Political action and social identity : class, locality and ideology / edited by Gareth Rees ...[et.al]

The pace of political change in Britain (and, indeed, in many other Western countries) has never been quicker. During recent years, the emergence of new forms of political expression have transformed the scope and organisation of British political life. The growth of nationalist movements in Scotland and Wales; the rise of the SDP; the emergence of a powerful 'New Right'; the development of a new politics of environmentalism, peace and gender relations; the crisis of the Labour Party: these are all of major significance to an understanding of contemporary British society. And yet, they are not easily encompassed within the terms of conventional sociological analysis; they appear to question many of the established notions about the determinants of political behaviour and its consequences.

Accordingly, the essays collected together here attempt to go beyond these conventional analyses of political behaviour. They present the results of original, empirical research which both re-evaluates some of the more traditional forms of political action and addresses some of the newly emerging issues in politics in Britain and elsewhere. They share a common theoretical emphasis on the significance of tracing out the interconnections between political consciousness and action and the social relations which are shaped by people's experience of work in their local communities and wider ideological currents.

The issues addressed include: the relationships between local patterns of work and political traditions; the determinants of nationalist political movements in peripheral parts of industrialised countries; the local influences upon the formulation of state policies; the social bases and consequences of the New Right' in Britain; and the politics of European environmentalism in the context of uneven development on a world scale.