Social exclusion

Social exclusion has become a major focus of attention in both academic research and policy development in recent years, in both national and EU contexts.1 In the course of the work of the Network that forms the basis for much of the material examined in this book, we systematically analysed different forms of available data (academic studies, official and semi-official statistical data, legal and governmental policy documentation, printed media). At each of those stages of analysis, social exclusion was the most difficult thematic concept to pre-define with considerable differences between the way each country in the study configured that concept. Moreover, these differences varied to some extent depending upon which forms of national and international data or evidence we were examining. For instance, what one country might define as social exclusion in terms of its academic outputs might differ to some extent from the definition in the same country in terms of what was found in legal and governmental documentation. Both forms of variability are interesting on several counts, and we explore some of these issues, among others, in this chapter.