Peter Townsend Memorial Conference

Ruth Levitas, University of Bristol

Ruth Levitas has been Professor of Sociology at Bristol since 2001 and a member of the Department of Sociology at Bristol since 1979. She is predominantly known for her work on utopianism and on social exclusion. Her research interests in the first field cover the history of oppositional and utopian thought, the relationship between utopia and social theory, utopia as a method in the social sciences, utopia and music, and utopia, history, memory and place.

Ruth has also written widely on contemporary political ideologies and discourses, as well as on New Labour, poverty, inequality and social inclusion and exclusion. Her recent work on social exclusion, in collaboration with colleagues in the School for Policy Studies and elsewhere, has focused on conceptualisation and measurement. It includes research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Social Exclusion Unit and The Social Exclusion Task Force. In 1999, JRF funded the largest-ever dedicated poverty survey in the UK and the only one to directly examine social exclusion. The former SEU funded work on the multi-dimensional measurement of social exclusion, generating the Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix, or B-SEM, is now being used to commission Government-funded secondary analysis of existing data sets. Her work on social exclusion has been translated into French, Spanish and Greek.

Ruth is one of the investigators on the ESRC Large Grant on Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK, which will start on 1st April 2010.

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Social Exclusion: Ongoing Challenges

Peter Townsend is now most noted as an expert on the conceptualisation, measurement and alleviation of poverty, and latterly of that inseparable dyad ‘poverty and social exclusion’. And that is his most obvious legacy. But he was also a superb sociologist, and one of the founders of the discipline as it expanded in the 1960s. He insisted that to understand and address the causes of poverty and social exclusion we need to look not just at the poor, or the poor in relation to the middle, but holistically across the whole of society. We need to understand the institutional processes that generate poverty, and the role of the rich in creating and sustaining these institutions and their outcomes. Hence Peter’s insistence that the key problem is not the underclass but the overclass. Hence his insistence that:

The problem of poverty is one part of the problem of inequality, the process of social exclusion is one part of the process of social polarisation, and the process of social polarisation is about power as well as resources.

This is both a scientific and technical matter and an ethical one. As Peter wrote:

During the last ten years the general image of the Labour Party as presented to the public seems to have undergone a subtle but significant change. The party now seems to be characterised by a diminished attachment to moral and social principle and by a correspondingly greater concern with piecemeal social reform, at least in social policy.

What is most surprising about that statement is that it was made not in relation to Blair’s transformation of the party in the 1990s, but in the New Statesman half a century ago, in 1959. The article argues for better data on poverty and living standards, a disengagement ‘from the cloying attentions of those who think it better to invest in machinery rather than people’, and an end to the truce on inequality. The ethical necessity is to ‘apply social principles which radically improve the income and living conditions of the poor’, and ‘at the small cost of limiting the individual’s ability to secure advantages outrageously in excess of those available to other citizens’.

TO ENLARGE PEOPLE’S FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHAT KIND OF LIFE THEY WILL LEAD.

Long before the dyad ‘poverty and social exclusion’ became current in social policy, Peter’s concern about poverty was never simply about material deprivation – although that concern was of course prominent. It was always also about the consequences for social participation, social relations.

Individuals, families and groups can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least are widely encouraged and approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities. (Townsend 1979: 32)

Thus poverty was described by Peter in 1979 as a lack of ‘resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities, and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies to which they belong’, and this lack of resources means that people affected are ‘excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities’. Indeed, they are prevented from carrying out the obligations associated with and ascribed to their social roles, both publicly and privately.

Early discussions about social exclusion in UK critical social policy circles were closely related to this redistributive discourse and policy agenda, but as the term became more central to European and then to New Labour policy agendas, the emphasis shifted – towards inclusion through paid work, and towards blaming the behaviour of the poor. Amid all the debates over appropriate indicators of social exclusion in the 1990s, there was surprisingly little emphasis on social relations. The 1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, on which I had the privilege to work with Peter on devising direct measures of social exclusion, was in part an attempt to put the social back in social exclusion.

Academically, of course, we need to continue to argue for, and produce, better data on poverty, social exclusion, and their causes and consequences both domestically and globally. One part of this will be the new Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, funded by the ESRC.

Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK:
• To improve the measurement of poverty, deprivation, social exclusion and standard of living
• To collect and analyse new cross-sectional data on poverty and social exclusion thereby extending the existing series of Poverty and Social Exclusion surveys
• To conduct policy-relevant analyses of outcomes and causal relationships from a comparative perspective

This will enable the series of specialised poverty surveys that have taken place roughly every decade to continue, with fieldwork in 2010/11. This will give us up to date substantive information about levels of poverty in the UK in the wake of the economic recession, as well as comparative data across the range of surveys. It will also enable us to refine the methodology for the measurement of both poverty and social exclusion, and — hopefully — to develop modules that can be incorporated into longitudinal surveys in the UK and Europe.

The new survey will of course build on intervening work, and especially the Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix, or B-SEM, of which Eldin Fahmy produced this natty diagram.

Three years ago, the Bristol team was commissioned by the then Social Exclusion Unit to survey existing data sets for their potential for secondary analysis of the dynamics of social exclusion or multiple deprivation. To do this we had to define social exclusion and devise a matrix of relevant domains and topics against which to assess existing data sets. Since then, the B-SEM has been used by SETF as the basis for four pieces of secondary analysis of multiple deprivation across the life-course. PSE 2010 will build on the B-SEM. The key challenge is to relate the social aspects of social exclusion to questions of material resources and forms of participation in paid and unpaid work, as well as quality of life.

We used a synthetic definition for this work, incorporating the general sense of a range of definitions in the literature.

Social exclusion is a complex and multi-dimensional process. It involves the lack or denial of resources, rights, goods and services, and the inability to participate in the normal relationships and activities, available to the majority of people in a society, whether in economic, social, cultural or political arenas. It affects both the quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society as a whole. (Levitas et al. 2007)

But this is specifically designed to capture social exclusion at the level of its effects on individuals and households, as we were chiefly charged with looking at survey data. What such a definition fails to capture is the structural determination of social exclusion, better reflected, for example, in this definition:

An accumulation of confluent processes with successive ruptures arising from the heart of the economy, politics and society, which gradually distances and places persons, groups, communities and territories in a position of inferiority in relation to centres of power, resources and prevailing values. (Estivill 2003:19)

So there is another academic task, and that is bringing these questions of material and social inequality, and especially the process of social polarisation, back to the centre of sociology itself. Sociology needs to overcome the fragmentation that has afflicted it following the postmodern turn, and return to more holistic, systemic and institutional analyses. And sociologists need to be a lot less afraid of saying what needs to change.

Politically and academically, more attention needs to be paid to inequality. There is of course some excellent work on this, not least Richard Wilkinson’s longstanding arguments about the measurable social harm inequality does. But the difficulty is sustaining the argument that the problem is extreme wealth, and widening inequalities on a local and global scale. Quite how this is to be done without public anger being quite so readily deflected from the beneficiaries of an out of control financial sector to the political class I don’t know. But it is crucial, not least because of the huge damage the habits of the super rich inflict on the biosphere.

So we need to:

• Continue to develop our capacity to understand ‘poverty’ and social exclusion
• Emphasise the processes of social polarisation & the institutions that generate it
• Imagine on a global and local scale, means of livelihood and ways of life that are sustainable
• Insist on what needs to change

We need, especially, to take forward Peter’s ethical commitment to change. And to hold fast, somehow, to the hope always present in his work, of a society based on equality and free from poverty and social exclusion.

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Ruth Levitas, University of Bristol

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