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This book has examined the nature and dynamics of working-class identity in Britain in the half-century from 1880, focusing on the coal and cotton industries in Lancashire. It may thus be seen to form part of a broader historiography which has sought to analyse more closely the central role accorded class in the social and political developments of that period. This historiography has come to emphasise alternative sources of identity which, at certain times and in particular contexts, cut across and so weakened the force of class loyalties. The fact that this period witnessed the emergence of a working class more culturally united than at any time before or since has not been fundamentally challenged. However, the evidence presented here suggests that, for Lancashire, that perspective is, in large measure, inaccurate. In reaching such a conclusion, this book has located the formation of class identity in the broader material context of working-class life, rather than in the agency of language: the medium through which perceptions of society and the individual’s place within it were articulated.

This chapter provides a socio-demographic overview of the membership based on the survey: the party emerges as a male-dominated party with a high average age. A socio-economic profile shows the party to be predominantly objectively middle class though a majority reject any class identity. The proportion of members who were born in England is around that found in the Scottish population as a whole though the membership is drawn disproportionately from small town and rural Scotland.

Over the half-century from 1880, class identities in Britain appeared to find their most overt expression in the growth of trade-union organisation. Associational ties, for long confined to craft minorities, came to extend to a peak of more than eight million workers by 1920. At the same time, a shared sense of interests within and across trades was seen to emerge from a series of large-scale industrial conflicts in the second and third decades of the 20th century. The necessary basis for the emergence of a collective consciousness of class appeared substantially in place. In certain sectors, including the coal and cotton industries, the density of membership in trade unions was such that questions concerning the role of labour organisations in promoting or containing class loyalties remain significant. This chapter considers the extent to which the temper of industrial relations gave rise to an unambiguous sense of class unity, as well as the extent to which the trade-union record accurately reflects the views of the rank and file.

This chapter examines the process of recruitment, the factors determining the timing, and the direction of the individual’s entry to work in Britain during the years 1880-1930, focusing on the coal and cotton industries in Lancashire. Throughout the period, despite the increasing intervention of state agencies, entry to work was mostly determined by personal connections. Responsibility for recruitment continued to devolve on to the workforce itself. In such circumstances, it is argued, family linkages were readily utilised, so that sons tended to follow their fathers into the same trade. Yet the importance which has been attached to kinship calls into question the broader cultural implications of internal work hierarchies. This chapter looks at contemporary attitudes to work and the ways in which this experience helped to shape the social outlook and the evolution of class identities.

Both the coal and the cotton industries in Britain were subject to important technological innovations during the years 1880-1930. The implications such innovations had for work practices reflect much about the attitudes and expectations which prevailed on both sides of industry and provide some insight into the relationship between the work experience and class identities. The decline of Britain’s established export industries in the early 20th century has been traced to technological conservatism and the survival of organisational structures inappropriate to altered competitive conditions. Of late, however, a sturdy defence of British entrepreneurship has been mounted, arguing that technical and organisational choices represented the most rational and profitable course in prevailing market circumstances. This chapter examines such points to elucidate the role accorded labour, particularly skilled workers, in the leading industries of south-central Lancashire.

This chapter explores an important issue within political sociology: the role of institutions and political articulation in establishing a connection between class and its attitudinal correlates. It challenges the argument that the magnitude of class conflicts will differ across countries, and instead offers an alternative hypothesis suggesting that class conflicts will be more pronounced in the social democratic welfare regime than in the liberal welfare regime. The chapter contends that a more fruitful understanding of institutional feedback effects should focus on other measures of welfare state performance, such as the profile of risk-reduction in social spending priorities or income redistribution via taxes and transfers. In support of this alternative hypothesis, it compares six Western countries—Canada, United States, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand—in terms of social stratification and social policy, as well as attitudes to welfare policy and redistribution. The chapter demonstrates that preferences regarding welfare state and redistributive politics are more linked to social class and class identity in the social democratic regimes than in the liberal regimes.

