Discourse on Inequality in France and Britain

Published in 1998, this volume consists of 16 edited papers presented at an Anglo-French conference on inequality in France in March 1997. The purpose of this book is to bring together ideas and perceptions of inequality in the two countries across several areas including multi-ethnicity, education, social work, housing and health, presented by experts in these fields and in cultural studies. The purpose is not comparative in the traditional sense, but rather to analyze the different meanings amd conceptions that apply to inequality in France and Britain and to demostrate how these differences affect policies as well as what is considered to be legitimate grounds for policy intervention. This approach to social policy in Europe pays attention to the cultural meanings of concepts like inequality and demonstrates that comparative social policy can only be properly productive when it acknowledges that key words like poverty, inequality, citizenship, social rights and insertion/exclusion carry with them quite different ideological, moral and social meanings in two countries such as Britain and France.