Policy steps towards a better social future

This chapter presents a possible vision of a more progressive future, by focusing on a widely acknowledged contemporary problem — socioeconomic insecurity — and concrete, practical policy steps to seek its redress. Put more positively, it is about building a social and economic framework grounded in security, and it is from that starting point that a better future can be imagined. The chapter details the extent and effects of insecurity in terms of being a tangible experience, the approach to identifying solutions to insecurity, policy steps for redressing insecurity (divided into housing, children, and income), and finally, a vision of a more progressive future that flows from the redress of insecurity.

Artfully thinking the prosocial

This chapter explores how arts-based activities form part of an experimental approach for social research that fuses sociological insights with creative practice. As an ethos, people conceive the prosocial as seeking to promote collective human flourishing, while a prosocial practice is inclusive and imaginative. The potential to flourish is supported by involvement in diverse social relations that connect people as families, friends, communities, neighbourhoods, and nations. Experiences of social collectivity, however, are being shredded through the expanding dominance, and cascading impacts, of market-oriented ideologies. The chapter shows how the status of the social as a nonmarket domain has little value or sense when seen from within these dominant ideological framings.

Better politics: Narratives of indignation and the possibility of a prosocial politics

This chapter calls for a truthful understanding of politics that admits the complex and sometimes very contradictory subject positions that people adhere to. There is always a temptation to disengage from contemporary political struggles and instead expend time postulating what a ‘postneoliberal’ future might entail. In examining neoliberalism, the politics of resistance, and prosocial forms of engagement, the chapter argues that a useful starting point is to interrogate the subject positions people adopt to understand the contemporary political era. Often these rely on a depiction of an economic and social crisis accentuated by neoliberalism, a sense of moral outrage, and the attribution of culpability on to those who are considered responsible.

The uses of catastrophism

This chapter argues that, if the goal is to rejuvenate the social, then there must be a corresponding rejuvenation of the political. There are one or two signs of life at the margins, but millions across the country now recognise that the political system is banal, stage managed, and profoundly alienating. On the surface, the political system seems dedicated to openness, fairness, and inclusivity, but huge swathes of the population feel entirely cut adrift from those who purport to represent them and those who claim to govern in the best interests of all. The chapter shows how alternatives to the present orthodoxy, especially with regard to political economy, are noticeable only by their absence. The effects of this long-standing political inertia are legion.

Confronting the roots of violent behaviour

This chapter focuses on confronting violence, by analysing humanity's capacity for ‘evil’. It asserts the importance of confronting a sad truth — the reality that it is currently not possible to imagine a world fully free of human violence and aggression. The seeming inexplicability of much violent behaviour may often generate a sense that the world today is somehow bereft of a common morality or mutual sense of compassion. Certainly the internet, print, and TV news media are often fixed on unsettling stories of murder, gang violence, riots, sexual assaults, child abuse, domestic violence, civil war, and terrorism. The seeming ubiquity of violence in society, and the apparent appetite for it, when packaged up as a consumer product, might help in understanding why many people hold the view that violence is ingrained in people's nature.

The social question and the urgency of care

This chapter examines ‘the social question’, a term denoting the misery of the poor, downtrodden, and underprivileged members of society. Those asking ‘the social question’ were morally and politically concerned with alleviating the social suffering experienced by people forced to live on low wages and in poor housing conditions. It was further understood to signal a commitment to combat the social causes of people's poor health conditions. ‘The social question’ was taken to express a shared understanding that there was something deeply wrong with the material conditions under which many people were made to exist; and further, that there was an urgent need to set social arrangements in place to make their lives worth living.

Cities, crises and the future

This chapter begins with a discussion of how, in the 1960s, state planners and public technocrats' neglect for democratic public space contributed to social and racial problems in inner city areas, while also allowing private developers and landowners to grab public space for profit, thus further strangling the social possibilities of the city. Second, the chapter focuses on public space as a lens for understanding larger processes in the city, and as a kind of laboratory for claims, protests and cultural insubordination. Finally, it reflects on notions of order and disorder that often feed one another, and suggests that disorder is not just a nuisance and an expression of opposition; it may also be a signal that change is possible, or at least it may stimulate the imagination of alternative aspirations.

Putting ‘the social’ back into social policy

This chapter illustrates how the dominant neoliberal approach to economic and social policy in the UK is becoming increasingly fragmented with a generation of people set to experience worse living standards than their parents. This includes a decline in social mobility within and across generations, a vast chasm emerging between the haves and have nots, a long term squeeze on wages and living standards, health crises relating to underfunding, and the move towards a mechanical learning based secondary education system geared towards a low wage, low skill economy. As a result, it is important to reassess the meaning and purpose of social policy and where it fits within the overall direction of contemporary British society.

Valuing and strengthening community

This chapter explores how there is a growing and distinct group of people in the UK who are faring badly in this period of advanced capitalism. As inequality rises and the gap between the top and the bottom of society widens, their lives are becoming more precarious. The people struggling the most are the working class, but unlike in previous generations, they have little in the way of self- or state-organised stability, from trade unions, political parties, or from identities connected to their employment. It is this group of people at the bottom of society who have been harmed the most by capitalist economics and who have traditionally relied on ‘the social’, whether in their employment or in their communities, to thrive.

The (in)visibility of riches, urban life and exclusion

This chapter studies the position of the wealthy and their relationship to society at large. It specifically addresses the question of the relative invisibility of the rich, and a related problem — the issue of connecting the wealthy to the kinds of social problems that are so evident to those who live less-secluded lives. Social research has long observed and analysed those at the social bottom — endless studies of poverty, crime, segregation, and what some have seen as exotic portrayals of the excluded and marginal. From the 1960s onwards, this singular viewpoint generated increasing concerns that sociology and related disciplines were acting as a wing of the state and corporate funders who wished to understand, discipline, and contain problem groups and problem people.