Imagined communities? Contextualizing claims about the White working class

Abstract

The authors of ‘Community, Virtue and the White British Poor’ argue that poor White communities can still organize themselves to protect their interests and, therefore, produce ‘virtue’ – good and admirable qualities among their members. This response suggests that the argument is poorly founded both in terms of its understanding of the White British poor and in terms of its conceptualization of socio-spatial processes in poor communities and especially in the misleading conclusions drawn from examples of communities provided.