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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
People in poverty suffer daily under misconceptions about economic hardship and its causes. Providing the most comprehensive consideration to date of poverty in the United States, Elizabeth Seale tackles how we think about issues of culture, behavior, and poverty, cutting straight to the heart of debates about social class. The book addresses tough questions, including how being poor affects individual behavior, and how we can make sense of that in a larger social and political context. The central premise is that to understand the behavior and lives of people in poverty, one must consider their relational context, especially relations of vulnerability and the human need for dignity. Poverty is a social problem we should address as a society by changing social relations that, as a matter of course, cause unnecessary and immense suffering. To do so, we must directly confront our lack of regard for people in poverty by recognizing that they are in fact worthy of an effort to induce major social change.
This critical introduction to poverty will be an important read for undergraduate students and above in sociology wanting to learn more about the growing social problems of poverty, inequality, and stratification.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1 On Understanding
Poverty in the USA
My Research Experience
How We Think and Talk about Poverty
A Relational Approach
What a Relational Approach Contributes
Relations of Vulnerability and the Desire for Dignity
Aims and Overview of the Book
2 Who Are the Poor?
Defining and Measuring Poverty
Mobility
Diversity
Similarity to and Difference from the Nonpoor
Conclusion
3 Family and Parenting
Single Mother Households
Young Moms
Child Maltreatment
Conclusion
4 Culture
Historical Context
Culture of Poverty and Policy
Problems with the Culture of Poverty Arguments
Contemporary Research on Culture and Poverty
A Culture of Dependency or a Culture of Blame?
Conclusion
5 Structure and Social Relations
How Structure Creates Poverty
Social Policy: Punishing the Poor
The Limits of Structuralism
A Relational Approach
Conclusion
6 Opportunity and Personal Autonomy
Going to College
Finding (Better) Employment
General Autonomy
Conclusion
7 Vulnerability and Dignity
The Relations of Poverty
Changing Our Thinking about Poverty
The Significance of a Relational Approach
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Understanding Poverty
A Relational Approach
Elizabeth Seale
polity
Copyright © Elizabeth Seale 2023
The right of Elizabeth Seale to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5334-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951311
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
I dedicate this toMom and brother Rod,the imprinters
Acknowledgments
This project was supported through the granting of a sabbatical for the Fall 2017 term by State University of New York at Oneonta. Undergraduate research assistants funded by the College Foundation of SUNY Oneonta also contributed to this project; special thanks go to Krista Green, Katie Kilichowski, Juliana Luna, and Samantha Palermo.
Thank you to the many colleagues, editors, and reviewers who read drafts of related material and provided enormously useful feedback. I also extend my thanks for and admiration to the professors who assisted in my early studies.
I am grateful for the research participants over the years who graciously gave their time and permitted the intrusion into their privacy. This book could not have been written without you; thank you so much.
Thank you to the community members in Michigan who opened their homes and hearts to me during a crisis in my youth. I have never forgotten.
And I thank my life partner, Michael Koch, for reading many, many drafts, and whose unwavering support has been nothing short of absolute.
1On Understanding
“I’m not poor, I’m broke. Poor means you can’t pay your bills. I pay my bills but then I have no money left.”
“I’m happy to be alive. God lets me live. I’m not saying I’m not stressed. I used to cry myself to sleep every night. I’m not used to asking for help. I’ve been on my own since I was 18 years old.”
“You say you are poor every day. Get out of it. It’s a mentality.”
(Quotes from fieldnotes and interviews with participants in antipoverty programs)
Poverty is thought to be a cause of many social problems. It is considered both a cause and effect of violence. It is believed to undermine public education and is associated with a variety of negative health outcomes as well as plain, old-fashioned despair. In the United States, a wealthy and powerful nation, poverty marks the lives of millions. Child poverty rates are particularly high. Such high poverty rates shape how people develop psychologically, emotionally, and socially. Poverty is the curse that keeps on cursing.
Given this, how do we understand the experiences of people in poverty, this already stigmatized state? Are individuals in poverty best perceived as their own worst enemies? As victims? As heroes? What are the best ways to help people in poverty? And how do we understand poverty without further stigmatizing “the poor”? This book is an effort to guide our answers to these questions using what I refer to as the relational approach, and with the United States as the focus.
How we think about people in poverty matters for the sorts of relations formed in society, from national social policies to everyday encounters between primary school teachers and low-income families. How the public and key gatekeepers think about people in poverty helps form the structure and culture that all people must navigate as they try to make a life for themselves. There is a potential paradox here: Can we recognize that, while poverty itself is damaging, the people who have been, and continue to struggle, in poverty are not necessarily damaged? Yes, because the damage is not just to the individual, nor is it primarily a feature of individuals. The damage is to social relations. Whether that damage becomes a semi-permanent feature of an individual is always an open question. While we can recognize that some individuals are severely hurt by poverty, it does not follow that all individuals in poverty are affected in the same way. The trick is to shift the focus from the individual as the problem to seeing the individual in the context of social relations.
