Health Promotion International, Vol. 19, No. 1, 115-121, March 2004
© Oxford University Press 2004. All rights reserved
DEBATE |
Social inclusion/exclusion: dancing the dialectic
Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada and Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies, University of Regina, Canada
Address for correspondence: Ronald Labonte, SPHERU, 107 Wiggins Rd, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 5E5, E-mail: ronald.labonte{at}usask.ca
The last decade has seen many of the ‘community’ concepts in health (community empowerment, community capacity) replaced by ‘social’ concepts (social capital, social cohesion). The continuous re-labelling of roughly similar phenomena may be a necessary stratagem to attract attention to the economic and power inequalities that arise from undisciplined markets. Social concepts also have an advantage over community ones by directing that attention to higher orders of political systems. The latest construct being wielded by health practitioners, researchers and policy-makers are the twinned concepts of social inclusion and social exclusion. These represent a conceptual sophistication over social capital and social cohesion. Like their predecessors, however, there are risks in their adoption without a critical examination of the premises that underpin them. For example, how can one ‘include’ people and groups into structured systems that have systematically ‘excluded’ them in the first place? The cautions expressed in this article do not dissuade use of the concepts. Their utility, however, particularly at a time when not only inequalities, but also their rate of growth, is increasing, requires careful questioning.
Key words: material inequalities; social exclusion; social inclusion