When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.

William J. Wilson. New York: Knopf, 1996.322 pp. $27.50.

Reviewed by

Daryl Michael Scott Columbia University 

Since the Great Depression social scientists have believed that long-term unemployment results in tragedies for individuals and families. When work disappears, social disorganization and perhaps personal disorganization are thought to follow. Policy makers have assumed that most Americans will not tolerate high unemployment and that social and political upheaval would ensue as people struggle to hold their lives together. Decades of relative prosperity have meant that the government has not feared political instability arising from unemployment, but in recent years job creation has replaced higher wages as a central political issue.

The consequences of long-term unemployment are so well understood that William J. Wilson's When Work Disappears hardly seems necessary. Yet it has ever been the case that experts must submit special evidence to demonstrate that general sociological theories and findings apply to blacks as well as whites. While conservatives have never convinced white Americans that their problems are personal rather than social, they have convinced them and other groups that the problems in black life are caused by black folks themselves - if not by too much state assistance.

For over thirty years, ever since the urban crisis of the 1960s, Wilson has shouldered the special burden of showing how sociological processes apply to blacks. Laboring in the post-Moynihan era when liberals eschewed black pathology arguments and conservatives promoted them, he has sought to discuss social disorganization without stigmatizing the poor. In The Declining Significance of Race, he skirted the question of pathology altogether and focused on the rising class divide. In The Truly Disadvantaged, the issue of social disorganization loomed in the background as he highlighted the structural causes of the urban poor's condition. In this newer work he attempts to explain how high rates of unemployment create social disorganization and problems in the inner city.

The inheritor of the Chicago School's tradition of urban ecology and empirical research, Wilson offers an understanding of social disorganization that varies widely from that of his predecessors. For the Chicago School, social disorganization was an attendant aspect of migrations, not of joblessness. Despite employment, immigrants and black migrants lived in social environments that reflected the fact that they had been uprooted. Traditional social control mechanisms did not function properly and individuals had to scramble to restore order to their lives and communities. Individually, the immigrants escaped socially disorganized communities when they experienced social and geographical mobility. Throughout the interwar years, E. Franklin Frazier, the leading urban ecologist who studied blacks, believed economic opportunity would also lift the black masses from the disorganizing forces of migration. During the 1950s, Frazier began to doubt that: the poorest blacks would be saved. Unfortunately, he died before he could undertake his last study of the black family in urban America.

The new urban poverty - or the disorganized inner-city neighborhoods of our time is not a consequence of migration, but of joblessness in the inner city, Wilson maintains. He views postwar black communities as institutional ghettos, a term he borrows from the historian Alan Spear. Prior to the 1970s, the institutional ghettos, Wilson believes, were not idyllic zones devoid of poverty and crime. Yet they had a high degree of social organization. He argues that the institutional ghettos provided jobs and had institutions that served as foundations of social health. It was not until changes in the economy shrank the employment opportunities for inner-city blacks, particularly black men, that social organization began to break down. To make matters worse, working- and middle-class blacks moved away, leaving in their wake high levels of social disorganization. Developments in the 1970s, he believes, led to the social chaos that reached unfathomable levels in the mid-1980s.

For Wilson, the truly disadvantaged who inhabit the disorganized, jobless ghettos face dim prospects. Public transportation often fails to provide access to many job locations, and employers of all races harbor stereotypes about poor blacks, especially black men, and often refuse them work. Contrary to what many think, Wilson does not depict inner-city residents as having a culture of poverty or damaged personalities. Instead he writes of "ghetto-related behaviors." In the tradition of the Chicago School, he subscribes to the belief that people do not need to be overhauled; they simply need opportunity and a new social environment. Recognizing the limits of individual agency, Wilson believes that the state must intervene with social programs, especially job creation.

Wilson concedes that his policy proposals are not politically viable, but he has taken pains to keep them in sync with the average American's view of how social policy should work. Recognizing that most Americans do not support many special programs for the poor or blacks, he advocates universal programs that will disproportionately aid the needy. Universal health care will serve all but would be a boon to low-wage workers, and most Americans might endorse tax credits rather' than direct assistance for the poor. At the heart of his recommendations is a return to a New Deal-style employment program that will provide employment for temporarily displaced workers as well as the poor.

Wilson follows Daniel Patrick Moynihan in sounding the cry about the consequences of joblessness among black men. While often viewed as a great prognosticator, Moynihan long ago recognized that the failure of social policy occurred well before the Great Society. By the mid-1960s, the effects of joblessness were manifest. Despite improvement in employment rates for blacks overall, a segment of the black community seemed incapable of taking advantage of America's abundance without state assistance. An advocate of the traditional patriarchal family and an adherent to socialization theory, Moynihan understood social problems as stemming from the way in which the previous generation was reared. In his view, the urban crisis of the 1960s was a product of the disappearance of work for black men prior to that fateful decade and of the effects it had on the rearing of their children in single-family homes. Frazier probably would have agreed.

One need not accept Moynihan's matriarchy hypothesis to endorse the general view that social problems are not born overnight and that past policy failures will plague a nation for years to come. The twenty-year difference in Wilson's and Moynihan's understanding of when the social organization of black communities deteriorated is no small matter and reveals the glaring weakness in Wilson's 'work. According to Wilson's calendar, the black community lived in an age of relative stability during the 1950s and 1960s, as evidenced by the employment of most black men. Yet it was that period that witnessed the rise of a number of indexes of social disorganization. Murder rates began to spiral upward in the 1960s, not the 1970s. The suburban exodus of the black middle class took place largely in the 1980s, but they fled the institutional ghettos for other urban neighborhoods as best they could during the 1960s. In Chicago many were fleeing the rapid expansion of the super gangs, whose rise is perhaps the best index of social disorganization. In Chicago, they had their origins in the 1950s and mid-1960s, and were powerful (if negative) institutions by the late 1960s. Indeed, the Black Stone Rangers' leader received an invitation to President Nixon's inauguration. The ghettos deteriorated in the 1950s, and social organization collapsed in the sixties. Relying too much on employment rates as an index of social cohesion, Wilson begins his analysis a generation after the moment of crisis.

The process by which social organization diminished was not only more rapid and continuous than Wilson suggests, but also more complex. Wilson argues that the new urban poverty areas, or jobless ghettos, developed from institutional ghettos. But many of the Chicago communities he writes about, including Woodlawn on the South Side and Lawndale on the West, never experienced the institutional ghetto. Instead of moving from white communities, to institutional ghettos, and finally to jobless ghettos, Woodlawn and Lawndale moved rapidly from a white neighborhood to a jobless ghetto in a single generation. Whites fled, and the working- and middle-class blacks who followed them did not stay long. Thus, there were few institutions and black businesses with deep roots. We should not be surprised to discover that the premier super gang, the Rangers, was founded in Woodlawn rather than Bronzeville, the classic institutional ghetto that follows Wilson's model.

If the 1950s rather than the 1970s was the crisis decade, then Wilson is probably wrong for dismissing the migration as a disorganizing force. Chicago's Lawndale was still white until the postwar migration, but by the mid-1960s Martin Luther King selected it to highlight the blight of Northern black ghettos. The point is not to argue that migrants had a defective culture, an error made by Nicholas Lemann, but to suggest that urban America failed to provide adequate opportunity and training for too many who were forced off the land in the postwar era. It also suggests that communities can tolerate a lot less joblessness than even Wilson believes.