ABSTRACT
The term ‘social exclusion’ has come to be very widely used by politicians, policy makers, practitioners and academics in the course of the 1990s. Although various conceptions of social exclusion were being developed as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, the very end of the millennium has witnessed an upsurge in the publication of a wide range of books and articles on the theme. Most have concentrated on various aspects of economic exclusion, or more precisely, the exclusionary effects of economic restructuring - see, for example, Brown and Crompton, 1994; Paugam, 1996a; Lawless, Martin and Hardy, 1997. Others have restricted their use of exclusion to analyses of poverty (see Rodgers, Gore and Figueiredo, 1995; Room, 1995; Walker and Walker, 1997). Yet others have explored social exclusion along other dimensions such as the political (Roche and van Berkel, 1997), while others - most famously perhaps, Jordan (1996), although his central focus is also poverty - have sought to develop holistic theoretical approaches based on the concept. There is also a growing body of literature on the overlapping theme of the ‘underclass’ (MacDonald, 1997). This list is very far from exhaustive, as we demonstrate in the following review of the relevant literature.
