they also experienced more problems. Increased likelihood of a problem was observed in the majority of problem categories and particularly those relating to issues of social exclusion, such as housing and welfare benefits. This propensity to experience multiple problems can lead to a negative impact on the lives of long‐term ill and disabled people.

Race, Virtue, and Moral Education

The moral education and character education movements in the United States are quite strong. But literature in these areas pays very little attention to racial issues. Thomas Lickona’s influential Educating for Character briefly mentions racial bigotry and the need to educate to reduce it, and also briefly learning respect for different cultures as a worthy goal of moral education. But in 420 pages, that is virtually the only attention race receives. James Davison Hunter’s Death of Character mentions race only to reassure the reader that white, black, and Hispanic children do not have different moral values: “There simply is no African-American take on honesty.” Larry Nucci’s Education in the Moral Domain is sensitive to issues of cultural difference in values, and to social exclusion in general, but does not mention race specifically, thereby at least implying that race does not raise any distinctive issues of social exclusion, or of group-based values. Kevin Ryan, a pioneer in the field of character education, makes no mention of race in his Building Character in Schools: Practical Ways to Bring Moral Instruction to Life (with Karen Bohlin).

The electronic procurement of ideas

This paper focuses on two non-traditional but important domains for electronic procurement - electronic government and electronic democracy. In particular, we describe how electronic consultation, an important form of electronic democracy, is being used to procure ideas from partnership organisations and citizenry and hence support the policy formulation processes at a devolved regional assembly in the UK. Such forms of intellectual procurement are seen by many to be significant ways in which government may re-engage with its populace and address issues of social exclusion in the area of democratic participation.

GPC Ten Years On: is self-reflexivity enough?

In the 10 years since the first issue of Gender, Place and Culture was published, feminist geography has grown, matured, become part of the normal curriculum in most departments of geography. The need to consider gender as a fundamental aspect of social life has become accepted wisdom. We have much to celebrate.Over the same period, increasing attention has been paid to questions of racialisation, and to projects that set anti-racism on the academic agenda. While I would argue that, socially as well as academically, we have made more progress in overcoming gender barriers than racial barriers, a growing body of work recognises the intersection, indeed the simultaneity, of sexism and racism, as well as classism, ableism and homophobia. Such recognition has characterised the pages of Gender, Place and Culture from its very first issue. Indeed, no paper that addresses issues of social exclusion from a geographical perspective would fail nowadays to make several references to articles in this journal.Theoretically, the connection between gendered and racialised social constructions heightens social awareness of the ways in which social exclusion occurs. It is now received wisdom, well beyond the narrower confines of feminist and anti-racist scholarship, that human attributes are the result of social construction and, while many controversies rage over the findings—and the social effects—of the postmodern ‘turn’, this fundamental theoretical tenet is hardly questioned by intellectuals of the early twenty-first century. Broader attention has now been focused on issues of what kind of society—and what kind of theoretical underpinnings—will replace a world in which social constructions such as gender and ‘race’ are taken for granted. Perhaps the most significant general trend of the last decade, then, has been the fact that our journal has played such an active role in the transition from the early 1990s' struggle to overcome essential ideas to today's struggle to re-place essential ideas with a new geometry of human relations. Significant historical events on every social front emphasise the difficulties of that transition, both theoretically and empirically.

Putting ‘developmental local government’ into practice: The experience of South Africa’s towns and cities

One of the key features of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries is the apparent re-definition of the role and place of the 'city' within national and global economies. Globalization has been accompanied by changing perceptions of the role of the locality within an increasingly integrated global system, which reflects the dominance of economic orthodoxy, independent action and the search for innovative ways to participate within a redefined global economic context. These trends have gone hand in hand with a notable policy shift around the world, which is enhancing the status, role and functions of local authorities, and simultaneously devolving to them many of central governments' social and economic responsibilities (Hambleton et al., 2002; UNCHS, 2001). Within this context, "cities are becoming central to economic development. They are increasingly taking on the role of focal points of economic growth" (Jouve and Lefevere, 2002, p. 186). In order to mediate their newfound role and status, cities are being challenged to significantly enhance the range of strategic socio-economic interventions which they undertake, in an effort to secure investment, encourage growth and deal with issues of social exclusion and poverty. The net result is the identification of an impressively diverse portfolio of city development strategies and interventions (Clarke and Gaile, 1998; Hambleton et al., 2002). Within this context of devolution, global integration and increasing responsibility in terms of issues of socio-economic transformation, it is timely to examine South African local authorities as they respond to the challenges of their radically altered powers and responsibilities, and as they attempt to deal with a daunting range of socio-economic challenges which are a legacy of the apartheid era before 1994. The greatly enhanced status of local authorities in South Africa, which are now constitutionally mandated to promote social and economic development (RSA, 1996a), makes them key agents for transforming South Africa's society and economy in the post-apartheid era. Local government has been transformed significantly

Urban Regeneration, Social Inclusion and Large Store Development: The Seacroft Development in Context