We pay real costs – moral, social, and economic – for allowing poverty to encroach on so many lives. The amount and severity of suffering are enormous. Yet this suffering is easily prevented socially when concerns about preventing fraud and idleness among the least powerful are not dominant. People in poverty put up with treatment that many of us could not imagine putting up with ourselves. In the United States, we address poverty through such fragmented halfway measures, with so many stipulations and bureaucratic requirements, that it typically becomes more effort to rely on the safety net than it would to have a(nother) job. I have repeatedly seen this for myself in agencies that serve the low-income community or people in crisis. The need to justify helping someone out and to demonstrate that clients are not taking undue advantage becomes a major stumbling block for anyone who wants to assist, and certainly for clients themselves looking for a safety net before they become stripped of any dignified recourse. We sometimes never do find out what happens to those who fall outside the safety nets. But why do so many people fall in the first place?
Reader, I say “we” throughout this book not because I assume you have no knowledge about poverty or that you only entertain bad thoughts about people in poverty. In fact, there is a very high likelihood that you have experienced poverty yourself and/or have close interactions with people in poverty. Social scientists believe that there are important implications for understanding people depending on how close the observer is to the situation of the observed. Too far away, and there is a tendency to see the characteristics of the observed as natural and unvarying. Too close, and there is a tendency to see characteristics as ingrained and unchangeable, and to miss the larger picture. It is thus important to be attentive to such tendencies and attempt to correct for them. In addition, I purposefully address not only the “deserving poor,” as they are sometimes referred to, but also the “undeserving poor” – the ones we – myself included – tend to categorize, even if only for a second, as less deserving of our full consideration. I want to go even further and explore our notions of what poverty is, what it involves, and who it involves. By necessity, this is very much a “we” endeavor. I hope you are willing to take this journey with me.
In our attempts to understand poverty, we are confronted by difficult questions about human value and worth; issues of race, class, and gender; and whether inequality is beneficial in stratifying people by ability and will. We have to take into account how people benefit from poverty, particularly the wealthy. Studying the most disadvantaged people in society tells us much about the human experience. For one thing, we learn about the role of human agency under severe constraints. Human agency is the capacity to take action in the world out of one’s own free will, as opposed to having those actions determined by circumstances and other people. It is important to recognize that people – even those in poverty – are not helpless. Often, they do not need our help so much as the same respect and basic rights that the nonpoor have. And in many ways, despite surface appearances and markedly different circumstances, we are not so different across social classes. It can be difficult sometimes to see our similarities when we are socially distant. But if we were actually placed in similar circumstances, how would we act?
Poverty in the USA
Poverty is the lack of the basic requirements to live a decent life in a given society – that is, the inability to acquire that which one needs to live a decent life in society. Although what is considered “decent” is partially subjective, we can identify certain needs as fundamental: reliable shelter, food, and healthcare. Some definitions of poverty go further than this, but let us begin with the official poverty measure, which is aimed at identifying those who cannot afford the necessities. In the next chapter, I identify some of the many ways researchers and policy experts define and measure poverty, but for now, here are some basic figures. The US government measures poverty by multiplying by three the estimated minimum cost of food for a given family size. That is the threshold for poverty by family size, and any household with a total income below that threshold is considered in poverty. In 2020, the annual income threshold for a family of three was $20,244. For 2019, around 34 million Americans were identified by the Census as living in poverty (US Census Bureau 2020c). This was 10.5% of the population, the lowest percentage since such data were provided, beginning in 1959. Poverty increased as the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the economy in 2020, rising to 11.4% of the population (Shrider et al. 2021).
Poverty rates in the USA are higher than those in nearly all other affluent countries. One measure of poverty used by the World Bank calculates the percentage of people who live on $1.90 or less per day (using 2011 US dollar equivalents). The World Bank (2022) found that the poverty rate by this measure is higher in the USA (at 1% for 2019) than it is for 69 other countries out of 171 total countries for which they had these data. An alternative used by the World Bank measures the percentage of people whose income is half the median income for that country, or lower. By this relative poverty indicator, the World Bank ranked the United States in 55th place out of 159 countries (17.8% in poverty) (World Population Review 2022). Thus, at extreme poverty levels ($1.90 per day) and relative poverty levels (half median income), the USA fares significantly worse than many other nations. Of course, many countries have much higher rates of extreme poverty than the USA – as high as 78.8% for the $1.90 per day level. However, given our very high levels of productivity and income, the USA tolerates an excessive amount of poverty compared to many other countries.
