Exploring Micro-Sociality through the Lens of ‘Established-Outsider’ Figurational Dynamics in a South Wales Community

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this article revisits The Established and the Outsiders, a largely forgotten and in our view unfairly neglected community study by Elias and Scotson (1965). Drawing from our ethnographic research on an urban community in South Wales, the contemporary significance of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of insider‐outsider relations in bounded, household‐based communities made by the original work is foregrounded. The findings from our research on ‘Cornerville’ confirms many of the empirically based conceptual claims of Elias and Scotson's earlier diagnosis of largely intra‐working class relations, distribution of status honour, and processes of micro‐sociality. The article concludes by drawing out some of the implications of community‐based research for advancing sociological criminology's contribution to the specific analysis of group stigmatization and more broadly of social processes of communal ordering and informal rule‐making and rule‐breaking in contemporary localities.

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