What are Community Studies? PDF

i What are Community Studies? ‘What is?’ Research Methods series Edited by Graham Crow The ‘What is?’ series provides authoritative introductions to a range of research methods which are at the forefront of developments in the social sciences. Each volume sets out the key elements of the particular method and features examples of its application, offering a consistent structure across the whole series. Written in an accessible style by leading experts in the field, this series is an innovative pedagogical and research resource. What is Diary Method? What is Qualitative Research? Ruth Bartlett and Christine Milligan Martyn Hammersley What is Discourse Analysis? What are Qualitative Research Ethics? Stephanie Taylor Rose Wiles What is Inclusive Research? What is Social Network Analysis? Melanie Nind John Scott What is Narrative Research? Corinne Squire, Mark Davis, Forthcoming titles: Cigdem Esin, Molly Andrews, What is Qualitative Longitudinal Barbara Harrison, Lars-Christer Hydén Research? and Margareta Hydén Bren Neale What is Online Research? What is Quantitative Longitudinal Tristam Hooley, John Marriott and Jane Data Analysis? Wellens Vernon Gayle and Paul Lambert What is Qualitative Interviewing? What is Rhythmanalysis? Rosalind Edwards and Janet Holland Dawn Lyon What are community studies? Graham Crow Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON OX F O R D N E W YO R K N E W D E L H I SY DN EY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Graham Crow, 2018 This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact Bloomsbury Academic. Graham Crow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3333-7 PB: 978-1-8496-6595-7 ePDF: 978-1-8496-6597-1 ePub: 978-1-8496-6598-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: What are community studies?/Graham Crow. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: The ‘what is’ research methods series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017019671| ISBN 9781780933337 (hb) | ISBN 9781849665957 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Communities–Study and teaching. | Communities–Research. | Community life–Research. Classification: LCC HM756.C76 2018 | DDC 307–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2017019671 Cover design by Paul Burgess Cover image © Eliks/Shutterstock Series: The ‘What is?’ Research Methods Series Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. Contents Acknowledgements vii Series foreword, Patrick Sturgis ix 1 Defining key terms 1 2 A history 7 2.1 Starting points and forerunners 7 2.2 The rise and fall of classic community studies 10 2.3 Reconsideration and renewal 16 3 Three exemplars 21 3.1 Divisions of Labour 22 3.2 The British on the Costa del Sol 28 3.3 The Other Side of Middletown 36 4 Worthwhileness 45 4.1 Useful and interesting research 47 4.2 Interesting and useful research 50 4.3 The capacity to surprise 54 5 Criticisms and defences 59 5.1 Are community studies too parochial? 60 5.2 Are community studies too static? 63 5.3 Are community studies too positive? 67 v vi Contents 5.4 Are community studies too descriptive? 70 5.5 Are community studies too prosaic? 74 6 Summary and where next? 81 References 89 Index 103 Acknowledgements This book has benefitted greatly from collaborative writing on community over the years with Graham Allan, Nickie Charles, Jaimie Ellis, Dawn Lyon, Catherine Maclean, Alice Mah, Bethany Morgan and Marcia Summers. Thanks are also due to the publisher’s anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. The team at Bloomsbury Academic have also provided invaluable support through keeping faith with the project and providing the advice needed to bring it to completion. vii viii Series foreword The idea behind this series is a simple one: to provide concise and acces- sible overviews of a range of frequently used research methods and of current issues in research methodology. Books in the series have been written by experts in their fields with a brief to write about their subject for a broad audience who are assumed to be interested but not necessarily having any prior knowledge. The series is a natural development of pres- entations made in the ‘What is?’ strand at Economic and Social Research Council Research Methods Festivals, which have proved popular both at the Festivals themselves and subsequently as a resource on the website of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. Methodological innovation is the order of the day, and the ‘What is?’ format allows researchers who are new to a field to gain an insight into its key features, while also providing a useful update on recent developments for people who have had some prior acquaintance with it. All readers should find it helpful to be taken through the discussion of key terms, the history of how the method or methodological issue has developed, and the assessment of the strengths and possible weaknesses of the approach through analysis of illustrative examples. This tenth book in the series is devoted to community studies. In it, Graham Crow takes readers through a field of social science research which has a history going back almost one hundred years. In that time it has witnessed a number of developments and reorientations, but has always kept the core idea that the different elements of people’s everyday lives are connected. The details of how these connections operate often turn out to be surprising, whether it is how information about job oppor- tunities is shared via unexpected channels, or the ways in which apparently welcoming communities can be inclusive for some people but exclusive for others. Researchers going into communities are therefore advised to proceed with an open agenda. The serendipity that is frequently reported to have played a crucial part in arriving at the most interesting findings ix x Series foreword cannot be pre-planned – it is something that happens unexpectedly, for example through chance encounters. As a result, community studies typically employ a range of research methods as a way of investigating the subject being studied from a variety of angles. As the exemplars that are discussed in the book demonstrate, there is a place in community studies for surveys, ethnographic observation, documentary research, photogra- phy and numerous other methods to be used in creative combinations. The enduring popularity of community studies can be attributed to the richness and diversity of the findings that they present as windows onto the key part that community relationships play in shaping people’s lives. The books in this series cannot provide information about their subject matter down to a fine level of detail, but they will equip readers with a powerful sense of reasons why it deserves to be taken seriously and, it is hoped, with the enthusiasm to put that knowledge into practice. Patrick Sturgis Director, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, UK 1 Defining key terms Defining ‘community’ has been a long-standing challenge. It can be readily agreed that a community involves a group of people with something in common, but it is less easy to find agreement about what that thing is. This book does not set out to solve the problem of defining ‘community’ to everyone’s satisfaction; rather it aims to explore the many different ways in which people understand ‘community’, and the related variety of methodological approaches that are available to be used in studying com- munity phenomena. Many of the most famous community studies have been undertaken using ethnographic methods that involve the researcher spending time among the people of the community under investigation, observing their behaviour and interacting with them in the conduct of their everyday lives. These studies are celebrated for their ability to cap- ture the texture of everyday interactions, exchanges and routines. The idea of a community study as a contextualized account of ordinary people’s everyday lives and of how the various elements of those lives are intercon- nected as parts of a larger whole provides us with a working definition. It should be emphasized, however, that ethnographic observation is by no means the only research method available to capture the stuff of com- munity relationships, and the exemplars of community studies that will be discussed in this book have been selected with this diversity of research methods in mind. There are multiple ways of doing a community study. This diversity of approach is a strength, not a weakness. The availability of a wide range of methods, from ethnographic observation to interviews and surveys, from photography and other visual methods to policy evalua- tion, from social network analysis to experiments, and from documentary analysis to online methods, means that researchers investigate community relationships from numerous angles. In terms of disciplines, community studies provide an interdisciplinary meeting place for anthropologists, educationalists, geographers, historians, psychologists, social workers, sociologists and others interested in how and why community contexts 1 2 What are community studies? matter. This is desirable because ‘community’ is an elusive quarry and debates about it involve different theoretical perspectives. Communities may be associated with particular places, but they do not have to be, as reference to the geographically dispersed deaf community readily demon- strates (Gregory and Hartley 1991). Similarly, communities may comprise people with some shared identity, but pinning down what constitutes the basis of that shared identity often proves frustratingly difficult, especially at the margins of the group where it is unclear precisely who should count as an ‘insider’ and who an ‘outsider’. Next, communities may be constella- tions of people with shared interests, such as the members of an occupa- tional community (coal miners, fishermen, railway workers and architects are some of the occupational groups that have been studied in this way), but it is evident here as well that such communities built around a com- mon interest can still be quite heterogeneous and have some members who are more active and influential than others. Communities do not come in uniform packages ready for one standardized mode of analysis. Not all studies of communities are community studies in the sense of attempting an extensive analysis of how the various parts of community life connect. The tradition of community studies research is frequently traced back to a pioneering piece of research conducted in the 1920s by the husband and wife team of Robert and Helen Lynd in the city of Muncie, Indiana, in the United States. In this study the Lynds went beyond their original brief to investigate religion in the life of small-town middle America, and identified five other aspects of everyday life besides religion on which they also focused attention. The book quickly if surprisingly became a classic piece of popular social science. Its core sections were headed ‘getting a living’, ‘making a home’, ‘training the young’, ‘using leisure’, ‘engaging in religious practices’ and ‘engaging in community activities’. This list of topics, which we can condense into work, home, education, leisure, religion and community action, has become familiar in community studies. Many researchers have sought to follow the Lynds in tracing the interconnectedness of the various elements of community life. Middletown (the pseudonym that they gave to Muncie) is a key point of reference for community studies scholars, and the town and its people con- tinue to attract academic interest, as we shall see in one of the exemplars of community research considered in