Download Social exclusion and social solidarity: Three paradigms

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LABOUR STUDIES
RECEIVED
2 2 JUN1994
Discussion Papers
Labour Institutions and
Development Programme
SntornetiorwJ
Labour OfHoe
ILO
BIB4.
BIT |
DP/69/1994
Social exclusion and social solidarity:
Three paradigms
by
Hilary Silver
Department of Sociology, Brown University
Providence (USA)
39959
The Discussion Paper Series presents the preliminary results of research undertaken by the ILLS. The
documents are intended for limited dissemination with a view to eliciting reactions and comments before they
are published in their final form in the Research Series or as special publications.
Copyright © International Labour Organization (International Institute for Labour Studies) 1994
Short excerpts from this publication may be reproduced without authorization, on condition that the source
is indicated. For rights of reproduction or translation, application should be made to the Editor, International
Institute for Labour Studies, P.O. Box 6, CH-1211 Geneva 22 (Switzerland).
ISBN 92-9014-553-6
First published 1994
The responsibility for opinions expressed in this paper rests solely with its author, and its publication does
not constitute an endorsement by the International Institute for Labour Studies of the opinions expressed.
Requests for this publication should be sent to: IILS Publications, International Institute for Labour Studies,
P.O. Box 6, CH-1211 Geneva 22 (Switzerland).
Table of contents
r
*
I. Three paradigms: An introduction
5
II. The history of "exclusion" discourse in France
10
From poverty to inequality to exclusion
10
Exclusion and republicanism
17
The social construction of exclusion
20
Exclusion in French social democratic discourse
27
III. Exclusion in social science: Three paradigms revisited
29
Exclusion and belonging: Nation, subculture, citizenship
29
Solidarity
30
Specialization
32
Monopoly
34
Citizenship
37
Solidarity and citizenship
38
Liberalism and citizenship
39
Monopoly and citizenship
43
Race and ethnicity
46
Economic exclusion
50
Solidarity
;'
50
Specialization
51
Monopoly and labour market segmentation
56
Conclusion: Exclusion, politics and social policy
60
Notes
64
Bibliographical references
66
Social exclusion and social solidarity:
Three paradigms1
*
*-
*•
.,
All changes coming to a head at this time — technological, economic, demographic, political, ideological — affected the poor to a greater degree than any other class and made their poverty more conspicuous, more controversial, and in a sense less 'natural' than it had ever been before... The changes
affecting the poor were changes in kind as well as degree, in quantity, in ideas, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, values. They were changes in what may called the 'moral imagination' [Gertrude Himmelfarb: The
Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, pp. 18-19, referring to England circa 1760].
Since the mid-1970s, the advanced capitalist democracies have been undergoing a process
of profound economic restructuring. As a consequence, new social problems have emerged that
appear to challenge the assumptions underlying post-war Western welfare states. Universal
social policies insure against predictable risks that affect people who share the same life-cycle,
career pattern, and family structure. However, the standardization of the life course can no
longer be assumed. More and more people — especially from identifiable minority groups —
suffer insecurities, have become dependent upon "residual" means-tested programs, or are
without social protection altogether.
How are we to understand these changes? As with the introduction of the idea of poverty,
reconceptualizing social disadvantage entails a shift in the "moral imagination." In some
countries, the new social problems have been taken as symptoms of a growing "underclass."
In other contexts, they imply the development of a "new poverty." But particularly in France,
these social transformations are said to reflect "social exclusion."
The discourse of "exclusion" is rapidly diffusing. For example, in 1989, the Council and
Ministers of Social Affairs of the European Community passed a resolution to foster integration
and a "Europe of Solidarity" by fighting "social exclusion" (Commission of the European
Communities, 1992a, b; 1991). The preamble to the European Community Charter of
Fundamental Social Rights also stated: "it is important to combat every form of social exclusion
and discrimination, including discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, and religion."
Today, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, and especially Belgium have introduced new
institutions to discuss or act on social exclusion (Kronauer 1993; Kronauer, Vogel, and Gerlach
1993; Yepez 1993; EC Commission 1992, p. 32; Carton 1993). Even U.S. President Bill
Clinton took up the rhetoric of exclusion in late 1993 when, speaking of inner city problems,
he remarked "It's not an underclass anymore. It's an outer class."
What precisely is meant by exclusion? This paper seeks to answer this question. It traces
the evolution of the term over time and across national contexts, and distinguishes three
theoretical paradigms within which the notion of exclusion is embedded.
By all accounts, defining exclusion is not an easy task. One European Community
document conceded that "it is difficult to come up with a simple definition" (EC Commission
1992, p. 10). Similarly, a recent review of sociological theories of exclusion (Weinberg and
Ruano-Borbalan 1993) concluded:
Les observateurs ne s'accordent en fait que sur un seul point: l'impossibilite de d^finir le statut
'd'exclus' par un critere simple et unique!... La lecture des multiples enquetes et rapports sur 1'exclusion
revele un profond desarroi des responsables et des experts.
1
Discussion paper for the UNDP-IILS project on "Patterns and causes of social exclusion and the design of
policies to promote integration".
2
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Indeed, the Commissariat General du Plan [CGP] in France, although responsible for
designing and evaluating policies to combat exclusion, also recognized how difficult it is to
define the term and to synthesize existing theories (Nasse 1992). One committee charged with
that mission, realizing that the term was never clearly defined in law, fell back on an
admittedly unsystematic classification of a "pluridimensional concept" (CGP 1993).2 Similarly,
the CGP's Commission on Social Cohesion and the Prevention of Exclusion concluded that:
Tout essai de typologie est obligatoirement r£ducteur, plus encore lorsqu'il s'agit de populations
exclues ou en voie d'exclusion. Les facteurs d'exclusion — d'origine individuelle, familiale, ou socioeconomique — sont multiples, fluctuants, interagisssent les uns sur les autres etfinissentsouvent par se
cumuler (Fragonard 1993).
Thus, exclusion appears to be a "terme flou" (Mongin 1992, p. 8), loaded with numerous
economic, social, political, and cultural connotations and dimensions. Despite attempts at
official definitions,
En fin de compte, la notion d'exclu ... est saturee de sens, de non-sens, et de contresens;
finalement, on arrive a lui faire a peu pres n'importe quoi, y compris le d£pit de celui qui ne peut
obtenir tout ce a quoi il pretend (Julien Freund in Xiberras 1993, p. 11).
In sum, the neologism "exclusion" is so evocative, ambiguous, multidimensional, and
expansive mat it can be defined in many different ways.
Yet the difficulty of defining exclusion and die fact that it is interpreted differently in
different contexts and at different times also can be seen as a theoretical opportunity. The
discourse of exclusion may serve as a window through which one may view political cultures.
In this paper, I argue that exclusion is a "polysemic" term, one with multiple meanings. It thus
requires "semasiological" definitions (Riggs 1988). The uses and meanings of "social
exclusion" are embedded in conflicting social science paradigms and political ideologies. A
paradigm is "a constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members
of a given community" (Kuhn 1970, p. 175).3 Paradigms "specify not only what sorts of
entities the universe does contain, but also, by implication, those mat it does not" (p. 7). In
effect, they are ontologies that render reality comprehensible and mingle elements of what "is"
and "ought" to be. When paradigms conflict, practitioners speak from "incommensurable
viewpoints" and use the same language to mean different things.
After introducing three paradigms of social exclusion in the first part of mis paper, Part
II traces the history of the term in France, contrasting it wim histories of the idea of "poverty".
This history indicates that "exclusion" came to have meanings distinct from those of poverty
and inequality and to encompass more and more dimensions of social disadvantage. While
poverty and inequality became social scientific concepts, it is most accurate to consider the term
"exclusion" as a "keyword" (Williams 1985) in French Republican discourse.
2
The classification was of types of "insertion," the commonly used opposite of exclusion. The types were
l'insertion comme parcours (Drancourt 1991); comme dispositif (Wuhl 1991); comme £cosysteme (Dubet 1987);
and comme ensemble de competences (Commissariat GeWral du Plan 1993).
3
They also refer to "concrete puzzle-solutions which, when employed as models or examples, can replace
explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science" (Kuhn 1970, p. 175). From
such exemplary studies or scientific practices spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. They are
sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific
activity and sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the new group of practitioners to resolve
(p. 10). Paradigms provide a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be
assumed to have solutions (p.37). In brief, they guide a scientific community's research.
*
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOL/DARM
3
Yet, with challenges to Republican ideology and adoption of exclusion discourse in other
national contexts, exclusion has been re-assimilated to earlier paradigms of social disadvantage.
For example, the EC increasingly uses an evolving Social Democratic notion of "exclusion"
based on T.H. Marshall's idea of social citizenship, recementing the term to notions of
inequality and the discourse of social rights. Similarly, liberal reconstructions of "exclusion"
concentrate on various forms of "discrimination", "isolation", and the cross-cutting or
cumulative personal characteristics of excluded individuals which are often generalized into the
idea of an "underclass".
Exclusion not only varies in meaning across national and ideological contexts. Another
reason it is difficult to define is that the empirical referents of the idea of "exclusion" are not
always discussed with the same terminology. The concept is not only reflected in such terms
as the new poverty, inequality, and the underclass, but also superfluity, irrelevance,
marginality, foreignness, alterity, closure, disaffiliation, dispossession, discrimination,
deprivation, and destitution. This means that exclusion must be analysed "onomasiologically,"
defining the same concept with reference to more than one term (Riggs 1988). Only by
identifying the many synonyms of exclusion is it possible to conceptually and empirically
delimit the term.
With such multiple, often contradictory connotations and synonyms, exclusion has become
an "essentially contested concept" in that the proper use of it "inevitably involves endless
disputes" (Gallie 1956). Such concepts are usually appraisive, complex, open in meaning, and
explicable in terms of their parts. Selecting among the mutually exclusive meanings of
exclusion necessarily entails the adoption of particular values and world views. Rather than
seeking to recast "social exclusion" as a general phenomenon or a scientific concept
transcending national and political contexts, the values underlying any particular definition
should be made explicit. This will clarify the objectives of any policies introduced to combat
exclusion.
For this reason, Part III elaborates the three-fold typology of the multiple meanings of
exclusion which are situated within different theoretical perspectives, political ideologies, and
national discourses (see Table 1). Based on different notions of social integration, I call these
types the solidarity, specialization, and monopoly paradigms. Each paradigm attributes
exclusion to a different cause, and is grounded in a different political philosophy:
republicanism, liberalism, and social democracy. Each provides an explanation of multiple
forms of social disadvantage — economic, social, political, and cultural — and thus
encompasses theories of poverty and long-term unemployment, racial-ethnic inequality, and
citizenship.
All three paradigms are cast in relief when contrasted with conservative notions that cast
social integration in organic, racial, or subsidiarist-corporatist terms and with neo-marxist
conceptions of the capitalist social order which deny the possibility of social integration to
begin with. My review of the English and French language literature suggests that national
exclusion discourse in France centres on the debate between Republicanism and Social
Democracy and hence, between solidarity and monopoly paradigms. In Britain, the debate is
between social democracy and liberalism, while in the US, discourse and debate on social
exclusion tends to take place within liberal ideological assumptions.
In conclusion, I consider some of the political implications of using the term "exclusion"
to denote the changing nature of social disadvantage in the West. On the one hand, by
highlighting the generalized nature of the problem, the idea of exclusion could.be useful to
reformers who seek to build broad-based coalitions in order to address the inadequacies of
current welfare states. On the other hand, exclusion discourse may also ghettoize risk categories
under a new label and publicize the more spectacular forms of cumulative disadvantage,
4
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
c
g
**3
1*
c
o
a>
u
«-^. CD c
c sz CD
0
o
w
o
5 CO
c
a>
U
E
CD
Q
"re
'o
o
CO
•^ re
- £
TJ
k.
<D
t * TJ
TJ
> *
w c
E
h.
ai
c 2>
ta>
ilv
*
k.
CD
S3
CD
3
O
00
CO
kT
**
o
re
CO
0)
**
k.
re
2
k.
3
co
•55
X
CD
re
2
c
o
o
O
u
o
a
CD
3
CD
Labo
o
a.
o
c
o
> O
O O
a _
k.
CD
C
Gobi
>•
£
a
^CO
tr
c
re
Balib
>«.
k.
3
CO
itiz
a>
o
re
E
E
o
o
cc
Dahr
Towi
•J
SZ
O)
>»
re
3
Marx
Mars
CO
re
«c-<
w
.2
*o
CO
a.
CO
g a.
'^ CO TJ
re a> CCD
N
,— +*
a
a>
re re TJ
k.
'5 re kCD.
a> a
a. CO
a>
CO
c
0
c
o
to
0)
O)
c
re
.c
o
X
h re
f
CD
S3
1 8CD
O -o
.52
c
TJ
re
5 c
CO
I5
CD
k.
re
2 re
SZ
CO CO
*J
*s
5T
"5.
CO
_c v> re
O
"35 w
o —
09
re
re
CD
O
o
re
CD
+J
.¥
O 1^
O 'P
_J
3
_>
c
co o
o
c
CO
«o
CD
E _
ai
to JX
»3=
=
2
CO
>
13
E
OJ
TJ
re
k.
ID
a
a>
O
0
LL OC
TJ
X
CO U
Q
(0
'c
re
c
0
__
re
X)
3
a.
CD
cc
c
0
CO
3
O
X
LU
cc O
0
LL
CD
TJ
CO
re
re
as, Me
E
jcauld
teg ati
chnaipper
osta -Lascoux
O
3
i_
iberr
k.
0
ouss eau,
urkh eim
1
3
O
c
Mor
idar
m
~_
(0
^
QL
Itu
0
CO
OJ
3
c
0
#ra
-»
k>
Ol
CD
fW
"•P
a.
V
0
c
0
O
0
*—
rat
1
uno
^. •c
> Tre
J
.t:
lexib le Prod uction
eguliation School
CO
CD
0
OJ
CD
*•
.£
**
C
•^
O
c
CD
SZ
c
>
CD
CD
O)
O
0
3
O
0
CD
•O
O
O
V)
CO
J >»
CD
E
0
CD
J*
10
w
3
5
ra
c
1
CD
CO
_ra
a.
E
CD
X
LU
c
0
*>
«^
0
0
CD
TJ
"•P
5
•5
^_
ra
•35 _o
re
to
£. "H
69
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUOARITY
5
distracting attention from the general rise in inequality, unemployment, and family dissolution
that is affecting all social classes. By recasting the rationale for social solidarity, it may
inadvertently undermine consensual support for older welfare state programs. Thus, just as the
idea of exclusion reflects different notions of social integration, solidarity, and citizenship, it
can also serve a variety of political purposes.
/.
Three paradigms: An introduction
To those unfamiliar with the term, the rhetoric of exclusion often gives rise to the question
"exclusion from what?" Virtually any social distinction or affiliation will exclude somebody.
In die United States, for example, the term calls to mind "exclusionary" social clubs,
"exclusionary" zoning, and "exclusionary" immigration policy. But the rhetoric of exclusion
in English language discourse is relatively rare compared to France. Consider just a few of the
things found in the literature that people may be excluded from:
—
—
-r—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
Exclusion from a livelihood
Exclusion from secure, permanent employment
Exclusion from earnings
Exclusion from property or indebtedness
Exclusion from housing
Exclusion from minimal or prevailing consumption level
Exclusion from education, skills, and cultural capital
Exclusion from the welfare state
Exclusion from citizenship and legal equality
Exclusion from democratic participation
Exclusion from public goods
Exclusion from the nation or the dominant race
Exclusion from family and sociability
Exclusion from humanity, respect, fulfilment, understanding.
At the heart of the question "exclusion from what?" is a more basic one, the "problem of
social order" itself, especially under conditions of profound social change. The problem of
order was a major concern of social scientists during the Great Transformations and coincided
widi the rise of the idea of poverty. Thus, one method of classifying theories of exclusion takes
theories of its opposite — insertion, integration, citizenship, solidarity — as points of reference.
Based on different notions of the nature of social integration, one can identify three
paradigmatic approaches to exclusion.4
In French republican thought, exclusion is the rupture of a social relationship between the
individual and society referred to as social solidarity. In this conception, group boundedness
4
Conventionally, solutions to the problem of order appeal to one of two perspectives. In the first, social
integration is externally imposed on individuals; in the second, social integration grows out of the voluntary
interaction among individuals. This distinction between the coercive and voluntaristic nature of social integration
corresponds to other dualism in the social sciences. For example, social boundaries may be imposed by
sociopolitical forces. They may be cognitive or ideal phenomena, located in people's heads. They may arise from
social interaction and communication (see Alexander 1992; Lamont and Fournier 1992). I build on these basic
dualisms in contrasting two major mechanisms of exclusion: exclusion as a basis of monopoly and exclusion as a
basis of specialization. However, as I will explain, exclusion as a consequence of solidarity represents the French
attempt to steer a "third course" between these two polarities.
6
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
is moral or cultural, rather than interested, in orientation. The approach lays heavy emphasis
on the ways in which cultural boundaries socially construct dualistic categories for ordering the
world. Applications go beyond analyses of Republican citizenship to discussions of cultures of
poverty and long-term unemployment, etiinic conflicts, and deviance. Adumbrated by Rousseau
and exemplified by Durkheimian sociology, the "social" order is conceived as external, moral,
and normative. It rests upon a national consensus, collective conscience, or general will that
ties the individual to the larger society through vertically interrelated mediating institutions.
Exclusion, like deviance or anomie, both threatens and reinforces social cohesion. The inverse
of exclusion is thus "integration" and the process of attaining it, "insertion" or "inclusion."5
In a Durkheimian sense, this implies assimilation to the dominant culture. More recent usages,
however, are "post-modernist" in that they have incorporated aspects of multi-cultural ism,
cultural pluralism, or the reconfiguration of the basis of solidarity in the dominant culture as
it adjusts to minority culture. This paradigm draws heavily on anthropology, ethnography, and
cultural (feminist, African-American, etc.) studies more generally and focuses attention on die
exclusion inherent in the solidarity of nation, race, ethnicity, and other cultural or primordial
ties that delimit group boundaries.
In me liberalism so dominant in the US and contested in the UK, exclusion is a
consequence of specialization: social differentiation, economic division of labour, and the
separation of spheres. It is individualist in method, although causation is situated not simply
in individual preference but also in the structures created by cooperating and competing
individuals — markets, associations, and the like. It thus conceives of the social order, like the
economy and politics, as networks of voluntary exchanges between autonomous individuals
witii their own interests and motivations. Social groups are voluntarily constituted, and shifting
alliances among diem reflect differentiated interests and desires. For example, liberal models
of citizenship emphasize the contractual exchange of rights and obligations and the separation
of spheres of social life. Social spheres and categories are not necessarily ordered hierarchically
in terms of resources or value since "excluded" individuals should have rights to move across
boundaries. Otherwise, exclusion constitutes "discrimination," the drawing of inappropriate
group distinctions among free and equal individuals mat deny access to or participation in
exchange or interaction. Exclusion thus implies a process of individual disaffiliation (Castel
1991), isolation (Wilson 1987), disqualification (Paugam 1991, 1993a), or persistent poverty
(Duncan 1984). The macrosociological causes of exclusion are most often identified in
inadequate separation of spheres, unenforced rights, or market failures, justifying state
intervention. The microsociological causes of exclusion are located in the individual's
immediate social environment, life course, or personal preferences. This approach is apparent
in neoclassical and microeconomic analyses of unemployment and poverty, in microsociological
approaches to cultural pluralism and ethnicity, and in social psychological theories of prejudice.
Finally, the third paradigm, influential in Britain and many Northern European countries
and among the French left, sees exclusion as a consequence of the formation of group
monopoly. Drawing heavily on Weber and to a lesser extent, Marx, it views the social order
as coercive, imposed through a set of hierarchical power relations. In this social democratic or
conflict dieory, exclusion entails the interplay of class, status, and political power and serves
the interests of the included. Social "closure" is achieved when institutions and cultural
distinctions not only create boundaries that keep others out against their will, but are also used
to perpetuate inequality. Those inside bounded social entities enjoy a monopoly over scarce
5
Although the opposite of exclusion is sometimes referred to as "insertion," in the sense of making room beside
others (Nasse 1991), this term also has multiple meanings (Paugam 1993b; Commissariat General du Plan 1993).
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
7
resources. For example, citizenship is founded on equal membership in the community,
creating bonds between otherwise unequal insiders that oppose them to non-citizens. Powerful
groups with distinctive cultural identities also use social closure to restrict the access of
outsiders to valued resources. The same process is evident in labour market segmentation,
regardless of whether the boundaries of exclusion are drawn within or between firms. The
overlap of group distinctions and inequality, "the barrier and the level" to adopt Gobelot's
term, is at the heart of the problematic of this paradigm.
Several preliminary remarks about these paradigms are in order. They are, of course, ideal
types. Since different societies and cultures define belonging in different ways, defining
exclusion with reference to its opposite can pose its own problems. This is not simply because
social integration necessarily coexists with exclusion nor because both concepts are relative
(Xiberras 1993, p. 25). If this were the only issue at stake, one might then be tempted to adopt
the "monopoly" paradigm's rhetoric to argue for a zero-sum relationship in which greater social
control or state power makes it easier to exclude others (Touraine 1992). Rather, highlighting
the inverse of exclusion might imply that within nation-states, there is a clear political
consensus as to the nature and bases of citizenship, integration, and social membership. I wish
to argue the contrary. Fighting exclusion means different things to different people. Moreover,
at different times, national debates emphasize some aspects of exclusion and not others:
Sometimes the emphasis is on migration and refugees (e.g. Belgium, Germany), sometimes on longterm or extremely long-term unemployment and exclusion from the labour market (e.g. Denmark,
France, Netherlands); or on the problem of low income (Portugal). Discussion is sometimes directly
linked to specific policy making, as is the case with the minimum income (France, Spain) or can be part
of more general consideration of the functions of the welfare state (UK: Citizens' Charter) or
discouraging the passivity engendered by certain forms of social protection (Denmark, Netherlands, UK).
It is sometimes fuelled by association or media campaigns focusing on particularly visible problems or
those which in any case catch the public's attention, such as the homeless (UK, France), drugs (Italy).
child labour (Portugal), and inner city crisis (France) (EC Commission 1992, p. 32).
Although recognizing the cultural embeddedness of the concept of exclusion makes the
development of legitimate cross-national indicators more difficult than measuring poverty, the
paradigms illuminate the reasons behind the contested and selective meanings of the term. I
argue that choosing one definition means accepting the theoretical and ideological "baggage"
associated with it.
Second, as is appropriate for a social scientific analysis, each paradigm conceives of
exclusion as a social relationship between the included and the excluded. That relationship may
certainly be conceived as social action, as the activity of excluding. But does exclusion refer
only to a change in the condition of those who are at one time integrated or can it refer to the
constant condition of excluded people who want to be included? To the extent that exclusion
is viewed as a process, analysts should specify its beginning as well as its end.
This is why I differ from observers who insist that exclusion refers only to a dynamic
process rather than to an identity or a condition. Exclusion may create a permanent categorical
relationship that is the structural outcome of the process. It may take the form of social
distancing over time or of social distance at any one point in time. The activity of "social
closure" draws social boundaries that persist. For example, nation-states newly exclude
residents who are expelled across the border, but have always excluded those born elsewhere.
Exclusion becomes structural as it is continually recreated through social relations and
practices. Turnover among the individuals who are excluded does not alter the structural
existence of the social boundary. Indeed, its social reality is confirmed when movement across
the boundary provokes reactions like distancing, fear, or new immigration laws. Group
8
DISCUSSION PAPER Semes No.
69
relations like these properly belong in any study of exclusion. Moreover, the excluded
themselves need not constitute a social group with common consciousness, goals, and activities.
In fact, the very differentiation and isolation of the excluded may be responsible for their
collective inability to demand inclusion on their own. In this respect and others, social
exclusion can also be a condition.
Nevertheless, exclusion should not be confounded widi social differentiation per se. If the
existence of social groups necessarily implies the existence of boundaries, it is less clear that
every difference or distinction implies exclusion. Exclusion may be based on virtually any
social difference, but the extent to which differences produce exclusion depends on such issues
as the permeability of boundaries, the extent to which membership is freely chosen, and
whetiier, as in Rawls's principle of difference or Smith's division of labour, distinctions have
any social benefits (Wolfe 1993). Indeed, some marginal or deviant individuals may not even
want to be included; they can be deliberate social dropouts (Room 1992; Xiberras 1993).
Rather than define these issues away, they should be explored.
Third, exclusion can be viewed macrosociologically or microsociologically. Weinberg and
Ruano-Borbalan (1993) distinguish between macro and micro causes in contrasting exclusion
from "above" and "below". The political and cultural approach — viewing exclusion as a crisis
of integrative social institutions or the Nation — and the socio-economic approach — treating
exclusion as an employment crisis and a crisis of ineffective immigration and social policies
— at "top-down" perspectives, while the local and communitarian approach — where exclusion
is a crisis of community solidarity and social regulation — comes from die "grass-roots." Such
macrosociological processes as the rise of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and individualism, or
increasingly global and mobile labour markets, may influence the social distance between
groups over time. But die same distancing process may alternatively be conceived as the
microsociological process of assimilation, where the second-generation immigrant begins as a
"stranger" — both insider and outsider, close and distant to the native-born citizen. Similarly,
one may consider die macroeconomic changes that have increased the numbers excluded from
employment or the microeconomic process of downward mobility as a person is progressively
excluded from a job and other social relations.
Fourth, die distinctions among paradigms should not be confused with institutional
classifications. Institutions are historical accretions that bear the imprint of past conflicts
between ideologies and paradigms. For example, the three paradigms of exclusion somewhat
resemble Esping-Anderson's (1991) typology of welfare states. However, if the liberal and
social democratic paradigms correspond rather well to Esping-Anderson's types, die solidarity
paradigm of Republican France from which the term "exclusion" arose is poorly reflected in
his "conservative" or "corporatist" welfare state regime. Esping-Anderson's conservative
regime not only originated in Bismarck's social insurance principles linking benefits to labour
market status, but also in Cadiolic social doctrine's "third way" between liberalism and
socialism mat reserves the rights of subsidiary institutions — family, die Church, and voluntary
associations — radier man me State to provide certain social welfare services. France shares
a strong central government and corporatist industrial relations widi Austria, Germany, and to
some extent, Italy, but French organized labour is relatively weak. Compared to mose
countries, French welfare policies have become increasingly universalistic and redistributive
(O'Higgins 1990; Castles and Mitchell 1991), and as non-republican natalism was discredited,
France now has one of the most comprehensive infant and child care systems in the world. The
influence of Catholicism and familism on political culture and social policies has been much
stronger in Germany than in France (Borchorst 1994). Republicanism is hostile to Church and
odier particularistic influences; its intolerance of traditional subsidiarity is reflected in die
State's incorporation and cooption of churches, associations, and odier mediating institutions.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUDARHY
9
Although, as I will show, periodic resurgences in conservatism highlight France's Republican
distinctiveness, the Revolution set France apart from the conservative regimes of Europe.
Finally, each paradigm addresses more than one dimension or aspect of exclusion:
economic, sociological and interactional, cultural and political. Thus, the paradigms cut across
the social sciences. This interdisciplinary approach differs from prior classifications of theories
of exclusion which focus on conditions in one country, usually France, or on one discipline,
especially sociology (Nasse 1992; Xiberras 1993; Weinberg and Ruano-Borbalan 1993).
Although each paradigm includes theories drawn from economics, political science, and
anthropology, I too stress sociological theories because the concepts of exclusion and
integration are central to that discipline.
>
Even when social exclusion is defined in "global" terms, research tends to be more
"sectoral", focusing on a specific population identified as being "at risk" of exclusion. Thus,
empirical studies of exclusion may draw on more than one paradigm, although they tend to
emphasize one over the others. The research literature on exclusion includes studies of the
following specific social categories:
— The long-term or recurrently unemployed.
— Those employed in precarious and unskilled jobs, especially older workers, or those
unprotected by labour regulations.
— The low-paid and the poor.
— The unskilled, illiterate, and school dropouts.
— The mentally and physically handicapped and disabled.
— Substance abusers.
— Delinquents, prison inmates, and those with criminal records.
— Single parents.
— . Abused children, those who grew up in problem households or were abused.
— Women.
— Youth, especially witfi no work experience or diploma.
— Foreigners, refugees, and immigrants.
— Racial, religious, and ethnic minorities.
— The politically disenfranchised.
— Recipients of social assistance.
— Those needing, but ineligible for social assistance.
— Residents of deteriorated housing or disreputable neighbourhoods.
— Those with consumption levels below subsistence (the hungry, the homeless, the Fourth
World).
— Those whose consumption, leisure, or other practices (drug or alcohol abuse, delinquency,
dress, speech, mannerisms) are stigmatized or labelled as deviant.
— Those whose standard of living is below that of their parents (the downwardly mobile).
— The marginal or superfluous.
— The socially isolated without friends or family.
These absolute and relative social disadvantages may be interrelated. Indeed, the extent
to which these dimensions overlap a frequent subject of research on exclusion. Some find very
weak correlations among the types of exclusion (Wuhl 1992). But others conceive of exclusion
as the accumulation of such disadvantages, as the last stage in a process of social
disqualification (Paugam 1993). For example, those born into particular groups, with a
particular upbringing, education, family or work history may in a sense be doubly or triply
excluded. However, the disproportionate representation of people with these social
characteristics among the "excluded" does not imply that these characteristics determine
10
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
whether any given individual is excluded. One needs to examine the incidence of these
attributes in the included population as well. Some individuals with such characteristics do
make their way into secure, well-paid employment, stable families, political participation and
the like. Depending on turnover, there need be no "hard-core" group of excluded people.
//. The history of "exclusion" discourse in France
The term exclusion "has always been a key concept in the French discourse on inequality
and poverty" (Room 1992, p.25). Some now deem exclusion to be "le principal d6fi auquel est
confronted la soci&e" francaise" (Esprit, 1991, p. 6). Although the term is used with increasing
frequency in other Western countries, exclusion is central to French political rhetoric. There
are two major nationally-specific historical reasons for this.
First, the idea of "poverty", which originated in Britain, was discredited in France by its
association with Christian charity, the ancien regime, and utilitarian liberalism. During the 19th
century before the consolidation of the Third Republic, French monarchists and liberals did use
the term "poverty" to oppose state intervention, while the extreme left incorporated the "poor"
into the broader category of "inequality", wedding poverty to labour issues. Republicans, in
contrast, rejected both liberal individualism and socialism in favour of the distinctively "social"
idea of "solidarity." Drawing selectively upon revolutionary rhetoric, the Third Republic
institutionalized this ideology. Seeing the State as the embodiment of the general will of the
Nation and the moral duties of citizens, Republicanism justified the establishment of public
institutions, a welfare state, as a means of furthering social integration. In Republican
discourse, "exclusion" is therefore conceived not simply as an economic or political
phenomenon, but as a deficiency of "solidarity" or a rupture of the social fabric.
