Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T10:45:44.132Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Entrepreneurs of Themselves: How Poor Women Enact Asset-Building Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2018

GUY FELDMAN  and
SANFORD F. SCHRAM
GUY FELDMAN
Affiliation:
Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University, Israel. email: [email protected]
SANFORD F. SCHRAM
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Hunter College, City University of New York, USA. email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Welfare policy discourse plays an important role in shaping how marginalised groups are identified and how poverty is addressed. Research on welfare policy discourse has mostly adopted a top-down perspective, examining how marginalised groups are constituted through interrelated discourses that are produced and enacted by powerful actors. However, little attention has been given to understanding how welfare policy discourse is used and enacted by marginalised groups themselves. This article focuses on asset-building discourse, a newly ascendant discourse which suggests that poverty can be alleviated through savings and building wealth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 poor single mothers of colour participating in a matched savings programme, the article explores how poor women rely on asset-building discourse to make sense of their poverty challenges and how to overcome them. The study finds that the women express neoliberal ideals as they seek to portray themselves as committed to becoming self-sufficient, financially literate, disciplined savers and entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that the women feel empowered and see themselves as worthy citizens, irrespective of whether their economic situation has actually improved or whether they ultimately come to resist asset-building discourse's individualisation of their predicament.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 651 - 669
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E. and Zucman, G. (2018), World Inequality Report, Paris: World Inequality Lab.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Askheim, O. P., Christensen, K., Fluge, S. and Guldvik, I. (2017), ‘User participation in the Norwegian welfare context: An analysis of policy discourses’, Journal of Social Policy, 46, 3, 583–601.Google Scholar
Berndt, C. (2015), ‘Behavioural economics, experimentalism and the marketization of development’, Economy and Society, 44, 4, 567–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution, New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Charmaz, K. (2014), Constructing grounded theory, 2nd edition, SAGE.Google Scholar
Cummins, I. (2018), Poverty, inequality and social work: The impact of neoliberalism and austerity politics, Policy Press.Google Scholar
Edin, K. J. and Shaefer, H. L. (2015), $2.00 a day: Living on almost nothing in America, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Elwood, S. and Lawson, V. (2018), ‘(Un)thinkable poverty politics’, in Lawson, V. and Elwood, S. (eds.), Relational Poverty Politics (pp. 1–24), Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N. (2013), Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language, New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (2008), The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Fraser, N. and Gordon, L. (1994), ‘A genealogy of dependency: Tracing a keyword of the US welfare state,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19, 2, 309–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, P. M. (2017), Welfare words: Critical social work & social policy, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Gowan, T. (2010), Hobos, hustlers, and backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grinstein-Weiss, M., Sherraden, M., Rohe, W. M., Gale, W., Schreiner, M. and Key, C. (2012), Long-term follow-up of Individual Development Accounts: evidence from the ADD experiment, Washington, DC and St. Louis, MO: Brookings Institution and Center for Social Development Washington University in St. Louis.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (2004), ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction’, Economy and society, 33, 3, 277–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herbst, A. (2013), Welfare mom as warrior mom: Discourse in the 2003 single mothers' protest in Israel. Journal of Social Policy, 42, 1, 129–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houser, L., Schram, S., Soss, J. and Fording, R. (2015), ‘Babies as barriers: Welfare policy discourse in an era of neoliberalism,’ in Haymes, S., Vidal de Haymes, M. and Miller, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States (pp. 143–160), New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lai, K. P. Y. (2018), ‘Financialisation of everyday life’, in Clark, G. L., Feldmann, M., Gertler, M., and Wokcik, D. (eds.), The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (pp. 611–627), New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Langley, P. (2010), The everyday life of global finance: Saving and borrowing in Anglo-America, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lemke, T. (2001), ‘The birth of bio-politics’: Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality’, Economy and society, 30, 2, 190–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loibl, C., Jones, L. E., Haisley, E. and Loewenstein, G. (2016), Testing strategies to increase saving and retention in Individual Development Account programs. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2735625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCormack, K. (2005), ‘Stratified reproduction and poor women's resistance,’ Gender & Society, 19, 5, 660–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patton, M. Q. (2014), Qualitative evaluation and research methods, 4th edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Prabhakar, R. (2009), ‘The assets agenda and social policy’, Social Policy & Administration, 43, 1, 54–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, L., Hughes, D. and Peckham, S. (2012), ‘The discursive turn in policy analysis and the validation of policy stories,’ Journal of Social Policy, 41, 2, 271–289Google Scholar
Sanders, C. K. (2014), ‘Savings for survivors: An Individual Development Account program for survivors of intimate-partner violence,’ Journal of Social Service Research, 40, 3, 297–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, A. L. and Ingram, H. M. (1997), Policy design for democracy, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Schram, S. F. (2000), After welfare: The culture of postindustrial social policy, New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Schram, S. F. (2015), The return of ordinary capitalism: Neoliberalism, precarity, occupy, New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schreiner, M. and Sherraden, M. (2007), Can the poor save? Saving & asset building in Individual Development Accounts, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Shapiro, T. M. (2017), Toxic inequality: How America's wealth gap destroys mobility, deepens the racial divide, and threatens our future, New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Sherraden, M. W. (1991), Assets and the poor: A new American welfare policy, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Sherraden, M. S. and McBride, A. M. (2010), Striving to save: Creating policies for financial security of low-income families, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soffer, M., McDonald, K. E. and Blanck, P. (2010), ‘Poverty among adults with disabilities: Barriers to promoting asset accumulation in Individual Development Accounts,’ American Journal of Community Psychology, 46, 3–4, 376–385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sullivan, L., Meschede, T., Dietrich, L. and Shapiro, T. (2015), The racial wealth gap, Waltham, MA: Institute for Assets & Social Policy, Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Suvarierol, S. (2015), ‘Creating citizen-workers through civic integration’, Journal of Social Policy, 44, 4, 707–727.Google Scholar
Sykes, J., Križ, K., Edin, K. and Halpern-Meekin, S. (2015), ‘Dignity and dreams: What the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) means to low-income families’, American Sociological Review, 80, 2, 243–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, T., Gross, C. L. and Turgeon, B. (2018), ‘Becoming a good welfare manager: Paternalistic oppressive othering and neoliberal boundary maintenance’, Sociological Focus, 51, 4, 335–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turgeon, B. (2018), ‘A critical discourse analysis of welfare-to-work program managers’ expectations and evaluations of their clients’ mothering,’ Critical Sociology, 44 1, 127–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, H. and Huntington, A. (2006), ‘Deviant (m) others: The construction of teenage motherhood in contemporary discourse’, Journal of Social Policy, 35, 1, 59–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, L. A. and Kroger, R. O. (2000), Doing discourse analysis: Methods for studying action in talk and text, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Woolford, A. and Curran, A. (2013), ‘Community positions, neoliberal dispositions: Managing not-for-profit social services within the bureaucratic field,’ Critical Sociology, 39, 1, 45–63.Google Scholar