Contemporary Britain Research Articles

Choosing party leaders: Anglophone democracies, British parties and the limits of comparative politics

Since 1965, Britain’s major political parties have radically, and repeatedly, changed the ways in which they choose their leaders. Building on a recent comparative study of party leadership selection in the five principal Anglophone (‘Westminster’) parliamentary democracies (Cross and Blais, 2012a), this article first outlines a theoretical framework that purports to explain why the major parties in three of those countries, including Britain, have adopted such reform. It then examines why five major British parties have done so since 1965. It argues that, while Cross and Blais’ study makes a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of processes of party leadership selection reform in Anglophone parliamentary democracies, it has limited explanatory power when applied to changes enacted by the major parties in modern and contemporary Britain. Instead, the adoption of such reform in the British context is ultimately best understood and explained by examining both the internal politics and external circumstances of individual parties.

Matthew Anderson. A History of Fair Trade in Contemporary Britain. From Civil Society Campaigns to Corporate Compliance. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2015. ix, 230 pp. Maps. $90.00; € 84.79. (E-Book: $69.99; € 66.99.) - Alexander Sedlmaier. Consumption and Violence. Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany. [Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany.] The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (MI)

Matthew Anderson. A History of Fair Trade in Contemporary Britain. From Civil Society Campaigns to Corporate Compliance. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2015. ix, 230 pp. Maps. $90.00; € 84.79. (E-Book: $69.99; € 66.99.) - Alexander Sedlmaier. Consumption and Violence. Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany. [Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany.] The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (MI)

Morris dancers, matriarchs and paperbacks: Doing the village in contemporary Britain

To call a place rural is to categorize it as a particular kind of place and, often, to presume that particular kinds of being innately occur there. Over the past 20 years, however, trends in British rural studies have problematized easy ascription; this article is an ethnographic contribution within those trends. If it is no longer adequate to read the rural as a container for being, then, as I contend here, rurality can be explored anew through doing. I draw upon David Matless’s (1994) frame of ‘doing the village’ representationally, and amplify it to include concepts of place as representational and relational. I thus use ‘doing’ to read the multiple ways in which diverse residents in a Northern England village engage with both their real locality and with nationally shared rural imaginings.

Social Media, Professional Media and Mobilisation in Contemporary Britain: Explaining the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Citizens’ Movement 38 Degrees

Digital media continue to reshape political activism in unexpected ways. Within a period of a few years, the internet-enabled UK citizens’ movement 38 Degrees has amassed a membership of 3 million and now sits alongside similar entities such as America’s MoveOn, Australia’s GetUp! and the transnational movement Avaaz. In this article, we contribute to current thinking about digital media and mobilisation by addressing some of the limitations of existing research on these movements and on digital activism more generally. We show how 38 Degrees’ digital network repertoires coexist interdependently with its strategy of gaining professional news media coverage. We explain how the oscillations between choreographic leadership and member influence and between digital media horizontalism and elite media-centric work constitute the space of interdependencies in which 38 Degrees acts. These delicately balanced relations can quickly dissolve and be replaced by simpler relations of dependence on professional media. Yet despite its fragility, we theorise about how 38 Degrees may boost individuals’ political efficacy, irrespective of the outcome of individual campaigns. Our conceptual framework can be used to guide research on similar movements.

Book Review: Roy Hattersley and Kevin Hickson (eds), The Socialist Way: Social Democracy in Contemporary Britain and Anthony Painter, Left Without a Future? Social Justice in Anxious Times

Book Review: Roy Hattersley and Kevin Hickson (eds), <i>The Socialist Way: Social Democracy in Contemporary Britain</i> and Anthony Painter, <i>Left Without a Future? Social Justice in Anxious Times</i>

Regional identity in late nineteenth-century England; discursive terrains and rhetorical strategies

Regional identity and regionalist politics in contemporary England seem muted and indistinct when compared with some other European regions. It is therefore unsurprising that historians have failed to discover unambiguous regional identities in the past. However, this article investigates one possible exception in a case study of a peripheral English region. Adopting concepts of narrative, discourse and rhetoric, it examines the discursive moments and rhetorical strategies of spatial identity in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Evidence of a tentative regionalism is marshalled in order to reflect on the usefulness of social scientific approaches to discourse and rhetoric for understanding a specific place identity of late nineteenth-century England. While they provide a handy toolkit for the regional historian they also hint at the limits as well as the possibilities of applying discourse analysis to the past and require supplementing with the concepts of power and context.