Second, as it became increasingly difficult for the State to cope with global economic and
national political trends, manifestations of "exclusion" multiplied. During the 1980s, as social
and political crises successively erupted in France, exclusion came to refer to more and more
types of social disadvantage. The continual recreation of the term to encompass new social
problems gave rise to its current diffuse connotations. Nevertheless, in France, it retains a
meaning distinct from poverty and inequality.
From poverty to inequality to exclusion
The idea of poverty emerged in late-18th century Britain during a period of dramatic social
change. New distinctions among the disadvantaged set "the poor" apart from the rest of
society.6 This new conception of poverty, culminating in the Poor Law reforms and
exemplified by the "workhouse", diffused quickly, especially to the United States. For
example, in the late-19th century, the American historian Nathan Huggins observed that "Poor
people were not merely rich people with less money, ability, and opportunity. In many ways,
they were in different societies altogether." That is, the "poor" were in a sense socially
"excluded".
Yet, over time, "circumstances conspired to create a highly differentiated poor, with
different groups, at different times, in different conditions, with different characteristics,
6
Sec Georg Simmel's essay on the rise of "The Poor" as a distinct social category and Tocqueville's 1835
"Memoire sur le pauperisme."
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
11
emerging as 'the social problem'" (Himmelfarb 1984). For example, Booth found that the
London poor included workers, challenging "any clearcut division between the respectable poor
and the residuum" (Morris 1994, p. 21). Nevertheless, the distinction between the immoral and
industrious poor persisted.7 The "poor" suffering from economic dislocations came to be
distinguished from undeserving "paupers" who rarely if ever worked, lived on alms, and lacked
direction and self-respect (Patterson 1981; Katz 1989, 13).
Anglo-American liberalism eventually legitimated rights to universal, contributory social
insurance by associating them with the obligation of the able-bodied to work when economic
conditions allowed. For example, universal unemployment coverage was accompanied by job
search requirements and policing against fraud (Morris 1994). In the case of those unable to
work, however, means-tested benefit programs institutionalized the old principle of "least
eligibility" that had framed the 19th century Poor Law reforms. These stigmatizing
disincentives to dependency coupled with economic growth restricted pauperism, or the
"undeserving" segment of the poor, to a small group — the "Fourth World", as Pere Wresinski
called them (Paugam 1991) or the "underclass" in Gunnar Myrdal's (1962) sense. By the
1950s, even in the US, poverty came to be regarded as a residual problem concentrated in
remote, rural regions or among small groups without access to industrial employment or state
programs. The meaning of poverty progressively narrowed to denote an insufficiency of
income.
This narrow conception of poverty is reflected in the myriad thresholds of absolute poverty
that Western governments use to determine eligibility for social assistance programs. Reflecting
the liberal origins of the conception, poverty "lines" are usually pegged to subsistence levels
or minimum wages so as to eliminate work disincentives but also to protect wage standards,
including those negotiated with unions. Yet most poverty measures do contain some
acknowledgement of social relativity. Poverty levels are often adjusted for family size,
inflation, and geography. They may also reflect in-kind transfers, changes in cost of living, and
duration of poverty (for a review, see Ruggles 1990).
Liberal assumptions remain dominant in social scientific studies of poverty as such. For
example, neo-classical labour economists in the US and Europe have increasingly begun to
study the duration of poverty, welfare dependency, and unemployment in terms of the personal
characteristics of the poor, rather than economic or political conditions. Some now speak of
a permanent "underclass" enmeshed in a "culture of poverty" or "dependency".8 Means-tested
welfare or supplementary benefit programs continue to stigmatize recipients as morally
unworthy, and new policies to move them into work still incorporate the principle of "least
eligibility". Although the transfer-dependent constitute only a subset of the poor, most
American commentators "deploy underclass as little more than a crude synonym for inner-city
blacks over whom they cast the old mantle of the undeserving poor" (Katz 1989 p. 234) or in
Britain, as those suffering from "status exclusion" (Morris 1994).
7
In The Class Struggle in France, Marx considered the "lumpenproletariat" to be "a mass sharply differentiated
from the industrial proletariat." For Mayhew, London's vagabonds were distinct from the "civilized," respectable
working class. Casual labour and the surplus unemployed were stigmatized as "outcasts". Mutual aid associations
and early social insurance programs served the "aristocracy of labour" and excluded the unskilled and casual
worker, (Stedman-Jones 1984; Morris 1994).
8
The "underclass" literature is now voluminous and cuts across the paradigms presented here. I shall refer to
the underclass only when the term is used in the sense of social exclusion. See, for example, Murray 1984; Mead
1986; Wilson 1987; Engbersen et al. 1993; Smith 1992; Giddens 1973; Gallie 1988; Dahrendorf 1988, 1985;
Schmitter-Heisler 1991. For critical reviews, see Cans 1991; Aponte 1990; Katz 1989; Stafford and Ladner 1990;
Jencks 1991; Morris 1994.
12
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
These liberal connotations of poverty were eventually delegitimated in France. By the turn
of the 20th century, even liberal French Radical "leaders and scholars were agreed that British
utilitarian ideas had no application to France" (Ashford 1986, p. 12). In contrast, French and
other European social democrats justified the postwar expansion of universal ist welfare states
in terms of equal citizenship. To insure full membership in the community, these scholars insist
that poverty must be measured relative to a society's normative standards of living, e.g. median
or median income (Fuchs 1967; EC Commission 1992) or consumption levels (Townsend 1987,
1979; Mayer and Jencks 1989; Rainwater 1990, 1974). Similarly, poverty may be defined in
terms of what is needed to perform social roles or in subjective terms, based on what most
people in a society regard as the "decent" or "adequate" income necessary to "get by"
(Rainwater 1992; van Praag et al. 1980; Goedhart et al. 1977; Danziger et al. 1984). Although
these approaches make it difficult to track changes in poverty over time, they do reflect trends
in socially acceptable standards of living.
Like the early definitions of poverty, these definitions of "relative poverty", "inequality",
and "the underclass" often make explicit references to social exclusion. For example, Townsend
(1979) maintained that the resources commanded by the poor are so meagre that "they are, in
effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs, and activities." Field (1989, p. 4)
noted that "the very poorest are separated, not only from other groups on low income, but,
more importantly, from the working class." The underclass is situated below the working
classes, because their "roles place them more or less permanently at the economic level where
benefits are paid by the state to those unable to participate in the labour market at all"
(Runciman 1990). Most British thinkers argue that "the idea of an underclass is a counterpart
to the idea of social classes, and acquires its meaning within that same framework of
analysis...they belong to family units having no stable relationship at all with the 'mode of
production' — with legitimate gainful employment" (Smith 1992, p.4). This relational, classoriented approach differs from conservative cultural definitions and those that define the
underclass as "that group of people who are not fully citizens because they are not able to
participate in certain basic social activities."
It can be argued that the underclass are excluded from the mainstream of society... Against this, it
can be argued that members of the underclass exclude themselves by refusing to make the best of their
opportunities. The suggested definition leaves open for these two types of explanation to be tested against
the evidence (Smith 1992, p. 7).
In this view, exclusion implies agency, so it must be demonstrated that consensual political
acts are responsible for it, not just impersonal market forces. Americans, too, have adopted
exclusion discourse in discussing poverty. Rainwater (1974, p. 135) argued that "the person
living in poverty is not me Middle American: he has passed over an invisible border".
Harrington (1962, p. 18) asserted that The Other America is invisible: "to be impoverished is
to be an internal alien", without "links with die great world".
Nevertheless, French usage of the term "exclusion" goes well beyond poverty and
inequality. This is not simply because the economic forces responsible for exclusion have
changed in recent years. To be sure, with the onset of the economic crisis of the mid-1970s,
increasing numbers of Europeans saw dieir unemployment insurance expire and ended up in
me residual, means-tested programs once confined to die underselling "poor." Between 1980
and 1985, die percentage of persons living in poverty began to rise in many, tiiough not all
European countries.9 In 1985, over half the 14 million unemployed in the EC were out of
' The EC defines poverty as 50 percent of national average equivalent expenditure (i.e. adjusted for family size).
By this criterion, the poverty rate of persons fell from 19 to 16 in France, but rose in the UK from 14 to 18 (Room
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
13
work for a year or more, and approximately 3 million persons were homeless (EC Commission
1992). To maintain the distinction between those populations traditionally considered as the
"poor" and those displaced by economic change, observers — particularly in Britain — began
to use the term "new poverty" (Room 1990; Donzelot and Roman 1991; Paugam 1991). The
term again encompassed many of the same empirical realities as those that the French labelled
"exclusion."
Unlike the old poverty which reflected cyclical downturns, die new poverty was considered
structural, grounded in a new economy that subjects all social classes to employment insecurity.
This vulnerability to downward mobility creates a relative poverty of "deprivation" as many
lose what they expected to have — a socially accepted or customary style of life (Townsend
1993, 1987, 1979; Rainwater 1992, 1990, 1974). The new poverty may set in motion a process
in which economic dislocation leads to a progressive detachment from friends, family, and
community, a loss of rights, and a deterioration of mental and physical health. It is this social
process, corroborated by many French studies, that is often labelled "exclusion".
The "new poverty" was also conceived as being multi-dimensional and highly
differentiated. It went beyond a lack of income. Poverty concentrated among new social groups
— immigrants, ethnics, youth, single parents — with new social identities that may serve as
bases for discrimination as well as mobilization. The accumulation of social disadvantages also
had new spatial expressions. No longer invisible, poverty was suddenly conspicuous in certain
streets and neighbourhoods. Indeed, the "new poor" occasionally engaged in violent,
inarticulate eruptions rather than organized protests. Yet the "new poverty" was not confined
to those with numerous handicaps. More than inequality, the new poverty implied social
fragmentation. Particularistic and complex combinations of multiple problems revealed the
inadequacy of post-war social programs that insure many who are not poor against assumed
universal risks but exclude from eligibility those who are already poor. At the same time, die
heterogeneity of social problems made it difficult to target specific social categories. The "new
poor" either fell into the safety net of means-tested benefits, or worse, received no assistance
and ended up destitute.
Yet in France, mere was great resistance to call this phenomenon "poverty", whether old
or new. This not to say that idea of "poverty" was unknown, but "the poor" as a social
category has been less salient in France than in either Britain or die United States. This can be
attributed to the hegemony of Republican thought.
During the ancien regime, there was a distinction made between "invalids" — who could
not work and thus, received local social aid — and able-bodied "indigents", "paupers" or
"vagabonds" who had no work and were "excluded strangers" to die community (Castel 1991).
The distinction endured after die Revolution until the late 19Ui century. Many French royalists
and liberals still stigmatized die indigent and demanded work in return for social aid.
Tocqueville (1835) himself, observing die operation of die British poor laws, worried about its
perverse effects on work incentives. Similarly, die defeated upper classes and liberal
Republicans periodically feared civil uprisings by the "croquants" and "les classes
dangereuses", die insecure social strata and die destitute in die faubourgs. Even during die 20m
century, the anti-republican right periodically used die rhetoric of "dangerous classes" to refer
to communist workers, and in turn, immigrants (Chevalier 1984; Balibar 1991; Noiriel 1988).
Nevertheless, die Third Republic delegitimated diese notions. The propagation of
revolutionary ideas and die delegitimation of reactionary and utilitarian liberal ideologies
1992, p. 57). In both 1985 and 1992, unemployment rates were slightly higher in the UK than in France (EC
Commission 1992). However, the long-term and youth unemployment rates are much higher than in the UK.
14
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
gradually dissolved the idea of "the poor" as an object of the Church and personal charity or
as those least fit in the struggle for survival. The French welfare state that emerged in the late
19th century institutionalized an ideology that developed in reaction to liberalism and socialism
and hence, rejected their notions of poverty and inequality. As Ashford (1986, pp.37-8) argued:
Unlike Britain, France never whole-heartedly embraced laissez-faire liberal assumptions, and except
for only brief moments in history...never adopted a consistently liberal view of the state...[To those]
devoted to perfecting the republican ideal, 'naked utilitarianism' was an anathema and could only lead
to the breakdown of social solidarity.
Solidarity was the essential concept which, after decades of political upheaval, finally
legitimated the Republic. In France, social security did not result from working class struggles
nor from the overwhelming rise in poverty and urban misery, as it did in Britain (Hatzfeld
1971). Social reform was an expression of the perfection of republican democracy and the
collective responsibility for any citizen suffering from the failures of the State.
Under the banner of social solidarity, French "social policies became parts of a more
general rationalization of collective authority" (Ashford p. 48). Given the political turmoil
during the 19th century — challenges from an alliance of patriarchal agrarian interests with the
anti-republican Catholic Church, the questioning of equal justice with the Dreyfus Affair — an
individualistic rationale for state social intervention policy was unthinkable. Given the social
and civic costs of British industrialization, laissez-faire appeared impossible. Beginning with
the education reforms in the 1880s and social reforms of the 1890s, French republicans found
little in British social policy to emulate. In contrast to T.H. Marshall's formulation, the
Revolution had given French citizens political, social and economic rights at the same time.
Thus, unlike British liberals, French liberals were predominantly reformist. They rejected
a contractual basis of society, arguing that progress dictated the growth of the State both to
enhance individual capabilities and preserve social solidarity. Although fragmented into
monarchical, Catholic, conservative, and republican factions and forced to ally with republican
agrarian interests unsympathetic to urban workers, French liberals shared the idea that state
authority must do more than maximize individual utilities (Ashford p. 79). The Revolutionary
rhetoric of equality meant that the Republic must promise citizens subsistence or assure them
a right to work. In return, assisted citizens have a duty to work and to participate in public life.
Similarly, by the late-19th century, the Church accommodated to republican democracy, and
Catholic social action organized worker "chapels" and voluntary groups. This induced
freemasons to form education and social groups, and influenced the fiercely secular Third
Republic's notion of social harmony and obligation.
The idea of social solidarity allowed the State to assume responsibility for social aid. Since
that time, if only in order to avoid popular radicalism, the Republic sought to create a "social
bond" {lien social) with the poor (see Farrugia 1993).10 The "lien social" created a "'quasicontrat' qui unit l'individu a 1'espece et a la collectivity de ses contemporains" (see Bernstein
10
Rousseau coined the term "lien social" in chapter 5 of the Manuscrit de Genive, an early version of The
Social Contract. Although his conception of the social bond was taken by later sociologists as "contractualist," it
can be argued that in fact, Rousseau saw the social bond as natural and hence, communitarian. Thus, equality was
not simply civil or legal, but also social, a conviviality that the Law and the General Will would bring about. The
term "lien social" is most fully discussed in Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society where the term "solidarity"
specified two sorts of social bonds, organic and mechanical, that morally regulated individual behaviour. Both
thinkers stressed distinctively "social" in contrast to political or market relations. Thus, both opposed liberal,
individualist, utilitarian, or "Anglo-Saxon" notions of the social contract, in which social relations are economically
motivated, commercial, and competitive, the State is minimal, and interested free exchange and cultural and political
pluralism are valued. See Farrugia 1993.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
15
and Rudell 1992, p. 193). If — as I will show — the universalist, laic, and unitary State did
not officially recognize cultural minorities, it did incorporate die poor into die working class
and die Nation (Chevalier 1984; Balibar 1991; Noiriel 1988). The Republican welfare state gradually extended social insurance to cover most economic risks, and corporatist bodies institutionalized class conflict. Once the "indigent" were included through basic social protections, poverty was considered to be a residual problem. Only after the mid-1970s economic crisis did
poverty re-emerge as a social issue, this time under the rubric of "exclusion".
The "social bond" between the state and the poor was central to the Republican concept
of "solidarism". The moral discourse of "social solidarity" rejected both liberal individualism
and political representation (or citizenship) as sufficient bases of social integration. Rather, it
sought a "third way" that would reconcile State responsibility and socialist rejection of
exploitation with individual rights (Procacci 1993; Ruano-Borbalan 1993; Bernstein and Ruddell
1992). Solidarity mingled notions of Cadiolic charity with revolutionary rhetoric on fraternity
and 19th century working-class mutualism.
In contrast to traditional Christian charity, solidarity had a philanthropic or humanist
element based on compassion, equality, and a more secular morality. Coined by Pierre Leroux
and propagated by L6on Bourgeois, the term solidarity was less organic than humanist in its
reconciliation of die feeling of belonging to die collectivity and the demand for individual
fulfilment. Thus, solidarity had both a subjective aspect in individual experience, borrowed
from liberalism, and an objective component, grounded in socialism and expressed in principles
of social and political organization. Mutualism contributed die notion that solidarity comes from
the society, dius justifying social protection policies. From die warm vision of die social bond
as sympathy, solidarity developed into a logical, secular morality of rights and duties
underlying future social policies (Chevalier 1992). The work of Emile Durkheim was "die
climax of a long intellectual struggle to demonstrate die interdependence of social solidarity"
(p. 39). The ideology of solidarity remains central to die contemporary French rhetoric of
exclusion.
The political incorporation of the poor into die French working class, of course, did not
mean diat mere were no differences among "workers." French workers were clearly segmented
by skill, gender, and national origin in terms of wages, firm size, union representation,
security, living conditions, consumption patterns, and especially housing (Noiriel 1990; Paugam
1993). However, unlike die U.S. and Britain, France did not demarcate a clear boundary
between the working and "dangerous" classes (Touraine 1991; but see Chevalier 1984).
"Pauperization" was largely considered a "working class" problem, reflecting die unequal
division of the social product, and the Communist Party and its unions consciously sought to
represent die working poor. Thus, during the Trente Glorieuses of full employment, one heard
more about social "inequality" than poverty. Poverty described the low standard of living of
die "couches populaires," but "the poor" never became a distinct social group.
Poverty among non-workers, though increasingly residual, was largely addressed with
categorical "allocations de solidarity." The very name of these programs illustrates the ideology
behind Republican integration. For example, the Bon de l'Aide Sociale (BAS), a social security
food voucher,
...confers a status: that of the accepted pauper... In a society completely structured by rules and
regulations, the worst condition of all is clearly not to belong to any particular category (Noiriel 1990,
p. 228).
Yet the post-war welfare state left die task of integrating the small, unassisted "excluded"
subproletariat to social workers and charities. To die extent diat "the poor" referred to a
distinct group in post-war France, it was die slum-dwellers of die bidonvilles and citis
16
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO. 69
d'urgence suffering primarily from poor housing. This became the constituency of Catholic
radicals like Abbe" Pierre and Pere Joseph Wresinski, who in 1957 established the "Aide a toute
d&resse-Quart Monde" movement in the homeless camp at Noisy-le-Grand. Unlike traditional
charities, however, ATD involved the "Quart Monde" in its collective improvement, tied
research to social action, refused to be constrained in its activities by the State, and included
militants who participated in the conditions of the "sub-proletariat." Such mobilization and
assumption of duties carried on the revolutionary tradition.
In sum, "poverty" in post-war French designated either an urban or spatial problem or the
unskilled working class (Paugam 1993). Although inequality, unemployment, low pay, and
poor housing received attention after WWII, there was "no poverty debate in France, no major
poverty lobby, let alone any official anti-poverty programme" (Sinfield 1980, p. 93). Before
the passage of the revenue minimum d'insertion [RMI], the country had no official poverty
line, not to mention a universal minimum income (Paugam 1993). Until the early 1970s,
French politicians, officialdom, and academia largely neglected the subject of poverty as such.
Even then, politicians and journalists mostly referred to the poor in vague and ideological
terms. One of these was les exclus.
Indeed, in France, "poverty", like the term "underclass" (Gans 1991), has pejorative
connotations. There is concern that the label "new poor" might contribute to the stigma of the
downwardly mobile. Thus, many French observers argue that poverty and exclusion are not
the same thing: poverty may be either a cause or a consequence of exclusion. Being poor does
not imply that one is excluded, especially if one works and has a family and friends. A
downwardly mobile single executive, however, may be excluded and isolated but is not
necessarily poor. While poverty is often considered a static, passive condition, exclusion is
constructed as an active and dynamic process.
For example, Castel (1991) prefers the term "disaffliation" over poverty, exclusion,
marginal ity, and deviance in order to stress the process of accumulating social disadvantage.
Similarly, the current Commissaire au Plan in France, Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, argues that
"Stre exclu n'est pas une identity, mais le resultat d'un processus" (in Nasse 1991, p. 6).
Exclusion thus encompasses the middle class's "fall from grace" (Newman 1988) as well
as a long-term condition. Using the term "new poverty" might suggest that the "old" poor have
disappeared when in fact, the new poor are simply joining their ranks over time. The notion
of social exclusion, in contrast, attributes agency to the rejecting society and suggests a
progressive banishment outside its bounds. It assigns responsibility for exclusion to the society,
and thus discourages its acceptance. It condemns those who profit from exclusion. The
approach also implies that preventive policies can intervene in the process before it is too late.
While poverty usually refers solely to absolute deprivation or the inability to satisfy basic
needs, exclusion is constructed as a multidimensional and relative term, reflecting socially
expected standards of living or those defined by one's previous "reference group." Yet this
relativity does not mean that exclusion is the same as "inequality." For example, Touraine
(1991, 1992) argues mat inequality and exclusion follow different "logics." Inequality belongs
to an industrial society of production in which opposing classes are "integrated" because they
confront each other face to face. In contrast, exclusion is a symptom of economic growth and
social change in which social actors contesting the dominant "historicity" are divorced from the
economic and political system. In the emerging post-industrial society, the social problem is
no longer inequality, but justice and the rules of the game.
Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld (1992a, b) also insists that inequalities and exclusions are not
the same, although both are rising and may have cumulative effects. Unlike inequality,
exclusion is tied to rising individualism and a changing market society which is divorcing actors
from the system and separating productive and social demands. While inequality and exclusion
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
17
differ, they are in fact joined today through the "optique of social cohesion" in a dynamic
society. Thus, says de Foucault, it is necessary to encourage both equality and justice, rather
than trade one off against the other.
Indeed, if poverty is usually alleviated by social welfare policies, exclusion, it is said, must
be addressed by insertion, integration, the rights and entitlements of citizenship, and
participation in social life. Redistributive policies may still be necessary, but the term
"exclusion" calls for a rethinking of the terms of social solidarity. Should it include direct
participation? New forms of political representation? Extend to everyone in the territory on the
grounds of human rights?
Thus, the French, however much they differ on other matters, claim that "exclusion" is
distinct from earlier notions and realities of social disadvantage. It calls for different remedies
than earlier welfare state policies. To understand this distinction and the idea of exclusion itself,
it is necessary to trace the term's intellectual history and its embeddedness in French
Republicanism.
Exclusion and republicanism
Like the idea of poverty, exclusion has its own history. It too became salient during the
dramatic social changes associated with the global restructuring of capitalist economies since
the mid-1970s. It too delineates a qualitative boundary between the excluded and the rest of
society which, upon closer inspection, reveals a myriad of social categories with diverse
problems. At different times, exclusion has referred to a wide range of "crises": of the city,
of drugs or crime, of immigration, homelessness, unemployment, and so on. But discourse
about exclusion not only reflects economic and political change. It also expresses a
transformation in the "moral imagination." It questions existing conceptions and commitments
to social solidarity.
The ideas of integration and exclusion are deeply rooted in the Republican tradition (see
Hoffman 1963). They can be difficult to grasp by those from liberal democracies. First of all,
although individual rights are recognized, Republicanism, unlike liberalism, is rather intolerant
of group diversity in public life. The accent during the French Revolution was more on
belonging to the Nation and the political community than on individual autonomy, civil rights,
or legal equality. Indeed, the Revolution itself might be seen as a struggle against exclusion and
particularism. Whereas land and territoriality (les &ats) once defined social integration, the
State (1'Etat) became the new basis for social integration (Nicolet 1982). This "jacobin" state
— strong, unitary, and centralized, egalitarian, universalist, and secular — actively sought to
assimilate regional, national, and religious cultures into a single, distinctive conception of
citizenship and national civilization. The state incorporated mediating institutions in order to
reconcile and synthesize separate interests and memberships (Rosanvallon 1992).
Indeed, reconciling the needs of state and society was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century French political philosophers (Ashford 1986). Under "les moeurs rgpublicaines",
individual citizens are less bearers of rights than participants in a communal "civility", a public
life of fraternity (Rosanvallon 1992). Such moral unity and equality demanded laicity. The
revolution aimed to abolish the feudal "corps interm&liaires" that oppressed individuals and
competed with the State for citizens' loyalty. Unlike the American "accommodationist"
separation of church and state, the French state, representing the political unity of the Nation,
officially recognized religions in part to relegate them to the private sphere.
As with regional and religious loyalties, the State then sought to integrate and thereby
suppress the public expression or political activities of other corporate bodies and cultural
communities (Roy 1991). Throughout the 19th century, the laws of association were a major
18
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
French preoccupation. The Revolution's intellectual legacy was a continual rethinking of the
relations among individuals, the state, and the institutions of "civil society" — from
Tocqueville's analysis of voluntary associations and local governments to Durkheim's concern
with the decline of "secondary groups" that "drag" individuals "into the general torrent of
social life" (Glendon 1991, pp.117-19). Worried about the threats to democracy posed by the
Church and other interests outside the state, the 1901 law on associations created itablissements
publics that shared the legal and moral authority of the State in return for registering and
submitting to State regulation (Ashford 1986).
Since State and "society" were in opposition, French republicans were less concerned than
liberal democrats about checking government power. In sharp contrast to liberal and social
democratic notions of citizenship, the unitary Republican state juridically protects individual
rights, but also the public interest and the cultural, spiritual, and moral unity of the Nation. As
Rousseau argued in The Social Contract, the State is composed "of morality, of custom, above
all, of public opinion." Indeed, the state defends the superior interests of the Nation — the
general will — over those of the communes and ethnic groups (Nicolet 1982).
Republicanism integrates individuals into the larger society by nurturing civic virtue. Citizens and their representatives learn to place the collective good above individual or special interest. Through participation and deliberation, solidarity is achieved. Compared to the liberal
stress on rights in the American Declaration of Independence, France's Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen placed more emphasis on the duties of Republican citizens.
Whereas absolute, individual, and unqualified rights "dominate the notion of citizenship from
the top to the bottom of the American system," the French Declaration of Human Rights stresses limits on rights to meet "the just requirements of morality, public order and the general
welfare in a democratic society" (Glendon 1991, p. 11-13). The army and the Republican
school in particular were used to assimilate traditional regional, linguistic, and other cultural
minorities. Ironically, the Republican national consensus emerged just as France was accepting
an unprecedented number of immigrants (Hollifield 1994). Again reflecting the Republican
impulse towards incorporation, French naturalisation laws have long been more lenient than
those in other European countries, but increasingly require an active declaration to become a
citizen. The 1993 Pasqua law demands an oath to Republic in an official naturalization
ceremony.
In sum, French notions of integration demand more participation in public life and more
cultural assimilation than do other models of citizenship. A social contract among individuals
alone, rather than one between individuals and society, is considered insufficient to guarantee
integration, as liberals would have it. The Republican tradition of solidarity also attaches great
importance to cultural as well as political criteria of citizenship (Nicolet 1982; Bernstein and
Rudell 1992; Roy 1991).
Mendras (1991) argues that the achievement of this national consensus constitutes a
"second French revolution." Since 1789, the republic's institutions were challenged by the
extreme right and the extreme left.
la the past, the pressures towards national unity were as strong as they were precisely because
France was divided into antagonistic social classes and vastly different regions; only by promoting the
central state could the nation be safeguarded (p. 121).
But today, most of the French see the republic as neidier left- nor right-wing but shared
by both. No political party can credibly represent itself as the party of democracy and
republican values as opposed to others.
To be sure, the revolutionary tradition lives on in the French penchant for direct
democracy: trusting mayors more than legislative representatives, voting in referenda, avidly
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
19
following public opinion polls, and participating in mass demonstrations. But since May 1968,
street demonstrations do not aim to bring down governments; they rather result in the
withdrawal of unpopular legislation like reforms of church schools and education (1984),
universities (late 1986), and minimum wages (1994).
Some interpret these specialized protests as evidence of a fragmented society and a loss
of national solidarity:
Politicians in France frequently speak of the necessity of unifying the French nation, as if it suffered
from being in a chronic state of division... However, the spectre of division or civil war appears to have
haunted ambitious politicians far more than it has the average French citizen (Mendras, 1991, p. 109).
There is now a consensus among the public about the importance of the nation and civic
virtue. The social security system has become the most highly valued French institution. And
the typical citizen believes in a right to a certain standard of living "without which he is not
really recognized as part of the national community". Although that standard varies among
social classes, it is in this sense that poor people are often labelled as 'excluded' from the
national community (Mendras, p. 117).
Insofar as Republicanism gave the French a strong sense of who is included in the Nation,
it is not surprising that the term "exclusion" has a special resonance in France. In Paul-Marie
de la Gorce's words, les exclus are the "pariahs of the nation," and in Republican France, the
nation and the state are one.
Perhaps because the cultural aspects of exclusion reflect consensual nationalist sentiments
that cross class and party lines, the ideological character of the term "exclusion" is less
transparent in France than it is in the Anglo-American liberal democracies where the excluded
are more likely to be discussed as die "new poor" or the "underclass." It is also notable that
in France, where pluralism and particularism exist in tension with national unity and the
common good, there is a conspicuous absence of theories that conceive of society as comprised
of groups. Since the state incorporated autonomous bases of solidarity, theories of political or
cultural pluralism based on relations among voluntary or interest groups remain
underdeveloped. Instead, French sociology concentrates on classes and movements (BodyGendrot 1993).
Nevertheless, these taken-for-granted aspects of the French Republican cultural consensus
are thrown into relief by the extremes of the French ideological spectrum. Over the years, a
persistent anti-republican undercurrent on the French right has sought to distinguish dangerous
outsiders — e.g. immigrants, Jews, communists — as a direat to social order and a "France
for the French." Republicans have periodically struggled with this intSgriste (organic), racistnationalist (xenophobic), and cultural (Catholic) counter-conception of citizenship. The far right
experienced resurgences during the 1930s, culminating in Vichy, and during the last decade
(Ruano-Borbalan 1992). Although immigrants are today no larger a share of the French
population than in 1930 (Noiriel 1988), the right branded both waves of immigrants with the
same labels — violent, dangerous, dependent on state, uncivilized, unassimilable and segregated
in "ghettos" (Guillaumin 1991).
Paradoxically, the Front National's recent attempts to preserve the "purity" of the French
nation against "unassimilable" immigrants is itself based on the same "right to difference" that
immigrant minorities are now demanding within France (Silverman 1992). Indeed, the extreme
left now advocates a more pluralistic, multi-cultural notion of French citizenship that is more
tolerant of local and community differences and resonates with the rhetorics of selfdetermination and human rights. As die French Communist Party has declined, these new social
movements, like the social scientists who study them, took to challenging the dominant
Republican consensus. Whether die "Republican synthesis" will withstand tiiese assaults from
20
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
the right and the left remains to be seen (see Hollifield 1994). I shall return to this "social
action" approach after tracing the evolution of exclusion discourse.
