ABSTRACT

The social and economic landscape today is widely regarded as subject to tumultuous change unprecedented in its speed and seemingly uncontrollable direction since the first Industrial Revolution of the 1780s. At the same time, it is eerily familiar. Ghosts long since thought of as laid have returned to haunt us, in the shape of the shrouded figures of the homeless, the outstretched hands of beggars and municipal graves for the nameless dead. It is increasingly the case that these developments are regarded as the sad, but inevitable accompaniments to late or post modernity, whose results are viewed as immensely beneficial to the minority but unfortunately slow to reach the groups variously described as the “excluded”, the “underclass” or the “bottom tenth” (or “fifth” or “third”, depending on whatever index is used). These trends have been astonishingly sudden in their impact, it is claimed, taking governments and experts by surprise. None can be blamed for their happening, since no-one predicted their occurrence. Moreover, it is often implied that the plight of the excluded is an unwanted but inevitable price worth paying for progress.