Introduction

This introductory chapter describes how contemporary social investigators portrayed post-war affluence as deleterious to what they saw as 'traditional' working-class community, and explores how this portrayal has influenced historians. It argues that specific claims about post-war working-class community should be seen in the context of wider theoretical assumptions about the social impacts of modernity, and outlines grounds for resisting narratives of community decline. Modernity is often associated with an intensified pace of change linked to historical processes including rationalisation, globalisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, mass communication, individualisation, economic liberalisation and the rejection of tradition. Theories about the social impacts of modernity have often juxtaposed pre-modern 'community' -natural, sentiment-based, unconscious social bonds, with the more selective, calculated, instrumental affiliation that proliferated as societies became more complex, economies more integrated and networks of interdependency more widely cast. Finally, the chapter reviews the methodological assumptions relating to class, community, oral history and case-study research that underpin the discussions in this book.