Introduction
Vulnerability has become a common-place term in social policy. Formal policy interventions describe individuals as vulnerable because they possess a measurable deficit and require treatment (Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, 2006; Fineman, Reference Fineman2008; Protection of Freedoms Act, 2012). These formal definitions of vulnerability are supported through the widespread colloquial use of the term across policy and among service providers to describe individuals who are at risk of physical or mental harm, frequently because of ill-defined personal short-comings (Ecclestone and Lewis, Reference Ecclestone and Lewis2014; Furedi, Reference Furedi2004). This discrimination-based account has little regard for the wider structures of society that might ameliorate, sustain or exacerbate vulnerability.
Critiques of this individualistic and rational use of the term have sought to bring political economy back into an understanding of vulnerability. The vulnerable subject is positioned in relation to economic liberalism and increasingly selective state welfare provision (Brown, Reference Brown, Harrison and Sanders2014, Reference Brown2015). Similarly, McLaughlin (Reference McLaughlin2012) notes the increasing emphasis on individual vulnerable identities at the expense of collective accounts, neglecting political, social and economic factors that shape experience in relation to societal structures. Contemporary characterisations purposefully ignore how vulnerability is produced and reproduced in society, emphasising, as Brown et al. (this issue) elaborate, an account of vulnerability imbued with normative assumptions about deservingness, deviance and deficit.
This article foregrounds a different approach, starting with typologies of vulnerability developed by vulnerability theorists, which have sought to address this deficit-orientated account through an emphasis on the social, political and economic dimensions of vulnerabilities. One way in which the relational account is presented is to contrast universal vulnerability as a forever imminent experience pertaining to the body that may affect us all at different times across the life-course, with particular vulnerabilities that have their genesis ‘in the interruption or destruction of social relationships’ (Fineman, Reference Fineman2010: 268). In presenting this typology, Fineman (Reference Fineman2008, Reference Fineman2010) concerns herself with the individual's position relative to institutional relationships, which, she contends, cushion individuals from vulnerability through providing physical, human, social, ecological, environmental and existential assets. The role of these social and legal intuitions is to subsidise, assist and support individuals to accumulate and maintain the assets needed to be autonomous. To address vulnerability, the state should not tolerate a system that privileges one group over another. Fineman proposes a benign state with responsive structures within which citizens choose from a range of options to address the vulnerabilities in their lives. Autonomy and vulnerability are therefore theorised as oppositional terms.
This article draws on a different relational approach, which treats autonomy as an intrinsic property of vulnerability (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie, Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds2014). Framed by capability theory (Drèze and Sen, Reference Drèze and Sen1995; Sen, Reference Sen1999; Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2011), this relational approach to vulnerability is concerned to understand how an individual's innate and learned capacities affect opportunities to achieve valuable functioning in relation to social, political and economic conditions in which political and legal institutions may enable or constrain an individual's freedoms and entitlements. In this relational capabilities approach, autonomy, as an evaluative effort by individuals to address their vulnerabilities (Sayer, Reference Sayer2011), is not considered as being in opposition to vulnerability. The capabilities approach to explaining vulnerability seeks to account for an individual's agency and how this might be exercised within legal and social structures. This paper adopts Fineman's classification of inherent and situational vulnerabilities. But adds a sub-set to situational vulnerabilities or pathogenic vulnerabilities (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie, Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds2014), which are morally unacceptable and, drawing on Goodin (Reference Goodin1985), have not as yet been eliminated. Explanations for their elimination lie in an elaboration of the relationships between agency and structure. In this article, the opposite of vulnerability is taken to be flourishing, which, following Sayer (Reference Sayer2011) and Rawls (Reference Rawls1973: 433), consists partly of ‘an account of what things are good for human beings taking them as they are’ achieved through their evaluative effort.
