What's up doc? On social exclusion and what's wrong with it
Rob Watts
RMIT Univeristy
Contact Email:   rob.wattsrmit.edu.au

As Smyth and Jones (2000) have noted, if Australian policy researchers and policy makers have been tardy in picking up on the theme of social exclusion, they are beginning to make up for lost time. In a context of enthusiastic and widespread support for ‘evidence-based’ policy, social capital and ‘rebuilding community’, the idea of social exclusion can almost seem empirically robust, theoretically interesting and likely to inform decent policy. Yet it isn’t and won’t.

The problem as always lies in the constructive schemes (Boehme, 1975) the researchers and policy makers have been reliant on. The role and the power of constructivist schemes has been well put by Janet Malcom (1994: 69) when she insists that journalists when writing their stories have to obey a fundamental rule:
.. which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism, significantly called ‘stories’ … derive their power from their firm undeviating sympathies and antipathies; Cinderalla must remain ‘good’ and the stepsisters ‘bad’.
As with journalists so with social scientists and policy researchers.

By ‘constructivist schemes’ I refer simply to the way disciplines like sociology or policy studies establish over time a sense of the questions their disciplines take seriously. In these constructivist schemes will also be found important metaphors and constitutive abstractions that shape and form their theoretical models and their descriptions. These constitutive metaphors provide disciplines with their conceptual vocabulary as well as their authoritative narratives that summarise that discipline's account of reality.

It is these ‘constructivist schemes’ which I argue here sets up many of the characteristic difficulties which these social sciences have when addressing issues like poverty, unemployment, powerlessness satisfactorily. In particular by pointing to some significant problems with exemplary theoretical and empirical work on the theme of social exclusion, I want to (i) identify those questions that need to be addressed, as well as (ii) specify an alternative approach that may shed more light on the problem which talk of social exclusion is trying to get at.

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