Culture of Poverty, Beyond the' in: The Wiley Blackwell … · · 2017-11-15of and reasons for prevalent mistrust and ... economic factors such as male joblessness ... natural

Culture of Poverty,Beyond theMONICA BELL, NATHAN FOSSE, MICHÈLELAMONT and EVA ROSENHarvard University, USA

Meaning making is an essential feature ofsocial life: as humans make their way throughtheir daily lives, they inevitably interpretthemselves, their actions, the actions ofothers, and the environment that surroundsthem. Thus, understanding social life requiresattending to the cultural dimension of reality.Yet, when it comes to the study of low-incomepopulations, factoring in culture has oftenbeen a contentious project. This is becauseexplaining poverty through culture has beenequated with blaming the poor for theirpredicaments. Lamont and Small (2008) andHarding, Lamont, and Small (2010) havetried to move the debate forward by makinga case for integrating culture in explana-tions of poverty. They have suggested thatthis requires going beyond the “culture ofpoverty” debate to incorporate concepts thatcultural sociologists have developed and usedsince the 1980s to understand the role ofmeaning making in basic social processes:concepts such as frames, narratives, insti-tutions, repertoires, and boundaries. Theseconcepts are analytical devices typically usedto capture intersubjective definitions of real-ity, as opposed to normative positions. Theyhave been useful for identifying a diversityof frameworks through which low-incomepopulations understand their reality anddevelop paths for mobility. This entry buildson these contributions by exploring the placeof culture in studies of American low-income

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, First Edition.Edited by John Stone, Rutledge M. Dennis, Polly S. Rizova, Anthony D. Smith, and Xiaoshuo Hou.© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.DOI: 10.1002/9781118663202.wberen108

populations in three important areas of sociallife: family, neighborhood, and work. Thethree core sections of this entry describescholarship that has incorporated cultureconcepts from cultural sociology, as well asother approaches to culture, to illuminatecrucial aspects of social processes related topoverty considered as an explanans or anexplanandum. Each section concludes with afew proposals for future research.

FAMILY

Family relations and family structure werecentral to the 1960s culture of poverty liter-ature. Lewis (1959, 1966) located the cultureof poverty within family, focusing on theculture of machismo among Mexican andPuerto Rican men, children’s emotionalties with their mothers, and the impact ofmigration on family dynamics. Lewis arguedthat these features contributed to the repro-duction of a culture of poverty from whichpoor populations were unable to abstractthemselves. Similarly, the Moynihan Report(Moynihan 1965) argued that family struc-ture was a central explanation for the ongoingeducational and economic disadvantagesfacing low-income American blacks: “TheNegro community has been forced into amatriarchal structure which, because it istoo out of line with the rest of the Americansociety, seriously retards the progress of thegroup as a whole.” Other research from the1960s and early 1970s underscored Lewis’sand Moynihan’s perspective that culturaldifferences in family organization and genderattitudes between the poor and nonpoorperpetuate disadvantages in housing, educa-tion, crime, and the labor market. Much of

2 CULTURE OF POVERT Y, BEYOND THE

that literature focused on urban low-incomeAfrican American populations.

Although these scholars described blackfamily organization primarily as an out-growth of racial discrimination and economicdisadvantage, their characterizations of thefragmented family as a cultural aspect ofpoverty implied that culture, not economicor social structure, was the main explanationfor why African American families wereperceived as “disorganized.” There have beentwo main responses to this implication inmore recent research on poor families. Oneline of research has mostly moved awayfrom cultural analysis of family structure,instead concentrating on macrostructuralexplanations for persistent poverty. The otherline of research has aimed to debunk theidea that there are major cultural differencesbetween poor and nonpoor families andhas attempted to explain the social contextdriving apparent cultural differences. Again,this research almost invariably focuses onAfrican American families. A segment of thisliterature avoided using the word “culture”and instead framed arguments in terms of“costs,” “expectations,” “barriers,” “aspi-rations,” and other somewhat less fraughtlanguage (see, e.g., Gibson-Davis 2007). Yetothers use standard concepts inspired bycultural sociology, emphasizing repertoires,frames, cultural capital, symbolic boundaries,narratives, and so on. This entry summarizesthese literatures by focusing on marriage andrelationship formation, family formation andparenting identities, and parenting strategiesand kinship networks.

MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIPFORMATION

Scholars who study poverty and marriageoften seek explanations for the lower propen-sity of low-income women to get married andfor why, in such large numbers, poor women

have children before or in lieu of marriage.Current research on delayed marriage amonglow-income populations emphasizes two fac-tors: perceived economic barriers to marriageand lack of trust between men and women.The importance of feeling economicallystable before marriage is prevalent amonglow-income families, with some work sug-gesting that economic concerns are the mostimportant reason for marital delay. However,mistrust and expected infidelity—culturalfactors—feature prominently in low-incomemen’s and women’s descriptions of theirreasons for delaying marriage.

Sociologists of culture, poverty, and thefamily have sought to understand the natureof and reasons for prevalent mistrust andconcerns about infidelity among low-incomemen and women. Some of the most recentresearch has emphasized the situational andcontextual characteristics of relationship mis-trust, pointing out that, although repertoiresof mistrust are frequently drawn upon inthese relationships, there is also great hetero-geneity within low-income populations in thedegree to which mistrust exists, the reasons itdevelops, and the ways in which it manifestswithin relationships. In a thirty-year studyof low-income African American families inBaltimore, Furstenberg (2001) documenteda generational difference in women’s cul-tural scripts about marriage, with the oldercohort of women eventually marrying theirchild’s father and the younger cohort, mostlybecause of gender distrust, never marrying.Other scholars call into question whetherrelationship mistrust and other culturalaspects of marriage planning are distinctivefeatures of relationship formation among thepoor; they note that changes to relationshipsand family structure among the poor havetaken place in a broader cultural context inwhich nonmarital birth and marital delayhave been rapidly increasing. Thus, maritaldelay among the poor may not necessarily

CULTURE OF POVERT Y, BEYOND THE 3

be the result of a distinctive subculturalperspective on marriage but rather a reac-tion to widespread cultural evolution in themeaning, timing, and perceived necessity ofmarriage (Cherlin 2009).

