Main results of case studies

(copyright: INPART research project, TSER contract no. SOE2-CT97-3043)

This page describes the general results of the case studies that were carried out in the six countries of the INPART project. The main objective of the case studies was to gain insight into the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work; an objective we formulated against the background of, on the one hand, the differentiation of the world of work in modern societies and, on the other, of the persisting ideology that the only road towards full inclusion and participation is a regular paid job.

1. Methodology

In the case studies, we distinguished the following types of work/participation:

• Participation in jobs on the primary labour market (‘regular’ jobs, full-time or part-time, fixed or flexible, temporary or permanent);
• Participation in jobs on the secondary labour market (subsidised jobs for the unemployed, for example job schemes or capitalisation of benefits);
• Participation in unpaid types of work;
• Training and education.

A description of the case studies can be found on another page.

Some of the case studies, especially those under the headings of secondary labour market and training & education, refer to activating social policies in the various INPART-countries. All case studies involved research among participants in the types of participation under investigation. Sometimes, in-depth interviews were used, whereas in other case studies participants were surveyed. In some countries (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands) the respondents were interviewed twice.

To conceptualise and subsequently operationalise the central concept of the case studies, inclusion, we used both an objective and subjective conceptualisation. When conceptualising the concepts in an objective way, measures are developed to assess and measure the degree of participation of respondents and the results of this are translated into different degrees of inclusion/exclusion. In the context of this ‘objective’ approach of inclusion/exclusion, the question is whether participation in a certain type of work is positively, negatively or not at all related to participation in other (sub-)domains. In a subjective conceptualisation of inclusion/exclusion, the focus is on people’s needs and the degree to which they are able to satisfy their needs given the types of work they are participating in or (in the objective sense) excluded from. This approach recognises that people’s needs may differ, and that different types of work may or may not offer them resources to satisfy their needs.
In the context of our case studies, we distinguished various ‘domains’ of participation, enabling us to investigate whether (non-)participation in the domain of work is related to (non-)participation in other domains, and whether participating in these domains fulfilled people’s needs. The following domains of participation were distinguished which, in turn, can be subdivided into various sub-domains:

• The economic domain, encompassing the sub-domains of work, income and consumption;
• The social domain, encompassing social relations and networks with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and so on. These social networks may operate in more or less formal and institutionalised contexts (compare the social relations with colleagues at the workplace with social relations in mutual-aid groups or friendships);
• The political domain, which may range from involvement in more ‘formal’ politics (voting, membership of political parties or trade unions) to involvement in, for example, decision-making processes at community level or forms of protesting. Of course, participation in the political domain may be more passive (membership) or active (being actively involved in interest representation, for example);
• The cultural or leisure domain, which involves a large number of formal and informal activities: visiting theatres, cinemas, museums; being an active or passive member of leisure organisations (sports, health, education, hobbies etc.); reading books or newspapers; taking part in community-based or religious activities, et cetera.

As far as the concept of ‘needs’ is concerned, apart from the ‘material’ need of income (and access to consumption), we distinguished the following ‘immaterial’ needs:

• Status and respect (e.g. feeling recognised by others, feelings of pride/shame, being able to live up to one’s own and others’ expectations);
• Autonomy and self-determination (e.g. being able to live independently, having control over one’s living and working conditions);
• Social participation and social networks (e.g. feeling a full member of society, considering oneself a full and ‘interesting’ partner in daily social interactions);
• Appreciation and being able to contribute to society (e.g. being useful to others or society at large, getting appreciation for one’s contribution);
• Individual development and personal rehabilitation (e.g. being able to use and develop one’s capacities and qualifications, being able to deal with personal problems);
• Spending time (e.g. having opportunities to be engaged in meaningful activities and avoid boredom).

2. Main conclusions from the case studies

Introduction

Here, we will formulate some general conclusions based on the case studies. First, we will comment on the central concepts of this study: social inclusion and social exclusion. Then, some conclusions are presented with respect to the relationship between participation and inclusion, first from a general point of view, then for the various types of participation we have been investigating in the case studies. Subsequently, some conclusions with respect to the domains of participation will be drawn. Finally, we will say something about the different policy approaches that we have encountered while conducting the case studies.

