Abstract
In this article, we examine how eighty-one participants in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment discursively construct and make sense of their own and others’ poverty in face-to-face interviews. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we identified three discursive strategies the interviewees use to engage with and challenge culturally dominant poverty discourses. First, poverty was constructed as a tragic experience attributed to external causes beyond individual control, such as precarious labour markets and governmental policies. Second, poverty was managed discursively through explicit and implicit moral judgements about other welfare recipients, which also highlighted the speakers’ own moral values regarding responsibility and self-sufficiency. Third, some interviewees discursively constructed their low-income status as a personal and deliberate choice to live an intentionally modest, sustainable or ‘deviant’ lifestyle. Overall, our results reveal how ideologically controversial sociopolitical experiments create a particular argumentative context in which poverty talk is constructed.
Introduction
In this article, we examine the poverty talk of eighty-one individuals who participated in the Finnish Basic Income (BI) Experiment, which was conducted in 2017–18 by prime minister Juha Sipilä’s centre-right populist coalition government. The experiment targeted long-term recipients of unemployment benefits and was motivated by political interest in whether a BI could be used to reform the Finnish social security system and reduce so-called incentive traps (i.e. ‘welfare traps’) by encouraging working-aged unemployed participants to obtain paid employment (Kangas et al., 2021). Considering that BI’s theoretical proponents have characterised it primarily as a means of ensuring basic economic security for all, regardless of a person’s labour market engagement potential (e.g. Van Parijs, 2013), the BI Experiment’s goal is somewhat unorthodox.
Finnish policy discourse on BI has a long history largely unrelated to this experiment. For example, proponents of BI across the political spectrum argue that it would improve the social rights and income levels of people living in poverty, simplify the benefit system, enable benefit recipients to do things other than conventional work or encourage diligence among benefit recipients (Perkiö, 2020). Conversely, critics of BI in Finland and other Nordic countries argue that it conflicts with a normative and foundational idea that underpins the Nordic welfare state model, namely, the ‘work ethos’, according to which everyone has a duty to utilise one’s right to work to contribute to the financing of the comprehensive, universalistic welfare system (c.f. Kettunen, 2001).
Moreover, not all Finnish proponents of this work ethos share the same views concerning the reasons for or solutions to poverty. Despite Finland’s institutionalised welfare state solutions, current discourses on poverty are significantly polarised, politically and ideologically, as right-wing ideologies generally frame people living in poverty as undeserving of (state) social support, while left-wingers adhere to a more universal or rights-based approach to social assistance that provides temporary support until recipients obtain gainful employment (Vuorenlinna et al., 2023). Thus, contemporary Finnish poverty discourses echo the age-old deservingness discourses identified in various other welfare state regimes (Tarkiainen, 2022). These often conflicting views on poverty, the role of work and the BI’s desirability as a solution to related problems, together with the outcomes of the experiment and the public and media discourses they generated, contextualise the interviewees’ discursive work.
The Finnish BI Experiment was the world’s first nationwide and government-backed randomised controlled trial (RCT) in which, over a 2-year period, 2000 randomly selected unemployment benefit recipients were given an unconditional monthly payment of 560 euros instead of the means-tested unemployment benefit (of the same amount). Based on qualitative face-to-face interviews with BI recipients, we reported on the various well-being and employment effects of this experiment, as accounted for by the interviewees after the experiment (Blomberg et al., 2021). For some participants, the mandatory, untaxed, unconditional monthly payment provided a sense of security and psychological ease, which was constructed by participants as meaningful in terms of meeting their basic needs and everyday survival. For others, it enhanced their ability to accept short-term and part-time work, which allowed them to secure better living standards, while some participants reported nonexistent or even negative effects. The modest increased level of employment and the experiment itself received widespread national and international media and political attention, which positioned the participants as objects of strong moral and judgement expectations. According to the participants themselves, the BI Experiment was represented in the media as a failure and its evidence for whether BI ‘works’ was used for tactical partisan purposes (Blomberg et al., 2024).
We begin the article with an introduction to the previous literature on poverty discourses, after which we present our data and methodology. We then introduce three key means through which the interviewees constructed poverty. Finally, the conclusion contextualises the empirical results within the existing poverty discourse literature.