It is important to recognize, however, that these one-point-in-time measurements of poverty do not take into account how many people live through poverty throughout their lives. Rank et al. (2021) estimate that around 58% of Americans experience poverty for at least a year of their lives. The majority of Americans are at risk of experiencing poverty at some point in their lives. A quarter of Americans are at a particularly high risk, often bouncing in and out of poverty over the years.
Younger ages are associated with greater risk for poverty. Typically, about one-fifth of American children are living in poverty at any given time. One in ten (nearly 9 million) US children grow up in poverty for more than half of their childhood (Ratcliffe and Kalish 2017). A majority of these children are African American (56%), followed by Whites (36%) (Ratcliffe and Kalish 2017). However, 40% of African American children grow up in persistent poverty, compared to only 5.5% of Whites. Although there are a lot of White people in poverty in the United States, one is still at greater risk if one is Black.
Poverty is not a monolithic experience or state; rather, it is wide-ranging and diverse. Geographically, the assistance available to people varies drastically, both between and within states. The amount of concentrated poverty or the level of chronic poverty varies geographically as well, generally being worse in the US south. Poverty is not just an urban phenomenon, and, although rural areas have the highest rates of the poor, suburban areas are catching up quickly. Some of the poor are disabled; most are not. Some of the poor struggle with addiction or substance abuse; most do not. Some of the poor are homeless. But most are not, though they may live perpetually with the risk of losing a roof over their heads. There is also a difference between people who are: (a) low-income but not poor; (b) in poverty at a given point in time; and (c) chronically poor, often moving in and out of poverty, and never secure. The lines between these populations are not always clear, and often concerns apply across groups. Because people move in and out of poverty, there is no defined, clear group of people we can identify as “the poor.”
Furthermore, poverty does not affect everyone equally and is itself reinforced by and made up of other forms of social stratification, including gender, race, citizenship status, ethnicity, and disability. It is now customary – indeed, it is almost automatic – to say that academics must consider race and gender as a researcher embarks on any analysis. But there are very compelling reasons to do so here, as we will see. Anyone who is disadvantaged in one regard, be it due to race or citizenship status or having a disability, is at greater risk for poverty, especially to the extent that a status affects their prospects for education, employment, and control over their lives. In some cases, one’s position in the stratification system may work to one’s advantage – having cultural identity and familial support related to one’s ethnicity, for instance – but the total advantages and disadvantages emerge in ways we can understand by studying the precise social relations entailed. These complexities will be further unpacked in later chapters.
My Research Experience
I have studied poverty since I became a research assistant for Dr. Barbara Risman in 2005 on her project examining the effects of welfare reforms on local nonprofits. Then, after considerable agonizing over a dissertation topic as a North Carolina State University Ph.D. candidate, I decided that ultimately what I cared most about understanding was poverty. I designed a comparative case study of two counties in North Carolina, one rural and one urban, that drew me into 6 different nonprofit agencies and over 100 interviews with a variety of community members, including people in poverty and officials or agents of nonprofits, community colleges, churches, local governments, and cooperative extension. I worked at nonprofit agencies, including shelters, food banks, and emergency assistance. I worked alongside client-workers in the warehouse devoted to providing for people in need and attended the classes assigned to the client-workers. At another organization, I attended weekly open community meetings among people who were engaged in the fight against injustice of all kinds. I shared cigarettes to ingratiate myself with the client-workers (to later “bum” from my graduate student peers – note the underlying meaning). In turn, I accepted generous offers of food, advice, and the time and trust of others. I struggled to help people at many nonprofits, falling physically ill from the stress on a couple of occasions. Day after day, I worked to conquer shyness, always be respectful to everyone, and put my nose to the grindstone of nonprofit work because I was so privileged in the first place to pursue this research and earn a Ph.D. I am thus aware of the struggle that many bear, and that I have only experienced for relatively short periods of time over the past couple of decades.
I did not have a chummy relationship with all of the people in poverty I encountered during this time. Some heckled the nonprofit workers – like one particularly memorable occasion when a woman mooned the entire staff and the director. Some were understandably hostile to my efforts to pry into their lives (though such efforts were often a necessary requirement for assistance). Many were disappointed at how little I could assist them in their time of extreme crisis. Since my dissertation research, I have occasionally volunteered at agencies serving people in poverty. In such cases, I was not conducting research, but simply helping my community. Across all of these experiences, I was despondent at how little I could actually help people. In 2015, in New York state, I began a research project on family planning among people in poverty and encountered individuals who seemed completely inept at basic life tasks, such as making and keeping appointments or remembering medication. These various experiences drove me to ask challenging questions about how to think about people in poverty, how to help those few individuals who do not seem to want to help themselves, and what all of this means sociologically. For instance, how do I reconcile the perspectives of people working with the poor day after day with those of poverty scholars who rejected culture of poverty understandings in favor of structural explanations? As you will see, I found a way to answer these questions.
