behaviour is shared within social groups. One of the central propositions of the ‘postmodernist’ approach to understanding consumption is that the importance of socio-structural context has decreased over time; we now live in a time where traditional forms of social stratification (for instance, along class, gender or racial lines) are less important than the individual’s ability to calculate individual actions rationally and where new forms of social structure create ‘new’ post-traditional social groups with quite different attitudes and orientations. Hence there is a
5 Racing culture: the racecourse and racecourse life hile people could not avoid having views on racing only a minority actually attended race-meetings, and it is to the cultural and social life of the racegoing public that we now turn. The anticipatory thrill of travel was important, and a first section deals briefly with changes in travel over the period. A following more substantial section deals with social relationships, behaviour and attendance in relation to social class and gender. Changes and continuities in the comfort and facilities of the course, and
5 Evaluating the mix: negotiating with multiculture Introduction The previous chapters have discussed the ways in which parents’ and carers’ discussion of school choice were infused with concerns about their children’s emotions and also how talking about school choice also frequently raised emotional responses. Chapter 4 focused in particular on ideas of threat and contamination which were produced when thinking of high schools and the presence of classed others. This ‘underclass’ was imagined as gendered, identified by both behaviour in and around the school
3 Off-course betting, bookmaking and the British n 1923 an assistant mistress of a London County Council boys’ school reported that betting was fairly general in her class. While she and the head took this seriously, the boys treated it as nothing wrong, and her remonstrations as a joke. They were actually ‘encouraged by their parents’. She felt helpless. She could not go to the police because ‘in a poor neighbourhood it is a very dangerous thing to excite the animosity of the parents’.1 The popularity of betting in that particular culture was clear. His Majesty
We now explore the term ‘equality’, defined in two ways: first, that which concerns equality as a starting point to life; second, equality as an outcome. We also consider equality before the law, equal political rights and equal social rights. After that we examine individual and group equality, and equality in terms of the class structure and international relations. Finally
demur to both those statements. The hospitals are always short of cash, because they are doing a great and expanding work, but they are getting enormous voluntary support from the whole class who will be treated in the hospitals all over the country. I do not think that ‘a lean time’ is the correct expression. They are being more and more useful as the community learns the importance of health, and the
together spatial and social identities which are often heavily classed and racialised. Savage et al. (2005: 207) argue that ‘one’s residence is a crucial, possibly the crucial, identifier of who you are’. This intertwining of social and spatial identities 40 Imagining places means that where you live does not just reflect who you are: it also plays an important role in shaping who you are and – particularly when thinking about schooling – who your children become. In considering the spatial nature of school choice, this chapter will first explore the different features
ITLP_C05.QXD 18/8/03 9:57 am Page 71 5 The continuing relevance of the Milibandian perspective David Coates and Leo Panitch The belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist politics is the most crippling of illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone . . . To say that the Labour Party is the party of the working class is . . . important . . . but it affords no answer to the point at issue, namely that a socialist party is needed in Britain, and that the Labour Party is not it, and it will not be
familiar in studies relating Labour’s fortunes and character to (primarily) the industrial working class, one famously advanced in Eric Hobsbawm’s essay ‘The forward march of labour halted?’ (Hobsbawm 1981). This ‘electoral sociology’ approach is evident in arguments about the growth of class politics as an ingredient in Labour’s rise, notably in work by McKibbin, Hobsbawm (Kirk 1991) and Laybourn (1995). It features, too, in debates about Labour’s ‘decline’ since the 1950s, in political science literature about class dealignment, fragmentation of values and the
6 Jockeys, trainers and the micro-world of the stable he top jockeys and trainers, often working-class in origin, enjoyed a middle-class income often equalling that of lawyers or doctors. To the public, jockeys were the object of either venom or veneration as they lost or won. Within racing’s social elite, trainers and jockeys were often looked down upon. As the Times racing correspondent in 1933 commented, ‘the very word “professional” arouses suspicion’.1 Significantly, while lists of breeders and owners in Ruff ’s Guide or the Racing Calendar, like racing