Work, Poverty And Welfare 📊 Flashcards
Oscar Lewis
functionalist
poverty is a consequence of poor socialisation, those in poverty lack motivation, ambition and trustworthiness
PIP
personal independence payment, given to disabled people who go through means testing first
Herbert Gans
poverty fulfils three main functions: creates jobs, creates motivation, ensures bad jobs are done
Townsend
relative poverty = when you lack so much money that you are excluded from taking part in society
Mack and Lansley
subjective poverty = if you don’t have 3 things from the changing necessary list then you are in poverty
Coates and Silburn
Cycle of deprivation (material factors)
Hirsch 2006
impact of child poverty:
-educational underachievement
-health and psychological development
-crime and deviance more likely in adults who were children in poverty
explanations:
-lone parenthood
-lack of employment
-disability
-inadequate welfare
knowledge economy
moved away from manufacturing products and towards design, development, marketing and sales. These new forms of work are reliant on employees skills
Housing Act (1980) (‘right to buy’)
privatised council housing which allowed either renters or others to buy the houses. However, owners could now increase rent prices which renters could no longer afford, leaving them without a house.
Booth and Rowntree
Absolute poverty = having to sacrifice things for others
social democratic ideas of poverty
underclass means people who are left behind by society, they don’t choose to self segregate
Palmer 2006
showed that poverty rates for disabled people is around double. 33% of disabled people love in poverty. 2/5 are single adults.
pauperisation and alienation
pauperisation = profits roll in, bourguisee gets greedy and takes shared away from workers
alienation = workers are forced to only think of themselves and not the community, becoming isolated.
flexible production
products are no longer mass produced, more customisable, use of global market.
Bonaeich and Appelbaum “race to the bottom”
functionalism and poverty
poverty has important functions for society because it helps to ensure that undesirable and undignified work gets done
poverty creates jobs in a number of professions
provides incentives and motivation - reinforces meritocracy in society. If enough people don’t fulfil their roles, society will fall into anomie
feminism
liberal = blames patriarchal on societal attitudes
radical = blames biology
marxist = blames capitalism
Charles Booth
absolute poverty = when your income is below the poverty line
post Fordism
work now focuses on consumer choice and greater freedom for workers
flexible accumulation
accumulation of income with greater flexibility
social policies to help working parents
-taxfree childcare
-15 hour free childcare
-30 hour free childcare
-universal credit
-tax credit
primary labour market
core workers, full time trained and highly skilled employees
Kenway and Palmer (2007)
poverty in ethnic minority groups is around double than that of the white British population. over half of Bangladeshis live in poverty. 1/4 of Indians live in poverty
Primitive Communism
a concept originating from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who argued that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership.
Bertrand and Mullainathan
- Method of the study was sending identical resumes to employers that only differed in name, specifically sending stereotypically African American names versus stereotypically white names (Dashawn Jefferson vs Katelyn Decker)
- Results were that resumes with African American names had lower callback rates, highlighting the impact of discrimination, perhaps both institutional and individual, in the workplace/hiring process
- Describes “taste-based” vs “statistical” discrimination, where race may or may not signal for some unobservable variable, such as having/lacking “soft skills” such as social skills
feminism and labour markets
women are more likely to be periphery workers because walby argued they are more likely to be in less skilled/ flexible work
evaluations to flexible accumulation
Marxist David Harvey says this doesn’t actually create freedom, it creates uncertainty and causes less chance of success
Al Gini
“what we do is what we will become”this is because we spend so much time doing work that it will become part of our identity
evaluations of new rights view on poverty
weakness -
blames victims and not structural factors
weakness -
social democrats would argue welfare state is under generous
weakness -
correlation between illegitimacy and welfare could be caused by societal factors such as views on marriage
evaluations of primitive communism
- there isn’t rooted evidence, archaeological evidence was not available at the time
- David Graeber argued that modern archaeology shows that society doesn’t develop consistently like Marx argues