Previous literature on poverty discourse
Traditionally, poverty discourses have been constructed within political, medical, academic, professional and charitable discourses by those with direct access to social, cultural and political power, and by people who do not experience poverty themselves and to whom poverty is an object of concern about which the ‘non-poor’ should do something (Flaherty, 2008: 13; Jeppesen, 2009: 488, 492). Previous research recognises this problem-centredness as poverty is often socially constructed as a phenomenon with several negative material, behavioural, psychological, familial, societal and cultural consequences (Loix and Pepermans, 2009). Poverty can, for example, be associated with flawed and irresponsible consumption habits and lifestyles (Paterson, 2020: 72–73; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013) or with physical manifestations, such as a lack of cleanliness (Cohen, 1997; Dean, 1992: 85; Devine, 2006: 971; Flaherty, 2008: 128; Jarosz and Lawson, 2002: 18). For example, the American discourse on rural white poverty centres on an image of whites who are ‘resistant to changing’ their class status and cleaning up their ‘trashy’ lifestyles (Jarosz and Lawson, 2002).
In previous literature, poverty has been associated with several other intersecting policy discourses, such as intergenerationality (Devine, 2006), medicalisation (Hansen et al., 2014), and asset building (Feldman and Schram, 2019). These types of poverty discourses are not limited to policy and science but are also reproduced in the popular cultural imagination (Jarosz and Lawson, 2002; Tarkiainen, 2022).
The existing literature indicates that, as a linguistic construction, poverty is often spoken into being through the discursive negotiation of in-group and out-group identities, including stories of the self and others (Paterson, 2020). When discussing poverty, people might deny their own poverty by, for example, claiming that there are people ‘worse off’ than them or not describing themselves as poor (Cohen, 1997; Dean, 1992: 82, 85; Flaherty, 2008: 120; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013: 289–290). Such distinctions between degrees of poverty have been made in relation to ideas about ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries and the extreme and ‘real’ forms of poverty experienced by people who exist ‘elsewhere’ either geographically (Flaherty, 2008: 111; Paterson, 2020: 80) or temporally, including past personal experiences of poverty (Dean, 1992: 84; Flaherty, 2008: 112).The key discursive mechanism identified in previous research deals with the desire to create distance from the stigmatic label of poverty by participating in ‘othering’ (Chase and Walker, 2013).
However, poverty can also be constructed by stressing one’s normality (Dean, 1992: 84), ordinariness and averageness (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013: 299), as well as one’s self-sufficiency, hard work and entrepreneurial spirit (Cohen, 1997; Feldman and Schram, 2019). Thus, when talking about poverty, people are often required to perform their own deservingness and responsible conduct (Tarkiainen, 2022). For example, in the United Kingdom, Flaherty’s (2008: 106) interviewees, who had experienced poverty, talked about the incompetence or personal failings of others living in poverty, including drinking, drug abuse and laziness. Conversely, in their own cases, the interviewees associated their problems with the incompetence of work and welfare agencies or the lack of available paid work. Consequently, the emerging discourses changed depending on whether people were talking about their circumstances or those of others. While poverty is often blamed on social and structural factors, including prejudice, capitalism, the welfare system and immigration (Cohen, 1997), speakers also locate solutions to poverty within individuals by admitting personal responsibility for having ‘messed up’ their lives by making poor choices (Pemberton et al., 2016: 25–26).
Additionally, some individuals resist and reject hegemonic behavioural and problem-centred explanations of poverty (Pemberton et al., 2016). Specific examples of this include, for example, interviewees resisting the image that all people living in poverty are sad by claiming that they are happy despite their financial problems (Flaherty, 2008: 126). In other cases, poverty may be conceptualised as a form of anticonsumerist ethical asceticism (Helne and Hirvilammi, 2022), an intentional way of life that involves good moments and experiences of pride (Jeppesen, 2009: 488–489, 500).
Despite all this good work, no previous research has yet examined the poverty discourses of BI Experiment participants. Thus, we aim to fill this gap in the literature by analysing how participants construct their own and others’ poverty through various discursive strategies. Methodologically, we use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to illustrate how interviewees both engage with and challenge dominant and ideological poverty discourses. Our research questions are as follows: (1) How do the interviewees construct poverty? (2) What kinds of discursive strategies and linguistic resources do interviewees use when making sense of their own and others’ poverty?
