Seeing poor children: Three artists' views

This essay explores representations of poverty in art. In so doing, the visual arts are offered as a supplement to traditional textual studies of poverty. The depiction of poor children in particular is rare before the modern period, and reasons for this are explored. Significant literary and artistic treatments of children in poverty, which begin to appear in the 19th century, are considered in the context of philosophical, political, and economic developments of the time. The New York painter of street children J. G. Brown represents Victorian era painters of poor children in that he distanced himself and his images from reality. More involved in the lives of the poor was the early 20th-century German printmaker Ka¨the Kollwitz, who steered away from the impetus to abstraction of that period in favor of an emotionally charged, politicized, activist approach which focused on the topic of children in misery. Finally, the use of photographs to document poor children is briefly summarized to set the stage for a consideration of the work of Wendy Ewald. This artist's novel approach of giving poor children the means to depict themselves and their own world breaks down the barrier between artist and subject and unifies them in a common purpose.     

Innovations to Make Markets More Inclusive for the Poor

Market failures, government failures and some of the characteristics of both the poor and business actors as well as their environment can act as barriers preventing the poor from participating more actively in markets, both as consumers and as producers. Private actors ‐ including for‐profit and not‐for‐profit entities, often in partnership with the public sector ‐ have been able to mitigate some of these constraints through innovations that have helped to make markets more inclusive for the poor, enabling them not just to gain access, but also to participate in ways that enhance their economic empowerment and human development. This article identifies the strategies and innovations used and devises a possible typology for them.     

Criteria for Welfare: Needs or Earnings?

The Report of the Poverty Commission followed Australian practice and recommended that payments to pensioners and beneficiaries be based on their needs. Two other recent reports, the Woodhouse Report on compensation for accidents and sickness, and the Hancock Report on National Superannuation, suggest an entirely different set of criteria—earnings and earnings-related contributions. It is argued that the latter proposals would discriminate inequitably between different groups of beneficiaries and that Australia should continue on a needs basis moving forward to a guaranteed minimum income scheme.     

A note on social capital and network content

As a guide to selecting name generators for social capital research, I use network data on a probability sample of heterogeneous senior managers to describe how they sort relations into kinds, and how the kinds vary in contributing to social capital. Managers sort relations on two dimensions of strength - intimacy (especially close versus distant) versus activity (frequent contact with new acquaintances versus rare contact with old friends) - and with respect to two contents - personal discussion (confiding and socializing relations) versus corporate authority (the formal authority of the boss and informal authority of essential buy-in). Comparing name generators for their construct validity as indicators of social capital, I compute network constraint from different kinds of relations, and correlate constraint with early promotion. The correlation is strong for the network of personal relations, zero for the network of authority relations, and strongest for personal and authority relations together. I close with research design recommendations for selecting name generators.     

Relation contents in multiple networks

Distinctions among kinds of relations (friendship, advice, intimacy, and so on) are typically ad hoc in empirical research. These ad hoc distinctions among relation contents can be expected to increase the likelihood of equivocal research conclusions. We develop three ideas indicating how standard, well-known, network models of relationship form can be used to clarify relationship content. (a) We begin with an idea for recovering the semantic context in which a relation content occurs. This context is cast as a network of tendencies for contents to be confused for one another and the form of this network—dissected with network models of relation form—holds insights into the ways in which relation contents are understood in a study population. (b) The network concept of structural equivalence is used to define content domains composed of specific relation contents that are substitutable for one another in described relationships. (c) The network concept of network prominence is used to define the ambiguity of contents in described relationships. The proposed perspective is analogous to a linguistic componential analysis of relation content.