Ann R. Tickamyer and Emily J. Wornell
INTRODUCTION
Statement 1: Poverty is caused by bad decisions made by people who are unable to contain their desires, plan for the future, or apply themselves to tasks that may not have short-term gain but ultimately will enhance their future fortunes.
Statement 2: Poverty is caused by the operation of large-scale structural factors and social forces such as the state of the economy, gender and racial discrimination, and the distribution of power and resources beyond any individual’s control.
These statements represents caricatures of two different approaches to explaining the existence and persistence of poverty that afflicts an otherwise affluent society. At one extreme is an individual-level explanation that sees people as the agents of their fates and poverty as the result of their bad decisions and behavior. At the other extreme is a structural perspective in which people are pawns in social arrangements that precede their existence and over which they have very little influence or control. Although these are exaggerated expressions of different approaches—one emphasizing human agency, the other, social structure—they loosely correspond to both popular and expert theories used to understand poverty and influence policy to address it.
Poverty is a complex social phenomenon made more complicated by political, social, and religious values and beliefs about personal responsibility and the effect of social structures that lie behind the agency–structure dichotomy. Multiple theories that roughly correspond to these perspectives have been proposed to explain why poverty exists, who is most likely to experience it, and how to best address it.
In this chapter, the common theories are grouped into three categories, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and how it relates specifically to rural poverty are discussed. The chapter starts with a discussion of the important distinction between the poverty of place and the poverty of people, what these terms mean, and the factors associated with both. Then three categories of poverty theory are examined. The first category emphasizes individual explanations. These theories—human capital, status attainment, and the culture of poverty—are largely based on neoclassical economics and rational choice theories and view personal strengths and failings as the primary driver for economic success or poverty. The second category—structural and spatial theories—understands the primary explanation of poverty to lie in unequal social and economic systems, which make success easier for some and poverty more likely for others, regardless of their personal characteristics. The final group of theories endeavors to merge people and place and individual and structural explanations for poverty. Examples of theories in this group are intersectionality, social exclusion and isolation, and forms of capital.
PEOPLE OR PLACE?
The distinction made between individual and structural theories is mirrored by a distinction between poverty of people (based on individual characteristics) and poverty of place (based on spatial factors such as unique characteristics of regions). Thus, poverty may be explained at an individual level of analysis or at the level of aggregate and collective units. Examples of individual characteristics and explanations include demographic and social characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and marital and family status. Spatial factors include types of places such as remote rural regions, large urban areas, deindustrialized regions, persistent poverty counties, and so forth. These different spatial units typically indicate differences in scale. Poverty theories and explanations, like many other social issues, are multidimensional, multilevel, and multiscalar.
Although sometimes presented as alternatives, these different approaches and forms of analysis are not necessarily mutually exclusive; rather, they reflect a particular perspective of interest and may be layered on each other simultaneously.
It is important not to confuse descriptive and correlational explanations with causal theories. Although individual theories of poverty may imply or mask deeper explanations of processes that associate specific factors with poverty, typically they are descriptive and correlational rather than causal. Knowing that women, racial and ethnic minorities, single household heads, and children are overrepresented in poverty populations may be transposed into a “theory” that claims that a status or circumstance, such as female single parenthood, is a causal factor in poverty. Certainly there is an empirical association, and the odds of being poor are high for people in such households, but an explanation of why this is true requires more than a superficial identification of individual level descriptors commonly associated with poverty. Examples of theories that seek deeper causal explanations for these empirical associations include human capital, the culture of poverty, and the persistence of patriarchy.
A more robust example of poverty theory can be found at a structural level using spatial units—such as countries, regions, states, counties, or communities—to link deindustrialization to the high poverty rates found in many rural regions. The loss of industry creates higher unemployment, higher unemployment results in loss of income, and, consequently, higher poverty rates. Here unemployment is a proximate factor, or the most immediate influence, and the loss of industry reflects deeper underlying structural changes in the economy prompted by domestic policies and global trends. Without a fully developed explanation that explicitly links these changes and trends to poverty, it remains questionable whether they are causes of poverty or merely correlated with it. Theories that elaborate these relationships, such as the rise of neoliberalism and the spread of global capitalism, however, have been used to provide a deeper explanation.
These examples illustrate the complexity and multidimensionality of even a seemingly straightforward social fact such as poverty. A focus on rural poverty further complicates matters. With individual explanations, one has to ask whether these factors differ in rural places or if they are the same regardless of location. Although place-based explanations of poverty clearly specify a spatial dimension, they must concern themselves with questions of similarity between rural and urban locations as well,1 and whether the factors associated with poverty have the same effect in both. All social life occurs in time and space, and social processes—including poverty—are in flux and vary spatially and temporally. Theories that explicitly recognize these dimensions and the great diversity that exists across time and space are more robust and compelling.
Standard explanations for rural poverty that focus on poverty of people and the individual level of analysis rely heavily on neoclassical economics and rational choice theories (Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2008; Tickamyer 2006). There are several variations, often combining elements from human capital, status attainment, and culture of poverty theories. The basic thesis of these theories is that people with lower levels of human capital—defined as education, training, and experience—are less likely to prosper in an advanced, technologically sophisticated society with a complex division of labor that rewards high skills and leaves those who lack them unable to compete in the labor market. These theories assert that investment in education and skills development will enhance attainments in a meritocratic society and, ultimately, reduce vulnerability to poverty, thus representing an informed or rational choice for behavior and action that increases human capital. Conversely, the lack of human capital creates greater economic vulnerability and risk of poverty.
Note that there is nothing specifically rural about this formulation. These theories apply to everyone, regardless of location. Empirical research is needed to specify whether the process works the same in rural and urban areas. Empirical research shows that there are lower returns for education in rural areas in the United States (Economic Research Service 2016). A number of explanations may play into this finding: rural schools may not be as good as urban educational institutions; there may be fewer opportunities for good jobs available to highly educated individuals in rural areas; or rural residents may have lower aspirations than their urban counterparts. There is some research to support each of these explanations, suggesting a need to focus on what is specific to rural areas to understand why education does not have the same payoff for rural residents.
