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Social Resources and Their Effect on Occupational Attainment through the Life Course 1

Hester Moerbeek and Henk Flap

in Social Capital: An International Research Program

This chapter discusses in detail the number of ways that social resources can affect a person's life chances. It focuses on a life-course perspective and copies part of the earlier research on ... More

This chapter discusses in detail the number of ways that social resources can affect a person's life chances. It focuses on a life-course perspective and copies part of the earlier research on access. It then considers a transition from ascribed to achieved social capital. Finally, the chapter studies people who applied for a job through the help of a contact person but failed to get the job.Less

The summation of poverty

Ann Oakley

in Welfare and wellbeing: Richard Titmuss's contribution to social policy

This chapter comes from Richard Titmuss's book, Poverty and population, which describes the concentration of poverty, poor diet, and premature death in certain social groups and regions. It analyses ... More

This chapter comes from Richard Titmuss's book, Poverty and population, which describes the concentration of poverty, poor diet, and premature death in certain social groups and regions. It analyses regional statistics of illness, accidents, and deaths, comparing the poorer with the richer. It notes that this careful computation of statistics about social groups and life-chances — a legacy of Titmuss's time in the insurance industry — is one of his most valuable contributions to the demographic and health literature.Less

Current Quality of Life in Poor Countries

Partha Dasgupta

in Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment

Illustrates how the concept of current well‐being can be put to work on the contemporary world. I draw upon evidence from the contemporary world's poorest countries to suggest that, interestingly, ... More

Illustrates how the concept of current well‐being can be put to work on the contemporary world. I draw upon evidence from the contemporary world's poorest countries to suggest that, interestingly, the three constituent spheres of citizenship may well be synergistically related to one another. The findings indicate that democracy and civil liberties are not only intrinsically valuable, but may even be instruments for bringing about material progress in poor countries. The fact remains though that, within democratic countries, there are enormous differences in people's life chances. Democracies in poor regions harbour malnourished people. It is argued that the malnourished are caught in poverty traps. In order to explain the findings, we are led to study institutions and the role they play in determining the allocation of resources.Less

Gender, Age, and Authority: The Case of Anne, William Ewart, and Helen Gladstone

Leonore Davidoff

in Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920

Siblings’ life trajectories varied with gender, birth order, personality, and life events. Although masculine status took precedence, elder sisters exercised authority over younger brothers. In ... More

Siblings’ life trajectories varied with gender, birth order, personality, and life events. Although masculine status took precedence, elder sisters exercised authority over younger brothers. In religious families boys negotiated between moral home values and the public world. William Gladstone's elder sister, Anne's early illness and death led him to regard women as suffering and saintly. From schooldays onwards William acted as a public man. A committed Anglican, he struggled with the sin of sexual desire, attraction to prostitutes and pornography. Helen, the younger sister, had no life outside the family. Her growing addition to opiates and what William regarded as lack of control over her appetites, and her resistance to his authority, enraged him. Helen's conversion to Roman Catholicism was a personal and political blow. The Gladstones’ life stories illustrate life-chances, emotional and psychic development in the context of gender and seniority played out in a particular familial setting.Less

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

Debbie Watson, Sue Cohen, Nathan Evans, Marilyn Howard, Moestak Hussein, Sophie Mellor, Angela Piccini, and Simon Poulter

in Imagining Regulation Differently: Co-creating for Engagement

This chapter explores how contemporary social practice art materialises interactions between regulatory regimes and low-income families with children and enables disruptions of regulatory regimes in ... More

This chapter explores how contemporary social practice art materialises interactions between regulatory regimes and low-income families with children and enables disruptions of regulatory regimes in ways not possible using traditional social science approaches. It focuses on a research team that included artists Close and Remote. Here, the chapter explains how the team co-produced, with community members and academics, a socially engaged artwork — Life Chances — that aimed to generate new knowledges about the regulatory regimes that low-income families with children experience. Aiming towards a form of improvisational empathy, Life Chances worked with Thomas More's (1516) Utopia and Ruth Levitas's (2013) Utopia as Method as ‘a form of speculative sociology of the future’. By staging and troubling contradictory notions of ‘life chances’ through art, the chapter specifically asks how the regulatory services that families encounter in two urban settings — the Easton area of Bristol and Butetown, Riverside and Grangetown in Cardiff — shape, constrain, and enable the life chances of individual families and communities.Less

