Throughout the book we have argued that SCOs are as much shaped by historically variable contexts as they in turn shape this context in interaction with other SCOs. Recognising SCOs as co-creators of social change invites us to consider together temporality, interaction, and the variety of forms of SCOs, and to do so within the broader historically variable context. The factors that allow SCOs and SCMs to secure social change vary across time and place. Thinking in this way alerts us to the magnitude and complexity of disentangling SCO outcomes – on each other, on SCMs, on policy, on legislation, on institutions and on culture as well as in relation to broader social, economic, cultural, and technological contexts at multiple (local, national, and international) levels over time. We therefore stress the value of our holistic approach, which encourages us to think realistically about the very real challenges of accurately tracing the outcomes of SCOs back to the source or sources from which they originated.

It is, nonetheless, important to recognise how an outcome in one sphere (for example, cultural or biographical) might set on course some chain reactions in different spheres (for example, political or material). Indeed, this is probably one reason why existing work on the outcomes of SCOs is currently unclear about the precise mechanisms through which outcomes are secured. This is part of the beauty of our approach: a simple, linear, theory of ‘organising for social change’ would do injustice to the multiple processes at play within and among SCOs and their broader historically variable context. A holistic account of the outcomes of organising for change must recognise how individual, SCO-sector, socio-cultural, and socio-political outcomes come to shape one another in usually unpredictable ways.

Throughout this book we have examined varieties of SCO and a range of intersecting classes of SCMs. What are the lessons learned and what are the implications of our intervention? In this, our concluding, chapter we first highlight the relevance of our work to the circumstances we find ourselves in at the beginning of the 2020s. Then we discuss the three key themes that our book raises about the role of SCOs and SCMs in social change processes.

Introduction

This chapter proposes a novel framework for the influence of heuristics and biases on the allocation of resources and sanctions by frontline workers. Under the heading of ‘Behavioural Public Administration’ (BPA), scholars increasingly engage in ‘the analysis of public administration from the microlevel perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology’ (Grimmelijkhuijsen et al, 2017). We focus on frontline workers, also called street-level bureaucrats or policy professionals, who are involved in either the delivery of public services, for example welfare or education providers, or the allocation of sanctions, such as police officers or inspectors. Street-level work entails direct social interactions with policy target groups, or clients, such as welfare applicants, students, car drivers, or farmers. Clearly, this interaction is not merely a rational, technocratic process. Yet, the ‘human factors’ that characterise these processes remain remarkably undertheorised (Winter, 2012; Saetren, 2014).

Frontline workers ‘cope’ with work demands that typically exceed the limited time and resources available to them (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2000; Tummers et al, 2015 a, b). In such a context streetlevel bureaucrats use heuristics and biases to aid decision-making (Jilke and Tummers, 2018; Harrits, 2019). Accordingly, the policies ‘in action’ can diverge significantly from the policy ‘on paper’ (Gofen, 2014). BPA-inspired research has undoubtedly fostered progress in our understanding of the micromechanisms that drive frontline policy implementation (Grimmelijkhuijsen et al, 2017; James et al, 2017). For example, inspectors have different ‘styles’ of enforcing public policies (May and Wood, 2003; Rutz et al, 2017; de Boer, 2018; de Boer et al, 2018). Or, frontline workers can feel ‘alienated’ from the policies they should implement (Tummers, 2011; Loyens, 2015; Thomann et al, 2018b). Frontline bureaucrats’ actions may be influenced by the extent to which they share the political ideologies of their principals (Lee and Park, 2020). However, the full potential of behavioural insights to explain streetlevel behaviour including direct impacts on clients has not yet been exploited.

Frontline workers who put democratically decided upon public policies into practice have more direct social impact than other bureaucrats: citizens usually have their most direct experience with ‘the state’ through them.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been shaped by multiple intersecting financial, health, and environmental crises, and rapid social change. The financial crisis of 2008 generated economic and fiscal consequences that resulted in unemployment and austerity measures. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began at the end of 2019, reshaped our societies dramatically and revealed the challenges of dealing with a pandemic within national health systems already under strain. The ongoing environmental and climate crises threaten the homes and livelihoods of many, particularly in the Global South, but also in the Global North, and have huge ramifications on how societies across the world organise their economies and citizens live their lives. These crises have intensified global economic, racial, and gender inequalities and thus must be analysed from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1991). Together, these intersecting crises have resulted in a wide range of mobilisations, from large-scale protests on the streets to self-help and DIY (do it yourself) mobilisations, which are less visible. This book is about the organisations and people that are responding to crises and seeking to bring about as well as resist social change. We call these organisations social change organisations (SCOs) and the people engaged in them social change makers (SCMs).