Human capital and status attainment theories focus on the individual’s ability to trade personal characteristics valued by society and the labor market into achievements that produce a satisfactory to affluent livelihood and lifestyle. A number of assumptions are built into these formulations, including the idea that meritocratic principles determine outcomes such as jobs and income; that individuals have agency, meaning they are free to make meaningful choices in whether to invest in their future or not; that people behave rationally to promote their self-interest; that a sorting process matches skills and labor market needs; and that people are mobile and can pursue opportunities and make these choices. Reality does not always match the theory. If rural schools cannot deliver the same quality of education as urban schools, for example, then individuals who attend schools that are not up to the highest standards will have fewer opportunities and perhaps lower aspirations.2 Similarly, there are many reasons individuals are tied to place and lack the mobility necessary for advancement. There are numerous other restrictions on individual agency, some that require more exploration than there is space for here. The important point is that people live in places, and spatial constraints will influence outcomes regardless of individual actions or intentions. One variant on individual-level approaches to explaining poverty is a theory called the culture of poverty. This theory most closely aligns with statement number one from the beginning of the chapter. It has a long history of application in various contexts and an equally long history of distorted versions that bear little resemblance to the original theory developed by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1959). The culture of poverty was originally developed to describe the difficulties of escaping generational poverty, but it was quickly reformulated and is more commonly used to blame poor people for their circumstances (Katz 1989). The extreme version of this perspective asserts that people who are too lazy, immature, or otherwise flawed will fail to invest in their futures and ultimately develop a culture of dependency on public assistance and other sources of aid. Once this dependency has developed, people will then operate in ways that run counter to the norms, values, and approved lifestyles of the larger society. These factors may include a lack of work ethic, sexual promiscuity and out of wedlock births, marital instability, family disorganization, substance abuse, and other forms of deviance or even criminality. The theory posits that these actions and lifestyles become self-perpetuating traits of a (sub)culture3 of poverty that is then transmitted to future generations.
Embedded in the culture of poverty theory are many negative caricatures about poor people, some of which arise from the kinds of individual-level correlations previously described, such as the greater vulnerability of female single-parent households to poverty. Other caricatures are associated with popular views that the middle-class morality prevalent during the twentieth century is “proper” and “desirable” and that “nontraditional” family forms and other practices are deviant. Finally, there is a great deal of latent and overt racism and racial stereotyping in this depiction of poverty. The myth of the welfare queen is a thinly veiled racial slur used to brand single African American women as welfare cheats who game the system for benefits they haven’t earned.
Although diminishing, these attitudes and stereotypes are still present in many segments of society and often drive public opinion and policy. For example, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—more commonly known as Welfare Reform and adopted in the 1990s—was premised on a view of poverty that assumed safety net programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, now Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) and Medicaid created the kinds of dependency depicted in the culture of poverty. Proponents of PRWORA argued that these safety net programs not only failed to assist the poor but victimized poor people by fostering a culture of dependence on the government that entrapped them in a vicious cycle of poverty that was difficult, if not impossible, to exit. In other words, in the view of the policy makers who adopted this legislation with much popular support, the programs designed to assist the poor perpetuate their poverty (Handler 1995; Schram 1995; Tickamyer et al. 2000).
There is, however, little evidence to support the culture of poverty theory in its popular distorted version, and there is much to refute it (Rank 2004). Furthermore, nothing in this theory suggests that poverty might vary spatially, thus it offers nothing to explain or differentiate rural poverty. In fact, there is a peculiar relationship between culture of poverty perspectives and rural poverty. The demographic and social characteristics of the rural poor are at odds with some of the most pernicious assumptions of this perspective. Historically, the rural poor are overrepresented in demographic groups that receive less disapproval and prejudice; that is, they are more likely to be white, married, and employed. Thus, they are more likely to be seen as the virtuous poor—or to be poor for reasons apart from their behavior—and to have moral capital (Sherman 2009b) even if they lack other resources. As members of the “working poor,” many rural people are exempted from the negative stereotypes promulgated by culture of poverty formulations. At the same time, the existence of ethnic and racial minority poor populations located in impoverished rural places such as the Mississippi Delta, Southwest Borderlands, and on Native American reservations are either ignored or subjected to the negative stereotyping found in the culture of poverty theory. Perhaps the most contradictory example is found in discussions of Appalachian poverty. In some quarters, “hillbilly” and “white trash” are pejorative terms applied to poor Appalachians that epitomize the culture of poverty (Billings and Tickamyer 1993; Wray 2006). At the same time, because they are white rural poor, they are more likely to be perceived as unfortunate but not immoral. The result is an uneasy existence in a contradictory location between stigma and virtue (Henderson and Tickamyer 2009).
STRUCTURAL AND SPATIAL EXPLANATIONS
The limitations of individual explanations have made structural perspectives more attractive. Structural theories focus on how social structure, societal institutions, and spatial arrangements determine an individual’s place in society. Although there are a large number of theories and perspectives, they share the understanding that human society consists of structures and processes that are more than the sum of the individual members, that outlast individual existence, and, to a large extent, that shape and constrain individual opportunity, beliefs, behavior, and outcomes. Theories of inequality and systems of stratification, including social class, race, and gender, and numerous theories of social and economic development, describe the ways that poverty is the result of systemic processes and arrangements that perpetuate disadvantage for some while simultaneously enriching others. They demonstrate how poverty, including rural poverty, is the outcome of these processes in action. Structural theories operate at different levels and units of analysis with explanations that apply to different social and demographic groups and spatial units at different levels of aggregation.
Structural approaches also receive their share of criticism. They are viewed with some suspicion for being too deterministic—for painting a picture of human existence that can appear to ignore human agency and individual volition. Although this can be a legitimate criticism, it is important to recognize that structural constraints are not an “iron cage,” to echo Max Weber (1930), but rather reflect patterns maintained over time that both influence and shape individual and collective action.
