Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Mendicoa, Gloria Edel
Materias
Spatial Coverage
Idioma
spa
Extent
203 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
ARG
Abstract
Marginality, exclusion and inequality situations have been focused in many research works. All of them agree with the fact that, despite structural conditions are modified and individual actors try to improve their situations, inequality still persists. How do the phenomena go on?
The main goal of this thesis points to the comprehension of inner mechanisms developed by poor families which implies that inequality persists. A structural sociology subject (inequality) is viewed from human agency aspects and the role of interactions and representations proper of microsocial level.
Such approach it is done since “family life strategies” concept (FLE- Torrado, 2003). As the work is about poor families, their strategies are named “survival” ones because they hardly reproduce elementary life conditions. In them it can be observed that behaviours oriented to improve the situation have the opposite result, that is to say that they consolidate the state it was supposed to be turned over. This does not mean that it is the social agent´s fault but he is conditioned by the frame of opportunities frame in which he is. The “option” related to practice is a reinforced mechanism of marginality with the plus that it is inscribed in the agent and refers to the reproductive practice of individual “will” or election.
In heterogeneous and dependent capitalism many sectors are marginal related to the dominant productive processes over practices which are approved by the social system and also guarantee its reproduction. (Salvia and Chavez Molina, 2007).
Family strategy concept allows the study of these practices as conditioned by its insertion in the social structure and by rescuing the internal dynamics of domestic organization. Micro and macro reproductive processes are related because family strategies choose satisfaction through the possibilities they can get from their relations with other social agents, This net provides a possible arch of results for each practice in a defined historical context, in which people can not decide evaluating all the possibilities, and where not all the possibilities are available for all the positions in social space.
In order to obtain empirical evidence, two different observation stages were built up: food and child labor. In both stages, the State has an unavoidable role as the main regulator of poor household options. Its incidence in practices leads to understand why some unequal reproductive behaviors happen and if it is possible for social agents to act in a different way.
Qualitative investigation strategy is the best for the objectives proposed since the main role of meaning that social agents assign to their practices. This does not mean that numerical information providing by statistics sources should not be combined in order to understand reproductive mechanisms of inequality.
Data obtained let keep the initial hypothesis. In food strategies, family decisions let people cover the calories needed daily, but they put in danger the nutrients components of diets. In same direction, changes in meals, blowout or unfeeding are examples of mechanisms through which social agents are trapped in reproductive practices.
As far as child labor is concerned, this kind of strategy in which a child works implies efficiency in covering material and symbolical immediate needs (reaching to reproduce existence conditions) but in the other hand, it reproduces social relations related to inequality, because these children workers limit their own future possibilities. In this way, child labor is “invisible” (out of legal frame) as begging and domestic labor. In both cases children do not work alone, neither in the street, nor in families’ nets. Child work keeps its economic side (because it frees adult handwork or because children are secondary handwork) that lets facing the situation not only without changing social production relations but also reinforcing them.
In both stages, the lack of options, a temporal register as perpetual present (without future), contradictions between autonomy and dependence in satisfying everyday needs, the necessity of articulating family interests taking into account that life courses which have been successful but could not get over poverty and the State action without complete recognition of these elements, allow the comprehension of a micro social mechanism which produces and reproduces new inequalities.
The main goal of this thesis points to the comprehension of inner mechanisms developed by poor families which implies that inequality persists. A structural sociology subject (inequality) is viewed from human agency aspects and the role of interactions and representations proper of microsocial level.
Such approach it is done since “family life strategies” concept (FLE- Torrado, 2003). As the work is about poor families, their strategies are named “survival” ones because they hardly reproduce elementary life conditions. In them it can be observed that behaviours oriented to improve the situation have the opposite result, that is to say that they consolidate the state it was supposed to be turned over. This does not mean that it is the social agent´s fault but he is conditioned by the frame of opportunities frame in which he is. The “option” related to practice is a reinforced mechanism of marginality with the plus that it is inscribed in the agent and refers to the reproductive practice of individual “will” or election.
In heterogeneous and dependent capitalism many sectors are marginal related to the dominant productive processes over practices which are approved by the social system and also guarantee its reproduction. (Salvia and Chavez Molina, 2007).
Family strategy concept allows the study of these practices as conditioned by its insertion in the social structure and by rescuing the internal dynamics of domestic organization. Micro and macro reproductive processes are related because family strategies choose satisfaction through the possibilities they can get from their relations with other social agents, This net provides a possible arch of results for each practice in a defined historical context, in which people can not decide evaluating all the possibilities, and where not all the possibilities are available for all the positions in social space.
In order to obtain empirical evidence, two different observation stages were built up: food and child labor. In both stages, the State has an unavoidable role as the main regulator of poor household options. Its incidence in practices leads to understand why some unequal reproductive behaviors happen and if it is possible for social agents to act in a different way.
Qualitative investigation strategy is the best for the objectives proposed since the main role of meaning that social agents assign to their practices. This does not mean that numerical information providing by statistics sources should not be combined in order to understand reproductive mechanisms of inequality.
Data obtained let keep the initial hypothesis. In food strategies, family decisions let people cover the calories needed daily, but they put in danger the nutrients components of diets. In same direction, changes in meals, blowout or unfeeding are examples of mechanisms through which social agents are trapped in reproductive practices.
As far as child labor is concerned, this kind of strategy in which a child works implies efficiency in covering material and symbolical immediate needs (reaching to reproduce existence conditions) but in the other hand, it reproduces social relations related to inequality, because these children workers limit their own future possibilities. In this way, child labor is “invisible” (out of legal frame) as begging and domestic labor. In both cases children do not work alone, neither in the street, nor in families’ nets. Child work keeps its economic side (because it frees adult handwork or because children are secondary handwork) that lets facing the situation not only without changing social production relations but also reinforcing them.
In both stages, the lack of options, a temporal register as perpetual present (without future), contradictions between autonomy and dependence in satisfying everyday needs, the necessity of articulating family interests taking into account that life courses which have been successful but could not get over poverty and the State action without complete recognition of these elements, allow the comprehension of a micro social mechanism which produces and reproduces new inequalities.
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales