Poverty, shame, and the class journey in public imagination

Abstract

Bringing together social science and literary sensibilities, this article employs a focused content analysis of the texts of three influential Norwegian novels for their personal portrayal of the relationship between modernization, the new welfare state, poverty, and shame. As significant facets of public imagination, the big and little stories presented in the novels deploy a decidedly social psychology, in which individual accounts reflexively relate to social life. Featuring associated characters and identities, the novels construct possible experiences. In this context, emotions such as shame are taken to be indigenous ingredients of modernization and the welfare state. The lessons of a lyrical sociology for understanding personal experience and social change are discussed in the conclusion.

Keywords:

• lyrical sociology
• modernity
• Norwegian literature
• Norwegian welfare state
• poverty
• shame

View correction statement:

Corrigendum for ‘Poverty, shame, and the class journey in public imagination’ online version

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ivar Lødemel for providing theoretical inspiration and constructive feedback during the preparation of this work. The author acknowledges funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development under the ESRC- DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research, grant number RES-167-25- 0557.

Notes on contributor

Erika K. Gubrium is a post-doctoral research fellow associated with the Oxford University-based project, ‘Shame, social exclusion and the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes: A study in seven countries’. She is also a lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at the Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway. Her research applies qualitative approaches to investigate anti-poverty policies in Norway, with a particular focus on the discourses, norms, and expectations surrounding both social assistance provision and the work activation approaches directed towards individuals receiving social assistance.

Notes

1 Abbreviations for the three main empirical texts are applied in the analysis as follows: H = Hunger, S = Seierherrene, HN = Hvite Niggere).

2 While social assistance claimants may have felt new-found agency, this is not to suggest that the stigma attached to assistance receipt ceased to exist. While there have been no in-depth studies of the stigma attached to the receipt of social assistance in Norway during the 1970s, Guttormsen and Høigård (1978) describe the reported experience of stigma by social assistance claimants in a well-to-do suburb of Oslo, both within the context of one's lowered sense of self as a social assistance claimant and the negative attitudes of others regarding claimants.

3 However, as there is now a trend toward the beginnings of a massive downward mobility from the parent to the child generation on both sides of the Atlantic, the exceptionality of this narrative may change in coming years.

4 This recalls the set of Danish-Norwegian cultural ‘laws’ – the Jante Law (Sandemose 1933). This text suggests a series of normative parameters for group behavior towards individuals within Scandinavian social communities, including the critique of individual success and achievement as negative and inappropriate.