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76 / Chapter 4 How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding of Poverty Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small T he term culture figures prominently in the literature on poverty, race, and ethnicity, though rarely with much theoretical or empirical sophistication. Conceived rather vaguely as a group’s norms and values, as its attitudes toward work and family, or as its observed patterns of behavior,1 culture has been discussed by many poverty experts without the depth or the precision that characterize their analyses of such matters as demographic trends, selection bias, or the impact of public policies on work and family structure. This lack of sophistication is reflected in many practices, such as the use of culture and race interchangeably , as if all members of a racial group shared a unified set of beliefs or pattern of behavior, or the use of culture as a residual category to explain unaccounted-for variance in statistical model, or the use of culture exclusively as an intermediary mechanism—an intervening variable that helps explain why structural conditions such as neighborhood poverty lead to unwanted outcomes, but not an independently causal force.2 By contrast, other scholars reject cultural explanations altogether , arguing that culture cannot be studied scientifically or that cultural explanations inevitably blame the victims for their problems. Poverty scholarship tends to reveal a rather thin understanding of culture. Over the last two decades, however, cultural sociologists have produced theoretical and empirical research yielding a subtle, heterogeneous, and sophisticated picture of how cultural factors shape and are shaped by poverty and inequality. They have used concepts such as frames, cultural repertoires, narratives, symbolic boundaries , cultural capital, and institutions to study how poor individuals interpret and respond to their circumstances, yielding insights that may be used to understand racial disparities in poverty. This literature has not coalesced into a coherent perspective on culture, but all of these approaches allow social scientists to move be- yond the assumption that racial groups have inherent cultural traits, such as an Asian work ethic. These new concepts allow us to understand racial disparities in a way that avoids the cultural stereotypes that have too often characterized poverty policies and produced research of minimal explanatory power. This new scholarship is often ignored by scholars of poverty and race, for at least two reasons. First, much of it has been conducted by social scientists who are not part of the community of economists, demographers, sociologists, and political scientists working on poverty and policy.3 Second, much of it is based on datagathering techniques—participant observation, in-depth interviewing, comparative historical research, and content analysis—that are unfamiliar to quantitative social scientists. Lacking the training to distinguish between good and bad practitioners of these techniques, many quantitative researchers are tempted to dismiss qualitative work as anecdotal or worse, nonempirical (which too often seems to mean nonquantitative). Even quantitative research in the sociology of culture, such as research on cultural consumption and on networks, too often remains ignored by the interdisciplinary core of inequality scholars, much to the detriment of scholarship (for an attempt to rectify the situation, see Furstenburg 2007).4 The consequences of ignoring this scholarship are not limited to the ivory tower. Culture is the subject or subtext of the recurrent public debates about poverty. It remains the subtext of the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and it underlies claims that the welfare system has been too permissive (see Bullock and Soss and Schram, chapters 3 and 11, this volume). It is referenced , often crudely, in the discussions of American individualism, responsibility, hard work, and fairness that characterize debates on poverty and immigration. The writings of influential policy researchers such as George Borjas (2001), David Ellwood (1988), and Lawrence Mead (1986) rely on assumptions about culture among the poor—assumptions often stemming from the culture of poverty theory —that have been criticized by sociologists of culture repeatedly since their emergence in the early 1960s (for example, Valentine 1968; Young 2004). Policy discourse often relies on unsubstantiated assumptions about American culture (for example, about what its core values are), assumptions that, in addition to lacking empirical foundation, have become part of a powerful narrative that equates liberalism with moral decadence and laissez-faire economics with fairness (Guetzkow 2006; O’Connor 2001; Somers and Block 2005).5 These issues cannot be resolved without taking seriously the scholarship on poverty among sociologists of culture. In what follows we do not summarize or review all of this literature; in fact, we...

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