The high school is one of the most recognisable features of the Hollywood teen movie, one whose setting itself usually guarantees a focus on its teenage inhabitants rather than on the adults that attend to them. However, prior to the mid- 1980s, the genre largely focused on its protagonists’ activities outside of the school, in youth-oriented spaces such as the drive-in cinema and, latterly, the mall. Even Grease, ostensibly set at Rydell High, has one of its narrative’s key junctures – the final reunion between Danny and Sandy – occur at the carnival, an event staged to celebrate the conclusion of the characters’ schooling. That teenagers are now more often portrayed within high school can largely be attributed to the work of John Hughes, who wrote, directed and produced a significant number of teen movies in the 1980s. Chief among these was The Breakfast Club, which established a set of archetypal figures that have remained largely intact to this day.

This chapter delineates how middle-class identity has shaped discussions on film and documentary. Middle-class characters and concerns are repeatedly represented in popular film—both fiction and documentary. But the critical tools with which to approach the classed nature of such portrayals need to be refined and developed. The same is true of class-sensitive perspectives on the media industries and media audiences. Some ways have been demonstrated in which screen representations of middle-class characters can be examined precisely as classed, rather than as simply neutral or taken for granted. The classed nature of such portrayals, the exact characteristics ascribed to the middle class, and the invitations made to a middle-class viewer are perhaps most readily available for analysis in films that stage meetings between members of the middle and working classes. The chapter is intended to act as a spur towards more critical thinking about class, in all its manifestations and complexities, within film and media studies.

This chapter explores the salience of social class and age for the formation of identities in later life. It draws on both cross-national and time-series data to provide both a global and historical view. The results show that neither class nor age is a dominant source of identity for older people. This lends support to the argument that there has been a dis-identification both of class and age amongst this age group. Moreover, age and class identities appear to operate independently of each other suggesting, from a relational sociology perspective, that other forms of identity and identification need to be examined. Ultimately these conclusions point to the need for continued research to understand how identities are formed in later life.

Chapter 3 documents the resilience of class identities and awareness. Changing class sizes and increased upward mobility have not weakened levels of class identification. There is even a modest increase in the tendency for people in middle class occupations to see themselves as working class. This partly results from background effects, but it also reflects the declining impact of educational qualifications on middle class identification. Conceptions of classes are also persistent. People are slightly less inclined to judge class on the basis of occupation than in the 1960s, but the middle class is still associated with white-collar jobs and good incomes, and the working class with manual work and low incomes. Perceptions of class divisions and barriers remain constant, and perceptions of class barriers to friendships, for example, are still present. Class remains an important feature of subjective social awareness.

This chapter describes how the young people, now in their late teens, returned to their childhood photographs and reflected upon their past selves. For those who were able to participate in the creation of an additional set of still and video images, the author examined how they used their cameras to represent their present lives and “what matters most.” Two things would shape the approach to analyzing the images, sounds, and sensibilities of what the young people produced as teenagers. The first was a shift in gaze—what some scholars have characterized as a move from “a familial gaze” to a “youth-culture gaze,” where young people can produce narratives that may be inaccessible to adults. The second was a tendency for the young people to self-consciously position themselves straddling different systems of value: the banal and the singular; the familial and the youth-cultural; the “interesting” and the “boring”; the ordinary (“normal”) and extraordinary aspects of their working-class and racialized lives and identities. Both of these patterns constitute what social theorist Michel Foucault called “technologies of self.” He used the term to describe a range of activities individuals engage in to refashion themselves, re-orient or maneuver emotions, re-shape values, and feel “agentic” in their lives.

Tom Leonard and Linton Kwesi Johnson have made use of place-specific spoken language in their poetry, which is represented in the text through experiments with orthography and phonetics. Leonard uses ‘phonetic city dialect’ in Intimate Voices, and Johnson's poetry, as set out in Mi Revalueshanary Fren, brings together a Jamaican-English-speaking voice with a musically rooted ‘sound’. The language of Leonard's text seems principally to justify a class reading rather than a colonial one. The epithet ‘scruff’ in ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’ might be read as an attempt to reify class identity as a form of the ethnic labour, structuring the hierarchical divisions of labour by denoting class as an essentialist category. The comparison of Leonard and Johnson's dialect work suggests that the effort to undermine the linguistic hierarchies that have governed poetic form can be effectively utilised to expose the political lines of privilege that such hierarchies support.