The concepts of inclusion and exclusion

Inclusion and exclusion are the key concepts in the research on which we report in this document. We will, therefore, start our conclusions with some comments on these concepts.

First of all, the introduction of the concepts of inclusion and exclusion have often been interpreted as distracting attention from the concept of poverty and from issues related to people’s income. Even though ‘broad’ interpretations of the concepts of inclusion/exclusion (the same goes, of course, for the concept of poverty) may be used, in which case they become almost synonymous, inclusion and exclusion focus our attention on participation whereas poverty draws attention to financial hardship.

In our research, we have tried to avoid using one-sided, ‘participation-biased’ concepts of social inclusion and social exclusion. We have dealt with both issues of income and participation by looking also at income and consumption as 'sub-domains' of economic participation and by paying attention to people’s financial and consumptive needs. From our case studies, it is quite clear that the issues of participation and income deserve separate attention (in research, but also in politics). Despite the fact that both issues are closely related, they cannot be reduced to each other. A lack of participation or social isolation is not necessarily only a problem of financial hardship, and financial hardship is not necessarily a problem of a lack of participation, as the situations of the ‘working poor’ and the ‘active unemployed’ illustrate. In other words: people’s participation problems cannot always be solved by merely providing them with more income, and people’s income problems are not automatically solved by promoting their participation. Financial hardship does, of course, often constitute a barrier, for example, to participation in the social and cultural domains. Our case studies have revealed several instances where this is clearly the case. In other words, financial hardship may trigger an accumulation of situations of exclusion. However, we also saw that financial hardship may have different impacts on participation levels of different groups of people and in different domains of participation. At the same time, we have identified several other barriers to participation or, more positively, several other resources that may improve and stimulate participation. Generally, it is impossible to identify one or several resources that have a fully deterministic impact on participation in the sense that they are to be seen as conditiones sine qua non. This does not exclude the possibility, of course, that a lack of certain resources may have drastic effects on participation in specified cases or for specific groups. Income may be one of these resources, but so may health, time (in the case of single parents, for example) and more ‘psychological’ resources such as self-confidence and worthiness. However, all in all the life situations and circumstances of underprivileged, socially excluded or marginalised, poor or unemployed people are normally so complicated and multifaceted that trying to identify ‘the single, critical cause’ of their hardship may seem convenient, but will not be very adequate.
What might be the policy relevance of these general observations? As a provisional conclusion, which will be elaborated below, we present the following. Passive social policies are being criticised for being one-sided in emphasising income provision and neglecting participation opportunities. Current active social policies, which have been developed as an answer to this criticism, may end up being criticised for the reverse one-sidedness: emphasising participation and neglecting income, or more generally, resources. Against the background of the above considerations, we would like to emphasise the importance of developing empowering or, using a less politicised phrase, enabling policies, supporting people in both overcoming financial or economic hardship and in promoting their participation. Given the diversity of people’s life situations and social circumstances, these policies will have to incorporate universal/generic, target-group directed and individualised, tailor-made measures.

Secondly, the concept of social inclusion has also been criticised for the exclusive role it attributes to paid work. Paid work is considered to be the only form of participation that should be pursued in the context of social policies stimulating social inclusion and combating social exclusion. The fact that other types of work or participation may not only be socially useful but may also contribute to people’s integration into society, is often neglected. This criticism of the conceptualisation of participation in the context of social inclusion policies has been the main starting point of our research, and we will say more about it in the following sections. At this point, we would like to emphasise that our case studies show that there are more roads towards integration than regular paid work only. Without implying that these roads are equal in terms of the opportunities for social inclusion they provide (they are not), there is no a priori reason why the ‘enabling policies’ should not be based on a broad concept of participation.