The social construction of exclusion
So far, I have argued that Republican ideology is responsible for the French aversion to
the term "poverty" and for the "elective affinity" between the ideas of "solidarity" and
"exclusion". But just as solidarity can be traced to the Third Republic, so the notion of
exclusion can be traced to the recent period of economic crisis.
The identification of exclusion as a social problem occurred just as France was belatedly
completing its system of standard social provision and as postwar economic growth was coming
to an end. The coining of the term exclusion is generally attributed to Rene Lenoir (1974), who
was then Secretaire d'Etat a 1'Action Sociale in the Gaullist Chirac government.11 He
estimated that "the excluded" made up one-tenth of the French population: mentally and
physically handicapped, suicidal people, aged invalids, abused children, substance abusers,
delinquents, single parents, multi-problem households, marginal, asocial persons, and other
"inadaptes sociaux".12 All were social categories thus far unprotected under social insurance
principles. Since the mid-1970s, France introduced numerous policies explicitly designed to
combat exclusion of this sort, so today, the handicapped and single mothers, for example, tend
to fall outside the purvue of commissions of integration and exclusion rhetoric.
During the 1970s, the French left also began to distinguish between objective and
subjective exclusion. The latter, drawing upon Sartre's existentialism and the participatory
ideology of Catholic social action, referred to alienation and the loss of personal autonomy
under advanced capitalism. In stressing subjective exclusion, discourse moved away from
political expressions of class conflict towards the struggles of mass urban and social
movements. Avoiding the question of objective exploitation in production, exclusion meant
being treated as an object, a condition which could apply to virtually all individuals or groups:
women, residents of the banlieues, the elderly (3eme age), consumers of public services
(Verdes-Leroux 1978). Since the appeal was largely moral and classless, so were the proposed
solutions:
True integration is the suppression of rigid values, taboos, ghettos, racisms, ostracisms, in brief,
all intolerance. It's the recognition of the right to fulfil oneself (Eli Alfanderi, cited in Verdes-Leroux
1978).
As a discourse, the concept of exclusion fit well with the fiscal constraints of the
recessionary period. Critics noted that the discourse also excluded the question of its true
causes (Verdes-Leroux 1978). At that time, the far left was still fighting against "social
inequality" and thus, opposed the Gaullist Stoleru's proposals for a negative income tax, an
idea the socialists would embrace in the 1980s. In sum, during the mid-1970s, exclusion and
insertion were terms grounded in political ideology (Paugam 1993b).
However, as an economic recovery began, the public became aware that some were being
"excluded" from economic growth and that, as Stoleru (1977) observed, "poverty" was a
problem that economic growth could not resolve. Thus, by the late 1970s, the "excluded"
designated "les oublies de la croissance" (Donzelot and Roman 1991). The rise of the "new
" See also Klanfer 1965; Lionel Soleru 1977.
12
The subtitle "one-tenth" is reminiscent of the early Progressive reformers in the US who appealed for state
intervention to serve the poorer "one-third of a nation."
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUDARITY
21
poor" was marked by a rise in "social cases", the prison population, and youth delinquency,
relocation to temporary housing, and intergenerational downward mobility (Noiriel 1990). As
time passed and entire regions deindustrialized, it became clear that the unskilled and
immigrants were suffering most from long-term unemployment and that youth were finding it
difficult to enter the labour market. The opposition charged that exclusion had became a
deliberate policy of me new socialist government in its pursuit of technological change. By the
mid-1980s, there was a political debate in the press over the use of the term "new poverty".
Both the right and the communist opposition blamed the socialist government for increasing
unemployment and die new poverty (Paugam 1993).
Thus, the construction of the idea of "poverty" as a French social problem was a moral
or symbolic project. In response to the opposition's emphasis on poverty and inequality, the
socialist government spoke of "exclusion." The term referred not only to the worsening labour
market — i.e. long-term and recurrent unemployment — but also to the growing instability of
social relations (liens) — family instability, single member households, social isolation, and the
decline of class solidarity based on unions, the labour market, and the working class
neighbourhood and social networks. It encompassed not only material but spiritual and
symbolic aspects. In sum, exclusion became a new way to describe the difficulty of establishing
solidarities between individuals and groups and the larger society.
Posed as a challenge to the "cohesion of the society", exclusion required new social
policies. The "promoteurs du social", including advocates of the revenue minimum d'insertion
(RMI), thus adopted Republican rhetoric: die creation of new "solidarities," "cohesion," "liens
socials," and in a Rousseauian sense, a "new social contract". The discourse was so compelling
that, by die 1988 presidential campaign, the electoral programs of both die right and the left
included a minimum income proposal to promote insertion.
The Commissariat General du Plan [CGP] recognized that it is the State's responsibility
to nourish social cohesion (Fragonard 1993). Indeed, the Republican discourse of "exclusion"
is exemplified by die writings of die current Commissaire au Plan, Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld
(1992a, b), found in die pages of die Cadiolic left review Esprit as well as in the publications
of die CGP. For example, in a society widi bodi inequality and exclusion, de Foucauld writes,
policy must pursue "une soci6te" plus juste et plus 6galitaire et d'une soci&e" plus coherente et
plus int^gratrice." But preventing exclusion requires a new conception of social justice diat goes
beyond the social compromise of 1950-80 which simply insured against risks. The welfare
state, he argues, must bind itself to die ethical and cultural values that make citizenship live not
only in the form of rights, but as a particular relation to die other. Thus, a new principle of
social justice, social cohesion, insertion, sharing, and integration calls for a more personalized,
participatory welfare state. This new citizenship "permet de r&oncilier notre tradition de la
solidarity et cette mont6e en regime de 1'individu et de la personne" (pp. 264-5). The fight
against exclusion must allow for more complexity, in order to adjust to individualized situations, and for more ethics, to help people battle against diemselves, against discouragement,
flight, and self-destruction. The excluded need to actively participate, exchange, express diemselves, and cooperate widi diose who are not excluded (de Foucauld 1994).
In anodier CGP account (Nasse 1991), exclusion became a metaphor for die social
polyphony of post-modern society, a lack of communication or mutual incomprehension of
individuals and groups, preventing diem from negotiating on common recognition and
belonging. The long review of die sociological literature upon which this diagnosis was based
(Xiberras 1993) defined exclusion as a progressive rupture of die social, and symbolic bonds
— economic, institutional, and meaningful — diat normally attach each individual to die
society. Exclusion entails a risk not only for each individual in terms of material and symbolic
exchange with die larger society, but also for die society in terms of losing collective values
22
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
and tearing the social fabric. Adopting Durkheimian rhetoric, Xiberras concluded that French
society is characterized by mechanical solidarity when what is needed is more symbolic, moral,
organic solidarity. However, the excluded are not all socially detached or deviant, as they may
form their own communities. They are "latent" groups which, in republican terms, may pose
a threat of multi-culturalism. This menace to integration must be addressed with
"polyculturalism":
L'int£gration signifie done dans ce cas de figure une gestion de la solidarity organique, e'est-a-dire
la capacity de relablir une reconnaissance r6ciproque et globale. Ce qui signifierait pour l'Etat regulateur
la capacity de gdrer l'expression d'un polytbiisme des valeurs (Xiberras 1993, p. 196).
The Durkheimian, sociological sense of the terms "integration" and "insertion" was also
conveyed by socialist politicians and bureaucrats. They sought to create conditions for
integration in which individuals would be in interaction with each other while exercising
complementary social roles, in which their behaviour and motivations become compatible with
the norms underlying social institutions, and feel a part of the society in which they live (e.g.
Nasse 1991; Fragonard 1993). Insertion policies would give those most at risk of exclusion the
means to participate in the production and exchanges of the society (Paugam 1993b, p. 16;
Nasse 1991). Indeed, a content analysis of ten years of the French press found that the term
"integration" was used synonymously with "insertion" and "adaptation" with little reference to
who was being integrated to what (Barou 1993).13
However, periodic crises and soaring unemployment challenged the DurkheimianRepublican notion of integration and by the late-1980s, its meaning began to change. The term
"exclusion" came to encompass additional problem groups (Paugam 1993; Nasse 1992).
First, in the early 1980s, the use of "insertion" in political discourse shifted from a focus
on the handicapped to youth leaving school without adequate skills to obtain a job (Paugam
1993b). For example, after writing a report, L 'insertion professionnelle et sociale desjeunes,
for Pierre Mauroy in 1981, Bertrand Schwartz was put in charge of a new socioprofessional
insertion policy, the missions locales d 'insertion desjeunes. Over the decade, the State initiated
numerous locally-based insertion policies to help "youth in difficulty", e.g. zones d'gducation
prioritaires, communal counsels against delinquency, etc. (see Nicole-Drancourt 1991). After
student demonstrations in the mid-1980s, the schools also were charged with creating "a new
relation with the collective conscience and the sentiment of social justice". This referred to
more personalized training and increasing student ("usagers") participation in the school system
(de Foucault 1992, p. 264). A recent evaluation by the CGP (1993), L 'insertion des adolescents
en difflculti, admitted that the mission of "insertion" was never clearly defined in law and had
to be constructed as a "pluridimensional concept. This may explain die proliferation of so many
diverse youdi programs: stages 16/18 (stages d'insertion et de qualification), travaux d'utilite"
en alternance, formation en alternance.
By the mid-1980s, France rediscovered the great poverty — hunger and homelessness —
associated since the 1950s with Catholic social action. Every winter since then, the media has
called attention to the activities of Abbe" Pierre's organization "Emmaus" and Coluche's
"restaurants du coeur" (Ruano-Borbalan 1993). Most recently, charitable associations have
13
Nasse (1991) maintains that, just as sociologists distinguish between exclusion as an individual phenomenon,
i.e. as a product of inadequate insertion or integration, and exclusion as a macro-sociological phenomenon, i.e. as
a result of insufficient social cohesion, so too can the opposites of exclusion be distinguished. Thus, in a liberal
individualist conception of society, "insertion" (placing side by side) is used, while in a Durkheiminan cultural and
normative conception of "assimilation", "integration" is used. However, I find that social scientists as well as
politicians have defined insertion like integration, and the reverse, so I have not attempted to use Nasse's distinction.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUOAR/TY
23
promoted the sale of newspapers by and for the homeless.
But perhaps more than any other problem, exclusion came to refer to the long-term
unemployed (Wuhl 1991). Indeed, one reason for the emphasis on "exclusion" in France may
be that there, as opposed to other OECD countries, both total unemployment rates and longterm unemployment have remained high, indicating no necessary relationship with economic
growth (Wuhl 1992). Indeed, over time, French long-term unemployment continued to rise
even after economic recovery. Between 1970 and 1990, job-seekers registered with ANPE, the
national unemployment office, for over a year — mostly women, unskilled, and older workers
— rose from 17 per cent to 31 per cent of the total (Yepez 1993). However, many were
inadequately protected by social insurance. Although unemployment benefits replace 59 per
cent of an average wage for up to 30 months, one of the longest durations in Europe, many
remained out of work for even longer periods.
Thus, the adoption of the RMI in December 1988 offered the long-term unemployed some
income replacement. It also reinforced social rights to health and housing and encouraged participation in a wide variety of new economic "insertion" programs. Some of these were designed
to create jobs, however temporary (e.g. entreprises d'insertion; TUC; "retour a Femploi contracts that subsidize employers and exempt them from social security levies to hire the longterm unemployed). However, most offered work experience or training (e.g. credit formation
individualise (CFI), contrat emploi-solidarite" (CES), actions d'insertion et de formation (AIF).
Almost 600,000 people benefitted from these insertion policies (Yepez 1993). By early 1994,
there were 765,000 RMI recipients in France, who live on considerably less than me 1.2 million recipients of minimum old age assistance, 129,000 recipients of assistance to single parents
(API), and 350,000 who used up their unemployment insurance (Assedic) but receive a specific
"allocation de solidarity" (ASS). The RMI payment for a single person is 2,298 francs a mondi,
compared to the average income of 6,366 francs. About a fifth of RMI recipients are single
mothers and another fifth are married couples, but most live alone, are unemployed, and live
in cities. It has been estimated that about half of the homeless do not receive RMI because they
lack papers, addresses, access, or patience with the system (Andre" 1994).
It is instructive that the RMI was named in terms of "insertion." One analyst, after
claiming to strip away die multiple and ideological meanings of "insertion", then went on to
define it as a form of regulation of the "lien social" and a response to a perceived threat to
"social cohesion" (Paugam 1993). Thus, even sociologists have situated the conception within
Republican ideology. It is also notable that in the French debate over the RMI, debate over
social security reductions or the taxes to pay for insertion programs were muted. In contrast
to the rising hostility to welfare recipients in the US and Britain during the 1980s, mere was
considerable consensus supporting the measure.
An additional series of political crises coupled with persistently high and long-term
unemployment among identifiable social groups further expanded the scope of the terms
"exclusion" and "integration" to incorporate racial, cultural, and spatial dimensions. First, in
die early 1980s, as unemployment fed resentment of immigrants and improved the electoral
fortunes of die Front National, me government was pressed to restrict entry. The FN's
challenge was a particular problem the Gaullists, tiieir main competitor. Therefore, RPR
discourse on immigration has wavered over the years. Chirac made pronouncements about me
"seuil de tolerance" and "the noise and the stink" of immigrants but also used rhetoric about
die need for an "inclusive" process of attaining citizenship (Brubaker 1992). In me current
government, Balladur has sought to address the unemployment crisis, while Pasqua tried to
tighten immigration and deportation laws, reinstitute identity checks, and restrict odier
immigrant rights (Hollifield 1994).
24
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
In contrast to the Republican discourse of exclusion and integration, the far right cast
French social disadvantage in very narrow terms to divorce class interests from the more
inclusive category of the national identity. By recasting the problems of exclusion and
integration as those of immigration and assimilation, conservative parties identified a scapegoat
for unemployment even as they advocated more restrictive, even punitive social policies, such
as the youth minimum wage. In fact, while many immigrants shifted into service work, the
unemployment rate of second generation immigrants reached 20 per cent in 1990 (Lebon 1992)
and was almost twice that among young minorities.
The Front National claimed that North African and Moslem immigrants, unlike earlier
white European ones, were "unassimilable". LePen evoked the smoldering resentments of the
Algerian war and warned of the potential for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in France
(see Hollifield 1994, 1991). The FN turned classic Republican assumptions about the treatment
of religious and regional loyalities on their head, arguing that Islam competes with French
culture and the State. In fact, adherence to Islam and other aspects of cultural distinctiveness
were waning among second generation immigrants (Lapeyronnie 1993).
Drawing upon the extension of political rights of association to foreigners and fuelled by
proposals in the Maastricht Treaty to allow foreign residents to vote in local and European
elections, immigrant and ethnic social movements like SOS-racisme and France Plus mobilized
mass anti-racist demonstrations in reaction to the FN. The extreme left began "harping on the
theme of exclusion" (Brubaker 1992). For example, Taguieff (1988, 1991) made a distinction
between the FN's "racisme de domination" — racial theory that rejects the universal, insists
on the fixity of individual memberships, and emphasizes laws of hereditary — and a "racisme
d'exclusion". The latter concept provided a rubric under which the anti-racist movement could
criticize of all kinds of "exclusion" — national, ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, sex, social
status, and physical appearance. The high unemployment rates of immigrant labourers, racist
incidents, and the periodic outbreak of violence in the peripheral housing estates all led to
concern that foreigners and their French-born children were being "excluded." The left,
perhaps out of post-colonial guilt (Barou 1993), took up the cause of multiculturalism, as if to
say that, given all the other aspects of their exclusion, immigrants should not also have to give
up their identity.
The national debate over assimilation culminated in the controversy over whether Muslim
girls could wear a foulard in laic State schools. The incident led to a grand debate over the
meaning of immigrant "integration" (Barou 1993; Haut Conseil a l'integration 1992, 1991).
These disputes revealed the inherent tensions in the Republican conception of the State as both
the embodiment of the Nation and the guarantor of equal rights. While the right and left viewed
it as an expression of legitimate and protected subcultural values, liberals saw the foulard as
an assault on universalism and laicity. Republican thinkers argued that multi-cultural ism,
particularistic loyalties, and ethnic-religious politics threatened the solidarity of French society,
especially when expressed in the schools, the main Republican mechanism of social "integration
(Body-Gendrot 1993; Schnapper 1991). Ethnicity was confined to the question of respect for
individual rights; only universalistic modes of collective expression, like class movements, were
considered legitimate (Costa-Lascoux 1992). Indeed, the French use the passive, labour-linked
category "immigr6" rather than the active, culturally assimilatory construction "immigrant" to
refer to their foreign-born population (Body-Gendrot 1993).
One notable aspect of the immigration dispute in the 1980s was the virtual disappearance
from Republican discourse of the term "assimilation". Durkheim used assimilation to designate
the new social bond created by Republican education and participation in the social division of
labour and in groups mediating between the individual and State. Traditionally, the term
assimilation was primarily used to refer to immigrants being recognized as French. Thus, if
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
25
the appointment of Koffi Yamgnane in May 1991 as Secretary of State in the Ministry of
National Solidarity was meant to exemplify the success of African assimilation, the creation of
the Secretariat G£n6ral a 1'Integration in January 1990 illustrated the sense of crisis in
republican values (Barou 1993).
In its first report (1991), the Haut Conseil a 1'Integration, composed of political and
academic notables specializing in immigration, found it necessary to define the term
"integration". It is:
...a process of active participation of various different elements in the national society, while
accepting the permanence and conservation of moral, social, and cultural specificities and that the whole
is enriched by this complexity and variety. Taking differences into account without exalting them, the
similarities that a policy of integration emphasizes are the equality of rights and duties, rendering
different ethnic and cultural components of the society solidary, and giving each person, whatever his
origin, the possibility of living in the society whose rules he accepts and of which he is a constituent
member (HCI, 1991, my translation).
This definition contains a most remarkable mixture of contradictory Republican and
multicultural meanings of integration.14 If equality of individual citizens dominates over the
rights of minorities, this document also admits that traditional Republican intermediary
institutions — work and school — are in crisis. Ethnic subcultures and neighbourhoods
suddenly become Republican tools to integrate individuals in society. Ironically, community
structures that Durkheim like the Chicago School would have seen as destined to disappear are
now called upon to teach social values and to prevent the anomie and marginalization of those
who lack other normative references. Moreover, in contrast to universalistic social programs
that treat citizens as equals, the Ministere des Affaires Sociales et de l'Integration is now
pursuing social policies under the rubric of "integration" that have more specific targets.
Thus, far more than blatant racism, disputes over immigrant integration challenged the
increasingly fragile Republican formula and went to the heart of the French "malaise social,"
a blurring of national identity and mission. The sentiment of losing control over national
identity and cohesion was further reinforced by the strengthening of the European Community.
The Schengen Agreement reflected France's attempt to restore sovereignty over entry to its
territory, although it required tradeoffs between its special relationship with former colonies
and the fear of Eastern European refugees (Hollifield 1994).
Another interesting aspect of the Republican discourse on immigrants was the recasting
of their distinctiveness in the apparently race-neutral terms of "distance". Rhetoric gave
prominence of keywords like "ghetto" and "banlieues" (Silverman, 1992, p. 107). Although
the equation of the French suburbs to the American black ghettos was clearly hyperbole
(Wacquant 1993), the term "seuil de tolerance" resonated strongly with well-known American
theories of "tipping points" as the cause of white flight from racially integrated neighbourhoods
(Schelling 1971; Farley et al. 1993). However flawed this theory of a tolerance threshold may
be, it seemed to express the limits of social distance that many of the French could endure.
Indeed, the interrelated rhetoric of immigrant integration, youth problems, and economic
exclusion was spatially fixed after a series of violent urban incidents, starting in Les Minguettes
in 1981 and peaking in 1991. Increasingly residents of the "banlieues" were described as the
14
Multiculturalism is often referred to as "Anglo-Saxon" models of integration in which individual equality of
opportunity is compatible with the autonomous existence of groups and in which the Nation as composed of ethnic
and cultural components (Barou 1993). Hollifield (1994) argues that the foulard debate and the rise of French
"ethnicity" was accompanied by anti-Americanism or at least, hostility to the "American model" of multiculturalism.
Ironically, these portrayals coincided with a national debate in the US itself over political correctness and
multicultural curricula.
26
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
excluded. Urban exclusion became the target of ongoing state decentralization of social and
housing services, the Loi Besson on housing which extended "prfits locatifs aides d'insertion"
and created a "fonds de solidarity logement", and the deVeloppement social des quartiers (DSQ)
program. However, the efficiency of these programs was undermined by the proliferation of
different contracts and conventions between the central and local governments to address die
400 DSQ neighbourhoods. Because the system was too complex and diffuse to obtain results,
the government adopted an increasingly global, holistic approach to urban problems. In 1989,
it created a Delegation interministeYielle a la ville (DIV) to fuse infrastructure, public works,
housing, and "citizenship" — delinquency prevention, social development — into a single urban
policy (see Linhart 1992). After the 1990 suburban riots in Vaulx-en-Velin and in Sartrouville
and Mantes-la-Jolie in 1991, the government launched a full-fledged Ministere de la Ville.
Despite these structural reforms, mayors still have little control over their police forces, who
seem to provoke the violence, and urban policy still remains separate from the lutte contre le
chdmage, which is very high among suburban youth.
Nevertheless, France's pioneering struggle against "exclusion" came to situate it in urban
politics. Locally-based insertion and integration policies would create "a political space of
belonging" and thereby increase the legitimacy of state intervention. Unlike passive social
insurance and assistance, urban and local programs would require more activity of the
recipient. In this way, "integration" becomes a project of reconstructing an active citizenship
and by increasing participation in public life, the "fight against exclusion" becomes political
(Donzelot and Roman 1991). Thus, urban exclusion launched a debate on the new forms of
solidarity or social contract needed under new conditions that may make it possible to avoid
the fate of American cities (Mongin 1992).
The interrelated problems grouped under the expanding rubric of exclusion also began to
attract social scientists. After years of neglect, French sociological research suddenly shifted
to the study of "ethnicity", unemployment, and youth delinquency in the banlieues. In this way,
French sociologists joined the national debate on the nature of social integration.
Some argued that die Jacobin state is too strong and inflexible to recognize die legitimate
solidarities of ethnic groups (Roy 1991; Genestier 1991; Body-Gendrot 1993). French
sociology, which never analysed ethnicity, has now come to see it as a reflection of die desire
for ties of solidarity to replace those of work. In this view, second-generation ethnic
associations are more social and cultural than political and hence, legitimate under Republican
formulas. By appropriating space, ethnic integration incorporates immigrants as neighbours,
rather than reinforcing segmentation (Body-Gendrot 1993). In the effort to reconcile ethnicity
to Republicanism, sociologists found nothing to suggest that the values of ethnic groups are
contrary to more universal national ones. For example, it was argued that when the Maghrebins
were relocated from the homogeneous bidonvilles, they were cut off from preexisting social ties
of community. They moved to an individualized setting, HLM estates where the French also
lived. Youdi, especially when unemployed, had no normative point of origin, resulting in an
anomic social universe. Thus, adopting Durkheimian and Chicago School discourse, die
problems of die excluded were presented as social pathologies, symptomatic of the anomie
unleashed by the breakdown of older modes of integration (Motiie- 1991). However, when
immigrants tried to recreate community with Islamic and other associations, diey provoked
fears of religious communitarianism (Barou 1993). They ran up against the Republican formula
that religion is a private affair and that groups are illegitimate bases for demands of autonomy
and rights (LaPeyronnie 1993). Nevertheless, social scientists increasingly argue that laic
Republican and communal principles can be harmonized if emnic associations do not demand
special treatment on this basis.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
27
Exclusion in French social democratic discourse
In contrast, a more social democratic motif is found in the social action literature: rather
than being too powerful, the Republican state, its institutions, and ideology are breaking down
or weakening. In this interpretation, social movements in "civil" society challenged the
republican "civique" and the State has been decoupled from the Nation (Lapeyronnie 1993;
Taguieff 1991; Leveau and Wieviorka 1992). The French political model of republicanism, the
welfare state, and the social contract a la francaise, it is said, no longer works.
For example, the transformation of die banlieues into "ghettos" was "a symptom of
economic, social, and cultural dualism" in a "soci&e" de l'exclusion" (Touraine 1991; Mongin
1992), a society that could no longer integrate individuals through employment. Similarly, the
insurance principle underlying solidarity programs does not help those without a stable work
history, forcing able-bodied workers into stigmatizing residual aid programs. As a result,
cleavages have developed between workers and the unemployed, creating social dualism.
Indeed, many recent historical accounts of French poverty and immigration have rediscovered
Tocqueville's 1835 essay on Pauperism which associates economic growth with increasing
inequality or social dualism (Paugam 1993a, b; Ruano-Borbalan 1993; Rosanvallon 1990).
Rather than focusing on the obstacles to ethnic integration posed by the State, this approach attributed the problems of the banlieues to an overly centralized State. These sociologists advocate greater local political inclusion, bringing the state closer to the people, so that
local territorial political communities can promote social integration. Indeed, rather than using
American cities as the nemesis (Wacquant 1993), Touraine (1991) cites the U.S. as a positive
model in this respect. However, assessments of the French "politique de la ville" and the DSQ
program have found mat it has been easier to improve the physical infrastructure and housing
that to increase the active participation of banlieue residents (Geindre 1993; Delarue 1991).
For example, Simon (1992) has argued that social classes do not want to live together and
so, attempts to deconcentrate "ghettos" under France's loi d'orientation de la ville (LOV) will
fail. Moreover, the HLM cit6s of the banlieues are not ghettos in the sense of community ties
or a style of life mat arose out of concentrated social homogeneity. The LOV confuses housing
conditions with social characteristics and attributes social cohesion to heterogeneous groups
sharing die same residential space. Dispersion would simply silence and demobilize die poor.
Rather than pursuing deconcentration, die social problems of the poor call for social assistance
and community organization along the lines of die developpement social des quartiers (DSQ)
program. Democratization, die encouragement of solidarity, citizen participation, and
neighbourhood associations are die stated goals for die new French politique de la ville.
However, it has so far focused on improving housing, transport, and local infrastructure that
would reduce physical isolation in diese neighbourhoods.
Studies by die social action school also show diat, contrary to Durkheimian analyses, die
banlieues are not as anomic as diey may seem. For example, while many immigrants and dieir
children are concentrated in deindustrialized suburban areas, i.e. not in die "centre," die
geography of exclusion is less localized dian die alarms about die banlieues per se would
warrant. If many suburbs are socially integrated, odier provincial areas suffer from exclusion.
Indeed, social problems tend to be confined to a small area - a neighbourhood or housing estate
- of die suburban towns wheretiierehave been troubles. Case studies emphasize diat die reality
of diese French neighbourhoods, despite die disproportionate numbers of unemployed young
immigrants, cannot compare widi diat of homogeneously black, inner-city American ghettos
(Dubet 1987; Wacquant 1993, 1991; Jazouli 1992; Duprez et Hedli 1992; Genestier 1991;
Vieillard-Baron 1991; Crowley 1992). The suburban housing estates still tend to have a
28
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
majority of French-born residents, and the immigrants are themselves very diverse in
nationality. It follows that decentralizing power will not create ethnic enclaves.
Indeed, related sociological studies argue that cultural assimilation is already evident in
the banlieues: immigrant status is increasingly irrelevant, there are no strong ethnic ties or a
single youth sub-culture, or if there are, they are just reactions to other forms of exclusion. La
gafere, as Dubet (1987) showed, is lived by all the youth of the grandes citis. Despite French
concerns about the rise of ethnic communities, militant anti-racist movements, and
fundamentalist Islam, most suburban youth are already integrated into French culture,
aggravating the resentment of other forms of exclusion (Touraine 1991b; Dubet 1987; Dubet
and Lapeyronnie 1992; Delarue 1991). Although they are culturally integrated and want to
participate in consumer society, they lack the means to do so and turn to destructive or illegal
behaviour (Jazouli 1992; Wacquant 1992; Dubet 1987). Even urban violence expresses a revolt
that "constitue une demande d'integration bien plus qu'une volont6 de rupture" (Leveau and
Wieviorka 1992, p. 3).
In sum, this school of thought sees the main problem in the banlieues as economic
exclusion, although aggravated by spatial, generational, and political exclusion. In general, for
these interpretations, the real problem is not race and ethnicity, but social exploitation in an era
when class-based movements and organizations have decisively weakened (Dubet 1987;
Wieviorka 1991; Touraine 1991). Lacking a political conduit to express their opposition to the
State, suburban youth of all backgrounds are outside with no perceptible way in. As I will
show, these assumptions are more compatible with the "monopoly" paradigm of social
exclusion and its underlying social democratic premises than with the Republican notion of
solidarity.
Indeed, during March 1994, a new movement of opposition to "exclusion" arose in
response to the "humiliation", as Prime Minister Balladur put it, of the government's proposed
SMIC-jeunes, or contrat d'insertion professionnelle (CIP). Originating with privileged students
in professional schools of higher education, high-school students, the homeless, and
unemployed youth of the banlieues quickly joined the student marches and transportation
blockages throughout the country. In some cases, looting and violent clashes with the police
accompanied the demonstrations. In Lyon, two demonstrating Algerians were detained and
summarily expelled under the new Pasqua immigration laws. Thus, the movement quickly
encompassed a wide range of "excluded" groups, reflecting the expanding usage of the term.
For this reason, the students received support from a wide range of political opinion. Both
social democrats and republicans interpreted the movement in their own way. On the one hand,
Alain Touraine called in Le Monde (30 March 1994, p. 9) for a "nouvel gtat-providence"
charged with limiting the extremely high human costs of rapid social and economic change. He
rejected the current corporatist policies that propelled 70 per cent of the population upward,
but left the rest partly helped by social assistance measures and partly abandoned to a violent
"contre-soci&g" of "mafia, drugs, and riots." Thus, Touraine stressed inequality and the
majority's monopolization of privileges.
In contrast, Charles Millon, president of the UDF in the National Assembly, provided in
the same issue of Le Monde an example of the Republican usage of "exclusion":
L'gmergence d'une societe d'exclusion ajoutee a la decouverte d'une tromperie sur l'efficacit£ des
dipldmes peut conduire a la desespeYance d'une partie de la jeunesse. A-t-on le droit de prendre le risque
d'une rupture grave entre la nation et sa jeunesse? Je ne le crois pas (p. 9).
To conclude, despite ideological differences in definitions and the multiple empirical
referents of the term, there is a broad "social consensus" in France that social exclusion is a
problem. The expansive meaning of this concept has since diffused from France to other
•
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
29
Western European countries where it has acquired yet more connotations. As mentioned,
Denmark, Portugal, Italy, and especially Belgium have introduced new institutions to discuss
or act on social exclusion (Yepez 1993; EC Commission 1992, p. 32).