This chapter examines the construction of revolutionary masculinity that accompanied the formation of the rebel army and the armed urban underground (el llano). It first recovers the many unexpected ways young men in the anti-Batista resistance expressed revolutionary masculinity, including references to male honor and martyrdom, fatherhood and Catholicism, proper sexuality, and middle-class identity. The chapter argues that the self-constructed image of the guerrillas and urban men of action as honorable, disciplined, and morally righteous young men helped “domesticate” political violence and make it more palatable for the Cuban public. Finally, the chapter charts the rise of the romantic icon of the guerrilla fighter or barbudo, a trope that soon eclipsed the many other actors of the anti-Batista struggle who have not been enshrined in either official history or popular memory.

This chapter emphasizes the feminine public sphere. The notion of the feminine public sphere is based on the active participation of women in the formation of a middle-class identity, which was derived from a commitment to civic life and public service. Associationalism was a key feature of civil society in the 1870 to 1914 period, and while women's contribution to philanthropic societies has received some attention this study represents a more concerted effort to link women's public careers with the rise of a middle-class identity. By taking a fresh perspective on the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ through the lens of local, urban civic life—as opposed to high politics and the upper echelons of industrial capitalism—this research shows that the wives, sisters and daughters of men in the local elite mirrored their male kins' investment in a public profile in order to assert their own social position. The feminine public sphere of this study is the sphere of influence more affluent women carved out of a hostile, male oriented ‘public’ through heterodox interpretations of separate spheres; it is the discursive and organisational sites from which women contributed to the socio-political issues of their day while further reinforcing middle-class notions of civic duty.

In chapter 6, I show how the specific history an immigrant group has with the receiving country is an important aspect of the context of reception which does not receive sufficient attention in segmented assimilation theory’s discussion of the black second generation. I show how national contexts—specifically how national identity and legacies of the past, from slavery, to colonialism, to color segregation—influence identificational assimilation among the second generation. The chapter analyzes respondents’ responses to two questions: What does being British or American mean to you, and do you feel British or American? It explains why, in the American case, most of the second generation articulate shared national myths and sentiments, but in the British case the second generation had narratives that, though widely shared, were not the national myths. Engaging the multiculturalism literature, the chapter discusses how legacies of the past and national identity are two rarely-considered factors affecting immigrants’ integration over time. Given the increased linkages between immigration and national security in discourse and policy, these findings add to our knowledge of the factors impacting the degree of national identification among immigrants.

One of the most notable features of urbanization in China in the past two decades is the rise of an urban middle class. From the proliferation of nightlife entertainment in urban hot spots to the consumption of luxurious items and/or foreign brands, the drastic increase in car ownership to the growth of gated communities, cityscape in contemporary China has undergone drastic changes in the course of urbanization and socio-economic re-stratification. The rise of a newly formed middle class in the major cities is both an agent in shaping the changing cityscape and an outcome of current urban development. This chapter, drawing upon the authors’ observations conducted in a suburban middle-classcommunity in Beijing in 2007-2017 and the study of the middle class in Shanghai since the mid-1990s, reports on the emergence and formation of an urban middle class in contemporary Chinese cities. It is argued that this middle class came into existence when China’s economy was marketized and the social structure had undergone a major transformation as a result of such economic changes. Within a period of 20-25 years, there witnessed the birth of a middle class in the context of the transition to a post-socialist economy, the formation of new class identities and lifestyles, and growing class-related anxieties. Our discussion covers the formation of this urban middle class, its social and cultural outlooks, and an analysis of how their class interests shape the social landscape of the Chinese cities.