New economy, neoliberal state and professionalised parenting: mothers’ labour market engagement and state support for social reproduction in class‐differentiated Britain

Contemporary economic, political and social shifts in the Global North are reconfiguring the resolution of productive and reproductive labour. This paper explores how the emergence of the New Economy, the rolling out of the neoliberal state, and the professionalisation of parenting are transforming: (i) the landscape in which mothers with primary‐school‐aged children make decisions about how to secure a living and care for their children and (ii) what role they think the state should play in facilitating the provision of childcare to support working parenthood. The paper makes two innovative contributions to knowledge. First, it pinpoints strongly class‐differentiated changes in women's reconciliation of paid employment and caring work in contemporary Britain. The academically dominant one‐and‐a‐half breadwinner model is commonly reflected in middle‐class lifestyles, but has little analytical purchase for working‐class women in this study, as they are more likely to mother full‐time in state‐dependent family households. It is vital that we understand these changes in women's labour‐force participation and their implications for class inequality. Second, the paper concentrates academic attention on the sweeping expansion in the state's role in social reproduction through the provision of wraparound childcare (breakfast and afterschool clubs) in primary schools. Novel insights into parental attitudes reveal that middle‐class women demand choice and feel entitled to state‐sponsored childcare provision which underpins the feminisation of the labour force. Working‐class women value provision for others, but fear being coerced into using childcare instead of mothering in the home. Their responses reveal competing understandings of what counts as equality for women, and stark variations in different women's abilities to achieve this.

Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain: A Quantitative Overview

ABSTRACTThis article presents a quantitative assessment of Catholic disaffiliates—those who were brought up Catholic, but who now no longer identify as such—in contemporary Britain. Using British Social Attitudes data, it seeks to: 1) gauge the overall extent of Catholic disaffiliation and its significance relative to the retention/disaffiliation rates of other major Christian groupings; 2) identify patterns in the changing rates of Catholic retention/disaffiliation over the course of the twentieth century; 3) analyse Catholic disaffiliation in terms of key demographic variables (sex and age); 4) compare the current religious beliefs and prayer practices of different groups of Catholic disaffiliates and retainees. As will be argued throughout this article, in-depth study of Catholic disaffiliates sheds important new light on the sociology of Catholicism in modern Britain. Furthermore, it contributes to ongoing discussions of secularisation, precisely as a case study of change over time within a significant religious minority.

Matthew Anderson, A History of Fair Trade in Contemporary Britain. From Civil Society Campaigns to Corporate Compliance

Matthew Anderson, A History of Fair Trade in Contemporary Britain. From Civil Society Campaigns to Corporate Compliance

Adapting from the Internet: Cultural adaptation in Teh Internet is Serious Business

Abstract This article argues that the Internet today constitutes a social and cultural space, holding within it a culture distinct from that of the physical world with its own customs, morals and beliefs. Taking as a case study Tim Price’s Teh [sic] Internet is Serious Business, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2014, it will use Patrice Pavis’ ‘hour-glass’ model to carry out a textual analysis of this adaptation of the factual story of the formation of online activist groups Anonymous and LulzSec for presentation within the theatrical form of contemporary Britain, a narrative which has become one of Internet Culture’s major cultural myths.

Brutalist Architecture: An Autoethnographic Examination of Structure and Corporeality

Brutalist Architecture: An Autoethnographic Examination of Structure and Corporeality

What is Austerity?