Aftershock: the post-crisis social investment welfare state in Europe

Patrick Diamond and Roger Liddle

in Towards A Social Investment Welfare State?: Ideas, Policies and Challenges

The focus of this chapter is the prospects for the social investment state in the wake of the worst financial crisis for more than eighty years. The concept of social investment alludes to ideas and ... More

The focus of this chapter is the prospects for the social investment state in the wake of the worst financial crisis for more than eighty years. The concept of social investment alludes to ideas and strategies that change the basic character of the welfare state shifting from remedial to pre-emptive approaches, from compensatory income redistribution to pro-active investment in human and social capital over the life course. The global financial crisis and recession has added renewed urgency to the debate about the future. Before the crisis, most discussion centred on technical questions of implementation, and whether EU processes were effective in promoting reform at member state level. Now the issue is whether a social investment strategy remains right and politically feasible for the new era ahead.Less

Does spatial concentration of disadvantage contribute to social exclusion?

Nick Buck and Ian Gordon

in City matters: Competitiveness, cohesion and urban governance

This chapter examines the influence of the spatial concentration of disadvantage on social exclusion in cities in Great Britain. It attempts to answer the question of whether it is possible to ... More

This chapter examines the influence of the spatial concentration of disadvantage on social exclusion in cities in Great Britain. It attempts to answer the question of whether it is possible to identify the negative effects of living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods on individual life chances. The chapter suggests that in developing future urban policy, it is important to move away from simple assumptions about neighbourhood effects, and to consider more specifically what relevant processes may be generating these effects and how policy might modify them.Less

A measurement of human progress

Ann Oakley

in Welfare and wellbeing: Richard Titmuss's contribution to social policy

This chapter is taken from Richard Titmuss's book, Birth, poverty and wealth. It anticipates much later work on child mortality in pointing out that the deaths of very young children are often the ... More

This chapter is taken from Richard Titmuss's book, Birth, poverty and wealth. It anticipates much later work on child mortality in pointing out that the deaths of very young children are often the most sensitive indicator of social conditions: death rates in early childhood show the biggest social class differences. It points out that the progressive equalisation of life-chances in a ‘civilised’ society cannot be assumed; on the contrary, the differential in infant mortality by social class has widened over the previous twenty years. It notes that later researchers would agree with Titmuss on the two main causes of infant death identified in the book: poverty and ‘insanitary urbanisation’. It also observes that diet, a concern of Titmuss's in Poverty and population, continues to show a pronounced and increasing class differential, with differences in nutrient intake related to income even within low income classes.Less

Youth and Trailer-Park Life

Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish

in Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park

This chapter examines the potential neighborhood effects of trailer park residence on child and youth development. Using parents’ aspirations that their children have broader life chances than they ... More

This chapter examines the potential neighborhood effects of trailer park residence on child and youth development. Using parents’ aspirations that their children have broader life chances than they themselves had, this chapter documents the range of developmental trajectories among children and youth growing up in a rural trailer park. While a few flourish, most often, young people seem set on a course to reproduce their parents working poor class status. Increasingly in adolescence, as the social stigma of park residence emerges, there are developmental costs of park residence that compromises life chances. Less

The Missing “M Word”: Promoting Committed Co-Parenting

Jennifer M. Randles

in Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America

This chapter shows how the Thriving Families program sought to reconcile the tension between parents’ views of marriage as something they could not afford and the policy’s goal of promoting marriage ... More

This chapter shows how the Thriving Families program sought to reconcile the tension between parents’ views of marriage as something they could not afford and the policy’s goal of promoting marriage as a route to greater economic and family stability. As street-level bureaucrats who shape healthy marriage policy implementation, Thriving Families instructors deliberately avoided talk of marriage and instead emphasized committed co-parenting as the primary resource parents had to support their children’s life chances. In doing so, staff and instructors emphasized the value of something parents presumably had within their control—the quality of their relationships and parenting—over the jobs and money they did not.Less

Legends and Aspirations of the Oil Elite

Tom Cliff

in Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang

Chapter 4 examines how the political economy of national memory affects the legends propagated and aspirations pursued by the Tarim Oilfield Company, and the way that people within the institution ... More