Data
The data in this article were obtained from eighty-one face-to-face tape-recorded interviews conducted by our independent research group (Blomberg, Kroll and Tarkiainen) at the University of Helsinki in early 2019, just after the BI Experiment had ended and preliminary results on its modest employment effects were released. The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, responsible for evaluating the experiment, delivered our research group’s invitations to 988 experiment participants by mail. Our research design and interview schedule received ethical approval from the ethics committee of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland prior to sending the invitations. Those willing to participate in a face-to-face interview were asked to mail their consent forms directly to our research group, which was the only party with access to the interview data at any stage. Personal data transfer occurred only with the explicit consent of the BI Experiment participants. We received 106 informed consent forms, and three people employed by the project, including the first author, interviewed a total of eighty-one participants in Finnish (N = 74), Swedish (N = 4), or English (N = 3). The length of the interviews ranged from 27 minutes to 2 hours and 22 minutes. In total, we amassed 88 hours and 1 minute of recorded interview material.
The interviewees resided in various regions of Finland and were aged 27–61 years old. Their educational backgrounds ranged from vocational schooling to university degrees. Forty-two interviewees self-identified as female, thirty-eight as male and one as nonbinary. Before the experiment, all interviewees received means-tested unemployment benefits, but many also received additional benefits (e.g. housing allowance or social assistance). Regarding their personal histories, the group of interviewees was not homogenous and participants had experienced poverty in different circumstances. While some interviewees had experienced financial hardship in most of their lives, others reported a change in circumstances, such as entering poverty due to an illness or periodic unemployment. Approximately two-thirds of our interviewees reported that during the experiment, they had obtained paid employment in either short-term, on-demand, longer fixed-term or permanent positions.
Given that themes such as BI, unemployment and financial support may be stigmatising in nature, all three interviewers aimed to foster empathetic and facilitative interactions. During the interviews, participants were free to discuss any aspects of life they found meaningful and relevant, such as telling stories in which they evaluated events and people, including themselves and others. Participant anonymity was assured and interviewees were informed that they could change the subject if an uncomfortable or distressing topic arose. The interviewers employed a semistructured interview guide – composed of questions designed by our research team – to structure the interviews but did not discourage some topical deviations. On occasion, while avoiding summarising statements, interviewers encouraged in-depth answers through follow-up questions.
During the interviews, which were conducted at a location of the participants’ choosing (e.g. homes, libraries), the participants were asked to discuss the sources and types of financial support they had access to before, during and after the experiment. We asked the interviewees to reflect on their past and current financial situations, among other topics and life events. Open-ended questions, such as those beginning with ‘How would you describe. . .’, were used to encourage interviewees to produce narrative accounts of their financial situation. The word poverty [Finnish: köyhyys] was not used in the interview guide due to its stigmatising connotations.
Method and analysis
Our analysis proceeded in a few stages. First, the eighty-one transcribed interviews were read, and all relevant data segments related to poverty and low income were separated into a file. We found examples of poverty talk in all interviews. Next, for closer analysis, we analysed all data segments in which interviewees talked about the current or past economic and material circumstances of themselves or others that often resulted from illness, low pay, unemployment or caring responsibilities. We observed that the interviewees made sense of poverty primarily in economic terms, with a strong focus on low income and purchasing power. Most of the interviewees described their financial situation as precarious and insecure.
In the next stage, analysing the relevant data segments revealed similarities and differences between the interviewees’ broader discursive strategies. By strategy, we refer to systematic language use and more or less intentional discursive practices adopted to achieve particular social and political aims (Wodak, 2001: 73). Our methodology is informed by CDA (Wodak, 2001), which pays close attention to the features of talk and language that emerge in interaction and acknowledges the sociopolitical contexts from which they emerge – in our case, the unique and politically contested context of sociopolitical experimentation.
As a result of our analysis, we identified three key discursive strategies interviewees used to construct poverty. First, the interviewees constructed poverty as a result of external forces beyond individual control. Second, interviewees constructed poverty as external to themselves by distancing themselves from the label of poverty and blaming others. Third, the interviewees constructed poverty as a deliberate personal choice. In a few interviews, all the identified strategies were present, which demonstrates the dilemmatic nature of poverty talk.
The data excerpts from our analysis of the interview material that are presented below were drawn from seven different interviews and translated from Finnish into English. They were selected to best illustrate the overall strategies identified and the interviewees’ various linguistic choices. After translation, the selected excerpts were subjected to detailed linguistic analysis. In translations, some semantic differences exist between English and Finnish and in a few cases, parts of the excerpts were omitted when those lines did not contain material that was relevant to the analysis.