Structural explanations apply to both poverty of people and poverty of place. At a structural level, poverty of people once again focuses on individual sociodemographic characteristics, but views them as part of systems of social stratification and social location. Race, gender, and class are individual attributes that are relevant to poverty because they identify systems of structured social inequality such as institutional racism, gender discrimination, patriarchy, and a number of other structures of domination and subordination determined by economic position that have been identified by Marxist and critical theories. Human capital may reflect individual decisions, but it ultimately rests on opportunity structures determined by stratification systems, which vary by location. To be relevant for explaining rural poverty, it is important to ask how these apply to rural residents and how rural and urban regions compare.
Structural explanations for poverty of place start with place-based units, such as states or counties. Rates of poverty are determined for populations located in these place-based units and are measured in the aggregate, which enables analysis to focus on larger scale processes for explanation. As the deindustrialization and unemployment example from the beginning of the chapter demonstrates, poverty rates can be “explained” by the operation of the larger economy, but a deeper understanding requires asking how economic change affects different locations differently.
Given this array of perspectives, groups of theories used to explain rural poverty can be identified. Economic development theories look at economic factors and systems, applied to both the local and the world economy, and range from modernization to internal colonialism, dependency theories, economic restructuring, globalization, and neoliberalism. All economic development theories of rural poverty were adapted from explanations of rural poverty in developing nations and applied to rural regions of the United States.
Other theories identify other forms of structural inequalities, including legacies of slavery, colonialism, institutional racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination. Although different theories sometimes present opposing explanations for rural poverty, more typically they complement and reinforce each other or apply to specific places and populations. Many of these ideas are discussed in greater depth in subsequent chapters. An overview is provided here of how the structures that these theories describe create and sustain rural poverty.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
A popular characterization of rural poverty is that it is a consequence of people and places not benefiting from or embracing the progress of the modern world and ultimately being “left behind” (Breathitt 1967). According to modernization theory, which is heavily influenced by neoclassical economics and promulgates a widely held view of poverty in developing nations, when the rest of the country was modernizing, industrializing, and urbanizing, rural America never got off the ground. During the economic and technological revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rural America remained locked in a preindustrial mode of existence. In the original cross-national analysis of developing nations, the failure of poor nations to “take off” was viewed as the result of embracing traditional values and practices that prevented the adoption of economic policies, technologies, and governance structures that could guide economic and social development through a linear set of stages modeled after the United States and western Europe (Rostow 1960). Within the United States, Appalachia, “a strange land and peculiar people” (Shapiro 1966), was the poster child for this perspective (Billings and Blee 2000; Billings and Tickamyer 1993). The combined isolation and poverty of Appalachia created images of deprivation that provided much of the impetus for the 1960s War on Poverty (Tickamyer and Duncan 1990).
Rural areas in Appalachia and other regions in the United States had (and have) a disproportionate share of poverty, but it is not because of a failure to industrialize. Although the slow acquisition of infrastructure for industrial development (highways, electrification, cable, and broadband access) may retard rural economic growth, many high and persistent poverty areas are well integrated into national and even world economic systems. Appalachia, for example, has been a source of natural resources fueling the industrial economy dating back to salt extraction in colonial times, through the growth and decline of the timber industry, and the evolution of coal production from underground mining to current technologically advanced extraction processes (Billings and Blee 2000; Tickamyer and Patel-Campillo 2016). Shale gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is the latest source of energy for the global economy to be produced from this and other rural regions. Similarly, the rise of corporate and industrial-scale agriculture is the norm throughout the United States, replacing the family farms dominant in preindustrial times. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many branch manufacturing plants relocated to rural areas and provided industrial-style factory jobs—until they left to find cheaper labor overseas (Falk and Lyson 1988). As the United States has become a postindustrial, high-tech, and service economy, the places that show the most economic growth and poverty reduction are now the so-called amenity locations (places dominated by retirement and recreational industries because of their natural beauty or other environmental attractions), which have the least industrial style development.
If backwardness and lack of industrial development are not the cause of rural poverty, what is? Some Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical theories apply variations of class analyses to argue that poverty is the outcome of power relations, exploitation, domination, and subordination pervasive to capitalism in which powerful upper-class and corporate elites exploit the labor and natural resources of rural people and places. Among the many variants of this perspective are internal colonialism, world systems theory, dependency theories, and related theories of uneven development, which view poverty as the outcome of asymmetric power relations between capital and labor, often with state collaboration or collusion. There are numerous variations on these theories, but they are all distinguished by focusing on the “development of underdevelopment” (Frank 1989) in rural economic outcomes.
A prime example of this approach is internal colonialism, which is used to explain the impoverishment of resource-rich but persistently poor rural regions. Similar to modernization theory, internal colonialism is patterned after theories originally formulated for the international arena. It hypothesizes that wealthy and powerful external elites and captains of industry gain control of the land and labor of places that are rich in natural resources and extract the wealth to enrich themselves, drawing it away from its source, and ultimately impoverishing both the people and the place. This model has been criticized for ignoring the fact that exploitation and resource extraction have often been at the hands of internal elites from the impoverished region rather than being perpetrated by external power holders (Billings and Blee 2000; Duncan 2014).
Destructive colonial exploitation certainly has played an important role in U.S. economic development, as witnessed by the persistent poverty of many rural regions whose histories include land grabs from native populations, slavery, violent repression, and a variety of discriminatory practices (Rural Sociological Society Task Force 1993). Thus, the Mississippi Delta, the southern Black Belt, and the internal colonies of the Southwest and Native American reservations provide evidence of colonial and neocolonial power relations that have helped impoverish these regions and their inhabitants. By itself, however, internal colonialism fails as a comprehensive theory of poverty of place.
Numerous related class-based approaches acknowledge the importance of local elites as well as the state in creating areas of persistent poverty. Apart from recognition of class dynamics and power relations, a basic contribution of these approaches is the acknowledgment that many remote and persistently poor places are not places left behind by the modern world. Rather, they are poor precisely because they are part of the world capitalist system, integrated into asymmetrical economic relations and hierarchies, often on a global scale. The complexity and interconnectedness of the world economy can have profound effects on even the most isolated rural regions, especially if their economies are resource dependent and lack diversity. The specific path to poverty, however, will vary from place to place and region to region.
