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The ‘Deserving’ and the ‘Undeserving’: Practice in an Urban, Local Social Security Office*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

L.E.A. Howe
L.E.A. Howe
Affiliation:
Research Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University of Belfast.
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Abstract

This article describes the processes of assessment and administration of certain aspects of the supplementary benefit scheme in a social security office in Northern Ireland. Based on evidence obtained observing staff-claimant interaction and interviews with over fifty unemployed claimants, the analysis attempts to demonstrate that a combination of resource constraints, staff attitudes and beliefs, and claimant tactics gives rise to practices which sustain and reproduce the categories ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ at the very same time that staff insist that such practices are actually intended to vitiate this distinction.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 49 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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