GLOBAL WOMEN

Global Women

Global Women

Q1: What is the purpose of the sociology of poverty? What does it mean to treat poverty as a social problem? What are the practical applications of the sociology of poverty?

Ans:

Poverty

Poverty is a global problem. Using the U.S. dollar as a hallmark for living standards, approximately 2.8 billion people live on less than 2 dollars a day, and almost 1.2 billion live on less than 1 dollar a day. Given the differing living standards across nations, a dollar has different weight depending on context. But in the United States, how much does it cost to live adequately? That is, what is the minimum one should expect to have to provide for adequate housing, food, health care, and transportation for instance? And more importantly, what measure should one use to indicate when an individual or family has fallen below these standards of acceptable living? To understand poverty in the United States, it is important to address (a) the consequences of poverty, (b) the definitions of poverty, and (c) counseling and psychology's understandings of poverty and social class and classism in relation to poverty and future research and practice.

One of the biggest challenges to the describing of poverty issues are the lack of consensus about defining what poverty is at any given time or place. Typically, poverty is related to economics and low income levels. Many countries have a government-set “poverty line,” a baseline amount of total family income, and any family or household making less than this income is considered to be living “below the poverty line.”

However, there is agreement that poverty is also defined by cultural perceptions and, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen suggests, includes deprivation of political, economic, and social rights resulting in and exaggerated by public shame. Added to this conundrum is that the poor are often socially ostracized. The United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Human Development Index adds life expectancy and education level to its dimensions of poverty.

Regardless of exact definition, the poverty line is a standard that shifts over time and place. The ways in which it shifts and the criteria for shifts are continuously at issue. More specifically, there is considerable argument about whether or not the criteria and shifts should automatically respond to the shifts in community living standards. In the United States, the federal poverty line as of late 2007 had not shifted (except for inflation) in four decades and has been considerably criticized.

Q2: How does Sassen define the concept of “global cities”? Explain the major pull factors that prompt private households, small businesses, and corporations to hire transnational migrants. What is your assessment of the growing demand for so-called “women's work” in the global North?

Ans:

Global Cities

The concept of the global city typically refers to those cities that function as command and control sites in coordinating transnational finance, production, and information processes integral to the global economy. As an object of analysis, the global city highlights the importance of spatial analysis and the local for the study of globalization and ...