Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes

Feelings of Class

Lars Meier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138312173
• eBook ISBN: 9780429857621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on qualitative research among industrial workers in a region that has undergone deindustrialisation and transformation to a service-based economy, this book examines the loss of status among former manual labourers. Focus lies on their emotional experiences, nostalgic memories, hauntings from the past and attachments to their former places of work, to transformed neighbourhoods, as well as to public space. Against this background the book explores the continued importance of class as workers attempt to manage the declining recognition of their skills and a loss of power in an "established-outsider figuration". A study of the transformation of everyday life and social positions wrought by changes in the social structure, in urban landscapes and in the "structures of feeling", this examination of the dynamic of social identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and geography with interests in post-industrial societies, social inequality, class and social identity.

1 Introduction

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organised – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history.

Walter Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 23)

Industrial areas, and the people living or working in these areas, have experienced enormous transformations, especially since the 1970s. These transformations manifest themselves not only in material structures, such as in the ruins of former factories (Edensor 2005a; Mah 2012; Storm 2014; Voiculescu and Jucu 2016), in newly established office buildings or in upgraded and gentrified working-class housing developments. Transformations also become apparent in everyday social encounters and interactions, such as in regions that have become socially more diverse (Vertovec 2007). It is known that economic and spatial transformations go hand in hand with a change in social structure. Yet the relevance of social transformations for everyday individual identity positioning in these areas remains largely unknown.

The transformations of the social structure and the growing social inequality in Germany have been frequently evidenced by social statistics.¹ I adopt a different perspective on the transformation of social inequality by showing how the latter is individually experienced and reproduced. The individual experience of social inequality is accompanied by daily identity-related repositionings in a local social structure. Social identities are dynamic and related to social structures. This means that transformations of the social structure are reflected in the individuals’ changed social positions. Changes in the structures of social inequalities may therefore also be described as the individuals’ identity-related repositionings in a social structure.

In this book, transformations are referred to as processes which have an effect on emotions at the subjective level. Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” (Williams 1965, 1977) explains this close relationship between transformation and the emotional individual.² He argues that objective structures, forms and values are “actively lived and felt” in the individuals’ everyday lives (Williams 1977: 132), thereby relaying the “structures of feeling” between the individual and the social. I will show that there is also a relationship between social structure and individual emotions.

The “structures of feeling” are dynamic and not “fixed forms” (Williams 1977: 129); they are conceptualised as “social experiences in solution” (Williams 1977: 133). These current “structures of feeling” have not only been coined by hegemonic structures and ideologies, but by the past (“residual”) and the future (“emergent”; Williams 1977: 121–127) simultaneously. Thus, transformations do not only become evident in the comparative retrospection on previous conditions, be it by studying historical sources or by demonstrating social statistical historical comparisons of time series analyses of unemployment or income distributions,³ but they also become evident in the present time. This understanding of transformation allows us first of all to conceive of transformations not as comprehensive and absolute, and therefore, second, to be able to analyse transformations even in current narratives as well as in narrated biographical memories by interviewed industrial workers, and finally, to comprehend the individuals’ social positions within a social structure as being dynamic, in that they are affected by any position changes, which also have a clear effect on their emotions.

I argue in favour of an analysis of social inequality conceived of as being dynamic, a dynamic of incomplete processes and changes in social positions within the social structure that have an emotional effect. Against this backdrop, I will point out the relevance of the long-neglected, often anachronistically appearing analytical category of class. The argument is that class is not only relevant in specific practices and in the availability of economic and social resources (Bourdieu 1984; Savage 2000), but also has a subjective emotional reality (Sennett and Cobb 1972; Sayer 2005; Kirk 2007; Walkerdine 2010), resulting in a “psychic landscape of class” (Reay 2005). From a sociological perspective I refer to emotions as social facts, which at the individual level manifest themselves in negative or positive emotional expressions. These are responses to the assessment of stimuli and situations and have themselves a structuring effect on the social setting (Gerhards 1988: 16). Individuals’ social positions are accompanied by emotional experiences (Kemper 1978; Sayer 2005), which, as in the case of a loss of status, can be expressed through the feeling of shame (Neckel 1991).

In this introduction, I propose in a first step to understand biographical narratives and emotional descriptions of current visits to the locations as well as social encounters and practices as social positionings in the present – the time when narratives are presented. At the same time, the oftentimes nostalgia-laden narratives of industrial workers come to mind, framed as today’s confrontation with the ghosts of the past (Gordon 2008). These narratives are not only backward-looking, but express a self-positioning based on present-day identities.

On this basis, I will show in a second step that in narrated memories, local references and thereby also the self-positioning in a local environment (transformed industrial landscapes) are relevant and that these, together with the “structures of feeling” approach, need to be taken into account.

In a third step it will become evident “that every person is fundamentally related to other people, and that every human individual is fundamentally a social being” (Elias 2001: 124)⁴ and how individuals with their narrated memories therefore function as part of a figuration. Thus, the figuration approach lends itself to being able to take a specific analytical look at the process of power inequalities in the relationship between different social groups. Figurations have a processual nature and allow analysing changes in people’s position in the social hierarchy, such as a changing local established-outsider figuration (Elias and Scotson 1965), as the narratives reveal.

The next paragraph in this introduction, which closes with an overview of the different book chapters, shows that the relevance of class in the interviewees’ subjective experiences, emotions and narrated memories becomes evident as well.

Transformations: biographical narratives and social inequality

Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in ways to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened. History, on the other hand, is reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is the representation of the past.

