ABSTRACT
The term first entered public prominence at the hands of Ken Auletta, a New York journalist, in 1982. He argued that while most people officially classified as poor in America, overcome poverty after a generation or two, a sizeable number (perhaps 9 million) do not assimilate. Auletta mixed together a range of ‘losers’ into a loose category of an underclass which constituted ‘both America’s peril and shame’ (1982: xvi -xviii). The reviews were mixed, for example, Fox:
An ambiguity as to who comprises the ‘underclass’ has continued in the more scholarly literature which took up this term. Whilst in the US it has come to refer predominately to the black inner-city population concentrated in areas of extreme
deprivation and virtual social apartheid the term ‘underclass’ has more universally become popularised as a loose categorisation containing those individuals who commit most of the traditional street crime and provide the cause of contemporary urban riots; most frequently in analysis in the US (Glasgow, 1981; Auletta, 1982; Murray 1984; Lemann, 1986; Wilson, 1987; Katz, 1989; the media coverage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992), and applied to Britain (Murray, 1990, 1994; and from the left: Dahrendorf 1985, 1987; Pahl 1988; Fields, 1989; Saunders 1990; Mann, 1990, but note arguments for rejecting the term in Macnicol 1987, 1990; Gallie, 1988; Dean and Taylor-Gooby, 1992) and applied in Japan (Schoenberger, 1990), while trends in underclass development have been argued in New Zealand and Australia.