Particularly in the late twentieth century,one concern for researchers of family, culture,and poverty among African Americans wasthe extent to which antebellum US slavery hasimpacted gender and marital relations amongblack Americans—especially low-incomeblack Americans—in the present. Althoughthis idea of cultural continuity is traceableto the early writings of Chicago sociolo-gist E. Franklin Frazier, Orlando Pattersonhas more recently and most thoroughlyarticulated the argument that conditions ofslavery, specifically the forced separation ofslave children from their parents and theemasculation of male slaves, has led to cul-turally embedded gender tension and familyfragmentation among African Americanstoday (see Patterson 2010 on mechanismsof cultural persistence). Scholars have crit-icized this view for at least three reasons.First, there is disagreement over the empir-ical story that black family structure washighly fragmented during and immediatelyafter slavery. Although most research onthis topic has found statistically significantdifferences between black and white familystructure in the United States a few decadesafter the Civil War, other researchers, mostfamously Gutman (1976), emphasize thestability and resilience of late eighteenth- andearly nineteenth-century African Americanfamilies. Second, scholars have questionedwhether there is adequate evidence to provethat slavery, as opposed to more recenteconomic factors such as male joblessnessor more recent changes in norms and atti-tudes about marriage, accounts for the sharpincrease in nonmarital births in the mid tolate twentieth century (see Wilson 2009).These scholars attack the cultural continuity

thesis less on its description of culturallyrooted gender dynamics within the blackcommunity than its attribution of thesedynamics to US chattel slavery.

FAMILY FORMATION AND PARENTINGIDENTITIES

Nonmarital births, particularly among ado-lescents and very young adults, have beenan issue of scholarly interest to family andpoverty researchers since at least the 1980s.Much of this work has employed the lens ofculture in direct and indirect ways. ElijahAnderson (1999), for example, has arguedthat early and casual sexual activity is partof the “code of the street.” Anderson uses astrong conception of culture with focus onbroadly held norms and values and with lessattention to heterogeneity, though he doesexplain in detail the structural conditionsunder which these cultural codes about sex,relationships, and pregnancy emerge. Morerecent treatments of the culture of sexualbehavior among disadvantaged adolescentshave emphasized heterogeneity and the mul-tiple, often competing, repertoires that pooradolescents draw upon in negotiating sexualactivity.

Researchers have also sought to uncoverhow poor parents make meaning about par-enting and their identity as parents. Most ofthis research is on mothers, but a small butgrowing literature explores the meaning offatherhood to poor men (see, e.g., Edin andNelson 2013). Both mothers and fathers oflow income tend to describe “being there”as a central element of parenthood. Somelow-income mothers describe developinga purpose in life or feeling “rescued” byhaving children. Researchers have foundthat poor men’s and women’s cultural idealsabout parenting differ at least somewhat byrace and ethnicity, with African Americans,for example, tending to emphasize parental


authority. Recognizing that low-income par-ents are rarely stably single, the most recentliterature on poor families and culture hasmoved away from exploring the culturalconditions and consequences of “single” par-enthood to researching family instability andfamily complexity (the presence of more thantwo adults and many half-siblings because ofmultipartner fertility) (Burton and Hardaway2012).

PARENTING REPERTOIRESAND KINSHIP NETWORKS

A century-old line of research has exploredhow extended kinship networks—thought tobe part of the cultural fabric of low-incomefamilies—shape the strategies that low-income parents use to raise their children andnegotiate survival. Most exhaustively, CarolStack’s All Our Kin describes rich networksof extended family that engage in “child-keeping” and fostering of children througha “folk system” that operates alongside butseparately from the legal system (1974: 46,62). Yet more recent literature has empha-sized tension and distrust among familiesand social networks rather than cohesiveness,though among different ethnic groups andunder different spatial circumstances kinshipnetworks may remain hypersalient.

Family and culture researchers have alsostudied cultural logics of parenting withinpoor families separately from the literatureon kinship networks. For example, Lareau(2003) describes two class-based culturallogics that parents draw upon to raise theirchildren. Middle-class parents engage in“concerted cultivation,” or close manage-ment of a child’s time through organizedactivity and development of middle-classstyles of interaction, which creates val-ued forms of cultural capital that promotesuccess in conventional institutional set-tings. Working-class and poor parents, in

contrast, value the “accomplishment ofnatural growth,” a style of parenting thatvalues sharp boundaries between adultsand children yet gives children a certainamount of autonomy. While these parentsare creating stocks of cultural capital thatare valuable in predominantly working-classsettings, these forms of capital do not tendto lead to success in middle-class dominantinstitutions such as schools and workplaces.These distinct cultural logics of parent-ing reproduce class distinctions. Lareau’sresearch has spawned studies exploring theidea of class reproduction through parentingstrategies in more detail (see, e.g., Ben-nett, Lutz, and Jayaram 2012). Researchershave found that many low-income moth-ers tend to emphasize protecting childrenfrom bad influences, a response to thechallenges of living in low-income neigh-borhoods that in some cases fosters culturalresources for resilience. Researchers havealso found that parenting strategies maydiffer between low-income parents by eth-noracial group. Such differences generatea considerable amount of boundary workbetween groups, which deserves to be studiedmore systematically (Lamont and Molnar2002).

