Do less and achieve more – starting today. Adopt some of these easy habits to make it happen.
Success tends to create clutter: more meetings, more projects, more decisions, more items on your to-do list. But often doing more can mean achieving less.
That’s why subtraction can be the best addition, especially when you streamline your workday and, in the process, your professional life.
Instead of doing a total professional makeover, the easiest way is to start small.
Exclusionary processes can have various dimensions:
Political exclusion can include the denial of citizenship rights such as political participation and the right to organise, and also of personal security, the rule of law, freedom of expression and equality of opportunity. Bhalla and Lapeyre (1997: 420) argue that political exclusion also involves the notion that the state, which grants basic rights and civil liberties, is not a neutral agency but a vehicle of a society’s dominant classes, and may thus discriminate between social groups.
Economic exclusion includes lack of access to labour markets, credit and other forms of ‘capital assets’.
Social exclusion may take the form of discrimination along a number of dimensions including gender, ethnicity and age, which reduce the opportunity for such groups to gain access to social services and limits their participation in the labour market.
Cultural exclusion refers to the extent to which diverse values, norms and ways of living are accepted and respected.
The term ‘social exclusion’ was first originated in Europe, where there was a greater emphasis on spatial exclusion. There is also a policy focus on those living in ‘deprived areas’, where poor housing, inadequate social services, weak political voice and lack of decent work all combine to create an experience of marginalisation.
In general terms social exclusion is a concept that can be defined and deployed in two ways:
It can be defined narrowly – in which case it is used as a synonym for income poverty and refers specifically to either those people who are not attached to the paid labour market (exclusion from the paid workforce) or to those people in low-wage work. It is often used alongside the concept of “social cohesion” in the sense that a cohesive society is one in which (political, social and economic) stability is maintained and controlled by participation in the paid workforce.
It can be defined broadly – in which case it refers to much more than poverty, income
inequality, deprivation or lack of employment. It involved a lack of resources and/or denial of social rights and that exclusion was a dynamic process. The processes of exclusion resulted in multiple deprivations, the breaking of family ties and social relationships, and loss of identity and purpose (Silver 1995).
Social exclusion is an independent process in itself. It involves the denial of resources and services, and the denial of the right to participate on equal terms in social relationships in economic, social, cultural or political arenas. Exclusionary processes can occur at various levels, within and between households, villages, cities, states, and globally. It provides information for international development agencies to identify those dynamic processes which they could aim to strengthen or minimise.
Naila Kabeer identifies three types of attitudes and social practices which result in exclusion (2000: 91-93). These can be conscious or unconscious, intended or unintended, explicit or informal. They are:
Mobilisation of institutional bias: Existence of “a predominant set of values, beliefs, rituals and institutional procedures that operate systematically and consistently to the benefit of certain persons and groups at the expense of others”. This mechanism operates without conscious decisions by those who represent the status quo.
Social closure: This is the way in which social system seek to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited group of favoured eligibles. This implies the monopolisation of certain opportunities based on group attributes, such as race, language, social origin and religion. State institutions cause exclusion when they deliberately discriminate in their laws, policies or programmes. Often there are social systems that decide people’s position in society on the basis of heredity.
Unruly practices: Refers to the gaps between rules and their implementation. Institutions unofficially encourage exclusion when decision makers reflect the prejudices of their society through their position and even institutionalising some kind of discrimination.
People who are socially excluded are generally also poor, particularly if poverty is defined in a multidimensional way. But several key differences are there between the concepts of poverty and social exclusion. The majority of people in a society may be poor, but it cannot be always said that they are excluded also. In most of the cases social exclusion implies inequality or relative deprivation, whereas poverty need not. Social exclusion implies that there are processes of exclusion and institutional processes and actors responsible for excluding, whereas poverty does not necessarily imply this.
There are various types of exclusion.
Political exclusion is defined as the denial of citizenship rights such as political participation and the right to organise, and also of personal security, the rule of law, freedom of expression and equality of opportunity. Bhalla and Lapeyre (1997) argue that political exclusion also involves the notion that the state, which should grant basic rights and civil liberties, is not a neutral agency but a vehicle of a society’s dominant classes, and so may discriminate between different social groups.
Economic exclusion includes lack of access to labour markets, credit and other forms of ‘capital assets’.
Spatiality of Social Exclusion
–>Spatial concentrations of deprivation/exclusion…
Current example of despatialization and respatialization is homelessness.
Heterogeneity of cities…one of their most prominent aspects. Two reactions: can try to impose an order on it (thus becoming manageable/understandable) or celebrate it. Emphasizing or deemphasizing difference…both have failed.
Types of Space
Absolute/relational, mental/real, physical/social, abstract/differential, space and time, space and mass, etc.
Boundaries
Local level: land/property development and spatial planning.
