POVERTY: culture and poverty debates

Remember back in the fall when Fabio talked about sociology’s new attempts to articulate cultural explanations for inequality? That research has started to catch some flack by those who see it as an embrace of the old “culture of poverty” argument. Never mind that Small, Lamont and Harding explicitly said in this essay from the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that one reason that inequality scholars should study culture “is to debunk existing myths about the cultural orientations of the poor”; critics of the essay argue that Small et al. are resurrecting the culture of poverty thesis. Of course, the loudest critic so far is Stephen Steinberg, who published a sorta response to their Annals piece in the Boston Review (I say sorta because much of Steinberg’s essay seems to be more about William Julius Wilson and less about the Annals piece). [and more] http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/culture-and-poverty-debates/