(Nora 1996: 3)

Biographical memories, as they have been recorded for this book in form of biographical interviews (see Chapter 2), are a problem if one intends to use them as historical data sources, because biographical memories are not “objective” retrospections on people’s own lives. Instead, they represent a “biographical illusion” as Pierre Bourdieu puts it (Bourdieu 2004 [1986]), due to forgetting, to new conceptualisation or even to unintentionally inventing experiences. In such interviews, past and future are set into a suitable relationship and single events are included, converting one’s life into a narrative story line (Ricoeur 1991). So why should a sociological research project work with such an uncertain data source?

To answer this requires a change of perception. This book is not about a historical retrospection and analysing how things actually were in earlier days or in which ways things specifically changed. Rather, the narrated memories are understood and analysed as personal social positionings in the present. Following this argument, I prefer to use the term “life story” instead of “life history” (Peacock and Holland 1993; Miller 2000). It takes a sociological perspective on narrated life stories, because life stories are considered to be based on social knowledge here, as related to general social structures. They are narratives that are location-dependent; they take on a certain perspective and occur at a certain point in time. I consider the biographical narratives in these interviews of former industrial workers as expressions of their social positions in hierarchical social space (Bourdieu 1984) today, at the time when the stories were told. Life story interviews have a situational nature since the interviewees narrate how they make sense of their life at a particular moment and from a specific identity-related perspective. The interviewees use a narrative of the past to interpret their lives in the present within a wider social and spatial context.

Biographical narratives allow us – and this makes them so precious for a sociological research project – to conceive of the individual experiences, interpretations and constructions of meaning within their structural context. Based on the understanding that a single case can be indicative of general action structures and interpretation patterns (Bude 1984; Rosenthal 2004), processes of social inequality in biographical narratives can be identified as supraindividual processes, and I perceive them as such. The figuration approach (Elias 1984) helps to grasp the individual narratives especially in their social embeddedness, whereas the “structures of feeling” approach (Williams 1977) focusses particularly on their local contextualisation.

Biographical narratives are also a “self-interpretation” (Ricoeur 1991: 198) and they are reconstructive, because in the narrative the life story is created in an active and dynamic process (Misztal 2003; Olick 2008: 159). Narrated life stories are based on individual memories, but they are not just related to the individual. Rather, individual memories are embedded in publicly circulating narratives that are particular for a certain era of history and for spatial contexts (Lawler 2008: 38). Consequently, memories depend on a certain era, as Karl Mannheim describes it, on a generation “with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process” (Mannheim 1952 [1923]: 290). Raymond Williams also points out that the “structures of feeling” have a chronological and generational dimension, because “no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors” (Williams 1977: 131).

The narrated biographical memories belong to a specific social context so that individual memories can be conceived as “collective memories” (Halbwachs 1980 [1950]) having a complex relationship to one another. Narratives are knowledge and as such they are correctly situated in sociology (Alexander 2003). This book refers to a long tradition in social sciences that refers to a social perspective on social knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1966) and conceptualises personal memory as a social phenomenon such as collective memory, cultural memory or social memory (Nora 1989; Halbwachs 1992 [1941]; Zerubavel 1996; Zerubavel, 2003).⁵ Despite further differences between these concepts of memory (Olick and Robbins 1998; Erll and Nünning 2008), it is important to note for the purpose of this book that memory and knowledge are collective matters; they need a social framework and they are transient (Zelizer 1995).

The personal perspective on one’s life and on the places where life took place is not an independent perspective of one individual. Biographic memories relate to a common knowledge and to powerful narratives as prevalent in official representations and general discourse. The individual memories are always related to the social, economic, spatial and cultural contexts in which the individual is situated. Through collective memories of a past, individual recollections become memories creating a sense of identity, which then leads to social positionings. Not only does this manifest itself in the personal interviews and in the industrial workers’ repetitive nostalgic narratives of an earlier solidary and harmonious community, but also in the focus group interviews. In these groups three to five persons were interviewed, all of whom presented common narratives on shared experiences and knowledge bases during their communicative interactions (Morgan 1996; Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2010: 101–107). In both interview situations, the individual biographical interviews and the focus group interview, narratives are generated which consist of collective memories shared with one another. As becomes repeatedly evident in the narratives and contextualisations therein of individual experiences as joint experiences of the group of industrial workers, these memories enable individuals to become members of an imagined community (Mills 2010: 14), namely, the community of industrial workers. Maurice Halbwachs’ view on the relationship between individual and collective memory is relevant in helping to understand individual biographical narratives in their social embeddedness. He states:

While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. While these remembrances are mutually supportive of each other and common to all, individual members still vary in the intensity with which they experience them. I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as may relationship to other milieus change.

(Halbwachs 1980 [1950]: 48)

Halbwachs views the individual memory as one that is formed by social interactions and communication, and as being closely related to collective memory schemes, thus also being socially shaped. From this perspective, the biographical narratives of the interviewed industrial workers can only be grasped when they are viewed in their social embeddedness, i.e. not as individual but as social memories. This perspective helps in understanding the workers’ individual biographical narratives as social and knowledge-based. Collective memories and cultures of memory (Erll 2011) are dynamic and changing. In fact, the framework within which individuals memorise, tell their life stories and socially position themselves is knowledge-related. Mannheim points out that this knowledge has a temporal dimension, which he calls the concept of generation. The membership in such a generation, which Mannheim refers to as a community of destiny, is the result of growing up in the same historical and cultural context. The “big” transformations of socioeconomic and spatial structures are therefore also reflected in individual lives and narrative memories. However – and this is often forgotten with regard to Mannheim – it is not just the belonging to a generation that is knowledge-relevant in a specific way, but for Mannheim it is also the belonging to a class (see also Halbwachs 1980 [1950]: 84), as becomes ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and table
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Context: spatial and social transformations
• Part II Senses of place and transformed industrial landscapes
• Part III Community transformations and social encounters
• References
• Index