Introduction

The debate over transmitted deprivation offers intriguing insights into the perspectives of a generation of social scientists. Richard Berthoud has argued that the cycle hypothesis was a test of the ability of social scientists to contribute to a real debate. However, researchers who did not accept the myth that deviancy caused poverty were more concerned to argue that deviancy did not cause poverty than to ‘examine what the relationship is between these two families of social problem’ (Berthoud, 1983a, p 154). Alan Deacon has claimed similarly that, by the 1970s, the alleged rejection of individualist or behavioural accounts of poverty by theorists such as Richard Titmuss had hardened into an approach that precluded any discussion of such factors. It was this ‘quasi-Titmuss paradigm or school’ that, in its hostility to explaining poverty by reference to the behaviour of the poor, created the intellectual void that was filled by neo-conservative writers in the 1980s. Because it was increasingly preoccupied with the growth of material inequalities and paid less attention to altruism and the quality of social relationships, it also neglected how people's behaviours and activities represented some form of meaningful choice (Deacon, 2002a, p 14). Deacon argued that this hostility was exemplified in the debate about transmitted deprivation. The original challenge to see how discontinuities in cycles of disadvantage could be brought about was not taken up, and the whole scope of the Research Programme was altered. Explanations of poverty, child health, and even abuse emphasised the uneven distribution of income and wealth, the unequal structure of employment, and the class-related pattern of life chances (Deacon, 2002a, pp 24-6).

While there was a longer tradition of research into poverty, behaviour, and culture, social policy analysts seemed reluctant to enter this arena from the mid-1970s. Like Berthoud, Deacon argued that academics did not respond to the challenge of the Research Programme, regarding Joseph's research agenda as ‘at best a red herring and at worst a distraction from the much more important issue of the generation and persistence of inequalities’ (Deacon, 2002a, pp 23-6). This chapter uses the Research Programme to explore further the approach of social scientists to issues of poverty, deprivation, structure, and behaviour.