Browsing by Author "Haapaniemi, Sampo"

The danger in tightening economic situation is that increasingly more people become margin- alized employment and education – at its worst entirely outside of our society. This research is aiming to create a picture of how the individuals are connected to the society. My special interest is how the people are getting on the edge or are totally left outside of the society. One of the major concepts of being part of the society is the concept of involvement. The in- volvement contains carrying and receiving real responsibility including individual’s own and the whole society’s performance. The dimensions of involvement are personal and social and this means that individual has right to her/his own identity and right to be respected. At the other hand society has to be a place where the individual should be recognized as him/her self, as a valuable person and part of the society. Opposite to involvement the literature often presents social exclusion. Social exclusion is a process were individual slowly drops out of the society’s norms and functions. Person can be excluded from for example education, working life, welfare services, and social relations as well as from the democratic decision-making. Social exclusion has brought up a great concern in Finland. Due to this concern in 2013 the government decided to initiate a project in order to prevent social exclusion. Part of it was the Youth guarantee that aimed to improve the youth’s possibilities to get a degree after the compulsory basic education and improve their chances to get employed. One of the tools youth guarantee has used is Workshop activities that aim to support the youth’s own life con- trol, increasing their involvement and preventing their social exclusion. There is a lot of literature on the subject of being part of the society, involvement, social ex- clusion and workshop activities. The interesting point is that there is no common view on how to scientifically define to these concepts. The varying concepts were seen to be making it more difficult to prevent social exclusion, since effective support demands to recognize those individuals that are in danger to be excluded.