Of central importance to the policy debate which emerged during the late 1990s in the UK on the topic of 'food deserts' were the causes of the perceived worsening access to food retail provision in certain poor neighbourhoods of British cities. The 1980s/early 1990s era of intense food superstore development on edge-of-city sites was seen as having unevenly stripped food retailing out of parts of those cities, or having repositioned that provision downwards in range and quality terms. By the late 1990s, however, tightened land-use planning regulation had begun significantly to impact the development programmes of the major food retailers and those retailers increasingly came to adopt an urban regeneration agenda to drive forwards the new store development vital to their corporate growth. Simultaneously, issues of social exclusion rose to prominence on the political agenda and 'tackling social exclusion' began to be promoted as a possible new criterion for retail planning policy in the UK. In this paper, we explore this nexus of interest in urban regeneration and social inclusion. Using the example of a major retail development in the deprived area of Seacroft, Leeds, we outline the characteristics of the increasingly important regeneration partnerships involving retailers, local authorities, government agencies and community groups. We ask to what extent such partnerships can be dismissed merely as 'clever devices to get stores built and passed by planners' and discuss the implications for retail planning policy of attempts to address both the social exclusion and public health agendas of deprived and poorly served areas of British cities.

The Digital Generation?: Children, ICT and the Everyday Nature of Social Exclusion

In this paper we explore the potentially inclusionary and exclusionary implications of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. We begin by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilised in three case‐study schools. We go on to consider issues of social exclusion, demonstrating that both material and social factors can prevent access to appropriate computer technology. In particular, we emphasise the importance of the way that children negotiate the meanings and use of computers through their everyday practices within the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that only when we recognise that children’s use of computers is about not only the broad‐scale distribution of resources but also children’s everyday social relations can we hope to institute policies that promote an inclusive ‘information society’.

‘E-stablishing’ an Inclusive Society? Technology, Social Exclusion and UK Government Policy Making

In many industrialised countries information and communication technology (ICT) is now being seen as a ready means through which governments can address issues of social exclusion. Indeed, in the UK this perspective has been quickly translated into a multi-billion pound policy agenda aimed at using ICT for socially inclusive purposes. Yet, beyond rhetorical concerns over bridging the perceived ‘digital divide’ and alleviating disparities between the information ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, little critical consideration has been given to how technology is being used by governments to achieve socially inclusive aims. This paper therefore examines the UK government’s ICT-based social policy drive through official documentation, policy statements and political discourse – considering the ‘problems’ that it sets out to address, the substance of the policies, and the perceived rationales and benefits for doing so. Having explored the official construction of these policies, the paper then examines how well founded this policy framework is in terms of achieving its stated aims of widening access to ICT and effectively facilitating ‘social inclusion’. The paper concludes by developing a critical perspective of such ICT policies which reveals deeper economic rationales informing this ostensibly ‘social’ policy programme.

Social Capital, Gentrification and Neighbourhood Change in London: A Comparison of Three South London Neighbourhoods

Social capital has been used extensively in recent years to examine issues of social exclusion. Following Bourdieu, the concept is reintegrated into social theory alongside cultural and economic capital to examine the variations in the upgrading of gentrified areas of inner London. Three neighbourhoods in south London are compared and it is argued that their differences can, to a limited extent, be understood in terms of the differential deployment of cultural, social and economic capital by their middle-class residents. These neighbourhoods have acquired distinctive characters as a result and it is argued that the gentrification process in inner London is leading to heterogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods which contrasts with the perceived homogeneity of the traditional suburban area.

Detention under the Mental Health Act: balancing rights, risks and needs for services

Mental health law has to balance considerations of both justice, and health and welfare. In the political climate of the 1990s mental health services have become targeted on those with serious mental illness, to address the objectives of containing risks and limiting service expenditure. This paper identifies that increasing rates of detention under the Mental Health Act through the 1990s in a particular region, disproportionately involve longer-term detentions (under section 3), men, and people with serious mental illnesses. Those detained are likely to experience social difficulties. Changes in legislation are imminent, and the paper concludes that thought should be given to the amount of statutory intervention in the lives of seriously mentally ill people, and to the principle of reciprocity in relation to those coerced for lesser periods. Services should seek to address the issues of social exclusion which are reflected in the circumstances of those detained.

Detention under the Mental Health Act: balancing rights, risks and needs for services

Mental health law has to balance considerations of both justice, and health and welfare. In the political climate of the 1990s mental health services have become targeted on those with serious mental illness, to address the objectives of containing risks and limiting service expenditure. This paper identifies that increasing rates of detention under the Mental Health Act through the 1990s in a particular region, disproportionately involve longer-term detentions (under section 3), men, and people with serious mental illnesses. Those detained are likely to experience social difficulties. Changes in legislation are imminent, and the paper concludes that thought should be given to the amount of statutory intervention in the lives of seriously mentally ill people, and to the principle of reciprocity in relation to those coerced for lesser periods. Services should seek to address the issues of social exclusion which are reflected in the circumstances of those detained.

