The Co-construction of Shame in the Context of Poverty: Beyond a Threat to the Social Bond

Introduction

Shame, along with embarrassment, pride and guilt, is widely understood as a ‘self-conscious’ rather than a basic emotion such as anger or fear. Essentially it entails a negative assessment of the self made with reference to one’s own aspirations and the perceived expectations of others, and is manifested as a sense of powerlessness and feeling small (Tangney et al., 2007). While the literature on human psychology has engaged extensively with shame as a social emotion (Gilbert, 1998; Miller, 2006; Tangney and Fischer, 1995; Tracy et al., 2007), it has arguably tended to explore its dynamics outside of the social matrix (Scheff, 2000, 2003).

This said, within the literature exploring the social dynamics of poverty, the intersection between shame and poverty has increasingly become the subject of important analysis and policy discourse (Jones and Novak, 1999; Lister, 2004; Tomlinson et al., 2008). Indeed, as early as the late 18th century, Adam Smith (1776) spoke of the essential requirements of a linen shirt and leather shoes for a man to be able to live without shame in society. The inability to procure the material goods which denote the contemporary symbols of success have continued to be recognised as having detrimental social consequences (Lister, 2004); and Sen defines shame as a universal attribute of poverty (cited in Alkire, 2002: 185).

Building on the work of Lewis (1971), Scheff (2003: 255) offers a sociological definition of shame conducive to the psychosocial analysis of poverty as follows:

Shame is the large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants, most notably embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and related feelings such as shyness that originate in threats to the social bond. This definition integrates self (emotional reactions) and society (the social bond).

Importantly, such a definition allows for an examination of what Scheff considers the frequent allusions to the emotion of shame even when it remains unnamed. There is, he argues, a certain ‘taboo’ surrounding the word ‘shame’ – a word in English which has strength in connotation perhaps not always matched in other languages (Walker, forthcoming). Parallels can thus be drawn with the implicit but not labelled ‘shame’ in Adler’s inferiority complex; in Cooley’s notion of self monitoring (1922) – imagining how we are assessed in the eyes of others and feeling either pride or shame; and in Goffman’s (1967) notion of ‘saving face’.

Drawing on an analysis of interviews with adults living in poverty in the UK, this article extends Scheff’s (2000, 2003) study of the impact of shame on social bonds to consider its more pervasive role in undermining social solidarity. The overriding focus here is on how shame is almost always co-constructed – combining an internal judgement of one’s own inabilities; an anticipated assessment of how one will be judged by others; and the actual verbal or symbolic gestures of others who consider, or are deemed to consider, themselves to be socially and/or morally superior to the person sensing shame.

It begins by presenting poverty as a meta arena for the emergence of shame, especially in contemporary British society where success is largely measured according to the attainment of economic goals. Access to this dominant social world is through material consumption and not having the resources for such consumption leads to social retreat and, ultimately, reduced social capital. These processes are further exacerbated by the sense of disempowerment induced by shame itself, generating feelings of inability, lack of agency or control and culminating in a sense of being controlled and dehumanised by the systems and structures which govern access to social and material resources.

The article goes on to illustrate the different arenas within which shame is co-constructed and how people living in poverty are acutely aware of its potential emergence in every social interaction (Goffman, 1963). In response, they often attempt to avoid shame at all costs, by withdrawing from social interactions which might expose their hardship and pretending that they are coping when they are not. Such strategies are hazardous since people risk having their financial inadequacies revealed and, through their withdrawal, risk fundamentally compromising their social connections.

Extending this analysis, the article then illuminates a further strategy employed to retain a level of dignity and respect by people living in poverty. This entails defining a stratified social structure within which a clear distinction is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘them’ looking up the hierarchy are those with power and influence who remain ignorant of, and insensitive to, the circumstances of ‘us’ facing hardship – indeed ‘they look down on us’. The ‘them’ looking down the hierarchy is the classified ‘Other’ (Lister, 2004), those who are less worthy and of lower status to ‘us’. Such categorisation, a protective response to the ubiquity of poverty-induced shame, it is argued, not only fragments the social bonds in the immediate milieu, but threatens social solidarity more broadly and adds further pressure towards the atomisation of modern society.

Methodology

Using the national Indices of Deprivation for England 2007 (Communities and Local Government, 2008), two research sites were selected within the two most deprived deciles and geographically situated in the south east of England. Within these sites, participants were accessed via a range of community-based advice and children’s centres.