Chapter 3. Beyond ‘Muncieology’, as this body of research is known, many ethnographers continue to use vari- ations on the format of the six broad topics on which the Lynds focused Defining key terms 3 nearly a century ago. Community studies do not have to be this ambitious, however; researchers are tending to concentrate on a narrower brief. The connectedness of community life is often understood as under- pinning the social solidarity of community members. The Lynds (1929: ch.XXVIII) used this concept, as did Alwyn Rees (1951) analysing kinship ties, Gerald Suttles (1972) studying neighbourhoods, Arlie Hochschild (1973) observing residential settings, Philip Abrams and Andrew McCulloch (1976) investigating communes, Graeme Salaman (1986) look- ing at occupational communities, David Rayside (1991) examining small- town change and many others (Crow 2002a). Social solidarity expresses a shared sense of belonging and commitment among community members; it is what differentiates community from an agglomeration of people who lack a firm basis for existing as an entity in which co-operation, mutual aid and reciprocity are practised. The abstract concept of social solidarity is not easy to operationalize in empirical research, however (Bulmer 1986: 34). In part as a response to this problem, alternative concepts have been developed to capture the idea of communities as groups of people bound together in some way (despite their myriad differences of social class, age, gender, disability and other lines of social cleavage). These include social capital, community cohesion, communities of practice and social networks. A common thread running through these ideas is the notion that being among ‘people like us’ (or ‘people like ourselves’) matters and is worth seeking out for the benefits it brings. The connectedness of people’s lives as workmates, family members, neighbours, schoolmates, friends, members of leisure groups, members of religious organizations and community activists is at the heart of conven- tional communities of place, in which roles and networks inevitably tend to overlap. Any individual relationship between two community members is unlikely to exist in isolation, but rather will be linked into wider webs of sociability that reinforce each other as common bonds and provide a basis for shared identity and action. It has been argued that such solidarities are the strongest where people are brought together by shared poverty and need for assistance – what Raymond Williams called ‘the mutuality of the oppressed’ (1975: 131) – but as Williams himself notes, there are many examples of active community solidarities outside of those conditions. Nor should it be concluded that poverty always stimulates social solidar- ity among members of groups faced with limited material resources; the dynamics of such situations are more complex than that. Social solidarity 4 What are community studies? is one possible outcome, but domination and control of poor populations is another (Brent 2009: 18). Ethnography has provided a particularly fruitful methodological approach in community studies. Only through participant observation will some aspects of the incredible complexity of ordinary people’s eve- ryday lives become apparent. Elements of community life may be hidden from researchers as they would be from any outsiders, due to mistrust; suspicion of being a spy or informant has been reported numerous times (Crow and Pope 2008). It takes time for the presence of researchers to be accepted. Periods of fieldwork may last for years or even decades (Crow 2000: 181), for reasons of trust-building and also because the meaning of mundane everyday activities may not be immediately apparent to either researchers or community members (Goffman 2002). Everyday practices are an important part of how communities function, but they may be too familiar to community members and too apparently insignificant to observers for their significance to be appreciated. It takes time to see things in proper perspective, and to know what to look out for. Participation in community life adds to researchers’ observations by giving them more of a ‘feel’ of what being part of a community is like. Recent reflections by researchers about the practice of research have led to growing interest in sensory ethnography and the breadth of ways in which the phenomena under investigation may be captured by researchers (Pink 2009). This development also reveals the more general point that ethnographic meth- ods do not stand still, but evolve as new ways of thinking emerge about how best to undertake research. Two further points stand out in respect of recent developments in the methods used in community research. One is that the merits of adopt- ing a mixed-methods approach to the study of community relationships are becoming more widely appreciated. Communities are multifaceted phenomena; it follows that it is unlikely that one research tool will capture this multifacetedness as effectively as an approach in which a combina- tion of methods is employed. The exemplars of community studies that will be examined in Chapter 3 are all pieces of mixed-methods research whose authors recognize that different methods are necessary in order to get at formal and informal relationships, open and hidden, episodic and enduring, consensual and conflictual, sacred and profane, or mythi- cal and real. A photograph may capture some aspect of community life that a person being interviewed could find it difficult to put into words. Defining key terms 5 A social network analysis may highlight connections and cleavages that conventional mapping of where different social groups reside might miss. And documentary analysis of archived material may cast a quite different light on matters than oral history testimony does. When used together, these methods can provide a much more rounded account of community life than any on its own would be able to, and although different methods always have the potential to generate apparently contradictory results, further analysis has the potential to resolve such issues. This ties in with the second point about recent developments, the growing tendency for community research to be undertaken collabora- tively, with researchers and community members working together in a shared enterprise (Campbell and Lassiter 2014). Collaborative ethnogra- phy provides one of the exemplars considered in Chapter 3. The rationale for doing ethnography in this way is instructive: it is framed in terms of granting respect to members of communities that are being researched, recognizing that research has the potential to be intrusive, and to involve costs to participants in terms of time and other things. With these con- siderations in mind, it is only fair that community members should have a say in what is to be researched, and how it is to be researched, as well as being able at least to ask, ‘What are the potential benefits to arise through the publication of research findings?’ Put simply, people being researched deserve a voice in the research process. Alongside this set of ethical argu- ments there is another set of considerations which points in the same direction but on more pragmatic grounds. Without access to consenting community members there can be little if any research, so working with them to secure their agreement to be studied has always been a point to bear in mind. Similarly, willing participants in research are more likely than reluctant ones to provide better quality data, and to be more effective partners in the dissemination of research findings. Researchers thus have a degree of self-interest in working collaboratively, and also in managing expectations about what research achieves; experience teaches us that over-promising about the benefits of research is something that it is important to avoid (Crow 2013). Community studies is thus a field of research in which there is a rec- ognizable tradition that at the same time has not stood still. Community studies are studies of communities that may be geographically based but do not have to be, because communities are constructed around a number of characteristics that people share, of which place is only one. 6 What are community studies? Community studies have the potential to focus on a range of aspects of everyday life, from youth to religion, work to home and politics to leisure, but always with an emphasis on the importance of the wider context in which the chosen subjects are to be understood. Ethnographic methods of participant observation are particularly widely used as a route into explor- ing the interconnectedness of the different aspects of community life, but they can be supplemented by many other methods such as surveys, elite interviews, life histories, visual methods and documentary analysis that also have the potential to capture the realities of ordinary people’s eve- ryday lives (Davies 1999; Payne and Payne 2004: 46–50). The Marienthal study in 1930s Austria famously used diary methods and essays imagining the future (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 1972). Tony Blackshaw (2010) has added action research, community profiling and social network analysis to the list. Jeremy Brent’s (2009) inclusion of autobiographical material brings another dimension, as does Daniel Nettle’s (2015) use of experiments. It should be noted that whichever of these methods are used, the ideal of researching ethically always requires attention. The history of community studies includes salutary stories where standards of behaviour have fallen short of what is desirable as well as cases of exemplary achievements that have become the landmarks of research in the community studies tradi- tion. This history is the subject of the next chapter. 2 A history 2.1 Starting points and forerunners The Lynds in 1920s America were the first researchers to produce a recog- nizable community study in the modern format, but Middletown was far from being the first piece of social scientific research into community mat- ters. Close by (both geographically and in time) a distinct body of work that would later become known as the Chicago School was already taking form as the sociologists in that city followed the exhortation of Robert Park, a journalist turned sociologist, to learn about the various phenom- ena of urban life through street-level observation and spending time close to the people being researched. It was the antithesis of so-called ‘armchair sociology’ (Smith 1988: 102). By the end of the 1920s, a wealth of studies had already been published on gangs, tramps, migration, ethnic segrega- tion, delinquency and the contrasting lifestyles of the inhabitants of rich and poor areas of the city. As a result, more was known about Chicago than anywhere else (Stein 1964: 13). Taken together, these reports revealed the city to be like an organism with its spatially discrete but nevertheless interconnected parts. Park and his collaborator Roderick McKenzie coined the term ‘human ecology’ to highlight the relationship of communities to their environment (Park 1952), expressing the enduring if contested idea that there is something natural about communities (Suttles 1972: ch.1). This did not mean that communities had to be accepted as they were. Dennis Smith (1988) rightly assessed the Chicago School to have advanced ‘a liberal critique of capitalism’. This is quite consistent with Park’s view of the city as a social laboratory where experiments in ways of living were taking place, out of which new forms of community could emerge. Various research-based social interventions intended to bring about improvements in people’s welfare had prominence in Chicago from the late