Abstract
Between May 1978 and December 1983, the sociologist Ray Pahl conducted seven extensive interviews with a couple from Sheppey that he called “Linda” and “Jim.” These not only informed a key chapter in Pahl’s classic book Divisions of Labour but also evolved into a uniquely intimate account of how a family used to “getting by” (though never “affluent”) coped with the hardships and indignities of long-term reliance on welfare benefits. Perhaps inevitably, fascinating aspects of Linda and Jim’s testimony were left unused in Divisions of Labour, primarily because they were marginal to Pahl’s principal aim of demonstrating how the state welfare system could trap a family in poverty. We deliberately retain the narrative, case study approach of Pahl’s treatment, but shift our focus to the strategies that Linda and Jim adopted to cope with the emotional and psychological challenges of life at the sharp end of the early 1980s recession. How they retained a strong orientation toward the future, how they resisted internalizing the stigmatization associated with welfare dependency in 1980s Britain, and how their determination to fight “the system” ultimately led them to make choices in harmony with the logic of the New Right’s free market agenda.
Highlights
Between May 1978 and December 1983, the sociologist Ray Pahl conducted seven extended interviews with a couple from the Isle of Sheppey in Kent that he called “Linda” and “Jim.” Initially, they were just one of a number of couples introduced to Pahl by a local doctor who thought they would be willing to talk openly to a stranger.1 But in October 1980, as the deflationary economic policies of the new Conservative Government began to bite, Jim lost his job and the interviews evolved into a profoundly human story of how a family used to “getting by” coped with the hardships and indignities of long-term reliance on welfare benefits
Pahl (1984) chose to focus on how, unlike “affluent” workers George and Beryl, Linda and Jim were “oppressed by circumstances they could not control” so that despite displaying “more enterprise, initiative and determination to achieve” they remained trapped in poverty and dependency (p. 309)
Pahl was less interested in the small stories they told about coping with unemployment, and his determination to reject deterministic psychological models of the effects of unemployment made him downplay questions of psychology and personal identity
Summary
Between May 1978 and December 1983, the sociologist Ray Pahl conducted seven extended interviews with a couple from the Isle of Sheppey in Kent that he called “Linda” and “Jim.” Initially, they were just one of a number of couples introduced to Pahl by a local doctor who thought they would be willing to talk openly to a stranger. But in October 1980, as the deflationary economic policies of the new Conservative Government began to bite, Jim lost his job and the interviews evolved into a profoundly human story of how a family used to “getting by” (though never “affluent”) coped with the hardships and indignities of long-term reliance on welfare benefits. The transcripts from Pahl’s first seven interviews with Linda and Jim survive with his papers at Essex University.. The transcripts from Pahl’s first seven interviews with Linda and Jim survive with his papers at Essex University.2 In all, they come to almost 90,000 words, and cover nearly 150 close-packed pages. Pahl’s chapter in Divisions of Labour draws on the first six interviews (the last of which was conducted in February 1983). His technique in the book was, as much as possible, to offer a chronicle of Linda and Jim’s lives organized around their own testimony. It is striking that Pahl devotes almost 5 times as much space to their
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