In-depth interviews were held with a total of 42 adults (11 men and 31 women) between April and October 2011. All adult participants had between one and seven dependent children (average of 2.1). Participants were selected as eligible to participate in the research if they lived within the defined geographical area and fulfilled the criteria of a) having dependent children; and b) having ever been in receipt of one or more benefits (including job seekers allowance, JSA; income support, IS; employment and support allowance, ESA – previously defined as incapacity benefit IB).

The research was promoted under the title of ‘Coping with Hard Times’, deliberately avoiding any direct reference to the word ‘poverty’ so as not to alienate potential participants (see for example, Hooper et al., 2007). Interviews were inductive, allowing interviewees to lead the discussion in relation to a range of key topic areas, beginning with a broad prompt such as ‘tell me a bit about your current situation’. Using a series of subsequent open-ended questions to guide the discussion at appropriate points, participants were asked about: their current financial situation; the types of difficulties (if any) they were facing; the types of strategies they employed to mitigate economic hardship; the sources and types of support (if any) they felt they had access to; the extent to which those not facing economic hardship understood the difficulties they might be facing; how the circumstances of people on low incomes were presented in the media and in policy discourses; and what could be done to better support people facing economic hardship. Background data on demographic profiles, household composition, approximate household income, employment status and housing tenure were gathered from adults using a simple supplementary questionnaire employed at the end of each interview.

The research design received ethical approval from both departmental (Social Policy and Intervention) and inter-departmental research ethics committees at the University of Oxford. All interviews were recorded using a digital recorder, with the prior permission of research participants, and transcribed. A thematic analysis was conducted of all transcripts.

Experiences of Hardship

With a few exceptions, the terms ‘poor’ or ‘poverty’ were rarely used by participants (Flaherty, 2008). Instead allusions to current or past financial hardship were made via a range of words and analogies such as; ‘struggling’, ‘it’s really hard’, ‘nightmare’, ‘going round and round in circles’, ‘struggling to keep head above water’, ‘scuppered’, ‘stuck in a rut’, ‘scrimp, save, borrow, beg and steal’, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ and ‘battering your head against the wall’.

At the time of interview, approximately 10 per cent of respondents were in full or part-time employment; the remainder were in receipt of one or more welfare benefits. Almost all adults interviewed described having to make tough decisions on a daily basis over whether to pay bills or provide food and clothing for children. Several spoke of having a shortage of food in the house, having to go to food banks (local church organisations offering non-perishable foods and assistance with debt management), or having to ask family or friends for food or money. Several people lived in over-crowded conditions, were temporarily homeless or were forced to occupy poor quality housing which had a detrimental impact on their own health and that of their children.

While some people had known such hardship most of their lives, others reflected on changing circumstances which meant that they had encountered poverty for the first time. Divorce, separation or bereavement left some women and men in severe economic circumstances, often with limited work opportunities conducive to their caring responsibilities. Others had faced redundancy, or had had to stop working due to illness or disability, resulting in a significant reduction in household income. Mike, ¹ for example, had previously spent seven years working in a local factory. After the death of his wife, he was forced to leave his job to take care of his one-year-old disabled daughter, a change which had a profound impact on his circumstances:

But once I lost my job, I just couldn’t possibly make ends meet. I was just getting deeper and deeper in debt and, in the end, I just had to stop paying them (debts), because I couldn’t do it. I’d never been in this situation and I just didn’t really grasp the sort of bare bones of it, you know … like how much you have to struggle.

These personal struggles were more generally framed by a consensus that within the present economic climate (viewed as a result of a combination of the recession and the austerity measures brought in by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government) everyone was finding things ‘tougher’ than in the previous few years. Rising food and fuel (gas and electricity) prices, increased Value Added Tax (VAT), limited work opportunities, ‘exorbitant’ bus fares and rises in the general cost of living all exacerbated daily struggles to ‘make ends meet’.

Shame as a Co-constructed Emotion

Either integral to their descriptions of poverty, or in response to further prompting about how their stricken circumstances made them ‘feel’, allusions to shame were pervasive in people’s accounts of their lives. Yet in keeping with the analysis that shame often goes unnamed (Lynd, 1958; Scheff, 2000), is coded (Retzinger, 1995), and may in fact be ‘taboo’ (Scheff, 2003: 240), rather than verbalising ‘shame’, most participants instead used a range of words and terms synonymous with the concept. Hence, ‘awkward’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘guilty’, ‘rotten’, ‘degraded’, ‘crap’, ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, a failure’, ‘uncomfortable’, ‘funny’, and ‘dirty’, were all used to convey how people felt about themselves or were made to feel in certain social interactions.

