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Simon J. Charlesworth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ix + 312 pp.
This is study of workers in a Yorkshire city of about 250,000, who have been devastated by the loss of thousands of manufacturing and engineering jobs and cutbacks in social services since the late 1970s. The area has among the highest rates of unemployment and poverty in all of Britain.
The author himself grew up working class in Rotherham, and knew many of those he interviewed personally. Therefore, he is probably justified in claiming that his interviewees trusted him more and gave him more and more accurate information about themselves than they would have with most other researchers. Furthermore, having himself spoken with a Yorkshire accent, Charlesworth has been literally able to translate interviewees' words for his readers. Otherwise, most would not have understood them. He also makes good use of the observations of working class life in Yorkshire by D.H. Lawrence and other non-academics.
Theoretically, the author relies heavily upon the phenomenologies of Heidegger ("Being-in-the-world"), Merleau-Ponty ("the habit-body"), and Pierre Bourdieu (the "class habitus"). Among the many interesting and provocative observations to come from this perspective is that workers have been personally devastated not only by the usual effects of un-, under- and poor-employment, but by feeling uncomfortable bodily in a community almost completely physically as well as socially transformed by recent trends. According to Charlesworth, widespread working class community spirit, let alone political organization as a class, even within the Labour Party, is neither present nor possible. This is not only because workers feel powerless and vulnerable and retreat from the public realm, but, because they "cannot recognize their plight in the discourses supplied by politicians and specialists...Political representation depends...