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

Bibliographic Data

ID3544359
AuthorsSean Hilhorst (0000-0002-7104-222X, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author), Sacha Hilhorst, I Koch (0000-0002-5016-1625, University of St.Gallen), Insa Lee Koch (University of St.Gallen), Mark Fransham (0000-0002-9284-2517, University of Oxford), Aaron Reeves (0000-0001-9114-965X, London School of Economics and Political Science), M Savage (0000-0003-4563-9564, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Year2024
Volume73
Issue6
Pages1201-1220
Publication date2024-12-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00380261241291308
OpenAlexW4405140658
LanguageEN
References cited46

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

Class consciousness · Language change · Marxist philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reification (Marxism) · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social and Cultural Dynamics

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access