Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class

239 Pages·2007·0.738 MB·English

by  John Kirk (auth.)

Class, Culture and Social Change
Also by John Kirk
Twentieth Century Writing and the British Working Class
Class, Culture and
Social Change
On the Trail of the Working Class
John Kirk
Working Lives Research Institute
London Metropolitan University
©John Kirk2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-54920-3
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Kirk,John,1957–
Class,culture and social change :on the trail of the
working class / John Kirk.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Working class – Great Britain.2.Social classes – Great Britain.
3.Social change – Great Britain.I.Title.
HD8391.K57 2007
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a
Post-Industrial Landscape 13
2 In Search of the Working Class: The Rise of
British Cultural Studies 38
3 Abyss-mal Sites: Representation and the British
Working Class 73
4 ‘Speaking for more than Itself’: Answerabilityand the
Working-Class Text 103
5 Working through Change (i): Oral Testimony and the
Language of Class 142
6 Working through Change (ii): Work-life Histories and
Narratives of Class 169
Conclusion 203
Notes 209
Bibliography 219
Index 228
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following editors and publishers for permitting
me to reprint work that previously appeared in their respective journals.
Sections of Chapter 2 are taken from ‘Northern Exposure: Mapping the
Remains of the Post-industrial Landscape’, which appeared in Space and
Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, 6:2 (May 2003), and I am
grateful to Sage and to the editors for their kind permission to use the
material. Chapter 3 was originally published as ‘Classifying Matters’ in
The European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:2 (May 2007) and has been
considerably reworked for the purposes of this book. My thanks go to
the editors of the journal and to Sage Publications. Parts of Chapters 5 and
6 originally appeared in Sociological Research Online, 11:1 (March 2006),
and I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to use the work here.
This book was long in the writing, though spurred on recently by
stimulating discussions with colleagues at the Working Lives Research
Institute, London Metropolitan University. In particular I owe a debt of
thanks to Christine Wall and Tim Strangleman, and to Jane Martin at
the Institute of Education. Clearly, Chapter 6 would not have seen the
light of day without the co-operation and contribution of my intervie-
wees, for which I am extremely grateful. Putting up with somebody who
is writing a book is never easy, so I am grateful as ever to my partner,
Alison, for her patience and support, not to mention a sharp editorial
eye. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Rose and Fred Kirk, for
their love and encouragement, and for their spirit and resolve.
vi
Introduction
Employing the language of class has always been a potentially
controversial exercise, and this is never more so than in the British
context. Indeed, as David Cannadine pointed out in his book, Class in
Britain (2000), there exists a wide belief ‘that the British are obsessed
with class in the way that other nations are obsessed with food or race
or sex or drugs or alcohol’ (Cannadine, 2000, p. ix).1 This obsession
takes contrasting trajectories, producing a range of contradictory dis-
courses on the topic. From Marx to Margaret Thatcher, the subject of
class – usually in the shape of the working class – has rested like a night-
mare on the brains of the living. This may well be one good reason why
invoking the idea of class invariably provokes its contrary – the notion
of classlessness, or the end of class. While the rhetoric of classlessness has
never quite found the resonance it has in North American mythology,
there have been key moments in British culture when this proposition
occupied a hegemonic role in sociological and cultural commentary,
while finding a different, if still insistent, register in wider culture. The
post-Second World War “age of affluence” represented the last juncture
where class was seen to be an anachronism in a society and culture
transformed by the introduction of the welfare state and full employ-
ment. There the workers were viewed by commentators to be moving
inexorably towards the status of their middle-class counterparts and in
the process inevitably erasing class divisions altogether (see Zweig, 1961;
Goldthorpe and Lockwood, 1969; for commentary, see Roberts, 1989;
Savage, 2001). Yet this fortuitous state was more imagined than real,
often based on superficial conceptions of affluence (the acquisition of a
television set or washing machine, it seemed) and were shown by the
1970s to be partial and inadequate as academic research revealed
continuing levels of poverty hitherto thought erased (see, for instance,
1
2 Class, Culture and Social Change
Townsend, 1967), while some critics identified a renewed shop-floor
militancy disrupting the workplace which implied that struggles around
class – in this case, the economics of class – lived on (for instance,
Beynon, 1973).
Yet narratives predicating the “end of class” re-emerged once again
during the 1980s and persist in the present. Indeed, a range of factors
have displaced class in this period, and produced a more confident and
