Social Exclusion and Inequalities in the United Kingdom

• Main Authors: John Washington, Ian Paylor
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2018-12-01
• Series: Critical Social Work
• Online Access: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/view/5606

   Social exclusion is a relatively new concept in the United Kingdom1. This is particularly so for academics studying in the area of social work and social policy analysis. Indeed, for some social scientists the emergence of the concept has been a challenge to ways of thinking about the analysis of society (Levitas 1996; Byrne 1997). Historically the United Kingdom has had a paradigm of social science that viewed social division with a distinctively different perspective from the current European usage of the concept of social exclusion. The nearest discourse to this in Anglo Saxon social science is the approach to the study of deprivation that focuses on poverty. Booth and Rowntree in the later part of the nineteenth and in the early part of the twentieth century established this tradition (Fraser 1973). Their works established a particular orientation to viewing deprived people in society from the perspective of poverty. The most significant component of poverty as they understood it was the lack of personal financial resources. Historically there has been an association of poverty studies with the academic study of social policy in the United Kingdom. In parallel the profession of social work has been informed by and is increasingly contributing to this analysis. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, alongside this analysis there has been a concern about stigmatisation and the problems of labelling people: there has been fierce debate in the UK about the use of terms such as 'the poor', 'the underclass', 'the excluded'. These words have been used to blame individuals. This has caused a certain amount of concern about the usage of such terms (see Rodger 1992). Social workers have been at the front line of intervention with people thus labelled. To a marked extent they have had the opprobrium of this labelling reflected on their profession.