But is it possible that the network perspective of strong links, weak links and hubs can help identify a solution to poverty in both the West and the developing world?
Boston, Massachusetts, 1950s
Two Boston working-class community groups–the North End and the West End–are under threat of ‘urban renewal’. The North Enders successfully campaign against the development plans and defeat them, keeping their homes. Across the city, the West End plan is particularly offensive–the compulsory purchase of 7000 people’s homes in order to build 2400 luxury apartments which will sell at prices way beyond the budgets of current West Enders. More noxious still, and a powder-keg in the hands of a journalist, the developer has links with the mayor, who stands to profit at the expense of the evicted community.
Surely such unfair proposals will be defeated? Yet the protests of the West Enders are totally ineffective. In 1958, the City takes title to the land and the stunned West Enders, still not believing their fate, start to move out.
Why did this happen? Herbert J. Gans wrote a sympathetic account of the West Enders’ failure in which he explained that a protest committee was set up, but
The Committee received little overt support from the rest of the West Enders, and its opposition did not significantly interrupt the city’s planning…West Enders, who knew much less about the process, and could not call city officials to get the facts, [believed that the City would not proceed with the plans]…the West Enders [were unable] to organise in their own behalf…The leaders were also hampered by lack of information…Nor did the West End have other attributes of power such as those displayed by the neighboring North End, which had successfully repulsed efforts towards its own redevelopment. This area…had a much larger business community–some of it politically influential.
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The West Enders lacked information and support; by contrast, the North Enders had information and links to middle-class business supporters, a few of whom lived or worked in the North End. The West Enders’ network was internally focused; they had very few weak links to more knowledgeable and influential people outside the community. The North Enders’ network was varied and effective.
Mark Granovetter says: ‘The lower one’s class stratum, the greater the frequency of strong ties.’99 That is, the poorer people are, and the more insecure they feel, the more likely they are to seek the protection of strong ties to family, neighbours and powerful employers. A study in Philadelphia confirms this picture–people who are young, poorly educated or black rely much more on strong rather than weak ties than the rest of the community.100 When disgruntled working-class youths want to break away, they may find it difficult to escape the boundaries of their own community. Lacking weak links to better worlds of opportunity, they sometimes fall into the gang culture (or fundamentalist cults) on their doorstep, which may be the ‘best offer’ for social and economic gratification available within their bounded world.
In his 2008 book Gang Leader for a Day, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh tells a fascinating story about crack dealers in Chicago at the height of the crack boom in the 1990s and early 2000s.101 His intrepid research revealed that most of the crack dealers lived in the neighbourhoods where they grew up, and many still lived at home with their mums.
Venkatesh relates how one of the gang deputy leaders, T-Bone, arranged to meet him surreptitiously and turned over notebooks recording the gang’s revenues and expenses for the last four years:
Perhaps the most surprising thing in T-Bone’s ledgers was the incredibly low wage paid to the young members who did the dirtiest and most dangerous work: selling drugs on the street. According to T-Bone’s records, they barely earned minimum wage…Now I knew why some of the younger…[gang] members supplemented their income by working legit jobs at McDonald’s or a car wash.
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The foot soldiers’ average pay was only $3.30 an hour. Why would anyone want to work for wages like that, enduring terrible working conditions–standing around on the street dealing with crazy addicts, risking imprisonment, and having a one-in-four chance of being shot dead? One reason was their inability to escape from the area. ‘It’s a war out here,’ one dealer told Venkatesh. ‘I mean, every day people struggling to survive, so you know, we just do what we can. We ain’t got no choice, and if that means getting killed, well shit, it’s what niggers do around here to feed their family.’103
Mark Granovetter implies that dependence on strong ties is a trap. His research shows that people who found jobs through strong ties had longer periods of unemployment than those whose jobs came through weak ties: ‘The heavy concentration of social energy in strong ties fragments communities of the poor into encapsulated units with poor connections between these units…one more reason why poverty is self-perpetuating.’104
The Flats, Jackson Harbor, Midwest USA, 1970s
Carol Stack’s research shows how the poor naturally become reliant on strong ties, to the exclusion of any other relationships. In the 1970s, she studied the people of a poor Midwest ghetto she disguised as ‘The Flats’ in ‘Jackson Harbor’–the real city is on a major rail line connecting Chicago with the Deep South. She worked much as an anthropologist would: spending most of her waking hours there and befriending the inhabitants, especially the women.
The residents, she says, fall back on a circle of friends and kin-folk in order to survive. They expand their actual circle of relatives by, for example, taking in their children’s father’s kin as members of their family, thereby extending the group who are obliged to look after each other. Whatever they have–food, stamps, a television, a hat, milk, grits, a cigarette here, a nickel there–is shared within the group. Welfare benefits barely provide enough for shelter and food, and any wages or windfalls are also made available to the kin group, according to need.
Although such strong ties help the poor cope day to day, we can also see from Stack’s account that reliance on strong ties blocks two possible escape routes from poverty. One is to marry and move out of the community, in the hope of gaining a job elsewhere and so beginning the slow ascent from poverty as a nuclear family, free of community responsibilities. But the community resists such a move:
Marriage and its accompanying expectations of a home, a job, and a family built around the husband and wife have come to stand for an individual’s desire to break out of poverty. It implies the willingness of an individual to remove himself from the daily obligations of his kin network…one cannot simultaneously meet kin expectations and the expectations of a spouse.
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Stark recounts the case of Ruby Banks who said:
If I ever marry, I ain’t listening to what nobody say. I just listen to what he say. You have to get along the best way you know how, and forget about your people. If I got married they would talk, like they are doing now, saying ‘He ain’t no good, he’s been creeping on you. I told you once not to marry him. You’ll end up right back on ADC [welfare].’ If I ever get married, I’m leaving town!
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The other route out of poverty is to save or receive an inheritance and buy a house or some other marketable property. Saving is conspicuous by its absence in Stack’s account; it appears unthinkable to her interviewees, since they have no surplus to save. She recounts a telling story about Magnolia and Calvin Waters. Magnolia’s uncle in Mississippi died and left them $1500 (equivalent to about $20,000 today). It was the first savings they’d ever had, and they planned to use the money as a deposit to buy a home. But their kin in the community had other ideas. Three days after Magnolia and Calvin had received the cheque, word spread. One niece borrowed twenty-five dollars from Magnolia to avoid getting her phone cut off. Another uncle in the South became seriously ill, and Magnolia bought round-trip tickets for herself and a sister to visit him. Then an elderly ‘father’ in the community died and nobody else could pay for a grave. Then another ‘sister’ needed two months’ rent to avoid being evicted. Winter was cold and Magnolia bought the whole family decent coats and shoes. To make matters worse, the welfare officer cut off payments to Magnolia’s family.