How We Think and Talk about Poverty
How people think we should address poverty is very much related to ideas about why people are in poverty and how different forms of assistance might affect their behavior. One explanation for why people remain in poverty is known as the culture of poverty theory, which is very influential in American culture and politics. The culture of poverty theory in its popular form is the idea that the poor navigate the world in ways that are inferior to those of the middle class and that serve to maintain their lower position in society. As discussed in a later chapter, culture of poverty ideas are not completely wrong, but the general notion that there is a single set of values and behaviors that characterize the poor – or, indeed, any social class – is demonstrably nonsensical. Culture of poverty explanations, despite their fall from favor among poverty scholars, remain stubbornly present in the wider consciousness, in policy circles, and even in some of the ways that we continue to study the poor. It is in part due to such culture of poverty assumptions that the United States has gutted social services, and when the USA does invest in antipoverty efforts, these efforts often focus on the wrong problems or become tied up in bureaucratic requirements aimed at controlling supposedly pathological behaviors.
People in poverty are often characterized as dependent, lazy, fraudulent, criminal, violent, untrustworthy, unintelligent, dirty, loud, addicted, unmotivated, passive, bigoted, and ignorant. They are sometimes compared to animals or parasites. This occurs in the media, in schools, in social services, in politics, and in the labor market. On the other hand, sometimes people in poverty or poverty itself are romanticized, viewed as character-building, or as some sort of state of innocence. Helping people in poverty makes those of us “better-off” feel virtuous and kind. And few people think of themselves as poor, even when they are by federal standards. As the quote above says, poverty is “a mentality” – and it is the wrong mindset. Attempts at personal change typically fail to lift an individual out of poverty, however, unless accompanied by a change in their relations to others (Seale 2017; Obernesser and Seale n.d.). Moreover, it is an odd thing to claim that poverty is a mindset when very few people in poverty consider themselves different from the middle class.
A Relational Approach
A relational approach focuses on the social relations in which individuals are embedded and the multiple ways in which their conditions and actions are products of more than just individual circumstance or development. Conditions and actions are products of social relations, the unavoidable ways in which we are connected to one another. This means that individual-level actions can be understood through attention to structural and cultural conditions as well as interactional dynamics. From a relational perspective, the dimensions that make up intersectional inequalities and power dynamics are important because they indicate social relations that profoundly affect experiences and opportunity. For instance, it is not the fact that someone is disabled that matters so much to the relationist as the social relations that occur as a result of an ableist society that renders disability a problem in the first place. For example, the inability to travel via public transportation can be located as an inability in the public transportation set-up to accommodate certain bodies, as opposed to in the individual or body itself. The focus should therefore be on ableism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, nationalism, and ageism, as opposed to the individual attribute (a similar argument is made by intersectionality theorists such as Aguayo-Romero [2021]). In my review of what we know about poverty, some of the key interactional dynamics that end up most relevant for large portions of people in poverty are relations of dignity and vulnerability. Using the relational approach, I will provide a set of guidelines for thinking through issues of poverty.
Poverty itself is a social relation. Poverty exists only as a matter of relation to other people and institutions that have the ability to acquire goods, wealth, and/or status. Although poverty can be defined as a lack of fundamental necessities, such a lack when disconnected from a larger social economy is not poverty – it is a struggle for survival. The lone person in the wilderness who struggles to shelter and feed themself is not best considered “poor”; they are best considered a hermit or a survivor. Race, gender, and dis/ability can also be thought about in terms of social relations, that is, how they acquire meaning and consequence through relations between people. Social inequality as we use the term is a durable type of relation that involves groups of people and relational factors that vary on the basis of categorical distinctions. One can think of inequality as a key characteristic of any relation between two or more entities. Thus, when I mention inequality as a factor, I am by default referring to social relations. However, we must go deeper. It is not enough to say inequality exists. We need to examine how unequal relations develop, persist, change, and manifest at both the interpersonal level and the level of how society is organized.
Social relations involve the positions people have relative to one another, including: (1) how we relate to one another and thus form identity; (2) interactions at the micro (face-to-face or equivalent) level, such as relationships; and (3) the macro-level relations (which encompass structure) whereby the action of one person, group, or institution affects another or is dependent on another. Any sense of the self occurs in relation to another: “I” am a teacher only in relation to others who are students. Or “I” am a considerate person in relation to those who are less considerate. “I” enact these identities in interactions with others; they must be confirmed and are shaped by my interactions with others. The ability to become a teacher and engage in that relationship are influenced by one’s position in society. These abilities are also shaped by the pathways that permit a person to become a teacher, and the consequences of becoming a teacher in the society. Social relations as practiced by everyone recreate both the organization of people and resources (“structure”) and the meanings of those arrangements and reactions to them (“culture”). Indeed, structure and culture are the effects of prior social relations that then provide the preconditions for other social relations.