The debate over the social dimension of the Maastricht Treaty was crucial to this diffusion
process. While Britain would not sign the social charter, France would not sign a treaty without
it. The Netherlands and Germany engineered a compromise Social Protocol, signed by all
nations but Britain, that accepted a qualified majority for improvement of the working
environment and conditions, information and consultation of workers, equality of treatment
between men and women at work, and "the integration of persons excluded from the labour
market" (Article 1 (1,2). The EC is also developing a uniform social policy through the judicial
"back door". However, it tends to be individualistic and tied to labour market status, making
it more difficult to combat low incomes. Similarly, unemployment insurance is not portable
across national boundaries, but rather is provided by die country in which a person was last
employed (Leibfried and Pierson 1993). In sum, the continental commitment to combat
exclusion leaves nation-states considerable leeway in interpreting what exclusion will mean
within their borders.
The shifting meaning of exclusion is illustrated in the European Community's own
publications. The EC's conception of exclusion originated in the French republican sense of
the term. For example, the 1989 Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of
Workers adopted by the EC Heads of State declared "in a spirit of solidarity, it is important
to combat social exclusion" (Room 1992, p. 11). However, exclusion quickly assumed die
social democratic rhetoric of the monopoly paradigm. A subsequent EC Commission report on
the subject explicitly used T.H. Marshall's notion of citizenship to define the concept, as the
social rights of citizens "to participate in the major social and occupational opportunities of the
society" (Room 1992 p. 14).
Thus, as I have shown, exclusion is not just difficult to define, it is defined in more than
one way. It does not just refer to poverty or inequality or unemployment or citizenship, but
also to social status, identity, and isolation. Its meaning keeps expanding and yet, is
contextually and ideologically embedded. How can social exclusion become an object of social
scientific research when it is a value-laden moving target?
///. Exclusion in social science: Three paradigms revisited
In Part I of this paper, I outlined three paradigmatic approaches to social exclusion
grounded in different social theories, political ideologies, and national discourses. Each is based
on a different conception of social order and integration, but all three are bounded by organic
conservative and orthodox marxist thought. Whereas my historical account of the term
exclusion in the French context illustrated two of those paradigms, based on solidarity and
monopoly, this section will elaborate upon the use of die concept and term "exclusion" in die
English language literature of the social sciences. I compare die mree paradigms by tiieir
dieoretical treatment of exclusion in studies of citizenship and national identity, race and ethnic
relations, and long-term unemployment.
Exclusion and belonging: Nation, subculture, citizenship
Theories of citizenship and national and subcultural identities all share a concern witii the
social construction of belonging. Exclusion can tiius be defined as die antipode of social
30
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
membership. Although absolute universal ism is often an aspiration, it has never been achieved.
Thus, all social distinctions entail some sense of exclusion.
The same is true with language: a word is meaningless unless it can signify one thing and
not anodier. Thus, social scientific terminology — exclusion, integration, nation, race,
solidarity, social closure, etc. — cannot avoid deconstruction; even deconstruction itself is
susceptible to it. However, there is a practical way out of the infinite relativity of identity and
difference. Connolly (1991) calls it "agonistic democracy" in which "conventional standards
sealed in transcendental mortar are tested and loosened through political contestation." Connolly
argues that "cultivating the experience of contingency does not entail the celebration of any and
every identity." Rather, it counters and contests diose identities defined solely by deeming what
deviates from them as "evil (or one of its modern surrogates)". This means that people must
also "strive to interrogate exclusions built into their own entrenched identities" (pp. 14-15).
Similarly, Thomas Kuhn's argued that practitioners of different paradigms should "recognize
each other as members of different language communities and then become translators. Taking
the differences between their own intra- and inter-group discourse as itself a subject of
study,...each will have learned to translate the other's theory and its consequences into his own
language" (p. 202)
For this reason, I have defined "exclusion" comparatively, referring to its use in different
national contexts and its embeddedness in political values. Contrasting paradigms is particularly
important when analysing theories of nation, race, ethnicity, and citizenship. These conceptions
are especially vulnerable to the dangers of ethnocentrism and conventional wisdoms because
they are often conceptions about "us."
Before turning to specific theories, it is necessary to lay out the general assumptions each
paradigm makes about social belonging, identity, and membership.
Solidarity
As indicated above, solidarity has a distinctive meaning in French Republican ideology.
However, social theorists, particularly anthropologists and sociologists influenced by Durkheim,
have generalized die approach. In this paradigm, exclusion is a consequence of others'
solidarity, their cultural solidarity in particular. While the two odier paradigms approach
cultural solidarities — groups' shared beliefs and values — in instrumental terms, as serving
individualized interests or those of the powerful, this paradigm emphasizes the autonomous
impact of culture on social life. The solidarity paradigm subsumes exclusion under such
concepts as anomie, deviance, pollution, danger, taboo, stigma.
The cultural solidarity approach to exclusion is based upon primordialist/essentialist, rather
than constructivist perspectives, although bom schools developed in reaction to the apparent
reductionism of instrumentalist and materialist approaches to culture (see Young 1993). The
primordialist school maintains that, unlike class and interest group conflicts, cultural conflicts
have a peculiarly intensive, affective or emotional nature because they touch on primordial
identity. Cultural boundaries enclose a social space behind walls where social life is orderly and
people feel they "belong" and are "safe." Outsiders thus threaten this social order and may
provoke a reaffirmation of in-group solidarity. Major figures in this school include Clifford
Geertz, Harold Isaacs, Frederik Barm, and Mary Douglas. Essentialism may also underlie the
cultural solidarity of excluded or minority groups who demand self-determination, cultural
autonomy, separatism, political decentralization, or multicultural ism. The approach can be used
in analysing exclusion from nation-states and within multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual,
and religiously plural countries.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
31
As mentioned, concepts like "social bond", "organic solidarity," "moral density," and
"collective conscience" in Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society reflected Republican
notions of solidarity. In his later Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim offered the
starting point for the cultural analysis of exclusion. The Durkheimian school of sociology
concentrates on the problem of human solidarity, particularly moral and normative integration,
that entails classification of people and ideas into sacred and profane, conforming or deviant.
This tradition influenced cultural anthropologists who emphasize the binary oppositions or
dualisms inherent in symbolic representations. Barth (1969), for example, sees culture as die
essence of identity, the symbols and values that allow groups to grasp their distinctiveness in
contrast to "the other." Thus, the cultural paradigm insists that the external symbols and
internal values of ethnicity, for example, may be sharper and more fixed than the boundaries
of social classes and so, should not be reduced to them.
Mary Douglas offers one of die most important cultural analyses of exclusion. Building
on Durkheim but differing from him in some important respects (see Wuthnow et al. 1984),
Purity and Danger analyses how culture entails die classification of social life.15 "Dirt," she
writes, "is essentially disorder...Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort
to organize die environment...to make unity of experience" (1966, p. 2). Symbolic boundaries
not only describe reality, but also become the reality dirough which people perceive the world.
Boundaries are also evaluative, moral, and hierarchical, protecting me ideal order of society
from threats of disorder. "Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing
trangressions have as Uieir main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience"
(p. 4). Thus, diings have both a cognitive and moral existence at once. Boundaries also reflect
Levi-Strauss's notion mat experience is often structured as dualisms.
However, for Douglas, the existence of symbolic boundaries — their visibility,
permeability, and influence on social organization and behaviour — is an empirical question.
Solidary sectarian groups, for example, have sharply bounded, inclusive/exclusive social
organizations mat perceive more danger at die margins. Pressures at die margins from outsiders
act to exaggerate die difference between diem and insiders: "That which is not wim it, part of
it and subject to its laws, is potentially against it." Lines mat are crossed create deviants,
people who don't fit. However, die anxiety outsiders provoke may not only lead to suppression
and avoidance, which reaffirms collective morality, but also to incorporation or die movement
of boundaries, imposing a new moral order that may include outsiders. Boundaries are in a
sense "inexplicable" because die very social consensus diey protect provides die reasons for
defining somediing as "sacred". A given symbol may have many meanings. Douglas' insight
diat outsiders can be culturally incorporated was used by Xiberras (1993) in arguing mat
"polyculturalism" mat can overcome exclusion.
In Natural Symbols, Douglas introduced a distinction to explain how cultural codes control
individual behaviour and social organization. "Group" refers to the external boundaries that
differentiate collectivities from "the ouside world." "Grid" refers to the other internal
distinctions and delegations of audiority used to limit social interaction. Institutional rules also
reduce uncertainty and dius, channel individual behaviour. Cross-classifying diese two
dimensions provides a classification of individual behaviour in daily interaction and die ways
societies constrain dieir members.
To summarize, die solidarity paradigm draws upon French Republican and Durkheimian
diought. It sees exclusion as a necessary by-product of group solidarity, cultural cohesion, and
hence, boundedness. The moral order divides die world into categories which are continually
See also Mauss's ideas about how cultural boundaries reflect interdiction or distinction.
32
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
recreated by primordial sentiments, essential identities, and institutional enforcement of the
norms and values that define group boundaries. However, inclusion and integration can be
achieved to the extent that the bases of group solidarity expand to encompass those once
considered as outsiders.
Specialization
The French notion of "solidarity", I have shown, was developed as a self-conscious
rejection of utilitarian liberalism. Similarly, French discourse and social scientific studies of
exclusion are explicit reactions to the "liberal" economic policies of the 1980s. Exclusion is
deliberately distintinguished from the liberal ideas of poverty and "the underclass", categories
mat, in the liberal lexicon, seem to connote those able-bodied, but idle individuals undeserving
of social assistance. This violates Republican principles of social solidarity.
Although Europeans often portray liberalism as synonymous with neo-classical economics,
rational choice dieory, and minimal government, liberalism has a more complex understanding
of exclusion. It derives from two key liberal assumptions: that individuals naturally differ,
giving rise to specialization, and that social life is therefore comprised of separate spheres.
Different individual interests and other psychological motives and preferences give rise to social
groups that are nonetheless interdependent. Social integration of this sort, however, rests upon
die guarantee of individual freedoms, including those of minorities. Liberals therefore conceive
of social exclusion as "discrimination".
Although profoundly individualist, liberalism does have a conception of social structure
in which difference need not imply social inequality. Liberalism considers social differentiation
to be a horizontal, rather than a vertical dimension of social structure. Social differentiation,
the drawing of boundaries, and hence, specialization can be considered more general cases of
the division of labour. And like the division of labour, specialization may have positive effects:
economies of scale, skill enhancement, the diversification of choices, reductions of time spent
in communication, movement, and exchange. Social differences that other paradigms consider
exclusion may thus be justified on efficiency grounds. For example, Gary Becker's (1985)
theory of the family argues that overall productivity is improved when women specialize in
domestic production while men perform market work. Of course, the larger issue for liberalism
is "liberty" — whether people have a choice about dieir specialties, group memberships, and
so on.
In liberal thought, the separation of public and private spheres is essential to the
preservation of liberty. Civil society is a freely constituted moral order grounded in personal
responsibility and die pursuit of personal values and interests. The state has an essential role
in ensuring this moral order, although liberals differ as to how active this state role should be.
In a liberal perspective, free and equal individuals cooperate on the basis of shared
interests and sentiments. Thus, groups are voluntarily constituted. To protect free association,
groups belong in the private realm. Reflecting liberalism's break with feudal privileges, state
recognition of social groups is assumed to constitute preference. State neutrality is even used
to justify the tax-exempt status of non-profit groups. Churches, neighbourhood associations,
and edinic groups are all treated equally without regard to content as voluntary interest groups.
However, some deem "group" rights compatible with liberalism provided that state recognition
is meant to insure die protection of minorities from majorities without restricting odier
individuals' freedoms (Kymlicka 1994).
It follows that liberals take an instrumental approach to citizenship, race, ethnicity, and
other aspects of cultural pluralism. Since group affiliations may combine political or economic
interests with an affective tie, they become "contingent, situational, and circumstantial." There
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
33
is a "liberal expectancy" that over time, the bases of group formation will shift from inherited
values to interests. Ethnic groups come to behave like self-interested actors, maximizing
material values through communal identity (Young 1993). However, ethnicity tends to be
treated differently from race. Historically, members of minority racial groups have been less
free to choose their affiliations or to assimilate into the dominant culture. Indeed, liberal
theories of pluralism assume that the same individual is free to choose a wide variety of
inconsistent cultural identities in different spheres and in different situations. Thus, social
scientific studies that identify multiple causes of exclusion — social, cultural, political as well
as economic — may reflect liberal assumptions about the existence of separate spheres.
Exclusion in one sphere need not "correlate" with that in another.
Liberal democracies not only give individuals the right to express their heritage, beliefs,
and identities privately as long as they do not impinge upon the rights of others, but they also
protect groups from "discrimination". Rawer than treat racism as an ideology, liberal discourse
and social science usually attribute the overrepresentation of minorities among the
disadvantaged to individual behaviour and "attitudes." American liberal, individualistic, and
Protestant ideology has had a profound impact on social psychology and the sociology of small
groups in that country, including the symbolic interactionists and the Chicago School now so
popular among French sociologists of exclusion (Silver 1990). Indeed, there is a long tradition
of survey research on questions of tolerance and social distance between groups. In social
psychology, exclusion is considered a consequence of prejudicial attitudes originating from
individuals' cultural, social, and situational socialization in small groups. Similarly, the liberal
pluralist model of civil society as a collection of cross-cutting voluntary groups also underlies
the Chicago School of sociology, much misunderstood in France. French microsociological
studies stress symbolism over interaction, the various social roles people assume, but not how
the resultant groups themselves interrelate.
Essential to pluralism, particularly in political science, are the shifting alliances among
social groups and the divided group loyalties of individuals. People belong to a multiplicity of
groups. In this view, American politics are "interest group" politics. For example, Madison
saw the proliferation of constituencies as a means of protecting minorities from the "tyranny
of the majority". Of course, as the monopoly paradigm suggests, liberal pluralism can be
severely criticized for not recognizing the inequality of group resources. But in France,
pluralism is often conflated with an "Anglo-Saxon" model of "multi-culturalism", assuming that
individuals perpetually inhabit mutually-exclusive groups and mat society is nothing more than
those groups, precluding integration and solidarity.
More accurately, group relations in both political and cultural pluralist thought are less
conflictual than competitive. For example, the new dominant paradigm in the sociology of
religion posits a "religious marketplace" in which churches compete for individual adherents
who increasingly feel free to move across denominations (Warner 1993). Similarly, individuals
have "ethnic options" in selecting their identities (Waters 1990). Such competition may be
beneficial in moderating extremism and promoting innovation. What matters is that individuals
are "free to choose", to use Milton Friedman's phrase. And that requires a consensus about the
"rules of the game". Not surprisingly, liberal politics in both Britain and the US is often
couched in "rights talk" (Glendon 1991). Equality is first and foremost equality before the law
and thus, citizenship is defined in narrow juridical and political terms. It is illegitimate for
inequality in civil society to influence civic equality.
To summarize, the liberal conception of exclusion begins with the assumption that
individuals differ, giving rise to specialization in the market and among social groups.
Specialized social structures are comprised of separate, competing, but not necessarily unequal
spheres which leads to exchanges and interdependence across diem. Analogously, exclusion
34
DISCUSSION PAPER Semes No.
69
may have multiple causes and dimensions. It results from "discrimination", that is, from group
boundaries that individuals are not free to cross. Individual freedom of choice should give rise
to cross-cutting group affiliations and loyalties because people have diverse personal values and
psychological motives for engaging in social relations. In social science, liberal individualism
is often reflected in methodological individualism in that group memberships are treated as
individual attributes.
Monopoly
|
In contrast, the monopoly paradigm of exclusion assumes that material, legal, and cultural
• boundaries restrict access to valued resources, giving insiders a form of monopoly and power
over outsiders. Thus, exclusion always entails inequality. Culture — whether it is construed as
an autonomous sphere of valued beliefs and practices, as in liberalism, or grounded in political
or economic interests, as in neo-marxism — is seen as a form of domination. By including
some, it necessarily excludes others.
Although compatible with marxian notions of superstructure or cultural hegemony, this
paradigm's fullest expression descends from the work of Max Weber. It treats group
boundaries — "status" — as a source of domination potentially independent of social class.
Orthodox marxism privileges class solidarity and denies the potential for true social integration
in class-based societies. It aspires to universalism. In contrast, this paradigm assumes the
unequal power underlying more general group monopolies can be mitigated with inclusive
"social democratic" citizenship, especially as defined by T.H. Marshall.
Weber's theory of status groups assumes that social action is motivated by "material and
ideal interests," by structure and culture, constraint and autonomy. Status groups are a
manifestation of power relations; they claim social honour and esteem, and have their own
f consciousness, consumption patterns, and style of life. Material, legal or other forms of
I monopoly maintain the status group's exclusivity. Social classes may be status groups to the
extent that they can exclude non-owners from competing for valuable resources. Much like the
estates (Stande) of the old regime, social classes in many continental European countries
developed corporate identities. However, there is nothing necessary about this process. Indeed,
j one of Weber's most influential theses is that, if the social closure of status groups creates
1 monopoly and thus, inequality, it does not follow that social classes are always status groups.
Those who do not have to exchange in markets have power over die terms of exchange,
i.e. a monopoly. Weber used the term "closure" to refer to a process of subordination whereby
one group monopolizes advantages by closing off opportunities to outsiders whom it defines
as inferior or ineligible. Any convenient, visible characteristic, such as race, language, social
origin, religion, or lack of a particular school diploma, can be used to declare competitors to
be outsiders (Murphy 1988, p. 8). By restricting access to opportunities and resources, closure
allows collectivities to maximize rewards. The group of insiders share a common culture and
identity and hence, norms legitimating exclusion. As Weber (1968) argued,
I
...this monopolization is directed against competitors who share some positive or negative
characteristics; its purpose is always the closure of social and economic opportunities to outsiders.
Weber also recognized that such social closure may cause the excluded to react and resist
exclusion (e.g. see Neuwirth 1969; see also Simon 1992). When excluded groups successfully
usurp in-group privileges, however, they may redraw boundaries in such a way as to exclude
groups even less powerful than themselves, in a process Parkin (1974) calls "dual closure".
Indeed, this monopoly paradigm does not assume that a society — however open — can include
everyone everytfiing.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUDAHITY
35
British and American neo-weberian sociologists have elaborated the theory of exclusion
by examining the mechanisms of social closure. Building on Weber, Parkin (1974) argued that
there are two generic forms of social closure, or strategies for staking claims to resources: the
power of exclusion and of solidarism. While exclusion exerts power downward, solidarism
exerts it upwards, away from excluded groups. The grounds for exclusion shift over time. At
any moment, it may be based on restricted access to land, knowledge, and arms or to capital,
a type of neighbourhood, or citizenship rights. Closure can rely on characteristics acquired at
birth (race, ethnicity, religion, the cultural capital of one's family) or attained through
achievement (credentialism). Yet, while most of these exclusionary bases persist over time,
closure tends increasingly to be based on individual rather than group characteristics.
Like the other paradigms, social closure has devoted insufficient attention to the
relationships between, and relative importance of different forms of exclusion. For example,
Murphy's (1988) decision to accord primary emphasis to exclusion from economic resources
— the class divide, so to speak — over "contingent" forms of exclusion that cut across class
appears arbitrary. Associations and state intervention, by extending categorical social rights,
may also produce social closure, giving rise to unexpected alliances or to labour market
segmentation. Analyses of exclusion have neglected the substantive codes or rules justifying
closure. For example, weberians suggest that rules of exclusion justifying monopolization of
property, skill, and so on are shifting from racial, gender, and traditional hereditary grounds
to rational-legal bases like credentials. Yet both types of codes may coexist, giving some
identifiable groups a head-start in an otherwise meritocratic, equal, and open race. Finally,
exclusion need not result in die formation of a status group with its own style of life on the
other side of a boundary. Social closure by one group does not require that the excluded
reciprocally develop any sense of solidarity, organize, or resist power.
In the monopoly paradigm, exclusion from a group often deflects the attention of included
group members from internal inequalities. As Goblot argued, "every social demarcation is at
once a barrier and a level" (Goblot 1925). Like Weber, Goblot considered position in income
or occupational distributions insufficient to identify self-conscious social classes. For him,
classes would not exist if inequality did not also imply heterogeneity. But unlike castes or
estates, social classes have no official legal existence. The socially mobile are constantly
crossing class barriers, and democratic norms and critical reason constantly challenge
justifications of privilege. Rather Uian the law, classes use their evolving mores and codes —
their education, good manners, style, and "ces mille riens" mat make a person well-bred — to
claim "consideration" from others — social authority, prestige, and moral ascendence. This
"esprit" — die representations, values, and behaviour of social classes and die French
bourgeoisie in particular — assures internal cohesion and codes of living.
Paradoxically, every level distinguishes, and every distinction levels. The very barrier that
demarcates class distinction, however exaggerated and imaginary, also creates equality within
class boundaries. To claim collective superiority, it must be generalized to all members of die
group. Thus, equality widiin a class is a condition of die superiority of a class. Yet one cannot
apply a principle of moral equality widiout designating its limits. To retain a collective
reputation, members of a class must avoid morally suspect contacts: "on ne re?oit pas
n'importe qui, on ne va pas chez n'importe qui...mais tous ceux qui y sont admis sont 6gaux"
(1967, p. 10-11). Inclusion in a group of equals implies exclusion of die unequal.
There are two main applications of die monopoly paradigm to cultural, edinic, and racial
groups: instrumental ism and constructivism. Economic dieories of racism originated in marxist
dieories and consider class exploitation to be die ultimate source of racial, ethnic, local, and
cultural prejudices (e.g. Cox 1948; Rex and Thomlinson 1979). The heightening of cultural
conflicts is treated as a reaction to economic insecurity and increasing competition, particularly
36
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
where residential localities divide the working class more than work-based differences. Thus,
as in liberalism, ethnic groups are basically conceived as interest groups. But economic theories
of racism depart from orthodox marxist theories that deny the reality of cultural differences as
mere "false consciousness" and cannot distinguish the notion of exclusion from exploitation
(Omi and Winnant 1986).
In contrast to die essentialism of me solidarity paradigm, constructivism properly belongs
within the monopoly paradigm. Associated with die work of Berger and Luckman, Bourdieu,
Derrida, Foucault, and other post-structuralists, constructivism construes cultural solidarities
as socially constructed, imagined communities (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991).
It removes die analysis of cultural codes and discourse from ediical, moral, and affective
concerns. In its relational definition of identity, national, cultural, and edinic groups merely
serve the interests of the powerful.
Power relations between groups shape identity. Rather than being a "given," actors
produce culture in concrete daily interactions and historically-specific group relations.
Deconstruction of cultural discourses thus reveals their underlying interests. The social
construction of rules and die social reaction to outsiders' presence or deeds determine who is
deviant; being "labelled" as deviant is sufficient to make one an "outsider" (Becker 1963).
Deconstruction tries to locate in time and space die multiplicity of meanings in a discourse and
diereby, identify its origins.
For example, Bourdieu's analyses of class-based cultural distinctions share many of die
assumptions found in Goblot's and Weber's works.16 For example, like Weber, Bourdieu uses
die monopolization of capital as an analogy for die monopolization of odier objectively valued
resources, such as cultural or scientific capital, from which others are excluded. Like Weber's
dieory of social action, Bourdieu's structural constructivism combines macro- and microsociological approaches, linking social classes, for example, to everyday action and practices.
His concepts of "habitus" and cultural predispositions (family structure, religion, dress,
language, type of life, access to commercial culture) mirror die style of life Weber stressed as
a basis for status groups. Bourdieu also extends Goblot's analyses of how collective identity
is constituted widiin groups and how distinctions exclude odiers, especially from social classes
odierwise open to market mobility (Hall 1992, p. 262).
Bourdieu sees cultures as objective, hegemonic codes mat protect die interests of die
powerful. Differentiated societies make symbolic distinctions diat botii separate groups and
bring them together. Boundaries are both symbolic and political/distributional in that cultural
capital is a basis for social domination. In his recent La Misere du Monde (1993), Bourdieu
goes to great pains to describe his "reflexive" mediod, explaining why, even diough mere are
many points of view about suffering and poverty, he rejects subjectivist relativism. He argues
mat however different, these perspectives are grounded in social reality. Suffering results from
the collision of different interests, dispositions, and styles of life that make it possible for
people to live togedier. Everyday microcosms, especially places of residence and employment,
are real contexts with which separate classes, ethnicities, and generations live and perceive
oppositions between styles of life. Direct confrontations of social differences, even between
excluded groups, take on die nature of a polemic. Though expressed in segregated micro
milieux, this discourse reflects die misery of social position in die larger society.
As is characteristic of die monopoly paradigm, Bourdieu ties exclusion to inequality. From
die macrosociological perspective, a person's misery of condition need not reflect an absolutely
disadvantaged position, only a relative one. Indeed, a society mat has eliminated great suffering
16
I do not refer here to his early work with its functionalist and structuralist overtones.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL souDAnnv
37
also permits the development of "la petite misere." By extending suffering up the social ladder,
Bourdieu introduces a relative conception of poverty. Exclusion will persist so long as
standards keep rising and people's aspirations are disappointed.
In a recent critique of Bourdieu's work, Hall (1992) places Bourdieu in what I have called
the solidarity paradigm because of the theory's "holism". Hall notes that the French have a
peculiarly strong sense of public culture that defines people socially. This public morality
creates the moral density of a strongly bounded society that is ill-prepared to deal with
multicultural ism except by imposing a single holistic grid of social location. Reflecting
Durkheimian and French structuralist influences, Bourdieu posits an objective structure or code
of social distinctions. Although Bourdieu is very Republican in assuming a single, universal,
hegemonic cultural code underlies cultural capital and enlarges the concept of class to
incorporate all other social distinctions, it is fair to say Bourdieu departs from the solidarity
paradigm. He uses Weberian notions of status groups as sources of fundamental distinctions
and the concrete practices of habitus that frame them.
But, Hall (1992, p. 279) develops the monopoly paradigm further towards
multiculturalism, proposing a "cultural structuralism" in which social structural arrangements
of power and practices are infused with cultural bases. Unlike Bourdieu, he posits multiple
forms of cultural capital, many grounds for legitimating them, and multiple cultural markets
of distinction. Each cultural group may vary in terms of integration and the boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion. Evoking Weber, Hall insists on a distinction between status group and
class. Put differently, instead of reducing status to class, social classes must be recognized as
one among myriad kinds of status groups. Sometimes status groups are based on class,
sometimes on other criteria. Bourdieu largely neglects race, ethnicity, and gender distinctions,
and the interpenetration of communities. Many distinctions or forms of cultural capital are
incommensurate, cannot be reduced to a single form, and may cross-cut each other. Nor are
cultural distinctions of social class the only concrete status situations or socially constructed
boundaries. An ethnic habitus, for example, may have its own cultural capital creating class
distinctions within it that have little importance outside it.
The monopoly paradigm sees culture as a resource used to justify the exclusivity of group
membership upon which social closure is based. Group distinctions may be used to restrict
access to other valued resources or to close ranks in group competition and struggles for scarce
resources. In either event, the paradigm is concerned with the necessary overlap of belonging
and inequality. The solution to social exclusion is expand citizenship, not only what T.H.
Marshall called civil and political citizenship, but social and economic citizenship as well.
Citizenship
The three paradigms conceive of citizenship, like social integration, in different ways.
These perspectives are often apparent in analyses of national identities, dominant cultures, and
the values embedded in welfare state institutions. Citizenship can refer to nationality status, active participation, or "ideal republican" citizenship, but the ideals and values it expresses are
often institutionally and ideologically entrenched. Indeed, one might argue that "citizenship cannot be discussed apart from its political setting" (Sklar 1991). Thus, I make explicit reference
to national context in this first illustration of how the paradigms differ in their understanding
of social belonging. In all three approaches, exclusion may be seen as an expression of
incomplete citizenship, but the paradigms diverge in what they mean by that term.
38
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Solidarity and citizenship
In Part II, I indicated the embeddedness of French national identity in Republican
ideology. The concept of solidarity illustrates this paradigm's assumption of the existence of
social consensus, a general will, or collective conscience. Although the aspiration for consensus
creates a tendency toward an overbearing state and the tyranny of opinion, it is tempered and
limited by guaranteed rights and active participation of citizens. Thus, the solidarity paradigm
of citizenship stops short of organic conservative conceptions of social integration in its quest
for civic virtue and equality before the law.
Essential ist and Durkheimian conceptions of dominant national cultures are not confined
to the French literature on citizenship and exclusion. Durkheim's, Douglas' and Barthes' (1977)
dualistic moral distinctions between sacred and profane have also been applied in analyses of
American political culture, national myths and identity. For example, Alexander (1992) argues
that dualist categories structure the discourse of American civil society by indicating "those who
deserve inclusion and those who do not." A symbolic structure indicating who is pure and
impure is encoded in nationally-specific homologies, or likenesses, and antipathies. These codes
operate at the individual level, classifying human motives in diametrically opposed ways (e.g.
rational/irrational; self-control /passion, sane/mad). Social relationships also follow a dualistic
discursive structure (critical/ deferential; truthful/deceitful; friend/enemy). Finally, social
institutions are discussed in the same binary fashion (law/power; equality/hierarchy;
inclusive/exclusive). The characteristics attributed to Americans amount to a "discourse of
liberty", while the characteristics attributed to outsiders — as evil, polluting, and threatening
to the community — is a "discourse of repression".
More than other institutions, the law codifies inclusion in American society. As Karst
(1989, p. 2) argues,
Culture shapes identity by contrasting 'our' beliefs and behaviour, which are examples to be
followed, with those of the Other, which must be avoided... Just define the community's public life —
or the community itself — in a way that excludes the subordinated groups.
Attachment to one's own group and separation from others legal exclusion. "The law is
seen to embody the community's values". Constitutional law, especially the principle of equal
citizenship, unifies the nation and treats insiders as "respected, responsible, and participating"
members of the community. In the US, the extension of the Fourteenth Amendment expanded
the "circle of belonging" and guaranteed equal citizenship to those "previously relegated to the
status of outsiders." To outsiders, "equality and belonging are inseparably linked: to define the
scope of the ideal of equality in America is to define me boundaries of die national community"
(p. 2).