Thirdly, although the concepts of exclusion and inclusion are widely used in scientific, political and public discourse, their precise meaning is quite unclear and their conceptualisation highly controversial. As we stated above, we have used both objective and subjective approaches in our conceptualisation. It should be pointed out that both approaches are normative. In objective conceptualisations, scientists, policy-makers or policy-administrators set standards for inclusion; those who do not meet these standards are considered to be excluded. The advantage of this approach is that it is relatively straightforward: by measuring, for example, people’s labour-market participation, income situation, number and frequency of social contacts et cetera, and comparing the results with the specified standard, we can decide whether they are included into or excluded from the domains of work, income and social participation respectively.
However, the most obvious weakness of the objective approach is its assumption that people in a society share a specific set of needs that goes uncontested. Reality is very different from this. Thus, the standards used in ‘measuring’ inclusion and exclusion are not as objective as they are presented to be: they reflect norms of certain groups, not necessarily coinciding with the needs of the people whose inclusion and exclusion are being ‘measured’. In order to take account of these differences, a subjective conceptualisation of exclusion and inclusion is introduced. Here, people’s own standards are taken as points of reference in defining their situation in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, two people in the same ‘objective’ situation can be assessed differently from a ‘subjective’ point of view, depending on the standards they set. Of course, this subjective approach has disadvantages as well. It might result into a situation where people’s standards are taken as given, without contextualising them by taking into account their social background, experiences, opportunities, the social consequences their standards may have, et cetera. Thus, setting standards may be partly individualised, but can never take place either completely top-down (at least, in a democratic society) or bottom-up: ideally, they should be defined in a dialogue between clients and consultants.

Translated into social policy approaches we may say that current activating social policies often start from an ‘objective’ point of view, defining people’s problems and needs and the ways to solve these problems and fulfil the needs without taken into account people’s own definitions of their situation, needs, problems et cetera. Fully recognising the fact that each intervention in the context of activating social policies is normative and the pluriformity of norms and values these interventions can be based on, standards of inclusion should ideally be defined in a discursive context, in which –in the framework of social policies- clients and consultants put forward and legitimise their standards in order to negotiate on the formulation of norms and values that guide social interventions. In this discursive context, the distinction between an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ approach makes way for intersubjectivity.

Participation and inclusion

One of the clearest conclusions we can draw from our case studies is, firstly, that there is no clear dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion, and secondly, that equating inclusion with having a regular paid job is as much a simplification as is equating unemployment with exclusion. Of course, we did find instances where employment is related to inclusion and unemployment to exclusion, but the overall picture is much more complicated than this. To determine the relationships between participation/non-participation on the one hand and inclusion/exclusion on the other only, paying attention to types of participation people are involved in is not sufficient. Interrelations between the following sets of factors are important to understand how participation and inclusion are related:

• Characteristics of the type of participation involved: are we dealing with paid or unpaid activities? Do the activities concern regular or additional/subsidised jobs? Are they stable or precarious jobs, permanent activities or activities aimed at improving labour-market participation?
• Characteristics of the policy context in which participation takes place, where the policy context may refer both to social policies and to employment policies: are activities supported or opposed by policies? What securities and insecurities are people confronted with? What resources are offered to people in terms of income, guidance, future perspectives? What stigmatisation risks are involved and how are they dealt with?
• Characteristics of the participants: their social situations, cultural orientations and life histories, the needs people have in terms of income and consumption, autonomy, status and respect, personal development, et cetera. These characteristics are, of course, related to social and demographic characteristics (gender, age, educational achievement, household composition, ethnic background et cetera) but can never be completely reduced to them.

Consequently, we can answer the question to what degree participation contributes to inclusion only by taking into account all these factors. This also explains the fact that our case studies show quite different experiences of inclusion and exclusion within the same type of participation. Different types of participation and different policy contexts in which participation takes place can meet people’s needs to different degrees. Thus, one cannot deal with the issue of the inclusionary potential of types of work in isolation: in assessing the inclusionary or exclusionary potential of types of participation, all factors mentioned above should be taken into account. In other words: the fit between characteristics of the type of participation, characteristics of the policy context and people’s needs is crucial.

