On the Dynamics of Poverty

Abstract

Speder, Zs.: A szegenyseg valtozo arcai. Tenyek es ertelmezesek. [The Changing Faces of Poverty. Facts and Interpretations.] Budapest: Szazadveg Kiado, 2002. Research related to poverty cannot be regarded as a peripheral area of sociological studies, because the domestic as well as international literature abounds in surveys of the topic. Despite our presence in academic discourse and the large number of publications dealing with the issue there are certain areas that belong to the shadowy side. One of them is the study of the development of poverty, its becoming a lasting one, and emerging from poverty that is the dynamics of poverty. Zsolt Speder’s book puts this issue into the focus of his interest and research, calling attention to a number of phenomena that have not been sufficiently highlighted by the domestic literature on poverty. This very fact would have justified a review article of the book published by Szazadveg Kiado in 2002 to follow its release soon and not three years later. The value of the book is produced by two specificities of approach besides the empirical analysis of the period between 1992 and 1997 that has not yet been embedded in research into poverty. Therefore it is worth calling the attention of researchers and social politicians dealing with the topic to these values of Zsolt Speder’s work even three years after its publication. The first specificity is that the author discusses the phenomenon of poverty from the angle of different theoretical frameworks and approaches. The second one is the dynamic interpretation of poverty. Let us see the first statement. Sociology has several research areas where empirical analysis is unimaginable without fixing the theoretical moorings. The study of poverty is not of this kind. Works in which an empirical study is testing a theory and hypotheses deductible from it may be regarded rather as exceptions and not the rule. The author himself opens his work with the thought that the dominance of empirical research and methodological discussions is conspicuous in the literature on poverty, and works studying poverty embedded in some theory are rather rare. The author wishes to fill this lacuna by the presentation of those decisive theories that may serve as a framework for getting acquainted with the phenomenon of poverty. At first he studies the two classical schools of social stratification, namely functionalism and conflict theory, how they interpret poverty, and how the concept of poverty may be deducted from their approach. These theories are similar in that they regard poverty as the consequence of structural conditions, and interpret it basically as a social situation determined by the position occupied in the labor market. Davis and