Poor Women's Moral Economies of Nonprofit Social Service Use: Conspicuous Constraint and Empowerment in the Hollow State

Abstract

This article explores the moral economy through which poor women apply shared understandings of what is fair, just, and appropriate to their use of nonprofit services. The findings suggest that such women perceive that others are needier than they, avoid undeserving opportunist labels (yet apply them to others), and complain that nonprofits routinely violate their moral obligations by withholding services or not affording respect. These views lead to “conspicuous constraint,” or service use only in the direst of circumstances, in which women claim to reject help, in part, so that needy others might receive aid. The author argues that this allows them to construct an image of themselves as self-reliant, morally empowered, benevolent actors in line with neoliberal rhetoric. Given that the public welfare system has transferred more responsibility for delivery of services to the nonprofit sector, the very sector that many poor women avoid, their well-being is of great concern.

The Moral Economy of Neoliberalism: How Voters Use Neoliberal Ideology to (De)Legitimate Undocumented Worker Access to Labor Markets

“…Voter use of neoliberal ideology across partisan affiliation to legitimate an economic policy position would constitute a “moral economy.” This term was coined by Thompson (), who argued that eighteenth‐century English bread riots were caused by popular outrage over the British government's permittance of merchants to sell flour well above normative prices—thus violating the popular consensus that everyone had the right to subsistence. In contemporary scholarship, “moral economy” refers to the “shared moral dispositions, assumptions, beliefs, rationales, and norms” (Kissane :190) in which market action is embedded (Taylor‐Gooby et al. ).…”

“…In contemporary scholarship, "moral economy" refers to the "shared moral dispositions, assumptions, beliefs, rationales, and norms" (Kissane 2012:190) in which market action is embedded (Taylor-Gooby et al 2018). A moral economy is then a consensus about moral principles used by actors to legitimate market action (Kissane 2012;Mau 2003;Sachweh 2012;Svallfors 2006;Taylor-Gooby et al 2018;Thompson 1971;Western and Rosenfeld 2011). The argument is that a consensus about "moral" market and state action-often conceptualized in terms of "fairness"-shapes individual or institutional "repertories" (Sachweh 2012;Swidler 2001)-thereby influencing actors' economic beliefs, evaluations, legitimations, and potential actions.…”

“…The key distinction, however, is that while neoliberal "fairness" is defined by a mission to preserve and enhance market competition, conservatives' use of "fairness" applies "proportionality" in order to promote or maintain a "moral community." Given previous work and definitions, I coded "moral economy" as the use of a criterion for evaluating market fairness across a major social division in my data-thus providing evidence of a popular consensus (Kissane 2012;Sachweh 2012;Svallfors 2006;Western and Rosenfeld 2011). This division in my data was partisan affiliation and means that both Democratic and Republican respondents must use the same criterion for judging market fairness for there to be evidence of a moral economy.…”

Important Interactional Strategies for Everyday Public Health Nursing Practice

“…In this article I focus on individuals who live in poverty, specifically the single mother living on public assistance (henceforth referred to as single mother or mother) who is considered vulnerable to health problems due to insufficient economic and social resources, and whose vulnerability is often compounded by stigmatizing labels such as “underserving”, “unfit”, “welfare mother” (Kissane, ). In particular, I discuss how PHNs working with single mothers fulfill the public health nursing practice standard Building Relationship (Community Health Nurses of Canada [CHNC], ).…”

Cosmopolitanism and the Moral Economies of Aged Residential Care

“…All human activity is fundamentally moral in the sense that it is imbued with meaning, and political economic activity is no exception (Sayer 2000, 81;Weber 2002). Recent debates about social welfare (Kissane 2012;Morgen and Maskovsky 2003;Sandberg 2015), working mothers (Solinger 2002), healthcare (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010), old age pensions (Macnicol 2015), in the context of neoliberal political economies (Harvey 2007;Larner 1997) illustrate this point. The term moral economy is not particularly evident within the medical anthropology literature although arguably much of the medical anthropological tradition addresses issues of moral economy (see for example, Kleinman 1988Kleinman , 2006Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1991;Singer and Baer 1995).…”