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