Absolute, relative and subjective poverty

• Absolute poverty means lacking the resources for physical subsistence. Rowntree's pioneering surveys of York used a carefully costed basket of necessities — food, fuel, rent, clothing — to define a 'primary poverty' line: a household was in primary poverty if its income was too low to buy the bare minimum for physical efficiency, however wisely it was spent. The strength is the appearance of objectivity; the weakness is that it takes no account of the standards of the society you actually live in.
• Relative poverty defines poverty in relation to the normal standard of living of the society. Townsend (Poverty in the United Kingdom, 1979) built a deprivation index — a list of ordinary activities and possessions most people take for granted (a cooked meal, a birthday party for the children, a holiday away) — and defined poverty as being unable to participate in the ordinary life of the community. This makes poverty a matter of exclusion, not just calories.
• Consensual (subjective) poverty. Mack & Lansley's Breadline Britain asked the public which items they regarded as necessities, and then counted households that lacked three or more of those items because they could not afford them. This answers the objection that Townsend chose the index himself.
• Social exclusion is the broader modern term: exclusion not just from goods but from work, services, social networks and political voice.

The political stakes: define poverty absolutely and it may almost vanish in a rich country. Define it relatively and it can only be reduced by reducing inequality. The definition is not a technicality — it decides the policy.

Townsend's definition

The unequal distribution of poverty

Poverty is not randomly spread. The specification asks you to know how it is distributed by class, age, gender, ethnicity and region, and to explain why.

• Class is the great divide: those in insecure, low-paid or no work bear the risk. Note that much poverty is in-work poverty — a wage is no longer a guarantee against it.
• Age. Children and pensioners are at high risk, because both are dependent on others' income or on the state.
• Gender. Feminists speak of the feminisation of poverty: women are more likely to be poor because of interrupted careers, part-time and low-paid work, unpaid caring, lone parenthood, and lower pensions. Pahl's work on money within households shows that resources are not shared equally, so a household above the poverty line may still contain a woman in poverty — hidden poverty.
• Ethnicity. Some minority groups face higher rates, reflecting discrimination in employment, concentration in low-paid sectors and residence in deprived areas.
• Region. Deindustrialisation left whole regions with collapsed labour markets — the geography of poverty is the geography of lost work.

Careful: these categories intersect. An older, minority-ethnic woman in a deindustrialised region is not simply four risks added together. Naming intersectionality is a quick route to the top band.

The feminisation of poverty

Why does poverty persist? Four answers

• The culture of poverty. Oscar Lewis, from fieldwork with poor families, argued the poor develop a distinct subculture — fatalism, present-time orientation, resignation — which, once formed, is passed to children and keeps them poor. Related is the idea of a cycle of deprivation. Critics: this blames the victim and mistakes a rational adaptation to poverty for its cause.
• The dependency culture and the underclass. Murray (New Right) argues generous welfare has created perverse incentives: it rewards lone parenthood and worklessness, and produces an underclass detached from mainstream norms. His remedy is to cut benefits. Critics reply that the evidence for a distinct underclass culture is weak, that jobs — not motivation — are what is missing, and that the argument is ideological.
• Marxist explanations. Westergaard & Resler argue poverty is the inevitable product of a class system in which wealth is concentrated; a reserve army of labour keeps wages down and disciplines workers. Poverty is not a failure of capitalism but a feature of it. Critics say this cannot explain poverty in non-capitalist societies.
• Functionalist explanations. Davis & Moore argue inequality is functional — unequal rewards motivate the talented into the most important roles. Gans turned this on its head with a mordant argument that poverty is functional for the non-poor: it guarantees that society's dirty work gets done, creates jobs for those who service and police the poor, and provides a group against whom others can measure their own status.
• Weberian accounts stress differences in market situation — skills, credentials and bargaining power in the labour market — and the role of discrimination in restricting some groups' market position.

Whose explanation of poverty?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective behind it.

The welfare state and the ideologies that fight over it

• Beveridge's 1942 report identified five giants to be slain — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness — and provided the blueprint for the post-war welfare state: social insurance, the NHS, education, housing and full employment.
• Universal benefits go to everyone in a category regardless of income: simple, non-stigmatising, high take-up — but expensive, and they pay the rich as well as the poor. Selective (means-tested) benefits target those in need: cheaper and more precisely aimed — but they are complex, stigmatising, suffer low take-up, and create a poverty trap in which earning more means losing benefits.
• Ideologies of welfare:
  • New Right: welfare creates dependency and distorts the market; roll it back, target it tightly, tie it to work.
  • Social democratic (Townsend): only universal provision and redistribution can end poverty; welfare is a right of citizenship (Marshall's social rights).
  • Marxist: welfare is a double-edged concession — it makes capitalism bearable and buys off revolt, while also being genuinely won by working-class struggle.
  • Feminist: welfare has historically assumed a male breadwinner and a dependent wife, and so reinforces women's unpaid caring role.
• The mixed economy of welfare. Provision now comes from the state, the private sector, the voluntary sector and the informal sector (family and friends — overwhelmingly women). Marketisation and privatisation have shifted the balance towards the first two.