Poverty constructed by attributing responsibility to external causes
As the most common strategy, interviewees constructed poverty as a tragedy caused by external factors beyond individual control. This construction enabled interviewees to protect themselves from personal accountability regarding the events and circumstances that caused and contributed to their financial insecurity. In this context, as a discursive resource, the interviewees located the ‘problem’ of poverty within various macropolitical factors, such as global economic crises, governmental policies, lack of jobs, housing and labour markets, legislative changes and the constraints of the welfare state. Additionally, the interviewees attributed material scarcity to discrimination and structural inequalities, such as racism, ageism and ableism. When making these claims, the interviewees acknowledged their own and others’ intersectional statuses by highlighting connections between age, gender, single-parenthood, place of residence, migrant status and level of education.
By attributing responsibility to external factors, the interviewees resisted attaching personal responsibility to their material hardship and reliance on social benefits. This type of poverty talk nevertheless captured some reflexivity and ambiguity introduced by the adoption of some degree of self-blame. This was the case when interviewees discussed the ways in which they were failing to meet certain societal and personal expectations, as seen in Extract 1.
Extract 1
From home, I got this kind of implicit or even explicit doctrine that a person must work, and if you don’t work, you are a disappointment as a human being.
Mm.
And I have never thought about it that way. I have never believed it. Plus, I belong to a generation that lives in the context of changing working life, work cultures and work environments. The type of jobs I have done didn’t even exist when I was in school. So, some of it, part of it, of those experiences of failure, I can explain away by saying that not all of it is my [laughter] fault. So, it is not my fault that I happened to graduate during a time like this. Or even that I am alive now, as we are living in a liminal stage where, for example, political atmospheres or digitalisation or changes in communication are enormous, so no one really knows what is yet going to happen. Um, and in a way, I try [laughter] not to feel like a great disappointment. Plus, I have mental health issues to the extent that, even though I am capable of working, I have been rather paralysed during my prolonged periods of unemployment, and this has led to a spiral where I feel awfully guilty about my unemployment.
Mm.
Like, I should be able to act differently. I don’t typically compare myself to others in my inner circle, but I feel conflicted that my mom paid my rent for December. I am really grateful. I think it is great that she had the opportunity to do this, but then again, I feel guilty, as I am nearly 30 years old.
Mm.
But then again [laughter], bloody hell, it isn’t my fault [laughter]. Or what else can I do?
Mm.
I can’t do anything. It isn’t my fault that my salary is so shitty.
By using the adverb ‘never’, the interviewee produces an absolute negation of a ‘work-centred’ doctrine, thus strongly distancing herself from this school of thought. The use of ‘must’ signifies a high degree of obligation to work, an idea to which the interviewee does not subscribe. Straight after, using the rhetorical device of a three-part list, she positions herself as a person who belongs to a generation that is encountering ever-changing and unpredictable labour markets. She then constructs her blamelessness for ‘being alive’ and graduating during a ‘liminal’ time ‘like this’. Again, with a three-part list and an evaluative account, she constructs ‘enormous’ external causes that influence her life, for which she cannot be held accountable and to which she needs to adapt. However, after voicing hesitation (‘um’) and attributing responsibility to these structures, she constructs some degree of self-blame by self-categorising herself as experiencing issues with ‘mental health’ and her ability to work. In particular, in her narrative, periods of unemployment are constructed as having ‘paralysed’ her, positioning herself as an agentless actor who cannot perform any other way. She then describes her experiences of financial scarcity and precariousness as ‘conflicting’ and expresses both her ‘gratefulness’ for help and the ‘guilt’ of not being able to afford her rent independently at her age, which is constructed with the adverb ‘nearly’. Throughout the extract, she uses the affective verb ‘feel’, an emotionally loaded selection of adjectives such as ‘awful’ and paralinguistic laughter to provide additional information about her emotional state when referring to her low-income status. Her laughter serves to mitigate the negative emotional experience of self-blame and ease potential tension for the interlocutor. Thus, the functions of laughter are used to both manage sensitive topic and reduce face-threat (Macqueen et al., 2024). She also poses the rhetorical question, ‘What else can I do?’ to position herself as lacking agency in her negatively evaluated situation. At the end of the excerpt, she explicitly constructs herself as not being responsible for her precarious situation or her ‘shitty salary’.
In Extract 2, the interviewee located accountability outside of herself by constructing an explanation that centres on the lack of available jobs in northern Finland as the reason for her financial insecurity. When constructing a narrative about herself and others living in northern Finland as victims, she denied that she was responsible for her status as an unemployed person and that her choices were constrained by low incomes. This perspective can be interpreted as an attempt to construct cultural and sociopolitical knowledge of Finnish geographical differences vis-à-vis poverty.
