The language of politics and the politics of language: Unpacking ‘social exclusion’ in new labour policy

Abstract

Since the election to power of New Labour in 1997, the concept of social exclusion has played a defining role in framing welfare policy. The rapid absorption of its terminology in government discourse has signalled a shift away from existing notions of inequality and disadvantage to a broader understanding of material poverty, which also includes (or instead prioritises) other social, cultural and political factors. This has important implications for New Labour policy-making. In particular, it allows for problems of inequality and disadvantage to be reinterpreted and new political measures to be introduced. Such measures produce different effects across space and society, which may be argued to disadvantage policy subjects. The aims of this paper are to explore how social exclusion has become installed as the primary framework of welfare policy in the UK and to examine the key assumptions embedded within specific policy formulations using discourse and content analysis. It thus points towards the importance of language in stipulating relatively enduring and stable sets of socio-political connections, and its role in mediating a particular (political) vision of the relationship(s) between state, economy and society as implicit in New Labour's ‘Third Way’.

The author would like to acknowledge the support of ESRC award number PTA-030-2002-01628. The author is also grateful to the editor for guidance in summarising the helpful comments of the referees and especially to Martin Jones, Mark Goodwin, Mark Whitehead and Columba Peoples for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The term after-Fordism is used to refer to the actually existing ensemble of mechanisms and practices which presently enable capital accumulation to occur in a relatively stable way, despite being marked by a continuing relative incoherence because a discrete post-Fordist accumulation regime and mode of regulation have not yet been established (see Jessop, 2002).

2. There are parallels here with Althusser's (1971) concept of ‘interpellation’, which refers to the mechanisms through which people are constituted as subjects (through the dialectical processes of subjectivity and subjection). This is often used to shift the empirical focus (further) from the constitution of ideas to the production of subjects and raise questions about how mental concepts become internalised or inscribed onto social practices.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Macleavy

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