Biography and social exclusion in Europe: Experiences and life journeys

Description

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation. Taking an innovative socio-biographical approach to comparative social policy, it argues that understanding individually differentiated biographical resources and strategies provides a bedrock for the appropriate training and effective practice of policy-makers, practitioners and researchers. Based on 250 life-story interviews in seven European Union countries, this work: analyses personal struggles against social exclusion to illuminate local milieus and changing welfare regimes and contexts; points to challenging new agendas for European politics and welfare, beyond the rhetoric of communitarianism and the New Deal; vividly illustrates the lived experience and environmental complexity working for and against structural processes of social exclusion; re-fashions the interpretive tradition as a teaching and research tool linking macro- and micro- realities. Students, academic teachers and professional trainers, practitioners, politicians, policy makers and researchers in applied and comparative welfare fields should all benefit from reading this book.

Prue Chamberlayne is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Welfare at the Open University. She has extensive experience of teaching comparative social policy and of using biographical methods in research. She is currently engaged in applying such methods to professional training and evaluation work. Tom Wengraf, formerly Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Research Methods at Middlesex University, was co-editor of The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (2000), and his Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured methods was published in 2001. Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. His recent book Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics (2001) explores interconnections between psychoanalysis, qualitative research methods, and social policy.

"a highly exciting and innovative book. This development in ethnographic methods in social research is immensely valuable and relevant to key questions in contemporary societies." Professor Walter Lorenz, Department of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.