Poor men's behavior can look at odds with mainstream values even when they share those values. Unable to meet standards like steady work and providing for a family, they keep the ideal while living by a weaker 'shadow' version of it. What looks like a different moral code is a fallback that sits beneath the same code everyone else holds.
The book pushes back on the idea that the poor are a different, morally inferior kind of people, or that broken families make their lives a self-perpetuating pathology. It treats their choices as responses to the conditions they face, not as a separate culture they pass down.
Men in unskilled, casual, or menial jobs, or out of work entirely, share a street corner as their base of operations. For people whose work is irregular, a fixed public meeting place takes the place of a steady workplace as the hub of their working and social lives.