The relatively permanent features of a particular context may been seen as constituting a
"boundary condition" which affects causal relationships witiiin the society by "excluding" some
possibilities. Because the boundary condition is invariant, it cannot account for changes internal
to the society. However, drawing on Wittgenstein's description of words as "tools in a toolbox"
that have different uses, Greenstone (1993) shows that boundary conditions themselves
continually change as language rules come into conflict. For example, the "exceptionalism" of
American political culture is conventionally attributed to a national consensus over what
Greenstone calls "genus liberalism" — beliefs in individual rights, private property, and
government by consent. However, Lockean "humanist liberalism" — with its stress on negative
liberty and instrumental reasoning — came to conflict witii "reform liberalism" — witii its
stress on positive liberties or duties to develop oneself and help ouiers do so as well. Thus, if
all Americans claim to value "equality", political conflicts often involve fights over what it
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
39
means. Greenstone's distinction between liberalisms also highlights the difference between
French Republicanism and early American Republicanism which did not prescribe a vision of
the good society nor assign the state the task of diffusing it. Rather, American republicans
imposed limits on the state and left moral questions to active, virtuous citizens.
Exclusion discourse can be found in other analyses of the dominant political ideology of
the United States. For example, genus liberalism or "Americanism" also conceives of society
as predominantly middle-class. Observers since Jefferson and Tocqueville remarked on the
large proportion of Americans of "middling condition." By the 1840s, Robert Wiebe (1985,
p. 322) argues, the levelling ideology of equality of opportunity had so progressed that people
"drew a line — in or out — and concentrated on preserving their one significant distinction."
Thus, the dominant conception of die US is not a class society, but one with an "imperial
middle" of individual strivers and self-betterers from which only the very rich and the very
poor are excluded (Demott 1990). Indeed, the "central, and largely unchallenged, image of
American society" is that the middle class "will eventually include everyone" (Bellah et al.
1985, p. 119).
An essentialist approach can also be applied to the "pandaemonium" of resurgent
nationalism. For example, Moynihan (1993) argues that the nation is "the 'highest' form of the
ethnic group, denoting a subjective state of mind as regards ancestry." National selfdetermination underlay the post-war international order, breaking up empires and providing the
basis for the United Nations. In Moynihan's view, bom liberals and marxists misunderstand
the force of ethnicity behind current self-determination struggles. Although bom the liberal
melting pot and marxist cosmopolitanism failed to solve ethnic conflict, he suggests that federal
or stratified government systems may resolve these disputes by legitimating essentialist ethnic
pride.
Liberalism and citizenship
The specialization paradigm contains at least two approaches to the analysis of citizenship,
partly reflecting the divisions between humanist and reform liberalism noted above. In the
classical conception, liberal citizenship is contractual. Private citizens in one specialized sphere,
civil society, make exchanges of rights and duties with another sphere, the government.
Dominant in the U.S. and ascendent in Britain, this approach is nonetheless contested in both
national contexts. In die UK, the dominant definition of citizenship is still social democratic
and belongs in the monopoly paradigm. But in the U.S., liberal citizenship is conceptualized
in a second way, as applicable to the public sphere alone. This "social liberalism" points to the
tension between the inequality inherent in protecting individual liberty and private property in
civil society and the equality of citizenship necessary in a democracy. It is in the latter variant
of liberal citizenship tiiat exclusion discourse can be found.
In classical liberalism, rights are usually construed as freedom from the state; government
intruding into civil society is a prelude to tyranny. This contrasts witii Republicanism in which
rights are granted by the State as an expression of the general will of the Nation. Thus, the
American government does not promulgate an official national culture, but only instructs
citizens on democratic structures and procedures. Indeed, education is a reserve power of the
states, not a national function. Ratiier, in a context of constitutional constraints promoting
religious and sub-cultural tolerance, national identity springs from civil society. Yet, as
liberalism evolved, negative rights were supplemented by positive ones: die right/o certain
resources and activities in tfie form of social welfare. However, tiiese entitlements are
exchanged for the exercise of civic responsibilities. In line with market reasoning, liberal
citizenship is conceived as a social "contract."
40
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
The distinction between the specialization and solidarity paradigms can be illustrated with
Parsons' (1965) functionalist theory of citizenship. Functionalism originated with Durkheim
and, like Durkheim, Parsons premised social integration on adherence to common norms and
values. However, when applied to the United States, his theory of citizenship took on a liberal,
rather than republican cast. Unlike Durkheim's notion of integration, Parsons maintains that
excluded groups must exchange die demand for inclusion (which arises when die normative
strain of exclusion is high) for the supply of social and cultural qualifications (the ability to
exercise citizenship rights). Thus, the social inclusion of excluded groups entails the same sort
of exchange one might expect in an individualistic market model. AlUiough Parsons recognizes
that citizenship requires common values, it achieved through die accommodation of American
civilization to minority norms, not simply die assimilation of minorities into the existing
culture. Thus, the theory supports American-style cultural pluralism more than French
Republican consensual solidarity.
Janowitz (1980) offers another example of a liberal exchange model of citizenship.
Concerned mat American political demands are too often couched in "rights talk," to use
Glendon's (1991) terminology, Janowitz argued for a better balance between civic privileges
and obligations — from die duty of getting an education to serving in die army. Similarly,
citizens have die responsibility to pay taxes in return for public goods. When citizens do not
perform dieir duties, taxpayer revolts and rising resentment against welfare recipients may
ensue. This exchange approach also illuminates the difference between French and American
republicanism.
Liberal contractual conceptions of citizenship can also be found in justifications for
"workfare" programs in many countries where people have an obligation to work at any wage
in return for welfare rights (see Lister 1990). Even in France, the RMI recipient signs.a
"contract" promising to look for work or participate in insertion programs in return for
support. Similarly, "culture of poverty" and behavioral theories of the "underclass" reflect die
view that dependency is at odds with middle-class standards of civic obligation: work effort,
compulsory schooling, paying taxes, and so on (Mead 1986).
Aldiough Britain has not conducted a public debate over social exclusion per se, die
contractual liberal model of citizenship can be discerned in die 1991 Conservative initiative for
a Citizens' Charter. That conception drew upon a market analogy in which taxpayers were
equal customers widi die right to demand value for money from state producers. Greater
consumer choice and competition in the provision of social welfare would ensure higher
standards of quality service. Citizens could now expect responsive, non-discriminatory, multilingual public services. They were guaranteed new rights to hold bureaucrats accountable.
Citizens were granted "the power to know, choose, complain, and take your custom
elsewhere." Not surprisingly, social democrats criticized mis liberal model of citizenship from
die perspective of dieir own paradigm: "In a society where die citizen is consumer, die citizen
widi least resources has die lowest kind of citizenship" (Room 1991, p. 34).
In contrast to die contractual perspective on citizenship, social liberalism is concerned widi
die boundaries and tensions between separate spheres governed by conflicting values. For
example, Wolfe (1992) argues that both the monopoly and solidarity paradigms of social
boundaries are too extreme. Postmodern or poststructuralist approaches to exclusion treat group
boundaries as artificial distinctions rooted in die power to protect privilege, but these
distinctions are not eidier/or but bodi. Communitarian, republican, and sociological dieories
consider universalism and perfect equality as die sources of social isolation and individualism
in contrast to die more fulfilling and meaningful group life diat expresses particularism, die
informal, the local, and the intimate, and enriches societies through diversity. Although
Enlightenment diought, democracy, and modernity do seem to dissolve differences over time
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
41
and social boundaries do exclude others, not all boundaries are alike. Some are more permanent
and impermeable than others. Some are arrived at through rational deliberation and justification
rather than tradition. Some are historically given, imposed, or based on ascription, while others
are socially constructed, freely chosen, and easily crossed. A liberal approach, which
maximizes individual freedom of choice, seeks to prevent people from being classified against
their will. The other paradigms tend to deny that individuals have the power and autonomy to
change social boundaries.
Another illustration comes from the self-proclaimed "inveterate liberal," Judith Shklar
(1991), who explicitly discussed American citizenship as "a quest for inclusion" through two
spheres in particular, voting and earning. In contrast to the solidarity perspective, "America
has not marched single file down a single straight liberal highway" (p. 13). Rather, liberalism
continually engaged anti-liberal dispositions — slavery, racism, nativism, and sexism —
institutionalized in exclusionary and discriminatory laws and practices. Core American values
— liberty, equal citizenship, the opportunity to work for pay and the disdain of idleness —
developed particularly in opposition to black chattel slavery. Since exclusion was easier than
inclusiveness, extending citizenship required struggle.
Historically, Shklar argues, American democratic and egalitarian values were often at odds
with a conception of citizenship as "social standing". As one would expect in a liberal setting,
standing was defined negatively, as not being a slave (or woman or in another disfranchised
group). Only by extending voting rights and opportunities to earn could equality be reconciled
with the "exclusiveness" of standing and inequality of respect.
The struggle for citizenship in America has, therefore, been overwhelmingly a demand for inclusion
in the polity, an effort to break down excluding barriers to recognition, rather than an aspiration to civic
participation as a deeply involving activity (p. 3).
Voting and earning emerged as the essential principles of inclusion used to combat
inherited inequalities. These are not necessarily good public values even if they are shared.
The incompatibility of citizenship and slavery was a major motif in American political
discourse. Second-class citizens "suffer derogation and the loss of respectable standing. It also
meant being ruled by others" (p. 17). Each time the suffrage was expanded, slavery was
mentioned. Similarly, protests against "wage slavery" expressed the view that miserable wages
and working conditions were incompatible with being an independent citizen. Unemployment
entails a shameful loss of autonomy. As Shklar argues (p. 93), "Not to work is not to earn, and
without one's earnings one is 'nobody'." If the unemployed seem to be free, they also lose
independence, social standing, and competency, must seek help from others, and are "expelled
from civil society, reduced to second-class citizenship". Finally, public dependence undermines
the dignity befitting equal citizens. "In effect, the people who belong to the under-class are not
quite citizens", Sklar (p. 22) notes. "All want to make good citizens out of the 'underclass' by
getting them a job and making them, too, earning members of the society" (p. 96). Sklar
argues that, if competency and independence in civil and political society are the identifying
marks of citizenship, then the loss of public respect and standing must be overcome with "a
presumption of a right to work as an element of American citizenship". In sum, exclusion from
the public emblems of standing — voting and earning — not only make people feel powerless
and poor, but dishonoured as well. The recognition of new rights combats such exclusion.
At the margin of the social liberalism paradigm, analyses of citizenship begin to
incorporate assumptions of social democracy. Walzer's (1990) analysis of the "nonexclusive"
character of American national identity is illustrative. First, Walzer clearly distinguishes his
approach from French Republicanism. Rather than a patrie, a homeland, a nation-state, or a
union of groups, America is an inclusive political framework for their coexistence. The national
42
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
motto, e pluribus unum, refers not to assimilation into an autonomous nationality nor to a
cultural melting pot, but rather into a politically-defined liberal citizenship accessible to all. The
U.S. allows many subcultures toflourishprecisely because American citizenship is independent
of, and noncompetitive with religion, ethnicity, and cultural identities. It is impersonal,
anonymous, and based on interests, rather than a source of solidarity or fulfilment. Patriotic,
non-ethnic, Yankee, or "American-American" national culture is just another identity among
many. In contrast to France, where a state jealous of other affiliations and loyalties inculcates
civic virtue, liberal citizenship is defined by its tolerance of difference and the right to choose
one's cultural identity. "A radical program of Americanization," Walzer points out (p. 614),
"would really be un-American." Thus, if Rousseau and civic republicans would make poor
pluralists, American pluralists, because of their liberal conception of citizenship, would make
poor republicans.
Yet Walzer (1992) shares the solidarity paradigm's assumption that all humanity is
particularistic. Since primordial and particular ties cannot be suppressed, they must be
accommodated. The first nation-states emerged from tribes who only later developed
nationalism. Tribal wars were based on the fear that differences would dilute absolute values,
cause social disintegration, or be exploited for economic gain. These dynamics are evident in
the new "tribalism" based on long-repressed ethnic, religious, national, and local identities.
Thus, a supranational Europe transcending nationalism and based on universalistic principles
is unlikely. Particularism will persist.
Walzer's solution, however, is liberal: the recognition that individuals belong to many
"tribes" simultaneously. The West overcame religious and ethnic wars not so much by an
absolute sovereign, but by religious "tolerance" — doing unto others as you would have done
unto you. Tolerance created protected spaces for a diversity of religions, overcoming fear by
confining tribes within boundaries. Today, individual identities are multiple and cut across
tribes. Cultural pluralism divides passions.
Walzer's (1993) discussion of exclusion and citizenship also contrasts with those of the
monopoly or social democratic paradigm. As indicated, liberals consider exclusion to be a form
of specialization and horizontal differentiation. Particularism is not necessarily a source of
social division. Walzer is agnostic as to whether inclusion by necessity entails a simultaneous
exclusion, even if political communities must decide "who is in and who is out." Second, like
liberals, Walzer argues that there is a plurality of principles of justice, and that liberty is best
protected by keeping institutional spheres separate.17 The political sphere of democracy
enforces the separation. Citizens share values and traditions, a territory and nationality. From
the agreement to sustain a society of "people like ourselves" follows social obligation. In
identifying politics as the sphere in which equal citizens make decisions about redistribution in
the other spheres, Walzer moves toward the monopoly paradigm.
Walzer defines exclusion as the result of "complex inequality," where disadvantage and
failure accumulate across spheres of justice. Most Americans are content widi exclusion
"precisely because me people they exclude or marginalize are 'those people', black or poor or
somehow stigmatized." But those he calls "the dispossessed, the underclass, the truly
disadvantaged, the socially isolated, the estranged poor, the uneducated, unemployed,
unrecognized, and powerless" are not excluded because of their cumulative individual failings.
There are no flatly incompetent people in all spheres. Rather, structural factors cause the
17
Liberal assumptions about the existence of separate spheres are also evident in Goffman's "frames" and
Boltanski and Thevenot's six different cites or worlds of justification for equitable distribution — inspiration,
renown, domesticity, market, industry, civic life (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991).
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
43
"reiterated losses whose sum is exclusion itself." Members of identifiable social groups are
disproportionately excluded because poverty in the market impoverishes them everywhere.
"Failure pursues them from sphere to sphere in the form of stereotyping, discrimination, and
disregard." In sum, exclusion results when principles of distribution in one sphere — e.g. the
market, or merit, or need — are inappropriately applied to another.
Inclusion, Walzer argues, "begins with citizenship, which then serves as a value reiterated
through democratic political activity in all the spheres of justice" (1993, p. 64). But where does
one draw the boundary of citizenship, of membership in the society? If nations are free to
constitute themselves as exclusive groups, so too are minorities. They shouldn't be doubly
disadvantaged by economic inequality. Similarly, nations cannot exclude immigrants without
overextending their proper sphere. Like Moynihan, Walzer identifies political arrangements that
might insure cultural pluralism and protect minorities within states: constitutional protections,
federalism, international policing of human rights, cultural autonomy, or a citizenship allowing
for the expression of differences in civil society and voluntary associations. There is no one
best political solution to exclusion.
The liberal pluralism inherent in Walzer's theory is also apparent in his insistence mat not
only the state, but also associations in civil society should provide social goods — especially
welfare and education — to enable excluded people to reenter society on their own and to
function in all distributive spheres. "Every voluntary association...is an agency of inclusion"
because each has a different understanding of merit (p. 61). However, in line with social
democracy, the State must not only use its political power to open all other spheres of social
life to excluded groups, redrawing and defending the boundaries between them, but redistribute
more resources as well.
The boundary between liberal American and social democratic paradigms of citizenship
drawn in Roman's (1992) critique of Walzer. While Walzer worries about the domination of
one sphere of justice over another, Roman is concerned with another type of injustice within
any given sphere, monopoly. Rather than maintaining boundaries between spheres, each with
its own distribution of material or symbolic goods, Roman calls for redistributing those goods
within spheres. Walzer's agenda is eminently liberal in emphasizing boundaries around die
market and protections for national and cultural solidarities within and between states. Like
Wolfe, Walzer rejects the positions of both left-wing internationalists, who dislike and
misunderstand tribalism, and postmodernists, who say tribes are only imaginary social
constructions. These approaches are characteristic of the monopoly paradigm.
Monopoly and citizenship
National identity in the monopoly paradigm is mythic, invented, socially constructed.
Deconstruction of national discourse reveals its underlying dominant and competing interests.
While national identity excludes others, citizenship is inclusive. It not only extends civil and
political equality, as liberalism does, but social and economic equality as well.
The social democratic formulation of citizenship as "full and equal participation in the
community" draws explicitly upon T.H. Marshall's (1950) classic formulation. Participation,
of course, is construed as a duty, but it is the progressive extension of civil, then political, and
finally, social rights that is Marshall's focus. Equal citizenship bestows equal status and the
equal rights and duties with which that status in endowed. It thus serves as the basis of social
solidarity, cohesion, and integration in inherently conflictual capitalist societies. Although
political equality, especially the franchise, serves to temper market and status inequalities,
Marshall feared it may also legitimate them. Only the extension of full social citizenship
through a redistributive welfare state could moderate economic inequality.
44
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
For Marshall, citizenship also entails "a direct sense of community membership based on
loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession" (p. 93). However, as Barbelet (1988)
notes, Marshall meant by civilization something quite different from the French term.
Civilization is more material than normative, though it may have cultural and social
consequences. The cultures of feudal estates and social classes dissolve not only in a common
national consciousness, but also in a shared material standard of living based on mass
consumption.
Nevertheless, Marshall's theory assumed a socially homogeneous nation-state. He hung
equality of citizenship on a notion of common social heritage. That this model originated in
homogeneous Britain and is most popular in the socially homogeneous countries of Western
Europe should not be neglected. The social democratic conception of citizenship is largely
class-based; integration is achieved primarily through decommodification, class compromise,
material redistribution, and rising affluence (Esping-Andersen 1991).
The distinction between the solidarity and monopoly paradigms of citizenship is clearly
illustrated by die European Community's shifting discourse of exclusion. Initial discussions
used the French republican sense of the term. For example, the Community Charter of the
Fundamental Social Rights of Workers adopted by the EC Heads of State declares "in a spirit
of solidarity, it is important to combat social exclusion" (Room 1992, p. 11). Similarly, the
third (1989-94) EC poverty programme's early discussions of exclusion acknowledged the dual
importance of disparity between those up or down the social scale and "those comfortably
placed within society and those on the fringe (in/out)" (EC Commission 1992). However, its
first report, Towards a Europe of Solidarity (1992, p. 10), already shifted towards a rhetoric
of social rights:
Social exclusion refers, in particular, to inability to enjoy social rights without help, suffering from
low self-esteem, inadequacy in their [sic] capacity to meet their obligations, the risk of long-term
relegation to the ranks of those on social benefits, and stigmatisation which, particularly in the urban
environment, extends to the areas in which they live.
The subsequent EC Commission's report on the subject explicitly defined the concept with
Marshall's notion of citizenship:
Here we define social exclusion first and foremost in relation to the social rights of citizens...to a
certain basic standard of living and to participate in the major social and occupational opportunities of
the society (Room 1992 p. 14).
Participatory democracy is an essential part of the social democratic vision of citizenship.
In France, social democratic conceptions of citizenship criticize Republicanism for its unitary
notion of die Nation and for its centralization of State power. As I indicated, both the Catholic
and socialist left advocate direct participation in local associations and social movements as a
means of connected the excluded to the larger society. However, rather than stressing
participation as a duty of citizenship that will insure solidarity and integration, social democrats
see participation of the excluded as contestatory, challenging die interests of die powerful. The
decentralization of power to localities and workplaces should permit the excluded, whatever
their group background, to pursue their common interests.
However, the class-based assumptions of die monopoly model of citizenship are under
stress. Social democracy is just beginning to adjust to increasing diversity in styles of life and
cultural values and to the political challenges posed by immigrant minorities, environmental
movements, and long-term unemployment. For example, die British Labour Party, which once
focused heavily on class conflict, now increasingly evokes Marshall's concept of citizenship in
its social policy publications and political programmes. In the rare cases in which the actual
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
45
term "exclusion" is explicitly used in Britain, reference is invariably made to Marshall's threepronged conception of citizenship and its role in combating inequality and poverty. For
example, die Child Poverty Action Group uses die rhetoric of exclusion to argue mat die poor
are "excluded" from full citizenship and participation in die society and dius are often excluded
from public consciousness as well (Lister 1990; Golding 1986). As I shall show, British
discussions of die "underclass" also draw on Marshall. But his theory is being extended beyond
its assumptions of social and cultural heterogeneity. Only recently have British discussions
expanded die notion of citizenship and equality of status to encompass die recognition of
diversity, the inclusion of all groups, and protection from stigma (e.g. Harris 1987).
Indeed, die class-based formula of minority assimilation that dismisses cultural allegiances
as socially constructed is just as universalistic as die liberal and French Republican formulas
diat produced anti-discrimination laws. In Britain, berth parties supported immigration reform.
Conservative and Labour ideologies remain "predominantly class-derived, and usually account
for racial phenomena by making use of existing formulae developed over many years in
response to class demands" (Reeves 1983, p. 247). For example, die Labour Party developed
its ideology of "Britishness" in reaction to die anti-semitism of die 1930s, a conception that
reemerged in die 1960s in response to racism against black immigrants (Knowles 1992).
Thus, contrary to die economic reductionist stream in die monopoly paradigm, die
constructivist perspective bodi identifies and deconstructs British national mydis and discourse.
Like die US and France, Britain invented its own national traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger
1983; Anderson 1991). Ironically, just as French Republicans rejected die "Anglo-Saxon"
model, notions of "Britishness" and "Englishness" were constructed primarily in opposition to
continental Europe and to France in particular. Both Britishness and Englishness reflect die
island's insularity and historical defense against invasions from abroad. While Britishness is
much older, more politically or legally based, and melds Britain's history of territorial
nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and imperialism, the latter arose in the 19th century, was more
cultural or edinic in orientation, and stressed selective peculiarities of national identity.
Components of Englishness include (1) Anglo-Saxon traditions of common law, Parliament, and sea-faring, radier dian landed border disputes; (2) die gradual, peaceful development
of political institutions and the franchise; (3) Protestantism, rule of law, and individual liberty,
in contrast to European and especially French Cadiolicism, absolutism, and revolution; (4)
empirical, pragmatic, utilitarian, concrete, individualist intellectual culture, radier than
continental abstraction, metaphysics, and ideology; and (5) die canonization and diffusion of
the English language and its realistic, sincere, individualistic literature depicting die rich
diversity of English life, radier dian die formalism and classicism of continental and especially
French literature (Kumar 1994; Anderson 1992; Colls and Dodd 1986; Samuel 1989).
Aldiough Britain shared with France a "civilizing" mission outside Europe, its relations
widi colonial subjects differed considerably. The Commonwealdi of Nations, however
paternalistic and unequal, bound post-colonial edinic groups to British political institutions and
English culture. Aldiough die post-war decline of empire undermined Britishness, Englishness
enjoyed a resurgence, partly in reaction to immigrant minorities, regional nationalism, and
European integration. Aldiough Englishness could accommodate social differences by
emphasizing its tolerance of an edinically, religiously, and regionally diverse society,
multicultural conflicts over education, subculture, family, and employment rules could not be
avoided. Similarly, since Englishness developed in contrast to Europe, integration with the
continent remains problematic (Kumar 1994).
Indeed, aldiough social closure dieories focus on power relations widiin national societies,
diey can also provide a framework for examining the international order. Some countries may
"monopolize" resources widi moral claims of civilization, democracy, skill or hard work,
46
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
justifying the exclusion of less powerful nations from access to certain markets. Indeed,
Murphy (1988, p. 228) suggests that, as particular states become more inclusive, citizenship,
an accident of birth, has become a stronger form of monopolization and exclusion.
The transformation from collectivist to individualist codes of exclusion within states is closely
related to the reinforcement of collectivist citizenship, monopolization, and exclusion at the interstate
level.
This inverse relation may explain the rise of nationalism in East European countries just
as they become free to integrate into the world market and political order. It may also account
for Europe's simultaneous imposition of stricter immigration laws and the introduction of
integration programs.
To summarize, the monopoly paradigm treats cultural identities as socially constructed,
ideological justifications for social closure. Exclusion is combatted with citizenship understood
as full participation in the community. The liberal paradigm treats cultural identities as the
outcomes of individual interests, preferences, and socialization. Different identities are relevant
in different social spheres, but individuals are free to move across spheres and to choose
identities. Exclusion is an outcome of the tension between equality in the sphere of citizenship
and inequality in the market. Discrimination is the application of a principle relevant in one
sphere to a sphere in which it is inappropriate. In the public sphere, equal citizens exchange
equal duties for equal rights. Finally, the solidarity paradigm sees citizenship as grounded in
national culture and social integration. National identities are essential and primordial, protected
by social boundaries that contrast insiders with outsiders.
Race and ethnicity
In Part II, I indicated in detail how the Republican notion of solidarity is inimical to
autonomous ethnic groups. The State and the nation are supposed to integrate and assimilate
ethnic and racial differences. Like religious practices, they are confined to a narrower private
sphere than in liberal regimes. Universalism should govern political activity and public life in
line with the equality of citizens. However, more recently, social integration is undergoing a
redefinition. Ethnic associations are tolerated if they play a republican role in promoting
solidarity, not separatism. They can contribute to civic virtue and connect individuals to the
larger society.
In introducing the specialization paradigm, I also indicated mat liberalism considers
ethnicity, but not necessarily race, to be one among many bases of pluralism. Compared to
France, liberal societies offer a larger sphere of civil society in which government may not
interfere in such voluntary group practices. Thus, ethnic groups are more likely to serve as a
basis for political mobilization and the pursuit of members' interests. But if the "melting pot"
idea is more appropriately classified under the solidarity paradigm, cultural pluralism stops
short of multicultural ism. This is because the specialization models assume individuals can
choose their group affiliations, freely cross social boundaries, and are equally protected from
naked preference and discrimination through legal rights of citizenship. In the public sphere,
at least, the penumbra of the law provides excluded groups with a way in. Moreover, groups
form shifting alliances depending upon the political issues at hand. Competition for members
and competitive democracy prevent groups from closing themselves off to newcomers.
However, in liberal thought, the basis of group formation and exclusion is not always
material and political interest, but individual tastes and sentiments. Rather than locating ethnic
and racial preference in culture, liberalism finds it in individual psychology. For example,
Allport's (1954, p. 41) classic theory of prejudice noted that
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
47
...every line, fence, or boundary marks off an inside from an outside. Therefore, in strict logic,
an in-group always implies the existence of some corresponding out-group.
Exclusion and hatred not only protect an individual from hurt and frustration, but also
simplify life, saving one the effort of dealing with those who are different. "Safety through
exclusion" is a philosophy of life that narrows one's social world by rejecting what is
threatening. The objects of prejudice, in turn, experience it as insecurity and thus, may be led
to strengthen their own in-group solidarity.18
As Walzer and others working in this paradigm argue, prejudice is combatted with
"tolerance". Allport argued that, above all, the tolerant personality has security, ego-strength,
and trust mat encourages affiliation with others and counteracts the flight into repression,
blame, and institutional guarantees of safety. By fostering the inner security to put one at ease
in dealings with others, prejudice can be overcome.
As noted, the specialization paradigm may be micro-sociological, attributing individual
attitudes to socialization in small groups, but it is not anti-structural. Thus, Allport isolated
certain social and cultural conditions that encourage bigotry. Prejudice tends to increase in
heterogeneous social structures where a minority group is large or increasing in size, where
vertical mobility occurs, and where rapid social change is in progress, producing direct
competition and threats to existing status. Prejudice is also greater where exploitation benefits
powerful interests, where segregation limits intergroup communication, and where the culture
discourages assimilation or cultural pluralism. For example, Thomas and Znaniecki (1918)
noted that, even after individuals migrated from Europe to America, historical group hatreds
were culturally transmitted in accounts of group identity. The conditions for prejudice that
Allport identified are not unlike those found in the other paradigms, but his focus remains
individual psychology, how people learn to exclude others as part of their identities.
Thus, Allport did not mean to suggest that it is impossible to construct tolerance, security,
or a sense of nonexclusive belonging. Preference for one's own identity and even the attribution
of inferiority to the alien are not incompatible with tolerance of others. In contrast with
essentialism, Allport maintained mat groups with their own codes and beliefs, standards and
enemies, need not act in a hostile or negative manner against outsiders. Insofar as identities are
constructed as overlapping, rather than competing and dichotomous, clashes may be avoided.
Here again we revisit liberal pluralism as cross-cutting individual loyalties.
In contrast, the monopoly paradigm is more likely to use the discourse of "racism" than
"prejudice." Like liberalism, this paradigm traditionally took an "instrumental" approach to
race, reducing it to social class interests (Young 1993). Originating in marxist theories and still
influential in Britain, economic theories of racism consider class exploitation to be the ultimate
source of racial, ethnic, local, and cultural prejudices (e.g. Cox 1948; Rex and Thomlinson
1979). Cultural conflicts are exacerbated in reaction to economic insecurity and increasing
labour market competition, particularly where the working class is racially and ethnically
divided within residential localities. Thus, marxist approaches to race deny the reality of
cultural differences as mere false consciousness and reduce "exclusion" to a form of
"exploitation" (Omi and Winnant 1986).
The continuing dominance of this perspective in British social science is often missed by
French observers who argue that British "race relations" are a reflection of mat country's
18
As social closure theory suggests, victims of prejudice may react in many ways besides strengthening in-group
ties or fighting back. Individual's ego defences may lead to obsession with exclusion, withdrawal and passivity,
clowning, slyness, self-hate, aggression against one's own group, seeking sympathy, status striving, and neuroses
(Allport 1954, pp. 142-61).
48
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
"multiculturalism" (Lapeyronnie 1993). To be sure, British colonial history and the peculiar
citizenship accorded to Commonwealth subjects differ considerably from the French treatment
of former colonials and immigrants. Britain's adoption of race relations and anti-discrimination
laws also contrast with France's universalistic treatment of minorities. For example, official
British statistics include data on "ethnic origin" while France affords no recognition of citizens'
national descent. But the British laws, adopted after urban race riots, were modelled upon
liberal American civil rights policies that stress "equal opportunity". In terms of universalism,
British liberalism is similar to French Republicanism (Silverman 1991, 19,92).
But this hardly means Britain has no sense of nationhood to make minorities feel like
outsiders. It is useful to recall that, historically, definitions of Englishness and Britishness were
constructed not only in contrast with peoples of colour but also with continental and especially
French national identities (Kumar 1994). Imperial Britain had a "civilizing" mission that
stressed not only democratic political institutions and common law, but also a national Anglican
Church. Thus, France is not the only country with nation-specific myths that produce bounded
discourse. Social scientists' deconstruction of national identity is just beginning in Britain, but
it reflects intellectual influences from across the Channel more than indigenous modes of
thought. Multicultural ism has a long way to go.
The monopoly paradigm's constructivism has been more influentijal in France. For
example, Balibar (1991) analyses racism as a "total social phenomenon" because it leaves few
aspects of European existence unaffected. Historically, he argues, racism — in the sense of
attributing negative biological characteristics — was first expressed in terms of class when an
"aristocratic" race imposed the slave-trade and colonialism. In the 19th century, racism was
then used against the working class. After the incorporation of the working class as citizens,
racism became tied to the nation and nation-state. Thus, even if it is increasingly justified in
cultural rather than biological terms, "nationalism is a crucial and undeniable historical
determinant of contemporary racism" (p. 71).
