Varieties of economic dependence

For several decades, public political discourses on ‘welfare dependency’ have failed to recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four senses of ‘economic dependence’ that can help to clarify what is missing from these discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian philosophical work has examined the problems of dependence on states, in families and in markets, the present approach adds a further dimension to our cultural and political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires a clarification of the ‘varieties of dependence’ that exist in contemporary societies and economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not about escaping dependence entirely.

No way home: the challenges of exiting homelessness in austere times

This chapter explores the ways in which austerity manifests at the ‘street level’ for a particularly poor and marginalised population, drawing on interviews with single homeless people and practitioners living and working in homelessness accommodation projects. While existing research has assessed the impact of recent housing and welfare reforms on those at risk of or transitioning into homelessness and those sleeping rough, the chapter offers additional insight by placing focus on the implications of austerity for transitions out of homelessness. The data presented reveals the ways in which austerity-driven policies are actively hindering service users' efforts to move beyond homelessness and leaving them increasingly susceptible to longer-term cycles of instability. Increases in benefit sanctioning and conditionality, combined with cuts to homelessness services over the last ten years, have resulted in overwhelmed practitioners increasingly forced to focus on crisis management, while little or no resources are left to invest in prevention and helping users to transition out of homelessness. Meanwhile, the interviews with homeless service users and practitioners suggest that contrary to the prevailing narrative of welfare dependency, insufficient funding has impaired transitions into work.

Digital Activism

Austerity blogs emerged in the context of radical reform of welfare benefits and constrained household budgets. The blogs, written by those forced to live hand-to-mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merge narratives of lived experience, food practices, and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty and hunger. A Girl Called Jack disrupted existing hegemonies by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished, drew attention to the corporeal vulnerability of hunger, and invited the pity of the reader. In the process, Jack refuted individual-failure accounts of the causes of and challenged notions of welfare dependency by detailing practices to survive and eat healthily on a £10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices resonated powerfully, yet also polarized opinion, drawing attention to social uneasiness over growing levels of poverty and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing these, and more fundamentally, who the modern poor are and what modern poverty is.

Divisive social policy: the competition for physical and symbolic resources

In this chapter, the focus turns to explore how the policy impacted on participants’ perceptions of fairness and justice in social housing allocation. This is set within the context of existing debates about the racialisation of social housing, a result of struggles over who should have preference to access this declining resource. While those tensions are played out at the local level, the rhetoric around social housing has increasingly linked this form of tenure with ‘welfare dependency’. The chapter begins by exploring how participants evaluate austerity politics in terms of their own economic position. It then turns to focus on their status and social positioning and how the policy raises questions of worth and value. What we see here are not just struggles over material resources such as housing, but also over less tangible psychosocial and symbolic resources that afford people a sense of worth and value.