Description

Based on interviews with a sampling of low-income people and those providing services to them, Patric Burman draws from front-line accounts about the modes of giving, receiving and acting in the modern welfare state. The more general concepts — power, agency, pauperism and poverty — draw from the later work of Michel Foucault and his students on govermentality, as well as other sources in interpretive and critical social science.

Table of Contents

1. Conceptual, Historical and Ideological Context

• Defining and Measuring Poverty and Need

• Historical Background: Relations between Poor and Non-Poor Industrialization in the Post-Confederation Period

• The Ideological Project against Pauperism The Emerging Welfare State in the Post-War Years

• The Welfare State: Ideological Conflict and Structural Change

• Traditional Welfare

• Paradigm Welfare Rights Approach

• Neo-Conservatism and Welfare State Restructuring

2. "Making Do" in A Market Society

• Daily Needs and Resources

• Struggling for the Basics: "Making Do"

• Buying and Managing Food

• The Social Meanings of Distributing Food

• Coping with Housing

• Handling Clothes and Personal Appearance

• Modes of Working: At Home and on the Job Parenting

• Employment Experiences

• Common Elements of Poor Experience

• Contingency

• Immobility and Isolation

• Conclusion

3. "A": Moralistic Giving of Charity

• Individualizing and Decontextualizing

• Ministering and Moral Guiding

• Resentment of Those Who Resist Moral Improvement

• The Social Community

• Maintaining Paternalistic Control

• Disciplinary Practices and Techniques of Surveillance

• Coordination and Control at the Community Level

• Concluding Analysis

4."B": Bureaucratic Subsidizing

• Conceptual Introduction

• The "JAT" (Fraser) Capillary Power (Foucault)

• Pastoral and Citizenship Aspects of the State Assessing and Monitoring

• Eligibility

• Being Processed for Eligibility

• Abstracting From Real-Life Situations into Bureaucratic Categories

• Abstraction as Tunnel Vision

• Distributional Injustices

• Wielding Discretion

• Discretion Which Enables Discretion Which Constrains and Controls Familism

• Handling Appeals In-House

• Social Patriarchy ÷ The Jealous State

• The Construction of Female Clients

• The Ambiguity of Job Developers

• Conclusion

5."C": Needs Responding

• Ministering to Needs

• Types of Responding and Caring

• Psychologically Engaged: The Exemplar Role

• The Helper as Institutionally Engaged (Advocate)

• Helper as Neutral or Disengaged

• Providing a Re-Integrative Space Safe, Fewer Hassles, Structure "Family" Bonds, Social Support Funding and Staffing Shortages

• Concluding Analysis

• Individualistic Perspective

• Over-Servicing: The Proliferation of Needs Responders

• A Helper's Vision

6. "D": Community Developing

• Self-Presentation

• Conception of the Low-income

• Subject Delegitimizing and Opposing Community Obstacles to Equal Participation

• Contextual Realism: Webs of Constraint Housing Barriers Learning and Supporting Community with and among Low-income

• People Being with, and Learning from, Low-income People

• Fortifying Their Community Connections

• Concluding Analysis

• The Romance of Community

• Assessment of Community-Based Approaches

7. "E": Anti-Poverty Activating Radical and Reformist

• Attacking the Institutional and Public Acceptance of the Poor as a Disentitled Deviant Group Critique of Capitalist Society

• Critique of the "Edifice that Confronts the Poor"

• The Charity Approach

• Critique of the Middle Class

• Organizing to Transform the System of Opportunities

• Engendering Poverty

• Dialoguing and Forming Alliances

• Confronting the Powers that Be

• Difficulties of Organizing the Poor

• Conclusion

• Criticisms of "E"

8. Receiving and Acting

• Living an Administered Life

• Being "On the System"

• Being Scrutinized and Appraised

• Being Controlled; Feeling Powerless

• Being Constrained by Disincentives

• Coping with Stigma and Disrespect

• Receiving Food from Others, Food Banks Soup Kitchens, Churches

• Informants' Practices

• Reproductive Practices

• Playing the Game

• Project Feelings about Being Dependent onto Others

• Invidious Comparison; Racism Proactive Practices of Personal and Collective Agency Personal Agency; Self-Empowerment

• Wanting to Work

• Education

• Making Their Own

• Narrative Building

• Social Connections

• "Owning" Social Benefits

• Resistant and Transformative Practices

• A Concluding Word

APPENDICES

• Service Providers

• Low-Income Informants

• References

• Name Index

• Subject Index