The lack of economic diversity of many resource-rich but persistently poor rural places is closely linked to their economic woes. Sometimes called the resource curse, primary dependence on a natural resource that can be depleted or lose its market advantage without other opportunities for economic growth and employment is linked to poor economic performance and poverty. This is particularly true if this dependency comes with heavy environmental costs, such as in mining and timber industries. Here, too, the original thesis was applied to nation states and world regions, but it has been adapted with varying results to U.S. rural regions (Betz et al. 2015; Partridge, Betz, and Lobao 2013).
Some rural places have a long history of poverty, and many others have suffered from more recent events and large-scale change. Economic restructuring and globalization gained momentum during the last third of the twentieth century and culminated in 2008 with the start of the Great Recession. Both long-term trends and shorter-term disruptions have been particularly hard on small, rural communities dependent on a single or dominant industry as their primary employer. The loss of a particular industry or firm may devastate the local labor market, whether prompted by new technologies that make old processes obsolete or industrial relocation to seek cheaper labor. The loss creates both direct economic hardship from unemployment and indirect economic hardship throughout the economy when fewer jobs means less money to spend in local businesses.
Many previously prosperous rural regions throughout the country, in both natural resource (agriculture, mining, timber, and fisheries) and manufacturing-based economies, have faced serious hardship during this economic transition. Economic cycles and processes formerly regionally and nationally constrained are increasingly subject to the world economy. Globalization moves many industries and jobs overseas as competition for cheap labor, lower taxes, less state regulation, offers of subsidies and incentives, and lower costs of production make domestic U.S. production less competitive in world markets. Further, the rise of neoliberal policies globally and nationally that push for deregulation and the reduction or elimination of barriers to trade and labor protections exacerbates these trends (Falk and Lobao 2003; Jensen and Jensen 2011; Lichter and Graefe 2011; Lobao, Adua, and Hooks 2014; Sherman 2014).
The growth of service sector jobs in some rural areas has provided new employment opportunities, but these jobs tend to be unstable and poorly paid, with few or no benefits. Good jobs in high-end services, such as those found in financial and high-tech industries, are unlikely to locate in rural communities where the necessary markets, financial and human capital, and infrastructure needs are lacking (Falk, Schulman, and Tickamyer 2003). Often the best hope for rural communities is the entry of a mass retail company such as Walmart, which residents typically welcome for its cheap goods and promise of jobs. The irony is that these stores manufacture the goods overseas, presumably replacing domestic sources and the jobs they supported, and the newly created jobs often do not supply a living wage (Irwin and Clark 2006).4
These economic explanations frame rural poverty as a source, outcome, and type of spatial inequality (Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2007). Thus, geography is a determinant of stratification systems and processes that allocate scarce societal resources and simultaneously is constructed by these processes. Rural poverty is a state or condition of places with certain characteristics and the outcome of larger forces such as the economic dynamics previously described. Economics plays a major role in understanding both spatial inequality in general and poverty more specifically, but it is not the only source of poverty. Other explanations are found in the institutions and organizations of rural communities, and the same reciprocal relationships hold—poverty impoverishes the institutions and organizations that in theory can help break cycles of poverty, thus reinforcing the difficulty of overcoming disadvantage. For example, schools in rural areas often cannot support the facilities or caliber of instruction of their urban counterparts, which in turn creates a poorer educational experience for rural children and reinforces the likelihood that future generations will not escape poverty (see chapter 12 for more detail). The schools, churches, public facilities, and civic groups found in rural areas may contribute to the poverty of place, and in turn are themselves weakened by the poverty they generate (Duncan 2014). The absence or poor quality of public services and the inadequacies of the safety net further reinforce poverty in many rural places (Smith and Tickamyer 2011).
SYSTEMS OF STRATIFICATION AND INEQUALITIES
Other systems of stratification are important structural sources of rural poverty. Especially prominent are those based on individual characteristics such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and age. These factors function as basic demographic characteristics of individuals while simultaneously representing social locations that determine an individual’s position in stratification hierarchies that create and maintain inequalities. Here, too, it is important to identify the processes that take place in society generally, as well as those having specific dynamics that are more prevalent in rural America.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Feminist-inspired theories of gender inequality and patriarchy explain why women are overrepresented in poverty populations and the disadvantages women face in trying to escape poverty. Much of the story is well known. Unlike many other parts of the world, women in the United States are no longer under the legal control of men (fathers and husbands), but historical subjugation diminishes slowly, and contemporary forms of discrimination and disadvantage are still widespread. On average, women’s wages still do not equal men’s, and women are more likely to be employed in lower paying service sector jobs. Moreover, women still shoulder more than their share of “reproductive labor,” unpaid care work and maintenance of the household and its members, even in the face of the expectation that they be full-time wage earners.
Women have made gains in some areas, and their disadvantage has been reversed in others. For example, women have increasingly higher educational attainments than men. The expected payoff for this educational attainment, however, has not kept up, and women are still underrepresented in many of the top paying and most powerful jobs and industries, most notably in executive offices, high technology industries, and politics (AAUW 2016; Council of Economic Advisors 2015). Although many gender-based disparities are diminishing, they are doing so at a disturbingly slow pace that retards progress toward equality and increases women’s vulnerability to poverty. Single mothers are especially vulnerable to these trends, and it is no accident that these women and their children make up the largest shares of poor and at-risk populations (see chapter 5 for detailed information).
In rural areas, the effects of these trends are magnified because there are fewer opportunities for good employment for both women and men. The effects of economic restructuring and the changing social safety net are perhaps most evident in the economic well-being of women in rural areas. The era of economic restructuring was also marked by changing gender norms around family and work, changing family structure, and a shift away from jobs in traditionally male-dominated sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and natural resource extraction and toward service sector employment. All of these trends affect the distinctly gender-based poverty outcomes of women (Jensen and Jensen 2011; Sherman 2009a).
