ABSTRACT
The empirical setting of the Affluent Worker Study, the Bedfordshire town of Luton, was, as we have seen, central to the project’s theoretical rationale. Lockwood and his colleagues devote almost a whole chapter of their principal monograph to justifying this choice of location. Luton’s industrial, demographic, social and geographical characteristics are said to make it an ideal site for testing the thesis of working-class embourgeoisement. However, it is one of the ironies of the project that the published results convey remarkably little sense of the town itself, or of the flavour of everyday life in the local community and factories. The authors’ survey technique tends to decontextualize the research. The setting is Luton—but the reader could scarcely guess this from the analysis of the interview materials. The text I will look at in this chapter, on the other hand, exhibits a pronounced sense of time and place. John Rex and Robert Moore’s Race, Community, and Conflict is a study of Birmingham in the early 1960s. The specific features of this particular urban setting constantly intrude into their sociological analysis; locality is crucial.