More empirical work is needed on cul-ture and family among a broader range ofethnic groups and family types. First, familyand poverty researchers have, on the whole,been slower to use cultural concepts such asframes, repertoires, scripts, and so forth thanpoverty researchers who focus on other areas,such as the workplace. Second, most currentliterature on culture and poor families hasfocused on white, African American, and toa lesser extent Mexican American families.Research exists, but more is needed, applyingnew cultural concepts to poor families ofother groups. Third, the study of cultureand poverty in the family should explore themechanisms through which family cultures


and cultural beliefs about family are trans-mitted intergenerationally and throughoutsociety through law and institutions. Finally,to date, nearly all scholarly research on cul-ture, poverty, and the family has focused onheterosexual relationships (but see Moore2011). As social and legal contexts aroundLGBTQ relationships and families evolve,more research will be needed on LGBTQ-ledfamilies.

NEIGHBORHOOD

The neighborhood is an essential spatialarena in which culture plays a role in thereproduction of poverty. Scholars of theolder conception of the “culture of poverty”posited that cultural adaptations to povertypersisted beyond the structural conditionsthat created them, thus placing the locus ofresponsibility for negative life outcomes onpoor residents themselves. Researchers nowunderstand cultural adaptations to povertyas heterogeneous and variable rather than asmonolithic, inherent, and immutable traits.

SOCIAL ISOLATION

In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson famouslyproposed that living in the bounded geo-graphic context of the ghetto shaped lifeoutcomes, independent of individual charac-teristics. He posited that, due to the departureof manufacturing jobs from the inner citiesand the out-migration of the black middleclass, increasing social isolation was thestructural condition that gave rise to culturaladaptations and orientations perpetuatingpoverty. With the departure of middle-classsocial institutions came the decline of socialorganization, contributing to the commu-nity’s inability to realize its collective goalsand resulting in disorder and a consequentrise in crime (Wilson 1987: 144).

More recent scholarship builds on thisidea that neighborhood structural conditionsoften give rise to certain cultural adaptationsbut suggests that disadvantaged neigh-borhoods are not necessarily cut off frommainstream institutions and social networks.Some have called for a more nuanced under-standing of how neighborhood context maybe experienced by residents, which wouldhelp researchers to account for divergingoutcomes within the same neighborhood.Small finds that “many people in poor neigh-borhoods do the opposite of what they wouldtheoretically be expected to do” in a given setof structural conditions (2004: 12). Similarly,Harding points out that, despite what socialisolation theory might predict, not all youngpeople in the disadvantaged communities hestudied are “getting pregnant and droppingout of school.” He argues that youth in poorneighborhoods have more frames and scriptsfor behavior at their disposal, and “neither‘oppositional’ nor ‘mainstream’ is dominant”(Harding 2010: 244). Thus, appropriate scriptsfor action are more “diluted,” and when onedoes not work it is easy to take an availableand socially supported alternative route, aprocess that Harding calls “model shifting”(Harding 2010: 242–43). This multiplicity ofstrategies within the same set of structuralconditions points to the principle of “effectheterogeneity”: neighborhood effects mayhave a different direction or magnitude fordifferent residents, which harkens back toShaw and McKay’s suggestion that we mustconsider the substantial heterogeneity withinneighborhoods.

HETEROGENEITY IN BEHAVIOR

The consideration of culture is essential tounderstanding the heterogeneous behavioraladaptations that residents employ to copewith the neighborhood environment, result-ing in different “doses” or levels of “exposure”


to the neighborhood. Sharkey (2006) arguesthat residents determine their level of expo-sure to different neighborhood conditionsthrough the decisions they make about where,how, and with whom to spend their time; res-idents living in the same neighborhood mayselect very different social environments. Inresponse to violence, children may retreat orthey may become tougher. Parents may reactby preventing them from getting to knowother neighborhood children or they may beoverinvolved in their children’s interactions.These choices determine the level of exposureto the neighborhood conditions, therebymediating or exacerbating the effects of theneighborhood. Thus, according to Hardingand Sharkey, heterogeneity is driven by bothexposure to the people, places, and activitiesthat drive neighborhood effects and differ-ences in vulnerability to the neighborhoodcontext.

Some neighborhood scholars havecharged that previous research has usedcompositional measures of neighborhoodcharacteristics as proxies for emergent cul-tural characteristics—including poverty rate,unemployment rate, welfare receipt, and thepercentage of single-mother families—as ameasure of cultural norms regarding nonmar-ital childbearing. This practice assumes a tightconnection between culture and behavior,exposure, networks, and interactions. Manypropose that researchers need to shift focusaway from broad theories of neighborhoodeffects and examine the specific mechanisms,especially the cultural processes, that createassociations between the compositional ordemographic characteristics of neighbor-hoods, such as neighborhood poverty andindividual outcomes. Researchers increas-ingly agree that, in order to better understandthe mechanisms through which neighbor-hoods transmit their effects, we need to thinkabout how culture plays a role (Small 2004).Rather than trying to assess the overall effect

of living in a particular type of neighborhood,researchers should strive to examine discretemechanisms in ways that account for effectheterogeneity.

CULTURE SHAPESTHE NEIGHBORHOOD

Cultural processes also work to shape theneighborhood itself through processesincluding community participation, col-lective efficacy, and social control. Sampsonand Wilson (1995) describe communitycontexts as “cognitive landscapes” con-cerning behavioral norms. The concept of“collective efficacy,” defined as the “socialcohesion among neighbors combined withtheir willingness to intervene on behalf ofthe common good” suggests that “one isunlikely to intervene [on behalf of one’sneighbors] in a neighborhood context wherethe rules are unclear and people mistrustor fear one another” (Sampson, Morenoff,and Gannon-Rowley 2002: 457). Further,Sampson demonstrates that neighborhoodswith higher rates of collective efficacy alsohave lower rates of violent crime.