Universal or selective?

Taylorism, Fordism and post-Fordism

• Taylorism ('scientific management') breaks work into simple, timed, repetitive tasks, separates the planning of work from its execution, and pays by results. Fordism applies this to the mass-production assembly line: standardised products, a semi-skilled workforce, mass consumption.
• Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital) gives the Marxist reading: this is a strategy of deskilling. By stripping skill and knowledge out of the job and concentrating it in management, capital tightens its control over labour and cheapens it. Deskilling, he argues, spread from the factory into clerical and service work.
• Blauner studied alienation (powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, self-estrangement — following Marx) across different technologies and found it varied with the production technology, peaking on the assembly line and falling in continuous-process industries. This suggests alienation is a product of technology, not of capitalism as such — a direct challenge to Marx.
• Post-Fordism. Piore & Sabel argue mass production has given way to flexible specialisation: short runs, niche markets, multi-skilled workers, teamworking. Optimists see re-skilling and autonomy. Pessimists see a flexible labour market that means insecurity — a core of secure staff and a periphery of temporary, part-time and outsourced workers.
• Globalisation of work. TNCs relocate production to low-wage economies; digital technology allows work to be offshored and monitored remotely; and the gig economy reclassifies workers so that risk is transferred to them. Hochschild's concept of emotional labour — being paid to manage your own feelings and produce a feeling in the customer — captures a defining feature of service work.

Braverman on deskilling

Sociologist to concept

Match each sociologist to their key idea.

Work, worklessness and identity

• Unemployment is not evenly distributed: it concentrates by class, age, ethnicity, disability and region, and is closely tied to deindustrialisation. Explanations range from the New Right's emphasis on incentives and 'employability' to structural accounts of the collapse of manufacturing and the movement of capital.
• The consequences reach far beyond income: loss of the structure of the day, of social contact, of status and of identity. Where work has been the core of masculine identity, its loss is experienced as a crisis of that identity — the link to Willis's lads and to Mac an Ghaill's 'crisis of masculinity'.
• The meaning of work. Marx's alienation describes work under capitalism as estrangement from the product, from the act of work, from other workers and from our own human nature. Goldthorpe & Lockwood's Affluent Worker study of Luton car workers found something different: an instrumental orientation, in which well-paid but boring work is endured purely as a means to a private, family-centred life outside it. Their well-paid manual workers had not become middle class — a decisive blow to the embourgeoisement thesis.
• Work-life balance. Longer hours, work following us home through digital technology, and the double or triple burden on women make the boundary between work and life increasingly porous.

The Affluent Worker study

Judging the debate

• The central argument of this topic is whether poverty is caused by the behaviour of the poor (Lewis, Murray) or by the structure of the economy (Marxist, Weberian, social democratic). Everything else follows from that. If the cause is culture, cut benefits and change behaviour. If the cause is structure, redistribute and create decent work.
• The evidence tends to embarrass the cultural account. Much poverty is in-work poverty; most poor people move in and out of poverty rather than forming a permanent underclass; and when jobs appear, people take them. Yet the cultural account remains politically powerful — which is itself a sociological fact worth explaining (see the media's representation of 'benefit scroungers', and Cohen on moral panics).
• Welfare's dilemma is real, however: universalism is expensive and untargeted; selectivity stigmatises and misses people. There is no costless design.
• Globalisation reframes the whole topic. Capital is mobile and labour largely is not, which shifts bargaining power to employers and puts downward pressure on wages and welfare — the structural context of the flexible, insecure labour market.

Exam craft: in every 20-mark answer here, make the definition do work. 'Whether poverty has fallen depends on whether we measure it absolutely or relatively — and that choice is itself political.' That single move signals genuine sociological understanding.

Culture or structure?

Segmentation, discrimination and the flexible workforce

• Dual labour market theory (Barron and Norris) divides employment into a primary sector — secure, well-paid, promoted, unionised — and a secondary sector of low-paid, insecure, easily replaced jobs with few prospects. Movement between them is difficult. Women, minority-ethnic workers, disabled workers and the young are concentrated in the secondary sector, which is how discrimination becomes structural rather than merely personal.
• The flexible firm (Atkinson) makes the same division internal: a core of multi-skilled permanent staff, surrounded by a periphery of temporary, part-time, agency and outsourced workers who absorb the risk of fluctuating demand.
• Trade unions historically compressed inequality by raising the bargaining power of labour. Their long decline — driven by deindustrialisation, legal restriction and the fragmentation of workplaces — is a large part of the story of rising in-work poverty.
• The gig economy takes flexibility to its limit: workers are reclassified as self-employed contractors, so employers shed the cost of sick pay, holiday and pensions. Sociologically this is not a new technology so much as an old strategy — shifting risk onto labour — carried out by new means.

The dual labour market

The big ideas to know

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