ABSTRACT
CHAPTER NINE THE ROLE OF LABOUR AND HOUSING MARKETS IN THE PRODUCTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL VARIATIONS IN SOCIAL STRATIFICATION CHRIS HAMNETT AND BILL RANDOLPH
Introduction In his 'The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844', Engels sketched his now well known description of the spatial distribution of social classes in Manchester. In doing so he recognised that social stratification necessarily has a spatial dimension. Exactly 130 years later, Giddens (1973, p. 199) pointed to the fact that:
In the past development of the working class, in the Western societies at least, the influence of neighbourhood and regional segregation has been fundamental to class structuration and class consciousness. Such segregation has taken various forms. Thus, in all the advanced societies, there are regional variations in the distribution of workers in manual labour, particularly in manu facture ... But there have also been, his torically, important divisions between com munities. It is with some truth that the archetypical 'proletarian worker', a member of a clearly distinct 'working class culture', and strongly class conscious, has been associ ated with industries, such as coal mining, which have grouped workers together in isolated villages or towns. On the face of it, this might appear to indi
cate a continuing awareness of the role played by spatial variations in social stratification. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there has been a long tradition of 'Community Studies' within sociology (Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, 1957; Frankenberg, 1966), the study
of social stratification and the study of spatial variations in social composition tend to have proceeded in splendid isolation. Whereas most urban sociology and urban social geography until recently, tended to take the structures of social stratification as a given and ignore them; soci ological grand theory has tended to examine social structures and processes as though they existed on the head of the proverbial pin. As Beshers (1962, p. 41) perceptively pointed out over twenty years ago:
No locale nexus for social relationships is provided by (the) macroscopic view of strati fication ...( It ) ignores the variations in stratification within society - variations among regions, among subcultures, between rural and urban areas, and even within social strata. Until relatively recently, the spatial di
mension of social processes has been a ’lost world' to many social scientists. Society and space have been analysed as though they existed independently of one another. But, as Castells (1977), Duncan (1979), Santos (1977) and Sayer (1979) have all pointed out, society is necessarily spatially struc tured and all social structures and processes possess an inescapable spatial dimension. As a result of this theoretical and analytical lacunea a number of recent authors (Giddens, 1979; Urry, 1981) have pointed in general terms to the need to reincorporate the spatial dimension into the study of social processes. As Urry (1 9 8 1) has argued: "sociology (apart from its urban specialism) has tended to pay insufficient attention to the fact that social practices are spatially patterned, and that these patterns substantially affect these very social practices" (p. 456).
