1. One reading of Michael Katz's The Undeserving Poor is that the issue of poverty has too often been trivialized by victim-blaming explanations. There is a need to combine broad structural, cultural, and individual explanations. Poverty is perhaps best understood by explaining how the levels interact and how that interaction varies depending upon circumstances.
2. Various factors are included among the popular explanations of why some people are poor. Genes, psychology, culture, social relations, the political economy, have all been suggested at various times by different people. Which factors are more important: individual factors like motivation, social-cultural factors like those suggested in arguments about the "culture of poverty," or structural factors like the changing postindustrial economy? Do each of these contribute to an overall understanding of the causes of poverty? Or are some factors not really very important at all? Does the importance of some factors suggest the unimportance of others?
3. The Undeserving Poor is instructive in suggesting that the "culture of poverty" has proven to be a highly contestable candidate for explaining why some people suffer profound material deprivation, have low incomes and live their lives in poverty. The "culture of poverty" suggests a distinctive culture. Analysts define culture in a variety of ways as we have already seen often placing their definition on a continuum that varies from one pole emphasizing culture as a set of shared behaviors all the way over to another pole emphasizing it as a set of shared values.
4. As was discussed in class, it is a concept that is situated between what is natural and what is freely chosen, highlighting how the values and beliefs people are given by their community, group and family both constrain and offer choice so that people end up choosing to develop particular practices in the face of living in poverty. It suggests how people tap into their culture as a set of resources to develop particular strategies and coping mechanisms to live under difficult circumstances.
5. Katz is helpful in highlighting that culture has become a very popular concept. Yet, as discussed in class, he would probably agree with scholars like Ruth Kornhauser in suggesting that culture is at risk of becoming an imperial concept colonizing all social life and in the process it is getting stretched too far and in trying to explain everything, it explains nothing.
6. Katz provides a great background to critically question the increasingly popular notion that poverty is culturally reproduced and that people who are part of a "culture of poverty" will learn to adopt the orientation, perspective, values and practices associated with that culture.
7. The phrase was coined by Oscar Lewis in The Children of Sanchez (1961) as a way of characterizing how impoverished Mexicans and Puerto Ricans had a set of common practices designed to cope with the hardships of poverty. Lewis' original term reflected both its positive and negative uses. The culture of poverty was a set of cultural resources--culture as shared behaviors and values--that grew out of extreme hardship and helped people cope with it. Yet for Lewis, the "culture of poverty" was also something people were trapped in--including the very poor in the United States. For Lewis, most poor in the U.S. were not trapped in a culture of poverty but some were and it was a debilitating, self-defeating culture that discouraged people from acting middle class, exercising self-discipline, being motivated, planning ahead, being hopeful about their future. Yet, Lewis did at times suggest that some people were poor because they were inured to a culture of poverty that sapped them of hope, motivation, discipline and the desire to succeed.
8. As was discussed in class, the "culture of poverty" has been used to imply either a negative or a positive value to the possibility of a distinctive subculture among the poor but that the negative connotation has increased in recent years. For some it has meant a positive subculture--i.e., a distinctive set of shared behaviors and/or values--among the poor that helps them cope with their poverty. More commonly, in recent years, the "culture of poverty" has been used to suggest that the poor are trapped in a debilitating, self-defeating culture that lacks value and only teaches them how to stay poor. An extreme example today would be the emphasis on a "welfare culture" where allegedly people trapped in the welfare system are encouraged by that system to stay dependent and not try to become self-sufficient.
9. Many people debated the term, starting with whether "the poor" were really a distinct group, whether they had a distinct culture, whether that culture was positive or negative, whether this was just a euphemistic way of talking about race, gender or class, etc.
10. Elliot Liebow's modern-day classic Tally's Corner provided an ethnography of low-income African-American males in an economically depressed neighborhood of Washington DC and suggested that they did not have a distinctive subculture as much as values of the dominant culture revised in light of their impoverished circumstances. Culture more as adaptive behavior perhaps than culture as an expressed set of values. Liebow's story is arguably one of economic marginalization and social isolation than the development of a self-defeating, debilitating culture of poverty.
11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's, The Negro Family, a short government pamphlet released in 1965, set off a fire-storm when it suggested that the low-income, African-American family would not benefit from economic growth because it was wrapped in a "tangle of pathology." This was a distinctive subculture that passed along self-defeating attitudes and behaviors from one generation to the next. William Ryan suggested in his classic book that Moynihan was "blaming the victim" for their poverty rather than emphasizing how the structural biases of the existing class, race, gender system made life more difficult for some people.
12. In recent years, William Julius Wilson has most prominently revived the "culture of poverty" argument and suggested that Moynihan has been proven right by the data indicating increased social breakdown in segregated, socially isolated, economically marginal low-income African-American neighborhoods in the major cities of the country.
13. Wilson popularized the newer term of the "underclass" to describe the people trapped in these neighborhoods. Wilson notes how deindustrialization, combined ironically with the decline racism has led to jobs, businesses, the middle class leaving these neighborhoods and allowing these neighborhoods to become more isolated. The absence of role models, the loss of jobs and decline of economic opportunities lead in turn to a breakdown in social behavior, with a growth in out-of-wedlock births, increased criminal activity, more violence, less labor force participation, more family break-ups, etc.
14. Katherine Newman in a very influential analysis however faults Wilson for not providing in-depth, qualitative, ethnographic research that would show what is actually going on in these neighborhoods. While she faults him for neglecting the study of culture in favor of a more structural argument, she also seems to be saying that Wilson emphasizes underclass culture as an important explanation for poverty only because he has not studied it. If he did, he would probably find out that a negative "culture of poverty" has not intensified and is not that important. Instead, he would find out that people living in these poor neighborhoods continue to participate in a rich set of positive coping practices, like the ones that Carol Stack has reported on in her writings, including the extended resource sharing and family caring networks discussed in All My Kin (1974). Mitch Duneier in Slim's Table takes issue with the idea that poor males are not good role models.
15. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet, provide detailed information on how poor single mothers with children get and use their income. They show that most women can not live on welfare alone and supplement welfare in a variety of ways from multiple sources. Most women on welfare have to rely on unreported income. While the dominant culture may define that as cheating, it is widely accepted among people in low-income neighborhoods that some income must go unreported and people have to "cheat" in order to get the welfare they need in order to get by.
16. Edin and Lein also show that while they remain still poor, women on welfare are better off than the poor single mothers who go to work; they are less stressed out, less harried, more time for children, have less expenses, more income. They find that these women are behaving in ways that are inconsistent with theories of how the underclass is trapped in a debilitating culture of poverty that undermines their ability to become self-sufficient. Instead, these women are often making the best of a bad situation and are working hard to provide for their children as best they can.
17. Larry Mead today represents one of the most-outspoken proponents of welfare reform as a way of forcing the poor to give up a debilitating culture of self-defeat (i.e., the culture of poverty).
18. Adolph Reed represents the most articulate proponent of the idea that poverty is largely structurally induced by the inequitable workings of the changing postindustrial capitalist political economy.
19. One very important book is Mercer Sullivan's Getting Paid which was used in this class last year. Sullivan has his own distinctive version of why there is these deviant social practices and criminal activity among the three low-income neighborhoods he studied. As was effectively discussed in class, Sullivan suggests that individual, cultural and structural political-economic influences need to be assessed in terms of their interaction.
a. He is pointedly dismissive of arguments that attribute this deviant behavior to individual characteristics like intelligence, though he does see some role for the individual, their outlook and their choices in all this.
b. Sullivan critiques individualistic rational choice micro-economic theories that suggest that there are markets, that they are open, that people are free to make choices, that those who choose "getting paid" in the sense of relying on crime have no one to blame other than themselves. He points out how markets are not open equally to all. He emphasizes how the increasing globalization of the political economy has marginalized some neighborhoods and left young people in these neighborhoods out of the economic opportunities that are developing. He notes how postindustrialismcreates a shift to a service economy that has done this as well. He also stresses that exclusive, noncompetitive labor markets are more common than capitalist ideology suggests and that they are more open to some people than others. The young white males in Hamilton Park for instance had their own exclusive networks and closed and protected labor markets associated with their enclave that could get them better jobs in the changing economy. Sullivan emphasizes how there is labor market segmentation that routes some young people into decent paying jobs while other young people are blocked entry by virtue of their coming from a poor neighborhood with poor schools, without contacts in privileged white society. Sullivan points to how being from a certain place, group, and subculture can be a form of "social capital" that enables you to cash that in and gain entry to exclusive sectors of the segmented labor market.
c. Sullivan also is critical of arguments that were exclusively cultural such as the "culture of poverty" argument. He notes that youths in all three neighborhoods engaged in variations on the same theme of illicit activities. These variations were due to the circumstances of their particular neighborhoods more than that one group was more enmeshed in a culture of poverty.
d. Sullivan however also rejected strictly structural arguments that said because of global, postindustrial economic change young people in certain communities were more likely to engage in crime. Such a monolithic explanation overlooks issues of which young people in what numbers engaged in what types of crimes.
e. Sullivan looked for a more nuanced explanation that emphasized how all three levels--individual, cultural and structural--were involved. One interesting idea that we can use to see this is Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration. The theory of structuration follows Marx' all dictum that "Men get to make history but not on terms that they choose." In this theory, young people, like all of us are operating with a structured environment, like global, postindustrial capitalism and the segmented labor markets it creates. Within that structure people get to make choices, but these are constrained choices. In this way, we could agree with David Harvey who argues that a cultural of poverty develops in reaction to the constrained choices the political economy imposes on marginalized, poor neighborhoods. The political economy marginalizes these neighborhoods, then people in these neighborhoods develop a set of cultural practices to cope with that. These practices are not always the best for some particular individuals (and encourage some people to live more for the moment, etc.). They are especially unhelpful for those whose personal background already has problems in it. These unhelpful practices end up helping to perpetuate poverty in some families and not others. The political economy is the initiating cause and cultural practices that arise in response can be for some people a compounding cause perpetuating their being mired in poverty.
20. The debates about the meaningfulness of the concept of "culture of poverty" raises the issue of how culture and community combine to engender social networks that provide access to social capital and give people the opportunity to get resources, share information, develop contacts. Poor people, including young males, get to do this too; it is just that their networks often lead to pursue social possibilities that are considered deviant by the dominant culture and are not helpful in them getting assimilated into a middle class lifestyle. In a thoughtful, in nonjudgmental way, Sullivan helps us think about how poor young males may end up choosing crime when they have few other options.
21. What's the best approach for understanding and dealing with the issue of deviant behavior in poor communities? Is a wholistic explanation for poverty is necessarily a better one? While holistic medicine may be a good thing in most cases and a wholistic approach may be the best way to look at various problems addressed by social work, it is an open question whether poverty must be explained by taking into account individual, cultural and structural factors. What do you think?
22. How do we explain the variety of forms of material deprivation that social workers confront in their clients on a daily basis? In particular how do we explain those many instances that are not due to strictly economic factors, the operation of the political economy, the structure of the class system and the high levels of inequality in our society? Does the concept of "culture of poverty" have any merit in explaining any of these instances? Should we use it or not to inform practice? In what ways? If not, how do the concepts of community and culture have a role to play in explaining such instances of material deprivation and informing social work practice designed to overcome them? If not, why not? If so how?