Women newly entering the workforce fill most of the positions created by the shift to the service sector (Struthers 2014). Unlike the relatively steady and full-time jobs of traditional rural industries, however, service sector work is largely characterized by low pay, part-time hours, no benefits, and general instability. High male unemployment in rural areas, coupled with a changing family structure that mirrors changes seen in urban areas—namely, higher rates of female-headed households and single-parenthood—means that rural families increasingly rely on the income of women as their primary, if not only, source of income (Sherman 2009a; Struthers 2014). When women’s income comes from these unstable, low-paying, service sector jobs, the economic well-being of both women and their families suffers, and women must often take on multiple low-paying jobs or informal work to make ends meet (Struthers 2014; Tickamyer and Wood 2003). This confluence of factors in some ways forced the progression of changing gender norms that was already under way. Increasing numbers of women were entering the formal, rural workforce in the 1970s, but this trend intensified through the 1980s and 1990s in response to the Great Recession as male unemployment in rural areas steadily increased (Smith 2011; Struthers 2014).
Although women’s paid work was increasing, their unpaid work at home largely stayed the same (Tickamyer and Wood 2003). Women’s “second shift”—unpaid care and housework—stems from traditional notions about the role of women and men in the household and how those roles are valued in society (Hochschild 2003). Although women’s formal incomes are increasingly important in rural households, help in the home may not be forthcoming, leaving women with less time for alternative economic activities (informal or self-employment) and political and community participation (Sachs 2014).
Changes to the social safety net at this time did not take into consideration the changing economic realities of rural communities. Although some research shows that the welfare-to-work system has increased the paid work of single mothers and decreased their reliance on welfare generally (Lichter and Graefe 2011), the result was not a reduction in poverty for these women, particularly in rural areas (Lichter and Jensen 2001). The lack of well-paying, full-time employment in rural communities now has to be balanced with the new lifetime limits imposed on TANF recipients. The lack of transportation, child care options, and even grocery stores in rural areas further exacerbates women’s difficulty in overcoming poverty under PRWORA. The result is to force women to “alternate between the subpoverty wages of the female labor market and the subpoverty benefits of the female welfare system” (Rural Sociological Society Task Force 1993). Even if the restructured welfare system introduced by PRWORA has reduced single mothers’ reliance on welfare, it has created new hardships for rural women and their families (Tickamyer et al. 2000; Tickamyer and Henderson 2011). Chapters 5 and 8 elaborate many of these processes.
The research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) people in rural communities is somewhat limited,5 as is the connection between LGBTQ identity and poverty more generally. New research has shown that LGBTQ adults have higher rates of poverty and food insecurity than their heterosexual counterparts (Gates 2014; Badgett, Durso, and Schneebaum 2013). Research has also shown that lesbian couples residing in rural areas are significantly more likely to be poor than their urban counterparts and that gay men are less likely to be poor if they live in large metropolitan centers than in other areas of the country (Badgett et al. 2013). What is less clear, however, is whether this correlation is a function of place, of social position, or both. The high poverty rate of rural lesbian couples, for example, may be a function of their position as women in rural places rather than as a same-sex couple. In 2010, the rural poverty rate of lesbian couples was 14.4 percent, whereas the general women’s poverty rate in the same year was 18 percent (Badgett et al. 2013; Housing Assistance Council 2012). Assuming that sexual identity plays some role in the poverty status of homosexuals in rural communities, the connection likely lies in traditional notions of family values that stigmatize homosexuality, a lack of anonymity, and informal community sanctions against individuals who resist dominant cultural mores and gender norms (Sherman 2009a; Preston and D’Augelli 2013; Sachs 2014; Stein 2001).
RACE AND ETHNIC MINORITIES
The reality of minority poverty in rural areas is stark. Minorities in rural areas have higher rates of poverty than their urban counterparts as well as greater poverty than their non-Hispanic white neighbors (Brown and Schafft 2011). Race and ethnicity serve as markers of group identities, which are associated with a social status that determines the benefits and privileges for members of that group (Green 2014). Because these hierarchies are relational, the lower status of some groups serves to benefit groups higher in the social hierarchy. Minority groups have always been given positions of low status in American society, and some have been more marginalized than others. The marginalization of African Americans, Native Americans,6 and Hispanic and Latino immigrants, as seen through historical legacies of discrimination and racism, have led to lower educational attainment, poor economic outcomes, and social exclusion of these groups.
Institutional racism built into societal institutions is a major source of rural poverty for minority groups in various rural regions. The legacies of slavery, the plantation economy, sharecropping, and Jim Crow political oppression and disenfranchisement are responsible for the concentration of persistent poverty among African Americans in the Mississippi Delta and the southern Black Belt. Extreme forms of discrimination pervaded virtually all public and private institutions from schools to the criminal justice system. Indian reservations of the West and the Southwest started as concentration camps and currently make up vast rural ghettos with few economic opportunities and massive social problems associated with poverty. Diverse groups of Hispanics, including both native-born people and migrants, often endure economic hardship resulting from a variety of sources, including the historic appropriation of communal lands similar to that of Native Americans and the more recent rise of poor rural colonias, another form of rural ghetto lacking basic services. Additionally, labor practices in agricultural and food processing industries that rely heavily on a Latino labor force pay poorly and lack protections, particularly for migrant workers both documented and undocumented. Chapters 6 and 7 elaborate on these relationships, but brief overviews of diverse population groups are included here.
