Youth, The 'Underclass' and Social Exclusion

Robert Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134726288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: General Health

The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of `decent' working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new `dangerous class' and `dangerous youth' are taken as the prime subjects of underclass theories. Debates about the family and single-parenthood, about crime and about unemployment and welfare reforms have all become embroiled in underclass theories which, whilst highly controversial, have had remarkable influence on the politics and policies of governments in Britain and the US.
Youth, the 'Underclass' and Social Exclusion constitutes the first concerted attempt to grapple with the underclass idea in relation to contemporary youth. It focuses upon unemployment, training, the labour market, crime, homelessness, and parenting and will be essential reading for students of social policy, sociology and criminology.

Chapter 1
Dangerous youth and the dangerous class

Robert MacDonald

INTRODUCTION

This book constitutes the first concerted attempt by British social scientists to grapple with the idea of the underclass in relationship to contemporary youth. It considers both how youth as a time of transition can be dangerous for young people themselves, leading to social exclusion, and how excluded youth – as a social category has been constructed as dangerous and threatening for the comfortable majority of middle-aged, middleclass society. ‘Dangerous youth’ refers, then, both to processes of social exclusion that affect vulnerable young people and to the groups so excluded. The chapter commences with a review of the underclass idea – of the various debates and issues which shape contemporary theories of a dangerous class. It then shows how and why young people have become the prime subjects in discourses of the underclass, before describing the specific contributions to these debates made by the subsequent chapters.

THE UNDERCLASS: DEBATES AND ISSUES

The idea that Britain and other late capitalist societies are witnessing the rise of an ‘underclass’ of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally separate and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of ‘decent’ workingclass life, has become increasingly popular over the past ten years (e.g. Macnicol 1987; Smith 1992a; Robinson and Gregson 1992; Westergaard 1992; Morris 1994). Some claim to see the emergence of a class or stratum of people with quasi-criminal, anti-social, anti-work cultures of welfare dependency, who now threaten the happy security and ordered stability of wider society. Others are more reticent about the cultural content of this class but accept its likely existence given prevailing social structural conditions. For government ministers and their speech writers, for television documentary makers and the feature writers of the press, and for academics of different disciplines and political persuasions, the underclass idea in its various guises can describe and explain much about the state of our society as we approach the end of the century.¹ Academic and more populist discussions about the future of the welfare state, about family changes and the consequences of rising rates of single motherhood, about the gnawing attrition of the social fabric by rising crime, and about the extent, experience and social impact of the marginalisation of disadvantaged groups, have all become embroiled in arguments about an underclass.

Yet there is perhaps no other term in the contemporary social scientific lexicon that generates so much argument, ambivalence and passion as ‘the underclass’. Indeed, despite its current popularity, some would argue that ‘the concept of the underclass is a recurrent political and social scientific myth … because of its inherent theoretical, methodological and empirical flaws [it represents] a demonstrably false set of beliefs’ (Bagguley and Mann 1992: 122, 125). There are, however, other points of view. Professors Giddens (1973), Dahrendorf (1987) and Runciman (1990), for instance, have each employed the concept, in different ways, to describe changes in the class structure and accompanying social and cultural developments, while Rex and Tomlinson (1979) use it to explain the situation of some ethnic minority groups in Britain. Runciman is as certain that there is an underclass as Bagguley and Mann are sure that there is not:

that there is below the working classes an underclass which constitutes a separate category of roles is as readily demonstrable as that there is an upper class above the middle class in contemporary British society … the term must be understood to stand … for those members of society [who are] … unable to participate in the labour market at all.

(Runciman 1990: 388)

Before considering the variety of positions which have been taken within the underclass debate it is necessary, at least tentatively and following on from Runciman, to attempt some definition of the phenomena to which the term refers. This is notoriously difficult. Macnicol (1994a: 30) says that ‘there are as many definitions of the underclass as there are sociologists’ and this partly explains the uncertainty and ambiguity which befuddles the subject. Kirk Mann – one of the most avid critics of the underclass idea in toto – captures the confusion in underclass conceptualisations: ‘the features of the underclass vary enormously … the disparate observers who claim to be able to witness an underclass are incapable of agreeing on what it is they have witnessed’ (Mann 1994: 79– 80).

