Capital Conversion and the Hysteresis Effect in Urban Poverty: Relational Barriers to Labour Market Participation

This article examines how individuals in persistent urban poverty attempt to access the labour market through capital conversion strategies, and how these efforts are shaped by the hysteresis effect. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory and relational sociology, the study analyses how people try to re-enter employment by converting social, cultural, and symbolic capital into labour market opportunities. Based on qualitative fieldwork in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the research highlights how mismatches between habitus and the structural logic of the labour market produce friction, failure, and exclusion. The hysteresis effect—where past experiences and expectations lag behind current field demands—helps explain why job-seeking efforts often misfire, despite high motivation or informal skill sets. Respondents struggle with institutionalised expectations of employability, bureaucratic eligibility criteria, and the erosion of informal networks that once facilitated access to work. These findings show that labour market exclusion is not only a matter of lacking resources, but also of symbolic disqualification and misrecognition. The article contributes to scholarship on poverty, labour markets, and agency by demonstrating how structural inequality is reproduced through field-specific logics, and how relational forms of agency both resist and reinforce these mechanisms.