Theories of Global Poverty

ABSTRACT

In September 2000, participants in the United Nations Millennium Summit made a commitment to alleviating global poverty and inequality through the Millennium Development goals. This historical pledge has raised public and academic awareness of the issue of global poverty. In light of this interest, this literature review seeks to clarify the issues surrounding global poverty by focusing on the developed world and the developing world. Given the substantial amount of interdisciplinary research on global poverty, it can be organized into at least four areas: poverty definitions, units of measurement, theories concerning resources, and findings on effective interventions. It is clear that context influences these four areas and the resulting theories relate to: (1) inclusion, exclusion, and access; (2) individual rights and responsibilities versus community focus; (3) human capital theories, structural poverty, and resource inequality; and (4) theories of welfare versus theories of development. This analysis of these four theoretical domains concludes with a conceptual framework for understanding of global poverty and the influence of the social environment on human behavior.     

Identity Development as a Mediating Factor Between Urban Poverty and Behavioral Outcomes for Junior High School Students

This study examines the developmental issue of identity development among 102 eighth graders living in a context of economic hardship. Results show that links between economic deprivation and behavioral outcomes were mediated by identity development for two of three outcomes. Support also was found for the hypothesis that content-specific identity development is more strongly related to behavioral outcomes than global assessments of identity development. Much of the research on youth living in urban poverty has focused on problem behaviors, such as drug use or dropping out of school. Less is known about how normal developmental transitions are resolved. Results are discussed relative to the protective nature of identity development and to theoretical and methodological issues regarding measuring identity development within specific populations.     

Sociological Knowledge and Profit: Urban Redevelopment and Policy Ethics of Application

A private commercial real estate firm achieved racial integration in producing private middle-income housing for private capital gains purposes in a publicly espoused urban redevelopment project in Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s. The effort included critical use of (1) market research (demographic data analysis considered in relation to race-based dominant dwelling types) and (2) sociological principles of white–black ratio tolerance. This paper describes the use of the data analysis and the application of the sociological principles to achieve the results in the face of a public policy ethical question. The urban context within which these efforts, accomplishments, and quandary took place and the central policy and development problems faced by the development firm in relation to these are outlined.     

Urban Poverty,Ethnicity, and Personality Development

There are multiple factors which contribute to the development of the individual’s personality. Many of these factors have been amply discussed in traditional theories of personality Jonnation. An area that has been neglected in these discussions has been the role that poverty and ethnic and cultural factors may have in this regard. This paper offers a discussion of these issues with special emphasis on cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors which tend to characterize the lives of Latino and Black individuals. Recommendations are made for a re-evaluation of the traditional theories of personality when applied to poor and minority individuals.     

Resilience of Families Living in Poverty

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that community social workers reflect the established literature on family resilience. This exploratory study involved semistructured group interviews with community social workers from an urban agency that serves families who are poor. The analysis was completed by comparing Walsh's “Key Processes in Family Resilience” with the responses from the participants in the group interviews. Specifically, Walsh (2002 Walsh , F. ( 2002 ). A family resilience framework: Innovative practice approaches . Family Relations , 51 ( 2 ), 130 – 137 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) identifies three domains of resilient families, including belief systems, organizational patterns, and communication processes. These were used as reference points for comparison. The interviews with the community social workers revealed a connection between using positive beliefs, thinking, and taking action steps that define a resilient family. This only becomes possible in the context of supportive internal family relations and external community connections. While the community social workers affirm elements of the established models of family resilience, they also emphasized its dynamic nature as the interplay of positive family beliefs combined with action steps and support from the community.     

The Rhetoric of Sociological Facts1

To develop inductively a preliminary list of rhetorical tools that sociologists use in their presentation of facts, we examine three general claims that are widely accepted as having been demonstrated empirically in the field of social movements: social networks are necessary for recruitment of new members; individual mental traits do not matter; and political opportunities are necessary for movement emergence. We identify eight rhetorical tools that helped promulgate these claims as facts. We all use techniques like these, but awareness about them can help us evaluate our arguments and find better ways to test them.     

