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Exploring the lived realities of both poverty and prosperity in the UK, this book examines the material and symbolic significance of welfare austerity and its implications for social citizenship and inequality. The book offers a rare and vivid insight into the everyday lives, attitudes and behaviours of the rich as well as the poor, demonstrating how those marginalised and validated by the existing welfare system make sense of the prevailing socio-political settlement and their own position within it.
Through the testimonies of both affluent and deprived citizens, the book problematises dominant policy thinking surrounding the functions and limits of welfare, examining the civic attitudes and engagements of the rich and the poor, to demonstrate how welfare austerity and rising structural inequalities secure and maintain institutional legitimacy.
The book offers a timely contribution to academic and policy debates pertaining to citizenship, welfare reform and inequality.
Introduction
Unequal citizenship? The new social divisions of public welfare
Lived experiences of poverty and prosperity in austerity Britain
The sociological imagination of rich and poor citizens
Heterodox citizens? Conceptions of social rights and responsibilities
Identity, difference and citizenship: a fraying tapestry?
Deliberating the structural determinants of poverty and inequality
Conclusion