Extract 2
But if you become unemployed here in the North, it isn’t your own decision. It is—
Mm.
—You are a victim of your circumstances, as the number of jobs is reducing. All the time.
Mm.
And when people have. . . Now, we are dealing with an issue of economic policy. These days, people who belong to the middle class have less money to use these days than they previously had. For real, when the money is not circling around in the domestic market, so—
Mm.
—the service sector is suffering too. People can’t afford to use hairdressers or massage therapists or purchase things.
Mm.
So, it is far from being your own choice, I think, if you end up unemployed. And people also experience it as shameful. I took it as a timeout; for me, it was not a shame; I was just—
Mm.
—a victim of circumstances.
Here, poverty in northern Finland is constructed as the result of structural external forces that have created a situation of job scarcity. The interviewee characterises the frequency with which jobs are disappearing as occurring ‘all the time’; however, she also seemed to implicitly attribute accountability to unemployed individuals living in other parts of the country who were unemployed ‘by their own decision’. While constructing a victim status for herself and fellow Northerners, she passes responsibility to the economic policies and markets that influence the purchasing power of the middle class. She then employs this discursively as a contrasting category pair to describe financial strain. In the excerpt, the interviewee emphasises her misfortune and that of other unemployed individuals in northern Finland, through generalisation, thus exonerating them from responsibility for these structural forces by positioning the speaker and her in-group as victims with little room for personal agency. At the end of the extract, when constructing herself as occupying an agentless position in a tragic situation, the interviewee uses the hedging expressions ‘I think’ and ‘just’.
Poverty managed discursively by passing moral judgement on other welfare recipients
The interviewees also constructed poverty through the explicit and implicit moral judgement of others, particularly those who received welfare benefits. This type of differentiation was made through markers of age, experience and themes of substance abuse or unwillingness to look for a job. These judgements were managed discursively as explicit or implicit moral assessments of the self and others. Interviewees highlighted their normality when self-identifying as contradicting popular notions of poverty; that is, when they distinguished themselves from those requiring the assistance of social workers, impoverished groups whose poverty was defined by more than a lack of money or self-identified as a ‘non-typical’ unemployed person. This approach distinguishes different categories of people living in poverty by constructing another group of people whose poverty originates in individual factors, such as adopting an implicit or explicit antimigrant stance.
Such moral assessments included a mix of sympathetic and unsympathetic constructions of low-income individuals and moral judgements against certain groups of welfare beneficiaries, such as migrants. This type of discursive work was accomplished through the use of the passive voice, as seen in Extract 3.
Extract 3
Unfortunately, here in Finland, we have loads of people on low incomes who can’t afford to live.
But citizens of our own country should be helped. It feels that these immigrants are given an entire life here when they arrive.
Mm.
They will get a place to stay; they will get education and all kinds of benefits. But what about the great number of people who already exist [in Finland] and who can’t afford to live?
Here, the interviewee first constructs a negative evaluation ‘unfortunately’ to introduce the problem. The use of quantifying terms ‘loads’ and a ‘great number’ of people constructs a large group of people living in poverty in Finland who should be helped due to their difficulties making ends meet. He uses the modal ‘should’ to establish necessity and a normative orientation to the idea that ‘we’ – that is, Finns – ought to be served before ‘these immigrants’. Using the possessive pronouns ‘our’ and ‘they’, the interviewee draws borders between low-income in- and out-groups, both of which are in poverty, while positioning the speaker and himself (‘us’) as belonging to an in-group. In Extract 3, the interviewee constructs poverty using the affective expression ‘it feels’ to support welfare state nationalist discourse by comparing two different categories and highlighting the moral superiority of Finns over migrant groups. He participates in moral evaluation by expressing the significance and scope of the problem constructed with the words ‘entire’ and ‘all’.
Interviewees also discussed poverty in relation to the negative associations surrounding welfare benefits and unemployment in Finland. By distancing themselves from the narrative of the lazy benefit cheat and constructing a devalued identity for others, the interviewees positioned themselves in opposition to the negative stereotype. The interviewees accomplished this by self-identifying as active, effortful and hardworking individuals. Moral judgement, for example, involves constructing the lack of entrepreneurial spirit and economic independence exhibited by other individuals. Specifically, interviewees stressed their own responsible conduct and represented themselves explicitly as active and responsible people willing to become self-sufficient and fiscally responsible. In Extract 4, an interviewee with a migrant background constructed such an identity for herself and others.
