Introduction

This chapter explores how incentives or disincentives to engagement can arise due to the way policy is delivered. What occurs at the point of faceto- face interaction is a key factor to inclusion. Without an appreciation of wider needs beyond the immediate focus, how interaction may be experienced, and the threats it can pose, it is difficult to know how to deliver processes in ways that will promote engagement. Without understanding differing objectives and motivations for engagement, parties may pull in different directions, jeopardising the coherence of the process. No matter how coherently structured a process may be, or how positive the intentions of policy-makers, it can fall apart at the point of face-to-face enactment.

Chapter Two suggested that intangible goods like self-respect and power might be better viewed as qualities of relationships rather than goods that can be distributed. Chapter Three explored how needs can take the form of human motivations and how interacting with others is likely to be required, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to meet such needs. Motivations are not just generated by the imperative of bodily survival. They also encompass universal or ‘species needs’ to belong, for self-esteem and self-actualisation (Maslow, 1943); for work as ‘purposive interaction’, for meaningful action and to realise potential (distilled from Marxian accounts); for the avoidance of harm (or promotion of well-being); and for autonomy (Doyal and Gough, 1991). Furthermore, theory explored earlier proposed that identity is constructed through socialisation (Chapter Four). It is reflected back through ‘dialogical relations with others’ (Taylor, 1992, p 34). The nature of interaction should therefore have profound implications for how an individual feels about themselves and the degree to which needs as motivations are fulfilled.

If the intention is that policy should promote engagement, participation and social inclusion, the way in which it is delivered must surely take human motivations into account. If engagement requires the affirmation of incapacity or inadequacy, not only could it adversely affect how recipients feel about themselves, it could also affect how recipients are viewed by others in subsequent transactions. Wherever possible, interactions that underline incapacity, invade privacy, or compromise autonomy, seem likely to be avoided.