Addressing culture

This book sets out to account for cultural diversity in lived experiences of welfare without relying on what Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small (2008: 76) describe as ‘thin understandings of culture’. They argue that poverty and inequality studies have tended to see culture as ‘a group’s norms and values, as its attitudes towards work and family, or as patterns of behaviour’ (Lamont and Small, 2008: 76). This can imply that culture is something that is fixed and pre-existing. In contrast, cultural sociology, anthropology and cultural studies have developed ideas of culture as a process of making and remaking shared understandings, customs and codes of behaviour in practice. Cultural formations are more likely to be understood as provisional and porous according to these approaches than fixed or unified. Rather than ‘imputing a shared culture to groups’, the emphasis is on ‘how individuals make sense of their lives’ (Lamont and Small, 2008: 79) and ‘the conditions under which people’s stories of themselves are constructed’ (Couldry, 2000: 52).

Approaching culture with care is critical given that both welfare policy and multiculturalism have oversimplified and reified class and ethnic group identity and difference (Berg and Sigona, 2013). I aimed to address ethnicity head on, but without assuming it was the most important factor conditioning and differentiating experiences of welfare. This required an approach that is ‘sensitive to ethnicity in the empirical world, but does not impose it where it is not’ (Fox and Jones, 2013: 394). Importantly, this approach does not assume that ethnicity and culture are synonymous.

Cultural explanations of poverty have driven criticism of the corrupting influence of ‘passive’ welfare and the rise of conditional support as a corrective to welfare dependency. The idea that poor people live according to a distinct subculture of dysfunctional values and behaviours that perpetuate poverty is well worn but resilient. So is the racist portrayal of poor Black communities as most afflicted by such cultural dysfunction. As I outline in Chapter 2, these ideas have been hugely influential in Australia and elsewhere in making social security and other forms of social support targeted at the most marginal members of society more directive and supervisory.