Poverty has been defined as “…a complex process of lack of economic, social, cultural, institutional and political resources which affect popular sectors and are associated mainly to the conditions of labor insertion prevalent in the labor market: volatility, informality, low salaries, job insecurity” (Ziccardi). The subject of poverty was originally discussed as associated to marginality, mainly on its origins and survival strategies.
The theory of marginality came from reflections on the social change as proposed by defenders of the modernization view. Heiress of the dualist perspective, it tried to explain urban poverty and the non-integration by the poor recently urbanized in urban life and economy. Nevertheless, it quickly changed from a geographical and economical notion to another sociological and psychological, to be understood as the location of poor housing at the cities surrounding areas and at poverty enclaves downtown, to a total lack of influence of this population in making decisions at any level. It changed from opening a perspective of Human Rights placed in the limitations of a populational group to a set of civil, political, economical and social rights into the focalization to demonstrate a strong relationship between marginality and rural life.
Finally, it focused in certain cultural characteristics towards the formation of a subculture which, as it produced typical ways of identification, it generated self-exclusion from legitimate ways predominant in society to relate and interact, to get to the most recent concept of social exclusion that says of a long term unemployment, of an increasing number of people without housing, of new ways of poverty between immigrants, women and youngsters, as much as marginal groups as new groups of those excluded from work, credit, social services, instruction, decent housing, etc.
Conceptually, exclusion collects the concept of marginality and broaden it in order to comprise the new ways of exclusion from different dimensions: like the tridimensional fragmentation of society generated by ethnic differences, alteration of populational pyramid and plurality of forms, family connivance, or how the impact of post industrial economy over employment, generator of occupational backgrounds in diversity of itineraries complex and dilated in time, as a irreversible flexibilization of productive processes in the informal economy, labor deregulations, erosion of labor rights and weakening of schemas or social protection, or like the deficit of inclusion of the welfare state that has consolidated fractures of citizenship, and the disaggregative character of certain markets of welfare with a very weak public presence: the best example may be the market of soil and housing.
The theory of marginality came from reflections on the social change as proposed by defenders of the modernization view. Heiress of the dualist perspective, it tried to explain urban poverty and the non-integration by the poor recently urbanized in urban life and economy. Nevertheless, it quickly changed from a geographical and economical notion to another sociological and psychological, to be understood as the location of poor housing at the cities surrounding areas and at poverty enclaves downtown, to a total lack of influence of this population in making decisions at any level. It changed from opening a perspective of Human Rights placed in the limitations of a populational group to a set of civil, political, economical and social rights into the focalization to demonstrate a strong relationship between marginality and rural life.
Finally, it focused in certain cultural characteristics towards the formation of a subculture which, as it produced typical ways of identification, it generated self-exclusion from legitimate ways predominant in society to relate and interact, to get to the most recent concept of social exclusion that says of a long term unemployment, of an increasing number of people without housing, of new ways of poverty between immigrants, women and youngsters, as much as marginal groups as new groups of those excluded from work, credit, social services, instruction, decent housing, etc.
Conceptually, exclusion collects the concept of marginality and broaden it in order to comprise the new ways of exclusion from different dimensions: like the tridimensional fragmentation of society generated by ethnic differences, alteration of populational pyramid and plurality of forms, family connivance, or how the impact of post industrial economy over employment, generator of occupational backgrounds in diversity of itineraries complex and dilated in time, as a irreversible flexibilization of productive processes in the informal economy, labor deregulations, erosion of labor rights and weakening of schemas or social protection, or like the deficit of inclusion of the welfare state that has consolidated fractures of citizenship, and the disaggregative character of certain markets of welfare with a very weak public presence: the best example may be the market of soil and housing.
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