Nevertheless, within British sociology (Mann was writing of the debate in the US and Australia as well) there is probably a greater and growing degree of consensus about what, for analytic purposes, might constitute this underclass and the processes which might define it. Later in this book, Ken Roberts (in Chapter 3) defines an underclass as follows: it should be beneath and disadvantaged relative to the lowest class of the gainfully employed population; this situation should be long-term and persistent for the individuals involved; crucially it should be typified by separate social and cultural outlooks and activities, as well as by economic exclusion, which serve as further impediments to joining the regularly employed workforce. Thus, at the centre of his definition, Roberts has the marginality of this group to regular employment, probably the defining feature of all sociologically oriented underclass theories in Britain. Whereas some (see Smith 1992b, for example) do not include reference to cultural factors (leaving these open to empirical investigation), Roberts’s version is more useful for including these. If they are omitted from the definition we might simply re-label the long-term unemployed or economically inactive as an underclass (see Heath 1992). There is little analytic value in this, and such a definition would also limit sociological engagement with the powerful variants of the underclass thesis offered by the Radical Right (as we will see shortly). The long-term unemployed and economically inactive no doubt share similar objective relationships to production and consumption but, I would argue, for the socially and economically excluded to be properly understood as some sort of class – an underclass – they must also share some similar cultural outlooks, values and activities. My definition would be similar to Roberts’ and it also attempts to encapsulate some of the diversity of underclass definitions within one working model:

a social group or class of people located at the bottom of the class structure who, over time, have become structurally separate and culturally distinct from the regularly employed working-class and society in general through processes of social and economic change (particularly de-industrialisation) and/or through patterns of cultural behaviour, who are now persistently reliant on state benefits and almost permanently confined to living in poorer conditions and neighbourhoods.

Of course, the notion of a ‘dangerous class’, defined and labelled in numerous ways, has a long and chequered history. It is impossible to read accounts of the underclass written in the 1980s and 1990s without hearing echoes of much older ideas about the poor and their social situation (Walker 1990; Buck 1992; Gans 1993. See Morris 1994 and Macnicol 1994a for detailed reviews of the aetiology and development of discourses of the dangerous class). Contemporary diatribes against an anti-social underclass mirror representations of the poor from previous decades and centuries (even into the Middle Ages, see Scott 1975); representations which persistently sought to divide the marginal, working-class poor into the deserving and undeserving (Mann 1992; Morris 1994). Malthus (1806), Marx and Engels 1848) and Mayhew (1950), for example, all described the burdensome, residual, pauperised, dislocated and redundant population newly to be found in the swelling urban centres of the industrialising world. The thriftless poor were regarded as parasitical upon the honest toil of the majority and threatened to morally corrupt the societies in which they moved. Although they occupied quite different political standpoints and provided quite different theories of poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment, these nineteenth-century social commentators were united in their moral condemnation of what they saw as the vagrancy, improvidence, idleness and irresponsibility of the ‘dangerous class’.

The ‘underclass’ was first coined in 1918 to refer to the majority oppressed by the capitalist ‘overclass’ (Macnicol 1994a), but Myrdal (1962) is usually accredited with authorship of the contemporary underclass term and Auletta (1982) is seen as the first to popularise the concept (both of whom were writing of the USA). Myrdal’s ‘underclass’ referred to an excluded minority left economically redundant through technological progress under capitalism, whereas Auletta focused upon the culturally as well as economically excluded, preferring to stress the inability of the underclass to assimilate into the American way of life. His underclass included drug addicts, drunks, drop-outs and drifters, bag ladies and released mental patients, street criminals and other hustlers, alongside the ‘passive poor’ and long-term welfare dependants. Auletta’s work is typical of many preceding and subsequent views of the poor which, whilst making mention of how they have been made economically marginal, tend to emphasise the cultural characteristics of underclass members, seeking to label many of them as somehow personally culpable for their predicament and therefore undeserving of public sympathy or charitable support.