相对贫困的理论与政策聚焦 ——兼论建立我国相对贫困的治理体系

贫困一直是世界各国首要解决的社会问题。本文基于我国全面进入小康社会,需要建立解决相对贫困长效机制这一战略转换背景,从相对贫困与绝对贫困关系入手,围绕相对贫困内涵的争论,聚焦我国相对贫困的表现形式,并基于我国国情,提出建立相对贫困治理体系的建议。在机制上,充分发挥基本公共服务的作用,建立相对贫困人口发展的基础性机制;形成"政府主导、社会参与、市场促进"的贫困治理的整体性机制;建立干预代际贫困传递的阻断性机制。在具体措施上,围绕低收入家庭,要建立生活负担减免制度;健全以生产帮扶和就业帮扶为主的专项援助制度;按需救助,对低收入户开展"救助会诊";建立相对贫困家庭陪伴式服务制度。     

Alleviating Urban Poverty in a Global City: New Trends in Upgrading Rio-de-Janeiro's Favelas

In contrast to the “eradication and resettlement” approach of the 1960s and 1970s, and the implementation of isolated public-works projects in the 1980s, the 1990s in Rio have brought a comprehensive upgrading approach to the favelas. Such local innovations in Brazil began to emerge after the enactment of the 1988 Constitution that gave municipalities the power to formulate urban policies and laws at the local level. We examine the Favela-Bairro Program, in particular, highlighting its five central features: (1) projects designed to integrate favelas with planned neighborhoods (bairros), (2) urban redevelopment plans that embody a comprehensive approach, (3) an emphasis on coordination among municipal agencies, (4) utilization of a participatory approach, and (5) the use of private sector firms in executing public works projects.     

Quantity Constraints, Poverty Lines and Poverty Orderings

By limiting the scope for substitution between commodities, other things equal quantity constraints raise the cost of living. Thus, rationed families have higher povery lines than unconstrained ones. This heterogeneity in both resources and poverty lines means that, in principle, bivariate dominance results are required to order distributions in terms of poverty.     

Sociological Theories of Low-Wage Work

This review addresses the use of sociological theories in the examination of low-wage work. Due to the vast volume of literature on this topic, only theories that help to explain the dynamics of low-wage work are described, along with the differences and controversies surrounding these theories. These theories are divided into four topic areas related to theories of work, racial and gender theories, immigration theories, and intersectionality theory. The theories of work include different models of wage determination, namely, functional, conflict, and structural models. The review concludes with a conceptual map that illustrates how these theories can inform and guide practice.     

Testing an Integrative Contextual Career Development Model With Adolescents From High‐Poverty Urban Areas

Variations in the economic recovery rate across the United States have led to even greater chasms that separate the employed, unemployed, and underemployed (DeSilver, 2017 ). Therefore, understanding and supporting the career development of future generations is critical—especially for those who live outside the context of social privilege. The authors examined the applicability of the integrative contextual model of career development (ICM; Lapan, 2004 ) to a sample of 220 adolescents (129 boys, 91 girls) from a high‐poverty urban area. Results indicated that a canonical variate comprising foundational ICM skills (e.g., career exploration, goal setting) predicted a variate composed of ICM outcomes (e.g., self‐efficacy, vocational identity), thus supporting the usefulness of the ICM framework for this population. The skill of setting viable career goals was an especially strong predictor of outcomes. Implications for career counseling with adolescents living in high‐poverty urban areas and directions for future research are discussed.     

Urban growth,policy and planning of public space

Under the pressure of the urbanizing tsunami, town planning and urban policies in Spain have given a residual treatment to public spaces in recent urban development. This work proposes a brief but comprehensive sociological analysis about social and morphological traits of public spaces – like paradigmatic social space – in order to show the city's irreplaceable role in citizen socialization processes. The network of streets and places, the city in this sense, make up the scenes of man's sociability. In this perspective, planning ought to be geared towards and for the city and redeem a civic impetus that pursues developing the whole instead of subjecting it.     

The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multi-dimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.     

Sociological Perspectives on Japanese Manga in America

Japanese popular culture has, according to journalist Roland Kelts, “invaded” the United States in the 21st century, and in particular Japanese comics, known as manga, have successfully “conquered America,” according to Wired magazine. Within the publishing trade itself, the medium's cultural and commercial success became known as the “manga revolution” or the “manga boom.” Yet despite all of this excitable rhetoric, there has thus far been scant sociological research into the particularities of this emerging phenomenon, and what exists is widely dispersed across multiple humanities and social science disciplines. This essay therefore aims to unite this scattered literature and provide a comprehensive survey of sociological perspectives on Japanese manga in America. I identify and explore three main substantive trends in the scholarly discourse: (i) studies of gender and sexuality and the homoerotic manga genres known as boys' love or yaoi; (ii) intellectual property, copyright, and the global digital piracy of manga colloquially known as “scanlation”; and (iii) studies of cultural production and the political economy of the American manga industry. This essay concludes with a discussion of the limitations these perspectives have in common and suggests a more critical research program drawing upon an expanded theoretical toolkit.     

