Families and Poverty

Everyday Life on a Low Income

Daly, Mary, Kelly, Grace

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781447318866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The recent radical cutbacks of the welfare state in the UK have meant that poverty and income management continue to be of great importance for intellectual, public and policy discourse. Written by leading authors in the field, the central interest of this innovative book is the role and significance of family in a context of poverty and low-income. Based on a micro-level study carried out in 2011 and 2012 with 51 families in Northern Ireland, it offers new empirical evidence and a theorisation of the relationship between family life and poverty. Different chapters explore parenting, the management of money, family support and local engagement. By revealing the ordinary and extraordinary practices involved in constructing and managing family and relationships in circumstances of low incomes, the book will appeal to a wide readership, including policy makers.

Introduction

The central interest of this book is the nature and significance of family in a context of poverty and low income. The book reports findings from a study carried out in late 2011 and early 2012 based on interviews with 51 respondents (most often mothers) in Northern Ireland. It aims to contribute to a sociological perspective on poverty by exploring and problematising how family-related exigencies, norms and relationships take effect in the context of an inadequate income. The ordinary and extraordinary practices of constructing and managing family life and relationships in circumstances of poverty and low income are the driving set of interests. The research on which the book is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under the Poverty and Social Exclusion 2012 study.¹ While the empirical material is from Northern Ireland – and there are of course unique aspects to family life there, as everywhere – the book proceeds from the conviction that what is being revealed has wide application and speaks to aspects of contemporary life in conditions of poverty and low income that are generic if not universal.

Aims and objectives

Investigating the relationship between poverty and family gives the book four main objectives:

• to contribute to the theoretical literature on family by offering a theorisation of the relationship between family and poverty/low income;

• to explore how decisions and practices around resource utilisation are influenced by family-related considerations and especially the well-being of children;

• to examine the support networks (if any) that people have available, the role of (near and distant) family, friends and neighbours in regard to support and the norms and expectations attending support;

• to elucidate how income shortages influence and affect people’s local and wider engagements and interactions and the actions and representations people undertake to maintain an acceptable ‘local face’ and ‘public image’.

Developing and applying a theoretical framework to understand the relationship between family and poverty is a primary goal of this book. Family life under conditions of poverty is far less theorised as compared with poverty in general or the household as a unit for the purposes of poverty analysis. Household-based studies help our understanding of poverty in a context of family in several ways. For one, the household is a collective unit and so as a basis for poverty calculations can help to complement estimates derived from individual income. Second, the household as a unit of analysis highlights aspects of the collective use of resources – in the sense especially of the relative economies of scale and expected patterns of allocation and consumption associated with households of different sizes and types. The household, therefore, gives a better basis on which to make adjustments to income so as to try to get a better approximation of people’s actual income and living situation. Both are helpful but it is necessary to move beyond the household if we are to better understand poverty. Why?

A primary reason is because people tend to live in families rather than households. Hence, their expected patterns of resource accrual and use can be anticipated to be governed by relationships, bonds and preferences rather than utility. Whereas a household is a functional arrangement, a family is an arrangement of personal life. Family is one of a small number of primary social institutions characterised by emotion and affect and embedded in kinship-based norms, relationships and identities. Seen from a perspective of income, family is a form of economic and social organisation that provides for care needs and welfare, especially of the youngest generations, and governs relationships and resource exchanges among people of different generations and genders (Daly, 2011). Rather than being a matter of economic fact, people’s actual income situation and their well-being are filtered through the complex of relationships, norms and practices associated with family. Hence, the rationalities implied by studies of households are unlikely to apply to families where moral and relational considerations predominate. This kind of sociological understanding suggests that the family’s relevance for poverty lies not only in the accrual and use of material resources but in how ontological, relational and social factors are implicated in these processes. This highlights a second drawback in work on households and poverty, which is that it has no particular interest in – or often capacity to examine – relationships, bonds and norms between members and how these influence decision making, practices and outcomes.

Examining people’s perceptions of and practices in regard to the operation of family life and family relations is the study’s second key interest and goal. While there has been a lot of research on the material dimensions of poverty, relatively little is known about how people living on low income actually conduct their family lives, what they prioritise about family life and to what extent they can live up to their own (and others’) ideals given the circumstances in which they find themselves. The study seeks not only to make visible some of the family-based processes and decisions about the use and distribution of resources but to locate these in familial interpretations and relationships. The way that people cope and the priorities that they set are guiding interests, especially when it comes to decision making and practices around resource distribution. Finch and Mason (1993, p 170), concluding their study of family responsibilities in England, say that it is not possible to understand family responsibilities or how they operate in practice if one concentrates only on material dimensions. The moral dimensions are also vital, in the sense especially of how people’s identities as moral beings are bound up in the way that they make decisions about resource use and the exchanges and support they offer to and receive from others.