Extract 4
And I am really a responsible person—
Yes.
—and I don’t belong to this group of people who want to have benefits—
Mm.
—and do nothing. I want to study and—
Mm.
—and work.
I am very responsible for my own life. If anything fails, I really do find that it is my own fault [laughter].
The interviewee assertively constructs herself as being responsible by using the intensifiers ‘really’ and ‘very’ to emphasise the degree of responsibility, thus distancing herself from those who struggle to perform responsibility through work and study. She constructs a group of people who ‘want to have benefits’ and then distances herself from this group by stressing her commitment to taking responsibility for her circumstances, even when she fails. A similar construction of moral standing, that of others as ‘benefit cheats’, not only displays an awareness of stereotypes but also confirms the interviewee’s oppositional status to such stereotypes (Flaherty, 2008: 170), which is a typical method of managing the stigma of receiving benefits. In other words, through the strategy of negatively representing others and assessing her own psychological disposition, the interviewee attributes a negative property to the out-group.
Poverty constructed as a deliberate personal choice
Interviewees also constructed poverty by self-identifying as individuals who chooses poverty or a low income as a lifestyle (Devine, 2006). Interviewees did so by describing their lifestyles as ecological and sustainable choices or rejections of a career-oriented and work-centred lifestyle. Additionally, interviewees constructed poverty as a personal choice to live a ‘deviant’ life.
Within this discursive strategy, some interviewees constructed themselves as individuals for whom money and materialism were not key motivations in life. Specifically, these interviewees explained that a lack of money had not led to personal crises and that their low-income lifestyles were the result of personal choices. In most cases, the interviewees constructed a narrative of deliberate choice to prioritise personal satisfaction over economic gain. This discursive construct resists the idea that money motivates all people and that happiness is dependent on consumption and wealth. In these interviews, low income was associated with the ability to spend time on meaningful and enjoyable activities (cf. Van Parijs, 2013). Thus, interviewees constructed themselves as individuals who chose to pursue low-paying jobs and careers in which they could be creative and satisfied instead of making money. However, in Extract 5, the interviewee’s laughter again, like in Extract 1, marks the manner in which personal experiences of poverty are uneasy and anxious topics.
Extract 5
I am actually quite pleased with—
Mm.
—if you are used to [the experience of] poverty [laughter].
Yeah.
I basically. . . We basically all consume too much—
Mm.
—and when you have nothing to consume, it is quite an ecological lifestyle.
Mm, mm.
So, it is quite good in that sense.
Yes.
I am quite pleased that I don’t live a luxurious life.
The interviewee first constructs himself as personally ‘used to’ poverty with the affective adjective ‘pleased’. Then, after a hesitant pause, he shifts from the singular, first personal pronoun ‘I’ to the plural ‘we’ and attributes moral responsibility to ‘all of us’, who consume too much. He constructs an ‘ecological’ lifestyle as desirable with the evaluate adjective ‘good’ and positions himself as personally unwilling to live a luxurious lifestyle. When constructing a positive self-identification and adopting a critical stance towards consumer capitalism (Helne and Hirvilammi, 2022), the interviewee uses the degree adverb ‘quite’ three times to construct luxury as a relevant rhetorical opposition to a nonconsumptive lifestyle.
Similarly, some interviewees resisted the problem-centredness of poverty by constructing income insecurity and precariousness as elements of a positive lifestyle, as expressed by the self-reflective interviewee in Extract 6.
Extract 6
Well, I think it is a question of personality type. Even if I had a regular monthly income, and I performed a meaningless job year after year, from nine to five. Even if I had a safe, everyday life, I think I wouldn’t be any happier at that point.
Mm.
It has been a lot better for me to have irregular income and insecurity, as it still has been a more positive everyday life for me.
Of course, I have never been any kind of a show-off person. I can sew my own clothes and do my renovations with my own little hands, and I save quite a bit of money there.
So, I have lived a life that reflects my personality.
Here, using the subordinating conjunction ‘if’, the interviewee introduces a hypothetical scenario in which she works ‘from nine to five’ and then uses an adjective to evaluate her life in this hypothetical scenario as ‘meaningless’. She constructs her real life, with no regular income and irregular working hours, as one that ‘look[s] like her’ lifestyle and compares it evaluatively with the hypothetical scenario by constructing a degree of difference: ‘more positive’. With the adverb ‘never’, the interviewee maximises the stance she expresses by distancing herself from people who ‘show off’ and constructs for herself the identity of a person who lives comfortably with limited financial resources. In similar interviews, the interviewees resisted the idea of poverty as a miserable, stigmatised or tragic lived experience. Instead, through positive self-presentation, they defend poverty not as a problem-centred status but as a matter of choice.