John Westergaard chose the underclass debate for his presidential address to the British Sociological Association in 1992. He, too, pointed to its long history and saw the re-emergence of a contemporary debate as evidence of the faddish nature of sociological concerns. However, Westergaard also argued that underclass theses were – at the same time – of critical sociological importance if they were correct in their view that ‘the divide between this underclass and the majority is increasingly the most salient and challenging line of social division for the future, by contrast not least with the older divisions of class now said to be in eclipse’ (Westergaard 1992: 576). He went on to identify different versions of the underclass thesis, and here four broad positions in the contemporary underclass debate are outlined.

First, there is what Westergaard refers to as the ‘moral turpitude’ thesis. This is the most well-known, politically influential and controversial argument. It posits that in America, Britain and other Western societies an underclass is either emerging or already fully formed which now threatens the social and moral order. This underclass is evidenced, it is claimed, by the anti-social actions, welfare dependency, moral irresponsibility and deviant cultures of a growing minority of the population (cultures which themselves have been fostered by prevailing, liberal welfare regimes). The underclass are regarded as the ‘behaviourally poor’ (Green 1992: 77). Elsewhere this perspective has been referred to as the culturalist, individualist or conservative approach and it has been championed by Charles Murray and others from the Radical Right in America and Britain.

The second perspective would concur with the first to the extent that it accepts that an underclass is here, or soon to be with us, but differs in the way that it explains its origins. Social structural factors are given precedence over cultural ones. As Robinson and Gregson observe, underclass theories hinge on the ‘classic polarity between structuralist and behaviouralist approaches, between structure and agency’ (1992: 42). Within this structuralist (sometimes called ‘radical’), liberal Left perspective the underclass of Britain and America can be understood as an outcome of social and economic change, particularly of the movement towards a supposedly post-industrial economy. Westergaard calls this the ‘outcast poverty’ thesis. Economic change and government policy have combined to make a significant minority economically redundant. In the absence of legitimate employment, alternative, sometimes deviant underclass cultures may emerge. Despite the political opposition of the authors equated with them, these first two positions can elide into each other with some liberally inclined commentators seeing the structural influences on the growth of an underclass as antecedents to adaptive cultural behaviour which further entrenches the social exclusion of the group(s) involved.

Third, there is a more ‘agnostic’ view. This accepts the theoretical possibility of the existence of an underclass, or something similar, especially given the profound economic changes occurring in late capitalist societies, but argues that, as yet, there is not the evidence necessary to prove that such a controversial concept has an empirical reality. Here commentators tend to stress the need for further social scientific investigation of the underclass idea (Smith 1992a; Macnicol 1994a; Westergaard 1992).

Finally, there are those who reject the underclass thesis outright. They argue that there is no such thing as the underclass; that the concept is politically dangerous, empirically unsupported and theoretically confused. This ‘atheist’ case has, in Britain, been best put by Kirk Mann and Paul Bagguley (Bagguley and Mann 1992; Mann 1992, 1994). It eschews discussion of the underclass as an empirical phenomenon and suggests that academic discussion of it simply serves the political interests of society’s privileged, ruling classes. The underclass concept is an ideological red herring which diverts attention from the real causes of poverty and the real problems faced by the poor.

The first two perspectives – culturalist and structuralist underclass theories – are considered in more depth in the following sections. The subsequent chapters collectively give a good example of the third perspective: they engage critically with the underclass idea and draw upon youth research to assess its theoretical value. Further consideration of the final, ‘atheist’ position in the underclass debate is reserved for the concluding chapter.

IDLE, THIEVING BASTARDS: CHARLES MURRAY AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

Charles Murray’s writings on the underclass have been the most influential on both sides of the Atlantic over the past ten years. It is rare to read British accounts without coming across reviews of his thesis; reviews which are almost uniformly critical. Nevertheless, his distinctive, iconoclastic approach has invigorated sociological discussion in Britain of poverty, social exclusion and the cultural consequences of economic change. His impact has been even more profound in the political sphere. His thesis has shifted the political outlooks of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the US and (at least sections of) the Conservative Party in Britain. The British Labour Party has also been keen to present itself as taking a less liberal, ‘tougher’ line on issues of welfare and crime in the light of the popularity of ideas such as those espoused by Murray.

