ActivesocialpoliciesintheEUinclusionthroughparticipation

1、inclusion through participationthe case studies (wp3): comparative reportreport in the context of the inpart research projectcontract nr. soe2-ct97-3043december 1999dr rik van berkelutrecht universitywelfare state departmentr.vanberkelfss.uu.nlcontents1. introduction 52. theoretical and socio-politi

2、cal backgrounds 82.1 introduction 82.2 discourses on social exclusion and poverty 92.3 the inpart research project103. the design of the case studies123.1 research questions and hypotheses123.2 types of work123.3 investigating types of work: the importance of contextualisation143.4 conceptualisation

3、 and operationalisation143.5 methodology174. the case studies194.1 primary labour market194.2 secondary labour market204.3 unpaid work244.4 training and education264.5 some concluding remarks285. the respondents325.1 introduction325.2 gender325.3 age335.4 level of education345.5 duration of unemploy

4、ment345.6 household composition356. unemployment and exclusion376.1 introduction376.2 exclusion from domains of participation376.3 experiences of exclusion406.4 self-exclusion through deviating work attitudes?437. employed in the primary labour market457.1 introduction457.2 primary labour-market par

5、ticipation and inclusion in participation domains457.3 experiences with inclusion478. employed in the secondary labour market508.1 introduction508.2 inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participation508.3 experiences of inclusion and exclusion549. participation in unpaid work619.1 introducti

6、on619.2 voluntary work619.3 informal work6510. education and training6910.1 introduction6910.2 inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participation6910.3 experiences of inclusion and exclusion7111. conclusions7611.1 introduction7611.2 the concepts of inclusion and exclusion7611.3 participation

7、 and inclusion7811.4 types of participation8011.5 domains of participation8411.6 traditional and new activation approaches861. introductionthis report is the third comparative report written in the context of the research project inclusion through participation, a two-year project funded by the ec (

8、4th framework, targeted socio-economic research, area iii). this report, which is based on separately published national research reports gives an account on the case studies that have been carried out in the participating countries: belgium, denmark, netherlands, portugal, spain and the united king

9、dom. through these case studies and a comparative analysis of their results, we try to answer the main research question of the project:how is participation in various types of work related to inclusion and exclusion and experiences thereof? to what degree are these experiences determined by factors

10、 such as peoples needs, resources, orientations et cetera?the structure of this report is as follows. part i contains the introductory chapters. chapter 2 describes the socio-political and theoretical backgrounds of the inpart project in general and of the case studies in particular. chapter 3 deals

11、 with the design of the case studies, the methodologies used and conceptualisations and operationalisations. chapter 4 describes the case studies in more detail. part ii goes deeper into the findings of the case studies. chapter 5 presents some background information on the respondents involved in t

12、he case studies. chapter 6 is an intermezzo on unemployment and exclusion. often, the unemployed are portrayed as a group of excluded and non-participants. this is a statement that we will critically examine on the basis of our empirical data. chapters 7-10 deal with the types of work and participat

13、ion we distinguished in the inpart project, i.e. primary labour-market participation, secondary labour-market participation, unpaid work and education. part iii deals with the conclusions of the case studies. these conclusions, together with those from the other inpart work packages, will form the b

14、asis of policy recommendations to be presented in the final report.in designing the case studies, which constitute the empirical part of the inpart project, different national policy contexts as well as different theoretical and methodological traditions of the participating institutions and researc

15、hers have been taken into account explicitly. from a comparative point of view, one might argue that a more homogeneous research design would have been desirable. at the same time, this would have required much more preparation time, which was no feasible option given the time limits the project was

16、 subject to. furthermore, despite the fact that the pluriformity of approaches of the case studies made concessions with respect to their comparability necessary, we think that this pluriformity also has an advantage: the different theoretical points of view and methodological approaches underlying

17、the case studies contribute, as we hope the reader will agree, to the richness of the material presented in this report. part 1introduction2. theoretical and socio-political backgrounds2.1 introductionthe main interests of the inpart research project originate among others from some well-known and b

18、y now well-documented developments that took place in the nations of the european union (as well as on a more global scale) and that have deeply and significantly changed the fabric of work in these societies. even though scientists use different theoretical concepts to make sense of these developme