This is the edited transcript of a conversation between Rebecca Bramall, editor of this special issue, Jeremy Gilbert, editor of New Formations, and James Meadway, who at the time was chief economist of the New Economics Foundation and is currently advising shadow chancellor of the exchequer John McDonnell in a consultancy capacity. The discussion touches on the different meanings of ‘austerity’ in contemporary political discourse, the history of neoliberal austerity programmes and their political and social effects, the uneven implementation of austerity in the UK, and various other issues in understanding the cultural, social and economic politics of ‘austerity’ in contemporary Britain, today and in the future.

Motherhood as Constructed by Us: Muslim Women’s Negotiations from a Space That Is Their Own

According to foundational Islamic texts, motherhood is a key aspect of women’s diverse social roles; however some Muslim religious commentaries position motherhood as the only aspect of women’s contributions to society. The everyday mothering experiences of Muslim women remain absent from these discussions. This anthropological article will examine Muslim women’s narratives of motherhood and mothering in contemporary Britain. In my research, Muslim women in Britain chose motherhood, firstly, as one of the many fronts on which to challenge patriarchy that is evident in some Muslim texts and to thus ‘reclaim their faith’ as articulated in foundational Islamic texts. Secondly, in their mothering experiences, Muslim women found a space of commonality that they shared with other women – motherhood was something these Muslim women believed they shared with their ‘sisters’ who were from backgrounds different to their own. Within their diverse and multifaceted struggles, Muslim women thus identified a space which they share with other women.

Vertical and horizontal approaches to the making of racial statistics in Britain

ABSTRACTThe release of data from the 2011 census fuelled a media storm over Britain's ethnic and immigrant composition, while at the same time a much less visible series of public debates developed over the scope, organization and purpose of government information-gathering centred on how the existing census could be replaced with ‘Big data’. It is therefore particularly timely to explore the political choices, ontological shifts and statistical challenges shaping the array of enumeration projects that have developed in contemporary Britain to identify, classify, and count immigrants and their descendants. This article analyses the relationships between holistic (horizontal) and single-purpose (vertical) approaches to racial statistics, and how these were affected by the standardizations of classification in 1962 and 1991. A range of state archives and contemporary accounts are used to examine the material practices and organizational tensions that fuelled the divergence, transfer and interaction of these attempts at racial legibility.

Response: Not So Fast: A Comment on Atkinson and Deeming's ‘Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain: The Social Space, the Space of Food and their Homology’

In a recent paper in The Sociological Review, Atkinson and Deeming argue that tastes in food are homologous to the social space, exactly as it was in Bourdieu's Distinction. This would involve differences in food tastes not only along the class hierarchy, but also a clear-cut divide by the relative weight of cultural and economic capital. However, Atkinson and Deeming base their claims on insufficient data analysis: They misinterpret their own correspondence analysis and the additional tables, which they in turn fail to subject to even the most basic statistical analysis. We show that the results they present are actually at odds with their own interpretations and main conclusions. It is not just that Atkinson and Deeming's arguments lack support; their proposition about a culinary division between cultural and economic class fractions is contradicted by their own data.

Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain Reheated: A Reply to Flemmen and Hjellbrekke

Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain Reheated: A Reply to Flemmen and Hjellbrekke

Behzti and beyond: Lessons learnt from the work of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti

Developments in the sociopolitical scene have heavily influenced the artistic productions of a new generation, of black and Asian playwrights in Britain. Responses to problematic questions about culture, politics and religion encountered by decentred subjectivities are articulated in their artistic expressions. The aim of this article is to shed light on the challenges placed by a new generation of British Asian women playwrights to their community as a result of changing attitudes to values across generations and to assess the wider implications of the issues brought to the fore in the light of such expression. With her play Behzti (Dishonour) in 2004, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti provided a critique of and from within her community, protesting against the unspoken injustices that remain deeply concealed under the drape of the Sikh community in contemporary Britain. This article explores not only the challenges posited by Bhatti, but also the riotous reception that the play received in its first performance and the debates that ensued, and have continued to simmer in the backburners of the sociopolitical landscape of Britain through the last decade.