Through empirical investigation, this article seeks to provide insight into these agential relationships of vulnerability. Drawing on case studies, this article examines how grandparents interact with social care and legal systems in their effort to provide care for their grandchildren. Their relationships with their grandchildren may be characterised as more about ‘rescue and repair’ (Hughes and Emmel, Reference Hughes and Emmel2008) than leisure and pleasure grand parenting (Mason et al., Reference Mason, May and Clarke2007). These cases provide insight into how these interactions make the grandparents and their grandchildren vulnerable and occasionally ameliorate their vulnerabilities so they may flourish. The aim of this article is to refine a relational model of vulnerability, which has been developed through several iterations (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010, Reference Emmel, Hughes, Holland and Edwards2014).
Methodologically, this article applies a (critical) realist approach to explanations of vulnerability (Harré, Reference Harré1986; Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar2008). This recognises that social processes, like a relational understanding of vulnerability and the ways in which agency is exercised, cannot be measured. Certain features may be observed and recorded, but many of the generative mechanisms that shape the regularities and outcomes of vulnerability are less amenable to measurement and are based on a variety of sorts of indirect evidence (Maxwell, Reference Maxwell2012). Explanations of the real-life experience of vulnerability include a bundle of the empirical experiences and claims for the causal generative mechanisms that shape these in particular contexts for particular individuals and groups (Pawson and Tilley, Reference Pawson and Tilley1997). A realist social science contends that adequate yet fallible causal accounts of social processes, like vulnerability and flourishing, can be produced to extend knowledge (Bhaskar, Reference Bhaskar2008). This article draws on purposefully and theoretically chosen cases (Emmel, Reference Emmel2013), described below, to refine a causal model of relational vulnerability located in a model directed theoretically by a capabilities approach.
Refining a relational model of vulnerability
One such causal relational model that provides an explanation of the social differentiation in cause and outcome of vulnerability (Adger, Reference Adger2006) has been developed by Watts and Bohle (Reference Watts and Bohle1993) and Bohle et al. (Reference Bohle, Downing and Watts1994) in their investigations of who are most vulnerable from famine and climate change. These cases, drawn from development and environmental studies, elaborate upon Robert Chambers’ (Reference Chambers1989: 1) definition of vulnerability as:
the exposure to contingencies and stress, and difficulty coping with them. Vulnerability thus has two sides: an external side of risks, shocks and stress to which an individual or household is subject: and an internal side which is defencelessness, meaning a lack of means to cope without damaging loss. (Chambers, Reference Chambers1989: 1)
Developing this definition, with its concern to account for both the structural dimensions of vulnerability as well as peoples’ ability to respond, Bohle et al. (Reference Bohle, Downing and Watts1994: 38) suggest three basic coordinates of vulnerability (1) the risk of exposure to external crisis; (2) the risk of inadequate capacities of individuals to cope with this external stress and shock, including effective and timely external interventions; and (3) the risk of severe consequences, including slow and limited recovery. Their proposed model to capture the complexity of these dimensions of vulnerability is ‘a multi-layered and multidimensional social space defined by determinate political, economic and institutional capabilities of people in specific places at specific times’ (Bohle et al., Reference Bohle, Downing and Watts1994: 39).
This focus on what people can be and do and ‘an ability to achieve a given function should they choose it’ (Sen, Reference Sen1999; Sayer, Reference Sayer2011: 234) informed elaboration of the dimensions of vulnerability theorised by Watts and Bohle (Reference Watts and Bohle1993) and Bohle et al. (Reference Bohle, Downing and Watts1994). The case considered in this article is empirical research investigating experiences of vulnerability (and occasional flourishing) in longitudinal research conducted exclusively with a low-income community in the city in the North of England (Hughes and Emmel, Reference Hughes and Emmel2008). In earlier reports from this qualitative longitudinal research, with my co-researcher Kahryn Hughes (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010, Reference Emmel, Hughes, Holland and Edwards2014), we described a model of vulnerability as a four-dimensional space (shaped like the Swiss chocolate confection, the Toblerone Bar). Our analysis of three sides of the triangle represent three dimensions: (i) material shortages in households, characterised by ‘making do’ with limited resources to meet basic everyday needs; (ii) the capacity to address needs in the present and plan for the future; and (iii) an uncertain reliance on welfare services acting to address crises when they happen (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010: 171). The fourth dimension, stretched longitudinally along a w axis, deals with time. Time is frequently implicated in accounts of vulnerability; references are made to the ‘episodic and shifting’ (Fineman, Reference Fineman2010: 265) and the ‘frequent downward spiral’ of vulnerability (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie, Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds2014: 46) for instance. But these motifs are rarely theorised. In an earlier article, we considered how chronological time and a social consciousness of time underwrite policies and practices and how practices at odds with these temporalities may exacerbate vulnerabilities (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel, Hughes, Holland and Edwards2014). The social relations expressed in these temporal experiences are not directly considered in this article. Instead, attention is focused on elaborating the relationships between the three dimensions discussed in Emmel and Hughes (Reference Emmel and Hughes2010) bringing new evidence to bear to refine a theory of a relational space of vulnerability. Drawing on capability theory, this article extends understanding of the relationships between agency and social institutions, including social care, legal systems and welfare provision.