nineteenth century. These projects have had a lasting impact on the field of social work studies in the same way that the Chicago School has 7 8 What are community studies? provided a defining point of reference for sociology. That disciplinary distinction was not as evident at the time as it has later become, and the association of women with welfare projects was only part of the story; the focus on this aspect has diverted attention from the achievements of Jane Addams and other women as social theorists and methodologists as well as practical reformers (McDonald 1994: 228–33; Platt 1996: 262). This outpouring of research activity in Chicago deserves explanation. There was something about the speed with which the city had developed that facilitated scrutiny of its operation – Max Weber on a visit there in 1904 commented that it was a city whose inner workings could be observed ‘like a man whose skin has been peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work’ (Weber 1988: 286–7) – and there was a corresponding urgency about finding solutions to its many evident social problems. The rawness of these problems sat uneasily alongside the city’s growing ‘cultural confi- dence’ (Bulmer 1984: 14), making for a heady mix. Chicago was also a city whose profile corresponded to the issues of theoretical debate that were being identified by early social scientists in the United States and elsewhere, particularly Germany, among whose authors Georg Simmel and his ideas on adjustment to city life had especial resonance. The development of industrial cities prompted the idea that contemporary urban life was of a different form to life in rural locations, and the recruitment to the cities of people from the countryside meant that this contrast was very real for migrants. This was famously true for the people studied in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, whose migra- tion had an additional cross-cultural dimension to it. The authors of this work, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, claimed that personal docu- ments such as letters constituted ‘perfect’ sociological material, although the life histories that these documents made it possible to construct were not necessarily representative of wider populations (Madge 1970: 61). This issue of the typicality or atypicality of cases is one that continually resur- faces in the history of community research, not least because the vividness of material relating to individual cases makes it attractive to use precisely because its unusualness brings with it an element of surprise. The conclusion towards which the Chicago researchers from the late nineteenth century onwards pointed was that modern cities needed to be studied because they were not only new in the form that they took, but also potentially unstable. This instability made them dangerous, both to their inhabitants through their poor living conditions and to the social A history 9 order through the more limited social support and looser social control that was thought to exist there. In this context it was understandable that urban life with its mobility and fluidity would come to be associated with an absence of community compared to the fixity and familiarity of rural communities, although in time the loss of community theme would also come to be associated with the countryside as well, as communities there saw population decline and growing urban cultural influences. Louis Wirth provided a key expression of these ideas of community taking dif- ferent forms in cities and the countryside in his classic paper ‘urbanism as a way of life’. In his view, cities took people away from ‘natural’ situations: ‘Nowhere has mankind been further removed from organic nature than under the conditions of life characteristic of great cities’ (1938: 1–2). This perspective paved the way for rural–urban and urban–suburban contrasts that have been significant in the history of community studies (as have later reactions to them, to be discussed below). In Britain where the first industrial nation was forged, the urban trans- formation took place sooner than in the United States and continental Europe; so did pioneering social research into life in urban communities. Among these pioneers Friedrich Engels stands out as an early illustration of the power of reporting on life as it takes place all around the atten- tive researcher who is minded to look behind facades. His account in The Condition of the Working Class in England revealed 1840s Manchester where he lived and worked to be a world of both prosperity and squalor, inextricably linked. London attracted more extensive investigation from researchers located in contrasting philosophical and political traditions who employed a variety of methods, including large-scale quantitative studies of poverty conducted over many years as well as more literary evo- cations (Crow 2014). At times the political purpose underlying studies of Victorian London and other cities found expression in judgemental narra- tives that arose from the tensions between what was discovered and what the researcher felt to be desirable. But whatever personal motivations the researchers had, they were united in believing in the value of research to reveal uncomfortable hidden realities to which complacent inactivity was not an acceptable response. Social researchers who were also social reformers saw research as a vehicle for promoting social improvement through community development, but their choice of methods and theories used to study communities could be idiosyncratic. This criticism has been made of the extensive body of research 10 What are community studies? projects associated with Patrick Geddes and his early-twentieth-century followers, whose openness to diverse and sometimes contradictory influ- ences led to accounts of community that were at once social, economic, geographical, biological and architectural, and also empirical and utopian, combined in something of a melange. This was compounded by the reli- ance on local volunteers rather than trained social scientists to undertake the surveys, with predictably uneven outcomes (Kent 1981). However well-intentioned, such research was open to criticism for its amateurism. In the disillusionment that followed the failure of such research to deliver sus- tained social improvement, community research took a different direction, although some elements of Geddes and his colleagues’ approach survived. These include the key tenet that place, work, family and community life are all combined in reciprocal relationships (Savage and Warde 1993: 20), and the practice of seeking an overview of a district from a high vantage point, inspired by the panorama of Edinburgh gained from the Outlook Tower (Scott and Bromley 2013: 96; Crow 2000). These elements were compatible with more inductive approaches that came to the fore around the middle of the twentieth century in what may be considered a golden age for com- munity studies, or at least community studies of a particular type. 2.2 The rise and fall of classic community studies The third quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable pro- fusion of detailed ethnographic studies of diverse places and the people who lived there. The way for this development had been paved by various landmark projects, including three pioneering studies conducted in rural communities in different national contexts outside of the United States and the United Kingdom: Robert Redfield’s Tepoztlán – A Mexican Village, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball’s Family and Community in Ireland and Everett Hughes’s French Canada in Transition (published in 1930, 1940 and 1943, respectively). The authors of the first and third of these came out of the Chicago School and their contrasting styles illustrate the breadth of that inheritance, while the second was different again, drawing inspira- tion from Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City research on Newburyport in New England (Bell and Newby 1974: 42), which was more reliant on the use of quantitative methods as part of a mixed-methods approach (Warner and Lunt 1941: ch. III). Despite their differences, all of them sought to record A history 11 in detail the way of life of people in rural communities, with the anthro- pologist’s concern to capture how core social institutions worked from the point of view of participants in those institutions. The elaboration of such internal points of view had the potential to surprise those outsiders who lazily assumed the universality of their familiar, fixed way of understanding the world. The rural community studies of the mid-twentieth-century genera- tion pursued a variety of themes, including the contentious one of social divisions in ostensibly contented communities. The title of E. W. Martin’s (1965) study The Shearers and the Shorn echoes Talleyrand to make this point. Such studies served to highlight how community members are divided (often materially) despite their commonalities, and united (often symbolically) despite their inequalities (Crow and Maclean 2013). Set in Wales, Ronald Frankenberg’s Village on the Border (published in 1957) recorded how social divisions were not only a feature of collective life, but also integral to it. In this early example of ‘anthropology at home’ (Jackson 1987), Frankenberg explored the position of ‘strangers’ through his own involvement in community life as a non-Welsh outsider. He later recounted: ‘In my early days in the village I would often climb a hill and look sadly down upon the rows of houses of the housing estate and wonder what went on inside them’ (1969: 16). The research progressed once Frankenberg became involved in village activities, which in turn shed light on what he called (in a phrase borrowing from Bronislaw Malinowski designed to convey the inherent strangeness of other people’s cultures) ‘the imponderabilia of everyday life’ (1990: 177). Not least among these issues was the role that outsiders may be called upon to play in the resolu- tion of disputes between community insiders. Another rural study to break new ground was Alwyn Rees’s Life in a Welsh Countryside, a book that gives a strong sense of place and people through its inclusion of photographs, maps, figures and diagrams. These include a representation of the network of kinship ties between house- holds in which the connecting lines are so dense that the local expression of these resembling ‘a pig’s entrails’ (1951: 75–6) makes immediate sense. Nigel Rapport later found this idea echoed in his own fieldwork in Cumbria, where the local expression had it that ‘Kick one person from Wanet and next day seven people will be limping’ (1993: 43), and a similar expression is reported for Swansea (Rosser and Harris 1965: 5). The use of visual meth- ods and social network analysis in Rees’s study may be rudimentary by 12 What are community studies? today’s standards, but the important thing to note is the fact that they are there at all; they serve as a corrective against those myopic narratives of methodological innovation that neglect this history. It is telling, however, that the network map of kinship ties stops at the parish boundaries and gives an impression of the community as a self-contained unit. In practice, local autonomy was fast being eroded, as Rees’s reference to ‘the impact of modern industrial and urban civilisation’ (1951: 164) conceded. This theme of the encroachment of the wider society into rural com- munity life was central to Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman’s Small Town in Mass Society, a study of a rural community in upstate New York. One of the purposes of community studies is to act