Poverty's Bonds: Power and Agency in the Social Relations of Welfare

Based on interviews with a sampling of low-income people and those providing services to them, Patric Burman draws from front-line accounts about the modes of giving, receiving and acting in the modern welfare state. The more general concepts -- power, agency, pauperism and poverty -- draw from the later work of Michel Foucault and his students on govermentality, as well as other sources in interpretive and critical social science.