Scholars have examined the ways inwhich cultural processes such as framingof the neighborhood context affect out-comes including social organization andcommunity engagement; perceptions, inter-pretations, and framing of neighborhoodconditions may be key mediators in pre-dicting whether changes in neighborhoodstructural characteristics will translate intochanges in social dynamics (Tach 2009).For example, Tach examines whether socialisolation and social organization in a Bostonpublic housing project were affected by theredevelopment into a HOPE VI mixed-income community. She argues that variationin neighborhood engagement stemmed fromthe frames through which residents inter-preted their neighborhood surroundings,


generated by current and past environmentsand reputations. Small (2004) also links resi-dents’ cultural framing of their neighborhoodwith subsequent heterogeneity in organiza-tional involvement. He finds that differencesin neighborhood participation in a Latinohousing project in Boston had little to dowith expressed values; rather, participationwas strongly correlated with respondents’framing of the history of political and socialactivism in the neighborhood (Small 2004).

IMMIGRANT INCORPORATION

As research on culture and poverty beginsto expand beyond the black–white colorline, scholars increasingly consider howthe neighborhood context shapes outcomesrelated to the incorporation of immigrantgroups. Theories of incorporation beganwith a view of culture as uniform, where theintegration process was theorized to occur ina linear fashion, with each generation pro-gressively incorporating more into Americansociety, beginning with language acquisitionand continuing with cultural assimilation,culminating with a “melting” into the cul-tural pot. Spatial assimilation theory positedthat, as immigrants acquired the languageskills, social capital, and economic statusto depart from the ethnic enclave, they didso; the ethnic enclave was thus theorizedas a fundamentally transitory space. Butthis idea of incorporation of immigrants asa consistent upward progression has beendeeply criticized over the years for inac-curately portraying the process for manyimmigrant groups. Glazer and Moynihan(1963) contended that even earlier groupshad not “melted” at all; they argued thatethnicity constituted a distinct social identity,characterized by a sense of persistent culturaldifference.

Increasingly, scholarship on immigrationand ethnic diversity has posited that—as it

has for African Americans—the neighbor-hood serves as a vector for geographic andsocial isolation of immigrant groups, oftengiving rise to cultural adaptations related toimportant outcomes for these groups. In theirtheory of segmented assimilation, Portes andZhou (1993) allow for the fact that incorpo-ration is not necessarily linear or upward;though many immigrants assimilate to theAmerican middle class, others may remainisolated in an ethnic enclave, or “downwardlyassimilate,” joining the “underclass” in neigh-borhoods of concentrated poverty. Tellesand Ortiz (2008) study Mexican Americans,showing that their incorporation has beenfar from complete on measures of residentialsegregation. Waters (2001) finds that WestIndian immigrants who differentiate them-selves from African Americans by retainingtheir ethnic identities experience positiveoutcomes, though the second generationoften experiences downward mobility due toforces of structural racism.

Though the neighborhood has not alwaysbeen central to immigration research, schol-ars are increasingly bringing these two fieldstogether to consider how the neighborhoodinteracts with cultural strategies that have abearing on outcomes for a range of immi-grant and ethnic groups. For example, Tran(2015) brings together studies of poor blackneighborhoods with immigration theoriesto examine socioeconomic outcomes forsecond-generation West Indian youth resid-ing in predominantly black neighborhoods.New ethnographic research that integratestools from cultural sociology challengesa fundamental premise of the theory ofsegmented assimilation—namely, that the“contaminating effect” of living in a neigh-borhood of ghetto poverty necessarily leadsto downward assimilation for immigrants(Warikoo 2011: 5). Warikoo provides asophisticated explanation of how culturalprocesses intervene to produce educational


achievement outcomes for immigrant youth,arguing that youth engage in precarious “bal-ancing acts” in order to maintain status inboth the social subculture of their peers andthe educational realm. Neckerman, Carter,and Lee (1999) argue that immigrant groupsalso draw on a “minority culture of mobility”consisting of distinct cultural strategies foreconomic mobility in the face of discrimina-tion and intergroup conflict, which help themattain and navigate the ranks of the middleclass.

WORK AND JOBLESSNESS

The cultural analysis of poverty stems froma rich tradition in the ethnographic studyof men in low-income neighborhoods andcommunities, particularly in Boston andChicago. Much of the work on poverty inthe early 1990s subsequently focused onthe so-called urban underclass—that seg-ment of the poor in low-income, inner-cityneighborhoods—while a number of recentworks have focused on minority male jobless-ness in particular. Research on employmentdiscrimination has implicated subjectivemeaning, often countering Wilson’s macro-economic account of employment inequali-ties. While this research shows thatdiscrimination matters, as do by extension themeanings ascribed to marginalized groups,much less work in this area has explicitlydrawn from cultural sociology for theoreti-cal insight. Two other areas of research aredrawn from the earlier urban ethnographictradition. First, research on human capi-tal development addresses the experiencesand the worldviews of marginalized youthin school; their attitudes, aspirations, andexpectations regarding their education andemployment; and the kinds of labels andmeanings that teachers apply to low-incomestudents. Second, research on the multifar-ious forms of work among the poor reveals

how the working poor distinguish themselvesmorally from the nonworking poor as wellas how the poor relate to their employmentactivity, whether legal or illegal.

DISCRIMINATION

Scholars have emphasized discriminationas a continual barrier to employment formarginalized groups, particularly for AfricanAmericans in low-income neighborhoods.While this research is not extensively drawnfrom cultural sociology, it reveals how sub-jective meaning is central to employmentdiscrimination. For example, in dialoguewith Wilson’s neighborhood research,Kirschenman and Neckerman interviewedChicago-area employers and found theybelieved most African Americans lacked therequisite characteristics of “good” workers,perceiving them to have a “bad attitude”toward work, to create social tensions in theworkplace, and to be “lazy and unreliable”(Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991: 213).Such blatantly articulated statements revealedthat employment discrimination, particularlyagainst the poor, worked against AfricanAmericans in the job-seeking process.

