Paul Littlewood - Social Exclusion in Europe: Problems and Paradigms

Edited by

PAUL LITTLEWOOD

Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, UK

with

IGNACE GLORIEUX

Vakgroep Sociologie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

SEBASTIAN HERKOMMER

Institut fr Soziologie, Freie Universitt Berlin, Germany

INGRID JNSSON

Sociologiska Institutionen, Lunds Universitet, Sweden

First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright Paul Littlewood and contributors 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Social exclusion in Europe: problems and paradigms

1. Marginality, Social - Europe 2. Socially handicapped - Europe

I. Littlewood, Paul II. Glorieux, Ignace III. Herkommer,

Sebastian IV. Jnsson, Ingrid

305.094

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-73316

ISBN 13: 978-1-84014-717-9 (hbk)

Identifying Social Exclusion
Some problems of meaning

Paul Littlewood and Sebastian Herkommer

The End of the Full Employment Society
Changing the basis of inclusion and exclusion

Georg Vobruba

Social Exclusion and the Flexibility of Labour
A theoretical exploration

Gerrit van Kooten

Paid Work: A Crucial Link Between Individuals and Society?
Some conclusions on the meaning of work for social integration

Ignace Glorieux

The Underclass: A Misleading Concept and a Scientific Myth?
Poverty and social exclusion as challenges to theories of class and social structure

Sebastian Herkommer and Max Koch

Ingrid Jnsson

Roswitha Pioch

Stigma and Non-take up in Social Policy
Re-emerging properties of declining welfare state programmes?

Staffan Blomberg and Jan Petersson

Paul Littlewood

Mike McGuinness

The Socio-Cultural Exclusion and Self-Exclusion of Foreigners in Finland
The case of Joensuu

Mhammed Sabour

THE EDITORS

This book is the outcome of the sustained collaboration of a group of colleagues working in areas of sociology, social policy and politics at a number of European universities. It originated in the establishment of an ERASMUS funded programme at the end of the 1980s, designed to facilitate staff and student exchange between a dozen institutions. This also involved running annual intensive courses, at which various combinations of colleagues would lecture and conduct seminars. The collaboration this involved was the stimulus to the preparation of a volume of papers on a variety of aspects of identity, conflict and social justice in Europe (Erskine et al, 1996)*, drawn from the themes of the courses we held in the early 1990s. But in 1996 we decided to develop a new, more focused theme for the courses, this time based on the increasingly topical issue of social exclusion, and with the explicit intention of producing a second volume.

We come from a wide variety of different academic traditions, which is no doubt reflected in this book. It is clear that the contributors to this volume do not pretend to share identical sociological perspectives or concerns, except in their common interest in the notion of social exclusion. We also have very different research interests, and a number of the chapters report the findings of various projects conducted in the recent past, while other chapters are more concerned with the development of competing theories seeking to explain the phenomenon of exclusion. Each chapter is designed to stand by itself, but what binds the volume together is the way in which a whole series of issues and themes are inter-linked. The end of full employment and the prevalence of high levels of unemployment, the ubiquity of new, less secure forms of paid employment, and the polarization of wealth between the rich and the not-so rich on the one hand, and the impoverished on the other, have had profound effects throughout Europe. The late twentieth-century trend in the reduction of welfare benefits is another crucial cause of these effects, which the authors proceed to analyse in various ways in each of the chapters. Another of the effects is arguably the emergence of new social tensions and conflicts, although the authors of this volume are generally in agreement that these cannot be separated from those traditional divisions which still give European social structures their basic character - class, gender and ethnicity.

The book begins with a review of some of the literature on social exclusion by Littlewood and Herkommer, in which they explore the origins and the multiplicity of meanings and uses of the term, some of the perspectives and paradigms which inform them, and what the dominant uses seem to have in common. The chapters which follow explore in more depth many of the principal features of social exclusion described in the opening chapter. They have been ordered in such a way as to give the volume an explicit trajectory. First there are four chapters which focus on social exclusion in the context of economic change, given the fundamental role of economic restructuring in the genesis and maintenance of social exclusion. Then the direction of the volume swings more to issues relating to social policy and state welfare. In the last three chapters the direction changes again, focusing on issues concerning cultural and political identity.

Vobruba sets the scene for what follows by examining the rise of unemployment. He argues that we are living through a period of epoch-making social change, now that our society is no longer founded on full employment, but faces a two-fold crisis of paid work: - the lack of it, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. He proceeds to analyse the consequences of this in relation to income mixes and claims for a basic income. Next van Kooten gives an account of one of the enormous changes in the nature of work - flexibilization - and its ramifications for emerging patterns in the division of labour. He considers these in relation to various classificatory schema combining income, relations to the labour market and duration of unemployment. Although his arguments focus on the Netherlands, the global nature of the trends he analyses give his model a much more general applicability. The following chapter by Glorieux describes some detailed findings of a survey conducted in Flanders about the meanings which different categories of people - men and women, paid and unpaid workers, give to their activities, stressing the gendered nature of work. Adopting a perspective derived from the sociology of Durkheim, he demonstrates that work is a key means to social integration and that long-term economic exclusion is likely to have serious socially disruptive effects. Finally in this first group of chapters, Herkommer and Koch, working from a very different perspective, drawing on the work of Marx and contemporary Marxists, consider the nature of the widespread poverty in contemporary society. They survey a mass of research on the so-called underclass and explore its relevance in the context of theories of social class and structural change.