ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the evolution of social exclusion as a concept. The components of exclusion: poverty, failure in job market, poorly performing social networks, living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, and exclusion from services. An understanding of what social exclusion means for social work practice and why tackling it is a key task in pursuit of a fairer society. The idea of social solidarity from which social exclusion emerged was and remains an important element in the French Republican ideal and very different from the tradition of investigation begun by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree on the poverty line and numbers falling below it. There is no social exclusion line as there is a poverty line but as social exclusion began to attract wider attention among policy circles and poverty researchers, attempts were made to pin down formally what defined it. Indicators of social exclusion move beyond focusing on income alone to highlight the lack of societal participation, as Townsend foreshadowed.