These terms, what we might refer to as the colloquialisms of shame (expressions or ‘verbal cues’, Retzinger, 1995: 1107, which denote the emotion but do not actually name it), constituted the body of language through which people described the psychological impact of failing to meet certain goals or expectations set by themselves or society. Importantly, while the psychological literature draws a robust theoretical distinction between ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ (Lewis, 1971; Tangney et al., 2007; Tracy et al., 2007) – the former associated with a negative evaluation of the global self over which one has little or no control; the latter with an internal negative assessment of certain behaviour which is controllable or could have been avoided – research participants employed the terms largely interchangeably. The effects of a sense of failure or rejection, irrespective of the emotion described were, nonetheless, the same (Scheff, 2000, 2003). In keeping with other research, people’s narratives often revealed significant self-criticism of their abilities to cope financially, despite evidence to the contrary of their extensive efforts to carefully manage scarce resources (Batty and Flint, 2010; Flint, 2010; Hooper et al., 2007).

However, participants did make an important distinction between their own personal sense of inadequacy and a perceived negative assessment of them by others as a result of their economic and social status. The colloquialisms of shame were thus used in a slightly different way to describe how the media and those with power and status generated, or attempted to generate, feelings of failure and insignificance. The verbal and non verbal signals of others’ disapproval were variably listed as, ‘looking down on’, ‘turn their nose up’, ‘judge’, ‘think we’re all the same’, ‘don’t get to know you’, ‘treat (or look at) you like shit’, ‘prey on people like us’, ‘exploit people like us’. Some people described attracting multiple social stigmas by virtue of their circumstances, such as being a young single mother, being a recipient of benefits and living on a particular (housing) ‘estate’.

Arenas for the Construction of Shame

This symbiotic relationship between feeling shame and being shamed was prominent in participants’ narratives and illustrated with reference to many different arenas in which they felt ‘awkward’ or ‘embarrassed’ as a result of their poverty at one end of the spectrum, and ‘worthless’, ‘a failure’ and ‘crap’ at the other. Indeed, the first hints of such awkwardness emerged in the course of the interviews when participants frequently lowered their voices when talking about sensitive issues such as being out of work, being on benefits, being a single mother, or having no money. Various other bodily signals associated with feelings of shame were also intermittently observed by the researcher, including gaze aversion, head down or a slumped posture (Dickerson et al., 2004; Gilbert, 1998; Tangney et al., 2007).

Responses to Poverty-induced Shame

The Emergence of the ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ Discourse

There was a strikingly common reference to ‘them’ as compared to ‘us’ in people’s narratives. Essentially, the ‘them’, in the first instance, referred to people with power and money, considered far removed from the circumstances of research participants. They had ‘no idea’ or ‘no clue’ about how much they were struggling and, it was felt, would have ‘no chance’ surviving on such limited resources. This ‘them’ and ‘us’ discourse laid the basis for a social stratification within which participants positioned themselves and others. While the ‘us’ shared an understanding of their difficulties, were ‘in the same boat’, and would help when they could, the ‘them’ would not. Deva commented, ‘Only the poor people help the poor people because they understand how difficult it is.’ And to some extent this shared connection between ‘us’ helped mitigate the impact of shame. Christine, for example, spoke of how she frequently had to ask a neighbour for help when she ran out of toilet roll half way through the week and had no money to buy more. Though embarrassing on one level, she said, she knew that she was equally likely to be asked for tea bags or a cup of sugar as the week went on and her neighbours were struggling to make ends meet.

Yet, the ‘them’ and ‘us’ categorisation was also used to distinguish the ‘us’ from another ‘them’, positioned lower down the social hierarchy from ‘us’. What emerged, therefore, was a complex process of social positioning (Dahrendorf, 1959) where others were classified as inferior to oneself according to certain comparative criteria, those who were working and those not working; those who had previously worked and those with a more chequered work history; those with one or two children and those with large families; people who were considered ‘citizens’ and others who were viewed as ‘outsiders’.

