POVERTY AS A PERSONAL FAILURE AND THE FEAR OF EXCLUSION

Abstract

The texts of sociological classics (de Tocqueville, Marx, Simmel) as well as recent European research offer a fruitfull analitical frame for thinking about poverty using the idel-type constructs of „integrated“, „marginalized“ and, nowdays dominant „disqualifying“ poverty (S. Paugam). The application of this analitycal frame, completed with new explanatory factors – as flexibilisation or precarization of work and jobs, the fear of getting fired as a new factor of inequality, the intensity of social ties and „spatial disqualification“ of social groups with the great risks of poverty and dependance of the social intervention system – lead to new insights in collective representation of poverty: now seen as personal failure, „social falldown“ in the process that include cumulation of social handicaps. So, what is nowdays perceived as a central social fracture – the fracture between those whose future is secured and those exposed to „threats of the job market violence“ (Maurin) – passes through the whole class structure producing social insecurity and diffused anxiety, undermining social cohesion and imposing new mechanisms of collective identities construction.