Abstract
This chapter uses a sociological approach to tackle poverty as a social problem. As a social problem, sociologists believe poverty is linked to the distribution of wealth and power structures and how political, economic, institutional arrangements, and historical conditions shape our lives and the possibilities to survive in a competitive world. They use analytic framework that shifts from the current popular focus of blaming the victim to addressing the inequalities of the distribution of power, wealth, and opportunity. Second, the chapter broadens the poverty reduction narrative to recognize that studying poverty is not the same thing as studying the poor. This framework turns empirical attention to political, economic, institutional, and historical conditions, as well as the policy decisions that shape the distribution of power and wealth, and interventions that seek to change the conditions of structural inequality and social stratification rather than narrowly focusing on changing the poor.