AFRICAN AMERICANS
The vast majority of African Americans can trace their ancestry to slavery (Green 2014). From the outset, African Americans have experienced extreme violence, exploitation, and social, political, and economic exclusion. The unequal power dynamic between African Americans and the white majority established during slavery has been replicated throughout American history and still exists today. Sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, segregated schools, illegal denial of land ownership and denial of access to credit and capital, uneven or nonexistent development in predominantly African American communities, unequally distributed punishments that imprison African American men at extreme rates, and the lack of response to environmental hazards and natural disasters have all functioned to keep African Americans in a socially, politically, and economically subjugated position (Brown and Schafft 2011; Green 2014). The outcome of systemic discrimination and exclusion is most evident in a region of the rural South called the Black Belt where high African American poverty rates have persisted for generations (Harris and Worthen 2003; Brown and Schafft 2011). This institutionalized discrimination “impedes access to labor markets” and directly limits economic opportunity and well-being (Rural Sociological Society Task Force 1993, 180–181). Individual racism and discrimination on the part of employers further limits the types and quality of jobs available to African Americans in the rural South. This division of labor has restricted African American labor to low-wage, low-skill, and low-prestige jobs with little opportunity for advancement or economic stability (Brown and Schafft 2011).
HISPANICS AND LATINO IMMIGRANTS
The U.S. relationship with Latino immigrants is a contentious one, alternating between need and suspicion. As the longest and largest immigration flow into the United States, immigration from Central and South America has been fundamental to the economic success of several industries and regions in the United States (Durand, Massey, and Capoferro 2005; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005). Encouraged by federal and state governments to work in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, Latino immigrants occupy jobs in the “second tier” economy, which is characterized by seasonal, low-wage, and low-prestige employment (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). Wages and employment conditions are dictated by large agro-business and manufacturing firms, which make large profits off the poorly paid labor of migrants. Latino immigrants—in the country legally or not—have little recourse for unfair and inhumane working conditions and compensation. Latino immigrants and native-born Hispanics alike also experience regular discrimination that limits educational attainment, political participation, housing equity, and health care access (Light 2006; Holmes 2013). Moreover, economic restructuring and discriminatory policies in states where Latino immigrants have traditionally settled have begun to shift immigration into new states and communities—many of them rural—that may have had little or no experience with immigration in the past (Durand et al. 2005; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005; Massey 2008; Parrado and Kandel 2008). In these “new destinations,” immigrants often find themselves in communities with few and difficult-to-access resources, school systems with little ability to support and teach English-language learners, and neighbors already concerned with limited economic opportunities in their communities. All of these factors create additional barriers for Latinos in rural America, immigrants and nonimmigrants alike, which is reflected in their high rural poverty rate.
NATIVE AMERICANS
Discussing Native Americans as a single, unified group is misleading. With more than 550 federally recognized tribal governments and communities, all with different histories, distinct cultural traditions, and varied spatial locations, “Native Americans” as a group identifier is largely one of convenience rather than substance, and it remains a controversial term (Dewees 2014). Regardless of their distinct identities and tribal differences, however, Native Americans do share some important historical and social experiences that have had a direct and significant effect on their social location and economic well-being. As colonized people, Native Americans have experienced centuries of state-endorsed violence and marginalization. Although individual tribes have had treaties with both the pre-Revolutionary War government and the post-Revolution United States, they have endured near extermination; forced removal from their land; the forced removal of their children; subpar access to social welfare, education, and health services; and a corrupt and mismanaged federal bureau that historically failed to ensure their interests and rights (Rural Sociological Society Task Force 1993; Dewees 2014).
Today many Native Americans live on or near the more than 300 federally recognized reservations, many of which are not near their traditional spaces and occupy remote rural and unproductive land (Dewees 2014). When originally established, however, these “trusts” constituted near concentration camp conditions in which Native Americans had little authority or power and had to rely almost entirely on rations from the military (Rural Sociological Society Task Force 1993). Today tribes have more authority over their internal and administrative affairs on reservations, but these “domestic dependent nations” are still reliant on the federal government for many social services, which tend to be underfunded and difficult to access (Dewees 2014). As a result of generations of violent colonialism and poorly funded services, reservations often lack basic infrastructure, and Native Americans generally have low educational attainment, poor health outcomes, shorter life expectancies, and high poverty rates.
CHILDREN
Although children do not necessarily experience the same racial and ethnic discrimination faced by minorities in rural America based on their age alone, they continue to have disproportionately high rates of poverty in general, and in rural areas specifically. It should be noted, of course, that poor children overwhelmingly come from poor families, and the high rural child poverty rate is directly related to elevated rates of poverty in rural communities more generally (Lichter and Graefe 2011). Childhood poverty is often considered a separate issue for several reasons. First, the lifelong effects of poverty during childhood are well documented and numerous. These effects include slower cognitive development, mental health challenges, poor health outcomes, higher obesity rates, poor school performance, and lower educational attainment (Iceland 2013; O’Hare 2009; Singh et al. 2010; Lichter and Graefe 2011; McLaughlin and Shoff 2014). Second, childhood poverty is a major concern for scholars and policy makers: poor children often grow up to be poor adults (O’Hare 2009; Sherman 2014). This connection is heightened in rural areas, where low educational attainment and poor health outcomes of poor children combine with very limited economic opportunities for adults, and where services to support poor families and children are more difficult to access (Iceland 2013; McLaughlin and Shoff 2014). In fact, the rurality of place is directly correlated with the rate of childhood poverty, and “poverty rates tend to be high in the most rural places” (McLaughlin and Shoff 2014, 367).
Family structure also has a significant and direct impact on childhood poverty (Snyder, McLaughlin, and Findeis 2006). Children in single-parent households are more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households, a fact that is intensified for children in single female-headed households (McLaughlin and Shoff 2014). It is in this statistic—that children in single female-headed households have significantly higher rates of poverty than in single male-headed households or two-parent households—that we begin to see the concept of intersectionality form.
THE INTERSECTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACES
Up to this point, individual and structural explanations, and poverty of people and poverty of place, have been treated as if they are completely separate, but in fact they are different perspectives on the same phenomenon and intersect in ways that are helpful for deepening our understanding of poverty. Several theories strive to elaborate this intersection and help advance the understanding of poverty and assist in balancing both agency and structure. These include theories of intersectionality, social exclusion, social isolation, social networks, and capital.