Chapter 4 examines how the political economy of national memory affects the legends propagated and aspirations pursued by the Tarim Oilfield Company, and the way that people within the institution deploy these legends in the pursuit of their own aspirations. Daqing oilfield, in Northeast China, is a significant element of Tarim’s institutional genealogy. Daqing oilfield became a defining icon of Chinese self-strengthening nationalism during the Cultural Revolution. The Tarim Oilfield Company has now assumed the “legend of potential” once attributed to Daqing, but not all of Tarim’s elite permanent employees have access to this prospectively-oriented legend. Cohort analysis shows that even a small generational difference can result in vastly different life chances. Socio-structural positions formed on the battlefields, wheatfields, and oilfields of northern China since the middle of last century echo in the classrooms and boardrooms of the early 21st century. But structures are not straitjackets: the oil workers’ biographies also highlight their own agency, and the role of chance.Less

Childcare, life chances and social justice

Gideon Calder

Catherine Needham, Elke Heins, and James Rees (eds)

in Social Policy Review 30: Analysis and Debate in Social Policy, 2018

The notion of ‘life chances’ is frequently invoked in political rhetoric and debate about social mobility and equality of opportunity. Typically, it is only loosely defined. This article considers ... More

The notion of ‘life chances’ is frequently invoked in political rhetoric and debate about social mobility and equality of opportunity. Typically, it is only loosely defined. This article considers the relationship between the ‘life chances’ agenda and persistent questions about the relationship between childcare and social justice. It unpacks the notion of ‘fair life chances’, considers problems associated with how life chances are measured, suggests that childcare will hold a pivotal place in any coherent ‘life chances’ agenda, and offers a defence of the crucial value of a child-focused analysis as part of the wider articulation of such an agenda. The chapter concludes with a proposal that we address childcare as a ‘relationship good’ – a uniquely valuable form of relationship, the distribution of which should be treated as a basic matter of social justice.Less

Welfare States and Welfare Attitudes

Stefan Svallfors (ed.)

in Contested Welfare States: Welfare Attitudes in Europe and Beyond

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book and provides background on welfare states and welfare attitudes. The book analyzes and reports results from a comprehensive research program on ... More

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book and provides background on welfare states and welfare attitudes. The book analyzes and reports results from a comprehensive research program on citizens' attitudes toward welfare policies across European countries. It also offers a novel comparison with the case of the United States, putting into further perspective the potential regional distinctiveness of the European context as a whole. Under the heading of welfare attitudes, the discussion occupies normative orientations toward the distribution of resources and life chances and toward public policies aimed at ameliorating adverse conditions.Less

Losing Face: A Postscript

Heather Laine Talley

in Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance

This postscript describes the author's experience at a “burn camp,” a camp specifically for children who had been burned. The camp provides an alternative to the different facial work processes ... More

This postscript describes the author's experience at a “burn camp,” a camp specifically for children who had been burned. The camp provides an alternative to the different facial work processes discussed in the book. It is a social intervention, ultimately inspired by the understanding that medicine cannot help one comprehensively recover. The author likens the burn camp to Max Weber's concept of “life chances,” the case that we do not all have equal opportunities to be burned. Race and class converge to wreak bodily trauma for those of us who are most fragile to begin with. For kids, burn camp may be the only space in which they are really seen for more than their injuries. In the place of a narrative of bodily trauma that suggests that life is over, following the children's lead might proliferate notions of being alive that allow people to claim vitality and suffering simultaneously.Less

Class segregation

Danny Dorling

in Social-spatial segregation: Concepts, processes and outcomes

This chapter concentrates on the causes, outcomes and implications of segregation by social class using a broad perspective. It argues that there has been a long-term increase in class inequalities ... More

This chapter concentrates on the causes, outcomes and implications of segregation by social class using a broad perspective. It argues that there has been a long-term increase in class inequalities and polarisation in Britain and that the UK, as a whole, has levels of inequality. It describes how these spatial and class inequalities mean different life chances for people from different classes in different places. There is unequal access to higher education, unequal life expectancies and experiences of crime. Globally, there is also evidence of widening inequalities although there is considerable variation in levels of inequality in different countries.Less

