Abstract
As Western societies experience growing insecurity, full employment wanes, as do social protection state spending for job creation. Spyridakis’ ethnography of greater Athens suggests that political decisions are not accepted uncritically or unconditionally. How people experience their citizenship in this situation raises challenging questions not only on the legitimacy of power structures such as governmental regulations and public policies but also on the way in which ordinary people, as well as business people hit by the crisis, use and conceive them. The discussion addresses the extent to which different informants relate to the unequal allocation of resources and their sense of shared adversity.
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- 1.
I would like to thank A. Kotsalos, MA, for his significant contribution to this research.
- 2.
APORE index (people-at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion) is defined as the percentage of population that is included in at least one of the following categories: (1) poverty risk, namely below the limit, (2) deprivation of important material goods and (3) households with an extremely low employment intensity (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statisticsexplained/index.php/Glossary:At_risk_of_poverty_or_social_exclusion_(APORE))
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Spyridakis, M. (2019). Legitimating Poverty: The Minimum Guaranteed Income Pilot Case. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G.B. (eds) Legitimacy. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96238-2_4
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