'Corruption talk’ and the politics of class in 21st century Britain

Hilhorst, Sacha ORCID: 0000-0002-7104-222X, Koch, Insa, Fransham, Mark ORCID: 0000-0002-9284-2517, Reeves, Aaron ORCID: 0000-0001-9114-965X and Savage, Mike ORCID: 0000-0003-4563-9564 (2024) 'Corruption talk’ and the politics of class in 21st century Britain. Sociological Review. ISSN 0038-0261

Text (hilhorst-et-al-2024-corruption-talk-and-the-politics-of-class-in-21st-century-britain) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (326kB)

• Scopus publication

Abstract

Scholars have diagnosed widespread class disidentification among working-class citizens in contemporary Britain despite high and sustained levels of inequality. Everyday narrations in working-class communities, however, reveal deeply classed accounts of politics and society, even if not expressed in the formal idiom of class. Across our field sites, practices of corruption talk were rife and aided citizens in making sense of their experiences of political powerlessness and economic dispossession. Drawing on political ethnographic studies from working-class areas in Oxford, Corby and Mansfield, and buttressed by survey data, we find that corruption talk can act as an informal political ontology. An analysis of international survey data on corruption perceptions and class identification further substantiates our ethnographic findings about the resonance and character of corruption talk. Following the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, we argue that corruption talk reveals the complex and at times contradictory ways in which marginalised citizens define and narrate their relationship to politics and state power under conditions of class fragmentation. These findings highlight, we argue, the importance of paying attention to vernacular discourses and call into question straightforwardly teleological accounts of the decline of class consciousness in the past 50 years.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Sociology International Inequalities Institute
Subjects:	J Political Science H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Date Deposited:	15 Oct 2024 10:36
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2024 00:58
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125768

Actions (login required)

View Item