The Business of Working-Class Credit: Subprime Markets in the United Kingdom since 1880

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

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Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly ◽

10.1177/0899764015597781 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 45 (1_suppl) ◽

pp. 95S-113S ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Jon Dean

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Social Class ◽

Young People ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Diverse Populations ◽

Widening Access ◽

The United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

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Lessons from the United Kingdom: Fightback on Workplace Hazards, 1979–1992

International Journal of Health Services ◽

10.2190/c02x-hd07-7crj-tmd9 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 489-495 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

A. J. P. Dalton

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Working Class ◽

European Community ◽

Trade Unions ◽

Environmental Issues ◽

Workplace Hazards ◽

The Past ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Made In ◽

Union Government

For the past 13 years there has been an aggressive anti-union government in the United Kingdom. Yet despite this fact, very real advances have been made in the area of working-class activity over the issue of workplace hazards. Trade unions, because of membership concern and activity, have been forced to keep this topic on their agenda. The European Community has been a big factor in these advances. This article describes some of the issues and elements of the fightback. In the 1990s, with the rediscovery of environmental issues, the hazards movement of the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, is here to stay and set to expand.

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University extension and the settlement idea

10.1332/policypress/9781447354239.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 91-108

Author(s):

Geoffrey A.C. Ginn

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Working Class ◽

University Teaching ◽

Personal Contact ◽

Social Force ◽

Settlement Houses ◽

Educational Activities ◽

Crucial Element ◽

The United Kingdom

This chapter focusses on two of the earliest settlement houses in the United Kingdom, Toynbee Hall and the Bermondsey Settlement. It examines the activities of the residents of these settlements and explores the contribution made by university extension, an effort to develop university teaching into a more democratic social force. to the inception and practical operations of them. Indeed, a close look at the activities of these settlements and the motivations of their founders and residents does indeed show that, alongside religious imperatives and paternalistic notions of class reconciliation through personal contact, the settlements embodied a progressive commitment to education that could be endorsed across class divide. As such, educational activities aimed to bring the knowledge of the universities to the working class neighbours living in the slums in which the settlement houses were established were a crucial element in their work.

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Looking for a Dream, Surviving a Time of Nightmares: Eric Hobsbawm, Marxism Today and the Resignification of Antifascism During Thatcher’s Time

Fascism ◽

10.1163/22116257-09010005 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1-2) ◽

pp. 146-166

Author(s):

Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Working Class ◽

Labour Party ◽

Popular Front ◽

Margaret Thatcher ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

International Threat ◽

Intense Debate

Abstract In 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom inaugurating the rise of neoliberalism. In the pages of Marxism Today an intense debate took place about the strategy of the Labour Party to defeat Thatcher and Thatcherism. The author aims to show how the famous communist historian Eric Hobsbawm appealed to his own memories of the French Popular Front and the antifascist movement to give ideological content to the fight against Thatcherism on two points. First, Thatcherism as a new international threat similar to fascism in the 1930s. Second, by appealing emotionally to his own experiences during the 1930s in order to show readers how antifascism could work to unite the diverse progressive forces ranged against Thatcher. By doing so, Hobsbawm and the contributors to Marxism Today would reshape antifascism based on two ideals: the unity of the majority, in particular, the unity of the working class, against the forces of reaction. Second, the strength of unity to articulate policies for the emancipation of the working class.

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Cultural Capital as Class Strength and Gendered Educational Choices of Chinese Female Students in the United Kingdom

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2020.584360 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 ◽

Author(s):

Siqi Zhang ◽

Xiaoqing Tang

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Tertiary Education ◽

Female Students ◽

Educational Choices ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Middle Class Families

The present qualitative study analyzes how cultural capital, gender, class, and family involvement impact Chinese female students’ aspirations of studying in the United Kingdom. We investigated how these factors facilitate or limit female students’ choice of study destination, as well as choices of subject and program. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. A total of 25 young Chinese female students from different subject areas took part in the semi-structured interviews. Out of those, five students are undergraduates, 11 are taught master’s students, and the other nine students are doctoral candidates. Most of the undergraduates and postgraduates are from middle-class families, while some of the Ph.D. students are from working-class families. The results of the content analysis were examined in light of gender and cultural capital theory. It was found that although there exist differences within the middle-class families regarding the possession of cultural capital, many female students from middle-class families obtained high levels of cultural capital, and these students usually internalized the idea of pursuing a place in the United Kingdom’s tertiary education system as a way of enhancing women’s competency in future job markets. Furthermore, compared with working-class students, many respondents’ choice of subject and program was highly gendered, as their families expect them to live a feminine life by choosing “appropriate” feminine subjects. Therefore, despite having the privilege to study abroad, female middle-class students’ educational choices are still constrained by gender and class.

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Fighting for “Respectability”

Journal of Sport and Social Issues ◽

10.1177/0193723511426291 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 350-376 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

James Rhodes

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Working Class ◽

White Male ◽

The United States ◽

Media Representations ◽

The Public ◽

Gendered Identities ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

The Media

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the White male boxer has long held a special appeal among the public and media. Boxing “heroes” are constructed not only on the basis of Whiteness but also on the basis of their perceived “working-class” nature, at a time when “working-class” or “blue-collar” identities in both the United Kingdom and the United States are subjected to forms of negative stigmatization. However, central to the appeal of the White, “working-class” boxing hero is their asserted “respectability,” which is used to establish distance from less “respectable” forms of raced, classed, and gendered identities. The media representations that surround boxing champions Ricky Hatton and Kelly Pavlik illustrate the way in which their “respectability” is asserted, explored, and related to broader conversations about a perceived growing “White underclass.”

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