SOCIAL INCLUSION

Social inclusion around London

[Name of the institute]

Social inclusion around London

Introduction

Social inclusion is a concept and policy agenda for social justice. It refers to processes of involving citizens in civil society and in collective decision-making. Such involvement may take many forms, including employment, church attendance, and voting. As a positive vision, the concept of social inclusion implies that the involvement of citizens in such activities helps to create a fair and cohesive community (Von, 2000, 45).

Every individual has a right to fully participate in the society in which he resides and interacts. This calls for a social inclusion that is primarily based on the concept that every member of a nation state has the right to live with dignity and integrity while being socially and economically active. Social inclusion is a concept of not distinguishing or separating any member from the society. Robert Kennedy clearly identifies inclusion as being a “bond of common fate”. Poverty is one of the problems that divide individuals within a society. As more people become poor, the rich-poor gap widens and leads to different classes of societies. This is where exclusion takes place. The poorer depends on the government for support while completely abandoning their participation in the economy. On the other hand, the rich enjoys all the benefits and luxuries that life can offer. This rich-poor gap is an issue that has been lately addressed in many countries particularly the United Kingdom.

Literature Review

We might distinguish debates on social inclusion according to whether they concern the concept itself or the policies that it has inspired.

Conceptual debates often focus on the question: what constitutes inclusion? Some people argue that social inclusion depends primarily on paid employment. Employment brings self-respect, interaction with others, and also the resources one needs to engage in other social activities. Others put more emphasis on the ability to participate in a range of political processes. Still others argue that irrespective of people's involvement in politics, poverty often precludes any kind of meaningful participation in civil society, while also resisting the argument that employment is the way to think about poverty.

This last view tends to push the content of social inclusion towards the historic socialist commitment to reducing disparities of wealth. Finally, some critics argue that the very concept of social inclusion is profoundly flawed. Perhaps it places too much emphasis on who is excluded as opposed to who is doing the excluding. Perhaps the simple dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion hides more important questions about kinds and degrees of exclusion. Perhaps the concept of social inclusion focuses on outcomes in a way that fails to recognize exclusion as a process (Safer, 2007, 78).

Other debates arise over the policies by which governments typically seek to promote social inclusion. Do local and other partnerships live up to the rhetoric of cohesion, trust, and integration? There have been several empirical studies of the capacity of local partnerships, their inclusiveness, their accountability, and their outcomes. These studies typically suggest that the new partnerships have managed ...