If we ask why any particular person is in poverty, looking at the individual characteristics of that person alone cannot really answer this. What can? Consider each of the following bullet points:
how their labor is valued and rewarded by their employer and the labor market
the opportunity they have had to build valued skills
whom they know, and the access to resources and opportunities that provides
the duties and obligations they have to other people (such as dependents)
the ways in which they create meaning in their life (such as valuing having children over having a career)
the ability they have to do a job in the formal labor market, relative to others (such as reliable transportation).
Each of these points refers to the relation that person has relative to other people and organizations. It is that relation that matters, not the personal characteristics per se. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Let’s consider this further with a simplifying hypothetical. Consider a world where two human beings are completely alone and separate. There is no society. Then, they encounter each other and decide to live in cooperation. They effectively form a society. As these two people – let’s call them Kiz and Phan – live together and find ways to cooperate, they form social relations. This involves a lot of different subprocesses and outcomes. In the process of living together, for instance, they form expectations of each other and themselves. They form inside jokes. They form routines. There is a division of labor. They develop new identities. Kiz is a really good fire-starter. Phan is the better fisher. That becomes part of their identity, their social role, and forms their worldview. They in effect develop all of these things – identities, expectations, routines, stories, vocabularies, justifications, and a history – that form a greater whole than if you took the sum of each of their personal characteristics and abilities in isolation. How Phan treats Kiz affects how Kiz thinks of themselves, and vice versa. For sociologists observing this small, new society, they might notice that personal characteristics can influence how they treat each other, but it is how they treat each other that really matters, not the personal characteristics. If Kiz had found someone else to cooperate with, they might not have become the fire-starter. They would not interact the same way with this other person as they do with Phan. The jokes and stories would be totally different. You cannot take who Kiz is and who Phan is and develop the whole of their social world living together. It becomes something apart from them as individuals – its own thing. Their social relations are what adds up to society. It’s their social relations that best inform and explain the society that results.
Relational sociology has deep origins in classical sociology, as well as social philosophy, including Marxism, feminism, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction, symbolic interactionism, and social network analysis. Symbolic interactionists have focused their efforts specifically on how social reality is inherently perceptual and communicative. They taught us, for instance, that even “the self” is constructed through interaction (Crossley 2015). As George Herbert Mead pointed out, the mind, the self, and society develop out of interaction. The self is performed interactionally and identity is relational. Erving Goffman gave us important tools to identify the processes of interactions by emphasizing how social action is performative and ordered on the basis of shared meanings (Collins 2010). The actions taken by people in any given field – education, say, or the welfare eligibility office – depend on the attributes of the other and the shared understandings of how the interaction is supposed to work. Goffman (1959) points out that the scene provides important cues to order the interaction as well. Similarly, for Bourdieu, physical space organizes social interactions and can reinforce division, union, or other social dynamics (Fogle 2011). To what extent does a classroom look and run like a prison? To what extent is the welfare office set up to enact discipline and humility? These processes have the effect of communicating to people where they are in relation to the other (i.e., the professor, the case worker, etc.) and what they should and should not do. Impression management can become about retaining dignity, often working against the purported objectives of the school and the welfare office. Hence, the high school student may be embarrassed about the real reason she did not do her homework, and so acts as if she chose not to do it. The single mother of two may strive to distinguish herself from other welfare dependents, and so the eligibility workers begin to doubt this client is really in need.
The relational approach as I define it is not a theory but a set of guidelines that can be applied in conjunction with a particular theory. It fundamentally guides the questions we ask about the social world. As Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019:226) indicate, the relational turn is not so much a new theory as a systematic turn back toward sociology’s strengths: “We think that much, perhaps most, social theory is already relational in its causal assumptions but that relational dynamics are hidden by explanations of action that exaggerate the autonomy of individuals or the homogeneity of social structures.” The task, then, is to uncover these relational dynamics. In the relational framework I have developed for the purposes of understanding poverty, we ask this set of questions about any action or problem of interest: (1) What obligations and expectations affect the behavior or outcome of interest? (2) How are these obligations and expectations shaped by structural and cultural arrangements? (3) Who are the relevant players in affecting the outcome? (4) How do they use power, and from what structural or cultural arrangements do they gain this power?
Obligations and expectations are critical for human behavior and involve consideration of multiple relations. Parent–child relations are also influenced by the relations a parent has with other people, such as other children, romantic partners, and their own parents. Relations between an employee and employer are affected by relations between the employer and other workers or potential laborers, and between the employee and their obligations as parents. And obligations and expectations are very much influenced by race, gender, and dis/ability, which takes us to the next issue.
