A major new study of white working class Britain since 1930, that showshow meanings of poverty have changed over time and how individuals reject categorization by the state. This book challenges accepted wisdom on the white working class, providing new understandings of community, place and class, arguing for the importance of migration."

Thisbook examines experiences and implications of 'against-the-grain' school choices, where white middle class families choose ordinary and 'low performing' secondary schools for their children.It offersa unique view of identity formation, taking in matters like family history, locality and whiteness."

Bringing together leading scholars to investigate trends in contemporary social life, this book examines the current patterning of identities based on class and community, gender and generation, 'race', faith and ethnicity, and derived from popular culture, exploring debates about social change, individualization and the re-making of social class.

This collection brings together leading scholars to explore the 'doing' and 'making' of identities. Drawing onthehighly innovative ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme, the chapters take core social actions such as performing, excluding, mixing, bonding and demonstrate how social practices and identities unfold together."

This book puts to the test the prominent claim that social class has declined in importance in an era of affluence, choice and the waning of tradition. Arguing against this view, this study vividly uncovers the multiple ways in which class stubbornly persists.

This book presents an accessible and fascinating account of theoretical debates around identity and work, recent empirical trends and methodological arguments concerning the role of oral testimony and its interpretation. Focusing on three occupational sectors in particular teachers, bank workers and the railway industry it also presents an argument that is both more general than this and theoretically and analytically wide-ranging. The book explores some important questions: how are workers, both in the past and the present juncture, socialised into work cultures? What are the cultural and...

This book juxtaposes the experiences of regions that have lived or are living through industrial transition in coal-mining and manufacturing centres throughout Europe, opening the way to a deeper understanding of the intensity of change and of how work helps shape new identities.

Why do people enter total institutions - places that confine and control them around the clock - and how does the experience change them? This book updates Goffman's classic model by introducing the Re-inventive Institution, where members voluntarily commit themselves to pursue regimes of self-improvement.

Based on a flagship research project for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Immigration and Inclusion programme, this book argues that social cohesion is achieved through people (new arrivals as well as the long-term settled) being able to resolve the conflicts and tensions within their day-to-day lives in ways that they find positive and viable.

This book explores understandings and experiences of 'dirty work' tasks or occupations that are seen as disgusting and degrading. It complicates the 'clean/dirty' divide in the context of organizations and work and illustrates some of the complex ways in which dirty work identities are managed."