ABSTRACT
Social life has an obdurate complexity which can be counted upon (fortunately) to badly dent, if not demolish most sociological concepts that are unlucky enough to make contact with it. It would therefore be surprising if there were not, in the studies reported in this symposium, many empirical ‘deviations’ from the typologies of the deferential and proletarian traditionalists set out in my 1966 paper on working-class images of society. Indeed, considering the method by which these types were arrived at (and by now it should be all too clear that this process was by no means as complete or as explicit as it should have been) this result is inevitable. For the way in which the concepts were constructed almost condemns them to being empty boxes to which no empirical instance will approximate. The method was one of conflation (Finer, 1955), that is the assembly of a set of properties defining work and community structures which, together with certain sociological assumptions of a general kind, may be thought to constitute extreme or limiting cases of working-class milieux. The cases were of a limiting kind in the sense that all the relevant properties bearing upon the production of a given mode of social consciousness were assumed to have values which are at a maximum or minimum so that all factors work together cumulatively in one direction to create a certain, and again, limiting image of society. Thus the types of work and community structure represent an imaginable but not necessarily a probable or even possible state of affairs.
