Q.Using the chapter’s comparison of naturalistic and sociological explanations of poverty, explain what makes an explanation ‘sociological’ rather than ‘naturalistic’.

The chapter draws a sharp and important contrast between two different ways of explaining the very same social outcome, using poverty as its worked example, precisely to show what "sociological" thinking actually adds beyond ordinary common sense.

A naturalistic explanation of poverty locates the cause inside the individual who is poor. On this view, people are poor because of some personal deficiency — they are afraid of work, they come from "problem families," they are unable to budget their money properly, or they suffer from low intelligence and shiftlessness. Notice what all of these have in common: each one treats poverty as if it were caused by the character or nature of the poor person themselves, as though poverty were an almost inevitable, natural consequence of who that individual is. This is very close to how common sense usually talks about poverty.

A sociological explanation, by contrast, locates the cause outside the individual, in the structure of society itself. The chapter (citing Jayaram, 1987) states it directly: contemporary poverty is caused by the structure of inequality in class society, and is experienced by those who suffer from chronic irregularity of work and low wages. On this view, a poor person is not poor because of some personal flaw; they are poor because the economy and labour market are organised in a way that gives some people insecure, badly paid work — or no work at all — regardless of how hardworking, careful, or intelligent that person is. …