Based on this historical account, Balibar deconstructs the term "exclusion." First,
"exclusion is the correlate of this representation of the purity of identity." The extreme right
rejects the term "race" but still uses the discourse of cultural differential ism — what I have
called the solidarity paradigm — when speaking of the "nation," "immigrants," and "culture".
The problem in France is that being a citizen does not mean being part of the majority nation.
The formation of a European identity will also put formerly colonized people and migrant
workers at risk of exclusion. Unfortunately, the far right has already usurped the multicultural
discourse claiming "a right to be different", leaving the opposing discourse of equality and
citizenship with only the weak term, "integration". Balibar sees "insertion" as a weak
euphemism for "assimilation" that serves more to reduce social conflicts than to integrate those
immigrants already inside social structures.
Exclusion is above all a official category of the administration, political class, media, and
ideology more generally (p. 156). It reflects a dominant view that the excluded have no
capacities and do not count. It can be internalized by the excluded themselves. Nor will
including them change the rules of the game.
All the aspects of exclusion enumerated today, with the behaviour of reciprocal provocation that
invades the news (on the one hand, populations 'at risk' - perhaps the contemporary name for what was
called a century ago the "dangerous classes" — and on the other hand, a state apparatus that, by the
force of things, is at once a security and an insecurity apparatus), aren't all these aspects fundamentally
framed by two great modes of exclusion: unemployment and exclusion from citizenship? (p. 157).
This quote exemplifies the monopoly paradigm's economic reductipnism and social
democratic notion of citizenship. Also in line with the paradigm, Balibar insists mat "exclusion"
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
49
and "inequality" cannot be distinguished. Even if both differ from class conflict, "inequality
is situated on the field of exclusions and is governed by the system of exclusion." This is
because those excluded from the market have nowhere else to go. Yet, inequality ignores the
basic antagonism of class. As inequality rises, all social classes may experience obstacles to
mobility. Exclusion can apply to everyone and has no specific object. Thus, the excluded
constitute an unorganized, unrepresented mass, not a class in antagonism with society. Balibar
concedes that identity may be a basis for conflicts of interest, as economic segmentation
theories have shown, but not all exploited peoples encounter the same prejudice. Thus, it is
unlikely the excluded will successfully contest their fate.
Building on Balibar is another constructivist critique of essentialism, Silverman's (1992)
deconstruction of the French conception of the Nation into three discourses: immigration,
racism, and citizenship. Silverman reveals the ambivalence in the dualistic discourse of the
French nation-state in which universalism is preached, but exclusion is practised through a
racialization of the French community. All nation-states, he says, are founded on a complex
unity of both racism and individual equality and civilization. French Republicanism,
particularly in its post-war Gaullist reconstruction, rejected ethnic and racial categories because
they separate individual citizens into exclusive communities, whereas integration and cohesion
must be based on individuals regardless of origin. Thus, legally, race is a category absent in
France (1992, p. 9, 171). Instead, people are classified in terms of nationality; one is either
an itranger or a national, regardless of naturalization. But in practice, the itranger born in
France is confused with an immigri, a category assimilated to non-European, North African,
or anyone who is a threat to national unity and identity. In this way, national and cultural
differences are "racialized" in essentialist, absolutist terms. Like "race," "nation" becomes a
natural, organic, homogeneous, exclusive community based on a fictive unity.
Rather than accept the dualistic discourse opposing exclusion to integration, universalism
to particularism, assimilation to difference, and individualism to community, Silverman argues
that these categories are not opposites but part of the same process of nation-state formation.
There has been continual tension between die universalism, equality and uniformity of modernity that assimilates alterity and is inclusive, and the cultural differential ism that produces hierarchy and exclusion. However, the paradox is that the only way to assimilate ethnic groups is
first to designate them as such. For example, to integrate public housing, it must be allocated
by racial quotas. Although the ambivalent discourse of inclusion and exclusion varies over
time, contemporary problems of immigration and racism reflect the current crisis of the nationstate. As the nation and state are distinguished, the dualisms associated with them decouple as
well.
The critique of similar dualistic distinctions can be found in Ruano-Borbalan's (1992)
discussion of two historical traditions in contemporary French exclusion discourse: a discourse
of "solidarity" and a discourse of "fear of barbarians." However, like the constructivists, he
locates these discourses in social class: "les discours sur les exclus sont avant tout l'oeuvre de
ceux qui ne le sont pas" (p. 29).
Constructivism has become influential in American social science as well, primarily in
cultural studies of race. One example is Collins's (1986) study of African-American women.
She argues that persistent exclusion has given these women a special perspective — what
Foucault called "subjugated knowledge" — that constitutes a culture of resistance. Until
recently, most black women were concentrated in domestic jobs where, unlike black men, they
saw middle- and upper-class whites from the "inside". Altiiough these close relations served
to demystify white power, black women remained economically exploited and were denied a
similar life. "The result was a curious outsider-within stance, a peculiar marginality that
stimulated a special Black women's perspective" (Collins 1991, p. 11). As the monopoly
50
DISCUSSION PAPER SEMES NO.
69
paradigm suggests, the subcultures of the dominated become a resource in resistance and
usurpation struggles.
To summarize, the monopoly paradigm analyses race and ethnicity as ideas and identities
that protect the interests of the powerful. Like class consciousness, the existence of racial and
ethnic solidarity among die excluded is an open question. It may become a resource in struggle.
But at its heart, exclusion is a problem of economic exploitation.
Economic exclusion
In this section of the paper, I come full circle, returning to economic exclusion and how
it differs from terms like poverty, inequality, and the underclass. It might appear that the way
the three paradigms have been described thus far, with the accent placed on cultural and
political belonging, have little to say about economic exclusion. But as the discussion of class
cultures and citizenship may have already hinted, paradigms of social membership and
integration are applicable to the long-term unemployed, those in marginal insecure jobs, or the
"poor." For example, the paradigms address the issue of whether economic exclusion produces
a "culture of poverty" (Lewis 1969).
Solidarity
Douglas's group/grid framework, as developed by Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky
(1990), provides an essentialist illustration. Engbersen et al. (1993) applied the framework to
the question of whether the long-term unemployed develop a monolithic culture. Crossclassifying cultures by group and grid, they in fact arrive at four ways of life among the
unemployed — egalitarian, hierarchical, individualistic, and fatalistic — and add a fifth,
autonomous, characterized by withdrawal from mainstream society. While the latter comes
close to some French conceptions of exclusion, Engbersen et al. find exclusion most evident
in the fatalistic culture of unemployment, which they consider a sort of "culture of poverty".
For some, long-term unemployment led to
...exclusion from social institutions and networks and had made them completely dependent on the
government... The negligible success on the labour market, the high social costs that continual jobseeking behaviour entails and the reduction or disappearance of social frameworks can all serve to
account for this shift from conformist to retreatist behaviour, and the longer the unemployment lasts, the
more this is the case (1993, p. 178).
Although older, poorly educated persons were more likely to experience this isolated,
dependent existence — a "shrinking of the social and geographic world they lived in" — it was
not the only reaction of the unemployed. Hence, Engersen et al. conclude, there are in fact
multiple cultures of unemployment and not a monolithic Dutch underclass.
Theories of die "underclass" are conventionally categorized as conservative or liberal,
behaviourist or structural, with social democrats rejecting the term altogether. However, the
three paradigms proposed here offer a more nuanced appraisal of underclass theories and
encompasses the literature on this subject from other countries. For example, Mead (1986), by
emphasizing the moral obligations of the poor to overcome their deviant values, properly
belongs in the solidarity paradigm, while Murray (1984), in stressing mat joblessness is a
rational, self-interested reaction to the work disincentives in welfare policies, adheres to the
specialization paradigm. Murray's neo-liberalism becomes clearer when it is contrasted with
British and Marshallian Uieories of the underclass. Similarly, the contrast between monopoly
or class conceptions of the underclass and mose of the solidarity paradigm become clear in the
CGP's translation of "the excluded" as "outsiders" in Howard Becker's sense of deviants. The
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
51
CGP explicitly rejects the translation of les exclus as "underclass" (Nasse 1991).
Underlying truly conservative ideas of the underclass is the assumption that preserving the
moral order is a state responsibility. Just as some British Conservatives have pushed "Back to
Basics" ethics, American neo-conservatives have made an issue of family values, sexual
. morality, and the individual responsibility to work. These concerns differ from those of neoclassical liberal theories of the underclass which attribute persistent poverty and unemployment
to perverse welfare state effects or supply-side and human capital variables.
For example, Lawrence Mead argues that there are enough low-skill, low-wage jobs in
the US to absorb the underclass. Rather, idleness reflects moral failure. The state must force
able-bodied citizens to participate in workfare programs in order to balance entitlements with
obligations. Empirical studies that use single motherhood, school leaving, and welfare receipt
as "behavioral" indicators of "underclass" status also assume, in line with the solidarity
paradigm, that the poor are essentially "deviants". For example, Auletta (1982, p. xiii) says
the underclass
...generally feels excluded from society, rejects commonly accepted values, suffers from behavioral
as well as income deficiencies. They don't just tend to be poor; to most Americans their behaviour seems
aberrant.
In these solidarity approaches, dominant consensual values are used as a point of
reference. Even David Ellwood (1988) has argued that welfare reform must reflect the
contradictory American values of individual autonomy, die virtue of work, the primacy of
family, and community. Because Americans want all of these, policy reflects the tradeoffs
found in three "helping conundrums": security vs. work, assistance vs. family structure, and
targeting vs. isolation. Ellwood finds "exclusion" in the third conundrum; the more that
services are targeted at the most needy,
...the more you tend to isolate the people who receive the services from the economic and political
mainstream... Targeting can label and stigmatize people... 'Truly needy' can easily viewed as 'truly
failing' — failing in their responsibilities to provide for themselves...
When people see the most support and services going to those who are doing worst, it appears to
the nonpoor and possibly to the poor that the needy live by different rules than does everyone else...
Targeting tends to isolate politically the "truly needy" from the rest of society (pp. 23-25).
*
v
In brief, social policy should reflect social solidarity.
It is perhaps an exaggeration to argue that the solidarity paradigm has its own approach
to economics, but to the extent that this is so, the French regulation school would have to
qualify (e.g. Boyer 1987). Indeed, die very notion of regulation resonates widi Republican and
especially Durkheimian thought in its departure from the assumption of self-regulating markets.
Key to the regulation school is the concept of "regimes of accumulation", stable configurations
that wed economic institutions to social regulations and norms. For example, during the Trente
Glorieuses, the "fordist" regime was based on a social compact giving corporations control of
mass production in return for high wages to fuel mass consumption. However, since the crisis,
it is unclear whether the emerging "post-fordist" regime will pursue high-quality employment
in "flexible specialization" or low-quality numerical, low-wage flexibility by externalizing
market uncertainties. The regulation framework has also been applied to developing countries
under different international economic regimes (Lipietz 1986).
Specialization
It may seem banal to note that liberalism undergirds neo-classical economics. In die
specialization paradigm of separate spheres, markets work best when states intervene die least.
52
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
The traditional solution to unemployment is to create jobs by lowering wages and eliminating
rigid employment regulations. Generous government income supports may create perverse work
disincentives that engender long-term dependency. Yet die paradigm also allows for deprivation
to be voluntary, radier dian a consequence of deliberate exclusion. Simply granting rights to
assistance does not mean that free individuals will choose to accept it. Consequently, take-up
rates vary widely. The problem is that it is unclear whedier those who do not receive benefits
have the information or access to get them or are in some way shamed, stigmatized, or coerced
not to take them.
These liberal assumptions of the specialization paradigm remain dominant in social
scientific studies of poverty as such. Most neo-classical labour economists studying the duration
of poverty, welfare dependency, and unemployment usually do so in terms of die personal
characteristics of the poor, rather than economic or political conditions (e.g. Duncan 1984).
Although the transfer-dependent constitute only a subset of the poor, proposed reforms of
means-tested welfare or supplementary benefit programs designed to move recipients into work
still incorporate the principle of "least eligibility". The "working poor" are assisted through
more universalistic programs. For example, me declining real income of less-skilled workers
is addressed with training, tax credits, or wage supplements.
In contrast to supply-side theories diat attribute poverty to individual failings, most now
accept that the new poverty and long-term unemployment have demand-side, or structural
causes, perhaps exacerbated by liberal economic and social policies (Wilson 1987; Jencks and
Peterson 1991). Indeed, the educational level of most labour forces continues to rise, suggesting
that supply-side remedies are less necessary (Jencks 1991; Wuhl 1991). In the United States,
continuing job growth has focused attention on structural causes of "poverty" and the
"underclass", whereas in Europe, the emphasis is on rising long-term unemployment and social
exclusion. The split between supply-side and demand-side theories parallel the division between
classical and social liberalism already discussed.
I classify some structural approaches to unemployment and poverty in the specialization
radier man the monopoly paradigm because, however unwillingly and unknowingly, researchers
who adopt a methodological individualism also take on board liberal individualistic
assumptions. One sees in these studies an emphasis on personal characteristics, microsociological interaction, and psychological tendencies, although they may be seen as die
outcome of changes in the larger economic context. In contrast to die solidarity paradigm, these
studies do not emphasize die dualism between insiders and the excluded, but see die latter in
all tiieir rich diversity.
For example, "die poor" is in fact a very social heterogeneous category of individuals.
CERC found that no one characteristic (e.g. difficulty in childhood, living in a single-parent
household) could be identified as the principle cause of poverty or receipt of RMI in France.
Similarly, Jencks (1991) rejected die idea of an American underclass because' trends in various
social indicators — poverty, female-headed households, dropout rates, etc. — moved in
different directions, so that disadvantages do not cumulate in die same group of people (see also
Herpin 1993).
'
There is also a long research tradition on die social psychology and behaviour of die
unemployed (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 1971; Bakke 1940; Komarovsky 1940).
Unemployment is usually experienced as humiliating, causing die jobless to wididraw from
friends and family. Most scholarly research in the US (Schlozman and Verba 1979), Britain
(Morris 1990), the Netherlands (Engbersen et al. 1993), and Germany (Kronauer 1993) has
found diat diose unemployed for at least a year are socially heterogenous.
For example, Newman's (1988) study of downwardly mobile Americans identified botii
general and particular responses to unemployment. Most workers felt anger, dismay, and a
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
53
sense of injustice, as if a social contract had been broken. Unemployment challenged personal
identities, disrupted the life trajectories of entire families, and undermined cultural values, like
loyalty and the work ethic. However, managers, with their individualist, meritocratic creed,
tended to blame themselves, whereas workers whose identities were shared with others in a
union or a community tended to blame outside forces for unemployment. In addition to
providing an explanation for their fate, communities of experience helped the unemployed
retain some dignity. Nevertheless, a shared sense of victimization did not overcome feelings
of helplessness.
In France, studies report that long-term unemployment affects virtually all categories of
workers (Reynaud 1993). While INSEE found that those unemployed for under a year are no
different socially from newly hired workers, those unemployed "on the way to exclusion" are.
Long-term unemployment today touches a more diverse part of the population than the
unskilled youth, aged, and women among whom it was once concentrated. "Exclusion" through
unemployment is still related to age, lack of diploma or skill, inexperience, immigrant
background, and handicap, but there is also much turnover among the unemployed over time.
While the number of people finishing school with diplomas (BAC and CAP-BEP) keeps rising,
increasing competition, individual characteristics do not predict well who will become excluded
from the labour market and who will regain employment. Even some young school leavers are
hired before their experienced and educated elders. The longer people are unemployed, the
more discouraged and isolated they become (Wuhl 1991, 1992). Thus, as the monopoly
paradigm suggests, there appears to be a labour queue in which some people can jump ahead
of those who have had longer bouts of stigmatizing joblessness.
Even when the unemployed reenter the labour market, new job openings are almost all of
short duration (Paugam 1993b). About half the new unemployment insurance (ANPE)
registrations reflect the end of a precarious job. Thus, in addition to seemingly permanent
unemployment of the "underclass" and the cyclical notion of long-term unemployment
underlying traditional social insurance (ANPE), the problem in France is recurrent
unemployment — "ch6mage d'exclusion" — in which many move back and forth among
idleness, internships, training programs, and short-term jobs (Wuhl 1992). Rather than
inadequate skills or inadequate job growth, the problem of recurrent unemployment stems from
the creation of short-term insecure jobs.
The heterogeneity of the poor and long-term unemployed is especially salient in research
that follows individuals over time. Even when these studies define exclusion in terms of the
Republican "social bond," they go on to analyse exclusion not as a societal problem of macrosocial integration nor as an absolute categorical condition of being over some boundary line.
Rather, exclusion is a multi-dimensional process that individuals undergo to a greater or lesser
extent. As a personal trajectory, exclusion occurs at different paces and in different social
spheres.
For example, French sociological research considers exclusion to be both an economic and
a social process. Paugam (1993a,c, 1991) defines exclusion as a process of "social
disqualification" that occurs in three stages, each conducing to the next: fragility
(under/unemployed but socially connected), dependence on social aid (discouraged from
working but filling other social roles), and then, total rupture of the "lien social." Unlike the
classical "Fourth World" poor, the "new poor" include the downwardly mobile who lose their
relation to stable work and with it, experience social withdrawal, depression, poor health,
family breakdown, identity crises, and a feeling of uselessness. At each .stage, people
renegotiate their identities and may find a way to regain their previous status: job searches,
training programs, social assistance, a minimum income. But if individuals travel the full
course of disaffiliation, they lose most of their social ties — job, housing, their relations with
54
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
the social assistance system, and the most elementary form of solidarity, a stable family.
Accumulating handicaps and failures, they come to feel useless, uncared foil, hopeless, and may
turn to drugs or alcohol. They can become hostile to the welfare system. For example, about
half the homeless people in France do not receive RMI, although they arj eligible and know
of its existence. Without relations of any kind, they lack the means to otyain food, clothing,
and shelter and cannot find a way back into society.
i
Castel (1992, 1991) too argues that there is a dynamic three-stage continuum running from
full integration through precarious, vulnerable employment and fragile rela ions to disaffliation
or exclusion.1* Although the new poor are socially heterogeneous, Castel argues that the
overrepresented social categories share a particular mode of dissociation of tie "lien social" that
he calls "disaffliation." It is an effect of the conjuncture of two vectors, one economic, the
other social. The first axis runs from integration (stable employment) through forms of
precarious, intermittent, or seasonal occupations to the complete loss of v 'ork which he calls
"exclusion". The second axis runs from "insertion" in stable socio-fanilial networks of
sociability to total "isolation". When cross-classified, these dimensions identify a zone of
"integration" — guaranteed permanent work and solid relational support — which assures social
cohesion, and a zone of disaffiliation — the absence of work and social isojlation — widi little
or no cohesion. Between the two extremes is a zone of vulnerability with precarious work and
fragile relations. However, the boundaries between zones are porous and a high score on one
axis might compensate for a low score on the other (e.g. a zone of assistance might be defined
by no work but strong social insertion). Thus, depending on the sppere, one can be
economically poor and socially integrated. Nevertheless, economic or social vulnerability puts
one at risk of the other kind. For example, 77 per cent of RMI recipients lack jobs and 76 per
cent lack a spouse. Castel's solution is "insertion" — not just distributing aid but also filling
the social void. In that way, policy can be preventive and reparative, intervening in the process
before people enter the zone of disaffiliation.
For all of these observers, the causes of individual processes of exclusion are structural.
Economic and social trends have independently contributed to the rise of I exclusion. On the
economic side, the labour market has changed. Although countries diffejr depending upon
national labour and social regulations, there is a general micro-economic restjructuring of firms.
In the attempt to avoid worker protections and improve competitiveness, employers have moved
away from long-term employment contracts towards part-time and flexible jobs. Rising
unemployment allows firms to hire workers who are over-qualified for the jpbs they do (Wuhl
1991, 1992; Rodgers and Rodgers 1992). For some, this has resulted in downward mobility
or the perception of underemployment, with the attendant problems of wo|rker morale, high
turnover, and low productivity. For others with less skill, the cumulative effects of this process
pushes them out of the labour market entirely, making them "unemployable." An additional
reason why some categories of worker remain unemployed longer is that Ihiring is not only
based on whemer the worker's skill fits the job, but also whether the worker! will integrate into
the workgroup (Vincens 1993). Thus, a wide range of social characteristics may be
disadvantageous to regaining employment. Finally, the longer people are out of work, the more
personal problems they develop and the more they appear unemployable to pc tential employers.
Besides these changes in the structure of employment, changes in sther institutional
spheres have caused individuals to become socially isolated. First, losing a job means losing
19
Already in the 1970s, Castel (1978) reviewed American conceptualizations of poverty as the absence of social
roles: the poor don't work, are unkempt, don't have normal families, produce nothing and possess nothing but
troubles, offenses, and crimes. But he indited the psychologizing of poverty as blaming the victim and attributed
it to the values underlying America's lack of basic social assistance.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
55
job-related benefits that protected workers from risks. Reemployment in temporary, short-term
jobs may not provide social insurance coverage. Turning to social aid that formerly assisted
only the "eternal exclus" entails a loss of status as well as income (Castel 1991). Second, the
decline of organized labour, ideological politics, and the breakup of working class
neighbourhoods has eroded class solidarities. In the banlieues, many youth do not form longterm attachments and immigrants cannot assimilate (Dubet 1987); in the ghettos, the young
have no positive "role models" or local institutions (Wilson 1987). The decline of local culture,
in the sense of shared values and practices in daily life, also weakens financial and social
support from neighbours. Third, while school should be a "vector of social cohesion", many
drop out because they feel excluded. One's own home can be a "ghetto" if the family has no
money. Indeed, job and family instability have led to more single-parent families and to more
people living alone (Daugareilh and Laborde 1993). In sum, exclusion is a series of ruptures
of belonging that leave individuals stranded in a "social no man's land" (Castel 1991).
However, different social spheres offer different affiliations and resources. Family and
community ties may replace income for the long-term structurally unemployed. Widi access to
productive assets — land, capital, credit — self-employment and self-provisioning may be
possible, incorporating the excluded into direct market exchanges, barter, and informal
economies. The West has seen a rise in self-employment, self-help strategies and household
economies among the poor, a phenomenon once confined to developing countries (Mingione
1994; Pahl 1984; Morris 1990).
One illustration of the liberal approach to informal economies weds network theories to
the concept of "social capital". It builds on rational choice theory but rejects its extreme
individualistic premises of utility maximization by assuming socialized individuals. For
example, Coleman (1988) views the various forms of social capital — obligations and
expectations, information channels, and social norms — as resources for action, increasing
human and financial capital. Networks that attain social structural "closure" enhance the
positive effects of particularistic obligations, expectations, and norms. Whereas social capital
is plentiful in some ethnic economic enclaves, black ghettos tend to lack social capital.20
Larger households and residents of tightly-knit local communities have an advantage in
maintaining consumption on these bases; informal economies are less likely to work among the
socially disaffiliated. The State may be their only recourse. Yet, even among the economically
inactive, access to "social capital" coupled with free time may enlarge one's social world
through participation in the "household economy" and local voluntary activities (Pahl 1984;
Mingione 1994; Putnam 1993; but see Morris 1994).
To summarize, the specialization paradigm of economic exclusion emphasizes the
individual causes and effects of structural changes in many spheres of social life. On the supply
side, different combinations of personal characteristics produce a socially heterogeneous poor,
unemployed population. No single social attribute is responsible for exclusion. On the demand
side, structural changes alter individuals' immediate social environments and thus, their
opportunities for social affiliations in a variety of separate spheres. As I will discuss in the
conclusion, these findings are moving social policy in an increasingly individualistic direction.
Since each individual has a different combinations of problems, assistance must be rendered
comprehensively and globally.
20
More recent work classifies types of social capital by the nature of group solidarity underlying it (Portes and
Sensenbrenner 1993). Thus, exclusion from social capital can be conceived under each of the paradigms proposed
here.
56
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO. 69
Monopoly and labour market segmentation
As I mentioned, the monopoly paradigm tends to treat exclusion and unemployment as
symptoms of severe economic exploitation. As Joan Robinson put it, "the only thing that is
worse than being exploited is not being exploited" (cited in Streeten 1993, p. 2).21
Social democrats reject the term underclass "as little more than a crude synonym for...
the old mantle of the undeserving poor". It diffuses "an image of poor people as split into two
sharply divided groups [that] helps perpetuate their political powerlessness by strengthening the
barriers that for so long have divided them against each other" (Katz 1989, p. 234-5). Michael
Katz provides an excellent example of monopoly paradigm's exclusion discourse in his critique
of underclass theories. First, he deconstructs the solidarity approach (p. 236):
We can think about poor people as "them" or as "us." For the most part, Americans have talked
about "them." Even in the language of social science, as well as in ordinary conversation and political
rhetoric, poor people usually remain outsiders, strangers to be pitied or despised, helped or punished,
ignored or studied, but rarely full citizens, members of a larger community on the same terms as the rest
of us.
He also deconstructs liberal discourse: "Poverty in America is profoundly individual; like
popular economics, it is supply-side" (p. 237). He then (p.237) argues that exclusion and
citizenship are monopoly issues:
For finally, the politics of poverty are about the processes of inclusion and exclusion in American
life: Who, to put the question crudely, gets what? How are goods distributed? As such, it is a question
of race, class, gender, and the bases of power... Europeans today write about the "new poverty," which
they understand in a similar way. They do not write very much about the underclass, which highlights
the peculiarly American tendency to transform poverty from a product of politics and economics into a
matter of individual behaviour.
In the case of African-Americans (1993, p. 454), "the story of exclusion is in part a
familiar one." Employers, white workers, and unions excluded African-Americans from trades,
manufacturing, office work, and other economic opportunities. Until government jobs were
opened, the lack of an ethnic employment niche excluded blacks "from the .dominant process
of immigrant economic mobility" and still excludes unskilled blacks. Voter registration
procedures excluded them from citizenship. "Legal segregation, social customs, and private
arrangements excluded them from public facilities and white neighbourhoods." In sum,
exclusion produced the economic, spatial, social and cultural isolation of the inner-city black
poor. And like social liberals and social democrats, Katz calls (p. 239) for "finding ways to talk
about poor people as "us" that expand ideas of citizenship" and 'defending', in Michael
Walzer's phrase, 'spheres of justice'."
French deconstructions of liberal and Republican discourse about the minority poor can
also been found. For example, Paris' mayor and former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac created
a stir by expressing sympathy for the French working class family who must put up with the
"noise and smell" of living next door to an immigrant with 3 or 4 wives and 20 children and
who receives 50,000 francs a month in social assistance without working. Maury and
Dommenach (1991) responded:
Croit-on qu'aux imprecations ravageuses qui malaxent en une meme pate solide et collante les
themes de la decadence, de l'insecuritd, de 1'immigration, de l'identite nationale et du matraquage fiscal
21
Similarly, Castel (1991) also cited the 17th century Traite' des Ordres as saying "il n'est certes pire profession
que de ne pas avoir profession".
i
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
57
il suffira d'opposer quelques gentils couplets bien propres sur la tolerance, les droits de l'homme et le
refus de 1'exclusion?
The dominance of the monopoly perspective in Europe is reflected in Eurostat's and the
Luxembourg Income Survey's adoption of a standardized comparative method measuring
poverty relative to average national income. As I noted at the outset, many specialists in the
relative definition and measurement of poverty have incorporated the rhetoric of exclusion and
T.H. Marshall's emphasis on full participation in the community (e.g. Townsend 1993). For
example, Rainwater (1992) defines poverty in terms of social participation and the ability to
fill mainstream social roles: parent, spouse, producer, citizen. "Without a requisite level of
goods and services, ...individuals cannot participate as full members of their society" (p. 5).
When otherwise heterogeneous people cannot maintain their social rank, they distance
themselves from friends, break ties with family and old relations, and exclude themselves from
their usual social networks at work or leisure.
Similarly, some scholarly analyses of the "underclass" have begun to adopt the Marshallian
understanding of the term "exclusion" (Schmitter-Heisler 1992; Mingione 1993). For example,
Dahrendorf s (1985) theory of the "underclass" draws on Marshall and notes "a crucial
boundary...between the majority class and those who are being defined out of the edifice of
citizenship."22 Another example is Morris (1994) who concludes that the British underclass
consists of those suffering from "status exclusion".
The relation between the ideas of social closure and economic exclusion is epitomized by
theories of labour market segmentation. Segmentation occurs wherever there are barriers to free
competition among workers and/or firms. There are many labour market barriers, from
regulations to credentials, and they operate simultaneously. They may even be efficient, so that
exclusion becomes compatible with economic growth. But like social closure more generally,
labour market segmentation results in poverty and economic inequality.
Two theories dominated the first wave of segmentation research. First, in institutional
economics, Doeringer and Piore (1971) distinguished between primary and secondary labour
markets based on both job quality and worker characteristics. To explain why some groups
could not gain access to highly paid, secure employment, they proposed the notion of the
"internal labour market" that insulates primary workers from external market competition.
While the secondary sector operates like a classical competitive market, early dual labour
market theories assumed that nonprice criteria, such as race, rationed good jobs (Lang and
Dickens 1988). Similarly, some firms and not others can use unionization, promotion from
within, and other institutional restrictions on mobility to limit access to in-house jobs.
Neo-marxist critiques of neo-classical economics complemented the neo-institutional
approach. "Radical" economists saw the segmentation and stratification of labour markets as
mechanisms to divide and control labour under conditions of partial unionization. Worker
power produces higher wages in unionized segments, while the disproportionately female and
minority secondary and subordinate primary labour markets serve as a "reserve army" of
labour (Gordon, Reich, and Edwards 1982).
Most of these early studies were criticized on theoretical, methodological, and empirical
grounds.23 But after a decade of criticism, labour market segmentation developed a more
22
Yet, liberal influences remain in his work, most particularly, his enumeration of the social characteristics of
the underclass.
23
Among the most important criticisms were that the industrial characteristics defining sectors were not strongly
correlated; that classifying workers into sectors by their earnings introduced circular reasoning and truncation bias
in rates of return; and that individuals choose sectors for their differential characteristics, introducing heterogeneity
58
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
technical neo-classical definition. Virtually all economic labour market segmentation theories
begin with the assumption that, contrary to competitive or human capital theories of wages,
different jobs offer different compensation to equally productive workers. Compensation is
usually interpreted as wages, but promotion opportunities, fringe benefits, or risks of
unemployment can also serve as monopolized resources. Since the supply side is controlled,
the reason for a persisting differential must lie in the rationality of firms. If wages remain
higher, there must also be barriers to mobility, access, and competition from unemployed or
otherwise employed workers. Exclusion rations jobs by nonprice criteria and creates queues.