We argue that focusing on SCOs and SCMs in a historical perspective contributes to the development of a theory of social change that takes into account structure and agency. SCOs and SCMs are constrained by the contexts in which they are active, but at the same time they are contributing to the transformation of these contexts – more often incrementally than rapidly. Our approach goes beyond models of social change that focus on the dynamics between incumbents and challengers (McAdam et al, 2001; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). We argue that it is important to broaden the perspective on efforts to bring about change beyond contentious politics (various forms of violent or non-violent protest) by paying more attention to insider activism and prefigurative politics. Insider activism refers to social change making that seeks to pressure institutions to change (or resist change) in more formal contexts than contentious politics (Pettinicchio, 2012).

Organising is politics made durable. From co-operatives to corporations, Occupy to Meta, states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), organisations shape our lives. They shape the possible futures of governance, policy making and social change, and hence are central to understanding how human beings can deal with the challenges that face us, whether that be pandemics, populism or climate change. This book series publishes work that explores how politics happens within and because of organisations and organising. We want to explore how activism is organised and how activists change organisations. We are also interested in the forms of resistance to activism, in the ways that powerful interests contest and reframe demands for change. These are questions of huge relevance to scholars in sociology, politics, geography, management and beyond, and are becoming ever more important as demands for impact and engagement change the way that academics imagine their work. They are also important to anyone who wants to understand more about the theory and practice of organising, not just the abstracted ideologies of capitalism taught in business schools.

Our books offer critical examinations of organisations as sites of or targets for activism; and we will also assume that our authors, and hopefully our readers, are themselves agents of change. Titles may focus on specific industries or fields, or they may be arranged around particular themes or challenges. Our topics might include the alternative economy; surveillance, whistleblowing and human rights; digital politics; religious groups; social movements; NGOs; feminism and anarchist organisation; action research and co-production; activism and the neo-liberal university, and any other subjects that are relevant and topical.

‘Organisations and Activism’ is also a multidisciplinary series. Contributions from all and any relevant academic fields will be welcomed. The series is international in outlook, and proposals from outside the English-speaking global north are particularly welcome.

This book, the fourth in our series so far, speaks directly to a concern with how ‘social change organisations’ and ‘social change makers’ can incubate and solidify new forms of social relations. The authors generously define social change organisations as a ‘broad range of organisations that work to bring about or resist social change through any combination of service provision, advocacy and protest.’

6.1 A systematic typology: comparison with Gordon et al.’s and Ringen’s views of poverty measurement methods

The typology I present here classifies PMM, in the first place, into normative (No), semi-normative (SN) or non-normative (NN) methods. I consider normative those PMM that define the threshold(s) separating the poor from the non-poor based on a notion of the acceptable minimum level of life or on a conception of the N that must be satisfied, and the S required to meet them. No and SN methods are additionally classified on the basis of two characteristics: the direct or indirect nature of the measurement of WB (or deprivation) and the use of one or various indicators in one or various dimensions. This gives rise to the further classification of methods into the categories of direct and indirect, and one-dimensional and multidimensional. The methods that use both direct and indirect indicators I call combined.

In the following pages I compare this typology with Ringen’s (1995), as well as with the methods described by Gordon et al. (2000). I include a critique of direct and indirect methods, leaving the critique of combined methods for Chapter 7.

I have not included Sen’s CA in the typology, since it has not been made operational to measure P or the standard of living. Neither have I included the measurement of social exclusion, for this concept is different from that of P, regardless of the serious difficulties encountered for its definition and measurement.

Table 6.1 presents a synthetic typology of PPM. The typology is built on three axes: the first axis (displayed in the columns) is the one-dimensional or multidimensional character of each method; the second (displayed in the rows), the indirect, direct or combined nature of each method; and the third (also shown in the rows), the No, SN or NN character of the methods (the first two categories have been grouped together in the table). All the NN methods included are indirect. With these simplifications, a matrix with potentially 18 cells was reduced to an eight-cell matrix where three cells remain empty.

