'Benefits Street', 'Cultures of Worklessness' and Inter-generational Inequality

Professor Rob MacDonald, University of Teeside
Thursday 15th January, 4 pm - 6 pm, W/222
Chair: Richard Williams

Interview with Professor Rob MacDonald

Seminar synopsis

Our recent research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – conducted in very deprived neighbourhoods of Glasgow and Middlesbrough – was highly critical of the popular idea that ‘there are families where three generations have never worked’ (Shildrick et al, 2012). Determined ethnographic fieldwork was unable to uncover any such family. Other recent, statistical studies confirm that families such as these are likely to be mythical. Perhaps more importantly – because this feasibly might be a more general phenomenon - nor could we find any evidence that worklessness in these families could be explained by values, attitudes and practices that favoured ‘welfare dependency’ over ‘working for a living’. Similarly we found little evidence to support another influential idea; i.e. that there are locales – or ‘Benefits Streets’ - where virtually no-one works. Consequently, the failure of the idea of ‘cultures of worklessness’ to explain the predominant experience of unemployment in the UK was the central conclusion of the study.

Yet there is no doubt that worklessness and poverty affected the twenty families we talked to over generations. Indeed, they described the multiplicity of social problems and traumas that the government associates with ‘Troubled Families’. It is not a myth that some families and some neighbourhoods are more likely than others to face long-term unemployment and material hardship. So how do we explain this? If not a ‘culture’ of worklessness, then what? How can we otherwise explain what appear to be family-based ‘cycles of disadvantage’? This paper will draw on biographical narratives, from different generations of the same families, to try to illuminate some of the shared, cross-generational experience of social class inequality and persistent poverty. More specifically, it will highlight some of the continuities, over decades, in the families’ experiences of systems of education and training that appear to fail people like them.

Professor Rob MacDonald

Having previously studied and worked at Durham and York universities, Robert MacDonald is Professor of Sociology at Teesside University. His research interests span sociology, criminology, social policy and youth studies and he has published in journals in all these fields. Recently he co-authored Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain (2012), which one the British Academy-Policy Press Peter Townsend Prize.

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