Thus, rather than there being a contradiction between high unemployment and economic
growth, exclusion and the accumulation of surplus workers may in fact be compatible with
economic efficiency.
Based on methodologically sound studies,24 there is now strong evidence for labour
market segmentation in the US (Dickens and Lang 1985). The existence of large and enduring
inter-industry wage differentials among equally productive workers provides some of die most
compelling empirical substantiation of labour market segmentation theory in economics
(Krueger and Summers 1986; Bulow and Summers 1986). However, current economic
segmentation theories differ as to the particular mechanisms responsible.
"Efficiency wage" models assume that some firms find it profitable to pay above-market
wages because they raise worker productivity more than enough to offset additional labour costs
(see Katz 1988 for a review). For example, shirking can be reduced and work effort increased
if higher wages increase the cost of losing a job and lower the cost of supervision (Bulow and
Summers 1986). Thus,firmswith high monitoring costs, such as large corporations, might find
it easier to trust their workers if they reward them amply. Over and beyond the wage effects
of union threats, minimum wage laws, large firms' internal labour markets, or other institutions
producing "imperfect" competition, excess labour supply can become a structural feature of the
labour market in equilibrium.
Efficiency wages may also improve worker morale and loyalty to die firm because they
are perceived to be "fairer" than market wages. Alternatively, efficiency wages may be paid
to reduce turnover and the costs of recruiting and training new workers. Indeed, while
industrial wage differentials persist after controlling for human capital, unmeasured personal
abilities, occupation, fringe benefits, and compensating job conditions, they are related to job
tenure and quit probabilities (Krueger and Summers 1988). This suggests workers in high-wage
industries are earning rents mat they do not want to lose. Indeed, between 1970 and 1987,
interindustry wage dispersion has risen, partly because those in more productive industries are
enjoying increased rents (Bell and Freeman 1991). Thus, exclusion would appear to benefit
"insiders" who enjoy a monopoly.
"Insider-outsider" models start from the same premise as efficiency wage models.
However, reasoning from union behaviour, they argue that the turnover costs of replacing
incumbent workers with the unemployed increase the bargaining power of organized insiders
who, by mreatening to quit, can demand higher wages. Outsiders cannot gain access to good
jobs by accepting lower wages since insiders can cost employers more than they would gain
by hiring outsiders. Bodi the erosion of skills and the stigma employers attach to "outsiders"
make it more difficult to reenter the labour market after a spell of unemployment, particularly
and selectivity bias.
24
Two techniques for testing the existence of labour market segmentation appear to pass muster. One uses
"switching models" in which no assumptions are made as to which jobs are in which sectors; the other uses
clustering techniques that split jobs at the mean to avoid truncation and estimates effects separately by race and
gender to avoid heterogeneity bias.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOUDARfTY
59
if it is a long one (Lindbeck and Snower 1986). Again, the empirical support for this model
is that high-wage industries have lower quit rates (Lindbeck and Snower 1986).
When monitoring and turnover costs are more important in some sectors, industries, or
firms than in others, one would expect to find labour market segmentation. Some jobs will pay
higher wages to increase productivity and will be rationed. Occupants of "good jobs" who do
not need added incentives will still collect "rents" because those jobs will be scarce relative to
the number of workers wanting them. In neo-classical theory, this excess supply for good jobs
should drive down primary sector wages, enabling workers to attain access through
intersectoral mobility. Instead, it produces a labour queue of either the unemployed or workers
in "bad" jobs. Of course, labour market queues are also the basis of an important theory of
statistical discrimination (Thurow 1975).
In sum, labour market institutions and institutional demand-side variables can be seen as
the source of group monopolies and social exclusion, which in turn is responsible for wage
inequality. Thus, earlier attempts to reduce inequality through collective bargaining and labour
legislation may now appear exclusionary. The higher wages they produced may have created
incentives to shift employment to more competitive sectors. Indeed, these processes underlie
theories of the informal economy, especially in developing countries (Portes, Castells, and
Benton 1989), and of "external" or "numerical" labour market flexibility in the West (OECD
1989, 1986; Boyer 1987; Tarling 1987). Obviously, differential sectoral labour costs are only
one reason for the rise of precarious employment and sub-contracting — others are greater
market uncertainty and the economies of scale derived from specialization — but exclusion may
in fact be the source as well as the result of labour market regulation.
Labour legislation may have inadvertently created new bases of exclusion. For example,
there is an incentive to shift work to those firms — e.g. those below a certain size or run by
the self-employed — or employees — e.g. part-timers and temporaries — that evade or are
exempted from compulsory welfare contributions, mandated benefits, taxes, or hours and safety
standards. Thus, new labour market entrants only have access to less desirable, unprotected
jobs. There may also be tradeoffs between redistributive equity, in the form of social security
contributions, and economic efficiency. Although negative income tax experiments suggest that
substitution effects (that reduce effort) may be outweighed or at least offset by income effects
(that increase effort), marginal, rather than proportional taxation may exacerbate the tradeoff.
Assumptions about a decent "family wage" that underlay much labour legislation and collective
bargaining may have also contributed to exclusion on the basis of gender and household
structure. The labour force influx of working women partly accounts for growth in part-time
employment (Godbout 1993).
However, the tradeoffs that have received die most attention of late are those related to
the "flexibility" debate (e.g. Rodgers and Rodgers 1992). Global competition has increased the
pressure to cut labour costs through external flexibility. Where a large youth cohort has bloated
the labour supply, there may indeed be a tradeoff between wages and employment (Bloom,
Freeman, and Korenman 1988; OECD 1993). As good jobs in high-wage sectors are automated
or subdivided into more low-wage jobs in less regulated, more competitive sectors, employment
growth may be decoupled from its historic association with rising wages and greater income
equality. In most countries, the relative wage return to higher education has been rising,
resulting in greater income inequality (Davis 1993; Katz, Loveman, and Blanchflower 1987;
OECD 1993). Technological change appears associated with the trend.
All this implies that differential access to firms introducing internal, "qualitative"
flexibility — where jobs and profits are more tied to capital investment, the reorganization of
production, teamwork, and retraining than to the cost of labour inputs — may itself generate
a new basis for labour market segmentation and exclusion in the future. Not only wages, but
60
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
job security as well may be traded off for employment. Indeed, in a number of OECD
countries - France, Germany, and France — employment growth was almost exclusively parttime (Godbout 1993).
In sum, segmentation and efficiency wage theories account for exclusion from a livelihood
within the framework of the monopoly paradigm. Since earnings still remain the major source
of income around the world, any labour market barriers or shelters from competition that
persistently raise some workers' wages at the expense of others' effectively exclude the latter
from access to some material resources or productive practices. Exclusion may be justified on
efficiency grounds, meritocratic grounds (like qualifications and credentials), or political
grounds (as with institutional protections like seniority that unions have bargained for their
members). Exclusion may result from differential access to high-wage countries, high-wage
industries, or firms with internal labour markets and "flexible specialization." Since informal
social contacts and place of residence often channel some groups into such firms and industries,
socially isolated or minority groups may find themselves at a disadvantage.
Conclusion: Exclusion, politics and social policy
In this paper, I have presented three major paradigms of exclusion, each grounded in a
different conception of integration and citizenship. In the solidarity paradigm dominant in
France, exclusion is the rupture of a social bond between the individual and society that is
cultural and moral, rather than interested in orientation. Cultural boundaries give rise to
socially constructed dualistic categories for ordering the world, defining the poor, unemployed,
and ethnic minorities as deviant outsiders. Republican citizenship wedded national solidarity
to political rights and duties.
In the specialization paradigm, dominant in the US and contested in the UK, exclusion
reflects discrimination. Social differentiation, economic divisions of labour, and the separation
of spheres need not produce hierarchically ordered social categories. This is because "excluded"
individuals are free to move across boundaries, and spheres of social life governed by different
principles are legally separate. Cultural pluralism like political pluralism rest upon voluntary
membership and group competition. Liberal models of citizenship emphasize the contractual
exchange of individual rights and obligations and the tensions between the sphere of civil
society based on liberty and a public sphere based on equality and democracy.
Finally, the third paradigm, influential in Britain and many Northern European countries,
sees exclusion as a consequence of the formation of group monopolies. Powerful groups, often
with distinctive cultural identities, restrict the access of outsiders to valued resources through
a process of "social closure." The same process is evident in labour market and enterprise
segmentation which draws boundaries of exclusion between and within firms. At the heart of
this paradigm is the necessary overlap of group distinctions and inequality, "the barrier and the
level" to adopt Gobelot's term. Inequality is mitigated by social democratic citizenship which,
in T.H. Marshall's formulation, entails full participation in the community.
Each approach to citizenship can be discerned in national welfare state institutions. Contemporary welfare states still embody the value premises that historically justified the initial social intervention of liberal democratic governments, particularly the tradeoff between assistance
and wages (Ashford 1986). Only in the US did liberal ideas remain dominant. The British
debate over social legislation led to a "new liberalism" that nonetheless retained the individualistic assumptions of the Poor Laws. In France, "social policies became parts of a more general
rationalization of collective authority" under the banner of social solidarity (p. 48).
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
61
Once firmly established, the basic institutions of postwar welfare states changed little.
Means-tested programs were targeted at residual strata unable to work, while universal welfare
state programs guaranteed the economic and social rights necessary for the exercise of full
citizenship. But the social homogeneity upon which universalism was based is now rapidly
breaking down.
The socioeconomic changes are most apparent. The rise in long-term unemployment even
after economic recoveries indicates that more and more Europeans are permanently
withdrawing from the labour market and are not sharing in the fruits of economic growth and
technological progress. In 1985, over half the 14 million unemployed in the EC were out of
work for a year or more (EC Commission 1992), a figure that keeps rising. Among workers,
restructuring has eliminated or threatens to eliminate many jobs, so that more people have
discontinuous employment histories or feel vulnerable to losing their positions. Similarly, a rise
in the number of workers whose employment is unprotected by basic labour regulations, in part
because more jobs are short-term or in legally-exempted firms, has increased turnover,
undermined employment security, and lowered expectations about future consumption levels.
For both economic and demographic reasons, there has been a rise in the number of recipients of means-tested benefits as well as those ineligible for or uncovered by any social assistance programs. In some cases, social insurance benefits are exhausted, propelling the unemployed into categories that receive less generous income replacement. As unemployment and
falling wages affect the skilled and middle classes, bad debts are rising. In other cases, personal
assets and social support are exhausted, leaving people destitute. By 198S, homelessness in the
European Community was estimated at 3 million persons were homeless (EC Commission
1992). In most European countries, the stark visibility of unprotected poverty — the homeless
and the hungry served only by charitable associations — has become commonplace.
In contrast, one of the less visible social trends of the last decades is the rise in social
isolation and individuation. Under economic and cultural pressures, a combination of family _
dissolution and changing marital patterns have increased the number of single-headed
households. Declines in union membership, party adherence, and residential community life
have reduced the social support and organized political expression of individuals in distress.
The geographic unevenness of economic restructuring has contributed to rising racial-ethnic and
class segregation, stigmatizing entire areas where the disadvantaged are concentrated.
Periodically, these residents engage in or are victimized by violence.
New health problems have emerged. The reappearance of tuberculosis, the spread of
AIDS, rises in drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness are all interrelated with rising poverty
and social isolation. These trends too call for new medical and public health measures.
Finally, while these trends have affected members of most social strata, producing a
heterogeneous population in need of some form of assistance, they have disproportionately
touched particular groups: youth, unskilled older workers, women, and those of foreign
descent. Many in these groups — youth, women who never worked, illegal immigrants, nonnaturalized residents — are often categorically ineligible for any form of social assistance.
Moreover, immigrants in some European countries lack civil and political rights. Thus, there
has been an increase in the number of European residents without legal protections and access
to political participation.
Reflecting the cumulative impact of these many trends, most, if not all European countries
have experienced a rise in both poverty, in an absolute sense, and income inequality relative
to average living standards. Demands to address these newly identified social problems have
increased as well. For more and more people, the assumption underlying post-war social
insurance programs of a uniform life-cycle, career pattern, and family structure no longer
applies. The growing types of social disadvantage appear to be "new."
62
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Older social assistance programs cannot adequately address the "new poverty" (Room
1990). The core universalist policies underlying European welfare states do not adequately
cover these "special needs". Means-tested categorical programs designed to serve small
constituencies are growing rapidly. Moreover, once-quiescent beneficiaries are politicizing
under the banner of "demographic identities", forming non-profit groups, and pressuring local
governments in areas where they are concentrated. Concerned less with transfers than with
unpopular and residual social services (e.g. drug rehabilitation, assistance for refugees or
immigrants, urban programs), this "politics of consumption" introduces distributive conflicts
between productive and unproductive citizens and between cultural and religious groups. The
demands for individualized, differentiated services for socially marginal groups challenges the
principle of universalism that once legitimated the post-war welfare states flmmergut 1993).
This crisis in social policy requires a rethinking of the notion of "citizenship."
In France, these manifestations of "exclusion" have led to new social policy approaches.
In contrast with earlier social assistance programs and traditional social work, which addressed
each discrete personal problem with a specialized institutional intervention, new social
"insertion" policies "globally" treat the excluded individual. They aim to reestablish three types
of "social bond" simultaneously: the bond to oneself, or self-esteem; the bond to community,
or feeling part of a "subsystem of belonging"; and the social bond, feeling like a citizen.
Nevertheless, most of the expenses devoted to combating individual patterns of exclusion
have in fact gone to income replacement; less money is spent on die prevention of exclusion
or on insertion (Room 1990). The inadequacy of other social policies accounts for the
heterogeneity of RMI recipients and tiiose receiving other "solidarity" allocations designed to
promote insertion. New French policies to aid occupational "insertion" outside the framework
of enterprises have not improved the employment chances of the long-term unemployed. For
example, a reduction of the minimum wage (SMIC) — itself a liberal policy producing
"exclusion par le revenu" — had limited impact on youth unemployment, but it was pursued
nonetheless. Similarly, the unemployed enter a "galere" in which they bounce from training
program to internship witfiout improving their odds of getting a job. CEREQ, after following
2000 young school leavers with a bac or less between 1986 and 1988, found only a third had
jobs after two years; 53 per cent were still in transition and 15 per cent were considered "at
risk of exclusion" (Paugam 1993a). Urban policies, too, have largely concentrated on physical
improvements at the expense of local insertion and community participation (Simon 1992).
Ashford (1986) argued that the initial establishment of national welfare states was a
process of "institutional searching" for political compromises. Thus, social policies came to
blend pre-existing nation-specific norms and practices. The achievement of such compromises
put political ideas in the forefront, ideas still reflected in existing welfare state institutions.
Today, the importance of ideas in forging political consensus would appear to be just as
important. New social problems call for major reforms of welfare state institutions. Does the
notion of exclusion offer a new formula to achieve die political compromises necessary to meet
these challenges?
The importance mat French observers attach to distinguishing "exclusion" from other
terms denoting social disadvantage suggests that the concept does have political significance.
By defining exclusion as a thoroughly new, multidimensional problem touching diose at all
levels of the social hierarchy in some respects or at some point in their lives, it may become
easier to build large, cross-class coalitions to combat it. Most people have suffered from some
kind of rejection or misery, and apprehension about it has become widespread (see Bourdieu
1993; Balibar 1992). As die connotations of exclusion expand to encompass die dashing of
extravagant aspirations, "chaque individu se considerera finalement comme un exclu" (Xiberras
1993).
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
63
For example, a widely reported December 1993 survey by CSA/La Rue,z newspaper sold
by the homeless, found that 55 per cent of French adults and 69 per cent of 18-24 year old
youdi fear they themselves will become "excluded" and three-fourths worried that one of those
close to them would be (Andre" 1994). That feeling of vulnerability is not confined to France.
The Families and Work Institute found that 42 per cent of American workers report their
companies are reducing their work forces temporarily or permanently (Gans 1993). That near
majorities perceive a clear threat of exclusion — in the broad sense of a loss of social status
— may account for the term's wide appeal and increasingly broad application.
Whedier these fears will be sufficient to mobilize strong political support for new social
policies remains to be seen. For example, during the March 1994 demonstrations against the
CIP, the second minimum wage for those under 25 years old, students debated whether to focus
on what a CGC union member called the "jeunes Kleenex, qu'on utilise et qu'on rejette", or
to extend their goals to fighting the Pasqua immigration laws and to demanding youth programs
for the unskilled. As one student spokesperson asked, "si on obtient satisfaction pour les
bac+2, est-ce qu'on continue a se battre sur les CAP et les BEP?" One response:
C'est nul, completement individualiste de se cantonner a notre propre IUT de privilegies. On va
repartir comme des cons en cours alors que plein de jeunes sont descendus avec nous dans la rue. On
va passer pour des moins que rien (Liberation, 30 March 1994, p. 24).
Other relatively privileged university students expressed the fear of being "worse off than
our parents" and of a future in which "the great majority will be much poorer". Such concerns
were shared with the unemployed suburban youth and homeless who joined the students in the
streets.
However, other students sought to disassociate themselves from the "vandals" who turned
to looting and violent encounters with the police (Riding 1994). Indeed, the official response
of the Balladur government was to exempt die most privileged, tiiose with advanced degrees,
from the wage ceilings imposed on others, preempting a cross-class alliance. Thus, if the
common fear of exclusion might serve as an interest that cements an alliance among those
differentially placed in the social hierarchy, it may not be enough to overcome other social
cleavages.
Indeed, exclusion may become a euphemism for stigmatized or scapegoated groups. Its
meaning may narrow to those with multiple disadvantages. From mis perspective, the mass
protests against declining employment prospects may simply reflect a defense of traditional
prerogatives and a demand for protection from increasing group competition. Terms like
exclusion, the new poor, or the underclass — by identifying the victims of economic
restructuring and die end of full employment — may even justify majority resistance to
redistributive taxation and expenditures (Room 1990).
Thus, while the idea of exclusion could be useful to reformers who want to point to die
inadequacies of current welfare states, it might conversely serve to distract attention from the
general rise in inequality, general unemployment, and family dissolution mat is affecting all
social classes. By ghettoizing risk categories under a new label and publicizing the more
spectacular forms of poverty requiring emergency aid, policies to combat "exclusion" may
make it easier to retarget money on smaller social categories like the homeless or long-term
unemployed while redistributing funds away from die universal social insurance programs mat
traditionally protected the working and middle classes. To conclude, just as the idea of
exclusion has many meanings, it can also serve a variety of political purposes.
64
DISCUSSION PAPER Semes No. 69
Notes
1. The classification was of types of "insertion", the commonly used opposite of exclusion. The types
were l'insertion comme parcours (Drancourt 1991); comme dispositif(Wuhl 1991); comme ecosysteme
(Dubet 1987); and comme ensemble de competences (Commissariat g£n£ral du Plan 1993).
2. They also refer to "concrete puzzle-solutions which, when employed as models or examples, can
replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science" (Kuhn 1970,
p. 175). From such exemplary studies or scientific practices spring particular coherent traditions of
scientific research. They are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away
from competing models of scientific activity and sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems
for the new group of practitioners to resolve (p. 10). Paradigms provide a criterion for choosing
problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions (p. 37). In
brief, they guide a scientific community's research.
3. Conventionally, solutions to the problem or order appeal to one of two perspectives. In the first,
social integration is externally imposed on individuals; in the second, social integration grows out of the
voluntary interaction among individuals. This distinction between the coercive and voluntaristic nature
of social integration corresponds to other dualism in the social sciences. For example, social boundaries
may be imposed by sociopolitical forces. They may be cognitive or ideal phenomena, located in people's
heads. They may arise from social interaction and communication (see Alexander 1992; Lamont and
Foumier 1992). I build on these basic dualisms in contrasting two major mechanisms of exclusion:
exclusion as a basis of monopoly and exclusion as a basis of specialization. However, as I will explain,
exclusion as a consequence of solidarity represents the French attempt to steer a "third course" between
these two polarities.
4. Although the opposite of exclusion is sometimes referred to as "insertion", in the sense of making
room beside others (Nasse 1991), this term also has multiple meanings (Paugam 1993b; Commissariat
general du Plan 1993).
5. See Georg Simmel's essay on the rise of "The Poor" as a distinct social category and Tocqueville's
1835 "M£moire sur le paupeVisme".
6. In The Class Struggle in France, Marx considered the "lumpenproletariat" to be "a mass sharply
differentiated from the industrial proletariat." For Mayhew, London's vagabonds were distinct from the
"civilized", respectable working class. Casual labour and the surplus unemployed were stigmatized.as
"outcasts". Mutual aid associations and early social insurance programs served the "aristocracy of
labour" and excluded the unskilled and casual worker, (Stedman-Jones 1984; Morris 1994).
7. The "underclass" literature is now voluminous and cuts across the paradigms presented here. I shall
refer to the underclass only when the term is used in the sense of social exclusion. See, for example,
Murray 1984; Mead 1986; Wilson 1987; Engbersen et al. 1993; Smith 1992; Giddens 1973; Gallie 1988;
Dahrendorf 1988, 1985; Schmitter-Heisler 1991. For critical review, see Gans 1991; Aponte 1990; Katz
1989; Stafford and Ladner 1990; Jencks 1991; Morris 1994.
8. The EC defines poverty as 50 per cent of national average equivalent expenditure (i.e. adjusted for
family size). By this criterion, the poverty rate of persons fell from 19 to 16 in France, but rose in the
UK from 14 to 18 (Room 1992, p. 57). In both 1985 and 1992, unemployment rates were slightly higher
in the UK than in France (EC Commission 1992). However, the long-term and youth unemployment
rates are much higher than in the UK.
9. Rousseau coined the term "lien social" in chapter 5 of the Manuscrit de Geneve, an early version
of The Social Contract. Although his conception of the social bond was taken by later sociologists as
"contractualist", it can be argued that in fact, Rousseau saw the social bond as natural and hence,
communitarian. Thus, equality was not simply civil or legal, but also social, a conviviality that the Law
and the General Will would bring about. The term "lien social" is most fully discussed in Durkheim's
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
65
Division of Labour in Society where the term "solidarity" specified two sorts of social bonds, organic
and mechanical, that morally regulated individual behaviour. Both thinkers stressed distinctively "social"
in contrast to political or market relations. Thus, both opposed liberal, individualist, utilitarian, or
"Anglo-Saxon" notions of the social contract, in which social relations are economically motivated,
commercial, and competitive, the State is minimal, and interested free exchange and cultural and political
pluralism are valued. See Farrugia 1993.
10. See Also Klanfer 1965; Lionel Soleru 1977.
11. The subtitle "one-tenth" is reminiscent of the early Progressive reformers in the US who appealed
for state intervention to serve the poorer "one-third of a nation".
12. Nasse (1991) maintains that, just as sociologists distinguish between exclusion as an individual
phenomenon, i.e. as a product of inadequate insertion or integration, and exclusion as a macrosociological phenomenon, i.e. as a result of insufficient social cohesion, so too can the opposites of
exclusion be distinguished. Thus, in a liberal individualist conception of society, "insertion" (placing side
by side) is used, while in a Durkheiminan cultural and normative conception of "assimilation",
"integration" is used. However, I find that social scientists as well as politicians have defined insertion
like integration, and the reverse, so I have not attempted to use Nasse's distinction.
13. Multiculturalism is often referred to as "Anglo-Saxon" models of integration in which individual
equality of opportunity is compatible with the autonomous existence of groups in which the Nation as
composed of ethnic and cultural components (Barou 1993). Hollifield (1994) argues that the foulard
debate and the rise of French "ethnicity" was accompanied by anti-Americanism or at least, hostility to
the "American model" of multiculturalism. Ironically, these portrayals coincided with a national debate
in the US itself over political correctness and multicultural curricula.
14. See also Mauss's ideas about how cultural boundaries reflect interdiction or distinction.
15. I do not refer here to his early work with its functionalist and structuralist overtones.
16. Liberal assumptions about the existence of separate spheres are also evident in Goffman's "frames"
and Boltanski and Thevenot's six different cites or worlds of justification for equitable distribution —
inspiration, renown, domesticity, market, industry, civic life (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991).
17. As social closure theory suggests, victims of prejudice may react in many ways besides
strengthening in-group ties or fighting back. Individual's ego defense may lead to obsession with
exclusion, withdrawal and passivity, clowning, slyness, self-hate, aggression against one's own group,
seeking sympathy, status striving, and neuroses (Allport 1954, pp. 142-61).
18. Already in the 1970s, Castel (1978) reviewed american conceptualizations of poverty as the absence
of social roles: the poor don't work, are unkempt, don't have normal families, produce nothing and
possess nothing but troubles, offenses, and crimes. But he indicted the psychologizing of poverty as
blaming the victim and attributed it to the values underlying America's lack of basic social assistance.
19. More recent work classifies types of social capital by the nature of group solidarity underlying it
(Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). Thus, exclusion from social capital can be conceived under each of
the paradigms proposed here.
20. Similarly, Castel (1991) also cited the 17th century Traite des Ordres as saying "il n'est certes pire
profession que de ne pas avoir de profession".
21. Yet, liberal influences remain in his work, most particularly, his enumeration of the social
characteristics of the underclass.
22. Among the most important criticisms were that the industrial characteristics defining sectors were
not strongly correlated; that classifying workers into sectors by their earnings introduced circular
reasoning and truncation bias in rates of return; and that individuals choose sectors for their differential
characteristics, introducing heterogeneity and selectivity bias.
66
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
23. Two techniques for testing the existence of labour market segmentation appear to pass muster. One
uses "switching models" in which no assumptions are made as to which jobs are in which sectors; the
other uses clustering techniques that split jobs at the mean to avoid truncation and estimates effects
separately by race and gender to avoid heterogeneity bias.
Bibliographical references
Affichard, Joelle and Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, eds. 1992. Justice Sociale et Inegalites. Paris: Esprit.
Alexander, Jeffrey. 1992. "Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification: On the Polarizing Discourse
of Civil Society." Pp. 289-308 in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of
Inequality, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Foumier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Allport, Gordon. 1954/1979. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry. 1991. English Questions. London: Verso.
Andre\ Catherine. 1994. "La France des Pauvres." Alternatives Economiques 114 (February): 23-32.
Aponte, Robert. 1990. "Definitions of the Underclass: A Critical Analysis." Pp. 117-38 in Sociology in
America, ed. Herbert Gans. Newbury Park: Sage.
Ashford, Douglas. 1986. The Emergence of the Welfare States. London: Basil Blackwell.
Auletta, Ken. 1982. The Underclass. New York: Vintage.
Autes, Michel. 1993. "Les politiques de lutte contre l'exclusion." Sciences Humaines 28 (Mai): 26-28.
Bakke, E.W. 1940. The Unemployed Worker. New Have: Yale University Press.
Balibar, Etienne. 1992. "Inegalites, fractionnement social, exclusion: Nouvelles formes de 1'antagonisme
de classe?", pp. 149-61 in Justice Sociale et Inegalites, ed. Joelle Affichard and Jean-Baptiste de
Foucauld. Paris: Editions Esprit.
Balibar, Etienne. 1991. "Race, Nation and Class." Pp. 71-83 in Race, Discourse and Power in France,
ed. Maxim Silverman. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1988. Race, Nation, Class. New York: Verso.
Barbalet, J.M. 1988. Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barou, Jacques. 1993. "Les paradoxes de 1'integration: De l'infortunedes mots a la vertu des concepts."
Ethnologie Francaise 23, 2 (April-June): 169-76.
Barth, Frederik, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives." In Image, Music, Text.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Becker, Gary. 1985. "Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labour." Journal of Labour
Economics 3, 1, Part 2 (January): S33-58.
Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.
Bell, Linda and Richard Freeman. 1991. "The Causes of Increasing Interindustry Wage Dispersion in
the United States." Industrial and Labour Relations Review 44, 2 (January): 275.
Bellah, Robert et. al. 1985. Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper and Row.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
67
Bernstein, Serge and Odile Rudell. 1992. Le Modele Republicain. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Bloom, David, Richard Freeman, and Sanders Korenman. 1988. "The Labour-Market Consequences of
Generational Crowding." European Journal of Population 3: 131-76.
Body-Gendrot, Sophie. 1993. "Migration and the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France." Pp.
77-93 in Racism, the City, and the State, ed. Malcolm Cross and M. Keith. London: Routledge.
Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thevenot. 1991. De la justification. Paris: Gallimard.
Borchorst, Anette. 1994. "Welfare State Regimes, Women's Interests, and the EC." In Engendering
Welfare States: combining Insights of Feminist and Mainstream Research. London: Sage,
forthcoming.
Boyer, Robert, ed. 1987. La Flexibilite du Travail en Europe. Paris: Editions La D&souverte.
Bourdieu, Pierre, ed. 1993. La misere du monde. Paris: Seuil.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Bulow, Jeremy and Lawrence Summers. 1986. "A Theory of Dual Labour Markets with Application to
Industrial Policy, Discrimination, and Keynesian Unemployment." Journal of Labour Economics
4, 3, part 1: 376-414.
Carton, Luc. 1993. Etat de lapauvrete dans la region de Bruxelles-Capitale. 2 vols. Brussels: Fondation
Travail-Universite' asbl, November 30.
Castel, Robert. 1991. "De 1'indigence a l'exclusion: la desaffiliation", pp. 137-68 in Face a I'exclusion:
Le modele francais, ed. Jacques Donzelot. Paris: Esprit.
—. 1978. "La 'guerre a la pauvretd' aux Etats-Unis: le statut de la misere dans une soci&e'
d'abondance." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 19 (January): 47-60.
Castles, Francis and Deborah Mitchell. 1991. "Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism or Four? LIS
Working Paper No. 63. Luxembourg: CEP/INSTEAD.
Chevalier, L. 1984. Classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses. Paris: Hachette Pluriel.
Chevallier, Jacques et al. 1992. La Solidarite: Un sentiment republicain? Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Coleman, James. 1988. "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital." American Journal of
Sociology 94 (Supplement): S95-120.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
—. 1986. "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist
Thought." Social Problems 33, 5: 14-32.
Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd, ed. Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. London: Croom Helm.
Commissariat G£n6ral du Plan [CGP]. 1993. L'insertion des adolescents en difficulte. Paris: La
Documentation Frangaise.
—. [CGP]. 1992. "L'exclusion, rupture du lien social." Problemes economiques 2.282 (1 juillet): 1-4.
68
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Commission of the European Communities. 1992. Towards a Europe of Solidarity: Intensifying the Fight
against Social Exclusion, Fostering Integration. Brussels: 12 December.
—. 1991. National Policies to Combat Social Exclusion, First Annual Report, ed. Graham Room.
Brussels: Directorate General V: Employment, Social Affairs and Industrial Relations.
Connelly, William. 1991. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Cox, Oliver C. 1948. Caste, Class, and Race. New York: Doubleday.
Crowley, John. 1992. "Minorit6s ethniques et ghettos aux Etats-Unis: Modele ou anti-modele pour la
France?" Esprit No. 182 (juin): 78-94.
