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This section presents a summary of chapters in the book Poverty and the Third Way, by Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank. The aim of this book has been to articulate and develop a new discourse on poverty. This sought to develop informal modes of production, which, as of November 2002, the poor are less able than those attached to the formal labor market to use an escape route from their poverty or response to their situation. Therefore, just as many have argued that intervention is required in the realm of employment to alleviate poverty, the argument of this book has been that informal modes of production also need to be assisted. To achieve this, a range of bottom-up and top-down policies to record, store and reward participation in work beyond employment have been advocated.

This chapter explores various approaches that could be used to implement the income conditional of a citizen upon people being worker citizens. First, the extension of the voluntary and community sector of the New Deal program is proposed by giving the unemployed greater freedom to define the social contribution that they wish to make. Second, therefore, and in order to open up such opportunities to a wider range of people, we have proposed a more comprehensive option. This involves the development of an Active Citizens' Credit (ACC) scheme that would seek to provide a means by which citizens can engage in various forms of work beyond employment of their choosing for which they would be reimbursed. Three types of ACC scheme have been proposed, parents tax credit, carers tax credit and community worker tax credit.

This chapter transcends the current third way approach that develops the third sector as a springboard into employment by outlining a new mutualism that seeks to develop the fourth sector. To show how this approach can be implemented, a number of bottom-up initiatives that resonate contemporary attitudes towards engaging in informal work was identified and documented. They focus upon developing one-to-one reciprocal exchange and do so using some form of tally or accounting system so that people can keep tabs on how much they are giving and receiving. The grass roots initiatives reviewed are local exchange and trading schemes, time banks, employee mutuals and mutual aid contracts. We conclude that for these initiatives to be used effectively and for the third way to become a distinct and radical departure from the past, thee will need to be a shift both from an employment ethic to a work ethic and from a full-employment to a full-engagement vision.

This chapter argues that the goal of full-employment is redundant and that a new goal needs to be put in its place. If the advanced economies manage to achieve full-employment, then the fact that this goal has been pursued will not be a problem. It will have played a positive role in facilitating greater community spirit and participation in civil society. If full-employment is not achieved, however, then this approach will have created alternative means of meeting needs and desires. To pursue the development of such additional poverty alleviation policies without changing the allocation of work in the formal sphere will act merely to create a dual society.

This chapter analyzes various barriers that prevent lower-income populations from participating in the informal sphere in order to enhance their coping capabilities. This has revealed that such households are prevented from engaging in informal modes of production by their lack of human capital, social network capital, financial capital and time capital as well as environmental and institutional constraints. This has revealed that many households that have entered the formal labor market but are confined to low wages have, if anything, lower household coping capabilities than jobless households. However, while inserting people into low-paid jobs has little overall positive benefit on household capabilities, encouraging households to pursue informal-orientated practices has been shown to have the potential to significantly improve overall capabilities.

This chapter argues that informal modes of production are a key component of household work practices. However, at present, these informal practices reinforce rather than reduce the socio-spatial disparities produced by formal employment. Lower-income populations are less able to participate in informal work than higher-income populations and often engage in only a narrow range of activity that is conducted out of necessity. Higher-income populations, meanwhile, not only conduct a wider array of activity but more often engage in informal practices as a matter of choice. If lower-income populations are to be enabled to draw upon the informal sphere as a coping practice, therefore, then the constraints that currently impede them from doing so will need to be tackled.

This chapter highlights some rationales for advocating an alternative third way approach that seeks to alleviate poverty and build a more inclusive society by developing the capabilities of people to participate in work beyond employment. We see that the coping capabilities of jobless households in rural areas are lower than those of their urban counterparts. Not only are rural jobless households less able than their urban counterparts to get necessary work completed but financial constraints are more prominent in their reasons for not being able to do this work than is the case in jobless urban households. The result is that they are unable to make their money go so far as their urban equivalents. Unlike those rural households with people in employment, however, these jobless households are unable to draw upon informal practices to the same extent in order to mitigate their circumstances.

This chapter attempts to set out the various discourses on the informal sphere and their implications for policies towards such activity. In consequence, this chapter has argued that swimming with the tide and harnessing informal work is the only viable option. Here, we have outlined that there are currently four different discourses on what forms of informal work should be harnessed and for what purpose. First, there are some, harking back to old-style social democracy, whose approach towards poverty alleviation is grounded in a return towards full-employment. For them, the value of informal work is solely as a springboard into employment. The role of informal work is thus relevant solely in terms of its function of providing alternative routes into employment. Second, there are those who view informal work as complementary to private and public welfare provision in creating a mixed economy of welfare and third, there are those who extend this notion of informal work as complementary to the economic realm where it is seen as complementing employment. Fourth and finally, there are those who view informal work as an alternative to employment.

This chapter evaluates critically the formalization thesis, which asserts that non-capitalist production is disappearing, albeit slowly and unevenly, and is being replaced by goods and services produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. The great transformation from a non-market to a market society, upon which many of the current assumptions about economic development are founded, must be thus treated with caution. Nor, moreover, is this persistence of informal work simply due to the social reproduction of marginal populations being offloaded from the formal to the informal sphere. Whatever the reason for their persistence, the important finding of this chapter is that informal economic activities are a large and growing segment of economic life, at least measured in terms of the time spent engaged in such work.

This chapter outlines the first rationale for adopting an alternative third way approach that seeks to develop the capabilities of people to participate in informal economic activity as a route out of poverty and a means of achieving a more inclusive society. First, we have identified a significant gap between the current employment situation and a full-employment scenario, despite all of the efforts in advanced economies to achieve the goal of full-employment. Second, and interrelated to this, we have displayed the accumulating evidence that although populations know that employment is currently the principal route out of poverty, many people value the income from employment and the social rights attached to it rather than employment itself.

This section presents an introduction to the book Poverty and the Third Way, by Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank. The aim of this book is to articulate and develop an alternative third approach towards tackling poverty and social exclusion that, although only briefly sketched up until now, as of November 2002, is gaining greater recognition as a potential way forward. This rejects the obsession of the political party New Labor with inserting people into employment as a means of tackling their poverty. Instead, its basic premise is that to alleviate poverty and build a more inclusive society, the capabilities of people to participate in alternative coping practices in the form of informal work need to be developed.

Acknowledges several individuals and institutions that contributed to findings reported in the book "Poverty and the Third Way," by Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

This section presents an introduction to the book Poverty and the Third Way, by Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank. What is poverty and how can it be tackled? The Old Left adopts redistribution as the solution to poverty, the New Right identifies the poor as an underclass in need of integration into the mainstream and the third way of the New Labor sees the root cause of poverty as joblessness and integration into the formal labor market as the solution. This book uncovers how the employment-focused approach of the New Labor causes, rather than resolves, poverty. Searching for an alternative third way, the authors find the seeds of such and approach in radical European social democratic and ecological thought that seeks to transcend capitalism and socialism by developing work beyond employment.