{"id":27222,"date":"2017-04-28T09:24:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-28T14:24:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=27222"},"modified":"2017-04-01T15:46:29","modified_gmt":"2017-04-01T20:46:29","slug":"guest-post-international-panhandling-and-vocabularies-of-motive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/04\/28\/guest-post-international-panhandling-and-vocabularies-of-motive\/","title":{"rendered":"International panhandling and vocabularies of motive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Smith<\/a> observed in his <\/span>Lectures on Jurisprudence<\/em><\/a> (1762) — a series of talks that he gave at the University of Glasgow — that national character plays a significant role in economic transactions: the Dutch, he said, are \u201cmore faithful to their word\u201d and better at \u201cperforming agreements\u201d than the English, and the English more faithful than the Scots.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In the past few months, I\u2019ve observed a similar kind of cultural variation in a much more prosaic setting: the panhandling interaction.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re from North America, as I am, you\u2019ve probably seen people on the street requesting money from strangers using appeals such as \u201cHomeless\u2014Please Help\u201d or \u201cHomeless Veteran.\u201d\u00a0 There are a number of variations, but homelessness is the common theme in many cases.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Photo by Steve Baker<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elsewhere in the world, panhandlers use quite different rationales\u2014or what the great mid-century sociologist C. Wright Mills<\/a> would call \u201cvocabularies of motive<\/a>.\u201d Mills wasn\u2019t interested in what actually motivated people\u2014such as what psychologists would term \u201cneeds\u201d or \u201cdrives\u201d\u2014but rather in the ideologically-charged terms they used to justify their actions to themselves and others. As he observed, some motives are more acceptable than others, and we can learn something about local cultures based on what passes for a \u201cgood reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s sociologically interesting that within the North American context, the concept of \u201chome\u201d has such resonance that the claim of \u201chomelessness\u201d is considered a compelling and sufficient motive for giving money to strangers. But while the need for shelter would seem universal, it\u2019s rare to see a panhandler outside North America requesting a donation on the basis of homelessness.<\/p>\n

In Germany, for example, one often finds people begging for trinkgeld<\/em>\u2014\u201ddrinking money.\u201d And they\u2019re not playing for laughs, as one sometimes finds in the US, when panhandlers give a wink and a nod to the stereotype that money given to beggars is only ever used to buy alcohol (or drugs). When a panhandler asks for \u201cdrinking money\u201d in the US, it\u2019s sort of an in-joke, or an attempt to appear disarmingly honest; based on the limited examples I\u2019ve seen, this seems to jolly people up and get good results (i.e., quantities of cash).<\/p>\n

But in Germany, drinking money is serious business. In the four years I lived in the Rhine Valley, I saw dozens of men (always men) on public transport and on the street, asking for \u201ctrinkgeld, bitte\u201d in monotonous, dirge-like tones that seemed to express just how grim a fate it was to lack beer money. Equally surprising to me was the willingness of Germans to open their purses for this reason, as if it was <\/em>a truth universally acknowledged that a man with empty pockets must be in want of a beer. In the interactions I witnessed, no one on either end of the transaction ever smiled.<\/p>\n

Yet another vocabulary of motive can be found on the streets of Istanbul, where panhandlers often approach passers-by with a request for ekmek paras\u0131<\/em>\u2014Turkish for \u201cbread money.\u201d In perhaps 10 visits to Turkey in the last 3 years, I\u2019ve never seen anyone on the street claiming to be homeless. Nor have I seen a cardboard sign of the kind so common in North America.<\/p>\n

In all three settings, the vocabularies of motive among panhandlers have a common theme of need: for shelter, drink or food. What\u2019s interesting is how each cultural setting changes the calculus about what kind of motive is most likely to bring in the cash. Perhaps it comes down to what each society views as among the basic human rights: in the US, shelter has a plausible claim to that status, but beer does not; whereas in Germany, it an appeal for trinkgeld succeeds as an appeal to common humanity and decency; in Turkey, hunger seems to trump all other claims.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n

Brooke Harrington is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the Copenhagen Business School. She is the author of two books:\u00a0Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and the New Investor Populism<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating<\/a>.\u00a0 She is currently doing research on offshore banking and blogs at our fellow Society Pages blog,\u00a0Economic Sociology<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Adam Smith observed in his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762) — a series of talks that he gave at the University of Glasgow — that national character plays a significant role in economic transactions: the Dutch, he said, are \u201cmore faithful to their word\u201d and better at \u201cperforming agreements\u201d than the English, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":70201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,15,23384,2124,260,1777,1807,3920,212],"class_list":["post-27222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-culture","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-foodagriculture","tag-international-comparisons","tag-nation-germany","tag-nation-turkey","tag-nation-united-states","tag-alcohol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/04\/10.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27222"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70202,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27222\/revisions\/70202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}