Introduction: key themes

This chapter explores two major themes from a structure–agency perspective. First, it focuses centrally on how access to the labour market has been influenced by divisions and identities, through the case study of Coventry, a city that has undergone a rapid change from a manufacturing to a post-industrial city in the past two decades. Initially, the remit of the Warwick University SEQUAL research was to focus on class and gender, but given the multicultural character of the city, we added ‘race’ and ethnicity, and, in practice, could not ignore the messages in relation to age, health and disability that were coming through our research. We retain, however, a focus on class relations as a thread running through other divisions because they are now in danger of being overlooked. Neither European policy discourses nor anti-discrimination and human rights legislation see class discrimination as something to prohibit, issues that will be picked up again later, in Chapter Eleven. We have utilised a holistic approach through biographical methods that show how social divisions play out in the lives of real people, hopefully enabling us to follow C. Wright Mills (1959) and link ‘biography and history’. While the structured shift to post-industrial capitalism is largley beyond local people's control, human agency can shape it in one of two ways. Individuals and collectivities can seek to challenge or alter the structures in which they operate or else they can seek to influence outcomes within them.

This connects to our second major theme, the transformative potential of community-based initiatives (CBIs) that have sought to pick up the human pieces following the periodic economic shocks in the city's history. We argue that on the whole Coventry's responses have recently been accommodative, in a period when Labour and the trade union movements experienced significant defeats under Thatcherism. This has, at national level, shaped the politics of New Labour, and is also reflected in the way that local initiatives work within the dominant employability discourse and welfare-to-work approach. However, this does prevent CBIs from making a real difference in enabling people to improve their situation in the labour market and lives in general.