By Zygmunt Bauman
From one in every of today's most outstanding thinkers--a piercing exam of poverty within the smooth age
If "being poor" as soon as derived its which means from the of being unemployed, at the present time it attracts its that means basically from the plight of a mistaken buyer. This contrast actually makes a distinction within the method poverty is skilled and within the probabilities to redeem its misery.
This soaking up publication lines this transformation, and makes a listing of its social effects. It additionally considers methods of scuffling with again advancing poverty and mitigating its hardships, and tackles the issues of poverty in its current form.
The new version good points: up to date assurance of the growth made through key thinkers within the box A dialogue of modern paintings on redundancy, disposability, and exclusion Explorations of latest theories of possible strategies to poverty
Students of sociology, politics, and social coverage will locate this to be a useful textual content at the altering value and implications of a permanent social challenge.
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Additional resources for Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (2nd Edition) (Issues in Society)
Example text
In a consumer society, a ‘normal life’ is the life of consumers, preoccupied with making their choices among the panoply of publicly displayed opportunities for pleasurable sensations and lively experiences. A ‘happy life’ is defined by catching many opportunities and letting slip but few or none at all, by catching the opportunities most talked about and thus most desired, and catching them no later than others, and preferably before others. As in all other kinds of society, the poor of a consumer society are people with no access to a normal life, let alone to a happy one.
The messages of the likes of Charles Booth or Seebohm Rowntree – that one can remain poor while in full employment, and therefore the phenomenon of poverty cannot be explained by the insufficient spread of the work ethic – came to the British enlightened opinion as a shock. The very notion of the ‘working poor’ had all the markings of a blatant contradiction in terms, certainly as long as the universal acceptance of the work ethic figured most prominently in public thinking about social problems and continued to be seen as the cure-all for social ills.
Each successive identity is likely to remain incomplete and conditional, and so the snag is how to stave off the danger of its ossification. Perhaps even the very term ‘identity’ has lost its usefulness, since it belies more than it reveals of the most common lifeexperience: more and more often concerns with social placement are fed by the fear of an identification too tough and stiff to be revoked if need be. The desire of identity and horror of satisfying that desire, the attraction and the repulsion that the thought of identity evokes, mix and blend to produce a compound of lasting ambivalence and confusion.
