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Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 First Impressions and Second Thoughts -- Plan of the Book -- 2 The Social Reproduction of Poverty -- Conventional and Critical Problematics -- Variable Environments -- The Culture of Poverty and Variable Environments -- 3 Potter Addition -- Grand Prairie -- The Ecological Setting of Community -- Surplus Populations -- The Material Infrastructure of Community -- The Material Culture of Potter Addition -- The Junkyards -- Betty's Market -- The Question of Class -- 4 The World of Work -- Disorderly Careers in Potter Addition -- The Jack-of-All-Trades -- Lower-Class Work Values -- 5 Labor, Leisure, and Ideology -- Leisure Time Farming -- The Car Cult -- The Subjective Reproduction of Male Morale -- 6 Saving and Spending -- Variable Environments and the Economic Conservatism of the Poor -- Variable Environments and "Nigger-Rich" Life-Styles -- Mining the Interstices -- Alternative Economies -- 7 The Uxoricentric Family -- The Parsonsian Model -- The Jurai Default of the Husband -- The Husband as Affine -- Protracted Intimacies: Mothers and Daughters -- 8 The Antinomies of Family Life -- Generational Compression -- The Dialectics of Uxoricentric Family Life -- 9 The Dialectics of Lower-Class Kinship -- The Structure of the Personal Kindred -- Kinship as Ideology -- Centripetal and Centrifugal Kinship Systems -- Centripetal and Centrifugal Kinship in Clay County -- Open and Closed Households in Potter Addition -- The Merging of Households -- The Iron Cage of Reciprocity -- 10 The Moral Foundation of Lower-Class Kinship -- The Axiom of Kinship Amity -- Merged and Amalgamated Identities -- Affinal Struggles -- 11 The Social Construction of the Kindred: Sibling-Based Descent Groups -- Potter Addition's Descent Groups

A formal typology of poverty paradigms is presented to clarify the concepts & ideological assumptions that ground modern theories of poverty. A theoretical "space" that maps the metatheoretical themes that inform current debates on poverty is constructed, & several recent works on poverty (eg, Ellwood, David, Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family [see IRPS No. 43/88c00971] & Wilson, William Julius, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy [Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1987]) are discussed to point out their implicit ideological contents. The typology encompasses accounts of poverty from Malthusian economics, the Marxian paradigm, neoclassical economics, secular Malthusianism, social Darwinism, & the programmatic poverty perspective. It is shown that the typology's utility derives from its ability to formally categorize extant paradigms of poverty & account for new eclectic approaches. 4 Figures, 52 References.

The revisionist trend away from the materialist & dialectical method of classical critical theory is explored as it has developed in the works of Jurgen Habermas. His theories are tracked from their roots in Western Marxism, to their present manifestation in neofunctionalist systems theory. An evaluation of the adequacy of the political economy within Habermas's present sociological theory is presented, together with the synthetic limits of his systems theory & the possibilities that recent advances in the theory of dissipative systems offer critical theory. 28 References. D. Dennis