strident rhetoric of classlessness in British society than hitherto heard.
Here, as in earlier examples, it is the working class that is deemed to have
departed the social landscape, either as a distinct cultural formation, as
an economic entity defined by types of work, or as an agent of political
change or action. It is possible to identify a range of reasons for this
development. In part, ideas of the demise of class derive from the deep
and rapid economic changes characteristic of Western capitalist societies
from the turn of the 1980s. Britain, in particular, witnessed a profound
shift in terms of production, where the wholesale erosion of its industrial
base turned the British economy from one based largely on manufactur-
ing towards one dependent on the service sector, thus shedding thou-
sands of jobs in traditional industries such as coal, steel and textiles. Such
economic and technological change fragmented stable class formations,
particularly working-class formations, and cannot be underestimated in
any discussion of class structure or formation in Britain (see, for
instance, Savage, 2000). One major response to this within critical and
social theory was the development of postmodern taxonomies with
which to make sense of the changes and their implications, resulting in
a number of social theorists identifying a new and unprecedented pro-
liferation of social and cultural identities clamouring for recognition,
thus reducing the importance of class, if not eclipsing it altogether (for
commentary, see Munt, 2000; Day, 2001; Milner, 1999, 2002; Kirk, 2003).
Thus writers on postmodernism, adopting poststructuralist theory’s
insistence on the fluidity and fragmentation of ontological boundaries
in this new dispensation, have challenged and in large part rejected
traditional methods of viewing class.2This has led to a shift from a broad
acceptance of class as central to the sources of change, conflict or cohe-
sion within society, to a new emphasis on identity politics and new social
movements as political conduits for action, and thus a move from the
politics of redistribution to that of recognition (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985;
Young, 1990; Butler, 1998. For a critique, see Meiksins Wood, 1986;
Harvey, 1993; Fraser, 1995; Eagleton, 1996). Academics and politicians
deride notions of class as they seek a “Third Way” (Blair, 1996; Giddens,
1998), a politics that might be seen to transcend class and nation to
embrace a globalised consumer culture where all that is solid melts
Introduction 3
intoair, and “traditional” identities give way to a proliferation of self-
fashioned subjectivities.
Thus ideas of consumption have come to occupy a primary focus of
attention in cultural analysis and are projected, it seems, onto all aspects
of social life: from health to education, politics to personal relation-
ships. This has been reflected in the intellectual marketplace, too, where
studies of consumerism abound and the consumer has emerged since
the 1980s as a potential political subversive in her/his own right.
Amongst all this activity, the dialectical counterpart of the consumer –
what was once called the producer – has all but disappeared. Thus any
significant interest in the concept and experience of class declines and
we are faced with an insistence on a kind of classlessness seen to be
paradigmatic of the new postmodern consumerist milieu, and this class-
lessness is then constitutive of a new take on individualism, argued for
by writers like Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992), and which I will discuss
later on. Simon J. Charlesworth, in A Phenomenology of Working Class
Experience (2000), suggests that while ‘class as a topic has sunk to the
bottom of the hierarchy of intellectual objects’, and while ‘universities
celebrate ethnic diversity’, they fail to recognise ‘forms of discrimin-
ation that have shaped the nature of their own space, to say nothing of
the inequalities upon which British nation-hood stands’ (Charlesworth,
2000, p. 14). These shifts of emphasis with regard to the significance
ofclass in society quite quickly established themselves as the new
“common sense”, so much so that one recent commentator can say that
‘having once been the fundamental source and subject of conflict in the
political culture of capitalism, class inequality is now the problem that
dare not speak its name’ (Sayer, 2005, p. 224).
In recent times, however, class has begun to make something of a
comeback, occasionally in the most unlikely quarters. Plainly class has
always been the stuff of popular culture, and the function of representa-
tions has kept notions of class alive while it was simultaneously being
denied. In an earlier book, Twentieth Century Writing and the British
Working Class (2003), I was interested in representations of working-
class life primarily within the field of British fiction, as well as the
broader discursive realm that is popular culture. Around that time other
work embedded both within the academic field and beyond it had
begun to re-open issues around the continued relevance of class in
British society after a considerable period of neglect.3Many of the ideas
and lines of argument developed here are shaped by and alongside
important themes explored by those writers concerned with re-figuring,
rehabilitating and restating the significance of class for academic
study.