Poverty as a Personal Failure and
the Fear of Exclusion Cover Image

Siromaštvo kao lični poraz i strah od izopštenosti
Poverty as a Personal Failure and the Fear of Exclusion

Author(s): Mirko Filipović
Subject(s): Civil Society, Sociology, Political economy, Politics and society, Social differentiation, Social Theory, Studies in violence and power, Victimology, Sociology of Politics, Globalization
Published by: Институт за етнологију и антропологију
Keywords: disqualifying poverty; cumulation of handicaps; work and jobs precarization; ghettoization; sociability; social devalorization

Summary/Abstract: The texts of sociological classics (de Tocqueville, Marx, Simmel) as well as recent European research offer a fruitfull analitical frame for thinking about poverty using the idel-type constructs of „integrated“, „marginalized“ and, nowdays dominant „disqualifying“ poverty (S. Paugam). The application of this analitycal frame, completed with new explanatory factors – as flexibilisation or precarization of work and jobs, the fear of getting fired as a new factor of inequality, the intensity of social ties and „spatial disqualification“ of social groups with the great risks of poverty and dependance of the social intervention system – lead to new insights in collective representation of poverty: now seen as personal failure, „social falldown“ in the process that include cumulation of social handicaps. So, what is nowdays perceived as a central social fracture – the fracture between those whose future is secured and those exposed to „threats of the job market violence“ (Maurin) – passes through the whole class structure producing social insecurity and diffused anxiety, undermining social cohesion and imposing new mechanisms of collective identities construction.

  • Issue Year: 18/2018
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 9-28
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Serbian