New Poverty Research

The new poverty research emphasizes interpreting research on poverty and social welfare policy by placing that research in historical and social context. It involves understanding the problems of social welfare policy in any one era as associated with a particular regime of practices. In the current era, where the ideology of neoliberalism celebrates participation in a globalizing economy, poverty management is being transformed to be more punitive. The new poverty research focuses on the extent to which the Keynesian welfare state is being replaced by a combination of both neoliberal and paternalistic regimes. The new regime offers less monetary aid to low-income families and more discipline for the adults in those families. Significant changes include (a) decreased financial aid to and increased work enforcement on the unemployed, (b) decreased rehabilitation and increased incarceration for those who commit crimes, and (c) decreased child welfare services to birth families and increased removal of children to foster families.

Further, welfare policy implementation is being devolved from the nation-state to subnational governments, where privatization has led to the growing role of for-profit vendors. As a result, new forms of governance operate on different levels and provide new ways for managing and disciplining the poverty population. This means that the welfare state is not being limited, but instead being eliminated—welfare policy is being decentralized and privatized to provide new programming focused more on regulating the poor to regiment them into local and regional, low-wage labor markets.

Work enforcement is the most pervasive development. Welfare states throughout the developed world are under growing pressure to make this shift, though they continue to vary in the extent to which they have complied. Facilitating this process has been a reframing of social welfare policy in terms of “welfare dependency” in the United States or “labor activation” in Europe. The United States has led the way in reframing issues of poverty and welfare to emphasize [Page 611]enforcing low-wage work on the poor. European countries have varied in the extent to which they have adopted similar policies but none is as draconian in its approach as the United States. Some countries are developing more supportive forms of labor activation that provide substantial training and education supports and income supplements. With immigration, European countries face becoming more like the United States, where the low-income population is disproportionately nonwhite and a disciplinary approach to the poor is more accepted.

Labor activation policies are often justified in terms of helping the unemployed overcome their social exclusion. Yet, the emphasis of workfare programs is to get the unemployed to make rapid attachment to the paid labor force, even if it means taking low-wage jobs. As a result, labor activation policies risk helping the poor overcome their social exclusion in ways that reinscribe their subordination.

The punitive turn in poverty management means that social welfare policy is increasingly associated with new forms of governance that are focused on inculcating habits of mind and levels of motivation that will be consistent with this overriding objective of integrating the poverty population into low-wage labor markets. Social welfare policy becomes more therapeutic in its orientation. In particular, social welfare provision is converted from a form of income redistribution to the social policy equivalent of a twelve-step program that medicalizes welfare dependency as if it were akin to other dependencies, such as a drug dependency. Recipients are screened, diagnosed, and treated for their dependence on welfare. Clients are increasingly evaluated for the personal barriers that prevent them from getting and keeping a job. The new disciplinary practices associated with the punitive turn in poverty management is implemented via a discourse that inverts the meaning of barriers to no longer be external social structures that block the economic mobility of individuals. Instead, now barriers mean something internal to the lowincome individual that must be addressed through treatment that helps him or her develop the personal discipline to become self-sufficient via the wage labor market.

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