These stigmas shape policy outcomes, ensuring endless scapegoating, dehumanization, and destroys value to life. These representations in policymaking have empirically had direct profound effects on policy.

The notion of ‘the poor’ as Other is used here to signify the many ways in which ‘the poor’ are treated as different from the rest of society. The capital ‘O’ denotes its symbolic weight. The notion of ‘Othering’ conveys how this is not an inherent state but an ongoing process animated by the ‘non-poor’. It is a dualistic process of differentiation and demarcation, by which the line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – between the more and the less powerful – and through which social distance is established and maintained (Beresford and Croft, 1995; Riggins, 1997). It is not a neutral line, for it is imbued with negative value judgements that construct ‘the poor’ variously as a source of moral contamination, a threat, an ‘undeserving’ economic burden, an object of pity or even as an exotic species. It is a process that takes place at different levels and in different fora: from everyday social relations through interaction with welfare officials and professionals to research, the media the legal system and policy-making (Schram, 1997). Valerie Polakow, for example, describes how, in the US, schools, teacher training institutions and research institutes are all ‘implicated in the framing of poor children as other, and in institutionalizing the legitimacy of their otherness status’ (1993: 150, emphasis in original). Othering is closely associated with, and reinforced by, a number of related social processes such as stereotyping, stigmatization and the more neutral categorization. Stereotyping is a discriminatory form of labeling, which attains a taken-for-granted quality and serves to portray particular social groups as homogenous. It is a discursive strategy that magnifies and distorts difference (Riggins, 1997). Michael Pickering writes that ‘stereotypes operate as socially exorcistic rituals in maintaining the boundaries of normality and legitimacy’ (2001: 45). He suggests that normally ‘stereotyping attempts to translate cultural difference into Otherness, in the interests of order, power and control’ (2001: 204). In contrast, in the case of ‘the poor’. Stereotyping functions to create cultural difference and thereby the Other. At the same time, as we saw in chapter 3, those groups who are more likely to be poor – women, racialized minorities and disabled people – are themselves groups that are frequently Othered. Processes of classification and categorization effected by governmental and legal institutions, the media and social scientists, although analytically distinct from stereotyping, can draw on stereotypes and thereby reinforce them. These processes can have implications for how ‘the poor’ are treated by fellow citizens as well as by powerful classificatory institutions (Edelman, 1977). As we shall see, the bifurcation of ‘the poor’ into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, each with their associated stereotypes, has had a profound impact on their treatment by the welfare state and its antecedents. The label of ‘undeserving’ poor has been negatively charged by the process of stigmatization, which, historically and today, has had implications for how society sees ‘the poor’, how they see themselves and how they are treated by welfare institutions. Erving Goffman’s classic text referred to stigma as ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting’ and to the belief that ‘the person with stigma is not quite human’ (1968: 13, 15). In this way, stigma contributes to the dehumanization involved in Othering (Oliver, 2001). Othering and associated processes such as stigmatization have various effects on ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the relations between the two. With regard to ‘us’, Othering helps to define the self and to affirm identity (Sibley, 1995). In contrast, it divests ‘them’ of ‘their social and cultural identities by diminishing them to their stereotyped characteristics’ and by casting them as silent objects (Pickering, 2001: 73; Oliver, 2001). In doing so, it denies them their complex humanity and subjectivity. Othering operates as ‘a strategy of symbolic exclusion’, which makes it easier for people to blame the Other for their own and society’s problems (Pickering, 2001: 48). The Othering of ‘the poor’ also acts as a warning to others; poverty thereby represents a ‘spectre – a socially constituted object of wholesome horror’ (Dean with Melrose, 1999: 48). As regards the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Othering legitimates ‘our’ privilege – rooted in superiority – and ‘their’ exploitation and oppression – rooted in inferiority – together with the socio-economic inequalities that underlie poverty (Riggins, 1997; Young, 1999). This underlines the ways in which power relationships are inscribed in the process of Othering. It suggests that Othering may be most marked where inequality is sharpest. An additional effect of Othering is that it denies the Other the 'right to name and define themselves' (Pickering, 2001: 73). The power 'to name one's Self' has been described as 'a fundamental human right' (Riggins, 1997: 8) and as a key 'political resource' (Silver, 1996: 135). Naming 'the poor' is an exercise in power, for 'we' invariably name 'them', even when sympathetically (Polakow, 1993). Naming or labelling of the Other has symbolic, cultural, psychological and material effects. 'How we name things affects how we behave towards them. The name, or label, carries with it expectations' (Clarke and Cochrane, 1998: 26). Likewise 'we' create images of 'them - the poor', which have a similarly powerful effect on attitudes and actions. 'The politics of representation' is therefore a crucial element in the politics of poverty (hooks, 1994: 169). As we shall see, it has taken on greater salience today as some groups of people in poverty, following the disabled people's movement, are resisting the ways they are represented by the wider society, in recognition of the power of language and images. It is through language and images that the discourses that frame how we perceive and act in the social world are articulated. Othering can thus be understood as a discursive practice, which shapes how the 'non-poor' think and talk about and act towards 'the poor' at both an interpersonal and an institutional level. Although it does not represent the only available poverty discourse, its impact on policy and the practice of officials and professionals has been profound in some countries, notably the UK and US. Moreover, welfare policy and administration can themselves be understood as a discursive and symbolic practice, which constructs 'the poor' and the nature of the problem of poverty in various ways (Schram, 1995; Saraceno, 2002). A focus on discourse thus helps to illuminate the relationship between the material and relational/symbolic dimensions of poverty and the ways in which the fibres of power are interwoven through them.