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629 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2010)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0629 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Reconsidering Culture and Poverty By MARIO LUIS SMALL, DAVID J. HARDING, and MICHELE LAMONT Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. An example is Prudence Carter (2005), who, based on interviews with poor minority students, argues that whether poor children will work hard at school depends in part on their cultural beliefs about the differences between minori- ties and the majority. Annette Lareau (2003), after studying poor, working-class, and middle- class families, argues that poor children may do worse over their lifetimes in part because their parents are more committed to natural growth than concerted cultivation as their cultural model for child rearing. Mario Small (2004), based on fieldwork in a Boston housing com- plex, argues that poor people may be reluctant to participate in beneficial community activities in part because of how they culturally perceive their neighborhoods. David Harding (2007, 2010), using survey and qualitative interview data on adolescents, argues that the sexual behavior of poor teenagers depends in part on the extent of cultural heterogeneity in their neighborhoods. Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2002), relying on the work of other scholars, argue that whether students invest in schooling depends in part on their cultural identity, wherein payoffs will differ among jocks, nerds, and burnouts. And William Julius Wilson, in his latest book (2009a), argues that culture helps explain how poor African Americans respond to the structural conditions they experience. These and other scholars have begun to explore a long-abandoned topic. The last gen- eration of scholarship on the poverty-culture relationship was primarily identified, for better or worse, with the culture of poverty model of DOI: 10.1177/0002716210362077 ANNALS, AAPSS, 629, May 2010 6

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