Street Papers, Work and Begging: ‘Experimenting’ at the Margins of Economic Legitimacy

Abstract

Street papers are publications produced specifically for sale by the homeless and other vulnerable people in many countries around the world. Their social status is, however, often conspicuously unstable: ‘Get a job!’ has been reported as a common insult addressed to vendors, and street paper organisations have responded with their own rhetoric and strategies that aim at disrupting any analogy with begging. The present analysis frames these rhetorical confrontations as a struggle over economic legitimacy, highlighting some of the ways in which social actors build and sever the normatively loaded associations that position them and others in social space, and how the ‘experimental’ combination of business and social responsibilities tests social actors' abilities to adapt to this practice.

KEYWORDS:

• legitimacy
• markets
• street papers
• value
• work

Notes

1. International Network of Street Papers homepage.

2. Much of the information on The Big Issue in this section is taken from Tessa Swithinbank's (2001) history of the organisation (with a focus on the London-based business), Coming Up from The Streets: the story of The Big Issue. ‘The Big Issue’ is both a company name and the name of the publication produced: it will be italicised here whenever it refers to the publication.

3. The statistic refers to the combined net circulation of all of the regional editions, and is an average calculated over the year 2011, produced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Big Issue itself puts the number of weekly readers at 670,000 (see The Big Issue 2011), drawing on statistics from the National Readership Survey.

4. August 2012.

5. Proposal by the Peterborough City Council (Rogers 2002).

6. Constable (2012) ‘One-third of The Big Issue sellers now Romanian: Job once reserved for Britain's homeless has been swamped by Eastern European immigrants’; The Sun (2012) ‘Big Issue seller from Romania wins legal right to claim housing benefit’; Morris (2012) ‘Big Issue seller wins right to claim housing benefit’; Rath (2012) ‘Mum's joy as court rules selling Big Issue in all weathers is “work”’; The Telegraph (2012) ‘Romanian woman wins right to housing benefit’; Daily Star (2012) ‘Big Issue: Third of sellers Romanian: “Gangs” push out Brit poor’.