Neighborhood: intimate scale of urban whole, digestible. Social cohesion through spatial organization. BUT, socio-spatial segregation persists, perpetuated by market forces that control how space is produced, used, and exchanged.
Tension: Alienation of the big city and smaller, romanticized communities.
Public and Private Space…privacy as an entitlement. Lack of privacy is also a kind of exclusion.
To promote greater inclusion of marginalized groups:
Decommodify space so that the private real estate market plays less of a decisive role in where groups are located within a city
Deliberate city planning to despatialize social exclusion
These potential theoretical approaches involve a variety of interventions from inclusionary housing units to mixed-use zoning.The ‘mainstream:’ how do we identify this and how does it differ from place to place? Is it defined by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability? A number of these? Can it differ from one side of the tracks to the other? How is it determined and can it be shaped? For example, in the Walnut area…are deliberate steps being taken to replace or recreate the ‘mainstream’ or is it an (un)intended consequence of needed/desired changes?
Inhabitants of the rural settlement depend for their livelihood upon the exploitation of the soil, small fishing, quarrying, mining forestry caps etc. A typical village has secondary workers supplying services to the primary group of farmers and farm labourers e.g. shopkeepers, teachers, clergymen, the . publican, postmaster, smith and garage proprietor. Besides the village consists of a part of retired people and in part of younger people who live inn the village but go to work in a neighbouring town as urbanism is fast becoming a new way of life. The proportion of population in each of these classes bears to the total village population, varies with the kind of farming characteristics of the locality, the quality of the soil, the attractiveness and accessibility of the site and its place within the general settlement pattern.
The main factors influencing the rural settlements are :
Depending on the size, the rural settlements are classified as (Hamlets is rural settlement comprising of few houses only), true village communities, villages and large villages. True village community are just ancient and long settled villages where in extreme cases, no personal property exists and everything belongs to community of peasants. Such village communities are seen in India, Malaya and France.
Besides agricultural villages, there also exists forest villages, mining and quarrying villages, fishing villages, villages chiefly supported by tourist industry, dormitory villages serving nearby towns and industrial villages. Each has its own characters :
Many industrial and mining villages are unprepossessing which suffer from ugly and drab surroundings.
Fishing and tourist villages are more attractively situated and in many cases possess the charm and interest of historical buildings.
Most of dormitory villages are either new or consists largely of modern housing estates. In all such settlements, occupations are much more specialized than in towns and such typical urban functions as administration and wholesaling are rarely present. The number of villages in a country and the role played by villages in the social and economic context is profound. In India around three fourth of the population live in more than six hundred thousand villages and most of these support a population of less than five hundred. It is estimated that two out of every three persons still live in villages or in hamlets and scattered dwelling all over the world.
The village has been both the cultural and physical entity since ancient times. If the physical factor of site have provided a mould for pattern formation, cultural factors have given the substance and vitality. The concept of Dih is a symbolic of traditional attachment to the site of the settlement of the growing village community while the decayed Dih has ever remained unwanted, and thus preserved amidst till the life around. The settlement has also preserved the various layers of the social fabrics with provisions for group segregation within the village territorial limit and is in consonance with the need of the time.
The villages is seldom an isolate; it is an essential part of a large territorial unit developed in the process of land occupancy. Such territorial units have continued to this day in more or less similar form maintaining uniform rural polity through the general political order at the national as well as regional levels has been registering frequent changes.
Indian Case
In India, the individual village may be dominated either by a single crop or a number of significant rural communities some of which may be insignificant on the territorial level. For instance, the Upper Doab, a territory with jat dominance does provide for Muslim, Rajput and Tyagi villages. The region as a whole, is predominantly rural as around 80% of the total population is living in villages. There is a general tendency of greater nucleation of rural settlement in the region.
The distributional pattern of rural settlements and their types in the region are intimately related to its dominantly alluvial morphology and the predominantly agrarian economy. The nature of terrain, type of soils, facilities of water supply have also important role in the development of the settlements. Means of transport is a very important factor in this regard. In the Ganga-Yamuna doab, high fertility soil, more ‘bhangar’ lands, adequate irrigational facilities, and means of well developed transport have given rise to almost uniform distribution of settlements. In ‘Tarai’ area of Rohilkhand-Awadh region, the settlements are, however, unevenly distributed due to high percentage of forests, marshy tracts and seasonal floods, and the villages are located on relatively higher ground. In general the unpopulated villages are a pronounced feature of the Tarai tract due to frequent desertion of sides owing to floods and other causes and the migratory cultivation by the aboriginal tribes. On account of over flooding and changes in the river courses, villages are mostly hamleted and are often located at the points of geographical advantage, such as embankment and river bluffs etc. In the Rohilkhand and Awadh, villages are generally evenly distributed and are located above the flood level.
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