ABSTRACT
This book arises out of three years’ sociological fieldwork conducted in the two North of England cities of Manchester and Sheffield in the early 1990s. The research enquiry was motivated primarily by an interest in investigating how different groups of people in these two cities (different ‘publics’) appeared to be making sense, in the broadest possible, commonsense, philosophical and practical terms, of the rapid changes taking place in those cities-most notably, in the sudden deep changes in the local labour market (the ‘demise of mass manufacturing’) but also in respect of redevelopment, especially in the core of those cities (‘regeneration’ and ‘(post)- modernisation’). It was also very much concerned with what we can refer to as ‘the public sense of well-being’ in these two cities. We shall return to all these issues later in this introductory chapter.
