What is social exclusion and is it a more useful concept for tackling disadvantage than poverty? This paper from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre documents some of the mechanisms of individuals’ downward spiral, with the accumulation of dimensions of exclusion. The study of social exclusion aims to transcend poverty’s narrow focus on monetary or material resource distribution. Exclusion as a process of progressive social rupture is a more comprehensive and complex conceptualisation of social disadvantage.
There have long existed poverty thresholds that allow policymakers to document trends in poverty. For social exclusion, there are no formal ‘exclusion thresholds’ to cross. Rather, at any one time, people are situated on a multidimensional continuum and may be moving towards inclusion in one or another sense, or towards a state of comprehensive, cumulative social rupture. This process has been labelled social ‘disaffiliation’ or ‘disqualification’, among other terms, and encompasses humiliation as well as social isolation.
At a more macro-level, groups, communities, and societies also may undergo a process of social exclusion from larger collectives in which progressive isolation and a decline of solidarity give rise to new social boundaries between insiders and outsiders. The process of residential segregation is a notable example. Despite the European Union’s designation of common exclusion indicators, national differences in the meaning of social exclusion, in contrast to poverty, may impede comparative study. The concept and its measures are still evolving.
There are a number of commonalities between the exclusion perspective and that of chronic poverty. But social exclusion overcomes some of the problems associated with the chronic poverty approach:
- The chronic poverty perspective seems to continue the historical tendency for elites and policymakers to sort and make distinctions among the poor.
- There is a danger in emphasising the few chronically poor rather than the larger number of vulnerable people.
- Solutions that emphasise participation by the excluded in order to overcome isolation can ironically encourage exclusion of even weaker and more isolated people.
- Chronic poverty, especially measured in money metrics, allows for greater comparability across countries and periods but at the expense of detail about the specific contexts in which chronic poverty emerges and the mechanisms that reproduce it.
The difficulty in defining social exclusion makes it hard to measure. However, at its best, social exclusion theory acknowledges the structural sources of the process rather than the characteristics of the excluded.
- The study of social exclusion dynamics should emphasise the large number of people who have spent some portion in their lives in a situation of multiple disadvantage due to transformations beyond their individual control.
- Material and non-material dimensions are implicated in social exclusion and so too are individual and group dynamics.
- National and local contexts – from the law to cultural understandings – shape the meaning of exclusion.
- Exclusion emphasises horizontal ties of belonging, although these may give rise to vertical distribution.
- Relations prevail over resources in the process of social exclusion. Exclusion can take place at the individual, community, national, and even international level.