The external critique of the Political Economy of Poverty (PEP) presented in successive sections in this and the following chapter comprises six aspects: Sen’s and Rawls’s critiques of utilitarianism, complemented by the former’s critique of the opulence approach (OA) and other related approaches (Section 2.1); an internal and external critique of Neoclassical Consumer Theory (NCT) (Section 2.2), which complements the critique of utilitarianism; a very brief summary of the critiques of Sen’s (and Nussbaum’s) capability approaches developed in Broadening Our Look (Section 2.3); a summary presentation of the New Paradigm of Poverty and Human Flourishing (NPPHF) (Section 2.4); a critique of conventional definitions of poverty (Section 3.1); and a comparison of what I have called the conceptual maps of the PEP and of the NPPHF (Section 3.2). Unlike the internal critique I have been formulating for over 30 years, and which is presented in Part II of this book, the one discussed in these two chapters is not a critique of measurement methods and their public policy implications but rather an external critique that focuses on the conceptual foundations of the PEP. In Sections 3.1 and 3.2 the critique contrasts the criticised positions with the NPPHF, which makes its external character evident.

2.1 Sen’s and Rawls’s critiques of utilitarianism: Sen’s critique of opulence and primary goods approaches

Amartya Sen defines utility theories as those that see value only in individual utility, defined in terms of a psychological metric such as pleasure or happiness. According to this interpretation, the moral importance of needs (N) is based solely on the notion of utility, says Sen, who distinguishes utilitarianism from welfarism. The former seeks to maximise total social utility by equalising everyone’s marginal utilities, while the latter posits utility as the single value but does not seek to maximise total social utility.

According to Sen, if one accepts the prior principle that the equality of the total utilities of all persons is valuable, then utilitarianism should be condemned. Sen introduces here human diversity, a concept that is repeated time and time again in his work, and which in this case explains that equating the total utilities of each person yields different results than equating their marginal utilities.

4.1 Introduction

Poverty measurement must be multidimensional because HN are multiple. For example, Maslow’s scheme (1943, 1954/1987) includes seven N, while that of Max-Neef et al. (1986) includes nine. Each N is met through various S (the typology of S presented in this book includes seven types; see Section 1.3) to which people have access through a range of resources or WBS (see my typology of six WBS in Section 1.2). This enormous diversity and complexity would not imply heterogeneity for the purposes of analysis if markets were unlimited, that is, if everything were bought and sold and had a price. But this is not the case. Markets have limits, and exchange values are not universal: many S cannot be acquired in the market. Money can neither measure nor buy everything. Some S and WBS cannot be expressed monetarily.

Therefore, the indicators we use to measure multidimensional poverty are either nominative indicators that can always be transformed into ordinal ones, or else cardinal indicators. This heterogeneity requires a solution to combine all the dimensions involved. Some solutions present in the literature are highly problematic and involve inconsistencies, and most of them lose much of the available information by adopting dichotomic indicators.

This chapter and Chapter 5 establish principles (Pr) and good practices (GP) that pave the way for better solutions to the problem of heterogeneity, as well as to many other problems I have found in PMM used worldwide. While this chapter broaches what I have called principles (Pr) and good practices (GP) of poverty conceptualisation (PPC and GPPC, respectively), Chapter 5 discusses Pr and GP of poverty measurement (PPM and GPPM). The boundary between conceptualisation and measurement is fuzzy, but the division seems quite useful. Although I had not stated them in written form, some of these Pr and GP have guided me in the multidimensional measurement of poverty I have been practising (and preaching) since 1990. Others, I have developed recently, partly as a response to a number of queries raised among some authors regarding my multidimensional measurement method, the IPMM.

