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The study investigates the level of empowerment of women entrepreneurs in Lima, the barriers and constraints they face when starting and running a micro business. Using the empowerment framework by Alsop, Bertelsen and Holland and the Asset Vulnerability Framework by Moser, the study analyses the agency and the structure opportunities in the context of entrepreneurship. The use of mixed methodology, survey, interviews and a focus group, allowed the analysis of the level of assets and the access to the structure opportunities. The research suggests that most of the women entrepreneurs have a low level of assets, especially the education, psychological and social assets, but the opportunity to make a choice exists, supported by the financial system. However, the social norms are the informal institutions that create the barriers and limit that women use the choice of being entrepreneurs. Three degrees of empowerment could be found with the data analysed. The first degree shows there is an opportunity to start a business supported by the microfinance institutions. The second degree of empowerment measures if women can use this opportunity and it was found that there are two groups of women, the passive agents and the active agents. The first group starts a business based on adaptive preferences which perpetuate the unequal power relations between men and women and see the business only as a survival strategy. The second group uses their agency and the structure opportunities to accumulate more assets and challenge power relations. They are transforming the roles of women and using the business as an empowering strategy. The third degree of empowerment concentrates the entrepreneurs who are achieving the desired results. Most of them are receiving incomes that allow them to cover necessary expenses. Microbusiness can be a mean of empowerment and transform the social relations; however, for a group of women the removal of patriarchal values is still critical at the three levels of empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study examines how and why Detroit-area credit-constrained members of the urban poor relied on owners/employees of corner convenience stores, known as "party stores," for accessing short-term, interest-free informal credit services. Findings indicate that for these informants, informal credit at party stores functioned as a low- or no-cost alternative to formal credit and high-cost fringe banking services such as payday lenders, both of which were inaccessible and/or cost-prohibitive for most informants. These data contribute empirically to a growing body of research on credit-constrained individuals, including "credit invisibles," by exploring this population's use of informal credit mechanisms. Findings also make a theoretical contribution by highlighting the importance of resource exchange networks through which members of the urban poor build strong yet disposable social ties and form fictive kinships in order to respond to economic shocks, combat food insufficiency, and survive economic destitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which characteristics enable a family to move out and up from an impoverished urban neighborhood? This paper examines the local environments of neighborhoods and proposes a new framework to conceptualize the link between social context and resources as they relate to upward and residential mobility. The proposed framework addresses a paradox, where the same resources that can help a family move out of an impoverished place can also hinder mobility in complex ways. Additionally, we argue that this new framework may help researchers understand residential and upward mobility at both the individual and community levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the ascendance of prisoner reentry programming represents at once the long standing collusion between social welfare and criminal justice actors and at the same time, a formal reconfiguration of the state, altering its scope, reach and consequence in the lives of the urban poor. I advance the term "Carceral Devolution" to capture a shift in poverty policy taking place on the geographic and conceptual level. Geographically, prisoner rehabilitation has moved from within prison walls into low income communities of color. Conceptually, reentry programs employ a variant of human capital investment that seeks to fill deficits and "transform" dependent former prisoners into "productive" economic actors through processes of cognitive reframing and non-cognitive skills enhancement. I present data drawn from a two year ethnographic study of prisoner reentry programming on Chicago's west side, demonstrating the ways in which prisoner reentry strategies articulate with larger social policy processes, and contribute to the ways that race, poverty, and criminality are embodied and understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effect of experimental and participatory public policies in urban poverty of youth and the linkage between poverty and the access to public structures and places for young people. In this paper we will focus on the Italian city of Milan. Particularly in the first part of the paper we will analyse the demographic evolution in the different zones of Milan in the last ten years considering both the distribution of the cohorts of generations both the presence of strangers. In the second part we will deal structures for young people in Milan and how they are distributed between areas. In this part, as well as highlighting the differences between the central and peripheral areas, we will also help to identify a relationship