How the word underclass shifted from economics to blame
When the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal introduced the term underclass in the early 1960s, he meant people shut out of work by the structure of the economy. Within a few decades many writers were using it to describe supposed habits and culture instead. That quiet change in meaning made it one of sociology's most disputed labels.
The underclass is usually defined as the group below the core of the working class, largely cut off from the rest of society. The notion is old. Marx wrote of a lumpenproletariat, and in Victorian London Henry Mayhew documented a hidden world of casual labourers and street people in London Labour and the London Poor. The specific word, though, spread in the second half of the twentieth century, first among researchers of American poverty and then among journalists.
Writing about inequality in the United States, Myrdal described a class of the unemployed, unemployable and underemployed, increasingly set apart from the nation's life and ambitions. According to the sociologist Herbert Gans, that structural idea survived in the work of scholars such as William Julius Wilson, but many others replaced it with a behavioural version, merging Myrdal's term with Oscar Lewis's notion of a culture of poverty. Where one version looks at missing jobs, the other looks at conduct.
Other thinkers framed it differently again. The Marxian sociologist Erik Olin Wright described the underclass as economically oppressed but not consistently exploited, because being largely denied access to the labour market left little to exploit. Unlike ordinary workers, in his view, their leverage lay not in withholding labour but in disrupting consumption. Critics see his account as treating other classes as acting in concert, when people may simply respond to individual incentives.
Because writing on the subject in the United States has concentrated on cities, underclass and urban underclass are often used interchangeably, and the idea features heavily in urban sociology. Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, published in 1987, described a population at the bottom of the ladder held back by poor schooling and low-paid work in rust-belt cities. Definitions, causes and proposed remedies all remain heavily debated.
Source: Underclass
