Towards an actor-oriented approach to social exclusion: a critical review of contemporary exclusion research in a Swedish social work context

ABSTRACT

Social exclusion has emerged as a key concept within Swedish social work research during the last decade. Yet, despite the plethora of conceptualisations put forward there is a dearth of critical discussion on potential pitfalls and limitations following this fragmentation. This article investigates the deployment of social exclusion in national social work research during the period 1999–2016. Three separate but linked research strands are identified: (1) a policy-absorbed approach, characterised by conceptual and analytical closeness to the Swedish policy discourse on exclusion, (2) a diluted approach, characterised by conceptual confusion and conflation and (3) an autonomous approach, distinguished by its conceptual and analytical distance from the official policy discourse on exclusion. Based on presented findings, we argue that there is need for an actor-oriented approach to social exclusion within social work research. We conclude with proposing a multi-level analytical framework that involves studying the sequence of events leading up to people being denied access to social, economic, material, cultural and/or political resources.

ABSTRAKT

Social exkludering har under det senaste decenniet börjat framträda som ett nyckelbegrepp inom svensk forskning i socialt arbete. En mängd olika definitioner och perspektiv på exkludering har lanserats men det saknas en kritisk diskussion om de potentiella problem och begränsningar som denna begreppsliga fragmentisering innebär. Artikeln presenterar en litteraturgenomgång av hur social exkludering definierats och tillämpats i svensk forskning med fokus på socialt arbete under perioden 1999–2016. Tre breda forskningsspår identifieras: (1) det policy-absorberade spåret, vilket kännetecknas av en begreppsanvändning i linje med policytermen ‘utanförskap’, (2) det urvattnade spåret, där exkludering sällan definieras men ofta används som synonym till en rad mer eller mindre liknande begrepp, samt (3) det självständiga spåret, som kännetecknas av en teoretiskt förankrad begreppsanvändning och distans till utanförskapsbegreppet. Artikeln avslutas med ett förslag på teoretiskt ramverk för framtida studier vilket fokuserar social exkludering som en aktörsdriven process. Detta innebär att den analytiska blicken riktas mot de handlingar och händelseförlopp som initierar, driver på och leder fram till att människor nekas tillträde till sociala, ekonomiska, materiella, kulturella och/eller politiska resurser.

KEYWORDS:

• Social exclusion
• social work
• Sweden
• critical perspectives
• critical review

NYCKELORD:

• social exkludering
• socialt arbete
• Sverige
• kritiska perspektiv
• litteraturgenomgång

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tobias Davidsson (PhD) is Senior lecturer in Social Work at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously, he has worked as a social worker in institutional care for children. His main research interest is in the field of social policy, with a particular focus on social history and the dynamics between social assistance and the labour market. In his thesis ‘The rationality of poor relief. A genealogy of the work strategy under capitalism’, he shows how contemporary Swedish workfare policies bears a close resemblance to the system of poor relief in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Frida J M Petersson (PhD) is Senior lecturer in Social Work at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has worked as a social worker in the field of adult social care and has a particular interest in applying micro-sociological theory to welfare policies and interventions directed against so-called ‘problem groups’ in society – for example, people experiencing substance abuse problems or homelessness. Her PhD thesis, ‘Controlling addiction. The logic, practice and semantics of methadone maintenance treatment’, contributes to an added understanding of how power is exercised and experienced in the Swedish maintenance treatment programmes.

ORCID

Tobias Davidsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8058-5971

Frida J. M. Petersson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8512-7892

Notes

1 Henceforth we use ‘social exclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ interchangeably.

2 The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (https://www.forsakringskassan.se/), The Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society (http://eng.mucf.se/), The National Board of Health and Welfare (www.socialstyrelsen.se/) and The Swedish Public Employment Service (www.arbetsformedlingen.se/).

3 The reason we have chosen to highlight a publication authored by one of us was the absence of ‘autonomous’ studies carried out in a micro social work setting. There are, of course, other social work researchers that have examined situated talk and interaction using similar analytical perspectives (see for example Knutagård, 2007), however, without making explicit use of ‘social exclusion’. Hence, these publications were not retrieved through our scoping strategy.