Introduction

Much has been written in this book about the inclusionary and exclusionary potential of work and of special schemes directed at activating people through work (Chapters Two to Four). It was noted repeatedly that social policies – or, to be more precise, activation policies – are driven by the assumption that unemployment is directly linked to exclusion. This assumption is then used to justify that work and welfare systems prioritise employment to pursue inclusion. Rather than promoting inclusion in a wider variety of systems, for example types of work and participation outside the labour market, increasing economic independence by labour-market participation and decreasing social benefit dependency are in many cases the main objectives of these policies.

It was an important objective of our research to shed light on the validity of these assertions by confronting them with the experiences of participants in different types of work and activation schemes. This chapter (and the two that follow it) presents the main results of our case studies into types of work, and in the process reveals the inclusion and exclusion opportunities and risks of various forms of work and participation. Chapter Six analyses these results in terms of what they show about the relations between inclusion in, and exclusion from, various systems of society. Chapter Seven elaborates on one specific case study, an activation programme aimed at ‘entrepreneurial activation’ which differs considerably from the mainstream activation programmes in the EU. So that overlap of chapters does not occur, this chapter will pay no specific attention to this scheme.

The case studies themselves were not designed as a systematic evaluation of activation programmes and schemes. Types of work, rather than activation programmes, were the central focus of the case studies. These are, of course, closely connected, which explains why various case studies dealt with these programmes. Besides, we also primarily focused on labour-market participation as the ‘participation’ or ‘inclusion standard’, and on types of work (voluntary and informal work) that, in most EU countries, do not play a significant role in social policies aimed at promoting inclusion. Secondly, the case studies as a whole were not designed as a large-scale quantitative investigation testing precisely defined hypotheses and aiming at statistical representation, although some of the national case studies fitted this design.