Neighbourhood rules

In every social field, social action is governed by the habitus. Social order is maintained both by field logic and field rules. This applies to the communities in the social field of the wider SW9 neighbourhood just as it applies to the narrower social field of the gang. In this way, the neighbourhood rules of SW9 act as the backdrop to the social field of the gangs embedded in SW9. Neighbourhood rules act as the predominant social order and the sub-field of the gang retains its own sub-field rules (see Chapter Five). In my metaphor, neighbourhood rules are ‘house rules’ and gang rules are ‘game rules’.

The house rules for SW9 are in many ways typical of those operating in traditional working-class communities in the UK and include a suspicion of the value of education, wariness of the police, self-reliance, and the cultural importance of violence. These broad concepts are understood by all those living and working in the neighbourhood. These meanings and understandings are also determined by locality and local culture and the habitus. They are then passed down through the generations as an unspoken street code (Anderson, 1999) and what Vigil (2002, 2010) calls ‘Street socialization’ (sic). Vigil argues that in deprived neighbourhoods where families are parenting under pressure, primary networks of social control can be loosed leaving young people to be effectively socialised by street peers.

The influence of the habitus

Social rules and thus social action within the field are guided and coordinated by the habitus. Habitus functions as a regenerative repository of previous experiences and social conditions that subjectively frames future actions and decisions, that is, it leads actors to decide what is and is not possible within the social field:

This ‘bounded agency’ (Evans et al, 2001, p 24) means those in the same social field often share the same social trajectory.