ABSTRACT
Among social scientists, development theorists, and policy makers there is today an emergent consensus about the multidimensional and contextual character of poverty. Working within the framework of such a consensus in this article, I attempt to identify the social dimension of human poverty. Most generally, I try to sketch an account of social poverty as a shared normative (or soft) constraint on human action and interaction. The argument is developed as follows. I begin by summarizing and then using social capital theory to characterize my account of social poverty more fully. Here I distinguish between what I call horizontal social capital (networks of social trust and connections that are accessible and appropriable within a specific socioeconomic or cultural stratum) and vertical social capital (networks of social trust and connections that are accessible and appropriable between and among various socioeconomic and cultural strata). I argue that social poverty is an absence or scarcity of vertical social capital. From there I go on to analyze some of the mechanisms and asymmetrical effects of social poverty in specific empirical contexts. In closing I reflect briefly on how the problem of social poverty has been addressed in the US context. I suggest that reducing social poverty requires both a bottom-up approach towards the creation of vertical social capital and a top-down approach aimed at the diversification of existing stores of horizontal social capital.
The author wishes to thank the US and Czech Fulbright Commissions and the Department of Political Studies at Charles University for supporting this research, and three anonymous readers of the Journal of Poverty for insightful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
Notes
1. For a fine-grained conceptual history of the origins of social capital theory, see Farr (2004). And for a more explicitly sociological account of social capital, see Portes (1998) and, especially, Lin (2001). Elsewhere I have sought to analyze in greater detail the core features and action-theoretical presuppositions of each of these threads (Lewandowski, 2006).
2. Perhaps the best single volume collection devoted to elaborating the rational thread in contemporary social capital theory is edited by Dasgupta and Serageldin (2000).
3. The defining texts in the Marxist thread in social capital theory remain Bourdieu's own studies of taste (1984) and higher education in France (1988).
4. The democratic thread in social capital theory, which has its origins in Alexis de Tocqueville, is examined in a comparative perspective in Edwards, Foley, and Diani (2001), and developed most fully by Putnam (1993; 1995; 2000).
5. Similarly, James Coleman's influential rational choice sociology of action begins with universal assumptions about human beings as radically individualistic utility-maximizing reasoners. In fact, he subsumes all human action under “a single purpose–to increase the actor's realization of interests” (Coleman, 1990, p. 32).
6. Bourdieu's attempt to define his use of the term social capital appears throughout his work, but is most concisely formulated in his essay on the forms of capital, where he says that “social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition–or in other words, to membership in a group–which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 248–249).
7. In this context, see again Bourdieu (1984).
8. Regional data taken from the United Nations Development Report (2002). This report further breaks down Roma population estimates by country within Central and Eastern Europe. Romania is home to the largest Roma population, estimated at 1,800,000–2,800,000 people, followed by Bulgaria (700,000–800,000), Hungary (550,000–600,000), Slovakia (480,000–520,000), the Czech Republic (250,000–300,000), and Poland (50,000–60,000). The exact size of the Roma population in Europe is of course unknown.
9. This regional human development summary surveys, among other things, trust in support networks and institutions among Roma in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
10. The 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, for example, was accomplished with a presidential order to dispatch 1,000 heavily armed paratroopers and 10,000 National Guardsmen to the school.
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