Interviewees also constructed low-income lifestyles as choices by categorising themselves into several ‘deviant’ social categories. Some interviewees identified with potentially face-threating categories, such as addict and prisoner, while the poverty talk in other interviews dealt with topics such as psychosis, being released from prison or sleeping rough in the forest. By presenting themselves discursively as having chosen one of these lifestyles, the interviewees’ self-constructions rejected normative, socially derived assumptions and displayed levels of agency. Thus, some of the interviewees accepted personal responsibility for their economic poverty due to the various choices they had made in their lives (Cohen, 1997). For example, one interviewee constructed alcoholism as a personal choice: Extract 7
I have not lived in affluence, but I have never been, like, properly poor.
Mm.
Or I mean, like, totally broke. You could be, like, hungry or you would have no place to stay.
Mm.
I have never been in a situation like that.
At some point, I chose unemployment as a lifestyle [Finnish: elämäntapatyöttömyys], which means that I actually wanted to be unemployed—
Mm.
—for example, when I used to drink excessively, it meant that I didn’t want to work, as it would have restricted my recreational activities [drinking].
Here, poverty is constructed as a relative phenomenon in which the interviewee’s nonaffluent life cannot be compared with absolute forms of poverty, such as starving or being unhoused – that is, the interviewee differentiates himself from those who are ‘totally broke’. In doing so, he creates divisions between degrees of ‘poverty’ and types of ‘poor’ (Flaherty, 2008: 196), using the adverb ‘properly’ to evaluatively self-identify as not belonging to the lowest degrees of poverty. The interviewee constructed his lack of money as the result of a deliberate choice and framed his excessive drinking as an intentional, personal choice. Thus, he argued that ‘unemployment as a lifestyle’, as the result of substance abuse, was his own decision and in doing so constructed himself as responsible for his ‘nonaffluent’ lifestyle by self-positioning himself as an agent. Here, the category of lifestyle unemployment is not negatively evaluated or used to create distance; rather, it is used to construct a positive self-identification.
Discussion and conclusion
Our analysis revealed three key discursive strategies adopted by the participants in the Finnish BI Experiment, including agential capabilities and accountability management, which were constructed through poverty talk. Similar to the findings of previous studies, the construction of poverty was discussed through the discursive construction of in-group and out-group category members (Paterson, 2020).
As a politically and ideologically motivated experiment, the Finnish BI Experiment created a particular argumentative context in which poverty talk was constructed. Accordingly, the interviews should be considered relevant for various audiences since the interview setting in itself was ‘unusual’ and dealt with a highly debated policy in Finland – that is, BI. However, as there was such a strong normative expectation of employment effects, the experiment offered a context for countering that political goal. Overall, analysing the interviews revealed that when the participants in such controversial social policy experiments fail to meet the expectation of obtaining paid work, they may, for example, uphold or resist individualised poverty discourses. Considering the rareness of such experiments, the widespread media and political attention it garnered, and the various definitions of ‘failure’ applied to the experiment, we assumed that, during the interviews, the participants performed agency for large sets of audiences. Thus, given that the experiment explicitly aimed to encourage people to exit poverty and gain employment, the participants may have oriented towards particular readings of the questions when asked about their financial situations during the interviews. Therefore, the discursive strategies identified here may also provide justifications for why such exits did or did not occur. These constructs also reflect a broader cultural discourse on welfare and the problem-centredness of poverty in Finland, which the interviewees needed to manage discursively while narrating their experiences as experiment participants.
The first strategy involved interviewees constructing poverty as a tragedy caused by external factors beyond individual control or agency. Interviewees engaged in this strategy by locating the ‘problem’ of poverty in the context of various macropolitical factors, discrimination and structural inequalities. By attributing responsibility to external factors and unfortunate events, the interviewees resisted attaching personal blame to their material hardship and constructed positive self-presentations to explain why they continued to live in poverty at the end of the experiment. However, interviewees also managed poverty talk by explicitly adopting some degree of self-blame and implicitly constructing narratives of others who ‘choose’ unemployment. Interviewees negotiated the extent to which they could be held personally responsible or not responsible, which reveals that poverty talk can be a complex and ambivalent interactional activity.