19、nts (from fordism to post-fordism, from industrialism to post-industrialism, from industrial society to risk society, from the keynesian welfare state to the schumpeterian work-fare state), they all agree on some of the manifestations of the changes that took and are taking place, among others the d

20、iversification of paid work and newly arising issues related to the paid work/unpaid work relationship. for our purpose, which is to gain insight into the consequences of the heterogeneisation of work in terms of the inclusion and exclusion of people, more specifically people on the margins of the l

21、abour market, the following developments are of major importance:· developments in the labour market, where flexibilisation on the one hand and the individualisation of labour-market participation on the other (compare the increasing labour-market participation of women) have made the life-time

22、, full-time job less and less normal and have introduced a panoply of flexible jobs, labour contracts and work careers;· developments in social policies and social security, where traditional passive policies gradually are making way for active policies and where the introduction of all kinds o

23、f activation measures not only involves a shift in the aims of welfare states from income protection to participation or even work-fare, but also introduces new types of work and participation. partly related to these developments and reflecting the necessity to deliver active policies tailor made t

24、o regional or local circumstances, social policies have increasingly become decentralised;· developments in peoples survival strategies: societal changes influence peoples opportunities and needs to lead a decent and respectable life. it is quite clear from the vast literature analysing current

25、 social developments, that they produce both winners and losers or, less dramatically put, groups at risk of loosing the capacity to adjust to the new conditions. nevertheless, the latter try to cope with changing circumstances as well, sometimes by making use of informal or illegal survival strateg

26、ies (black economy, informal work, etc.). we have described these developments in more detail before, as part of the earlier work of the inpart project. for our present concern, it suffices to say that the heterogeneisation of work resulting from developments taking place at all levels of society (r

27、anging from the global level to the level of the individual household) reorganises peoples opportunities and risks with respect to being able to fulfil their needs, not only in economic terms (such as financial independence, income situation) but also in more social-psychological terms (such as wort

28、hiness, self-fulfilment, social participation). this is even more so, since work or, to be more precise, a paid job- is considered to be an important condition for full participation in society or, in other words, for full social citizenship. in the past, this was hardly problematic as there was ful

29、l employment (actually, full male employment) and the typical job was a fixed, full-time and often life-long job, although even then debates on the quality of work, labour conditions, workers co-determination et cetera raised the question whether some jobs involved fuller citizenship than others, an

30、d the womens movement started claiming already that womens non-participation in the labour market involved forms of exclusion and second-rank citizenship. today, the contribution of work to full citizenship and social inclusion is a major issue in social scientific and social policy debates, due to

31、high unemployment, the heterogeneisation of work and the increasing labour-market participation of women.2.2 discourses on social exclusion and poverty the growing emphasis in social policies on activation and participation was preceded by the introduction of the concept of social exclusion. a lot o

32、f debate has been going on and is still going on with respect to the meaning of this concept, particularly in relation to the concept of poverty. some have taken on the view that both concepts are more or less synonymous, whereas others emphasise the differences between the two. for example, some st

33、ate that whereas poverty refers to financial constraints (either because of a lack of financial resources or because of high expenses), social exclusion mainly refers to issues related to participation. also, the concept of poverty is said to be more static, whereas the concept of social exclusion i

34、s supposed to be more dynamic, paying attention to the processes that exclude people from (parts of) society. these debates are not purely academic. they also may have consequences for social policies addressing problems of poverty and exclusion, for example with respect to the emphasis the policies

35、 put on income improvement. in a recent book on social exclusion ruth levitas (1998), the inclusive society? social exclusion and new labour, macmillan (see chapter 1 in particular)., in which she analyses the social policy debates in the uk in particular, ruth levitas has distinguished three ideal-

36、typical discourses of social exclusion: a redistributionist discourse (red), a moral underclass discourse (mud) and a social integrationist discourse (sid). she characterises theses discourses as follows.the characteristics of the redistributionist discourse are summarised as follows:· red emph

37、asises poverty as a prime cause of social exclusion;· red implies a reduction of poverty through increases in benefit levels;· red is potentially able to valorise unpaid work;· in positioning as the obverse of exclusion, red goes beyond a minimalist model of inclusion;· in addres

38、sing social, political and cultural as well as economic citizenship, red offers a critique of inequality including material inequality;· red focuses on the processes which produce that inequality;· red implies a radical reduction of inequalities and a redistribution of resources and power.

