Introduction

working-class life in the twentieth-century interregnum

pp. 1-28

in: Tony Blackshaw, Working-class life in northern England, 1945–2010, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Between the start of the 1930s and the end of the so-called long sixties (Marwick, 1998), working-class life in England was fundamentally transformed. It changed so rapidly and radically that it is a reasonable interpretation that by the 1970s the longue durée of modernity had entered a new conjuncture in which the contradictions underpinning social class inequality revealed during the Industrial Revolution moved decisively away from a specific and distinctive producer "heavy" and 'solid", "hardware-focused" shape to take the form of a more uncertain but distinctively consumer "light" and "liquid", 'software-focused" one (Bauman, 2000). If solid modernity was one of the rationalization of objects (and human subjects) through standardization, abstraction and mass production, Bauman asserts, the liquid modernity that superseded it was one of rationalization through cultural difference, reflexive individualization and consumerism.