The second strategy involved the interviewees constructing poverty by participating in ‘othering’, morally judging other welfare recipients (Chase and Walker, 2013) and adopting the problem-focussed construction of poverty (Loix and Pepermans, 2009). Interviewees discursively managed this construction by making explicit and implicit moral judgements of others or highlighting their own responsible conduct (Cohen, 1997; Feldman and Schram, 2019). One specific strategy involved passing moral judgement on certain groups of welfare beneficiaries, for example, by drawing on welfare state nationalist discourses. By drawing distinctions between in-groups and out-groups, interviewees performed morally plausible identities when talking about stigmatising topics (Tarkiainen, 2022). Chase and Walker (2013) argue that this ‘projected shaming’ helps mitigate any shame that people living in poverty are prone to experience themselves. Our results suggest that this kind of self-performance also works as a mechanism to negotiate interviewees’ roles as BI Experiment participants.
The third strategy involves constructing poverty by invoking the alternative category of a person who chooses poverty or a low income as a lifestyle (Devine, 2006). These interviewees described their lifestyles as ecological, nonmaterialistic, nonluxurious and sustainable choices or as decisions not to pursue career-oriented or work-centred lives. This construction involved adopting a critical stance towards consumer capitalism (Helne and Hirvilammi, 2022) and expressing resistance to the centrality of work. Alternatively, interviewees constructed poverty as a personal choice to live a ‘deviant’ life and rejected socially normative assumptions in the process of constructing themselves. Constructing a low-income lifestyle as a personal choice challenges interpretations of poverty as a tragic, unfortunate and undesirable lack of material resources and deviates from mainstream discourses and culturally common-sense ‘knowledge’ about poverty in Finland.
Choosing poverty and unemployment as a lifestyle is typically identified as a stigmatic construct from which people aim to distance themselves; however, some participants adapted this construction into a positive self-presentation, portraying themselves as ethical consumers or challenging the problem-centredness of the poverty discourse. They reinforced this construction by, for example, stressing that people living in poverty are happy despite their financial problems (Flaherty, 2008) and that some people choose poverty as an intentional way of life (Jeppesen, 2009); thus, this strategy may be interpreted as resistance towards the policy goal of the experiment itself. It also echoes the discourses of the proponents of a ‘real’ universal BI (Van Parijs, 2013).
Thus, when experimenting with ideologically controversial policies, new poverty discourses can be identified. We assume that casting oneself as intentionally choosing poverty dealt with the fact that there were no institutional gatekeepers – such as NGOs or social workers – involved in our data collection and consequently no fear of any negative consequences of producing such a discourse. The experiment’s RCT design, the fact that experiment participation was mandatory and our research group’s promise of anonymity may also have allowed us to reach people who would not otherwise participate in qualitative poverty or unemployment studies in Finland.
Overall, our results show that people who have experienced poverty explain and understand poverty in different ways, by emphasising or minimising their agency, by constructing victimhood or by identifying degrees of poverty. These broader constructions included specific constructions of internal and external causes that sometimes conformed to and sometimes rejected dominant poverty discourses. Interviewees also either morally judged others, constructed personal narratives or explained their poverty by negotiating a combination of individual and structural factors (Cohen, 1997; Hansen et al., 2014). Thus, interviewees constructed poverty in ways that are culturally, socially and ideologically either taken for granted or contested. Agential capabilities were often constructed ambivalently, with subtle and implicit discrimination and with attention to various intersecting identifiers, such as the implications of one’s age, place of residence or migrant status. Differences among the participants influenced the discursive strategies available to the interviewees, thus demonstrating the heterogeneity of the people included in this category (Dean, 1992: 81). This finding challenges discourses that conceptualise ‘poor people’ as a monolithic group (Jarosz and Lawson, 2002: 19) with indistinguishable characters and opinions.
Qualitative interviews serve as a specific context for poverty talk, which intersects with interactional goals such as saving face. To a large extent, these can be understood as performances of deservingness (Tarkiainen, 2022). However, our research adds a personal choice discourse that future studies should investigate in more detail. Methodologically, future studies might focus on analysing naturally occurring data, especially concerning participant discussions about controversial experiments like the Finnish BI Experiment. One limitation of this paper is its largely language-centred approach to how interviewees make sense of poverty. Future studies might also focus on the interplay between discursive practices and nonverbal cues, which can clash with and contradict each other. Finally, further analysis of the paralinguistic features of poverty talk in different institutional and sociopolitical contexts is a promising direction for future studies.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
