Sociology of Poverty and Sociological Assessment of the Poverty Alleviation Program

Officially, the poverty line in Russia is tied to the subsistence minimum but from the sociological point of view, its linkage to the subsistence minimum is arbitrary. The subject of the research is social boundaries, social space of poverty. The purpose of the research was to formulate the principles of an approach to overcoming poverty as a social phenomenon. The paper attempts to outline the social space of poverty as an attribute (stigma) by which a person is placed in a specific exclusion space that forms the specific ethos of poverty and the poor man’s habitus preventing any attempts to climb out of poverty. Belonging to this space institutionalizes the poor as a “kind of people”, which is reflected in specific mechanisms of referencing and self-referencing of poverty expressed in the life-purpose deficits. “Combating poverty” implies the creation of participation institutions through which relations and processes of social differentiation, social participation and reference are withdrawn from the dictate of economic factors. It is concluded that the poverty alleviation program should take into account the social limology of poverty and include the development of participation practices and institutions that exclude the stigmatization of poverty and the transformation of the poor into the “kind of people”. Such institutions should provide the poor with ample opportunities to participate in the formation of elites (professional, intellectual, and political). It is particularly important that children, teenagers and young people have access to such practices and institutions because each generation produces and reproduces the “social topology” in which poverty forms a specific “exclusion space”.