Poverty between exclusion processes and widespread precariousness

The term social exclusion does not seem to express fully the extension of the privations present in our societies, it can only be referred to well-defined areas of the population. The attention moves from processes of exclusion to processes of social integration and their more or less foreseeable effects. The article explores the international debates about poverty and social exclusion, comparing concerns about more or less permanent poverty with the increasing evidence of the precariousness of the position of most of the poor. Poverty appears an extended concept that includes stable privation in time and more unsettled conditions. Next to long-term poverty are short spells of poverty as an experience of life, which involve families only in limited periods of time, an occasional economic condition or swinging between hardship and an average income shared by the community they belong to. The new forms of poverty are characterised starting from the social dynamics that contribute to build them: stable poverty fully expresses the results of a process of social exclusion, considered as a fracture between the individual and the community, a fracture of the social link, isolation that tends to reproduce itself also without the manifestation of further accumulations of negative events; occasional poverties on the other hand are the expression of a more general way of life, of a widespread precariousness, of prevalent ways through which the individuals are integrated, not of specific processes but of a critical gathering, for a certain amount of time, of processes substantially common to all individuals The article locates Italian social research and policy development in this context and summarises some of the recent research on social exclusion and inclusion in Italy