ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the Beverley evidence to explore continuity and change in working-class involvement in associational life and civil society during the age of affluence. It outlines the range and extent of working-class associational life in Beverley during the three post-war decades in order to demonstrate that working-class community-of-place should not be conceptualised only as neighbourliness, family propinquity and informal sociability. The chapter focuses on civil society and shows how some from the working classes joined groups in order to further a public service ethos. It also focuses on changes in the content of associational life across the period, revealing some shifts in the contours of local class relations. The involvement of working-class people, which included playing in sports clubs, debating in local politics, running and participating in youth associations, has been overlooked by those sociologists and historians who have conceptualised working-class community primarily as neighbourhood-and-kinship sociability.