as ‘gauges of change’ (Hughes 1971: 76), and the study of ‘Springdale’ (Vidich and Bensman’s pseudonym for the community they were studying) was undertaken mindful of agri- culture’s declining proportion of the workforce and the rise of urban influ- ences on rural communities. The resultant book, first published in 1958, has been much-discussed because of the hostile reception it received, including the townspeople hanging effigies of the researchers. The pro- ject’s impact has been enduring because the ethics of gaining access to a community by promising something more positive than it is actually possible to deliver has ongoing relevance (Crow 2013). Also of enduring significance for the practice of community studies is the way in which Vidich and Bensman sought out as key respondents ‘individuals who are socially marginal in the society being studied’ (2000: 354). People working in professions such as journalism and teaching will typically be less-firmly incorporated into mainstream local culture and less persuaded by widely held beliefs about its superiority over other ways of life. By adopting their more critical stance on Springdale’s view of itself, and treating local beliefs as ‘myths’, the book’s authors were set on a collision course with their hosts, a problem compounded by Vidich and Bensman’s (1971) subsequent characterization of the townspeople as ‘sensitive’. Any future research in the town was rendered impossible. The same theme of the incorporation of people and places into the wider society was pursued as well in research into suburbia. J. R. Seeley and his colleagues’ Crestwood Heights presents it as a depiction of community life, but it is a community that exists only because of its relationship to ‘Big City’ (in fact Toronto, Canada). The relationship was treated as psy- chologically important, with the city providing a point of comparison that allowed the residents of Crestwood Heights to feel superior. In this respect A history 13 there was a parallel with the prevailing belief in Springdale of the town being a desirable place to live, but the grounding of such beliefs could not be the same since Crestwood Heights as a new community lacked history. Its functioning as a community had instead to be attributed to ‘the relationships that exist between people – relationships revealed in the functioning of the institutions which they have created: family, school, church, community center, club, association, summer camp’. Suburban developments brought together populations of strangers, and constituted something of an ‘experiment’ (1963: 4, 431). In the case of Crestwood Heights, not only did residents arrive not knowing their new neighbours, they also were aware that their new location was impermanent because of the periodic geographical mobility that accompanied their middle-class lifestyles. Suburbanization might be expected to bring with it anonymiza- tion and fragmentation rather than the successful creation of communi- ties, and the discovery to the contrary in this and other studies of suburbia (such as Herbert Gans’s (1967) The Levittowners and Suzanne Keller’s (2003) report on Twin Rivers, New Jersey) posed a fundamental challenge to theories of community reliant on the idea that geographical location has a determining influence on social life. Gans had already grappled with the issue of the relationship of com- munity to place, both theoretically (1962a) and in his account of the dense patterns of social relationships found among Italian Americans in a slum area of Boston, Massachusetts, prior to its demolition. His book’s title, The Urban Villagers (Gans 1962b), conveyed the paradoxical nature of the phenomenon, at least from the point of view that associated urban life with atrophied forms of community. In the UK various studies were arriv- ing at similar conclusions, the most widely read of these being Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s (1957) Family and Kinship in East London, which discovered the very opposite of urban anonymity and social frac- ture at the heart of this global city. Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris (1965) painted a similar picture for urban life in Swansea in The Family and Social Change, even as its population became more mobile, both socially and geographically. It fell to Ray Pahl to pull all of these strands together and draw the inevitable conclusion to which they and his own research on commuters who lived in rural settings north of London (Pahl 1965) pointed that ‘any attempt to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieux is a singularly fruitless exercise’ (1968: 293). If the classic occupational community, that of Yorkshire coalminers as 14 What are community studies? studied by Norman Dennis and his colleagues (1969) in Coal Is Our Life, had to be interpreted as ‘the town that is a village’ (Frankenberg 1969: ch.5), then it was clear that the time had come to abandon the idea, embodied in a ‘rural-urban continuum’, of there being a deterministic relationship between the size and density of settlement patterns and distinct types of urban and rural community relationships. Some researchers in the field of community drew even more radical conclusions than Pahl. Margaret Stacey’s first study of Banbury, a market town in the English midlands, had taken the Lynds’ Middletown as a point of reference (Stacey 1960: v) and she was engaged in working on a restudy when she concluded that ‘it is doubtful that the concept “community” refers to a useful abstraction’ (1969: 134). Coming at the end of a decade which had seen the publication of numerous influential community stud- ies, including her own, this statement represented a serious loss of faith in the wider project of capturing the social world through this genre of research. Her concerns were both theoretical and methodological. She argued that ‘community’ was difficult if not impossible to isolate in research into how societies work, and proposed instead using the concept of ‘local social system’ as the basis for developing testable hypotheses. This strategy offered a way out of the problem of community studies being unable to progress beyond individual insights into a coherent incremental body of knowledge. For the field to develop through accumulating knowl- edge, some way of comparing studies would be required; as she expressed it, ‘A highly idiosyncratic non-replicable study may be seminal, but cannot be used comparatively’ (1969: 138). The Banbury restudy was eventually published (Stacey et al. 1975), but it was one of the last community studies conceived in what can be called, following Jennifer Platt (1971: ch.3), the ‘old tradition’. It would be superseded after a hiatus by a rejuvenated form in which confidence about the value of ‘community’ as a focus of inquiry had returned, along with revised methodological practices that could meet the criticisms of community studies as insufficiently theoretically informed and overly concerned with small-scale, local issues in a way that left the impact of larger social and economic forces unaddressed. The work of the Institute of Community Studies ICS embodies in miniature this phase of the genre’s evolution, in which remarkable success was followed by doubt and reassessment. Founded in 1953 by the social entrepreneur Michael Young (Briggs 2001: 6), the ICS is most famous for his and his colleague Peter Willmott’s best-selling Family and Kinship in A history 15 East London (Young and Willmott 1957), which reported on the continu- ing importance of community ties in the age of the welfare state. Further studies by numerous ICS authors followed, covering a range of topics (including widowhood, mental illness, medical services, education and social mobility, youth and urban planning) that arguably matched the breadth of scope of the early Chicago School, all emphasizing the impor- tance of community context, although not all of them involved fieldwork in East London. These projects were deliberately framed as social research with a purpose, to promote social awareness and social change; that is, they embodied an ethos of engagement with the wider public as well as policy makers. Platt’s (1971) evaluation of this body of work was that engagement with diverse audiences came at a cost: opportunities for methodological innovation were not always taken up, and in presentation there was a tendency towards an ‘impressionistic’ style, a word also used in Richard Titmuss’s foreword to the first edition of Family and Kinship (perhaps explaining why the foreword did not appear in subsequent edi- tions). Put another way, questions were being raised about the rigour of the ICS’s way of working. Jocelyn Cornwell’s (1984) return to Bethnal Green highlighted the way in which the public celebration of ‘community’ was one side of a coin which could lead to the less attractive reverse side of private narratives (in which violence and snobbery also figured) being overlooked. Only by penetrat- ing behind the public face of community myths of positive togetherness could a more balanced assessment of the traditional working-class com- munity be gained. Geoff Payne’s question about community studies which Family and Kinship epitomized, why do they ‘seem so full of such nice people?’ (1996: 18, emphasis in original), is answered partly by the failure to penetrate behind myths, and partly by selectivity (conscious or otherwise) in decisions about which members of communities to consult. When researchers at the Young Foundation (which the ICS became) undertook a restudy of Family and Kinship, other charges would be levelled at their book (Dench, Gavron and Young 2006), but not ones of looking at things through rose-tinted spectacles or of failure to speak to ‘missing’ sections of the study population. This was a key point of criticism of mid-century community studies: that they were vulnerable to being partial in their coverage. In some, women’s voices went unheard, or were misheard, and misrepresented, by male researchers; the best-known community studies were among these (Frankenberg 1976). Similar points were made about 16 What are community studies? how in other studies different groups’ voices came to be marginalized. These criticisms required researchers to pay attention to the lessons this entailed for the research methods employed and to the operationalization of the term ‘community’ using researchers’ chosen tools. 