This article draws on two sources of data. A secondary analysis of qualitative longitudinal data with low-income grandparents supporting their grandchildren and ethnography of meetings to support grandparents in a third sector organisation. The secondary analysis is of data collected in Intergenerational Exchange, a part of the ESRC Qualitative Longitudinal Initiative, Timescapes (2016). The sample, methods and the ethical implications of the methods used in Intergenerational Exchange have been described in detail elsewhere (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010). For the purpose of the secondary analysis (Irwin and Winterton, Reference Irwin and Winterton2011), in this article a purposeful and theoretical sample (Emmel, Reference Emmel2013) of two sets of transcripts (four in-depth interviews conducted over two years) were retrieved from the Timescapes Archive, where the data from Intergenerational Exchange are held. These cases were purposefully chosen because they provide rich and detailed accounts of two key experiences. The first are interactions with public service providers (social workers, educational psychologists, lawyers and family court officials) in the process of gaining legal custody of grandchildren. The second are relationships developed during these custody proceedings and afterwards with a third sector organisation with a specific remit to support grandparents and their families.
This third sector organisation was the site for further enquiry through a support programme specifically focused on sharing information, knowledge and skills with grandparents who were managing difficult relationships with their children and grandchildren. Ethnographic observations of three monthly meetings were undertaken. These provide detailed field-notes (written by the author) where participants agreed to notes being taken but did not wish the meetings, which often dealt with sensitive issues, to be recorded.
The three meetings were attended by between six and eight grandparents. Six individuals attended all three meetings (two couples and two widowed grandmothers) with a further couple attending the second two meetings. Two advice workers were also present at each meeting. All the grandparents were involved in direct care of their grandchildren – this ranged from established legal custody to one grandmother who described her grandchildren as ‘just sleeping over’. A significant part of the conversation focused on the grandparents’ interactions with social care providers, legal systems and access to welfare provision. These conversations are the focus of the field notes.
Important to the analysis in this article and absent from our earlier data, with its focus on low-income families (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010), are insights from grandparents with a range of socio-economic experiences. The two couples who attended all meetings described themselves as comfortably off, one couple were retired teachers while the other couple ‘had been in business’. All the other grandparents lived exclusively on the state pension.
Verbal informed consent was sought with all participants in the meetings, continuing a practice adopted throughout our longitudinal research (Emmel et al., Reference Emmel, Hughes, Greenhalgh and Sales2007) where written consent can be perceived as authoritarian and/or threatening. Anonymity was assured. The purpose of this research was explained as an opportunity to refine ideas about the nature of vulnerability, particularly through bringing new cases to bear in its interpretation and explanation.
