Poverty and Social Exclusion in the New Russia by Nick s> Manning Nataliya Tikhonova , Karen George (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 387 beginning to revert to the old 'friendsof friends'network system, to identify 'acquaintancedoctors' that came with personal recommendation. Throughout the book Rivkin-Fish does not hide her own values. She favours collective over individual solutions, and despairs of the system ever developing the kind of sensitive and personalized maternity experience now de rigueur in Western Europe. As such this is not merely an ethnographic report,but an engaged and passionateappeal for feministinspiredreformsto take seriouslythe anthropologist'ssensitivityto culturalcontext. School of Sociology andSocialPolicy NICK MANNING University ofNottingham Manning, Nick and Tikhonova, Nataliya (eds).Poverty andSocialExclusion in the JNfew Russia. Translations by Karen George. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington,VT, 2004. xiv + 288 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography . Index. ?5995 THE last decade or so has seen a plethora of research into poverty in the former Soviet Union. Much of this has targeted the causes and extent of poverty and relativelylittle has really sought to understand what this concept has come to mean for people living in the region. This edited volume, based on fieldworkcarriedout in I999 and 2000, goes some way toward fillingthis gap. The intentionof thisresearchis to respondto the emerging'humancrisisof monumental proportions'(p. 9) in the former Soviet Union through presenting a multidimensionalview of poverty andsocial exclusion focusing on the nature of poverty in Russia, rather than the amount. Chapter one presents a contextual background, outlines the objectives of the study and reviews the key findings.Both the context provided and the fieldworkon which the core workis based cover the period up to I999/2000. In view of this it is somewhat misleadingto imply, as on page 9, that thiswork examineswhether the trends of the I990's continue beyond I999. The remainder of the book falls into three parts. The first two of these devote a chaptereach to concepts and resultspertainingto povertyand social exclusion respectively. The final and most fascinating part examines the 'special issues' of ethnicity and gender as they relate to poverty and social exclusion. The success of this book must ultimatelybe judged by the extent to which it crediblydistinguishesbetween povertyand social exclusion both conceptually and empirically.Judged by such criteriaI would argue that the picture is mixed. The crux lies in the effectivedelimitingof poverty to 'market-based exclusion' (p. 40) and the removal of all other aspects of well-being to what Manning et al. interpret as social exclusion. This methodological sleight of hand is exposed by the subsequent constructionof deprivationand social exclusion indices which renders the quantitative analysis presented, at best, problematic. Indeed, the quantitative analysis stemming from these indices is riddled with issues of collinearity,endogeneity and selection bias, is based 388 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 on the adoption of arbitrary,subjective thresholds for which no sensitivity analysisappears to have been carried out and presents statisticaldifferentials without commenting on their statistical significance. For a study so ready to dismisswhat it (wrongly)terms 'theoreticaleconomistic models' (p. 47)it is all too ready to attempt to shadow the methods of that discipline. I would much rather have seen more of the illuminatingand absorbingethnographic vignetteswhich do much to shed light on the notion of 'survival'and suggest that it may be survival that straddles the concepts of poverty and social exclusion. Such insight is essential to inform interdisciplinary studies of well-being. Chapter four provides a useful historical account of the evolution of the term 'social exclusion' though there is no attempt, until the final page, to relate that to the transitionprocess. This mantle is taken on in chapter five, which is also left with the more challenging problem of delineating between social exclusion and poverty. The attempt to do the latter is laudable though undermined through our knowledge that, by construction, all of the social exclusion indicatorsare associatedwith poverty, and that the entire sample is 'poor' and thereforeit is not possibleto distinguishcause and effect.Thus the effortsto realize their conceptual distinctionempiricallyis criticallyfloored. It is only on reachingthe finalfew pages of chapterfive, in discussionof the issue of 'old' and 'new poor' in Russia, that one startsto feel convinced that social exclusion and poverty could have been successfullydistinguishedas concepts. It is a shame that more was not made, and earlier,of this theme. The final part of the...