Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class (Cities and Society)

This book adopts a new perspective on the transformation of social inequality by analyzing how it is experienced by individuals. Based on qualitative research among industrial workers and local experts in a region that has undergone deindustrialisation and transformation to a service-based economy, the author examines the loss of status among former manual labourers. Focus lies on their emotional experiences, nostalgic memories and attachments to their former places of work, to transformed neighborhoods, as well as to public space. Against this background the book explores the continued importance of class identity 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.