It is also important to consider the contextual and macro-level factors that shape relations at the interactional or micro level. For instance, not having dependable childcare can interfere with a parent’s relations to both their employer and their child. Racial segregation of schools reinforces the message of disadvantage that racial minority students who do not show exceptional ability (and even those who do) are not expected to succeed. Standard expectations for workers devalue the contributions and abilities of those persons with limited mobility, different sensory abilities, or cognitive disabilities. This line of interrogation is more difficult in that such factors are often less visible or obvious to the investigator. Certainly, it tends to be ignored by those involved in the interaction at issue. For the employer, it only matters that the employee is not fulfilling expectations or obligations as an employee. If the employee wanted a better job, they should have gone to college, or not have had a child before achieving financial stability. Such a perspective fails to recognize such outcomes are not merely individual choices, but are subject to multiple social relations. In turn, the employer has their own social obligations and expectations with which to deal. It is not a matter of who is at fault, but understanding what social relations, including macro-structural and cultural factors, lead to what sorts of outcomes. To widen that perspective to consideration of macro-level factors, a general understanding of how society works is essential. Practice helps. But, more practically and precisely, identifying the relevant institutions is a useful first step.
I use the term “player” as a way to think about who is invested in the macro-level set of conditions, as well as individuals and institutions closer to the individual. Considering the relevant institutions is a useful step here as well. But sometimes players are not immediately identifiable through institutions. It becomes essential to consider the explanations that people have for the actions they take. Sometimes an unexpected connection comes from in-depth observations of people’s lives. For instance, Burton (2009) found that, for some women having trouble getting off welfare, the problem was not their relations with employers so much as their relations with abusive partners or ex-partners. But we need to go one step further to ask why these (ex-)partners should have such power over these women? This takes us to the next question.
Finally, we can consider what power players use and from what structural or cultural arrangements they gain their power. Many sociologists argue that the cultural allowances for domestic violence that come out of patriarchal beliefs, as well as a flawed criminal justice system, make domestic violence the problem that it is. This is part of the web that we are all stuck in: we are connected, constrained, and enabled by the different strands of social relations that make up society. That does not mean we do not exercise any individual choice or agency. But the consequences of our choices, the opportunity we have to exercise agency, and the power we have to realize our hopes are compelling products of social relations.
What a Relational Approach Contributes
E. P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, writes that:
By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. (1966:9)
And so we cannot have poverty without wealth, or homelessness without the housed. There is no “pure” specimen of poverty. We can examine the social relations that make up the experiences of people in poverty in specific cases to identify relevant sets of conditions. My review of the research points to how many problems of the poor are relational in nature – that is, they are not problems in or with the individual, but problems that arise out of the imbalanced social relations that characterize the lives of the poor. Such social relations can be brutal at times. They are in other cases quite subtle, and hardly visible to the outsider. Erdmans and Black (2015) reveal the ways in which young women in low-income families in their study experienced abusive relations that sapped their ability to own their life, leading to lax self-protection, and, eventually, early pregnancy. A more subtle example can be drawn from Garcia’s (2010) work on addiction and the overlapping institutions of the criminal justice system (including drug courts) and the detox clinic that provide scripts and roles for the “patient-prisoners.” Over time, the addict comes to adopt the claims and roles provided by these institutions, which ends up reinforcing a sense of personal failure and hopelessness. The recent coronavirus pandemic also provides a clear example of how the personal problem of contracting an illness is more a product of social and relational factors – e.g., the ability to isolate ourselves or the local interpretation of mask-wearing – than of individual choices alone. In addition to meeting the standards for interrogating class as set forth by E. P. Thompson, the relational approach as I use it has the benefit of fulfilling several ideal aims in addressing poverty. Specifically, this approach entails a combined but nuanced approach to culture and structure; a need to recognize intersectional inequalities, particularly race, gender, and disability; and allowance for individual agency.
Discussing sets of conditions might help us better envision development and change rather than reinforce rigid, monolithic images of social forces. I use the concept of sets of conditions to refer to structural and cultural products of human relations that provide the context for social relations at the interactional level. Neither structure nor culture is given primacy over the other, but neither is the possibility ruled out that one may have some primacy in a given situation. This approach addresses the problems entailed by merely structural or merely cultural understandings of poverty. Structure refers to the durable and material outcomes of social action, such as law, institutions, technological capacities, and the physical characteristics of places. Structure represents those difficult-to-change conditions that people confront and live by. Structure shapes opportunity, resources, and exposure to harm or help. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the symbolic resources that are formed through social interaction and relations. Structure does rely on culture, as culture is also influenced by structure; the two are intertwined. When we change our minds about the meaning of some structural feature, that feature can come under attack. We follow constitutional law because so many people believe in it, and it thus legitimizes certain actions. In turn, past decisions made about what is lawful and subsequent rules influence ideas about nationalism and lawfulness. But the circle can be interrupted – for instance, changing interpretations of the US Constitution combined with institutional change feasibly endanger traditional ideals and processes of law in the United States.