Third, the study is interested in identifying the kinds of support networks that people have, where family figures in these and how people engage with familial and other networks in a context of need and potential dependency. For these purposes, the book examines the use and exchange of goods, money, emotional support, advice/ information and practical assistance within families and across wider networks. Research has found that, while family support is important across all social classes, it is more acutely so for those living in precarious situations and neighbourhoods. Moreover, given that existing research underlines that moral and emotional support may be as important as that of a material and economic nature (Daly and Leonard, 2002; Olagnero et al, 2005), this study takes an open approach to investigating the range of support available and its sources. Throughout, though, we want to ascertain the extent to which familial and other personal ties involve support when people need it and how this is received, interpreted and reciprocated.

How people view their local relationships and social engagement more widely and how they manage the social and public aspects of being on a low income is the fourth point of investigation. Here the two driving interests are localness and representation. In regard to the former, the book investigates the extent to which and how people’s lives are locality-based. This directs attention to their contacts with friends and neighbours, their use of local services and their engagement in life locally. The second driving interest here is how people engage in public encounters, especially in situations where their low-income status is a key element. These encounters are taken as an opportunity to consider respondent agency, especially in regard to how they ‘represent’ themselves and their family in situations where reputation and wellbeing may be at stake (for example, in encounters at the benefits’ office or their children’s school). This directs attention to how the respondents see themselves and their family reflected in others’ eyes and how they manage their behaviour in this kind of situation and seek to negotiate and shape their ‘public’ relationships and engagements (if at all). Managing reputation and avoiding embarrassment and shame are of primary interest here.

Designed to augment existing theory and knowledge about both family life and poverty, the book breaks new ground in several respects. In the first instance it fills a gap in knowledge about the texture and conduct of family life in a context of poverty and low income. Most existing work focuses on households and/or individuals and generally fails to explore family as a factor mediating income-related processes and relationships. There are, of course, publications illuminating the nature of family life, but some of these are old (for example, Brannen and Wilson, 1987; Finch, 1989; Finch and Mason, 1993) and most are not specifically focused on family life in a context of poverty and low income. While there has also been quite a number of studies on the lived experiences and situations of those living in poverty (Daly and Leonard, 2002; Ghate and Hazel, 2002; Hooper et al, 2007; Katz et al, 2007), these have not generally theorised family as a factor in poverty. Further, the breadth of its focus on family and its theoretical intent in this regard also act to distance this book from existing work.

The book is topical in several respects. Given the radical cut-backs of the welfare state that are underway in the UK and elsewhere, one can expect the topic of poverty and how people manage their income and personal circumstances to retain a prominent place in intellectual, public and policy discourses. Indeed, even before the recession, one could identify a family focus in social policy in the UK and elsewhere (Daly, 2010a). From the late 1990s ‘think family’ became part of the policy orientation under successive Labour governments (Cornford et al, 2013). A familialistic orientation, which has continued somewhat under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government that took office in 2010, has rendered family relationships and family practices an increasingly important area for policymakers. As a result, there is greater intervention in family life and ideals about good family life and good parenting are more prominent in public discourse and public policy than they used to be. State policies seek especially to increase people’s self-sufficiency. But it is a very qualified form of self-sufficiency – interpreted not as independence from family but more as independence from state benefits. The thrust, in a nutshell, is to get people to rely more on themselves and their families and less on the state. This book contributes evidence around these and other issues, and in its penultimate chapter engages in a reflection about the role and contribution of state policy in regard to easing (or worsening) people’s circumstances.

The book is also well placed in regard to a strong current in recent British sociology around family as a frame of analysis (Morgan, 2010; Edwards et al, 2012). A debate is underway about the trend in UK-based scholarship in prior decades to de-emphasise family as an analytic category. Scholarship moved away from ‘the family’ out of a concern about its rigidity as a category of analysis. The depiction of family as a distinct social universe and a reality that transcends its individual members was also heavily critiqued (Bourdieu, 1996). A new understanding has emerged, with scholarship being taken forward by the view that personal life (Smart, 2007), intimacy (Irwin, 2005) and family-related practices (Morgan, 1996; 2010) are not restricted to any particular relational form or location. Family is not something that one has but rather something that one does (Cornford et al, 2013, p 14). That said, while it is probably more or less accepted nowadays that family should not necessarily be privileged as a unique space in which to study intimate relationships, it is also increasingly being recognised that there are particular and enduring aspects to family as a normative sphere, structural unit and set of relationships that merit investigation in their own right (Edwards et al, 2012). Pierre Bourdieu (1996), for example, pointed out that even if one regards family as a myth, social activity has to be engaged in to reproduce the family as a category of existence and meaning. There is, he says, a labour of institutionalisation involved – a set of engagements and activities whereby the feelings, dispositions and commitments necessary for the integration of the unit as a whole are engendered in each individual family member. There is great merit, therefore, in retaining family as a focus of analysis (Atkinson, 2014). This book fits itself into this kind of space. In its nuanced and differentiated conceptualisation of family and its investigation of the working out of family life and family dispositions in a specific economic situation, it will advance knowledge of family as both a collective entity and individual experience, while bearing in mind the insights from existing scholarship about not reifying family and not relying on old – structuralist – standards to analyse today’s family.

