Understanding Poverty and Well-Being

Bridging the Disciplines

David Hulme, John Toye, David Hulme, John Toye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317998570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Written by a multi-disciplinary team of contributors, this collection explores the different dimensions of well being, poverty and inequality.

A person's sense of well being is compounded of many elements including economic, political and social psychology. Poverty and inequality are aspects of a lack of well being in multiple dimensions and, this texts argues, development should be considered a process that overcomes these multiple deficiencies

This book examines the advantages of analysing poverty and development by multi-discipline research. Economists, political sociologists and anthropologists put forward an idea of well being from their own perspective, using their own research material, while the editors argue in their introduction that bringing to bear of many disciplines can enrich the research output of all.

The Case for Cross-Disciplinary Social Science Research on Poverty, Inequality and Well-Being

DAVID HULME & JOHN TOYE

I. Introduction

If we ask academics why poor people are poor … different disciplines will answer … in their own unique ways; each with certain kinds of data, certain methods, certain habits of thinking … in most substantive areas (of the social sciences) there is what to outsiders seems like an amazing lack of reciprocal knowledge. (Abbott, 2001: 142)

At the end of the nineteenth century, partly as a response to the ebbing of Christian religious belief, a new secular humanitarianism increasingly coloured British public opinion. It focused attention on a social phenomenon that had previously been accepted as natural and inevitable, if unfortunate–the poverty of those in the lower ranks of society. This new humanitarian feeling of concern for the poor produced its own scientific analogue. It motivated a new, positivist science of society, which went well beyond the informational eclecticism and the political partisanship of Engels' ground breaking Condition of the Working Class in England (1973, first published 1845). People now believed that the compassion of concern for the poor should be tempered by a sense of proportion, and that this could be best provided by thorough and intelligent enquiry into numerical information. The aim of social research was to give a sober statistical account of the extent and nature of poverty, and thus to provide the evidence base for a properly measured social policy response (Himmelfarb, 1991: 3–18). Key exponents of this approach were Charles Booth (1892) in London and Seebohm Rowntree (1901) in York.

During the twentieth century, however, research on poverty became increasingly specialized, as the methods of study were gradually refined to make them more penetrating and sophisticated. However, the benefits of specialization brought with them various costs, most particularly an erosion of the overall coherence of the concept of poverty. Those working in different subject areas of social science, such as economics, anthropology, human geography, sociology and political studies, have undoubtedly done much illuminating research into many aspects and dimensions of poverty. However, communications between researchers in different areas have been remarkable largely for their absence: this has particularly been the case between practitioners of economics and of the other social science subjects. Throughout the 1990s, while economists have attempted to define and measure global poverty with increasing precision, researchers taking an anthropological perspective have advised that ‘poverty is a myth, a construct and the invention of a particular civilization’ (Rahnema, 1992: 158).

There are general reasons, then, arising from the splintering of theoretical and applied knowledge, for believing that the adoption of a more cross-disciplinary research strategy would strengthen the coherence and social relevance of the results that researchers generate. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the study of well-being and poverty is a particularly appropriate subject for cross-discipline research. John Knight (1991: 26) put the point well from the economist's perspective.

If we are ultimately concerned with things like poverty, hunger, inequality, ‘people's capabilities to be and do things’, and so on, and with policies to make improvements, then we must recognise that economics is interdependent and cannot be isolated.

Such recognition leads in the direction of cross-disciplinary research, defined as any analysis or policy recommendation based on questions, concepts or methods of more than one academic discipline. Yet as long as many economists still claim that economics can be ‘contaminated’ by the ‘softer’ disciplines of other social sciences and many non-economists dismiss as ‘reductionist’ economists' analyses of human action, it will require considerable energy, intellectual courage and integrity to design and implement a cross-disciplinary research strategy on poverty and well-being.

When we speak of social science, we have a particular set of subjects in mind, and it is useful at the outset to specify our coverage. Our focus is on economics, sociology, anthropology, politics and human geography. Much of our discussion will contrast economics with sociology, anthropology, politics and human geography (henceforth SAPG).¹ To two potentially important subject areas we pay limited attention. The first is psychology, often formally classified as a science, rather than a social science, in UK universities. Psychology, and even social psychology, has less frequently engaged with development studies or the analysis of well-being, poverty and inequality in the context of developing countries.² However, very recently, economists and social psychologists have begun to work together and in future psychology may well demand greater attention. The second is philosophy. Every social science draws on philosophy, in one way or another, in search of answers to its specific ontological, epistemological, methodological and conceptual problems. Yet philosophy can provide them with neither a Platonic method of acquiring knowledge infallibly nor an Aristotelian map of all branches of knowledge. In this introduction (and in the articles that follow), reference is made to the contributions of social scientists who have drawn on philosophy (especially Amartya Sen)³ and philosophers who have ventured into social science (such as Martha Nussbaum). The large and growing body of work on well-being produced by philosophers is not explored, however.⁴

A generation ago, Michael Lipton (1970) made the classic statement, from the economic viewpoint, of the case for a cross-disciplinary dimension in poverty research. Yet the arguments of 35 years ago may not be persuasive today, and may be in need of revision in the light of recent intellectual developments. With this in mind, we reassess the case for cross-discipline research on poverty and well-being, to see how much validity it retains and where it needs to be supplemented. In the course of this reassessment, we introduce some relevant key ideas from the cross-disciplinary collection of papers that follows.