Typically, for example, people who were working but still hard up saw themselves as having a strong ‘work ethic’ and a track record of previous work. This gave them a moral trump and enabled them to distance themselves from those they considered to be ‘happy’ not working or ‘not bothered about’ claiming benefits. And this same tendency of ‘Othering’ (Lister, 2004) was mirrored among those who were not working and claiming benefits. While participants desperately wanted to distance themselves from the archetypal benefit claimant portrayed through the media, they often identified others who they felt fed such stereotypes and hence became critical of others (Batty and Flint, 2010). Teresa’s assertions, for example, typify this view:

I’m not a scrounger, I’m just in a difficult situation. Why should I be looked on as a scrounger? I’m not, I’m educated and it’s just that I can’t get a job. There are those … I’m not going to lie … I do know some who are capable of working and they choose not to. Those guys make me angry … Yeah I do see where the tabloids get that from because there are people who are like that. You know, girls who will just keep having kids because they refuse to go to work. It’s not that they’re taking care of their children, they look on their children as a burden but they’re getting benefits because of the kids. So tabloids have got it half right, but we’re not all like that, not all of us.

And equally, people defended their position of being on benefits and not finding work by focusing on immigrant workers who they claimed, ‘have taken all the jobs and housing’. Aida neatly summarised this process by signalling with her hands a hierarchy of classifications (used by her synonymously with class) which she had observed:

With all these things it’s about class … they classify you that you’re on benefit, they classify you down there … if you’re working part time, you come a bit … one level up. If now I go full time, like now I want to go to university, they give me a place, I’d be there (at a higher level).

While on the one hand examples of self-deprecation abounded in participants’ narratives (Batty and Flint, 2010; Flint, 2010), on the other, there was an apparent need to salvage elements of social and moral standing by positioning themselves at a distance from the socially constructed and archetypal ‘Other’ – the uncaring benefit recipient unwilling to work for a living. This ‘projected shaming’ – shame imposed on others who do not meet an acceptable standard of attitudes and/or behaviour paralleling our own – arguably helps mitigate any shame or anticipated shame which people living in poverty are prone to experience themselves. At the same time, however, this process works against fostering social solidarity among people in shared difficult circumstances and, instead, divides the ‘us’ into multiple ‘others’.

Discussion

Emotions of pride, dignity, embarrassment, awkwardness, shame and guilt were intertwined in complex ways in people’s narratives, terms such as shame and guilt frequently used interchangeably and shame often alluded to without being named as such, signifying perhaps the ‘taboo’ of shame (Scheff, 2003). These complexities aside, a coherent thread ran through the narratives – people facing economic hardship frequently suffered interactions with others in family, social and institutional settings in which they were made to feel inferior and unworthy. The triggers for these emotions were both internal and external. They were borne out of a sense of failure in meeting self-imposed expectations such as to progress along certain work or education trajectories, provide or care for others, or remain independent of institutionalised welfare support. Equally, these emotions were socially constructed via a complex array of norms and values which dictated people’s worth largely in relation to economic goals.

Each of the participants described how events had construed to make it increasingly difficult for them to provide for themselves and their families. Some had become ill, some had acquired disabilities, others had experienced redundancy, separation or divorce, others still had taken on caring responsibilities which made working an unrealistic option for the foreseeable future. Yet despite these different trajectories, the majority of people felt an acute sense of being ‘tarred with the same brush’. They felt the intensely dehumanising effect of being treated, by the media, the general public, by politicians and by the welfare institutions they entered, as a homogenous category of people who were ‘not bothered’, ‘spongers’, ‘scroungers’ or ‘benefit bums’. Such shame and disdain were used as forms of moral tools which accentuated people’s sense of deficiency, and undermined core emotions of dignity, pride, self-esteem and confidence.

There were numerous occasions where interviewees variably described avoiding social situations which risked exposing their lack of resources; pretending that they were coping better than they were; making out they were working when they were in receipt of benefits; and not admitting to needing help because it would mean a loss of pride or face (Goffman, 1967). Such responses led to temporary withdrawal, hiding or pretence at one end of the spectrum, to attempted suicide and permanent social withdrawal at the other, ultimately demonstrating the potential of poverty-related shame to eliminate those who feel unable to measure up to the normative expectations of society.

Equally, such feelings were evoked by dominant cultural norms and values and the essentially regulative (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1977) discourses generated by contemporary British society. Participants repeatedly alluded to certain prevailing ‘truths’ which governed the attitudes and behaviour of the general public towards them. These ‘truths’ were seen to be played out within the media, public, political and policy discourses. A central tenet of such ‘truths’ saw poverty as a direct result of people not working, with welfare benefits being the main source of income. Thus poverty was reported as having become intrinsically associated with those on benefits, who were ‘work shy’, ‘scroungers’ or ‘can’t be bothered’ and who were responsible for raising families into, and hence perpetuating, poverty.

