ABSTRACT
Social change does not take place because of material forces alone. They are reflected in public discourse on appropriate strategies aiming at overcoming functional deficits. This is the subject matter of symbolic struggles on symbolic change in the sense of framing the situation by way of establishing a dominating vocabulary or semantics used to address problems of inclusion. Symbolic change first of all needs a change of the rhetoric used in framing social problems and possible solutions. This is what we can call the rhetoric of social inclusion. It entails basic ideas, concepts and remedies, which different strategies of social inclusion in a variety of problem areas have in common. Beyond rhetoric used in public discourse, basic ideas, concepts and remedies might form a semantics – that is a common language defining situations and problems in the same way – or even a paradigmatic core of social inclusion, which is complemented by special programmes designed for the solution of special problems (employment, sickness, old age, discrimination). While the core of a paradigm is of a relatively enduring character and is protected against change, programmes are of a less enduring kind and are adjusted in as much as changes of the situation call for such adjustment. The core is sacred and untouchable. As a rule, change starts with programmes and might lead to the accumulation of anomalies when new programmes are started to solve problems that could not be solved with the established ones. Regular programmes fit in the paradigmatic core. With a rising amount of anomalies – that is, the inability of established programmes to solve problems – the chance is increasing that new programmes will be introduced that do not fit in the core. They are like residual categories of a foreign kind. They produce tensions in the paradigm and bear the potential of greater change, which affects the paradigm’s core, the more they are complemented by further new programmes of a foreign kind (Hall 1993).
