The dilemma of the agency of the poor

Abstract

Multidimensional poverty concepts conceptualise poverty as a combination of material and immaterial lack: a lack of material means which constitutes an important, albeit not the only cause for a lack of self-determination. At the same time, such multidimensional approaches have a strong normative impetus towards acknowledging and promoting the agency of people living in poverty. Thus, while this broader understanding of poverty has its sociological merits, it also leads to a theoretical dilemma: if the lack of self-determination is a defining dimension of poverty, can the poor have agency at all while they are living in poverty? Empirical poverty research mirrors this dilemma in that it mainly focuses on the limited choices of the poor and the detrimental effects of their choices and actions. Finally, there is no doubt that the lack of material means poses countless dilemmas in daily life, not least because choosing one course of action may jeopardize one’s welfare in other respects, e.g. risking one’s health by accepting a hazardous job). The presentation analyses the agency of people living in poverty from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach (CA). (1) If value-based choices are a marker of agency, how can we distinguish autonomous choices from adapted preferences stemming from habituation to poor circumstances? (2) All the different strands of the CA posit minimum standards (basic capabilities) for various material and immaterial conversion factors as conditions for genuine agency. For political and measurement purposes these standards must be the same for everyone. In contrast, in qualitative research individual cases constitute the starting point of analysis. How can we thus bring together general standards with individual ideas of ‘good enough’ living conditions expressed in qualitative interviews? (3) Agency is not a binary phenomenon but a gradual one. Referring to the debate on autonomy in feminist philosophy I propose to distinguish ranges of agency in different domains of life. The presentation is based on empirical data from a qualitative long-term study of the practices of welfare production of poor households in Switzerland comprising three waves of interviews with 40 households and financial diaries over one month.