ABSTRACT
My own qualitative research on popular discourses of citizenship has illustrated that although people in Britain are seldom able to engage coherently with the concept of 'citizenship' they usually can and do convey what they understand with regard to rights and responsibilities and the nature of their and other people's relationships as individuals to society. In their attitudes to redistributive state welfare, people tend to exhibit an ostensibly contradictory mixture of guarded altruism and pragmatic instrumentalism (cf. Rentoul 1989; Brook et al. 1996; Dwyer 2000). The participants in our study were, by and large, predisposed to ideological principles that would underpin more contractarian or individualistic self-sufficiency, but they none the less valued key elements of the solidaristic or collectivist principles on which the welfare state was originally founded. Judged in terms of their explicit opinions, our sample was, on balance, more individualist than collectivist in outlook. The way they answered questions conformed, by and large, to the assumptions about popular opinion upon which New Labour policy has been constructed. However, close examination of the participants' underlying discourses revealed a subtler reality. Our findings suggested that people are capable of both selfishness and altruism, but that what most aspire to above all is ontological security. By implication, their preference was for a form of citizenship that protects against poverty before it secures the opportunity to pursue wealth. There remains a fundamental tension within popular discourse between contractarian and solidaristic expectations of citizenship.
