SOCIAL EXCLUSION IMPORTANT FOR SOCIAL WORKERS?

Why is an understanding of social exclusion important for social workers?

Why is an understanding of social exclusion important for social workers?

This assignment focuses on the definition and meaning of the term 'Social Exclusion' important for social workers. It discusses the intricately linking of 'relative poverty' and Social Exclusion, and how class stratification plays a role in creating divisions, oppression and discrimination within society.  It demonstrates how our own value systems are derived and the implications of these for practice.

The explicit use of the term 'social exclusion' (SE) has been utilised in European social policy contexts, particularly through the 1990-94 EU anti-poverty programme, focusing on the integration of the 'least privileged'.  New Labour adopted this concept as a key policy priority and the 'Social Exclusion Unit' (SEU) was established in 1997, to help to improve government action to reduce social exclusion; producing 'joined-up solutions to joined-up problems' (SEU 1997). The SEU website provides the following delineation of communal exclusion:

'...a shorthand period for what can occur when persons or areas bear from a blend of linked troubles such as job loss, poor abilities, low earnings, poor lodgings, high misdeed environments, awful wellbeing and family breakdown.'

 

Fairclough (2000) contends 'new work have restored 'long standing work party targets of greater equality' with 'the target of greater social inclusion', reliable with the authorities citizenship agenda, this move to an 'inclusive humanity' being a moving from the previously dominant notion of scarcity' (p36).  By doing this the broader matters associated with scarcity, inequality and distributions of riches are edge lined. This endows communal exclusion to be embedded in a variety of discourses which are utilised or fell' into and out of in accordance to political constituencies and procedures to keep constituents content and eager to supply votes.

Under New Labour, Ruth Levitas (2001) identified three types of dominant discourse: a redistributionist discourse (RED) which is mainly concerned with poverty, inequalities and redistribution of wealth; a moral underclass discourse (MUD) which looks at moral and behavioural delinquency of the excluded which are largely defined in young unemployable men, those with 'criminal inclinations' and single mothers; and a social integrationist discourse (SID) which focuses on paid work as part of a means to socially integrate those that are unemployed or economically inactive, from this it could be argued that New Labour has used the flexibility of social exclusion to move attention away from wider problem of structural inequalities.

An alternative perception of 'structural inequality', equates to association with an existing class stratification that is still prevalent in society today but disguised via the creation of a class 'outside of current structures' referred to as the 'underclass'.(Murray 1990)  The concept of underclass is derived from an American model mainly associated with a 'black underclass'. However, as Murray (1990) points out, transferring the model to Britain is not straight forward due to the differences in statistical/data collection and other methods which are associated with levels of ...