INTERSECTIONALITY
Various drivers make it more likely for certain groups in rural America to have higher rates of poverty than others, but it is equally important to recognize that one person can experience the marginalization of multiple group locations at the same time, all of which makes him or her more likely to be poor. But what does that mean for that individual? Consider the situation of an African American woman living in the rural southern Black Belt. People living in this region are more likely to be poor than people in most other places in the country, and the poverty they experience is typically deeper and longer lasting than in other regions. In addition, women are more likely to experience poverty than men, and African Americans have higher poverty rates than their non-Hispanic white neighbors. Because of an unequal and inequitable social structure that locates ruralness, femaleness, and blackness at or near the bottom of the hierarchy, this woman would experience the challenges and barriers of three separate social locations. This is the concept of intersectionality.
Perhaps the most important aspect of intersectionality is its compounding nature. Intersectionality theorists and scholars have posited that a person with multiple points of inequality and oppression will experience more marginalization than if he or she experienced any one of those locations individually (Crenshaw 1989; Dill and Zambrana 2009). This means that the level of marginalization a person experiences, and the related likelihood of experiencing poverty, do not depend on the social location of any one group. Rather, people with multiple points of marginalization inhabit a social location composed of that intersection, which is ultimately different from any of the individual components. “African American, female, in the rural South” is a social position that comes with more oppression and discrimination than that of a person in any one of those three categories alone (Crenshaw 1989). This person would be expected to experience more discrimination and oppression and more frequent and deeper poverty than would African American men, white women, or an African American woman in the urban Northeast.
This theory is borne out in the statistics throughout this book. Minority children, for example, are more likely to experience poverty than white children, and minority children living in rural areas are even more likely to experience poverty than minority children in urban areas. Nearly 46 percent of African American children in rural areas live in poverty (Brown and Schafft 2011). It is a similar situation for children living in same-sex households, who are particularly vulnerable to poverty, which is compounded yet again if those children have a minority status. African American children in same-sex households are more likely to be poor than children living in any other kind of household, with over 52 percent living in poverty (Badgett et al. 2013). Hard numbers on minority children living in same-sex households in rural communities are not available, but due to the social location of ruralness, one might hazard a guess that their poverty rates are even higher.
There are problems with intersectionality. For example, what happens with seemingly contradictory social locations (such as poor, rural, white, Appalachians)? Does one status dominate others, or do they mitigate each other? Another issue is how to test and measure this theory (Henderson and Tickamyer 2009). The value of intersectionality comes from explicitly linking the fortunes of individuals with the effects of complex social locations, thus emphasizing the interplay of multiple influences and forces.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SOCIAL ISOLATION
As described in chapter 3, poverty in the United States is primarily viewed as a condition of absolute deprivation rather than a relational status. In other advanced industrial and postindustrial societies, especially in the European Union (EU), poverty is defined in relative terms that emphasize its relationship to inequality. The official U.S. government-determined poverty line defines who is poor by income below an absolute amount based on the cost of basic needs such as food and shelter,7 whereas relational measures assess poverty relative to median income. In principle, these relative measures are set regardless of degree or amount of hardship experienced at or below either 50 or 60 percent of median income (Shucksmith 2016). The driving rationale is to define poverty as the inability to participate in the lifestyle or standard of living enjoyed by the majority of the population in a society. Poverty then becomes a form of inequality in a stratification system. Issues of inequality and relative position in class and status hierarchies lie behind many explanations for poverty, although these are less frequently stated explicitly in U.S. poverty research. In practice, there is probably less difference in who gets classified as poor using alternative measures, but there is a big difference in how poverty is conceptualized and explained. One of the biggest differences in the explanation of poverty can be seen in the application of theories of social exclusion.
Social exclusion has been used in multiple ways, shifting over time and varying by analysis. Shucksmith (2016) cites Burchardt, Le Grand, and Piachaud (2002) to locate its original use in France, where it referred to people not covered by the social insurance system. Later it came to refer to those who were unemployed or “excluded” from the labor market, especially as the result of the trends described previously: globalization, neoliberalism, and the world capitalist system. Other forms of exclusion have been defined, both theoretically and practically, to show that social exclusion has multiple dimensions. Thus, individuals and groups can experience exclusion in terms of education, housing, health care, political participation, and so forth, with poverty as the outcome of their inability to access these and other social goods (Shucksmith 2012, 2016). Why exclusion occurs, however, is not always obvious. Is it the result of underlying processes of class formation and reproduction? Other stratification hierarchies? Alternatively, do individuals exclude themselves from social interaction and institutions?
Its critics contend that social exclusion is primarily a different term for poverty, a way to diminish the importance of social class and theories of class stratification, and even a disguised version of the culture of poverty “blame the victim” discourse (Shucksmith 2012). According to its proponents, social exclusion’s strengths are its multidimensionality, fluidity, emphasis on local context, and explicit connection to systems of inequality (Milbourne 2004; Reimer 2004; Shucksmith 2012). Shucksmith (2012) argues that social exclusion can be understood as the ability of individuals and groups to access valued social resources, whether a job, social insurance, voting rights, or social services. In doing so, he highlights parallels with a theory of social class and inequality based on Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of symbolic capital.
The concept of social exclusion is strongly associated with relative measures and perspectives on poverty, but in many ways social exclusion theories share similarities with homegrown social isolation theories. Primarily associated with urban poverty studies, this explanation highlights the physical and social isolation of poor urban ghetto dwellers, typically African American and other racial and ethnic minorities, whose neighborhoods lack the resources, role models, and stability that create opportunity for avoiding or overcoming poverty (Wilson 1996, 2012). Parallels have been found in isolated, class polarized rural communities in the Mississippi Delta and rural Appalachia (Duncan 2014) and presumably exist in other locations that share the lack of jobs, services, and civic engagement that characterize the deprivations of social isolation. As is the case with social exclusion, forms of symbolic capital feature prominently in social isolation explanations for poverty, both rural and elsewhere.
