ABSTRACT
The exploration of the working class as a social problem, the concern with the exotic and the deviant is particularly prevalent in the earliest post-war studies. The new sociology of the working class can perhaps be divided into two traditions. The first traditions focused upon 'community studies', upon attempting to understand working-class communities from within. A second and to some extent more powerful tradition began to form around the problem of the affluent society and the place of the worker within it. In a number of studies Jeremy Seabrook has, following Richard Hoggart, expressed a consistent message that the working class has become impoverished amid a world of material wealth. Both portrayals of the pathology of the working class are related to the dynamics of the wider class-divided society, the former in the historically more rigid structural conditions of the immediate post-war period, the latter in the context of a society displaying higher levels of absolute social mobility.
