What is poverty and how can it be tackled? Taking the Third Way out of its narrow party political context, this book argues that it is necessary to harness work beyond employment in order to pave a Third Way beyond capitalism and socialism. The outcome is a thought-provoking new approach towards combating poverty.
Poverty and the Third Way uncovers how New Labour's employment-focussed approach causes, rather than resolves, poverty. Searching for another approach, the authors find the seeds of an alternative 'Third Way' in radical European social democratic and ecological thought which seeks to transcend capitalism and socialism by developing work beyond employment. Exploring the reasons why such an approach is needed and how it can be implemented, the authors transcend the 'there is no alternative' to capitalism school of thought dominant in many advanced economies by providing a clearly marked route map of the way towards a post-capitalist economy.
Part I Rationales for a Third Way Approach
2. The Problem of Full-Employment
3. The Informalisation of the Advanced Economies
4. Discourses on Informal Work and Their Implications
Part II Examining Poverty: Household Coping Capabilities and Practices
5. Coping Capabilities
6. Coping Practices
7. Developing Household Coping Capabilites: Problems and Prospects
Part III Tackling Poverty: A Third Way Approach
8. Towards a 'Civil-ised' Society: from Full-Employment to 'Full-Engagement'
9. The New Mutualism: a Fourth Sector Approached
10. The 'Working Citizen': Top-Down Initiatives
11. Conclusions
Biography
Colin C. Williams is reader in Economic Geography at the University of Leicester.
Jan Windebank is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and Associate Fellow of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at the University of Sheffield.
'The authors' creative way of articulating, developing and presenting their idea deserves attention and should provoke debate among intellectuals.' - Rathi Kanta Kumbhar, Development and Change