—. 1991. "Immigration et Minorites Ethniques au Royaume-Uni." Esprit No. 169 (February): 60-72.
Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1988. The Modern Social Conflict: An Essay on the Politics of Liberty. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
—. 1985. Law and Order. Boulder: Westview.
Danziger, Sheldon, Jacques van der Gaag, Michael Taussig, and Eugene Smolensky. 1984. "The Direct
Measurement of Welfare Levels: How Much Does it Cost to Make Ends Meet?" Review of
Economics and Statistics 66, 3: 500-05.
Daugareilh, Isabelle and Jean-Pierre Laborde, eds. 1993. Insertions et Solitudes. Bordeaux: Editions de
la Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme Aquitaine.
Davis, Steven. 1993. Cross-Country Patterns of Change in Relative Wages. Cambridge: National Bureau
of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 4085.
Delarue, Jean-Marie. 1991. Banlieues en difficulte: La relegation. Paris: Syros.
Demott, Benjamin. 1990. The Imperial Middle. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dickens, William and Kevin Lang. 1988a. "The Reemergence of Segmentated Labour Market Theory."
American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings (May): 129-34.
Doeringer, Peter and Michael Piore. 1971. Internal Labour Markets and Manpower Analysis. Lexington,
MA: D.C. Heath.
Donzelot, Jacques and Joel Roman. 1991. "Le defacement de la question sociale", pp. 5-11 in Face a
I'exclusion: Le modele francais, ed. Jacques Donzelot. Paris: Esprit.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Dubet, Francois. 1993. "Les jeunes et la 'banlieue'." Science Humaines 28 (Mai): 21-23.
—. 1987. La galere: Jeunes en survie. Paris: Fayard.
Dubet, Francois and Didier Lapeyronnie. 1992. Les quartiers d'exil. Paris: Seuil.
Duncan, Greg. 1984. Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty. Ann Arbor: Survey Research Centre, University
of Michigan.
Dupeyroux, Jean-Jacques, ed. 1974. special issue on exclusion. Droit social (November).
Duprez, Dominique and Mahieddine Hedli. 1992. Le Mai des Banlieues? Sentiment d'insecurite et arise
identitaire. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Dubet, Francois et Didier Lapeyronnie. 1992. Les Quartiers d'exil. Paris: Seuil.
Ellwood, David. 1988. Poor Support. New York: Basic.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL souoARrry
69
Engbersen, Godfried, Kees Schuyt, Jaap Timmer, and Van Waarden. 1993. Cultures of Unemployment.
Boulder: Westview.
Esping-Andersen, Gosta. 1991. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Farley, Reynolds and others. 1993. "Continued Racial Residential Segregation in Detroit: 'Chocolate
City, Vanilla Suburbs' Revisited." Journal of Housing Research 4, 1: 1-38.
Farrugia, Francis. 1993. La Crise du Lien Social: Essai de sociologie critique. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Field, Frank. 1989. Losing Out: The Emergence of Britain's Underclass. London: Basil Blackwell.
de Foucauld, Jean-Baptiste. 1994. "Exploitation et Exclusion. * Alternatives economiques 114 (February):
37.
—. 1992a. "Exclusion, in£galit£s et justice sociale." Esprit No. 182 (June): 47-57.
—. 1992. "Vouloir Faire, Savoir Faire", pp. 257-68 in Justice Sociale et Inegalites, ed. Joelle Affichard
et Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld. Paris: Editions Esprit.
Fragonard, Bertrand. 1993. Cohesion Sociale et Prevention de I'Exclusion. Paris: Commissariat General
du Plan, February.
Fuchs, Victor. 1967. "Redefining Poverty and Redistributing Income." The Public Interest 8 (Summer):
88-95.
Gallie, Duncan. 1988. "Employment, Unemployment and Social Stratification." In Employment in
Britain, ed. D. Gallie. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gallie, W.B. 1956. "Essentially Contested Concepts." Aristotelian Society Proceedings 56: 167-98.
Gans, Herbert. 1993. "From 'Underclass' to 'Undercaste': Some Observations about the Future of the
Postindustrial Economy and its Major Victims." International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 17, 3: 327-35.
—. 1992. "Preface." Pp. vii-xv in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of
Inequality, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gans, Herbert J. 1991. "The Dangers of the Underclass: Its Harmfulness as a Planning Concept." Pp.
328-43 in People, Plans, and Policies. New York: Columbia University Press.
Geindre, Francois. 1993. Vllles, Democratic, Solidarite: Le Pari d'une Politique. Paris: Commissariat
G£neYal du Plan, La Documentation Franchise.
Genestier, Philippe. 1991. "Pour une integration communautaire." Esprit No. 169 (February): 48-59.
Giddens, Anthony. 1973. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. New York: Harper and Row.
Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson.
Glendon, Mary Ann. 1991. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free
Press.
Goblot, Edmond. 1925/1967. La Barriere et le Niveau: Etude sociologique sur la bourgeoisie francaise
moderne. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Godbout, Todd. 1993. "Employment Change and Sectoral Distribution in 10 Countries, 1970-90."
Monthly Labour Review (October): 3-20.
Goedhart, Theo, Victor Halberstadt, Arie Kapteyn, and Bernard Van Praag. 1980. "The Poverty Line:
Concept and Measurement." Journal of Human Resources 12, 4: 503-20.
Golding, P. ed. 1986. Excluding the Poor. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
70
DISCUSSION PAPER SERES NO.
69
Gordon, David, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich. 1982. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The
Historical Transformation of Labour in the United States. Cambridge University Press.
Greenstone, J. David. 1993. The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
?
Guillaumin, Colette. 1991. "'Race' and Discourse." Pp. 5-13 in Race, Discourse and Power in France,
ed. Maxim Silverman. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
Hall, John. 1992. "The Capital(s) of Cultures: A Nonholistic Approach to Status Situations, Class,
Gender, and Ethnicity." Pp. 257-88 in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the
Making of Inequality, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Foumier. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Baltimore: Penguin.
Harris, David. 1987. Justifying State Welfare: The New Right vs. the Old Left. Basil Blackwell.
Hatzfeld, Henri. 1971. Du pauperisme a la securite sociale, 1850-1940. Paris: Colin.
Haut Conseil a l'integration. 1992. La connaissance de I'immigration et de Vintegration. Paris: La
Documentation Franchise.
—. 1991. Pour un modele francais d'integration. Paris: La Documentation Francaise.
Herpin, Nicolas. 1993. "Uurban underclass chez les sociologues americains: exclusion sociale et
pauvrete\" Revue francaise de sociologie 34, 3 (July-September): 421-40.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1984. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, ed. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hoffman, Stanley, ed. 1963. "Paradoxes of the French Political Community." In In Search of France.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hollifield, James. 1994. "Immigration and Republicanism in France: The Hidden Consensus." Paper
presented at the International Conference of Europeanists, Council for European Studies, Chicago,
March.
—. 1992. Immigrants, Markets, and States: The Political Economy of Postwar Europe. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Hollifield, James. 1991. "Immigration and Modernization." Pp. 113-50 in Searching for the New France,
ed. James Hollifield and George Ross. New York: Routledge.
Immergut, Ellen. 1993. "Dilemmas of the Welfare State in the Current Conjuncture." Paper presented
to the Study Group on Citizenship and Social Policy, Centre for European Studies, Harvard
University.
Janowitz, Morris. 1980. "Observations on the Sociology of Citizenship: Obligations and Rights." Social
Forces 59, 1.
Jahoda, Marie, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. 1971. Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed
Community. Chicago: Aldine.
Jazouli, Adil. 1992. Les Annees Banlieues. Paris: Seuil.
Jencks, Christopher. 1991. "Is the American Underclass Growing?" Pp. 28-102 in The Urban
Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson. Washington: Brookings Institution.
A
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
71
Jencks, Christopher and Paul Peterson, ed. 1991. The Urban Underclass. Washington: Brookings
Institution.
Karst, Kenneth. 1989. Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Komarovsky, Mirra. 1940. The Unemployed Worker and His Family. New York: Dryden Press.
Katz, Lawrence. 1988. "Some Recent Developments in Labour Economics and Their Implications for
Macroeconomics." Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 20, 3 (August, Part 2): 507-22.
Katz, Lawrence, Gary Loveman, and David Blanchflower. 1993. A Comparison of Changes in the
Structure of Wages in Four OECD Countries. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research,
Working Paper No. 4297.
Katz, Michael. 1989. The Undeserving Poor. New York: Pantheon.
Kreuger, Alan and Lawrence Summers. 1988. "Efficiency Wages and the Inter-Industry Wage
Structure." Econometrica 56, 2 (March): 259-93.
Knowles, Caroline. 1992. Race, Discourse and Labourism. London: Routhledge.
Kronauer, Martin. 1993. "Unemployment in Western Europe: Individual and Social Consequences."
InternationalJournal ofPoltical Economy 23, 3 (Fall): 3-13.
Kronauer, Martin, Berthold Vogel, and Frank Gerlach. 1993. 1m Schatten der Arbeitsgesellschaft:
Arbeitslose und de Dynamik sozialer Ausgrenzung. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.
Kunn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
'
Kumar, Krishan. 1994. "'Britishness' and 'Englishness': What Prospect for a European Identity in
Britain Today?" Paper presented at the International Conference of Europeanists, Council for
European Studies, Chicago, March.
Kymlicka, Will. 1994. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Lamont, Michele and Marcel Fournier, eds. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the
Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lang, Kevin and William Dickens. 1988. "Neoclassical and Sociological Perspectives on Segmented
Labour Markets." Pp. 65-88 in Industries, Firms, and Jobs: Sociological and Economic
Approaches, ed. George Farkas and Paula England. New York: Plenum.
Lapeyronnie, Didier. 1993a. "De 1'integration a la segregation", pp. 97-116, in Ville, exclusion et
citoyennete, ed. Roman, Joel. Paris: Editions Esprit.
—. 1993b. L'individu et les minorites: La France et la Grande-Bretagne face a leurs immigres. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Lebon, Andre. 1992. "L'immigration en France, donnees, perspectives." Revue Francaise des Affaires
Sociales (December).
Leibfried, Stephan and Paul Pierson. 1993. "Europe's Semi-Sovereign Welfare States: Social Policy in
an Emerging Multi-Tiered System." In Fragmented Social Policy: The European Community's
Social Dimension in Comparative Perspective, ed. Stephan Leibfried and Paul Pierson,
forthcoming.
Lenoir, Rene. 1974/1989. Les Exclus: Un Francais sur dix. 2nd ed. Paris: Seuil.
72
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Leveau, Remy and Michel Wieviorka. 1992. "Approche compared des violences urbaines. "Cultures et
Conflits No. 6 (Summer): 3-6.
Lewis, Oscar, 1969. "The Culture of Poverty." Pp. 187-220 in On Understanding Poverty, ed. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan. New York: Basic.
f
Lindbeck, Assar and Dinnis Snower. 1986. "Wage Setting, Unemployment, and Insider-Outsider
Relations." American Economic Review 76 (May): 235-39.
i
Linhart, Virginie. 1992. "Des Minguettes a Vaulx-en-Velin: Les Reponses des Pouvoirs Publics aux
Violences Urbaines." Revue Francaise de Science Politique 3 (June): 91-111.
Lipietz, Alain. 1986. "New Tendencies in the International Division of Labour." Pp. 16-40 in
Production, Work, Territory, ed. Alan Scott and Richard Storper. Boston: Allen and Unwin.
Lister, Ruth. 1990. The Exclusive Society. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Maury, Serge and Nicolas Dommenach. 1991. "Oil il est de^nontre' que si on continue comme ca, le
Front national peut arriver au pouvoir." I'Evenement dujeudi (27 juin): 9.
Mayer, Susan and Christopher Jencks. 1989. "Poverty and the Distribution of Material Hardship."
Journal of Human Resources 24, 1: 88-114.
Mead, Lawrence. 1986. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free
Press.
Mendras, Henri with Alistair Cole. 1991. Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural
Anthropology of the Fifth Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la
Maison des Sciences de l'Homme [originally published as La Seconde Revolution Frangaise. Paris:
Gallimard].
Mingione, Enzo. 1994. "Socio-economic Restructuring and Social Exclusion." Presented at conference
on "Cities, Enterprises and Society at hte Even of the 21st Century," Lille.
Mongin, Olivier. 1992. "Le contrat social menace?" Esprit No. 182 (June): 5-11.
Morris, Lydia. 1994. Dangerous Classes: The Underclass and Social Citizenship. New York: Routledge.
—. 1990. The Workings of the Household: A U.S.-U.K. Comparison. Cambridge: Polity.
Mothe, Daniel. 1991. "Les progres de l'exclusion." Esprit No. 169 (February): 73-92.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1993. Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Murphy, Raymond. 1988. Social Closure: The Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. New York: Basic.
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1962. Challenge to Affluence. New York: Pantheon.
Nasse, Philippe. 1992. Exclus et Exclusions: Connaitre les Populations, Comprendre les Processus.
Paris: Commissariat G6neYal du Plan, Janvier.
Neuwirth, Gertrud. 1969. "A Weberian Outline of a Theory of Community: Its Application to the 'Dark
Ghetto.*" British Journal of Sociology 20, 2 (June): 148-63.
Newman, Katherine. 1988. Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American
Middle Class. New York: Vintage.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARY
73
Nicole-Drancourt, Chantal. 1991. Le Labyrinthe de I'insertion. Paris: La Documentation Francaise.
Nicolet, Claude. 1982. L'idee Republicaine en France: Essai d'histoire Critique. Paris: Gallimard.
Noiriel, Gerard. 1990 (1986). Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Berg.
—. 1988. Le creuset francais: Histoire de I'lmmigration, XlXe-XXe siecles. Paris: Seuil.
O'Higgins, Michael, G. Schmaus and G. Stephenson. 1990. "Income Distribution and Redistribution."
Review of Income and Wealth 35, 2: 107-31.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winnant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 1993. Employment Outlook. Paris: OECD.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 1989. Labour Market Flexibility: Trends in
Enterprises. Paris: OECD.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. 1986. Flexibility in the Labour
Market: The Current Debate. Paris: OECD.
Pahl, R.E. 1984. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell.
Parkin, Frank. 1974. "Strategies of Social Closure in Class Formation." Pp. 1-18 in The Social Analysis
of Class Structure, ed. Frank Parkin. London: Tavistock.
Parsons, Talcott. 1965. "Full Citizenship for the negro American?" In Politics and Social Structure. New
York: Free Press.
Patterson, James. 1981. America's Struggle Against Poverty 1900-1980. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Paugam, Serge. 1993a. "La dynamique de la disqualification sociale." Science Humaines 28 (Mai): 1620.
—. 1993b. La societe frangaise et ses pauvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—. 1993c. Pricarite et risque d'exclusion en France. Paris: CERC, La Documentation Francaise.
—. 1991. La disqualification sociale: essai sur la nouvelle pauvrete. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Portes, Alejandro and Julia Sensenbrenner. 1993. "Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social
Determinants of Economic Action." American Journal of Sociology 98, 6 (May): 1320-50.
Portes, Alejandro, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton, ed. 1989. The Informal Economy: Studies in
Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Procacci, Giovanna. 1993. Gouverner la misere: La question sociale en France 1789-1848. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1989. "Sociology and Its Poor." Politics and Society 17, 2 (June): 163-87.
Putnam, Robert. 1993. "The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life." The American
Prospect (Spring): 35-42.
Rainwater, Lee. 1992. "Poverty in American Eyes." Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No. 80,
Luxembourg: CEPS/INSTEAD and in Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Socialpsychologie.
—. 1990. "Poverty and Equivalence as Social Constructions." Luxembourg Income Study working paper
No. 55. Luxembourg: CEPS/INSTEAD, October.
—. 1974. What Money Buys: Inequality and the Social Meanings of Income. New York: Basic.
Reeves, Frank. 1983. British Racial Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
74
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
69
Rex, John and S. Thomlinson. 1979. Colonial Immigrants in a British City: A Class Analysis. London:
Routhledge and Kegan Paul.
Reynaud, Emmanuele. 1993. "Le chomage de longue duree: la theorie et Taction." Revue frangaise de
sociologie 34, 2: 271-91.
f
Riding, Alan. 1994. "French Students Angry at Cut in Minimum Wage." New York Times (24 March):
A3.
Riggs, Fred W. 1988. The Intercocta Manual: Towards an International Encyclopaedia of Social Science
Terms. Paris: Unesco.
Rodgers, Gerry and Janine Rodgers, eds. 1899. Precarious Jobs in Labour Market Regulation: The
Growth of Atypical Employment in Western Europe. Geneva: International Labour Office.
Roman, Joel, ed. 1993. Ville, exclusion et citoyennete. Paris: Editions Esprit.
Roman, Joel. 1992. "Le pluralisme universaliste de Michael Walzer." Pp. 207-20 in Justice Sociale et
Inegalites, ed. Joelle Affichard et Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld. Paris: Editions Esprit.
Room, Graham and others. 1992. Observatory on National Policies to Combat Social Exclusion, Second
Annual Report. Brussels: Directorate General V: Employment, Social Affairs and Industrial
Relations, Commission of the European Communities.
Room, Graham. 1990. 'New Poverty' in the European Community. London: St. Martin's.
Rosanvallon, Pierre. 1992. Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France. Paris:
Gallimard.
—. 1990. L'Etat en France de 1789 a nos jours. Paris: Seuil, Univers historique.
Roy, Olivier. 1991. "EthnicitS, bandes et communautarisme." Esprit No. 169 (February): 37-47.
Ruano-Borbalan, Jean-Claude. 1993. "L'imaginaire de l'exclusion." Sciences Humaines 28 (Mai): 29-30.
Ruggles, Patricia. 1990. Drawing the Line: Alternative Poverty Measures and their Implications for
Public Policy. Washington: Urban Institute Press.
Runciman, W.G. 1990. "How Many Classes are There in Contemporary British Society?" Sociology 24,
3: 377-96.
Samuel, Raphael, ed. 1989. Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. 3 vols.
London: Routledge.
Schelling, Thomas. 1971. "Dynamic Models of Segregation. "Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1: 14386.
Schlozman, Kay and Sidney Verba. 1979. Insult to Injury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schmitter Heisler, Barbara. 1991. "A Comparative Perspective on the Underclass: Questions of Urban
Poverty, Race, and Citizenship." Theory and Society 20, 4 (August): 455-84.
Schnapper, Dominique.
Gallimard.
1991. La France de Vintegration: Sociologie de la nation en 1990. Paris:
^
Shklar, Judith. 1991. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
A
Silver, Allan. 1990. "The Curious Importance of Small Groups in American Sociology." Pp. 61-72 in
Sociology in America, ed. Herbert J. Gans. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
75
Silver, Hilary. 1992. "Le discours et la realite' de I'exclusion sociale aux Etats-Unis et en France."
Presented at the Journee d'Etudes, "Processus d'Exclusion et Dynamiques d'Emploi," CLERSE,
URA 345, CNRS, Lille, November.
Silverman, Maxim. 1992. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern
France. London: Routledge.
Silverman, Maxim, ed. 1991. Race, Discourse and Power in France. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
Simon, Patrick. 1992. "Banlieues, de la concentration au ghetto." Esprit No. 182 (June): 58-64.
Smith, David J., ed. 1992. Understanding the Underclass. London: Policy Studies Institute.
Stafford, Walter and Joyce Ladner. 1990. "Political Dimensions of the Underclass Concept." Pp. 138-55
in Sociology in America, ed. Herbert Gans. Newbury Park: Sage.
Stedman-Jones, Gareth. 1984. Outcast London. London: Penguin.
Stoleru, Lionel. 1977. Vaincre la pauvrete dans les pays riches. Paris: Flammarion.
Streeten, Paul. 1993, "Comments on 'The Framework of ILO Action against Poverty." Presented at the
symposium on Poverty: New Approaches to Analysis and Policy, International Institute for Labour
Studies, Geneva.
Taguieff, Pierre-Andre\ 1991. Face au racisme. 2 vols. Paris: La D£couverte.
TaguiefF, Pierre-Andre\ 1988. La force du prejuge: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: La
Decouverte.
Tarling, Roger, ed. 1987. Flexibility in Labour Markets. New York: Academic.
Thomas, W.I. and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Boston:
Badger.
Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder: Westview.
Thurow, Lester. 1975. Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of Distribution in the U.S. Economy. New
York: Basic.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1983-4/1835. "MSmoire sur le paupeVisme." Commentaire nos. 23-24.
Touraine, Alain. 1992. "In£galites de la soci&e" industrielle, exclusion du marcbi", pp. 163-76 injustice
Sociale et Inegalites, ed. Joelle Afficard and Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld. Paris: Editions Esprit.
—. 1991. "Face a I'exclusion." Esprit No. 169 (February): 7-13.
Townsend, Peter. 1993. The International Analysis of Poverty. Milton Keynes: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
—. 1987. "Deprivation." Journal of Social Policy 16, 2: 125-46.
—. 1979. Poverty in the United Kingdom. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Van Praag, Bernard, Theo Goedhart, and Arie Kapteyn. 1980. "The Poverty Line: A Pilot Survey in
Europe." Review of Economics and Statistics 62, 3: 461-65.
Vieillard-Baron, Herve\ 1991. "Le risque du ghetto." Esprit No. 169 (February): 14-22.
Verdes-Leroux, Jeannine. 1978. "Les 'exclus'." Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 19
(January): 61-66.
Vincens, Jean. 1993. "Reflexions sur le chomage de longue dur^e." Revue francais de sociologie 34
(July-September): 327-44.
Wacquant, Loic. 1993. "De l'Amerique comme utopie a l'envers." Pp. 169-79 in La Misere du Monde.
Paris: Seuil.
76
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO.
63
—. 1993. "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban
Periphery." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, 3 (September): 366-83.
—. 1992. "Pour en finir avec le mythe des citeVghettos." Les Annates de la Recherche Urbaine 54
(March): 21-30.
t
Walzer, Michael. 1993. "Exclusion, Injustice, and the Democratic State." Dissent (Winter): 55-64.
—. 1992. "Le nouveau tribalisme." Esprit (November): 44-57.
^
—. 1990. "What Does It Mean to Be an 'American'?" Social Research 57, 3 (Fall): 591-614.
Warner, R. Stephen. 1993. "Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of
Religion in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 98, 5 (March): 1044-93.
Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkely: University of California
Press.
Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society, trans. Guenther Roth and C. Wittich. New York: Bedminster
Press.
Weinberg, Achilleand Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan. 1993. "Comprendre l'exclusion." Science/fWna//jey
28 (Mai): 12-15.
Wiebe, Robert. 1985. The Opening of American Society. New York: Knopf.
Wieviorka, Michel. 1991. L'espace du Racisme. Paris: Seuil.
Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords, rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolfe, Alan. 1992. "Democracy versus Sociology: Boundaries and their Political Consequences." Pp.
289-308 in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michele
Lamont and Marcel Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wuhl, Simon. 1992a. "Ch6mage: de la longue duree a l'exclusion." Esprit No. 182 (June): 12-22.
—. 1992b. Les exclus face a I'emploi. Paris: Syros.
—. 1991. De Chomage a l'exclusion. Paris: Syros.
Wuthnow, Robert, James Davison Hunter, Albert Bergesen, and Edith Kurzweil. 1984. Cultural
Analysis. London: Routledge.
Xiberras, Martine. 1992. Theories de l'exclusion sociale. Paris: Meridiens Kliensieck.
Y£pez, Isabel. 1993. "Review of the French and Belgian Literature on Social Exclusion: A Latin
American Perspective." Discussion paper, UNDP-IILS project on "Patterns and causes of social
exclusion", International Labour Office, Geneva.
Young, Crawford, ed. 1993. The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay? Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
<
Titles still available in the Discussion Paper Series
L'analyse du marchi du travail urbain en Afrique, by Jean-Pierre Lachaud. No. 2. 1987.
ISBN 92-9014-420-3.
Non-standard employment practices in Latin America, by Adriana Marshall. No. 6. 1987.
ISBN 92-9014^27-0.
Latin America's labour market research: A state of the art, by Jorge Jatoba. No. 9. 1988 (rev. 88).
ISBN 92-9014-448-3.
Lespolitiques du temps de travail dans 13 pays industrialisis, by G. Bosch and F. Michon. No. 16.
1989. ISBN 92-9014-460-2.
Empleo temporario y trabajo a tiempoparcial en la Argentina, by Adriana Marshall. No. 17. 1989.
ISBN 92-9014-480-7.
Flexible specialisation in Third World industry: Prospects and research requirements, by Hubert
Schmitz. No. 18. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-481-5.
Subcontracting as an alternative organizational form to vertically-integrated production, by Mark
Lazerson. No. 20. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-483-1.
The secrets of industry are in the air. Cooperation industrielle et iquilibre organisationnel de lafirme
innovatrice, by Dominique Foray. No. 21. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-484-X.
State employment in the fiscal crisis: The Latin American case, by Adriana Marshall. No. 22. 1990.
ISBN 92-9014^85-8.
Recent trends of industrial subcontracting in Japanese manufacturing industry, by Naoki Kuriyama.
No. 24. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-487-4.
Public sector labor market and privatization in Korea, by Young-bum Park. No. 25. 1990.
ISBN 92-9014-488-2.
Formas precarias de trabajo asalariado: dos estudios en el drea metropolitana de Buenos Aires,
by Adriana Marshall. No. 26. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-489-0.
Developments in the reorganisation of the Swiss economy: The small and medium-sized enterprise
structure as an opportunity and a threat, by Beat Hotz-Hart. No. 27. 1990.
ISBN 92-9014^91-2.
Bilan et propositions de recherches concernant I 'approche du diveloppement des petites et moyennes
entreprises en Afrique sub-saharienne, by Jose" Trouve\ No. 28. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-490-4.
Small enterprises and business work partnerships in Hungary, by Peter Galasi and Gyorgy Szir&zki.
No. 29. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-492-0.
Labour market flexibility. No. 31. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-494-7.
Laflexibilite'des marches du travail. No. 32. 1990. ISBN 92-9014-495-5.
Le marchi du travail urbain au Maroc, by M. Salahdine. No. 33. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014-496-3.
Le marchi du travail urbain en Algtrie, by Chantal Bernard. No. 34. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014-497-1.
El empleo attpico en Lima-Metropolitana, by F. Verdera V. No. 36. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014^99-8.
Review of the developments in the organisation and structure of small and medium-sized enterprises
in Norway, by Kristin Dale. No. 37. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-500-5.
The impact of labour law on employment practices: Temporary and part-time employment in Argentina
and Peru, by Adriana Marshall. No. 38. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-501-3.
Pauvreti et qffre de travail a Abidjan (Cdte d'lvoire): concepts, mithode et analyse, by Jean-Pierre
Lachaud. No. 39. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-502-2.
Priorities for urban labour market research in anglophone Africa, by William J. House. No. 40.
1991. ISBN 92-9014-505-6.
Labour institutions and economic development, by G. Rodgers. No. 41. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014-504-8.
Growth model, state social intervention and labour regulation, Argentina, 1890-1990, by Rosalia
Cort6s and Adriana Marshall. No. 42. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-506-4.
Impact du disengagement de I'Etat sur le marchi du travail au Togo, by Dodgi V. Silete-Adogli.
No. 43. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-507-2.
Industrial districts and the Valencian community, by J.-A. Ybarra. No. 44. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014-508-0.
Trade unions and decentralised production: A sketch of strategic problems in the West German labour
movement, by Horst Kern and Charles F. Sabel. No. 45. 1991.
ISBN 92-9014-509-9.
Globalisation and strategic choices in tripartite perspective: An agendafor research and policy issues,
by Duncan Campbell. No. 46. 1991. ISBN 92-9014-511-0.
Recent developments in the small enterprise sector in India: Economic and social aspects, by Surendra
Pal Kashyap. No. 48. 1992. ISBN 92-9014-513-7.
Wage-setting institutions in Japan and the Republic of Korea, by Tsuyoshi Tsuru and Young-bum
Park. No. 51. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-517-X.
Pauvreti et marchi du travail au Mali: le cas de Bamako, by J.-P. Lachaud and B. El Hadji Sidibe\
No. 52. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-518-8.
Les icarts de salaires entre les secteurs public etprivi en Afriquefrancophone: analyse comparative,
by J.-P. Lachaud. No. 53. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-519-6.
The creation of employment in segmented labour market: A general problem and its implications in
India, by Gerry Rodgers. No. 54 (rev. 1). 1993. ISBN 92-9014-520-X.
Pauvreti et marchi du travail urbain en Afrique au sud du Sahara : analyse comparative, by JeanPierre Lachaud. No. 55. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-521-8.
L'ajustement structurel et le marchi du travail en Afrique francophone, by Jean-Pierre Lachaud.
No. 56. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-522-6.
Pauvreti et marchi du travail a Ouagadougou (Burkina-Faso), by Ourobe" Mathias Sanou. No. 57.
1993. ISBN 92-9014-523-4.
Economic consequences of labour protection regimes: A comparative study of Latin American
countries, by Adriana Marshall. No. 58. 1993. ISBN 92-9014-543-9.
Trends in deprivation in the London labour market: A study of low incomes and unemployment in
London between 1985 and 1992, by Peter Lee and Peter Townsend. No. 59. 1993.
ISBN 92-9014-544-7.
Employment deprivation and poverty: The ways in which poverty is emerging in the course of
economic reform in Russia, by Natalia Tchernina. No. 60. 1993.
ISBN 92-9014-545-5.
Labour institutions and technological change: Aframeworkfor analysis and a review of the literature,
by M. Carnoy, S. Pollack and P. Lindquist Wong. No. 61. 1993.
ISBN 92-9014-546-3.
Social exclusion and Africa south of the Sahara: A review of the literature, by Charles Gore. No. 62.
1994. ISBN 92 9014-547-1.
Some paradoxes of social exclusion, by Marshall Wolfe. No. 63. 1994. ISBN 92-9014-547-1.
Mexican maquiladoras: Origins, operations and outlook, by Philip L. Martin. No. 64. 1994.
ISBN 92-9014-548-X.
Footwear industrial districts in Mexico and Italy: A comparative study, by Roberta Rabellotti. No. 65.
1994. ISBN 92-9014-549-8.
Growing points in poverty research: Labour issues, by Michael Lipton. No. 66. 1994. ISBN 92-9014550-1.
Labour institutions and economic development in Asia: Exploratory micro-level research on labour
institutions and productivity in the Korean automotive and garment industries, by Young-bum
Park. No. 67. 1994. ISBN 92-9014-552-8.
Labour institutions and productivity: A study based on enterprise level investigations in India, by T.
S. Papola. No, 68. 1994. ISBN 92-9014-551-X.
Social exclusion and social solidarity: Three paradigms, by Hilary Silver. No. 69. 1994. ISBN 929014-553-6.
A complete list of IILS publications can be obtained upon request from the International Institute for
Labour Studies, P.O. Box 6, CH-1211 Geneva 22 (Switzerland).