Urban poverty,economic restructuring and poverty reduction policy in urban China: Evidence from Shanghai, 1978–2008

This article uses the city of Shanghai as a case study to analyze the changing institutional mechanisms for the new urban poverty stratum in China. Specifically, the article examines urban poverty in relation to economic restructuring and the transformation of the welfare provision system in three stages of market reforms. The article first examines the overall economic growth strategies at the national level, and then examines local government policy outcomes at the city level. The impacts of institutional changes on urban poverty and social inequality are subsequently. Finally, the article assesses the current poverty reduction policies and proposes a “social inclusion” framework to alleviate urban poverty in China.     

A New Poverty Decomposition

This note proposes a new poverty decomposition that can be used to explain changes in poverty over time. The change in poverty is derived as the exact sum of four elements: (i) the overall growth effect, assuming inequality in the distribution does not change; (ii) the impact of differences in growth rates between the groups; (iii) the effect of the change in inequality within the different groups; (iv) the impact of changes in the population shares of the various groups.     

Poverty dynamics corrected for measurement error

We use latent class models to correct measurement error in estimates of the dynamics of relative income poverty in ten EU countries measured over four waves of the European Community Household Panel. A latent mover-stayer Markov model gives an acceptable fit to all ten transition tables. We focus in more detail on four countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK – and show that mobility in poverty transition tables is over-estimated by between 25 and 50 percent if measurement error is ignored. In addition, once error is corrected, poverty rates show less cross-national variation.     

Middle‐Class Parents,Urban Schooling,and the Shift From Consumption to Production of Urban Space

Dominant approaches to the study of gentrification tend to attribute this process either to the production of urban space by elites or to the consumption of urban space by individual consumers. In this article, we take a preliminary step toward bridging this gap by illustrating how these groups may, in some cases, be the same actors. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with middle‐class parents in Boston, we explore the transitions that gentrifiers undergo as they age and have children. As young singles and childless couples, our respondents interacted with the city mainly as passive consumers. Years later, however, facing pressures to relocate in search of high‐quality educational options, these parents emerged as active producers of the urban landscape through their substantial involvement in their children's public elementary schools. This school‐based engagement reinforced their loyalties to their neighborhoods, dissuading them from moving to the suburbs. Since it is based on intense interactions with small local institutions, though, this strategy will likely be more difficult for parents to sustain in larger, less personal high schools. Thus, these parents may reconsider their dedication to city living as their children age. We discuss the implications of this research for urban theory and policy.     

Weberian Political Sociology and Sociological Disaster Studies

The specialized field of disaster studies seems to be moving farther away from mainstream sociology, to the detriment of both. For sociologists working in this field, application of Max Weber's political sociology is proposed as one way to reconnect their research with longstanding concerns of the discipline. Weber's political sociology contains a conflict model focusing on structured inequalities of class, status, and power. Its relevance to both contemporary sociology and sociological disaster studies is illustrated through a reexamination of one of the early classic studies of disaster. The paper concludes with an overview of Weber's thoughts about the role of values in research and a brief comparison of Weber's political sociology with alternative theories.     

Poverty,Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage: Ethnographic Perspectives from Urban Tanzania

The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment as dependent on the ability to make choices, not only between actual alternatives but also between perceived alternatives. In contexts of severe poverty, more attention is needed to the lack of viable alternatives open to families, and their motives in this context. In this study, 171 persons were interviewed in two majority-Muslim neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam. Some girls reported wanting to marry early, since poverty forces them to become adults capable of supporting themselves at roughly age 15–16, regardless of the personal wishes of their parents or guardians. Prior research tends to assume that early marriage prevents girls from continuing their education. This study suggests that educational opportunities are often closed off to girls before marriage. Policy recommendations given here are that organizations can more effectively address early marriage by (1) shifting the focus from legislation to urban poverty alleviation, (2) creating more employment opportunities for the poorest women in the city, (3) campaigning for more gender-equal attitudes in the informal employment sector, and (4) reducing financial costs of secondary schooling for adolescents.