2.3 Reconsideration and renewal Rethinking the way in which community was researched necessarily entailed theoretical debate about the concept of community. A key refer- ence point that had been published in German in 1887 but was not avail- able in an English translation until 1955 was Community and Association by Ferdinand Tönnies. The reduction of the distinction between two antipathetic types of social arrangements, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, to a contrast between small rural and large urban settlements lost much of the subtlety of what Tönnies had to say about the erosion by social and economic forces of the enduring connections to and consequent intimate knowledge of others that came from living in close-knit social worlds (Lee and Newby 1983: Part 2). Industrializing and urbanizing societies were becoming less ‘organic’ and more ‘mechanical’ (Tönnies 1955: 39), and as a result communities’ religious, work, family and cultural traditions were transformed. Interestingly, Tönnies’ contemporary Emile Durkheim bor- rowed and reworked the concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity, and through his account of social change challenged the notion that the conditions of modern social life ruled out the intense social bonds that Tönnies treated as beleaguered (Crow 2005). By the early 1970s the ensu- ing debate was focussing on whether using the concept of community implied acceptance of Tönnies’s nostalgia that appealed to readers who longed to see ‘a return to an earlier stage in the development of societies where life was simpler’ (Elias 1974: xi). This debate has continued down to the present, for example in the work of Zygmunt Bauman (2001). The renewed attention being paid to the theory of community had powerful consequences. Engagement with theoretical ideas was neces- sary because community studies were being characterized by critics as descriptive, capable of portraying communities but not explaining them. It was partly as a response to this criticism that Stacey looked to theory to help frame an approach that would get beyond fact- finding about social problems and capture a fuller understanding of the dynamics of ordinary life including everyday routines as well as A history 17 the pursuit of power and status (Savage 2010: 151). Meanwhile, critics of the tendency to romanticize community relationships that char- acterized the work of the ICS arrived by a different route at the same conclusion, that communities were about competition and conflict as well as co-operation, and these phenomena needed in particular to be explained as something other than expressions of exceptional, aberrant social forces. Supporters of this line of reasoning could refer to John Rex and Robert Moore’s path-breaking Race, Community and Conflict as an example of the sort of research results that could be achieved by drop- ping the assumption that communities were consensual and adopting instead a conflict perspective. By the 1960s immigration from overseas into cities like Birmingham was resulting in intense competition over resources such as housing, and the Sparkbrook study drew successfully on the Chicago School’s model of differentiated urban zones, occupied by subcommunities brought together around ethnic and racial identi- ties. Spatial segregation along ethnic lines meant that there were ‘three Sparkbrooks’ (1967: ch.II), not one. Here, and elsewhere, research was highlighting that an administrative boundary could contain more than one community. First published in 1965, Norbert Elias and John Scotson’s (1994) study of the ‘Winston Parva’ neighbourhood of Leicester offered a different explanation of the same scenario, a bounded geographical area split into a hierarchy of residential groups whose members related to others with a combination of stereotype-based discrimination and fear. A shared iden- tity was strikingly absent in both Sparkbrook and Winston Parva. Across the Atlantic, Gerald Suttles (1968) was retracing themes of the Chicago School in the area of that city where Addams had been active in seeking to combat social problems three quarters of a century earlier. This slum neighbourhood was characterized by a pattern of separation between dif- ferent racial and ethnic groups, which, despite being marked by conflict, was orderly. Suttles found solidarity between ethnic group members, and separate, ‘provincial’ cultures which were reproduced through social pro- cesses such as gossip (which Elias and Scotson had also highlighted in their study) to sustain a ‘moral order’. Despite expectations to the contrary held by outsider observers, slum areas were characterized by social order, just not the type that was usually associated with that term. Alice Goffman’s study of Philadelphia as home to ‘a community on the run’ (2014: xii) is a recent expression of this tradition of research finding shared identity and 18 What are community studies? norms of behaviour and even solidarity among a disadvantaged group frequently subject to misunderstanding by outsiders. As previous thinking about the relationship of community to space was criticized and the association of community with consensus was challenged by researchers whose work highlighted conflict, community studies went out of fashion for a time. Awareness that local distinctiveness was being eroded by large-scale secular forces such as bureaucratization led some commentators to suggest that the phenomenon of community was in the process of being eclipsed (Stein 1964). For others the very con- cept of ‘community’ was an object of attack for glossing over and thereby concealing the presence of inequalities of social class, gender, and race and ethnicity. Graham Day’s useful account of community studies up to this point treats the 1960s as a decade in which a crisis point was reached from which it was difficult for the genre to recover (2006: ch.2). It is certainly true that few community studies were published in the 1970s, although pointers to themes that would figure prominently in the rejuvenation of the field that was to come can be detected among those few that were (Bulmer 1985: 431). There is a political edge to Ken Coates and Richard Silburn’s (1973) study of poverty and housing decay set in the context of inner-city Nottingham, while Ken Pryce’s (1979) Endless Pressure explored ethnic minority alienation in another British inner-city context, Bristol. In Australia, the gap between suburban promise and reality was the setting for Lois Bryson and Faith Thompson’s (1972) analysis of the reproduction of class inequalities, while in the United States Albert Hunter’s (1974) work in Chicago emphasized the importance of community symbols. All of these studies in their different ways made the case for holding on to a focus on community phenomena which continued to have real significance in ordinary people’s everyday lives. Arguably this was not despite the grow- ing significance of wider influences on communities, but because of them. People looked to ‘community’ as a source of support and of meaning precisely as community boundaries were being traversed as never before. Since 1980, criticisms of community studies as backward-looking nostal- gic celebrations of disappearing ways of life have been met by numerous studies of contemporary community which are anything but nostalgic. As Robert Burgess has noted, ‘The ethnographer no longer focuses merely on the exotic and the obscure in societies other than our own’ (2001: 38), but is increasingly found investigating familiar phenomena closer to home. In anthropology, Anthony Cohen has highlighted the importance of A history 19 communities’ symbolic boundaries in the context of it becoming ever more apparent that complete self-containment for communities is impossible in the modern world. Cohen’s (1987) own work on Whalsay in Shetland is part of a much broader body of research in relatively remote locations (Cohen 1982, 1986), but similar themes about the constructed and negoti- ated character of boundaries also emerge from research conducted in the heart of great cities. Here long-established themes of spatial boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that can be traced back to the Chicago School continue to generate ‘turf wars’ (Modan 2007). In some exclusive contexts boundaries are managed through the device of ‘gated communities’ (Low 2003), in others there are more subtle mechanisms by which the desire to live among ‘people like us’ is pursued (Butler with Robson 2003; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2005). These and other studies such as Keller’s (2003) research into a suburban development reveal that the pursuit of the dream of community often involves geographical mobility. The growth of people’s spatial movement anticipated in Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris’s (1965: ch.1) notion of ‘the mobile society’ is a prominent theme of recent restudies. Janet Foster’s (1999) Docklands involves a return to the east end of London, and stands out as a study of ‘worlds in collision’ as people, ideas and practices from around the globe are brought together in new configurations. Other studies of this area also highlight the movement of people and its effect of ‘changing places’ (Mumford and Power 2003: ch.10), including what some see as the loss of the ‘brief golden age’ (Dench, Gavron and Young 2006: 20) that had been celebrated in Young and Willmott’s original research. Restudies of classic community studies do not have to be conducted in exactly the same way and with precisely the same conceptual frameworks as the originals in order to illuminate the process of social change; rather, they are stronger for looking at old themes afresh (Charles and Crow 2012; Hammersley 2016). These themes of the erosion of isolation, the signifi- cance of geographical mobility, and the lessons to be learned about com- munities through restudies have influenced the selection of exemplars of recent community studies, which will be focused on in the next chapter. These exemplars have been selected to convey the vitality of community research as researchers have responded imaginatively to the critique of ‘the old tradition’ in order to better capture how as some forms of com- munity decline, others emerge. 20 3 Three exemplars It is somewhat arbitrary to take 1980 as the start of a new period of com- munity studies research, but not entirely. The need for a fresh beginning had been encapsulated in Philip Abrams’s observation that the field was marked by the paradoxical ‘coexistence of a body of theory which constantly predicts the collapse of community and a body of empirical studies which finds community alive and well’ (1978: 12). Abrams himself was immersed in empirical research into community relationships involv- ing neighbours as these words were being published (Bulmer 1986), and at the same time the fieldwork for the first exemplar to be considered in this chapter was commencing. Ray Pahl had been seeking a location to conduct his planned research into the informal economy, and in 1978 he resolved that the Isle of Sheppey in Kent met his and his funder’s requirements. With that decision, a period of six years of intensive fieldwork began that resulted in Divisions of Labour. It has been selected partly because Pahl wanted to do something other than a traditional community study, and because in doing so he broke new ground in the combination of research methods employed by him and his team. The chapter will then go on to consider Karen O’Reilly’s The British on the Costa del Sol, which she undertook single-handedly as a PhD student. She later returned to the fieldwork site to conduct follow-up investigations. Her study takes further the investigation of the changing relationship between community and place in an age of unprecedented geographical mobility, and again is characterized by preparedness to inno- vate both conceptually and methodologically in the context of studying people’s active pursuit of the dream of community. The third exemplar to be considered is Luke Eric Lassiter and his colleagues’ The Other Side of Middletown, which is included because it facilitates a discussion of the issues raised in the conduct of a restudy – the Lynds’ Middletown research being the original point of reference – and because it exemplifies the collaborative approach that was mentioned in Chapter 1. Together the 21 22 What are community studies? three studies considered in this chapter are intended to give a flavour of the many ways in which community researchers have responded to the challenges laid down by the critics of the community studies tradition. 