Vulnerability and being
The most frequently reported constraint cited by participants is an inability to exercise their agency. Difficulties in accessing basic needs and material deprivation can significantly curtail the range of possible ways of being (Doyal and Gough, Reference Doyal and Gough1991), where the notion of being does not capture mere existence of basic needs but the relations needed to acquire those needs. Geoff and Margaret, for instance, who care for three granddaughters, describe the significant impact their sudden arrival had on the household economy. Neither Geoff nor Margaret work. They are dependent on disability welfare payments. They reported how difficult it was to feed and clothe the children and themselves. Unreliability and inaccessibility of services is one dimension of the model of the longitudinal space of vulnerability (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010). This is highlighted in Geoff and Margaret's case. They describe how the grandchildren were left with them by social workers late one night, having been removed from their mother, who was a long-term heroin addict. The social worker explained that social services would support Geoff and Margaret and would be in touch the next morning. For some reason, their case was not followed up. This is not an unusual event and has been described to us by the advice workers at the third-sector organisation as the ‘midnight drop’. In this case, the midnight drop led to a significant change in the household economy. Geoff and Margaret observe how it took many months to access basic needs – an inability to put food on the table on occasions, buy and replace school uniforms and pay for leisure activities were all cited by Geoff and Margaret as examples. In elaborating these experiences, Geoff goes beyond recounting a deficit of basic needs to emphasise how resources are accessed and the relations these are contingent upon. The absence of relationships with structures of support from social, welfare and educational services are discussed in their enduring condition.
As Geoff observes:
We've always had to fight for things in life, er, me wife being disabled. Erm, you've really gotta fight and sometimes you don't know which way to turn, you don't know who to go to, who to see, er, and to me it's frustrating, a lot of people get frustrated over it because we don't get it or it takes ages to get it. And you can understand why, because she's entitled to it. It's not as though you're asking for summat for nothing. I've worked all me life.
Geoff's account of their attempt to access welfare provision evidences a lack of agency, an inability to access the resources they need and to which they feel entitled. But Geoff's narrative is also one of both confrontation and frustration. And this is a frustration borne of a recognition that they do not, and nor can they, adequately exercise control over their lives. As Geoff notes ‘we keep hitting a bloody brick wall’ – the impediments to accessing services are the social institutions that control resources.
Accounts of vulnerability that assume a causal link between poverty and vulnerability locate powerlessness and inability to engage meaningfully with societal institutions in their explanation. Fineman (Reference Fineman2010: 266) notes that vulnerable populations are frequently characterised as ‘discriminated against, marginalized, and disenfranchised from mainstream society’. Yet, in this research individuals who would not be regarded as poor, using any relative or actual measure of poverty, also report the difficulties they have in accessing services. As one participant, Mark, a relatively affluent retired businessman observes:
Not in our wildest dreams did we imagine we would end up sitting in a [social worker's] office trying to make the case for custody of our grandchildren. It's frustrating, they don't understand, ahh, it's hard to make them understand. There we were fighting for our grandchildren – their safety, well you know – and we knew we were entitled, but we didn't know how to do it, how to tell them, how to explain, we failed . . .
This grandparent provides a similar account of relationships with service providers to Geoff. He thinks he and his wife are eligible to particular services, but experiences barriers of access. He attributes these barriers to being uncertain about how to negotiate for resources. In this case, these grandparents were seeking to protect their grandchildren from a parent they considered dangerous. Mark invokes the word failure, reflecting his inability to master the situation, to control access to resources, and gain what he thinks he deserves from service providers in social care and welfare provision who exercise control over these resources.
These cases point to the role that the ability to assume control over resources plays out in definitions of vulnerability. It emphasises how resources are mediated through institutions and how, when individuals are unable to lever access to these resources, however just they feel their case for access may be, this is expressed as frustration and failure. These cases show ways of being and emphasise how being can only be understood in relation to what can be done in a given circumstance. To more adequately understand the capability to do (Sen, Reference Sen1999), the nature of these relationships require elaboration.
Vulnerability and doing
Lynn's case provides insight into the ways in which agency cannot be separated from a relational account in any understanding of vulnerability. To all intent and purposes, Lynn meets the definition of vulnerability described in discrimination-based deficit accounts. She demonstrates an apparent lack of ability along intersections of gender and class. She is on disability benefit. At the time of the first interview, she lived in social housing, which, by her own admission, was uninhabitable. Yet Lynn rejects the label of being vulnerable in a forthright way. An investigation of her case shows that this is not hubris but situated in practices that mediate, reduce and militate against vulnerability through the ways Lynn exercises her agency. This understanding of agency cannot be divorced from the ways in which she relates to institutions or without reference to the social settings in which she exhibits her self-confidence.