Nevertheless, our case studies also show that different types of participation offer opportunity and risk structures that are very important in shaping their inclusionary of exclusionary potentials. We have been able to identify the following:

• Income. Types of participation outside the regular labour market normally offer only limited income improvement opportunities or no income improvement opportunities at all. This implies that these types of participation have little to offer to those people for whom increasing income and consumption levels are important needs, and for those people who perceive remuneration as an important symbolic expression of society’s recognition of the usefulness of their activities. More generally, even though income is not a sufficient condition for inclusion, we have seen that it is an important resource to improve social inclusion in other domains, specifically the social and cultural domains.
• Status. Different types of participation offer participants different status resources. Status resources are partially structured by social and employment policies, and resulting status differences may be reflected in social interactions, for example, between different ‘kinds’ of workers in work situations. Status differences may be sources of stigmatisation, reducing the inclusionary potential of forms of participation.
• Career opportunities. Participation often involves processes of development in which people acquire new skills and competencies, develop new ambitions and needs to engage in new challenges. Types of participation can vary considerably in the degree to which they encourage these developments and offer opportunities to meet career needs of participants, either by adapting placements/jobs to new needs or by supporting people’s outflow into other types of participation.
• Future perspectives. More generally, types of participation may open up or block future perspectives of participants. In some cases, types of participation are designed explicitly to improve future perspectives, for example by being stepping-stones towards regular labour-market participation. In other cases, participants themselves use types of participation to increase their future perspectives. However, the degree to which participants are actually offered resources, guidance, support and training opportunities to enhance future perspectives, varies widely. Thus, types of participation may act as springboards, but may also be dead-end activities, trapping people in an endless recycling process of activation.
• Opt-out and failure provisions. Types of participation, and particularly those developed in the context of activating social policies, may or may not offer people opt-out or failure provisions. ‘Opt-out’ refers to the issue whether people are allowed to refuse activation offers, for example, because they consider the offer as not meeting their needs. In the context of ‘welfare-to-work’ and ‘workfare’, obligatory activation programmes have, of course, become more and more widespread and accepted, transforming activation offers into offers that cannot be refused. Failure provisions refer to the options available to people who do not consider their participation successful. Can they stop participating, take up their benefit rights and try different activation offers? Or are benefit entitlements reduced, will they be sanctioned and not be entitled to other activation offers?
• Flexibility. Types of participation offer different degrees of flexibility to participants. For example, flexibility of the number of working tasks, the number of working hours or the scheduling of working hours, and autonomy in deciding over these issues, may be an important condition to increase the inclusionary potential of types of participation, specifically for people with caring responsibilities (for example, single parents) or for people with physical or mental health problems.
• Availability of guidance and support. Activation schemes may operate according to a ‘plug-in-and-play’ philosophy, in which little care is given to participants after placement, or according to a more human-resource-management like philosophy, in which guidance and support is offered after placements. As we have seen in our case studies, the availability of guidance and support may be an important factor in increasing the inclusionary potential of types of participation. This is specifically the case for long-term unemployed people who are or have been confronted with several and severe problems.

Summarising, we might state that the degree to which types of participation offer participants security with respect to their ability to fulfil current and future needs is an important determinant of the inclusionary potential of these types of participation. People do, of course, have other resources of security: compare, for example, the importance of the family we witnessed in the Southern European countries. However, since all countries increasingly emphasise the importance of labour-market participation, alternative ‘security providers’ (such as the family, forms of self provision, mutual aid) are increasingly eroded.

Types of participation

Against the background of the general comments in the previous section, this section will explore the opportunity and risk structures with respect to the inclusionary potential of the different types of participation we distinguished in the case studies.

