ABSTRACT
For a long while, studies of the nature of the working class in industrial societies were close to the centre of the development of empirical sociology. This includes investigations of the organization of working class communities, for which there is extensive documentation. According to one commentary, such studies form sociology’s ‘single most massive encounter with the located experiences of working class people’ and the major accredited source of qualitative accounts of working class culture (Brook and Finn 1978: 131). Like accounts of rural community, these studies have obvious historical, as well as spatial dimensions, and certain accounts of ‘the ways things were’ (Crow and Allen 1994; Crow 2001) have been constructed more or less exclusively on their basis. Although the classic studies reach back now some fifty years, and the communities they refer to have long gone, the impact they made on sociological awareness is engrained so deeply that they still provide vibrant points of reference.