An insight into Lynn's agency is offered through understanding the way in which she took custody of her grandson Kyle when he was three years old. Before this Kyle lived with his mother who Lynn believed was abusing him. Lynn's son, who had a very brief relationship with Kyle's mother, was unable to care for his son. To gain custody of Kyle, Lynn was involved in a protracted legal process through the family courts, which included interactions with welfare officers, psychologists, judges and legal representatives. Throughout the first interview, Lynn talks about how intimidating these interactions are. She describes the court as ‘brown, big wooden doors, a very imposing building’, evoking this symbol to emphasise the power of the legal system as authority, she also reflects on the power of judges, solicitors, social workers and educational psychologists, who she perceives as trying to exclude her from the processes of gaining custody of Kyle. But she is quick to point out that she was not intimidated:
Er, but I do see myself as somebody who I'm not frightened of authority and a lot of people are and I'm not. And I'm not frightened of keeping on and battling on when I mean many times I've felt, ‘I can't take this anymore, I can't go on with this’ you know. And people get to that stage quite often you know.
In this first interview, a reason Lynn gives for her lack of fear is her early experience working as a clerk in the local council, a role that included delivering documents to the courts. She also emphasises her later training as an early years child care worker.
Later interviews returned to this theme, probing further to understand the configuration of experiences underlying Lynn's confidence. Her early history is important. Lynn is relatively well educated, She left school with ‘qualifications’, allowing her to secure the job at the council and later as an accounts clerk in a large tailoring manufacturer in the city, a job she compared favourably with class mates who ‘ended up working on the shop floor’. In addition, her father had been a ‘union man’ and shop steward for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW) in the same workplace. He was a community organiser too. All of these experiences Lynn identified as increasing her confidence. Beyond her immediate experiences, Lynn also drew on further resources – in particular a third-sector organisation that advised her on her legal rights, supporting her as she navigated through the protracted child welfare and legal processes of gaining custody of her grandson. These resources of education, experience, institutions and networks are drawn upon by Lynn to increase her self-confidence and mastery over her grandson's and her condition. Lynn's account focuses attention on the ability to engage. She contends that the service delivery and legal systems she comes into contact with recognise that she has mastery of her situation and responds accordingly. Lynn reports the example of a lawyer who approaches her after a hearing and tells her he is impressed by her ‘self-confidence, the way she speaks and her understanding of her rights and Kyle's rights’.
Empowerment in the longitudinal space of vulnerability
These cases emphasise the ways in which taking control in relation to social and legal institutions must be included in understanding vulnerability and flourishing. For Wallerstein (Reference Wallerstein1992: 197), empowerment is ‘a multi-level construct that involves people assuming control and mastery over their lives in their social, [economic] and political environments’. This reflects the capacities Lynn describes, which also appear to be absent in the experiences of other grandparents in this study.
Empowerment is the opportunity and capability of individuals and groups to be included in the economic, social and political processes of capability. Drèze and Sen (Reference Drèze and Sen1995), in their discussion of the vast differences in health and educational outcomes between the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, with its very poor health outcomes, and Kerala in the south, with health outcomes similar to many European countries, emphasise the importance of well-functioning public services in Kerala and the ill-functioning and frequently non-functioning services in Uttar Pradesh. They explain these differences within India as partly being situated in historical, social and political processes that have aided Kerala's transformation. They also note that the informed agency of women, 92.07% of women in Kerala are literate (Census of India, 2011), has played a crucial role in social action by a well educated public, who are vigilant in ensuring the adequate functioning of public services.
As the cases in this article have shown, agency, in which people act to bring about change relative to the adequate function of public services, is one part of a relational model of vulnerability. Accounts that focus on an evaluation of an individual's assets and their position relative to institutional relationships are insufficient. While it is right to recognise, as Fineman (Reference Fineman2010) does, that state institutions can privilege some groups at the expense of others, it does not necessarily follow that the resolution to these relationships of disadvantage lies only in the reform of these state institutions. This article has shown that an explanation of vulnerability must include what people ‘do’ to access, or to fail to access, resources and opportunities.
