The Power of Labelling: How People are Categorized and Why it Matters

Labelling is a paradoxical concept. Although in development and public policy spheres labelling is crucial, as it represents a challenge for accountability, researchers note that it is also a mechanism for both policy focusing and social exclusion. Labelling, more than anything else, is an overarching political matter: it has multiple and interrelated dimensions, shaped by diverse frames of reference, motivations and objectives. Some of its main potential outcomes are:

· if conduced at a distance, labelling overlooks whole social sub-categories and many substantial issues;
· since it is often exerted by the hegemonic power, labelling usually obscures diverse other interpretations that are fundamental for addressing the very problems/cases that labelling highlights;
· bureaucratic labels can easily mix the observed problems with the people involved, generating social dislocation, fostering new forms of inequality and sustaining pre-existing unequal power relations; and
· labelling can discriminate, stigmatize and underpin persistent human rights abuses.

The politics of labelling is not a new subject. After the modest impact produced by the first publications on the matter 20 years ago, the issue has become central to political science and developmental practice. This book expands the themes raised in the mid-1980s, integrating new ideas: e.g. new participatory and “whose voice-counts” approaches, actor-oriented epistemology, notions of “everyday practice” and the “weapons of the weak”. There are three central arguments presented. First, labelling processes involve relations of power, in which more powerful actors use frames and labels to influence how particular issues and categories of people must be regarded and treated. Second, there are diverse motivations for labelling, which produce unanticipated outcomes, since labelling – even produced under the most altruistic motivations – can misrepresent and stigmatize. And third, labelling and framing processes involve complex relations of accountability and diverse obligatory relationships, complementary and conflicting.

Chapter one revisits past literature to overcome the old theories based on “bureaucratic rationality”, and bringing more comprehensive approaches (e.g. forms of contestation, subversion, intermediate actors and informal hierarchies). Chapter two demonstrates how well-intended “bureaucratic labelling” can lead to misrepresentation and questionable strategies that involve negative outcomes. In the same way, Chapter three contests the methods of labelling used by the World Bank’s “Voices of the Poor” project, intended not for gaining knowledge but confirmation of what the Bank already supposed about poverty. Chapters four and five show how arbitrary categorizations can lead to systematic exclusion. Chapter five specifically analyzes the case of children in Haiti.

Chapter six provocatively describes the non-salutary purposes that often lie behind development policies, and the hypocrisy that exists among those who claim for “eradicating poverty”. Here, the author focuses on how poverty is conceived by the charity industry, as a “theatrical event, a series of artfully contrived pictures of presentations provided to a public that demands a certain type of show”. In a similar manner, but among academics and consultants, labelling is manipulated because it attracts funding or fits within donors’ current agendas. The next two chapters deal with the problem of misrepresentation in different ways. Chapter seven critically analyzes how the current donor’s emphasis on framing religion, as a central development issue, narrows space for secular alternatives of development, preferred even by many believers. Chapter eight focuses instead on the role of the media in constructing hegemonic labelling and framing.

Chapters nine and 10 return to the state’s role in labelling with a comparison between India and South Africa. In the Indian case, social labelling is se