3.1 Divisions of Labour The genesis of Pahl’s Divisions of Labour is worth noting, because the project became considerably more ambitious in scope than the original research design. Starting out with only a vague notion that ‘work’ in its broader sense was being transformed by the growth of informality in how things get done and how people ‘get by’, Pahl’s interest in everyday life had a special twist in the context of levels of unemployment and inflation that were taking people into unfamiliar territory. He rightly appreciated that such changes would have a marked impact on male industrial workers made redundant by the accompanying process of deindustrialization, although he was seriously wide of the mark in his initial speculation that equivalent opportunities for informal economic activity would open up for them. Even had it not been erroneous, the idea that people could respond to changed economic circumstances by engaging in practices of questionable legality (such as working informally for ‘cash in hand’ pay- ment) meant that the identifiability of study participants would be an ongoing challenge. Pahl had the option of anonymizing his study area, and was still doing so as late as 1982 when he spoke of ‘a local labour market on the Kent side of the Thames estuary, which has a long tradition of seasonal unemployment’ (1982: 91). As time went on and the distinctiveness of the location became ever more apparent, so did the impracticality of disguis- ing it in the book. Naming Sheppey as the fieldwork site did naturally carry some risk of some community members who had participated in the study being identifiable, at least to other community members to whom they would be instantly recognizable, but the participants were either not named or given pseudonyms, and this afforded them more protection than in some cases they wished to have. Being an island meant that Sheppey offered an apparently self-con- tained community of 33,000 people whose fortunes had been tied to the occupational community associated with the Admiralty dockyard over several centuries. The closure of this dockyard in 1960 and its impact on the people of the island was still a focal point of discussions two decades later, and Pahl described conversations that he had with local residents Three exemplars 23 as lay versions of the sociological perspective on social solidarity rooted in Durkheim’s ideas. In these narratives the ‘strong sense of social cohe- sion’ (1984: 186) that the dockyard community had engendered became atrophied, and people’s collective identity was undermined. Pahl had a long-standing interest in the way that connections to ‘people like us’ (1972: 83) play a pivotal role in shaping social life, as well as in community research more generally (Crow and Takeda 2011), and he was receptive to the argument that associated the weakening of collective identities with a loss of purpose and sense of direction at an individual level. As the research proceeded, he discovered unexpected things, such as that two- fifths of the island’s households at the time of the study had moved there since 1960 (1984: 193), which meant that the local population was far more mobile than the imagery of ‘islanders born and bred’ suggested. The chap- ter devoted to ‘myth and reality in Sheppey in the 1980s’ (1984: ch.7) thus serves a useful purpose in the study, just as the myth/reality contrast has been useful in other community studies (see Berger 1968: ch.1; Keller 2003). Pahl’s interest in the island was also related to the fact that it had both urban and rural characteristics, and so reinforced his scepticism (noted in Chapter 2) that places could be located on a rural–urban continuum. An early part of Pahl’s fieldwork on Sheppey involved the collection of essays written by young people in which they were invited to imagine their lives to come. Over 140 of these imagined futures essays were collected, and they sensitized Pahl to several things about the local community. These included the distinctive culture of individualism and self-reliance that instilled a degree of optimism that was arguably not warranted in the context of bleaker economic circumstances than those that had been faced by the young people’s parents as they entered adulthood (Pahl 1978). Pahl certainly encountered this resilient culture among the adults with whom he spoke in his early ethnographic fieldwork, and was so struck by it that his initial speculation was that people were responding to unemployment by devising alternative ways of ‘getting by’. This fitted with the broad historical sweep of his perspective which saw the reliance of households on a male breadwinner in full-time employment as a relatively recent and arguably unsustainable innovation. Informal conversations with Islanders appeared to support the argument that there were viable other ways of making a living and that the economic crisis was ushering in new patterns of working, including a revised division of labour between men and women, as part of a more general ‘quiet revolution in everyday 24 What are community studies? life’ (1984: 200). The fact that the people of Sheppey were not typical of the wider society did not matter in this respect; indeed, the opportunity that they presented of studying the effects of deindustrialization ‘in a particularly extreme form’ (1984: 195) added to the location’s attraction. Sheppey could be regarded as a type of laboratory, or at least ‘a test case’ (1984: 145), because if the much-discussed development of informal work were to be found anywhere it would be here. The next element in Pahl’s study forced a fundamental reassessment of his initial take on Sheppey life. He had been well aware of the criticism that ethnographic researchers could be vulnerable to hearing rosier views of communities than the reality justified, and the survey of one in nine of Sheppey’s households confirmed a harsher message than his pilot study’s thirty interviews had suggested. There are two reasons for this discrepancy between the findings generated by the two methods. One is that surveys are more trustworthy as a means of accessing a representative sample than are connections made through ethnographic fieldwork; the latter has the potential to produce findings that are skewed in various ways in terms of who participates (Payne 1996). The second reason is that surveys like the one that Pahl commissioned on Sheppey are more structured in the format of questions put to research participants than are ethnographic conversations, and this structuring of the research encounter gives survey researchers confidence that they are getting at what people do in their lives rather than what they take to be socially acceptable answers that a researcher will want to hear or be impressed by. Once the quantitative data on households’ divisions of labour had been analysed, a very dif- ferent picture emerged to that of the bright post-industrial future full of new opportunities. The survey data led inescapably to the conclusion that deindustrialization was producing a process of social polarization. At one pole were households that were comfortably placed with several of their members in work, while at the other extreme were households with no work. These latter households had the compensation of having plenty of time available to them, but this was scant consolation for the fact that they were unable to access opportunities to work (either in the formal labour market or informally). Thus society was gravitating towards a comfortable ‘middle mass’ of ‘work-rich’ households and an emerging ‘underclass’ of ‘work-poor’ households. Claire Wallace’s complementary research among young people on Sheppey echoed this finding as the for- tunes of ‘swimmers’ and ‘sinkers’ (1987: 140) diverged in a similar fashion. Three exemplars 25 Once discovered, this pattern made perfect if unpalatable sense. The logic of their respective situations meant that employment makes people better connected than their unemployed counterparts, who by contrast are isolated by their lack of connection. Opportunities for work in all its forms tend to gravitate towards people already occupied and to enhance their position, while marginality is also self-perpetuating. This phenomenon of community members being subjected to centripetal and centrifugal forces had been noted by previous community researchers (Crow 2002a: ch.4). Pahl’s analysis went further by tracing how this outcome was reinforced through the operation of the welfare benefits system. His decision to focus attention on the household as the unit of analysis drove home how unem- ployment blighted the prospects not only of individuals but also of others with whom they live where there is relatively little to be gained financially by their being in work when the income from that work is deducted from their unemployed partner’s welfare benefits. What mattered, in other words, was that the approach to economic activity adopted by a household needs to be viable as a household work strategy (Crow 1989). Pahl used this concept to show how households with multiple earners were prospering while those in which members were unemployed could find themselves constrained in terms of options available to them, and in the extreme trapped and reduced to following a dour, anxiety-ridden survival strategy. Pahl’s key theme in Divisions of Labour of changing patterns of work generating a relentless process of social polarization needed the survey of Sheppey households to discover it, but the exposition of the argu- ment came through most forcefully using case studies of two households with contrasting fortunes. Pahl (1980) had already used this technique of comparing two households in an early and very provisional report on his fieldwork and these sketches of the Parsons and Simpson households are reproduced as an appendix to Divisions of Labour. By the end of the fieldwork, however, it was apparent to Pahl that the stories of two other couples, Linda and Jim and Beryl and George, functioned far better as illustrations of how social polarization played itself out at the household level. The chapter devoted to the two households comprises a full tenth of the whole book. In particular, Linda and Jim spoke for downwardly mobile people, and they did so in a way that echoed Pahl’s higher-level theorizing. In one passage discussing access to job opportunities, he notes that ‘Linda demonstrated her natural capacity as a sociologist by remark- ing aphoristically, “It’s true what they say: it’s not what you know now but 26 What are community studies? who you know”’ (1984: 298). Beryl and George merit some attention as representatives of the affluent, upwardly mobile members of the ‘mid- dle mass’ leading comfortable, home-centred lives with all the benefits of steady and secure incomes, but it is Linda and Jim that have the lion’s share of the chapter devoted to them. Even that could not do complete justice to their case since, in Pahl’s opinion, ‘in some ways they deserve a book to themselves’ (1984: 304). The powerful nature of Linda and Jim’s story is instantly apparent because it captures so effectively how much at variance their lives were from ‘the so-called “informal” or “black” economy of popular misconception’ (1984: 250). It is no surprise that Pahl continued visiting Linda and Jim for a further decade, for research purposes (Wilson and Pahl 1988) but also because of the depth of the personal connection that they achieved (Elliott and Lawrence, 2017). Pahl’s study warrants consideration as a modern classic (Crow and Ellis, 2017) because of the way that it addresses core social scientific concerns. The maxims drawn from Charles Wright Mills’s (2000) manifesto for sociology about the discipline’s capacity to illuminate the intersection of biography and history are so well known that Pahl did not need to reference his driving concern to ‘focus on the connections between public issues and private troubles’ (1984: 7). It is through the depth of attention given to Linda and Jim’s story that Pahl’s points hit home