Poverty, social class and social immobility

Tracy Shildrick

in Poverty Propaganda: Exploring the Myths

This chapter considers the issue of poverty and social class. Since the 1970s, social class has become a complex, confused, and contested concept, with much debate over its meaning as well as its ... More

This chapter considers the issue of poverty and social class. Since the 1970s, social class has become a complex, confused, and contested concept, with much debate over its meaning as well as its continued relevance. In both political and popular arenas, the concept has become largely redundant amid social changes that have, on the surface at least, appeared to make the concept of class less vital. This idea has been supported by a neoliberal agenda that prioritises the promotion of free choice along with the individualisation of life chances, experiences, and responsibilities. The increasing propensity towards the stigmatisation and demonisation of the working class, particularly through poverty propaganda, leads to a situation whereby even those experiencing deep poverty prefer to disassociate and distance themselves from the condition.Less

Social structure and inequality

John Bynner and Walter R. Heinz

in Youth Prospects in the Digital Society: Identities and Inequalities in an Unravelling Europe

Focuses on the meaning and effects of social inequality from a structural perspective, i.e. how life chances are based on wealth and income in populations distributed demographically according to ... More

Focuses on the meaning and effects of social inequality from a structural perspective, i.e. how life chances are based on wealth and income in populations distributed demographically according to such features as education, age, ethnicity, locality and nationality. Social class based patterns and dimensions of stratification that define young people’s life chances in the US and Europe characterise neo-liberal digital societies in which inequality is rising, threatening social cohesion. The book shows how Germany and England are marked by such ‘path-dependent’ inequalities that structure privileged and precarious youth transitions. In addition, inequality is impacted by such factors as globalisation, and migration showing how national economic and social policies respond. Social mechanisms structuring unequal youth transitions are also outlined.Less

The Battle to Define Life Chances and the Distributional Consequences of the Current Education and Economic Systems in America

Willliam Elliott and Melinda Lewis

in Making Education Work for the Poor: The Potential of Children's Savings Accounts

Our stories serve to illustrate that divergent experiences are not primarily the result of different choices or preferences. Willie’s route to and through higher education was often perilous and ... More

Our stories serve to illustrate that divergent experiences are not primarily the result of different choices or preferences. Willie’s route to and through higher education was often perilous and frustrating because he lacked the resources with which to maneuver and bend institutions in order to meet his needs. In contrast, Melinda’s college aspirations were encouraged and rewarded by the same institutions because she had the resources to make them work for her. As stark as these different routes were, if the gap in our families’ wealth had ceased to matter once we got our degrees, some might still argue that higher education is “working” as a leveler. Sure, Willie had to try harder, wait longer, and forego many opportunities, but isn’t it where you end up that really matters? Our stories suggest that the answer to this question is a resounding “No.” Instead, our lives continue to be marked by the effects of wealth inequality and by the substantial differences in how the education system treats those who start with money and those working to get it. This is the thesis of this chapter: that wealth inequality is not just another manifestation of unfairness in US society but instead a primary force determining how people fare, including in the institutions that are supposed to catalyze equitable opportunities. Our lives reveal how assets chart one’s course not only at the beginning of a college career but also well into a college graduate’s future. In Willie’s case, even though it has been more than nine years since he graduated from his PhD program, student debt still compromises his ability to leverage his relatively high salary to secure sound financial footing. His lingering financial instability is rooted in the economic disadvantages of his family of origin, but, critically, it was not erased when he graduated. Less

Introduction

Barry Godfrey, Pam Cox, Heather Shore, and Zoe Alker

in Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850

Chapter 1 starts with descriptions of the life courses of two individuals and goes on to explain the remit of this study, which follows the life courses and life chances of 500 people born in late ... More

Chapter 1 starts with descriptions of the life courses of two individuals and goes on to explain the remit of this study, which follows the life courses and life chances of 500 people born in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. Their lives are linked by virtue of their shared experiences within, or at the margins of, the early youth justice system. The chapter then summarizes key themes within the literatures that have inspired this study: life course criminology, crime history, and socio-economic history. The life course has become a rich research terrain in recent years, one that requires researchers to find ways of tracking the twists, turns, and tipping points of their subjects’ lives as they change over time. Finally, the contents of the following chapters are summarized.Less