One can add plenty, or just a few words at the end of a complex book. I am happy to have got to the point of writing this Epilogue. I am also happy with the book’s structure, which has at its centre the distinction between poverty conceptualisation (Part I) and measurement (Part II), and the view that measurement ought to be based on conceptualisation. All too often, this ought to is not observed in poverty studies. For instance, the World Bank (WB) identifies the lowest PLs used in the world and averages them to obtain what it calls the IPL (International Poverty Line), which it then uses to measure poverty in peripheral countries. According to Reddy and Pogge (2020, p 43), the ‘bank’s estimates of the level, distribution, and trend of global poverty are marred by three serious problems’, the first of which is the one that interests me now: ‘The bank uses an arbitrary IPL that is not adequately anchored in any specification of the real requirements of human beings’ (emphasis added). One could say that the WB does not comply with the abovementioned ought to because it excludes any kind of conceptualisation. Another very different example of a text that does not fulfil the normative statement that measurement should be based on conceptualisation is Altimir (1979): after thoroughly analysing the concept of poverty, and the relations between poverty and basic needs, in chapters 2 and 3, with arguments that clearly point to a multidimensional PMM and multiple human needs, the author adopts a one-dimensional PMM that reduces the WBS to income and recognises only one need, food. Chapter 6 discusses ECLAC’s procedure in more detail. Moreover, this procedure is the core object of a very detailed empirical and simulation-oriented research in Boltvinik and Damián (2020).

This distinction also involved breaking the narrative on principles (P) and good practices (GP) into two chapters, each of them in a different part of the book. This felt slightly forced at times, since the dividing line between what constitutes conceptualisation and what constitutes measurement can become blurry on occasion. However, I think that all in all it benefitted the book.

In March 1980, slightly over 42 years before I found myself writing this Introduction – one of the last tasks in preparing this book – I started working as Director of Essential Needs in COPLAMAR, an agency attached to the President’s Office in Mexico and responsible for improving the living conditions in the country’s poor areas and among groups designated as marginalised. My role was to coordinate a research team of around 20 professionals working on the unsatisfaction of essential needs in Mexico. This team was the largest part of the agency’s General Direction of Socioeconomic Studies. I started studying poverty from the standpoint of unsatisfied needs, which has been the central element in my conception of poverty since that time. COPLAMAR was shut down in December 1982 with the arrival of a new federal government; however, understanding and fighting poverty has been my vocation and main occupation ever since. Although from the beginning of this century I have broadened my look and started aiming at the more ambitious purpose of human flourishing (to which I added, in the second decade of this century, the fashionable topic of well-being (WB), including subjective WB, poverty remains among my core tasks. I am aware that achieving human flourishing and generalised WB is impossible, or is only possible for a reduced elite, if poverty is not overcome first.

I have worked with international organisations (particularly UNDP and CROP); in Mexican left-wing political parties; in the Mexican Congress; in the Mexico City government; as a journalist in the critical national newspaper La Jornada, writing a weekly column called Moral Economy since 1995; and primarily in the academic world as a full-time researcher and Professor at El Colegio de México – a postgraduate and research institution devoted to the social sciences and the humanities in Mexico City – since 1992, and also as a visiting professor at the British Universities of East Anglia, Bristol, and Manchester. My work in all these institutions has largely focused on poverty, social policy, and human flourishing.

The intention to put this book together grew out of my awareness that my work on poverty and human flourishing was scarcely known among people who don’t read Spanish, since around 95% of my published work is in Spanish and very few texts are in English.

5.1 Poverty measurement

In this chapter I explain the lower part of Table 4.1, which refers to principles and good practices of P measurement.

PPM1 and PPM2: principles of diminishing marginal WB and the existence of a maximum WB

In his major work on the collapse of the facts/values dichotomy, philosopher of science Hilary Putnam (2002) makes a radical criticism of neoclassical economic theory and its normative expression, so-called ‘welfare economics’. He recalls that in the late nineteenth century, neoclassical economists (such as Jevons and Marshall) adopted the concept of utility, assumed that it could be quantified, and drew utility curves whose shape was determined by the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility (LDMU), which holds that the utility derived from the consumption of the last unit of a given good diminishes as consumption increases. In Welfare Economics (1920), Putnam adds, Pigou argued that money and income (Y) are also subject to the LDMU. Based on this, Pigou formulated the thesis that the reduction of Y inequality increases social welfare, since total social utility (or happiness) would increase if one withdrew a thousand dollars from a millionaire and gave them to a destitute person.

