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Recent commentary on working-class life has emphasised its 'privatisation', the restriction of networks of everyday relationships to the immediate family and its home. This marks a distinctive shift from earlier characterisations in terms of 'communal sociability' in which the extended family and a web of neighbours and friends are prominent. This paper presents evidence from a study of people living in a post-war suburb of Coventry which points to a considerable degree of communal sociability in an (apparently unlikely) locality. Privatisation is wholly inapt as a description of the contact with relatives, sources of help, neighbourliness, membership of organisations and recreation reported by respondents. The empirical basis of claims put forward by advocates of the privatisation thesis is examined and an alternative approach to the issue is sketched.
Ian Procter (Fri,) studied this question.
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