In the early 1970s Sir Keith Joseph, the then Secretary of State for Social Services in the UK, spoke of a ‘cycle of transmitted deprivation’, poverty which was passed on from one generation to the next. This notion, insinuating a moral deficit on the part of those living in poverty, mirrored the work of sociologists such as Oscar Lewis in the USA (1969) who had coined the term, ‘culture of poverty’. From the late 1980s, similar assertions were taken up under the growing discourse in the UK, propagated by Charles Murray (2001), of the ‘underclass’– a section of society who lacked aspirations, had no work ethic nor any sense of shared responsibility to contribute to society. While, over time, the language has become tempered – the ‘hard to reach’, the ‘problem family’, and the contemporary ‘troubled’ or ‘multiple problem family’ (Hooper et al., 2007) – the underlying assumption remains; that there is a residual core of people living in poverty largely of their own making, and that they inculcate a ‘value system’ which is transferred from one generation to the next.

Throughout the research, participants repeatedly indicated how they were acutely aware of these representations of the individual, rather than structural, causes of poverty. Indeed, they appeared so powerful that, although they held no explanation for interviewees’ own circumstances, they seemed to provide an account for how the ‘them’ (those people down the social hierarchy) had ended up in poverty. Hence, the imperative for participants to distance themselves from the stereotypical welfare recipient, responsible for their own lot and inculcated so firmly in the public psyche. Indeed, almost everyone we spoke with at some point in their narrative sought to ensure that they were not perceived as ‘one of them’.

This co-construction of shame, the internal sense of inadequacy combined with the externally imposed disapproval for failing to live up to society’s expectations, appears to have potent ramifications. The dominant public, policy and media discourses described above serve ultimately to differentiate those deemed as socially deserving of support from those who are undeserving – social constructs surrounding poverty that have been sustained for centuries and certainly since the introduction of the Elizabethan poor laws. The more insidious effects of such discourses are observed, however, via the social divisions and hierarchies that begin to emerge as individuals strive to distance themselves from the socially constructed ‘undeserving’ recipient of welfare – inextricably linked in the public perception to the person in poverty.

Hence there was evidence of shame being a dynamic, cyclical process which raises important questions about its role in society. If one feels shamed, is one bound to feel the need to shame others? Almost all adult participants in the study identified other individuals or groups who they categorised as having a lower social or moral status than themselves. Young mothers who continued to have babies allegedly to access housing and benefit payments; people who claimed benefits and worked illegally; the ‘foreigners’ or ‘asylum seekers’ who usurped available work opportunities by accepting lower than average pay or had apparently easier access to housing and accommodation than ‘local’ people. Thus, to some extent others provided an alibi for one’s own circumstances and served to deflect or lessen the sense of internal shame

Conclusion

Previous research exploring the place of shame in society has highlighted the taboos surrounding it (Scheff, 2003); its ubiquitous yet unnamed presence (Lynd, 1958; Retzinger, 1995); its role alongside pride as a premier social emotion (Scheff, 2000); and its implicit recognition in concepts such as Adler’s inferiority complex and Goffman’s (1967) ‘saving face’. The shame of poverty and its injurious impact on self-esteem and sense of worth has equally been documented elsewhere (Lister, 2004) and participants in this research have clearly borne testament to it. Shame – whether felt or anticipated – epitomises the threat to any social bond between a person and their social environment. This research suggests that when the context of such interactions is poverty, and particularly in a society where consumerism is increasingly seen as the mark of success, the potential for shame is perhaps limitless.

The research further suggests, however, that shame in the context of poverty can possibly have an even more destructive impact on social solidarity. Here we have seen how the dominant portrayals of those living in poverty in the UK, and especially those who are welfare recipients, are deeply derisive. By striving to distance themselves from these humiliating and negative constructions of ‘the poor’, people appear to enter into processes of ‘othering’ through which they can vindicate themselves as valid social beings. While the power of such ‘othering’ towards people living in poverty has previously been articulated by Lister (2004), what emerges in this analysis is the strength of its ripple effect – people who sense being defined as the ‘Other’ appear to distance themselves from the label by passing it to ‘others’. Poverty-induced shame undoubtedly undermines human dignity and for that reason alone warrants further analysis. Perhaps more importantly, however, it demands our attention because of its power not only to divide communities along the lines of ‘ them’ and ‘us’ but to generate a fragmented ‘us’, hence adding further pressure towards the atomisation of modern society.