FORMS OF CAPITAL
The roles of human and financial capital are standard categories of economic analysis that have obvious meaning for poverty studies, and there is substantial evidence that rural areas suffer deficits in both types of capital. Other forms of capital, lumped under the general term of symbolic capital, also should be considered when attempting to explain rural poverty (Bourdieu 1986). Symbolic capital includes nonmaterial types of resources accessed by individuals and groups and often is reflective of relationships between them. These include social, cultural, and moral capital (Sherman 2009b; and chapter 8 this volume). Social capital consists of social networks and connections that can be used or exchanged for other resources, such as friends and acquaintances supplying information about jobs or other opportunities. Cultural capital refers to the acquired tastes, beliefs, and values that reflect and determine one’s place in society. It has echoes of the culture of poverty theory discussed earlier but avoids normative or value judgments. Do you prefer opera or country music? Sushi or burgers? Budweiser or craft beer? Although these examples appear trivial, they illustrate that cultural capital serves as a marker and maker of class position. Cultural capital has been compared to a toolkit, acquired through socialization and association, that determines opportunity and access to other resources (Swidler 1986; Duncan 2014). Moral capital is similar but reflects value judgments of worthiness within a particular context or social setting. Are you viewed as having a strong work ethic, devout religious adherence, or solid family values? Although these signs of virtue do not directly put food on the table, they can influence access to opportunities that may provide material support. Chapter 8 explores the relationship between forms of capital and rural poverty at length. The important point for understanding rural poverty is that all forms of capital serve as valued resources that influence poverty risk and the ability to overcome it within its context.
These capitals are associated with both individuals and groups, although they specifically mark social relationships. At least one form of social capital—social networks—also has been conceptualized collectively and spatially, most often at community and societal levels. The kinds of networks and connections found in a community can act either as stimulants or impediments to economic development, mobility, and poverty reduction. Social networks that are “horizontal” connect individuals across similar social strata and promote democratic participation conducive to economic growth and well-being, whereas “vertical” networks represent hierarchical connections that concentrate power at the top, are subject to corruption, and are obstacles to development (Putnam 2000; Duncan 2014). A slightly different conceptualization distinguishes between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital, with the former making connections across different groups—tying disparate parts of society together—and the latter reinforcing tight-knit bonds among people with similar characteristics—creating more homogeneous connections. The implication is that the broader links of bridging social capital promote democracy, participation, and economic development, whereas the latter are subject to fostering social exclusion (Putnam 2000). In both formulations, the types of networks that characterize a community or society are linked to its economic fortunes.
These ideas have been applied to understanding differential rates, effects, and outcomes of poverty in rural communities, and there is some support for associating horizontal and bridging social capital with better poverty outcomes. For example, qualitative research that compared three poor rural communities in different regions of the country, all with different demographic profiles and histories of social provision and class structures, found that the community most able to draw on broad horizontal networks and bridging social capital was also the community most able to assist people in poverty and enable them to overcome it (Duncan 2014).
Forms of capital, social exclusion, social isolation, and intersectionality can be coherently linked together to better understand poverty. They demonstrate the multidimensionality of the causes and consequences of poverty, the connections across different scales and levels of analysis, the benefit of thinking of poverty as a form of inequality and position in sets of hierarchies rather than a static condition, and the importance of access to resources whether at the individual, group, or spatial level. Most important, these theories bridge the micro–macro and individual–structural divides that characterize many other efforts to explain poverty. They demonstrate the value of avoiding dualistic, either-or arguments and instead seek ways to integrate the individual with the society and human agency with social structure.
Individual behavior and action is important and cannot be predicted in a deterministic way, but it is influenced by powerful economic and social forces that make some outcomes much more likely than others. Whether an individual, structural, or integrative model, our theories are used to discover trends and associations and to explain phenomena in the aggregate rather than the experiences of specific individuals. There always will be exceptions, sometimes many, but the key to understanding a social phenomenon such as poverty is found in the larger patterns. The complexity of all these systems and forces operating together make social life predictable but not inevitable.
Social scientists are often criticized for failing to have satisfactory and direct causal explanations for social phenomena, or for making everything too complicated by considering the effects of multiple variables and factors. Unlike in the physical sciences, it is difficult to run experiments on our research subjects—societies and human beings. We are unable to hold all of the possible factors that might influence an outcome constant while subjecting a person to an experimental treatment that will demonstrate causality. Some experiments are feasible, but the ones most likely to determine influence and causality typically are not. Certainly, rural poverty is one of those highly complex conditions that is influenced by several factors under innumerable contexts. In other words, it is complex.
This does not mean that it is not important to attempt to disentangle the complexities, particularly for policy purposes. Policy fails most spectacularly when the diagnosis of a social problem is oversimplified, without recognition of all the intricacies, multiple dimensions, contextual influences, and conditional relationships. Policy is supposed to provide the cure for a social ill or problem, but if the problem itself is not properly understood, it is unlikely to respond as predicted or desired. Understanding and explaining rural poverty in the United States requires a willingness to engage in the complexities of social life.
NOTES
1. How rurality is measured is a topic of much debate. Competing definitions and classifications are described in chapters 1 through 3.
2. Alternatively, the rural brain drain depletes rural communities of the most promising youth who are unlikely to find opportunities in impoverished places (Carr and Kefalas 2009; Sherman and Sage 2011; Petrin, Schafft, and Meece 2014).
3. Critics of the culture of poverty point out that it is more accurately described as a subculture existing within the larger culture and society, and one to which people from any socioeconomic background can belong.
4. Chapter 9 has more information on jobs and the rural economy.
5. The majority of LGBTQ research in rural America has focused on identity, religion, and culture. For more on these issues, see work by Emily Kazyak, Mary L. Grey, Arlene Stein, and Colin R. Johnson.
6. There is much debate regarding the use of the terms Native American and American Indian. Native American will be used to identify this group throughout this book.
7. The determination of the poverty line was originally devised in the 1960s to reflect the cost of a minimally nutritious diet and its relationship to other basic needs. How well it captures under- or overestimates of real poverty is quite controversial today. Review chapter 3 for the details of its source and adequacy.
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