about down- ward mobility happening to people despite their best efforts to secure their economic position. It is a compelling story that provides a powerful indictment of popular perceptions of welfare ‘scroungers’ idling their time away supported by unemployment benefit, and of government policies founded on those perceptions. Durkheim may have been on methodolog- ically sound ground when arguing that a single example does not prove a general rule, but Pahl was nevertheless correct in opting to use the case study to follow the extensive but dense statistical analysis of the survey data in a way that ‘brought them alive’ (1984: 277). The interpretation of the facts and figures derived from the survey about how households func- tion was unarguable in the case made for needing to rethink the work done by individuals in different gender and social class positions, but there is also value in using the persuasive capacity of making an abstract idea embodied (Crow 2005: 45). In a similar way, Divisions of Labour engaged readers by using Sheppey as a case study of how high-level processes like deindustrialization and globalization are expressed in a particular place. This is a strength of Three exemplars 27 community studies generally, their capacity to make abstract notions more tangible, accessible and understandable (Crow 2000). Pahl’s treat- ment of deindustrialization is a good example. The historical contextual- ization that he provides of Sheppey’s development as an ‘industrial island’ serves to maximize the impact of the narrative that follows it of the loss of the dockyard as a major employer and the changed nature of industrial production in the factories and steelworks brought in to provide alterna- tive employment. Woven into this narrative are further observations about how the world of work would have changed even without the closure of the Admiralty dockyard as the feminization of the workforce, the changing power of trade unions, and the modernization of employer attitudes and practices worked themselves through. These were national and global forces, but Pahl’s analysis succeeds in portraying their local expression. The inclusion of ten contemporary photographs taken locally (1984: 182–3) aids readers’ ability to grasp the realities of Sheppey and its people, to whom the book is dedicated. Photographs thus added another dimension to Pahl’s efforts to express ‘the reality of ordinary people’s lives’ (1984: 8). They reflected his aware- ness that ‘contemporary studies of local labour markets need to be seen in context’ (1984: 155), because no two places are identical, and local distinctiveness is lost in macro-level analyses that overgeneralize. The behaviour of Sheppey people made more sense once the peculiarities of the place were appreciated, and so Divisions of Labour is at pains to convey the distinctiveness of the community’s history, its housing and labour markets, and its culture. Pahl’s longstanding interest in housing led him to attach particular significance to the fact that rates of owner- occupation were considerably higher on the island than the average for the UK overall (1984: 175–6). This was all the more remarkable given the fact that the wages paid to those islanders in work ‘were not high’ (1984: 171); owner-occupation did not necessarily signify affluent lifestyles. Pahl gained insights into the local labour market through visiting workplaces and speaking to employers; such elite interviews complemented conver- sations conducted with workers, and the book’s narrative gives no sense of privileging accounts from either side of the employment relationship (although Pahl did incur a degree of displeasure locally by reporting some employers’ opinions more frankly than may have been judicious). The methodological message that comes through from the Sheppey study is the value of employing a wide range of different research 28 What are community studies? methods in order to capture the multifaceted phenomenon that is ‘community’. This research required contributions from numerous peo- ple with diverse but complementary skills. In addition to the specialist researchers brought in from Social and Community Planning Research to undertake the island-wide survey, Pahl also benefitted from the archival work undertaken by Nick Buck looking into the history of the dockyard, from research undertaken by Jane Dennett into the more recent his- tory of industry, employment and housing development, and from the contributions of Claire Wallace to interviewing and to ethnographic and photographic elements of the project. Jim Styles also contributed to the photography, and the book also contains a map of the island. And at the heart of the varied activities, the ‘large-scale, multi-faceted research project’ (1984: 11) was Pahl himself, interviewing, conversing, observing, consulting records, keeping up with events through the local newspaper (which is quoted extensively in the book), and generally absorbing the various facets of community life on Sheppey. He remarked that, ‘A per- ceptive observer visiting the Island would see and understand much by travelling about’ (1984: 155), and Pahl was such an observer. He was also speaking from first-hand experience when noting that, ‘Doing empirical research in sociology involves more cold waits in the rain, and more cups of tea or coffee when one really wants a solid meal, than is perhaps rec- ognized’ (1984: viii). He did, however, purchase a property in Sheerness so that his team had a base on Sheppey, and over a six-year period of field- work Pahl became much more than simply a visiting observer. He also did not cut his connections with Sheppey once the book was published, but continued to undertake research there and to keep up relationships, thereby highlighting that fieldwork connections can last for many years, sometimes decades (Crow 2012). 3.2 The British on the Costa del Sol Karen O’Reilly’s ethnographic research among expatriates in Spain led her to spend a much lengthier period in her fieldwork location than she had originally intended. On the basis of her own experience and that of oth- ers, she has commented that ‘an ethnographer needs time’ (2012: 16). A traditional model of ethnographic fieldwork involves researchers spending at least a year immersing themselves in the culture of the people whom they have chosen to investigate (Goffman 2002), but just as Pahl found Three exemplars 29 himself going back to Sheppey more often than he had anticipated, the same is true for O’Reilly and her research location, Fuengirola. In her book, she reports that, ‘I spent fifteen months in Spain with my family during 1993 and 1994 and have returned to the area many times over the years since then’ (2000a: 10). Later on, this pattern of return visits was further extended in a process that she calls ‘ethnographic returning’ (O’Reilly 2012). She found, like Pahl, that the focus of the research evolved over the course of the time spent in the field, extending from the initial interest in how British migrants to Spain had managed that process to embrace much broader aspects of the practice of social life. Spain’s British migrants were a focus of media attention, and so a public issue aspect to the research was present alongside the personal problems that people reported encounter- ing. Indeed, individual stories of disappointment at the failure to realize the anticipated ‘dream’ lifestyle that migration had been expected to deliver were common enough to warrant, through the examination of myths, consideration of the puzzle of how people routinely come to be ‘falsely conscious of their social positions’ (Mills 2000: 5). Like Pahl, O’Reilly experienced one question leading to another which made it ‘difficult to know when to stop’ (2012: 532). Furthermore, ethnographers make the decision to leave the field influenced by many other factors besides the amount of material that they have collected, including ethical concerns about leaving study participants feeling that they have been exploited and then abandoned (Pole and Hillyard 2016: ch.6). Generating such disap- pointment is not only undesirable in itself, but also to be avoided because it makes things difficult for future researchers (Crow 2013; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 94–6). O’Reilly was aware that community studies had been criticized for assuming an unproblematic relationship between communities and places. Focussing on a community of British migrants in Spain held great potential to explore this issue afresh. The book has the subtitle ‘transnational identities and local communities’. Her research participants constituted a recognizable community in a particular locality, but they were quite different from the people who populated conventional com- munity studies because they were still outsiders in many respects, such as not always being fluent in Spanish, the local language. In consequence they were not particularly well-integrated into the host society, and remained distinctly British. As a social group whose members did not readily blend in with their new surroundings, the British in Spain found 30 What are community studies? their way regularly into the news, and not only because of the size of the migrant population (although that was in itself remarkable, running as it did into hundreds of thousands of people). The familiar community stud- ies theme of ‘us’ and ‘them’ consciousness was prominent among research participants, but as migrants they could not construct a common identity around lifelong associations with a place or each other and so had to build a more complex narrative about what brought and held them together. The situation was thus fertile ground for the study of how myths function in the construction of community identities. Myth and reality served as a useful analytical framework for exploring how there can be discrepancies between what migrants expect to find in their new envi- ronment and the situation that they encounter upon arrival. Pahl’s early study of people moving to commuter villages taking with them idealized notions of what their new lives would be like, what he called ‘villages in the mind’ (Pahl 2005), was echoed in O’Reilly’s transnational migrants not necessarily having realistic expectations about what awaited them. One of her participants complained of her compatriots that ‘they all just want to live a fantasy life. It’s not real!’ (2000b: 243) In particular, many of them were not prepared for the social segregation that they would encounter. Thus O’Reilly reports that ‘several men told me that they find it difficult to make friends in Spain’ and adds that while women tended to be less forthcoming on the subject of isolation, she did nevertheless have conversations with them that conveyed ‘that they sometimes feel terribly lonely and wish they could go home’ (2000a: 82), having discovered that the downside of ‘trading intimacy for liberty’ (2000b) was a loss of depth to their friendships. Immersion in ethnographic fieldwork has the great benefit of generat- ing extensive field notes, and an extract from these allows the point to be illustrated far better than a quotation from an interview would: Later on that morning Joan and Beryl sat chatting over a cup of coffee. I heard Beryl say that she is much less bored here now that she has something to do with herself. She said that she used to get very bored and lonely, and people never really understood because they don’t think you should. Joan seemed relieved to hear her say these things and started to tell how lonely and bored she gets, how she misses her family and how she feels she must not admit this to anyone. They said that people do not talk about things like Three exemplars 31 that here, they do not admit that they are lonely. … They talked about how visitors are always jealous of them but don’t realise that everything is not always perfect. (2000a: 83) The key point here is that there can be significant discrepancies between people’s ‘public accounts’ and their ‘private accounts’ (Cornwell 1984), and that unless a researcher can access the latter they are destined to remain in the restricted sphere of the public face that people present. There are several good reasons why the public accounts presented by the British in Spain were positive. The active pursuit of migration to Spain represented an investment in the project, both financially and emotion- ally. The case for having made the move is something that they needed to be persuasive, and the people that they needed to convince that it was producing the desired outcomes were not only others but also themselves. There was therefore a readiness to subscribe to the belief that moving to Spain offers access to a desirable lifestyle; migrants to whom O’Reilly spoke ‘seemed concerned to stress the benefits of life in Spain’, and most ‘wanted me to know that they had not made a mistake in moving to Spain’ (2000a: 70, 13). The concept derived from Durkheim via Michael Crick of ‘collec- tive representations’ is useful in conveying how a positive picture of the migrants’ way of life was reproduced through reinforcement of the idea that it involves ‘a healthy, happy lifestyle where elderly people are more active and more included than they would be back home’ (O’Reilly 2000a: 2, 69). Thus alongside the compelling collective representation of Spain as somewhere that offered a good quality of life was a corresponding collective representation of Britain as problematic because of its weather and its social problems expressed in high rates of crime and the social marginalization of older people. Within this view of the world, the pull of Spain and the push from Britain combined to make migration a sensible course of action to take. The ideal of community lies at the heart of this narrative about the case for moving to Spain. In contrast to the attractive, relaxed lifestyle in Spain that offered freedom, enjoyment and the opportunity to be yourself, migrants were ‘continually constructing and reconstructing a negative image of Britain and a “bad Britain” discourse’ that features, vari- ously, ‘routine; dullness; monotony; greyness; cold; no hope for the future; a miserable old age; misery; modern life; rushing around; no time for pleasure; crime; selfishness; lack of caring; loss of community; lack of trust; 32 What are community studies? poor health; poor education; and a poor welfare state’ (2000a: 99). What is being expressed here is the ‘loss of community’ theme that has been a familiar feature of thinking about community change in a host of cases (Lee and Newby 1983: ch.4), but with the consolation that the lost social arrangements have been rediscovered in another context. Traditional val- ues may have been subject to prolonged erosion in contemporary Britain, but longed-for community could be found instead in Spain. A British bar owner to whom O’Reilly spoke described his new home as ‘like Britain was in the fifties – like turning the clocks back. Like the time that people knew their neighbours and cared about them, and you could go out and leave your door unlocked, and it was safe to walk the streets at night … and families were close’ (2000a: 115). The nostalgic tone of this description is instructive, revealing a longing for a past that is felt to be no longer avail- able in Britain. It is more that Britain has changed than that the migrants have changed, although the idea that they have had to make no adjust- ment to their new environment is an oversimplification. Rather, it is that Spain had provided them with a setting in which they have been able to re-establish many valued patterns of community relationships, or at least to believe that they had done so. Fieldwork encounters threw up much familiar community-related rhetoric. One British migrant claimed to be well-integrated with both Spanish and British neighbours, reporting it to be ‘like a village here; one sneeze and we’ve all got a cold’ (2000a: 101). Commitment to the move was reinforced by the absence of plans to return to Britain, and indeed antipathy to the idea, because of the ‘unidealised view of home’ (2000a: 98) that was held. Whereas other migrant groups such as Pakistanis in Britain have been found to operate with a ‘myth of return’ (Anwar 1985) that kept open the possibility of going back to a country of origin, O’Reilly interpreted the many statements along the lines of ‘I’ve got no desire to go back there’ to constitute a ‘myth of (no) return’ (2000a: 97, 96). The lan- guage of myth is appropriate here, because over time evidence emerged that returning to the UK was a common occurrence. First impressions of a permanently settled British community in Spain were misleading. During the initial phase of fieldwork O’Reilly was ‘unaware of the various comings and goings in what turned out to be an important season for the commu- nity: the period of a huge temporary summer re-migration to the home country’ (2000a: 13). As O’Reily’s awareness of this pattern of people going back and forth grew, so she came to appreciate the heterogeneity of her Three exemplars 33 study population. As a result, the simple distinction between tourists and settlers proved unworkable, and a more sophisticated typology evolved in which ‘full residents’, ‘returning residents’, ‘seasonal visitors’ and ‘peri- patetic visitors’ (2000a: 52) were differentiated, all distinguishable from tourists. Several paragraph-long descriptions of individuals or couples are provided for each of the types, and this serves to further emphasize the heterogeneity of the British in Spain, with important differences being noted within as well as between the types. The British on the Costa del Sol does not seek to cover everything. One of the six core topics of community research in the classic ‘Middletown’ tradition, youth, would have been unproductive to pursue in Fuengirola, because teenagers are uncommon among the British in Spain. Given that people over the age of fifty are a prominent part of the migrant population, there would have been plenty of reasons to justify a focus on retirement migration, as other researchers have done (Ahmed 2015; King, Warnes and Williams 2000; Oliver 2008). Previous research into retirement migration in the UK such as that by Valerie Karn (1977) was clearly being superseded by the opening up of opportunities for international mobility, and O’Reilly’s findings do much to reveal the extent of this change, but she is at pains to confront ‘the assumption that the British in Spain are mainly elderly and retired’ (2000a: 9). Among the 259 people living in and around Fuengirola from whom she collected data, more than three-fifths were under the age of sixty, and although this was not a representative sample of British people living in Spain, it did enough to convey that there are ‘large numbers of migrants who do not fit neatly into typologies or stereotypes formed by other authors and commentators’ (2000a: 60). Not only was there variation in the ages at which people migrated, there was also diversity introduced by the presence of opportunities to combine drawing a pension with undertaking different kinds of work. Ostensibly retired people were to be found among those ‘working informally … involved in all sorts of activities from home maintenance, decorating and ironing, to taxying, pool maintenance and car mechanics’ (2000a: 122). This finding would not necessarily have emerged had the study adopted a more conventional focus and categorization. O’Reilly’s primary concern was not with numerical data. The approach that she adopted of participant observation was justified by her belief that ‘people and actions cannot simply be observed, logged and counted but require interpretation, understanding and empathy’ (2000a: 10). 34 What are community studies? Suspicions about the problematic status of statistics on migration were soon confirmed. Statistical data on British migrants to Spain were sparse, and those that were available were prone to significant variation; some were little better than educated guesswork. The reasons for this were not hard to find. Not only was it the case that people who settled permanently were just one of several types of migrants alongside others who travelled back and forth between Spain and the UK, it was also apparent that by no means all migrants had gone through the formalities of acquiring appro- priate legal documentation. In some quarters it had the reputation of being ‘an expensive, time-consuming and bureaucratic nightmare’. British migration to Spain is both fluid and quite often not recorded officially and as a result is ‘very difficult to quantify’ (2000a: 46, 41). A further charac- ter of the migrant population that presents a challenge to attempts to quantify its dimensions relates to the fact that ‘for the British themselves the identity as permanent or temporary migrant does not always seem to depend on clear, objective criteria’. Some participants’ narratives suggested that an important part of migrants’ expectations being fulfilled could be expressed by reference to involvement in an active social life, and O’Reilly found there to be ‘numerous British-run clubs and social groups’ (2000a: 104, 120). It would have been possible for her to follow Robert Putnam’s (2000) influential methodological strategy of taking voluntary organiza- tion membership as a quantitative indicator of social capital, but she did not. The community networks that have grown up among the British migrants are characterized by informality, and that makes participation in them hard to measure. Her emphasis on ‘the informal construction of social and community life’ (2000a: 124), as well as her discussion of how such informality shades into illegality (2000b: 237), highlights parallels between these social networks of exchange and the informal economy studied by researchers like Pahl. The penultimate chapter in O’Reilly’s book is entitled ‘The construction of community’. The way in which the individuals being studied constitute a ‘community’ is instructive because the people involved are far from static; they ‘are changing all the time’. Put another way, it is a community whose members’ mobility makes it vulnerable to ‘the threat of transience’ (2000a: 133, 132). The question of what members of a community have in common is raised particularly starkly in this case. Of the three possible answers of place, interests and identity delineated by Peter Willmott (1986), it is shared identity that comes out most strongly in the analysis. Three exemplars 35 Spain in general and the Costa del Sol in particular are necessarily refer- ence points in the constructed community, but this is not a population with rootedness in the place over generations. Shared interests feature in people’s accounts of how exchange and reciprocity are integral to com- munity members’ lives, but O’Reilly’s argument is that such exchanges are more important for their symbolic value than they are for their monetary value. What drives the making of this community is a shared commit- ment to particular values, or at least the quest to achieve them. Among these values, egalitarianism featured prominently, with the claim asserted frequently that past lives in Britain had no bearing on a person’s status in Spain. People were said to be accepted as equals, provided that they showed commitment to the community

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