Affluent Workers Revisited

Fiona Devine's important new book offers a qualitative re-evaluation of the Affluent Worker study conducted by John Goldthorpe and his colleagues in Luton nearly thirty years ago. Drawing on her intensive interviews with Vauxhall workers and their wives, Devine examines the motivations, processes and consequences of geographical mobility and explores working-class lifestyles and the extent to which they may be described as privatised or communal. Contrary to the predictions of the older study, Devine's findings suggest that working-class lifestyles are neither exclusively family-centred, nor entirely home-centred. No evidence of a singular instrumentalism appears; instead aspirations for material well being form a crucial component of a collective working-class identity, with criticism of the trade unions and the Labour Party being directed at their failure to change the distribution of resources in Britain.