While some discrimination researchreveals how employers view marginalizedgroups, less research has examined thedynamics of social capital activation in thejob-referral process. Smith, in particular,provides new evidence that it is social capitalactivation, rather than access, that variesdifferentially by race and by class. In otherwords, “even when information is availableand contacts can influence hires, they oftendo not” (Smith 2005: 44). The interviewees inSmith’s study sound surprisingly like employ-ers unwilling to hire inner-city minorities,expressing concern over the moral worth,work ethic, and reputation of individualsfor whom they provided references. Smithfound that low-income respondents were


unwilling or hesitant to refer others, in partbecause they were concerned over managingtheir own reputation. This research augmentssocial capital theory, showing how mean-ing making plays a key role in the hiringprocess.

In addition to social capital activation,another mechanism for male joblessnessper se is the mark of a criminal record.In particular, Pager (2008: 73) argues that“disproportionate growth of criminal jus-tice intervention in the lives of young blackmen and the corresponding media cover-age” reinforce preexisting and deep-seatedprejudice against young black men in thehiring process. Indeed, research shows thatnearly one-third of African American menand over one-half of African American highschool dropouts experience incarceration atsome point in their lives. Pager argues thatincarceration serves as a state-sanctioned“credentialing institution,” in which thepower of such credentialing “lies in its recog-nition as an official and legitimate means ofevaluating and classifying individuals” (Pager2008: 73).

Recent scholarship on discrimination haslargely used audit studies to examine how thenames of job candidates lead to diminishedlikelihood of response by employers (Pager,Western, and Bonikowski 2009). While fieldexperiments allow the identification of racialmarkers such as race-specific names, muchless research has examined the dynamics ofthe hiring process itself. Evidence suggests,however, that employers’ stated beliefs offerlittle insight into their actual practices. Inparticular, when considering discriminationagainst incarcerated men, Pager and Quillian(2005) found that employers discriminatedagainst candidates with criminal recordsregardless of what employers themselvesprofessed. Such research perhaps suggeststhat implicit bias is a core mechanism ofdiscrimination.

Research on discrimination reveals a com-plex process involving implicit bias againstcertain cultural markers, overt or blatant aver-sion to hiring poor minorities, and reluctanceamong the poor to refer peers. This researchtypically does not distinguish between social-psychological and cultural processes thatlead to employment disparities, yet it opensthe door to a close examination of the placeof cultural processes (e.g., evaluation andclassification) in generating outcomes. Fur-thermore, while these findings show thatdiscrimination matters, much less researchhas examined how the poor respond to theeffects of racism or of incarceration (Lamontand Mizrachi 2012). More research exam-ining the resilience of marginalized groupsmay provide insight into the heterogeneityof employment outcomes among stigmatizedgroups experiencing discrimination.

HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT

Cultural analysis has also focused on humancapital development—specifically, howschools generate inequality in their dis-parate treatment of low-income youth;how low-income and minority youth mayhave different attitudes toward educationalachievement from those outside these cat-egories; and how aspirations and expecta-tions vary by race, ethnicity, and class in thetransition to adulthood. Foundational workby classical cultural theorists emphasized therole of schools in shaping different educa-tional trajectories for impoverished youth(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1998; Willis 1977).While Bowles and Gintis (2013) have arguedthat the role of schools is to create a compliantlower class, Willis (1977) argued that schoolsengendered lower-class disobedience andthat pervasive lower-class sentiments amongworking-class boys led them into working-class jobs. Ferguson (2001) complicates this


dynamic by emphasizing how schools tendto categorize some African American youthas “bad boys” needing management whileat times neglecting the needs of AfricanAmerican girls.

Ogbu (2008) and Fordham and Ogbu(1986) have argued that antiachievementattitudes among minority youth in particularare in part to blame for ethnic disparitiesin academic achievement, since, as they putit, African American youth who performwell academically and engage in school areaccused by their peers of “acting white.” Sub-sequent research, however, has failed to showsignificant race-based differences in attitudestoward achievement (Downey 2008), thoughevidence supports differences in academicbehavior and engagement (Ferguson 2008).There is evidence suggesting that prior skilldeficits among minority youth before theyenter high school account for differencesin academic performance; other researchpoints to differences in the quality of schoolsand teachers. For their part, Tyson, Darity,and Castellino (2005) argue that devaluationof schooling is not necessarily race basedbut class based, with white and minorityyouth using different language to devalueacademic achievement. Adding to the com-plexity, other scholars point to the substantialcultural diversity within ethnic groups thatare masked by comparing group averagesexclusively. Carter argues that educationalinequalities can be overcome through aschool’s “cultural flexibility”—its capacity to“embrace multiple cultural codes, practices,or currencies” (2012: 9).

Moving from the educational system tothe transition to adulthood, research hasdocumented the increasingly complex waysin which adolescents transition to adulthood,with social class exhibiting the strongesteffect on college attainment (Hoxby andAvery 2013). Nevertheless, research sug-gests that educational and career aspirations

remain high in young adulthood, thoughthere is some “cooling off” of these beliefsand behaviors. Young (2006) provides acompelling case that African American menin their late teens and early twenties main-tain high aspirations in part because theyare excluded from the labor market andlack knowledge regarding the opportunitiesthat exist for them—high aspirations areat least a consequence of segregation fromthe labor market. MacLeod (2009) showsthat race has a significant impact on edu-cational aspirations and expectations, withAfrican American men he studied expressinggreater optimism toward the future thantheir predecessors, largely because of theirevaluation of advances made during thecivil rights movement. In short, researchon the cultural analysis of aspirations andexpectations shows how beliefs diminish inthe transition to adulthood as well as howthey are shaped by collective memory and byracial segregation.

