Introduction

At the end of Chapter Five, we noted the reaction to the Research Programme, when the Heinemann books began to appear in the early 1980s. Around the same time, and among academics and policy makers, the phrase ‘transmitted deprivation’ passed out of use, at least in Britain, and was replaced by that of ‘underclass’, later ‘social exclusion’, which is the term favoured by New Labour. The debates about the underclass, in both the US and Britain, cannot be dealt with here, and have in any case received much attention elsewhere (Welshman, 2006a, pp 127-82). Instead we jump forward 15 years or so, to the election of the Labour government in May 1997, and its emphasis on social exclusion. The origins of social exclusion have been related variously to the increasingly pejorative connotations of the term ‘underclass’; debates about relative deprivation and an inability to participate in society; concepts of social capital and social isolation; and a growing emphasis on worklessness (Smith, 2005, p viii). Certainly the government's definition of social exclusion, with its emphasis on the structural causes of deprivation, its acknowledgement of the role of behavioural factors, and the stress on intergenerational transmission, immediately has echoes with the cycle speech and Research Programme.

This chapter explores continuities between the 1970s and the 1990s, and between the cycle hypothesis, the Research Programme, and social exclusion. We look first at how the idea of social exclusion evolved in France, and how it has been subsequently embraced by other European countries; in France, debates around the issue of deprivation have always been framed by discourses of exclusion and insertion. We look at how the language of social exclusion was imported into Britain, and became part of the vocabulary of New Labour. The chapter traces the relationship between the emphasis on social exclusion and the new literature on poverty dynamics, attempts to operationalise social exclusion, notably by CASE at the LSE, and the revival of agency among academics. But despite its appeal to academics and policy makers, the concept of social exclusion has been challenged, as being centred on paid work, and difficult to test empirically