ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the issues raised by a study on poverty from a sociological perspective, and not those raised by the demands of social or economic policy. The international debate reveals many disparate understandings of the poverties, deprivations and exclusions in societies around the world. The variety of national meanings of poverty cannot be read off from national statistics of income distributions or the like. Its social meanings and the specific resources needed to avoid it have to be studied and understood in their national or local context and manifestations. The chapter refers to the complex question of disparate discourses only because agreement on the identification of resources appropriate to meeting human needs depends on prior agreement on the discourse appropriate to the analysis of the unmet need, the poverty, deprivation or social exclusion in question. The picture is far more complicated than the common political simplifications sometimes suggest.