Regular employment

The emphasis in our case studies has been on types of participation outside the regular labour market and on groups of people with a vulnerable labour-market position. This means, of course, that our findings are biased: they are primarily focused on vulnerable socio-economic groups. For example, our conclusion that security offered by types of participation is an important aspect of their inclusionary potential should be qualified when focusing on people with a strong market position, in the double sense that, firstly, they have more opportunities to make supply meet their demands and, secondly, they can rely on private security arrangements.
But even though we should recognise that people are dependent on their jobs in different degrees for acquiring security, to the degree that they do depend on their jobs, the general comments in the previous section apply to people participating in regular employment as well. This was clearly illustrated by the part-time case study in the UK. Part-time work offered the female respondents partial security: a moderate income, social interactions outside the private sphere of the family, and a certain degree of flexibility to match paid work with the prioritised mother role. At the same time, part-time work excluded them from opportunities to choose the job they would like to do, from certain employment rights and from long-term security. Thus, this case study clearly shows that, even where regular employment is concerned, inclusion can only be partial. Rather than treating regular employment as an undifferentiated category and putting it at the top of a hierarchy of participation, statements on the inclusionary potential of regular employment should be qualified with respect to the growing diversity in the regular labour market.

Secondary labour-market participation

In our research much more attention has been paid to participation in the secondary labour market. Many EU countries have started secondary labour-market schemes to create participation opportunities for unemployed people. Most of the times, these schemes are directed at groups of older and low-qualified unemployed, offering them low-skilled jobs. The small sample of schemes investigated in our case studies already revealed the diversity of these schemes. The Spanish scheme is clearly exceptional and has hardly any characteristics of a secondary labour-market scheme, since it is not directed at long-term and low-skilled unemployed people and since it is not aimed at creating a labour-market segment of low-skilled and low-paid jobs. In terms of the inclusionary potential of the secondary labour-market schemes, the associated workers in the Spanish capitalisation of unemployment benefits scheme seem to be best off, even though failure effects can be quite large for the participants, larger than any of the other schemes we investigated. At the same time, compared to participants in the other schemes, the Spanish participants were already better off in the first place, before starting their participation: on average, they were higher qualified, had a more stable labour-market history and were short-term unemployed. Part of this can, of course, be attributed to the preventive nature of the scheme. Rather than providing activation opportunities after people have been unemployed for some time, the Spanish scheme provides these opportunities the moment people are threatened with unemployment.
As far as the other schemes are concerned, we have found that these schemes do certainly have an inclusionary potential. Although to different degrees, they provide participants with economic independence, income improvement, social contacts, status and respect, useful activities, self-confidence and a more positive outlook. At the same time, all schemes also have clear exclusion risks. As far as the temporary schemes are concerned, the most important issue is, of course, what will happen to participants once their participation in the scheme has ended. Since these schemes are designed to be stepping-stones to regular labour-market participation, their inclusionary potential is significantly increased when they actually manage to contribute to labour-market participation. Participants’ positive evaluations of the schemes can at least partly be attributed to the positive expectations they have in this respect. At the same time, we also observed that when these expectations are not fulfilled, experiences of exclusion will increase. This risk is not imaginary, as our case studies and other investigations into similar schemes show: there is a considerable risk that people find themselves trapped in an activation recycling process, participating in one scheme after another. This does not imply that people prefer being on passive benefits, but being caught in this activation process and lacking opportunities to escape from it may contribute to experiences of marginalisation and stigmatisation.