between the joints of the cohorts of younger generations from some areas of Milan and the endowment, or underprovision of school facilities or recreational activities. In the third part we will make a suggestion on the instrument of generational mainstreaming as an instrument of policy for the City of Milan to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of interventions for young people, intervene in counteracting social exclusion and to be able to decrease the flow of people out of Milan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the importance of social service organizations as a source of social capital for extremely poor persons has recently received increased attention, there has been little study of what characteristics make certain social service organizations more effective sources of social capital than others. I compare the organizational cultures of two transitional housing programs for the homeless—one in Los Angeles and the other in Tokyo—to assess the aspects of these cultures that make one much more effective than the other as sources of social capital. I find that two dimensions of organizational culture, service richness and flexibility, promote client trust of staff and thus the mobilization of expressive and instrumental resources important for exits from homelessness. My findings demonstrate not only that social service organizations are an important source of social capital in efforts to exit poverty in contemporary urban areas, but also that characteristics of an organization's culture can affect the level of trust clients place in these organizations, and thus the extent to which they can effectively mobilize resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Why some neighborhoods grow and other decline in Greater Lisbon? We propose that despite the inner city desertification, the Greater Lisbon experienced a gentrification and displacement process with tremendous consequences in terms of social cohesion, community building and sprawl. The city of Lisbon is a different case concerning the other 17 conurbations in the same Metropolitan Area. Consequently we report data from two different situations - inner city and outer city (the suburbs). This paper describes the population evolution in Greater Lisbon in the last decade and the social analyses of urban phenomena. The research hypothesis is to investigate why people migrate in Greater Lisbon. This question is approached with census data and multi regression analyses. According to the different independent variables analysed - family, housing, immigration from African Countries of Portuguese Language and employment in tertiary sector (by decreasing importance) globally they explain 54% variability of dependent variable. In terms of causability family and migration has a negative effect in terms of entrances of new residents. The results confirm that the Portuguese cities bear similarity to the situation to the American and British ones (Wilson and Power 2000) people have been moving away from the inner city to suburban developments. Urban neighbourhoods can break down if social exclusion, segregation, desertification and displacement are not introduced as things to be reversed in Portuguese urban agenda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of writings on male prostitution focus almost exclusively upon the sexual aspects of their lives (the sexual orientation of the workers, the nature of their sexual exploitation, etc.); meanwhile, studies which examine the dynamics of male street life more generally typically focus upon the aggression of its most violent participants. Where investigations of male sex work generally fail to scrutinize the dynamics of poverty or street-level violence, studies of men identified via their violence typically fail to document situations in which locally hegemonic versions of masculinity are either undermined or compromised. Both academic and popular accounts thus present two divergent foci, one upon the sexualized victim status of the (white) runaway prostitute, and another upon the non-sexualized predator status of the (non-white) gang member, a dichotomy which directly supports the varying deployment of either social services or incarceration. Using insights from this comparison as a springboard, I rely upon both a critical literature review and my own ethnographic research in San Francisco to detail the ways in which various tropes-of agency, vulnerability, and deservedness-are utilized by service agencies and male street-based sex workers in order to further their disparate agendas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the findings from my Determinants of School Success study-a qualitative comparative analysis of six elementary schools in low-income, immigrant neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Despite having similar neighborhood profiles in terms of socio-economic factors, three of these elementary schools have high standardized test score achievement in literacy and numeracy, and the other three low scores. Utilizing in-depth interviews and participant observation in these schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, I explain the factors that promote or hinder academic achievement. These include the successful implementation of curriculum, basic-needs, training, literacy, and other programs as well as programs that address the basic needs of students. The research also uncovers some of the deleterious consequences of education funding cutbacks in the province of British Columbia. Finally, I consider some of the theoretical implications of these findings in terms of the debates in sociology of education, segmented assimilation