A representation of the relationship between structure and culture and individuals
Sets of expectations and transactions are conditioned by structure, culture, and direct individual action. In turn, individual action is shaped by social relations and individual-level factors. We do not typically experience structure, culture, and the material as social realities directly. Rather, we experience these phenomena through interactions, through how we come to think of and present ourselves in relation to others, and positions we hold relative to others. So why do we need structure and culture as overarching concepts at all? Because even those immediate social relations are shaped by temporally durable effects of other human action occurring through social relations.
A relational approach also highlights the intersectional nature of poverty. Poverty is not just a structural feature or an individual characteristic, but a matter of positioning relative to others. If we address the production of and the experience of poverty as operating through a series of relations, we find several processes that operate according to different logics. By examining the actual social relations that form the context of people’s lives, we find that these social relations are shaped strongly by ideas and institutionalizations of race, gender, age, disability, citizenship, and other social constructs. The production and experience of poverty are shaped by these other positions and relations.
Intersectionality is, in part, about the positioning of individual actors within these larger relations of domination. A relational approach is well suited to recognizing that racism is implicated in the production and experience of poverty. Multiple power processes operate in any given social relationship. Yet these power processes are subject to change as well as variation in their salience. A Latina woman in poverty without citizenship or legal documentation, an African American male in poverty, and a White single mother each could have a different social relation to a law enforcement officer. The outcome of any interaction or action with relevance, such as a decision to call or not call the police about a domestic violence incident, is affected by the particular social relation. If interaction ensues, the race, ethnicity, or gender of the officer is also likely to impact the relation to the extent that these constructs bear on expectations and resources. So too will the race and gender of the higher authorities to which this officer is accountable, though they are more distant. In turn, a given interaction between any of the two parties has the potential to alter or perpetuate common expectations and resource differentials. The point is that the decision to call the police is not just formed by one individual in isolation. It is formed within and by social relations, and the specific impact of these social relations varies according to the different positions of actors relative to larger social relations of domination and inequality.
Finally, a relational approach rejects the notion of the individual and society as independent realities. The individual and society act upon each other in fluid and constant development, and we need to recognize how the individual is both agentic and constrained. Power is not something that people have or do not have – power only exists in and through relations. As other researchers such as Edin and Shaefer (2015) have pointed out, eliminating poverty requires integrating the poor into society. Many nonpoor are more susceptible than they think to being cut off from society, and falling into poverty. An uncontrollable crisis, the subsequent loss of employment and thereby income, and the spiral begins. Until we eradicate the conditions for poverty, we are all insecure.
Relations of Vulnerability and the Desire for Dignity
Though the problems encountered by people in poverty are, as we will see, highly diverse, there are larger patterns. The social relations that contribute to the actions of people in poverty are often characterized by their vulnerability and the desire for dignity. Relations of vulnerability refer to sets of transactions and expectations between two or more individuals or groups in which at least one actor has significantly lower bargaining power to draw upon, and thus is in a vulnerable position. For instance, the relations between landlords and tenants as described in Matthew Desmond’s (2016) research are an example of a relation of vulnerability for the tenants. Tenants who are behind in paying rent refrain from asking for basic housing maintenance because of the ability of the landlord to evict them. Indeed, I know from my own experience in nonprofit relief agencies that when a person in poverty is evicted, they often lack the knowledge or legal support to challenge it. Evictees often have their belongings thrown out, and if they do not find housing or storage for their belongings, they lose most of them. Moreover, there is little people in poverty can do if they are denied housing – legally or illegally – on the basis of bad credit (legal), large families (not typically legal except in the case of fire codes), criminal record (legal), race (illegal), employment status (legal), or lack of an initial payment that is three times the cost of one month’s rent (legal). While landlords may find poor tenants bothersome and risky, ultimately landlords have the backing of the law, based in part on the sanctity of private property, and they have better access to the rules of the game. People in poverty may take advantage however they can, but that is often a creative recourse in the face of few options. The origin of the advantage – as “taking advantage” implies – lies with the owners and rule-makers in society.
In such relations of vulnerability, spanning the sectors of employment, childcare, social services, creditors, housing, and personal relationships, people in poverty must struggle to attain dignity. These two realities are at odds with one another. And sometimes this means that the person in poverty chooses dignity regardless of the costs. The desire for dignity is a human need. Although survival will often take precedence, the desire for dignity will nonetheless emerge in consequential moments, especially in a nation such as the USA that values individualism and status above all. Together, relations of vulnerability and the desire for dignity help us perceive the predicament of poverty. But to gain a complete picture of poverty, we must also examine how these relations and desires are shaped in the context of the phenomena we call structure and culture.
