One of the most dramatic findings of the contemporary scholarship on the urban poor has been the extent to which this population has been affected by the departure of manufacturing, and industrial, employment from inner city areas. The effects of this have included the sharp rise in unemployment and the increase in the number of individuals on welfare rolls. Although writers such as Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead have argued that with the growth, and entrenchment, of welfare an attitude of “dependency” has arisen, more recent empirical research does not substantiate these claims of dependency and “shiftlessness” among the urban poor; these latter studies have raised more general questions concerning individual employment histories including attempts to reenter positions of stable and meaningful employment. The article addresses such questions by examining the responses of 27 black males, the majority of whom were out of work and/or receiving public assistance, to open-ended questions concerning their experiences in the labor force and their assesments of the contemporary structure of social mobility. In brief, the conclusions reached in the examination of these interviews point to the numerous forces—racial, spatial, and political as well as strictly economic—which have come into play in shaping their past and present.
Agency and Structure in Social Mobility in the Light of Individualization: Empirical Research Review