39、the characteristics of the second discourse, the moral underclass discourse, are summed up as follows:· mud presents the underclass or socially excluded as culturally distinct from the mainstream;· mud focuses on the behaviour of the poor rather than the structure of the whole society;

40、3; mud implies that benefits are bad, rather than good, for their recipients, and encourage dependency;· mud ignores inequalities among the rest of society;· mud is a gendered discourse about idle, criminal young men and single mothers;· mud does not acknowledge unpaid work;· mud

41、 regards dependency on the state as a problem, but does not do this for personal economic dependency, especially dependency of women and children on men.finally, levitas characterises the social integrationist discourse as follows:· sid narrows definitions of inclusion and exclusion to particip

42、ation in paid work;· sid does not squeeze out the question why people who are not employed are consigned to poverty;· sid obscures the inequalities between paid workers;· sid obscures gender and class inequalities in the labour market;· sid erases from view the inequality between

43、 productive property owners and the working population;· sid is not able to address the question of unpaid work in society properly;· sid implies an increase in womens workload;· sid undermines the legitimacy of non-participation in paid work.connecting these discourses to the issue o

44、f the concepts of poverty and social exclusion, it is quite clear that in red poverty dominates over exclusion, in mud exclusion is reduced to self-exclusion, and in sid exclusion dominates poverty. or, in levitas own words (p. 27): “() in red they have no money, in sid they have no work, in mud the

45、y have no morals”. these discourses, which in some form can be found in all countries involved in the inpart research, highlight some important issues research in social exclusion should deal with. this research projects main concern is with the inclusionary potential of different types of work. it

46、does not, however, limit work to paid work only; neither does it treat paid work as an undifferentiated category. also, even though our focus is on participation in types of work, the importance of income, both as an element of inclusion in itself and as a condition for full participation, is not ne

47、glected. furthermore, we will also pay attention to peoples needs, wishes and attitudes with respect to participation in general and with respect to participation in paid work in particular. thus, rather than positioning ourselves in one of the discourses summarised above, we have used them in conce

48、ptualising and operationalising some of our core concepts. we will return to this in the next chapter. in the next section, we will present the research projects main research questions.2.3 the inpart research projectgenerally speaking, social policies more and more emphasising the importance of par

49、ticipation, as we have stated before - are based on the assumption that labour-market participation involves social inclusion whereas unemployment involves exclusion; and many social scientists seem to share that assumption. in levitas terminology, this may be interpreted as revealing the dominance

50、of the sid discourse, although the dominance of paid work and the neglect of unpaid work can also be found frequently among adherents of the red discourse. this assumption, however, may be criticised because of its determinism (having a job equals inclusion, being unemployed equals exclusion), its u

51、niversalism (the road to inclusion is the same for everyone) and its simplicity (lack of differentiation in the concepts of work and unemployment). it is not very hard to find empirical evidence that may support these criticisms, especially when peoples own experiences with work or unemployment are

52、taken into consideration:· some jobs seem to have exclusionary rather than inclusionary potential, whereas at the same time, there are quite a few unemployed people that seem to be fully or at least partially included;· for some people, having a paid job is a necessary, though not automati

53、cally sufficient, precondition for inclusion, others manage very well without;· different types of work can contribute to, or limit, peoples inclusion in various ways, not only depending on characteristics of the work involved (quality of work, labour conditions, social relations, autonomy, et

54、cetera) but also on active social policies themselves (income levels, participation opportunities opened up or closed off, etc.) and on personal characteristics (e.g. orientations).against this background, it is the purpose of the inpart project to investigate the relationship between participation/

55、non-participation in types of work and inclusion/exclusion empirically, thereby testing the social policy assumption mentioned above. the main research question we want to answer in this report is:how is participation in various types of work related to inclusion and exclusion and experiences thereo

56、f? to what degree are these experiences determined by factors such as peoples needs, resources, orientations et cetera?the first research question tests the assumption that participation in paid work equals inclusion whereas non-participation in paid work equals exclusion. the second question tests

57、the assumption that roads towards inclusion can be defined universally and independent of the people involved. we will elaborate this in the next chapter.in order to investigate these questions, various types of work and participation have been distinguished:· participation in jobs in the primary labour market (regular jobs, full-time or part-time, fixed or flexible, temporary or permanent);· participation in jobs in the secondary labour market (subsidised jobs for the unemployed, e.g. job