This orientation towards ‘doing’ thus shifts the focus from the top-down relationship between societal institutions and individual vulnerability to vulnerability understood as relational and shaped, at least in part from the bottom-up, through people's actions. The notion of empowerment provides an explanation of these relationships between institutions that have the capacity to produce and maintain vulnerabilities and the mastery and control individuals may be able to exert to flourish in their lives. The achievement of flourishing suggests the empowerment of individuals, which is rooted in historical, cultural and social processes, such as Lynn's childhood, education and training, work experiences and social structures. ‘At issue’, as Hall and Lamont observe (Reference Hall, Lamont, Hall and Lamont2013: 13), ‘is the capacity of individuals or groups to secure favourable outcomes under new circumstances and, if need be, by new means.’
Figure 1 presents a new iteration of the longitudinal space of vulnerability (the Toblerone Model) developed from the relational causal model of vulnerability described earlier in this article (Watts and Bohle, Reference Watts and Bohle1993; Bohle et al., Reference Bohle, Downing and Watts1994) and refined through the analysis in this article. The first dimension is relabelled. In the earlier iterations (Emmel and Hughes, Reference Emmel and Hughes2010, Reference Emmel, Hughes, Holland and Edwards2014), it emphasised ‘making do’, based exclusively on research conducted in a low-income community. Now labelled meeting basic needs (Doyal and Gough, Reference Doyal and Gough1991), this dimension extends explanation to recognise a broader consideration of services, goods and wants. These include intermediate basic needs such as childhood security and safety. The relatively affluent grandparent, Mark, who attempts to secure the safety of his grandchildren is an example of this. Minimal needs continue to be recognised in this dimension, Geoff and Margaret's struggle with deprivation emphasise this. These basic needs are universal and knowable. They are also, as this article has emphasised, dynamic and evaluated by people (Rawls, Reference Rawls1973; Sayer, Reference Sayer2011). As Doyal and Gough (Reference Doyal and Gough1991) emphasise a basic needs approach requires explanation of the capacity for action through agency and the ways in which this might be constrained or liberated.
Figure 1. The four dimensions of the longitudinal space of vulnerability
The second dimension, drawing on capability theory (Sen, Reference Sen1999), is relabelled as capacity to be reflecting the extension in this discussion to understand the opportunities and constraints individuals experience in exercising functions to address vulnerabilities or to flourish. Examples of the capacities discussed in this article include the negative experiences of not having the knowledge or experiences to lever resources from service providers. But Lynn's case also highlights the role education, family history and networks play in developing capacities. None of these features is determined. Lynn's case demonstrates that it is her relation with a third sector organisation that allows for the mobilisation of capacities to meet her basic needs, and through which she is able to attend to Kyle's and her rights in the legal system.
Each of these dimensions of vulnerability cannot be divorced from the third dimension, access to service providers. In this article, from research in the United Kingdom, this relation to societal institutions is with public and third sector service providers. The role played by social care, legal systems and welfare provision has been pivotal in explanations of vulnerability and flourishing throughout this article. The concern here is not with an idealised account of society in which autonomy is defined as a desired state that allows all citizens to choose their mode of life and access to opportunities. But the cases in this article highlight how inequalities persist and may often be exacerbated for individuals who are unable to develop relationships to connect the three dimensions of the longitudinal space of vulnerability elaborated. They are not able to act to bring about change to reduce vulnerabilities.
The dotted arrows in Figure 1 between the three dimensions of the longitudinal space of vulnerability represent the relationships that allow individuals to flourish as empowered and autonomous agents and have mastery to purposefully exercise control in their lives. They make explicit a relational account of vulnerability in which the attainment of basic needs, and the capacity to be, are intimately implicated with access to service provision in any explanation of vulnerability. An explanatory model that includes this understanding of empowerment also recognises that freedoms pursued will always be partial and constrained within social, economic and political circumstance where the possibilities for flourishing and vulnerability are ever present.