Finally, research has examined cohortchanges in educational aspirations. This workreveals that aspirations have risen in recentdecades and that a majority of young adultsmaintain high aspirations for themselves.Longitudinal surveys, however, have failedto show any negative mental health effectsof unrealized adolescent educational expec-tations, suggesting a process of “adaptiveresilience” in young adulthood, where aspir-ations are diminished or altered accordingto one’s circumstances (Reynolds and Baird2010). Possible mechanisms accounting forresilience include the incorporation of leisurepursuits, such as arts and athletic participa-tion, as alternative sources of work-relatedidentity. While work on educational aspira-tions and expectations reveals considerablevariability over the life course, it also suggeststhat low-income groups have a variety ofmeans of buffering personal setbacks, anavenue for further exploration.


FORMS OF WORK

A third area of research in the cultural analy-sis of poverty concerns the diverse forms ofwork, as well as what people do when theyare not engaged in formal labor. As Wilsonpoints out, “joblessness” is not identical to“non-work,” since, “to be officially unem-ployed or officially outside the labor marketdoes not mean that one is totally removedfrom all forms of work activity” (1996: 74).Subsequent research has focused on whatthese forms of diverse work are in the infor-mal economy, as well as what people do whenthey are chronically unemployed. Takentogether, these analyses show how the pooractively construct meaning in challengingcircumstances.

While much of the urban poverty debatein the 1990s focused on the concept of theurban “underclass,” debating its relevanceand existence, scholars have been quickto point out that, consistent with earlierresearch, not all of the poor are unemployedor jobless. Moreover, boundaries betweenpoverty and nonpoverty are complex andtransitory, consisting of multiple “exits” and“entries.” A substantial portion of the poorwork in low-wage jobs but are relativelyinvisible in America in part because they donot figure heavily in policy debates. Researchon the working poor or “near poor” showsthat these groups struggle with chronic stressand feelings of economic precariousness. Inaddition, often because the working poor livewith and among the unemployed, and alsobecause they are often precariously employedthemselves, they sometimes take pains todistinguish themselves morally from theunemployed.

Work on the informal economy has oftenfocused on the street gang, starting withearly neighborhood research, much of whichcounters social disorganization theory, whichposits that delinquency is a consequence

of the lack of community norms. In con-trast, researchers of urban street gangs pointout that they fulfill social, economic, andcultural roles in low-income communi-ties. Ethnographic research has consistentlyshown that urban street gangs providesocial membership and connections with thewider community even if gang members areadherents to a distinct “culture of poverty.”Venkatesh updated much of this research (fora review see Coughlin and Venkatesh 2003),documenting both the economic activities ofthe inner-city street gang and its role in thecommunity as a social institution.

Other research has similarly shown howinformal labor is at times monotonous, rou-tine, and ordered, even if the structure ofwork and payment is precarious. In general,this research emphasizes the efforts of work-ers to maintain their sense of self-worth inlight of such circumstances. Research on daylaborers has documented their experiencesof social suffering and of the managementof on-the-job injuries, and the ways that daylaborers construct a sense of self-worth inthe job-search process (Purser 2009). Gowan(1997) similarly finds that homeless scav-engers in San Francisco structure their livesin orderly ways, viewing the dangerous andmonotonous task of collecting as a way ofproving their moral worth to society.

Much of the early research on the lives ofthe poor focused exclusively on men, andresearch has only recently begun to pay moreattention to gendered worlds of work amongthe poor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).Low-wage domestic workers find themselvesin jobs that demand long hours and rules ofbehavior that make it difficult to distinguishbetween intimate and professional life. Rosenand Venkatesh (2008) examine the under-studied world of sex work as a supplement toor replacement for low-wage labor. Within acertain context, they find sex work to serve asa rational strategy to make ends meet, which


can also offer the stability, autonomy, andeven professional satisfaction that individualsseek. It has also been shown how prostitutionin New York City has evolved in part becauseof the response from law enforcement: assex workers have been banned from citystreets since the 1970s, they have begun toconceive of sex work as a long-term “vicecareer” rather than as a short-term meansto get by. Research on female-dominatedwork reveals the unique challenges facingdomestic and sex workers when they con-struct meaning around intimate spheres ofsocial life.

LINGERING QUESTIONS IN THECULTURAL ANALYSIS OF WORKAND JOBLESSNESS

The cultural analysis of work and job-lessness reveals how discrimination is acomplex process involving meaning makingamong employers and job referrers, withincarceration playing a significant role as a“credentialing institution” for a significantproportion of low-income African Americanmen. Research in human capital developmentunderscores the place of peers, schools, andshared ethnic identity in generating gaps inaspirations and expectations. Finally, a wealthof studies on the forms of work among thepoor reveals the diversity and heterogeneityof culture, as well as the agency of the poorin constructing meaning around all forms ofemployment activity.

Such analyses have improved our under-standing of the forms of work among thepoor, as well as their barriers to more stableemployment, yet much interesting researchareas remain. The research on poverty hasprimarily focused on low-income inner-cityneighborhoods, and much less is knownabout the forms of poverty in suburbanand rural communities. In addition, theliterature on poverty in the United States

operates without much dialogue with inter-national poverty researchers. Finally, whenunderstanding processes of employmentstratification, how victims of discriminationrespond to their situation may matter fortheir well-being and employment (Fleming,Lamont, and Welburn 2012; Hall and Lamont2012).

CONCLUSION

As this review reveals, sociologists havealready paid considerable attention to howcultural frames and cultural practices con-tribute to the production and reproductionof poverty in the realms of the family, neigh-borhoods, and work. While there is a certainheterogeneity in the analytical conceptsresearchers have used, the literature revealsa widely spread concern for understand-ing the place of culture in explaining—atleast in part—experiences and outcomesfor low-income populations. Much of thisresearch demonstrates cultural diversity inlow-income populations, as well as a sensi-tivity to the interaction between contexts andoutcomes that moves us far beyond stereotyp-ical views of the poor that fed controversiesaround the study of the place of culture in theproduction of poverty in the 1960s.