Embracing inclusion: the critical role of the library

Social inclusion is high on the Government’s agenda but the role of public libraries in this area has not always been clearly defined. This paper first examines the issue of social exclusion, attempting to define the inclusive society. Drawing on recent work by the Library and Information Commission (2000), it then proposes that research conducted by the University of Central England – A Place for Children and The Value and Impact of Homework Clubs in Public Libraries – demonstrates the capacity of the public library service to combat the exclusion of the child from society, by enabling access to the adult world. The paper concludes that the public library service supports the educational, social and cultural development of all citizens, indeed that it is the essence of inclusion. Public libraries must therefore be integrated into the infrastructure for inclusion, and recommendations towards this end are made.

Disability Politics, Language Planning and Inclusive Social Policy

Language is one of the primary media through which capitalism and the mobilisation of resistance against capitalism are perpetrated. However, although capitalism is becoming an increasingly global phenomenon, language continues to delineate nationstates and identities—no language is fully translatable. Drawing upon a large body of literature and research concerning minority-majority language relationships and language planning, this paper will, first, interrogate the relationship between bilingualism and proposed policies of inclusive education in the context of current struggles for linguistic minority ‘rights' by sign language users. The ‘minority rights' agenda is contrasted with disabled people's struggles for the legitimation of ‘new’ disability discourses within a framework of citizenship, as contextualised by issues of social exclusion. It is argued that language use, language development and their relationship to disability, cannot be adequately addressed within localised interpretations of ‘special needs' policy. The paper concludes with the view that in the face of New Labour's rhetoric of ‘modernisation’, disabled people must address the hegemony implicit to language planning, by acknowledging the centrality of language rights and practices to social policy, political expression, citizenship and the mobilisation for social change.

African Immigrant Workers in Spanish Agriculture

This paper explores reasons for the uneven employment of African workers in Spanish agriculture. Examining employment patterns at a provincial level, it explores why there is a concentration in certain regions of Spain. Focusing on the province of Girona, the study utilizes interview responses from African workers, employers and key local informants to explore reasons for African employment, as well as examining the working conditions of African labourers. It finds that Spanish workers have come to reject farming as an occupation, just as farm employers have come to favour African labourers over possible Spanish labour sources. Whether within or outside the farm sector, the vast majority of African workers do unskilled work, on poor pay, in occupations associated with inferior social status, with short periods of employment, in jobs that are rarely part of a promotion ladder. For many African immigrants, this means they have to shift into and out of farm work repeatedly, while those who stay in farming usually do so on a poor contractual footing. With the majority of immigrant African workers seeing Spain as their permanent home, the paper concludes by noting that the work experiences of African labourers strongly support segmentation theory ideas on the development of niches for particular kinds of workers. This is seen as having potentially detrimental long‐term consequences for issues of social exclusion, as well as restricting the pace of productivity improvements in the farm sector.

An evolution or a revolution?

It was inevitable that after so long in opposition a new administration would want to make its mark on national policy. Issues of social exclusion, poverty and inequality clearly needed to be addressed.

Social exclusion and modern apprenticeships: a comparison of britain and the USA

‘Modern’ apprenticeships have been in place in Britain since 1994. However, the social characteristics of ‘modern’ apprentices appear remarkably similar to those of traditional apprentices: 89% of the first wave of modern apprentices were male; and only 3% from ethnic minorities. As will be shown subsequently, such exclusivity is deep-set within the British apprenticeship system. It is interesting to note that most previous analyses of modern apprenticeships have described this situation in a variety of ways but failed to grasp its significance. The lack of commitment by the Conservative Government, headed by John Major, to issues of social exclusion has been well documented. This is seen clearly in the Department of Education and Employment's report into the early stages of modern apprenticeships. Their discussion of social exclusion and modern apprenticeships is perfunctory and their recommendations merely boil down to exhortations to various institutions to increase the proportion of apprenticeships from ethnic minority backgrounds and who are female. In this they reproduce the timidity of the Commission for Racial Equality. The main purpose of this article is to situate the continuation of patterns of ethnic and gender exclusivity in British apprenticeships within a broad historical and comparative perspective. It will be shown that ethnic and gender exclusion is central to apprenticeship structures historically in both Britain and America. Further, it will be shown that these structures are breaking down to a considerable degree in the United States, more for women than for ethnic minorities, and that the catalysts and institutional changes that have helped precipitate these developments in the United States hold important lessons for contemporary Britain.

ENSAIO SOBRE A EXCLUSÃO E O DIREITO À VIDA

Busca-se neste ensaio discutir a questão da exclusão social em paralelo à questão do Direito à Vida. Defende-se a tese de que a exclusão social é um processo histérico socialmente construido e que o Direito à Vida não é um valor que em si mesmo possa ter efetividade e concretude. Conclui-se que a única forma de encarar a exclusão e evitar as suas armadilhas consiste num esforço do género humano em escala planetária para forjar um “mundo bom para ser vivido”.