ABSTRACT

With the manifest return of pauperization, brought about by increasing mass unemployment and constantly less preventive social welfare policy, European social scientists are confronted with a debate which first started in media reports in the USA in the 1970s, and then led to a broad range of empirical research, mostly in black urban ghettos. The so-called underclass debate has been comprehensively covered in books and reviews (e.g. Devine and Wright, 1993; Gebhardt, 1995; Katz, 1993; Andersen and Larsen, 1995); therefore we do not need to repeat or summarize them in all their aspects and complexity. Rather, we are going to concentrate on three questions.