With respect to the permanent schemes, we witnessed a tendency that their inclusionary potential is smaller than that of the temporary ones. However, we should be careful in drawing the conclusion that this means that temporary schemes are ‘better’ than permanent schemes. In both cases, the degree to which the schemes meet people’s needs and expectations is crucial. In the temporary schemes, people have the expectation to be able to find a regular job in the end; when they are disappointed in this respect, the inclusionary potential of the temporary schemes is decreased significantly. As far as the permanent schemes are concerned, the important issue is to what degree developmental and career perspectives are offered, either in the context of the scheme or in the regular labour market. Since these offers are practically absent in the schemes we have been investigating, respondents who have these ambitions are confronted with experiences of permanent stigmatisation and marginalisation. Once again, not the temporary or permanent character of the schemes as such but the fit between participation, policy and participants’ characteristics determine the inclusionary or exclusionary potential of the various schemes. The status of participants in permanent secondary labour-market schemes is an issue that deserves special attention. Whereas for participants in temporary schemes status differences may be acceptable because there is the expectation of a regular job in the near future, status differences for permanent scheme participants may at some point become unacceptable and turn into an important motive for desiring to leave the scheme. We have seen that various status differences exist: programmes are targeted (at long-term unemployed, low-qualified people, certain age groups, people with multiple problems, et cetera) which may influence interactions with others; they are subjected to income ceilings; they are confined to specific kinds of tasks; et cetera. Whereas some participants resign to these status differences because of a lack of alternatives, or do manage to cope with them, they result in increasing feelings of stigmatisation and marginalisation among others. Decreasing status differences (for those for whom secondary labour-market participation is likely to be permanent) and increasing investments into people’s future perspectives (for those who want and are able to participate in regular jobs) are two policy options to increase the inclusionary potential of secondary labour-market participation.

Unpaid work

Participation in unpaid work may have an inclusionary potential as well. Obviously, without additional measures, the inclusionary potentials of this type of work are limited to the immaterial aspects, since as such, participation in unpaid work will not offer economic independence and income improvement. Nevertheless, these immaterial aspects (status and respect, social networks, personal development, meaningful activities) may be and, in our case studies, actually are important on their own. Of course, as is the case in the other types of work as well, people may chose to be active in unpaid work from different backgrounds and for different reasons. Among the Danish volunteers, reasons for participating seem to be more ideologically inspired than among the Dutch, where motives are more related to breaking through social isolation and/or increasing social networks and developing meaningful activities, sometimes seen as first steps towards labour-market participation. In the British case, where the attention was focused on different kinds of unpaid activities, motives were related to getting things done in the household. The inclusionary potential of unpaid work depends among other things, on the degree to which these motives are met. For example, unpaid work is often not allowed to unemployed people, certainly not as an alternative to paid work, which of course limits its inclusionary potential. Where unpaid work is done as a stepping-stone towards paid employment, its inclusionary potential is highly dependent on support people get in realising this objective. The British case shows that being able to make use of unpaid work to fulfil needs depends on the availability of resources.

Generally speaking, whereas the promotion of secondary labour-market participation is entirely subjected to social policies, the contrary is the case with unpaid work. Supportive policies (recognising and rewarding unpaid work, guiding people in finding placements or in finding a job, offering them the resources needed, et cetera) are practical absent and sometimes unpaid work is counteracted rather than encouraged. Thus, often the inclusionary potential of unpaid work is realised despite rather than as a result of policies. This is, of course, closely related to the dominance of paid work in social policies. This also goes for the Dutch case, where participation actually is encouraged and supported in social policies. For the target group of these policies is limited to those unemployed whose labour-market chances are considered to be nil. In other words, here it is clearly designed as a last-resort integration option: only when participation in measures directed at primary or secondary labour-market integration has failed or is considered unrealistic, integration through unpaid work is allowed. So even though the inclusionary potential of unpaid work is recognised, it is clearly positioned at the bottom of a participation hierarchy. Contrary to what was the case with secondary labour-market programmes, our case studies into unpaid work did not reveal experiences of stigmatisation of unemployed people in unpaid work. Probably this is related to the fact that our case studies did not deal with forms of obligatory participation in unpaid work, and to the fact that in our case studies, unpaid or voluntary work carried out by unemployed people could not be distinguished from unpaid work done by other categories of unpaid workers. Furthermore, secondary labour-market schemes often limit work tasks to low-skilled and/or low-productive work, whereas such a limitation does not exist where unpaid work is concerned. The degree to which participants in activating social policies or their tasks can be clearly ‘identified’ (either in existing work organisations or in separate organisations) seems to have influence on stigmatisation risks. This does not mean, of course, that unpaid workers never report experiences of stigmatisation, for example, in work organisations where both paid and unpaid workers are working. However, in these circumstances, processes of stigmatisation will likely be directed at unpaid workers as such, not specifically at unemployed unpaid workers.

