How useful is the concept of the 'Underclass' in explaining changing patterns of social inequality in contemporary society?

How useful is the concept of the ‘Underclass’ in explaining changing patterns of social inequality in contemporary society?

It is widely argued that traditional patterns of class inequality are breaking down and that the social structure of advanced industrial society is going through a process of fragmentation. There have been important changes in the class structure at the base of society leading to many commentators to argue that an increasingly large underclass is emerging. However, the work of these commentators such as Murray and Lewis is riddled with problems concerning the Underclass. The concept of Underclass is not exceptionally useful in explaining changing patterns of social inequality. It does however individualise the causes of poverty by diverting our attention from blaming mechanisms through which resources are distributed, including the role of government, to blaming in William Ryan’s famous words ‘the victims’ (Walker 1990).

The concept of the underclass has recently become popularised in the media as well as becoming an increasingly important subject of academic debate. The youth riots and joy riders of the Meadow Well Estate in Newcastle in the early 1990s, the more recent revelations of villages in South Wales with a majority of households constituted by unmarried single parents has raised a public debate as to whether there exists in society ‘a class apart’ with deviant behaviour and attitudes. The idea of a deviant substratum is however not new but an enduring element in the public discourse on welfare and poverty for the past 200 years. Marx believed that the Under class was in fact a reserve army of labour which played a vital role in depressing the wages of the working population and a reservoir of spare capacity in times of economic expansion. However there was still a degree of moral condemnation who also believed there was a ‘social scum’. More recently there can be seen to be two main views on the Underclass, a culturalist and structuralist account.

The culturist approach is based on the notion that it is possible to distinguish between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, or the ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’ working class. These ideas were not new, and had their roots in the social policy and political discourse of the 19th century, in reforms such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, and the repression of vagrancy under the Elizabethan Poor Law, but these ideas were reintroduced into academic debate in the 1960s by Oscar Lewis. Lewis was interested in why there was constant residuum of poverty and deprivation in what was know at the time to be the ‘affluent society’. Lewis argued that poverty was increasingly the result not of structural inequalities in the economy or welfare state, but rather the existence of what he termed a ‘culture of poverty’ into which a significant minority of the population were being socialised. (Walker 1990) The content of this culture was an extreme fatalism in respect of escaping poverty, and an over-reliance on state agencies and benefits. The result of this subculture was the emerge of a section of the population who were deemed psychologically incapable of taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the ‘increasingly meritocratic and affluent society’ of the 1960s (Walker 1990). The idea was subsequently popularised by leading Conservative politicians such as Sir Keith Joseph who developed the notion of a ‘cycle of dependency’ (Walker 1990) in which individuals incapable of looking after themselves became increasingly dependent on an overgenerous welfare state and reproduced this dependency inter-generationally.

The most recent exponent of this theory is the leading right wing social commentator Charles Murray. His thesis fits very neatly into this ideological and theoretical legacy, with its characteristic mixture if popular stereotypes. Murray was initially interested in explaining the increasing levels of poverty in the US but has more recently explored this ‘phenomenon’ in the UK.

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For Murray, the emergence of the underclass does not mark an increase in the scale of poverty but to an increase in a particular type of poverty. In this regard, the underclass is not defined by its poverty, but by what Murray argues is its appalling behaviour in response to the condition of poverty. Murray relates this to his own background growing up in small town Iowa. He recounts the view of his own middle class parents that there are essentially two types of poor people. Those that had low incomes but lived normal lives, and those who had low incomes and behaved deplorably - marked by being untidy and having dirty homes, the inability to hold down a steady job, excessive alcohol consumption and ill-behaved and delinquent children. In other words, Murray is re-invoking the undeserving and feckless poor of the 19th century. He not only separates a type of poor person from others but also personalises the causes of this type of poverty, ‘with a strong whiff of the public accusations of fault and attribution of stigma associated with past eras’ (Walker 1990).

For Murray the emergence of the underclass constituted a serious ‘social disease’ that was increasingly ‘contaminating’ entire neighbourhoods. The principal cause of the growth of the underclass according to Murray was the over-generosity of the welfare state. In the US circumstance, Murray argued that the over-generosity of welfare was a major factor in the disintegration of black families and the unemployment of young black males in US inner cities. In this context a poor urban family could substantially improve their financial position by dissolving their marriages, withdrawing from the labour force and subsisting on welfare: indeed, by the 1970s the welfare package available to unmarried mothers exceeded the minimum earnings for a 40 hour working week! In the UK context, Murray has argued that the underclass has only recently started to emerge, but will develop to the scale of the US underclass if corrective measures are not adopted - it is also worth noting that Murray has played down the importance of race in the UK context. According to Murray there are three main indications that an underclass is developing ‘illegitimacy, violent crime, and drop out from the labour force’ (Murray 1989)