theory, urban poverty, and stratification. The paper concludes that high academic achievement in literacy and numeracy is possible to achieve in public schools serving low-income, immigrant urban populations, if the government provides the resources for teachers and students to succeed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The livelihood framework suggests that poverty is not only a product of material deprivation but of a set of interlocking factors, including physical weakness, social isolation, vulnerability and powerlessness. The paper aims to explain how the poor cope with urban life though their household strategies in reference to livelihood framework. Data have been collected from five hundred urban poor living in three different neighbourhoods in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, by using a structured questionnaire. The study reveals that the poor face extreme poverty and vulnerability in terms of their economic and social conditions and cope with these adverse situations having adopted different strategies in their households. The paper argues that the urban poor adopt such strategies through their household to survive in the city as they have limited access to the existing economic and social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philadelphia faces a "new" poverty in the neoliberal era, shaped by the interconnecting forces of postindustrial decline, welfare state retrenchment, and the devolution of public authority. Among the most prominent street-level poverty survival configurations to have emerged in the fallout of these trends is the Kensington recovery house movement. Recovery houses can best be described as a collective housing strategy for drug addicts and alcoholics located in the city's poorest and most heavily blighted zones. The purpose of this paper is to explain ethnographically the ways in which the recovery house movement forges links between the survival mechanisms of poor subjects and the projects of the declining welfare state in postindustrial Philadelphia. Using Foucault's notion of governmentality as a conceptual frame, ethnographic research was conducted on the internal strategies by which recovery houses refashion poor subjects into recovering citizens. This analysis illustrates how recovering subjects have become able partners of, and facilitators for, the projects of the postwelfare state. Secondarily, the paper exposes a variegated regime of regulation and tolerance among city elites. This analysis elucidates the ways that recovery houses have become situated within the fabric of Philadelphia's social service sector as a mechanism of the "shadow" welfare state. These factors, taken together, help to explain the persistence and proliferation of an illegal, unlicensed, and irregular form of housing settlement located conspicuously in areas of spatially concentrated poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of self-identification among immigrant day laborers on the street corners of San Francisco, focusing in particular on the ways in which they seek and affirm dignity in the face of rampant stigmatization, ever-present uncertainty and poverty. Drawing upon interviews and ethnographic data, it presents evidence that many who work in this informal labor market maintain a sense of dignity and claim their moral worth by fashioning themselves as entrepreneurs, jacks-of-all trades and/or role models, taking pride in the seemingly unparalleled autonomy this work affords them as well as in the skill and work ethic their work purportedly exemplifies. These findings challenge popular perceptions about immigrant day laborers as well as existing scholarship on the relationship between work and dignity among the urban subproletariat. This paper furthermore argues that attempts to affirm this dignified status come all too often at the expense of others. Many of these street corner day laborers engage in a variety of practices of social distancing and differentiation, deflecting stigma onto other "undesirables" who share the same social space and joining in the dominant discourse of denouncing those who undeservingly profit from social assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I extend a model of behavioral adaptation in stressful situations—self-efficacy theory—to the social world of urban neighborhoods to help explain the association between neighborhood disadvantage and individual violence. In particular, I propose the concept of street efficacy, or the perceived ability to avoid violent confrontations and to be safe in one's neighborhood, as a mechanism connecting neighborhood disadvantage to individual youth violence. Building on Bandura's theory on the sources of self-efficacy (1997), I hypothesize that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood reduces adolescents' confidence in their ability to avoid violence. Adolescents with low levels of street efficacy are less likely to expend significant effort to find ways to avoid violence in their everyday lives by selecting environments and peer groups that reduce the likelihood of violent confrontations. Empirical tests using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods provide strong evidence that neighborhood concentrated disadvantage directly reduce adolescents' confidence in their ability to avoid violence, while individual-level measures of adolescents' exposure to violence and personal victimization also reduce street efficacy. Further, street efficacy is a robust predictor of violent behavior in conservative models, though it only partially mediates the association between neighborhood disadvantage and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]