Reconceptualising Social Exclusion: A Critical Response to the Neoliberal Welfare Reform Agenda and the Underclass Thesis (original) (raw)

The 'Underclass' and the US Welfare State

Socialist Register, 1995

In the US as in Britain, conservativesincluding those in the Democratic Partyrepeatedly proclaim that the welfare state engenders dependency, laziness, and immorality, a new pauperism sometimes labelled with an old namethe 'underclass.' Under the force of that conservative attack, many liberals have joined in the clamour for or acceptance of cutbacks in social spending. Those on the Left who have resisted this moralizing against the very poor have been reduced to defending the puny and humiliating welfare provision we have in the US, so that our earlier radical critiques of the welfare system now seem frivolous and utopian. Even if one leaves aside questions of the accuracy and morality of this defence, it is not at all clear that it is instrumentally effective, because the negative consequences of the US welfare system are so palpably evident that our denial is transparently ideological. Fifty years ago T. H. Marshall theorized a notion of a welfare state as a final, social, state of citizenship. His persuasive and optimistic idea arose in large part from the effort to make civil and political citizenship actual, acknowledging that poverty could effectively exclude people from actively exercising political rights or even defending their civil rights in a democracy.' Today it has become clear that not all versions of social citizenship are equally effective in providing a corrective to exclusion. It turns out that no type of citizenship is a binary, yesorno condition, free from stratification, and that certain constructions of soical citizenship, certain welfare states, even as they extend the theoretical reach of citizens' entitlements and relieve poverty, may also worsen the exclusion of the poor from all kinds of citizenship. These exclusions rarely target 'simply' the poor; they do not follow 'pure' class lines. Indeed, there is no such thing as simple poverty or pure class because these abstractions cafinot encompass the actual, historical construction and reproduction of social divisions. In the US as in all modern states, social citizenship is organised according to gender, racial and familial as well as class systems. In US history, for example, exclu

Welfare Reform and Social Exclusion

Paper for the Political Studies Association–UK 50th …, 2000

This paper uses welfare regime analysis to further develop the idea that New Labour's social inclusion agenda is shaped by a range of policy traditions and principles. It is argued that while the chosen policy mix may cohere to successfully tackle social exclusion in the UK, it may not be done in the most effective and efficient way since it also entails mixing the guiding principles which underpin welfare regimes. If the mix of principles contradicts it may act to undermine the policy mix of the carefully crafted social inclusion package. The paper characterises New Labour's welfare policies according to regime types and uses evidence from recent comparative European policy reviews and empirical studies to suggest that there is a way of achieving socially inclusive society and economic success without risking a clash principles. This is through preventative, universalistic, social democratic welfare. The paper will conclude by considering evidence that New Labour's still has welfare ambitions in this direction, and will identify barriers which prevent this aim being pursued in the short to medium term.

Welfare to Work: Myth and Fact, Social Inclusion and Labour Exclusion

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2008

It is a rare occasion to find a book that has a much more ambitious goal than the one its author claims. But in Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality, 1 Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld repeatedly claim that the thesis of the book is that America's record in treating poor, single mothers is grim, if not scandalous. 2 In fact, however, the book covers a much wider terrain. It not only describes and critiques a wide array of welfare state arrangements that do not target welfare mothers in particular, in areas such as health, housing, child care and education, but also includes an assessment of the contemporary American low-wage labour market. And it is to the reader's benefit that the authors go beyond their stated objective. America is indeed exceptional in its demonizing of single mothers, but tracing the roots of this phenomenon (which will probably reveal race-based explanations) is not the same as an institutional, bureaucratic and legal appraisal of American welfare and low-wage labour policy. And the latter, after all, is what the authors were after. The rift between the authors' stated and real objectives is never more apparent than in the fourth chapter of the book. Despite its title-'Demonizing the Single Mother Family'-it quickly moves beyond a discussion of this issue and into the realms of race, fraud and privatization. The broad and narrow objectives interlock and intertwine throughout the book. In American modern social policy parlance, welfare often does mean, to many, single mothers on benefits. But welfare policy, even when targeting (black) single mothers, actually affects a much larger population. Moreover, discussing welfare policy as if it consists only of aid in cash or kind to the poor ignores the larger context. First, the state distributes money to the rich as well as the poor (in the form of tax expenditures, subsidies, etc.).

The social exclusion discourse: ideas and policy change

Policy &# 38; Politics, 2007

This article explores the political discourse of social exclusion and its potential impact on social policy. The analysis suggests that in France, Britain, and the European Union at large, the growing political focus on social exclusion has helped to shift policy attention away from other forms of inequality, including income inequality. This logic and the reforms enacted in the name of social inclusion are compatible with moderate forms of economic liberalism distinct from Thatcherite neoliberalism. Theoretically, the article draws on the social science literature on the role of ideas to stress the possible consequences of the social exclusion discourse.

The 'Underclass' Debate – A Discourse that Maligns People Living in Poverty

Social Change Review, 2013

The concept of an ‘underclass’ originates in the United States and is wide-spread in political and social science discourse today. Its power is most visible in discussions about deep cuts to social safety nets. The foundation of this discourse is the assigning of negative character traits and behaviours to poor people. This promotes the claim that they have brought negative consequences upon themselves and furthers the idea that poor people are personally responsible for their poverty. Discussion about an ‘underclass’ must be understood in the larger context of a comprehensive neoliberal ideological transformation, or ‘Newspeak’. Newspeak is implicitly based on the schema of a game in which everyone has the same chances, but which inevitably results in winners and losers.

The Social Exclusion Debate: Strategies, Controversies and Dilemmas

This paper explores the UK government’s approach to combating social exclusion since 1997. It considers the philosophy and political economy underpinning New Labour policy, and explains the economic and social policy prescriptions that follow from these principles. The government’s social exclusion agenda has provoked a wide range of controversies and debates in the academic and political communities. In addition to putting a perspective on the government’s political economy of social exclusion, the purpose of this paper is to explore key debates. The story of New Labour’s political economy of social exclusion therefore pauses at key junctures to discuss eight controversies and dilemmas representing a range of critical responses to third way thinking about social inclusion. It is concluded that New Labour’s approach to social exclusion is contractarian, offering conditional access to the mainstream to outsiders. The individual pledges to take responsibility across the full spectrum ...

Connecting social exclusion and agency: social class matters

The aim of this chapter is to develop a social and political psychology of the connections between social exclusion, social class and agency. Specifically, the chapter illustrates how individuals within communities experience social exclusion as a result of intersecting structural forces despite prevalent understandings in contemporary Western societies of the self as a free and independent agent with a significant degree of social mobility. Indeed dominant political ideologies and discourses, including some that dominate social and political psychology itself, such as individualism and meritocracy, tend to construct people as independent agents able and responsible for their own paths, success and prosperity. At the same time, Western capitalist economies have moved from industrialised to 'knowledge economies' and the labour market and job opportunities have radically changed. Now the demand for credentials and qualifications are becoming increasingly important for obtaining secure work, status and even reasonable pay. However despite an expanding higher education sector, access to these credentials is unequal as economic and social forces combined impose significant structural barriers within the education system. Furthermore, these social and economic forces, which can be conceptualised as social class, often intersect with other axes of disadvantage such as ethnicity and gender. As a result individuals, families and often whole communities experience social exclusion, poverty and stigmatising representations which reproduce their exclusion from the labour market. These changes have been accompanied by cultural shifts where social class is rarely considered an important and self-defining identity. These