The next section considers both the reasons why cross-discipline research is essential for future investigation of poverty and well-being, and the incentives that have favoured ever more specialised single-subject research: incentives that at times have generated self-justifying subject stereotypes. The paper then argues in Section III against the application of dichotomous stereotypes to economics, on the one hand, and the SAPG or ‘non-economics’ subjects on the other.⁵ The commonly applied dichotomies are objective versus subjective, quantitative versus qualitative, and positivist versus post-positivist. In Section IV, we explore the meaning of an intellectual discipline and suggest that it is the normative practice of a ‘knowledge community’, and that it shapes both cohesion within social science subjects and the degree of affinity between researchers in different subject areas. We decompose cross-disciplinary research by distinguishing between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Section V makes a qualified defence of those researchers, and particularly economists, who ‘trespass’ beyond the assumed boundaries of their disciplines against charges of intellectual imperialism. In Section VI, we examine the ways in which different disciplines do and do not relate to practising professions. This has profound implications for cross-disciplinarity. The conclusion suggests ways in which the benefits of cross-discipline research can be realised.

The paper draws on the existing literature and the cross-disciplinary seminars mounted by the ESRC's Global Poverty Research Group (GPRG) at the universities of Manchester and Oxford. In addition, it makes use of the results of two types of empirical analysis. Content analysis and citation analysis studies, applied to articles in academic journals by economists and other social scientists, are used to give an account of how social sciences differ with respect to quantification, and how they communicate with each other.

II. Why is Cross-Discipline Collaboration Needed?

How does the need for cross-discipline collaboration arise? One reason is that the individual disciplines have, over the years, become increasingly differentiated and refined. In the very process of differentiation and refinement, they have also developed blind spots and methodological limitations that arise from their high degree of specialisation. Within a discipline, its basic working assumptions are accepted uncritically, because they are part of the consensus around its research paradigm. Sophistication has been purchased at the cost of an excessive narrowing of focus. For example, the bulk of econometric research on poverty dynamics still uses a concept of income/consumption poverty (Hulme and McKay, 2005), even though many of the econometricians conducting the work agree that poverty has to be understood as a multidimensional phenomena and that ‘non monetary’ measures are feasible (see below).

Similarly established paradigms shape the work of sociologists, social anthropologists, political scientists and others who have refined their own conceptual vocabularies, and developed preferred strategies of investigation that are highly specific to themselves. Sociologists and human geographers may have documented fascinating life histories of poor people that reveal important processes (for example Gulati, 1982; Bourdieu et al., 1999; Hulme, 2004), but it is difficult (econometricians would say impossible) to use these to test hypotheses or to make generalisations in the absence of a sampling procedure that can explain the position of respondents in the wider population. The existence of these distinctions in research paradigms means that new efforts are now required in collaboration among disciplines that study well-being, poverty and inequality, to deepen understanding and contribute to more effective policy. Indeed, the recent shift from analysing poverty (deprivation) to well-being favours cross-disciplinary approaches that can capture some or all of the different aspects of well-being.⁶

This insight is by no means new, but it does seem to be something that has to be repeated. It is important to recall that Charles Booth's foundational studies of poverty in late nineteenth century London were based on a mixture of methods of investigation and a multidimensional concept of poverty. Booth believed that ‘the statistical method was needed to give bearings to the results of personal observation, and personal observation to give life to statistics’ (quoted by Himmelfarb, 1991: 93). He never attempted to define the poor solely as those whose consumption fell below a monetary poverty line. His investigators used figures of apparent weekly earnings as one criterion among several, including information on health status and school attendance recorded by authoritative local observers, to assign households to a number of different social classes (see Booth, 1892). This made it possible to triangulate findings, consider the linkages between different dimensions of poverty and examine some of the underpinning processes.

Later work on poverty has tended to be more methodologically bifurcated. Rowntree, for example, developed much more sharply than Booth the idea of a ‘primary poverty line’ based on the income required for a diet providing bare physical efficiency. He also produced a social class analysis of the people of York based on observations and judgements about ‘obvious want or squalor’ or ‘secondary poverty’, but this could not be reconciled with his income-based analysis.⁷ By 1941, Rowntree had abandoned the concept of secondary poverty, and the primary poverty line based on a minimum diet took on a life of its own (Glennerster, 2004: 26). Today this kind of incongruence is most evident between disciplines. Many economists of poverty tend to operate as if the poor could be defined exclusively with reference to a criterion level of consumption or income, and sociologists (and others) often operate as if income and consumption surveys were redundant and all that was needed to identify the poor was oral testimony and qualitative information collected by participant observation.⁸ This specialisation in partial approaches to estimating the incidence of poverty has been accompanied by a loss of overall perspective, and particularly a loss of connection with the motivation for poverty research, and the reasons for being concerned about the fate of the poor.

Economists may take it for granted that it is useful to discover that X per cent of the population of Country Y are income or consumption poor, although the use to which their estimate is put falls in someone else's problem area. The government of Country Y may be very keen to employ economists to make such an estimate, not because it is essential for devising anti-poverty policies, but because it wants to prove that the figure has fallen or is lower than in neighbouring Country Z. In this collection, Francis Teal's paper performs two useful functions in this context. It both clarifies the reason for regarding measures of consumption as measures of welfare (essentially because increases in consumpt...