Training and education

 The training and education schemes we investigated were all, like the temporary secondary labour-market schemes, designed to prepare people for labour-market participation. Generally speaking, the training and education schemes are targeted at groups of people that are younger than the target-groups of secondary labour-market schemes are. The inclusionary potential of these schemes is, like the temporary secondary labour-market schemes, highly dependent on people’s opportunities to find a job after completing the scheme. And even though participants in these schemes are on average younger, there is a clear risk of ‘educational recycling’ or ‘activation recycling’ here as well. Thus, even though participation in the schemes raises people’s expectations to be able to find a job, the risk that these expectations will be frustrated is very real. Nevertheless, despite these considerations training and education schemes also have an inclusionary potential: they may offer people new skills, social contacts, status, meaningful activities, some income improvement in some cases, et cetera. These ‘advantages’ of participating in education and training schemes may have positive effects on participation in other domains than the labour market. In other words, the successes of training and education schemes in terms of their integrative functions cannot be measured by merely evaluating their contribution to participants’ labour-market chances. Sometimes training and education programmes recognise this explicitly, as we saw in the Portuguese case study where stimulating social participation was considered to be a separate objective of the training programme, apart from labour-market integration.

Domains of participation

In the research, we have been distinguishing several domains of participation: the economic, the social, the cultural (including leisure and religion) and the political domain. From our case studies it can be concluded that the economic and social domains seem to be by far the most important in shaping people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion; even though this does not mean, that they never feel excluded from or would like to be more included into the cultural or political domains.
It turns out to be rather complicated to establish the relationship between participation on the one hand and inclusion into the various domains on the other. Usually it is assumed that regular employment offers resources and opportunities that enable inclusion into the domains: income, social networks, status, employment rights et cetera. At the same time, access to these resources and opportunities may differ from one job to another, as the part-time case study showed. Furthermore, having a paid job may also limit resources and opportunities to be engaged in other domains: the Spanish case studies illustrated this with respect to the resource of time. In other words, generally speaking there is no straightforward relation between having a regular paid job and inclusion into other domains.
Another aspect that makes the relationship between participation and inclusion into various domains a complicated issue is that people are not necessarily dependent on the resources that regular jobs offer them to be included into the domains of participation. For example, other types of work or participation may give access to similar resources as well. This goes for all types of participation we have been distinguishing. And even beyond the types of participation we distinguished, people may find other ways to get integrated into the various domains, such as through networks of family or friends, leisure activities et cetera. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that different types of participation are not equivalent in the access they offer to certain resources. For example, we showed that unpaid work gives no access to income, and that secondary labour-market participation may give only limited access to status. Thus, different types of participation reveal different patterns of integration opportunities, and the fit between these opportunities and people’s needs will determine their inclusionary potential.
In this context, income seems to be a resource deserving special attention. On the one hand we observed that income is an important resource for being integrated into the domains of consumption, culture/leisure and social networks in particular. Many respondents pointed at a lack of income as an important barrier to their integration into these domains. On the other hand, of the various resources that may increase integration into these domains, access to income is most exclusively related to job access. Thus, insofar as income is a prerequisite for inclusion into the various domains, one might argue that participation in a regular job and, to a lesser extent, in secondary labour-market jobs does actually constitute an entry ticket to full participation. Nevertheless, even in this case, the link between paid jobs and full participation is highly policy-dependent. For example, passive social policies in the countries we have studied provide people with very different levels of income, thereby influencing the degree to which full participation is dependent on having a job. Furthermore, proponents of a basic or citizens’ income scheme argue in favour of loosening the work-income nexus, which would make availability of income and, consequently, full participation less dependent on availability of paid work. In a more moderate version, a participation income might give people access to income improvement dependent on their involvement in useful activities rather than just paid work. And systems of informal exchange may open up non-monetary income resources that can enhance people’s full participation. In other words, even though income is an important resource to be able to fully participate in a highly monetarised society, there are other options available to improve people’s income situation than just offering them a paid job.
Summarising, even though paid employment may –at least potentially- give access to resources for full participation, it does not do so exclusively. Furthermore, insofar as paid employment does stimulate integration into domains of participation, it does not do so by its very nature, but by the way policies deal with work and participation. In other words, to increase full participation of people out of employment, two policy options are open: either to stimulate their participation in paid employment, or to open up other opportunities and resources towards full participation.