Each of the sections concluded with recom-mendations for future research. For instance,the study of meaning making among poorfamilies could benefit from more explicitengagement with concepts from culturalsociology, which might better specify thepresence of cultural mechanisms while, at thesame time, recognizing heterogeneity thatthe “norms and values” literature does notcontemplate. Family scholarship could ben-efit from examining a more diverse array ofethnic groups and family types, which wouldperhaps lead to a more precise and nuancedunderstanding of how culture operates inthe family context. For its part, the study


of poverty and culture in the neighborhoodis often limited in its conceptualization ofculture as norms or local subcultures that donot vary internally. The field would benefitfrom building on the critiques of Harding,Small, and others to consider how culturalmechanisms operate within neighborhoodsto produce heterogeneous outcomes. Finally,while cultural analysis of work has examinedthe meaning of employment activity and ofhuman capital development, much discrim-ination research has largely concerned itselfwith whether or not discrimination exertsa causal impact on employment outcomes.This work could benefit from distinguishingdiscrimination and stigmatization, the latterof which more explicitly incorporates sub-jective meaning and symbolic boundariesinto inequalities processes. Moreover, asLamont points out, “considering responses todiscrimination is crucial because individualscannot be presumed to be passive recipi-ents of discrimination” (2009: 153). Thus, amore targeted focus on “situated agency” ofmarginalized groups would likely reveal thecultural mechanisms underlying employmentdiscrimination.

Beyond these recommendations, povertyresearchers should be more explicit about theconceptual tools they mobilize to describehow culture contributes to the productionand reproduction of poverty. A focus on thenormative (e.g., “belief ” and “norms”) illumi-nates different aspects of culture than a focuson the cognitive (e.g., “frames,” “narratives,”or “repertoires”). The literature often remainsquite slippery about such distinctions. More-over, it would be helpful to engage in a morepurposeful reflection concerning the assump-tions associated with various conceptual toolsused for describing the place of culture inthe production of poverty—whether theyimply a “risk and resilience” model or anindividualist “decision making” or “eco-nomic” model, for instance. Finally, further

theoretical development may be facilitatedby a concern for systematically disentanglingsocial-psychological processes (often focusedon perceptions) from cultural processes thatinvolve intersubjectivity and shared meaningmaking (e.g., symbolic boundaries, classi-fication systems, and repertoires) in theirinteraction and articulation with social andinstitutional processes. These various levelsshould be examined in their interaction withaccess to a range of social, material, and otherresources that act as determinants of povertyand inequality, and that have been amplydocumented in the literature. To considera part of the equation will by definitionresult in an inadequate (because incomplete)understanding of crucial causal pathways.

SEE ALSO: Racism; Social Work and Race;Underclass; Welfare Queen

REFERENCESAnderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency,

Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City.New York: W. W. Norton.

Bennett, Pamela R., Amy C. Lutz, and LakshmiJayaram. 2012. “Beyond the Schoolyard: TheRole of Parenting Logics, Financial Resources,and Social Institutions in the Social Class Gapin Structured Activity Participation.” Sociologyof Education 85: 131–57.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. 1998. TheState Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power.Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2013. School-ing in Capitalist America: Educational Reformand the Contradictions of Economic Life.Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Burton, Linda M. and Cecily R. Hardaway. 2012.“Low-Income Mothers as ‘Othermothers’ toTheir Romantic Partners’ Children: Women’sCoparenting in Multiple Partner Fertility Rela-tionships.” Family Process 51(3): 343–59.

Carter, Prudence L. 2012. Stubborn Roots: Race,Culture, and Inequality in US and South AfricanSchools. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cherlin, Andrew J. 2009. The Marriage-Go-Round:The State of Marriage and the Family in AmericaToday. New York: Alfred Knopf.


Coughlin, Brenda C. and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh.2003. “The Urban Street Gang after 1970.”Annual Review of Sociology 29: 41–64.

Downey, Douglas B. 2008. “Black/White Differ-ences in School Performance: The OppositionalCulture Explanation.” Annual Review of Sociol-ogy 34: 107–26.

Edin, Kathryn and Timothy J. Nelson. 2013. Doingthe Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie R. Hochschild.2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, andSex Workers in the New Economy. New York:Metropolitan Books.

Ferguson, Ann Arnett. 2001. Bad Boys: PublicSchools in the Making of Black Masculinity. AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ferguson, Ronald F. 2008. “What Doesn’t Meet theEye: Understanding and Addressing Racial Dis-parities in High-Achieving Suburban Schools.”In Toward Excellence with Equity: An EmergingVision for Closing the Achievement Gap, editedby Ronald F. Ferguson, 203–27. Cambridge, MA:Harvard Education Press.

Fleming, Crystal, Michèle Lamont, and JessicaWelburn. 2012. “African Americans Respond toStigmatization: The Meanings and Salience ofConfronting, Deflecting Conflict, Educating theIgnorant and ‘Managing the Self’.” Ethnic andRacial Studies 35: 400–417.

Fordham, Signithai and John U. Ogbu. 1986.“Black Students’ School Success: Coping withthe ‘Burden of “Acting White”’.” Urban Review18: 176–206.

Furstenberg, Frank F., Jr. 2001. “The Fading Dream:Prospects for Marriage in the Inner-City.” InProblem of the Century: Racial Stratification inthe United States, edited by Elijah Anderson andDoug S. Massey, 224–46. New York: Russell SageFoundation.

Gibson-Davis, Christina M. 2007. “Expectationsand the Economic Bar to Marriage among Low-Income Couples.” In Unmarried Couples withChildren, edited by Paula England and KathrynEdin, 84–103. New York: Russell Sage Founda-tion.

Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1963.Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, PuertoRicans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City,2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gowan, Teresa. 1997. “American Untouchables:Homeless Scavengers in San Francisco’s Under-ground Economy.” International Journal of Soci-ology and Social Policy 17: 159–90.