Because You're Worth It: Women's daily hair care routines in contemporary Britain

Hair care is a significant international industry – estimated to be worth over £1.44 billion in contemporary Britain (Mintel, 2015). Given this, it is perhaps not so surprising to learn that British women spend on average £40,000 on their hair over a lifetime (Sharkey, 2014). However, despite women’s preoccupation with hair, social science research has paid little attention to this area (McCracken, 1997; Cox, 1999).

From the Editor

From the Editor José Brunner As we know, modern societies have developed a broad spectrum of practices to preserve the memory of their past. They impose a history curriculum on pupils, store documents in archives, build museums and proclaim official days of remembrance. In all these instances they seek not only to provide information about a world that no longer exists, but also to produce narratives of past events and experiences, giving them present meaning and pointing to future ramifications. Literature constitutes a less formal and more imaginary way of resuscitating the past, giving it a fictional new life and narrative meaning. In the first contribution to this issue, Nathan Bracher analyzes a striking phenomenon in the French literary scene: the recent appearance of a number of prominent historical novels and narratives of World War II, which, along with an account of traumatic events, relate their authors’ own quest to reveal the truth about the past and explore its meaning for the present. Describing these novels as written in the “first-person present imperfect,” Bracher refers both to the fact that this past is not yet entirely over or complete and to the narrator’s deep involvement in this history. The following two contributions deal with problems in narrating the First World War in contemporary Britain, which also arise from the involvement of the narrators in the history they wish to relate. Catriona Pennell discusses the ways in which the history of the war is taught in English secondary schools and investigates the consequences of such narratives for British society. Marlene A. Briggs analyzes the transcribed oral history of “Harry” Patch, The Last Fighting Tommy, in order to reveal the psychic and social dimensions of trauma in the testimonies of Great War veterans. She points to the ways in which such oral histories may contradict established versions of the experience of the war and shed light on reconstructions of memory after trauma The analysis also raises broader questions about the reception of the First World War in Britain today. [End Page 1] It may seem, perhaps, that questions relating to narrative entanglements, omissions and emphases are more relevant to literary representations, history teaching and oral accounts of the past than to the collection and storage of testimonies in archives. But Ari Joskowicz’s exploration of the ways in which testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are often provided by Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust is a striking example of how one minority controls a large portion of the public memories of another. Noah Shenker examines how the distinct archival techniques and testimonial methodologies that the USC Shoah Foundation Institute developed for recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors may affect our understanding of other genocides and the fate of their victims, in this case those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He argues that although the transfer of these methodologies to the Cambodian context may obscure the historical and cultural specificities of the Cambodian genocide, they can nonetheless contribute to the documentation of that event. Thus, while the first three contributions to this issue analyze the effects of present personal, political or social entanglements on the way history is narrated, the latter two essays analyze their effects on the techniques and methods deployed to record and store testimonies about the past. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2016 The Trustees of Indiana University

A narrative of cultural occupational performance

This article considers the occupational performance of cultural participation, specifically that of the author’s personal experience of being a “worker writer” and grassroots activist in the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP). The FWWCP was a UK based organisation made up of co-operative publishers, history, literacy and writing workshops which produced narratives and other forms of writing about ordinary people’s experiences of everyday life in contemporary Britain. The author relates these experiences to occupational therapy’s concern with the meaning of occupation, and uses heuristic methods to reflect on the connections between this form of community activism through cultural activity and occupational concepts. The paper explores issues of the representation of social class and political consciousness which have not been visible in the professional discourse on occupation. It concludes that there is a strong case for the exploration of autobiographical and community writing in developing understanding of the cultural basis of occupation.