In this context, some remarks should be made with respect to the issue of ‘self-exclusion’. In describing the results of the case studies in previous chapters, we encountered various instances of self-exclusion. People withdraw from the labour market in order to avoid disappointments and frustrations related to frequent rejections when applying for jobs. People withdraw from social networks in order to save money, because they cannot afford it, or because of feelings of shame and a lack of self-confidence. People withdraw from political participation because of their lack of trust in the political system. Of course, social interventions do not (and probably should not) take these ‘self-exclusion strategies’ for granted. Even though people might use these strategies as ‘survival strategies’ and even though they might find it hard to break through them as ‘self-exclusion’ also offers them security and a reduction of social risks, in many cases they result from an actual and/or perceived lack of resources, opportunities and options. Here, the importance of a dialogic approach of social interventions aimed at activation becomes clear. Instances of exclusion, assessed from an ‘objective’ point of view, which are not immediately perceived as problematic by the people involved, do not necessarily indicate that one should refrain from social intervention. Thus, the dialogic character of social interventions implies that norms and values of both the interventionists and the target groups of interventions should be open to debate.

Traditional and new activation approaches

Traditionally, active social policies start from a rather top-down point of view, fettered by a paternalistic perspective saying that paid employment is the one and only way to integrate people into society. From this perspective, there seems to be no need to legitimise social policy interventions, since the dominance of paid work is considered to be an issue of consensus. However, the dominance of paid work, and with it the top-down and paternalistic character of active social policies, have been criticised again and again. The reasons for this criticism are various:

• There is not enough paid employment for the ever increasing number of people that are subjected to active social policies;
• Paid employment is not the only way in which people can contribute to society, neither is it the only route towards social integration;
• Not everyone wants or is able to participate in paid work.

Against this background, social policy ‘niches’ have been developed in which different social policy approaches are used, opening up non-traditional social inclusion strategies and/or paying more respect to strategies and ambitions of the target groups of social policies themselves. Examples of these policies were found in the Dutch and Belgian case studies, and were advocated on the basis of the British case study into informal work. In most cases, these policies have been developed for groups of unemployed or poor people who, time and again, were not reached by more traditional social policy approaches: the very long-term unemployed, unemployed or poor people with multiple problems, et cetera. The reasons for not reaching these groups are various such as the lack of flexibility of existing programmes, the lack of an integrative approach in tackling people’s problems, the lack of opportunities to develop tailor-made integration routes, et cetera. The failure of traditional social policies for these people has opened up opportunities to experiment with a variety of alternative approaches, ranging from tailor-made guidance in supporting employment, to recognising and facilitating participation strategies developed by poor and unemployed people themselves, to creating new types of participation et cetera. Once again, these new approaches have, up until now, been confined to people who were excluded from traditional activation approaches. However, one may expect that since social policies in the EU countries are becoming more and more activation-oriented, EU countries will be increasingly confronted with groups of people that are not reached by these policies and, consequently, are not only excluded from the labour market, but from activating social policies as well. In a negative scenario, one may expect a situation in which these people are left to their own devices and policy interventions are limited to reduce the inconvenience they may cause to the better-off and included parts of society. In a more positive scenario, opportunities will be created to develop the ‘enabling’ social policies we mentioned, providing room for experimenting with new social intervention strategies, new ways to improve social inclusion, et cetera.