For those who struggle with chronic and deep poverty especially – what Edin and Shaefer refer to as the $2-a-day poor – their circumstances may be “worlds apart from the experiences of most Americans” (Edin and Shaefer 2015:173). Surviving deep poverty may entail doing that which one finds morally objectionable, thus isolating one even further from mainstream society or a sense of normality. Deep poverty may very well entail “deep physical and emotional wounds” (Edin and Shaefer 2015:173). I think that many of the behaviors and worldviews of people in chronic poverty can be understood as products of the existential tension between the struggle to live – to keep body and soul together – and the search for meaning – a reason to live. While this tension exists for much of humankind, it is exacerbated among the poor. Nonetheless, in addition to recognizing diversity among people in poverty, I see a need to identify the circumstances of people in poverty that tend to lead to particular behavioral outcomes and ways of living. These relationships, interactions, and sets of conditions are all characterized by the vulnerability of people in poverty, and what one must do to maintain dignity under relations of vulnerability is not always conducive to future security, as we will see.
Aims and Overview of this Book
There are three major aims of this book. The first aim is to demonstrate how the culture and behavior of the poor are not the cause of poverty. I explain what sociologists know about the culture and structure of poverty, and how popular portrayals misrepresent poverty. Chapter 2 – “Who Are the Poor?” – tackles issues of misrepresentation and addresses the basic question of how poverty manifests in the United States. Chapter 3, “Family and Parenting,” addresses issues of family that are associated with poverty – namely, single motherhood, teen pregnancy, and child abuse. Now that the reader is acquainted with some key empirical research on poverty, I take us back through a broad view of how social scientists have tried to understand poverty through culture and structure. Chapter 4, “Culture,” focuses on the study of culture and poverty, including the historical context of such study and alternative ways to understand culture. The prior two chapters provide a good counterpoint to some of the claims of the culture of poverty approach. The other main approach to understanding poverty – structure – is the next subject. Chapter 5, “Structure and Social Relations,” takes on the role that the durable and material results of social relations play in creating and perpetuating poverty. In Chapter 6, “Opportunity and Personal Autonomy,” I consider how individuals act within this structure, specifically examining college attendance, employment, and immigration. Altogether, I find that, while individual agency is not irrelevant, we must consider agency in the context of oft-imbalanced social relations. When addressing a social problem, rather than identify behavior that needs to be changed, we should identify relations that need to be changed. If it is a social problem, then, by definition, the root of the issue must reside in social relations.
My second aim is the pivotal one: to demonstrate a different approach to poverty. I argue that, to understand the behavior and lives of people in poverty, one must consider the relational context, especially the relations of vulnerability and the human need for dignity. In Chapter 2, race, gender, and dis/ability feature as important dimensions for understanding both the experience of people in poverty and the persistence of poverty. To demonstrate these ideas further, I identify two important dimensions in the lives of people in poverty and summarize what we know about these issues: family, and opportunity – in Chapters 3 and 6, respectively.
Third, I make the case that it is important to recognize that persistent poverty has harsh effects, and that we can and should eliminate much of the poverty that exists in the United States. Furthermore, the people are worth this effort. Edin and Shaefer (2015) note that there is much in the lives of the deep poor “to cherish,” “protect,” and “nurture.” I argue that this should be one of our central aims as a society, with major implications for our general future. As part of this, Chapter 5, “Structure and Social Relations,” discusses how poverty policy tends to punish and criminalize poverty and the poor. Throughout all of the chapters, however, it becomes clear that a reassessment of poverty is due. We need a different approach.
2Who Are the Poor?
Defining and Measuring Poverty
Defining poverty is necessary in order to adequately measure it and thus ascertain how much of what sort of poverty we have and determine appropriate responses accordingly. Definitions and corresponding measurements of poverty include two approaches: the absolute and the relative. The aim of absolute definitions of poverty is to identify a threshold at which it is impossible to adequately care for oneself and one’s family, given living expenses. An absolute definition and corresponding measurement of poverty is often necessary in order to efficiently identify who needs assistance. Many programs and researchers thus rely on official national measurements of poverty such as the US Official Poverty Measure (OPM). The relative definitions of poverty help us remember that poverty is a relational condition – it is about what people have in relation to other people, and how that affects their ability to live a worthwhile life. It thus turns our focus away from just meeting basic needs and toward empowerment. Since there are many different ways of defining and identifying poverty with important implications for how poverty is viewed and addressed, I have included a separate box outlining and summarizing some of the different types of poverty that may be referenced in this book or that are influential in terms of policy and practice.
Of course, meeting basic needs is among the basic requirements for empowering people. But, as Haugen and Boutros (2014) indicated in The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, addressing institutions that provide basic levels of security and rule of law is a necessary component of antipoverty efforts; otherwise, efforts
