Strategic poverty: How social and cultural capital shapes low-income life

Abstract

We investigate how material poverty functions as a cultural space, specifically addressing when it becomes a strategy, that is, when an individual with cultural and social capital adopts a life of low income in order to form other social identities. We examine two groups that use low income to further other goals but differ in their temporal lens: (1) ''transitional bourgeoisie,'' graduate students and artists who frame their economic deprivation as a temporary means to prospective identities, such as a professorship or success in art; (2) ''embedded activists,'' committed adults rooted in political and religious organizations who see low income as a permanent strategy to bolster their anticonsumerist desires. Relying on 37 in-depth interviews with informants we ask, how do people in strategic poverty construct satisfying lives? What cultural tools and skill-sets do informants draw upon to negotiate their economic circumstances and middle-class backgrounds?

Champagne taste, beer budget: The new poor’s incongruent capital and consumption

“…Informants’ eclectic consumption strategy and interpretation reflect their “in-between” status and fragmented social class consciousness. Compared to informants who deem consumption as a way to foster certain social identities (Demetry et al., 2015), project future identities (Demetry et al., 2015), convey political beliefs (Zamwel et al, 2014), or perform creativity and self-expression (Campbell, 2005), the new poor’s consumption is less a voluntary or political expression of personal identity but a reaction to internal identity strain, as well as to potential marginalization of their status as consumers. They employ an alternative framework to subvert some marketplace conventions, so as to disconnect the pursuit of status in the consumerism society from their own economic standing.…”

“…In addition, sometimes a demographic indicator (such as income) is not a condition but a by-product of an individual’s identity project. For example, some artists and graduate students strategically adopt a low-income lifestyle in order to support their prospective identity (Demetry et al., 2015). Zamwel et al.…”

The subject who thinks economically? Comparative money subjectivities in neoliberal context

“…Research shows that downshifters often have the ability to adapt to their low income because they can draw on a middle-income ‘tool kit’ of resources and networks. Poverty, then, becomes a ‘strategy’ not a ‘condition’ (Demetry et al, 2013: 21). However, downshifting is also clearly a ‘disruptive’ strategy in the context of theories of neoliberalism.…”

Revisión crítica del consumo en el siglo XXI. ¿Nuevas formas de politizar la ciudadanía?

“…Los estudios relacionados con la vuelta a la austeridad en el consumo o a la frugalidad, que han acuñado conceptos como downshifting consumer, strategic poverty y low-income lifestyles (Demetry, Thurk y Fine, 2013;Nelson, Rademacher y Paek, 2007), subrayan el auge de una tendencia de consumo basada en un modo de vida frugal. En el Estado español, al estudiar esta tendencia, Luis Enrique Alonso, Carlos Fernández Rodríguez y Rafael Ibáñez Rojo (2016) destacan que se trata de un tipo de consumo en el que prevalecen los sentimientos de angustia y el miedo, y en el que se acepta de un modo fatalista la pérdida de poder adquisitivo como preludio de una nueva sociedad más desigual que se va consolidando progresivamente en los países con economía de mercado.…”