In the US, the policy outcomes of Radical Right views of the underclass have included the Clinton administration’s support – prior to the 1996 Presidential election – for state-level ‘policy experiments’ and national legislation which effectively demolish welfare for unmarried mothers (and so-called ‘welfare queens’), institute ‘workfare’ programmes for the longterm benefit dependent and introduce ever more punitive approaches to offenders with the slogan of ‘three strikes and you’re out’.² President Clinton is reported as thinking that Murray is ‘essentially right’ and the Democratic Senator of Connecticut favours a shift in state funds from supporting teenage mothers to financing state orphanages in which their children might be raised (Sunday Times 29 May 1994). In a similar vein in this country the Institute of Economic Affairs has promoted calls for single mothers to give up their children for adoption and for single mothers to be confined to hostel accommodation so that their behaviour and the upbringing of their children can be monitored and supervised (Independent 5 March 1995).

5 March 1995). In Britain policies attacking the underclass have not as yet been so far reaching. The early 1990s saw the Conservative government launch a moral crusade for a return ‘Back to Basics’ which stressed the ‘traditional’ values of marriage and family life (and which proved rather ill-fated as a number of Tory MPs were revealed themselves to be absentee fathers, adulterers or to favour sexual practices at odds with the sorts of ‘Victorian values’ espoused by Conservative Party Central Office) (Macnicol 1994a:

31). Single mothers, offenders, those on benefit and other members of the putative underclass continue to feature large in the demonology of the Conservative Party, however, and various policies have been, or are to be, implemented which attempt to police such people and regulate their behaviour more closely.

Given the enormous impact of Murray’s thesis upon the politics and policies of governments and parties on both sides of the Atlantic, his ideas will be reviewed in detail – and in a neutral manner – in the following pages. The subsequent chapters of the book include extensive critique.

In 1984, Charles Murray published Losing Ground, which argued that US post-war welfare policy had encouraged the growth of a non-productive underclass dependent upon welfare payments (an argument which found an eager audience in the Reagan administration of the time). In 1989, at the behest of the Sunday Times, Murray visited Britain and produced reports later published by the Institute of Economic Affairs as The Emerging British Underclass (1990). This, and his 1994 update Underclass: The Crisis Deepens (also serialised first by the same newspaper), contain his account of the underclass in this country and are the references most frequently cited by British sociologists. Although Murray remains the chief protagonist, other right-wing British intellectuals – Patricia Morgan (1995) and David Green (1993), for instance – have authored further tracts which present a radical conservative reappraisal of welfare, the family, crime and unemployment.

In 1994, Murray wrote The Bell Curve with Richard Herrnstein, a volume even more controversial than its predecessors. Here, the authors revisited dusty debates about race and intelligence to argue that the disadvantage experienced by black Americans could be explained in part by the genetic inheritance of intelligence. Putting it simply (the book extends to several hundred pages), American society is claimed to be dominated by a powerful ‘cognitive elite’ who control an increasingly technological, informationbased society.³ Many of the social problems of the US have at their root low intelligence, and Murray and Herrnstein go on to argue that black people, on average, have lower IQs than whites and, because of their poor cognitive abilities, fall into a deprived and dangerous underclass. A fuller discussion of the black American underclass can be found later, and a review and cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Dangerous youth and the dangerous class
• Chapter 2: Young people and the labour market
• Chapter 3: Is there an emerging British ‘underclass’?: The evidence from youth research
• Chapter 4: Underclassed or undermined?: Young people and social citizenship
• Chapter 5: Status Zer0 youth and the ‘underclass’: Some considerations
• Chapter 6: The formation of an underclass or disparate processes of social exclusion?: Evidence from two groupings of‘vulnerable youth’
• Chapter 7: Youth homelessness and the ‘underclass’
• Chapter 8: ‘Destructing a giro’: A critical and ethnographic study of the youth ‘underclass’
• Chapter 9: The ‘Black Magic Roundabout’: Cyclical transitions, social exclusion and alternative careers
• Chapter 10: Changing their ways: Youth work and ‘underclass’ theory
• Chapter 11: Youth, social exclusion and the millennium
• Bibliography