ABSTRACT
Social scientists generally assume that it is needs and resources, through the requirement that people make ends meet, that constrain behavior. Needs and resources are socially constructed. The conceptions of needs and resources are, in effect, supplied to the members of a way of life, thereby enabling them to justify that way of life. Needs and resources have a certain social malleability; they are underdetermined by our own physiological properties and by the physical properties of the world in which we live. The individual who has no scope to manage his needs or his resources really cannot be said to have a management strategy. The need-and-resource-managing strategies for making ends meet are the only ones that contain views of economizing congruent with the models of nature that serve to justify the corresponding ways of life. These strategies meet our compatibility condition in that their biases match the desired social relations of their adherents.