Such a subversive thesis, however, could not last in academia (which tends towards an apology of the status quo). Putnam relates that, in 1938, Lionel Robbins convinced all mainstream economists that interpersonal comparisons of utility lack any significance. He maintained that rational discussion in the domain of ethics is impossible and that, therefore, ethical issues should be kept completely outside economic theory. Thus, in a single stroke, the idea that economists could and should be concerned with social WB in an evaluative sense was rejected. The dichotomy between facts and values was taken to the limit in Robbins’ statement: ‘It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition. Economics deals with ascertainable facts; ethics with valuation and obligations’ (Robbins, 1932, p 134, quoted by Putnam, 2002, p 54). Putnam goes on to say that economists, convinced by Robbins’s ideas, instead of abandoning the discipline of welfare economics, sought – however strange this may seem – a criterion of optimal economic functioning that was value-neutral and found it in the notion of the Pareto optimal.

8.1 The genesis of the IPMM

In 1987 I presented a lengthy report on poverty in Mexico to UNDP Latin America. The report had been prepared by a small team of consultants that I headed and was well received at the headquarters of the Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty. As a result, I was soon hired. Shortly after that, the new head of the Mexican team, Antonio Suárez McAuliffe, wrote a comment severely criticising the structure of the report, particularly the lack of integration between the measurement of Y poverty (or PL method) and the parallel description of the levels and evolution of deprivation regarding some basic N. He was absolutely right. I had followed COPLAMAR’s procedure and thus replicated its fragmentary and disintegrated character. My receptivity to this criticism changed my view of poverty. A few months later, I had the good fortune of coming across the research results by Beccaria and Minujin (1987) and Kaztman (1989), referring to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, respectively. These authors had been experimenting with the contrasts between the populations identified as poor by the two PMM applied at the time in South America: Y poverty (PL) and UBN, which were conceived as alternative methods. In its Latin American variants (that I call original or restricted, because of the very few indicators used), UBN conceives a HH as poor if it is poor (deprived) in one or more indicators, as described and appraised in Chapter 6. Both research papers looked simultaneously at UBN and PL, formulating a contingency matrix similar to the one presented in Table 8.1.

Neither Beccaria-Minujin nor Kaztman realised that they were witnessing the birth of a new PMM. However, my awareness had been sharpened by Suárez McAuliffe’s critique, and I discovered that by adding a P criterion to these contingency matrices, a new method would ensue. This method, which I called the Integrated Poverty Measurement Method (IPMM), conceives PL and UBN not as alternative but as complementary PMM. The poverty criterion adopted defined the poor population as the union of both sets of poor, that is, the three italicised cells in the matrix: the poor by PL and by UBN separately (13.5% and 16.5% respectively) and the intersection of both (40.7%), totalling 70.7% (Boltvinik, 1990a).

3.1 Critique of the dominant definitions of poverty in the PEP: comparison with the definitions of poverty in my New Paradigm

In Section 3.2 below I examine the predominant conception of needs (N), satisfiers (S), and resources or WBS, which as a whole I call the conceptual map of the PEP. I do this in a general fashion without referring to specific authors, with the purpose of highlighting the implications of directly dealing with the SLA, without considering the HFA. I call critical thesis the critique of an SLA built without deriving it from the HFA. The conclusions of this section, in which I examine several authors’ definitions of poverty, underpin the generalisations I arrive at in Section 3.2. As will be seen in the analysis of specific definitions, the distinction between primary and secondary WBS is lost, as well as the entire dimension of S. Both analyses are complementary and should be jointly regarded as central to the CPEP.

According to the ‘official’ Spanish dictionary DRAE, poverty is ‘the condition of lack of what is necessary to sustain life’. I have standardised the ten definitions of poverty included in Table 3.1 in line with the basic structure of the DRAE’s phrasing, identifying the terms with which each author defines ‘what is necessary’ (the means) and how they phrase what follows after ‘to …’ (the end). By doing so we can see how they identify the object of poverty studies. The first column of Table 3.1 contains the authors’ literal definitions, which are rephrased in the second column following the DRAE format, while the last column contains observations. The definitions have been classified in two groups: those incorporating the concept of N (definitions 1 to 5) and those based on different concepts, whether or not they explicitly reject the concept of N (definitions 6 to 10). The first group includes Altimir’s definition, Foster and Sen’s first definition, and Boltvinik’s three definitions. The first three can be classified under the conventional needs approach to poverty, while the last two belong to the approach I developed in Broadening Our Look. The second group, which also includes five definitions, has in turn been divided in two sub-groups: Townsend’s definition and Foster and Sen’s second definition (6 and 7), which I have qualified as failed searches for a new approach (FSNA), and the remaining three, which belong to the dominant economicist approach (definitions 8 to 10).