Z klasy robotniczej do pomocy społecznej. Biograficzne doświadczenia dawnych „beneficjentów socjalizmu” w postindustrialnym polskim mieście
From Working Class to Social Welfare. Biographical Experiences of Ex-“Beneficiaries of Socialism” in Post-Industrial Polish City

Summary/Abstract: Since 1990 the sociologists from the University of Lodz have been conducting multidimensional analyses of poverty and social exclusion. In 1997-1999, within the framework of two projects, “The Social Cost of Economic Transformation in Central Europe - Social History of Poverty in Central Europe” and “Forms of Poverty and Social Risks and Their Spatial Distribution in Lodz,” family life histories of 3 generations of the families supported by social welfare agencies were collected. In Polish People’s Republic, the narrators from the generation named “the basic” (40-50 years old) belonged to the working class and - in a sense - represented the collectivism of socialism beneficiaries; at the moment of the research they were experiencing traumatic trajectories of unexpected impoverishment. In the paper, we are coming back to the data from 1990 and discuss biographical experiences of narrators within the context of their understanding of transition process. In the last part of the article, some results of the follow-up study conducted in 2008-2010 are presented with the notion to the macro structural conditioning of family life histories and factors decisive to the vicious circle of poverty and social exclusion.

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