Murray’s thinking has been widely influential in government policy in the 1980’s and 1990’s, there are however several problems that have been raised in respect of the cultural approach. The poor are blamed for their own poverty, there is considerable empirical evidence that the poor move in and out of poverty and the idea that the underclass reproduces itself inter-generationally is thus highly problematic. For example, Sir Keith Joseph prompted a massive research programme in the 1970’s devoted to his theory then: Nearly £1 million, 37 different studies producing 20 books, found that there is no simple continuity of social problems between generations of the sort implied by Murray. There is no consideration of the way in which poverty is the result of the social structure. Related to this, it raises the question as to whether cultural values develop in response to poverty or whether cultural values are the cause of poverty. Murray’s thesis is thus misleading. Perhaps wilfully so. It diverts attention from the real problems: pauperisation and social segregation as acts of government policy, and it misleads policy makers and the general public into believing that poverty is a family or neighbourhood issue, rather than a widespread issue.

The principal difference between ‘culturalist’ and ‘structuralist’ analyses of the underclass is the extent to which the poor are blamed for there own poverty. There is a marked difference in the way in which structuralist accounts have developed in the US and UK context which reflects the differential focus on the importance of race. In the US context writers such as William Julius Wilson. Wilson (1987) traces the development of the US underclass to long-standing processes of racial marginalisation, changes in the spatial organisation of the US economy and important changes to the structure of black families. He traces the development of the underclass to the concentration of large numbers of low skilled black workers in US inner cities. He argues that successive waves of low skilled workers from the Southern USA (i.e. Mexico) to the large industrial cities of the North, coincided with important changes in the structure of the US economy. There became a more highly skilled service sector work outside the inner cities which in turn created high concentrations of unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment in inner city black ghettos. Wilson believes the result has been a disintegration of the black family and the lack of appropriate male role models to encourage attitudes to work. This has been compounded by the isolation of ghetto communities from the more affluent sections of a growing black middle class in the suburbs. The result is a growth in violent crime, joblessness and welfare dependency that marks out the underclass as a distinctive social grouping. However, this is critisised by Walker who states that a representative study of young long term unemployed men and Women found they placed very great importance on having jobs. It seems that many studies on the Underclass concept, counter all theorists that claim such a class exists.

In the UK context one the most important advocate of the structuralist approach has been in the work of Frank Field. In Losing Out (1989) Field highlights the existence of a new underclass, comprising of long-term unemployed, single parents and pensioners, that has been created by important changes in the UK social structure associated with Thatcherite policies of welfare reform and labour market deregulation. Field thus verifies the existence of an underclass that is denied the citizenship rights enjoyed by the rest of the population. The problem of the underclass could be countered according to Field through a return to full employment, a return to redistributive welfare policies and a restructuring of welfare service delivery. Walker disagrees and argues that the increases in crime extend back to the 1950’s and the slope in the graph in violent crime steepened most conspicuously in the late 1960’s before Thatcher’s government. However, this view does seem to have more evidence behind it than Murray’s argument. But there are still problems created by exercising the term ‘Underclass’ at all, empirically, analytically and theoretically.

By the early 1990’s it could appear that the Underclass had become “ the only significant class in an otherwise classless society” (Mann 1995). Unfortunately recognising the Underclass is made rather difficult by the diverse features that it supposedly possesses. There is no clear and accepted definition of who are, and what the underclass actually is. Highly diverse groups are lumped together, can pensioners, violent teenagers, teenage mothers all be put in one cohesive group? There are also important diverges within groups, i.e. Unemployed youth and long-term unemployed 50+. Accepting the existence of an underclass is also an acceptance of the language of disease (even if culture comes from structural poverty) and thus fails to link poverty with differential citizenship rights.

There is also much controversy over causation. Field has no difficulty in laying the blame at Thatcher’s door however the increases in crime extend back to the 1950’s. The underclass approach links together a wide array of social process, but does not demonstrate empirically any causal relationship. While there may be an association between poverty and violent crime are all groups of the excluded equally likely to develop violent criminality. They seem to be nimble enough to burgle any home, but the disabled are also members of the underclass.

Empirical surveys have questioned the extent to which the underclass forms a cohesive social grouping that is inter-generationally stable. Gallie supplies evidence to refute these claims, he found that the long term unemployed are actually more committed to the idea of work than those in work. Many people move in and out of unemployment and poverty. How can a term be useful if faced with all these upstanding problems?

Even with the structuralist approach there is a constant danger of slipping back into culturalist approaches that define marginalised groups via their values and attitude. It then becomes easy to present the poor as ideological scapegoats for the structural problems in society. This raises the question as to why the underclass has become a popular concept at a time of rapid welfare state and labour market restructuring, blaming the victims of the restructuring process. Just as each generation seems to discover ‘like some lost tribe’ (Mann 1985) a class of hopeless cases so this class appears to evaporate as a social problem once the economy or labour market changes. There are very real social divisions and social problems in Britain and certain groups may be more likely to fall into them, however, the Underclass debate seems to be part of a moral panic and can be no basis for useful evidence in explaining changing patterns of social inequality in society.

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