Gutman, Herbert G. 1976. The Black Family inSlavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York:Random House.

Hall, Peter A. and Michèle Lamont, eds. 2012.Social Resilience in a Neo-liberal Era. New York:Cambridge University Press.

Harding, David J. 2010. Living the Drama: Com-munity, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-CityBoys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harding, David J., Michèle Lamont, and MarioLuis Small. 2010. “Introduction: ReconsideringCulture and Poverty.” Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science 629:6–27.

Hoxby, Caroline M. and Christopher Avery. 2013.The Missing “One-Offs”: The Hidden Supply ofHigh-Achieving, Low Income Students. Cam-bridge, MA: National Bureau of EconomicResearch.

Kirschenman, Joleen and Kathryn M. Neckerman.1991. “‘We’d Love to Hire Them, but… ’: TheMeaning of Race for Employers.” Urban Under-class 203: 203–32.

Lamont, Michèle. 2009. How Professors Think:Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lamont, Michèle and Nassim Mizrachi. 2012.“Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things:Responses to Stigmatization in ComparativePerspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35:365–81.

Lamont, Michèle and Virag Molnar. 2002. “TheStudy of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.”Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–95.

Lamont, Michèle and Mario Luis Small. 2008.“How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Under-standings of Poverty.” In The Colors of Poverty:Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist, editedby Ann Lin and David Harris, 76–102. NewYork: Russell Sage Foundation.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class,Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Lewis, Oscar. 1959. Five Families: Mexican CaseStudies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: BasicBooks.


Lewis, Oscar. 1966. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Fam-ily in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and NewYork. New York: Random House.

MacLeod, Jay. 2009. Ain’t no Makin’ It: Aspirationsand Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood.Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Moore, Mignon R. 2011. Invisible Families: GayIdentities, Relationships, and Motherhood amongBlack Women. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro Family:The Case for National Action. Washington, DC:US Department of Labor.

Neckerman, Kathryn M., Prudence Carter, andJennifer Lee. 1999. “Segmented Assimilationand Minority Cultures of Mobility.” Ethnic andRacial Studies 22: 945–65.

Ogbu, John U. 2008. Minority Status, OppositionalCulture, and Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Pager, Devah. 2008. Marked: Race, Crime, andFinding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005. “Walkingthe Talk? What Employers Say versus What TheyDo.” American Sociological Review 70: 355–80.

Pager, Devah, Bruce Western, and BartBonikowski. 2009. “Discrimination in aLow-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment.”American Sociological Review 74: 777–99.

Patterson, Orlando. 2010. “The Mechanisms ofCultural Reproduction: Explaining the Puzzle ofPersistence.” In Handbook of Cultural Sociology,edited by John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, andMing-Cheng Lo, 139–51. London: Routledge.

Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “TheNew Second Generation: Segmented Assimi-lation and Its Variants.” Annals of the Ameri-can Academy of Political and Social Science 530:74–96.

Purser, Gretchen. 2009. “The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men: Boundary Work among Immi-grant Day Laborers.” Journal of ContemporaryEthnography 38: 117–39.

Reynolds, John R. and Charlie L. Baird. 2010.“Is There a Downside to Shooting for theStars? Unrealized Educational Expectations andSymptoms of Depression.” American Sociologi-cal Review 75: 151–72.

Rosen, Eva and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. 2008.“A ‘Perversion’ of Choice: Sex Work Offers Just

Enough in Chicago’s Urban Ghetto.” Journal ofContemporary Ethnography 37: 417–41.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, andThomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. “AssessingNeighborhood Effects: Social Processes andNew Directions in Research.” Annual Review ofSociology 28: 443–78.

Sampson, Robert J. and William Julius Wilson.1995. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, andUrban Inequality.” In Crime and Inequality,edited by John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson,177–89. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sharkey, Patrick T. 2006. “Navigating Danger-ous Streets: The Sources and Consequences ofStreet Efficacy.” American Sociological Review71: 826–46.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Trans-formation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Sandra Susan. 2005. “‘Don’t Put My NameOn It’: Social Capital Activation and Job-Finding Assistance among the Black UrbanPoor.” American Journal of Sociology 111: 1–57.

Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Sur-vival in a Black Community. New York: BasicBooks.

Tach, Laura M. 2009. “More than Bricks and Mor-tar: Neighborhood Frames, Social Processes,and the Mixed-Income Redevelopment of aPublic Housing Project.” City & Community 8:269–99.

Telles, Edward and Vilma Ortiz. 2008. Generationsof Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation,and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Tran, Van C. 2015. “More than Just Black: CulturalPerils and Opportunities in Inner City Neigh-borhoods.” In The Cultural Matrix: Understand-ing Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson andEthan Fosse, 252–80. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Tyson, Karolyn, William Darity Jr., and DominiR. Castellino. 2005. “It’s Not “a Black Thing”:Understanding the Burden of Acting White andOther Dilemmas of High Achievement.” Amer-ican Sociological Review 70: 582–605.

Warikoo, Natasha K. 2011. Balancing Acts: YouthCulture in the Global City. Berkeley: Universityof California Press.

Waters, Mary. 2001. Black Identities: West IndianImmigrant Dreams and American Realities.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Work-ing Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York:Columbia University Press.

Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvan-taged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and PublicPolicy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disap-pears: The World of the New Urban Poor. NewYork: Knopf Doubleday.

Wilson, William Julius. 2009. More than Just Race:Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York:W. W. Norton.

Young, Alford A., Jr. 2006. “Low-Income BlackMen on Work Opportunity, Work Resources,and Job Training Programs.” In Black MalesLeft Behind, edited by Ronald B. Mincy, 147–84.Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.

Documents

Culture of Poverty, Beyond the' in: The Wiley Blackwell … · · 2017-11-15of and reasons for prevalent mistrust and ... economic factors such as male joblessness ... natural