Theoretical background

Two main bodies of work inform the book. The first is scholarship on family; the second is research on poverty, particularly that on poverty as a lived experience.

Family as a structure and arrangement of collective and personal lives is one of its most familiar features and representations in intellectual work. The systemic view of family, originating mainly in structural functionalism, emphasises the functions performed by the family and how family evolves and changes to fit the surrounding conditions, especially economic conditions (Parsons and Bales, 1955). It tends to view family in relatively singular and unproblematic terms, both in regard to how people become organised into families and the role and place of family in social life. The focus is on the links between family and society: the nuclear family form is said to dominate because it is the most efficient and suitable for prevailing economic and social conditions. Its emergence and development is regarded as a specialisation of the family as an institution, with the modern family mainly oriented to functions such as socialisation, emotional needs and the provision of support (as the family’s direct economic production and employment functions have withered). An entire economic and social arrangement is involved, whereby at macro level family helps to organise a series of structural relationships between the economy, state and society, and at micro level family is a unit organising and governing everyday life and intimate relations. This work privileges a particular view of family. The family is a cooperative unit, resting on shared interests and mutual support. In this understanding of family, poverty can only be the result of some kind of dysfunction, either in the family’s structure (inappropriate or deviant family form or size) or its operation (maladjustment at a personal and/or institutional level).

This perspective is not widely subscribed to today. This is so for numerous reasons: partly because it is out of date and out of fashion; partly because of its representation of family as devoid of power dynamics or internal diversity; partly because it over-generalises and over-relies theoretically on a particular form and type of family; and partly because it privileges continuity to such an extent that change has to be perceived negatively as some kind of systemic failure or dysfunction (Chambers, 2012, p 22). That said, however, one should not be blind to the extent to which structural functional notions and the idealised vision of family that flows from them – the heterosexual, nuclear, two-parent family – continue to inform debate and policy. Nor should one jettison the structural aspects of family entirely because they have continued relevance, not least because individualised forms of living are often not possible for those with inadequate incomes. But work and thinking have moved on to highlight other aspects of family.

From the 1970s onwards, the focus of academic work changed and the thesis of family as changing only when pressure to do so was exerted on it from the outside (that is, from elsewhere in the social system) underwent a revision. A view stressing interdependence between family and other social institutions emerged (Berger and Berger, 1983). One of the consequences was not just a re-evaluation of the functions of the family in contemporary society, but a reconceptualisation of family to recognise its forms and behaviours as diverse and strategic. This meant according the family a theoretical status equal to that of other political and economic institutions (Sgritta, 1989, p 74). Gender scholarship was very important here in opening up the internal life of families to scrutiny and suggesting that families are sites of power struggles (especially along gender lines) (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Marx Ferree, 2010). Empirically, this kind of critique led to the examination of the internal lives of families, with special attention to the material and non-material resources and exchanges constituting the everyday life of families. The concrete accomplishment of these activities and the relationships and inequalities (of class, gender and generation) which they actualise became of key interest. But so also was there recognition of the significance of varying forms of family organisation and structure. Among the relevant developments to be highlighted here are: increasing diversity in family structure and form; the emergence of two-income families and the changing nature of gender and generational concerns as they affect the organisational and emotional life of families; and the increasing mobility of families within a context of insecure economic and social conditions and global migration.

This brings us towards the ‘doing’ of family life, reflecting a movement in scholarship away from institutional or organisational features and towards family relationships and behaviours. The newer scholarship on family is animated especially by the richness of family life, the elective nature of much kinship activity, family as constituted by the predispositions, needs and concerns that people bring to their interpersonal relationships, the significance of individualisation, and how family ties are altered and recreated through discourses, relations and interactions (Irwin, 2005; Smart, 2007; Dermott and Seymour, 2011). While it has not been specifically developed in relation to families on low income, the scholarship invites one to witness the complex exchanges involved (whether relating to money, support, care, information/know how or control) in family life and in sustaining family-based relationships within a network of other relationships and commitments. This has been a very strong current of recent sociology in Britain, taken forward by scholars such as Janet Finch, David Morgan, Carol Smart, Ros Edwards, Jane Ribbens McCarthy and Val Gillies. A leading concept has been that of family practices, which focuses on the everyday interactions of those with whom people are close and how these act to create the meaning of family (rather than it being a given). Scholarship examines how boundaries – of co-residence, marriage, kin status and so forth – are not fixed but fluid (Williams, 2004, p 17).

The second guiding body of work for the book is that on poverty. This is a very large scholarship, dating back at least 100 years. As one might imagine, poverty is a concept that has undergone considerable change, if not transformation, since its early days. A significant part of the challenges and debates around poverty is captured by questions around whether poverty should be seen and understood in a quantitative or qualitative way. In the former regard poverty is a lack of material resources; in the latter view poverty is a negative or substandard quality of life experience associated with inadequate material and other resources. While the quantitative approach to poverty has dominated the field, over time this has also become more ‘socialised’. Of signature importance in this regard was the work of Peter Townsend in the 1970s and 1980s. Townsend’s approach was heavily sociological – he was ...