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Much has been written on the apparent urban renaissance in UK cities and the new lifestyle arrangements, working time patterns, economic activities and the more general reordering of work and life that appears to accompany it. Certainly, recent decades have witnessed a range of economic, social and cultural changes in the lives of those living and working in cities and surrounding suburbs. Much of the attention in this work has focused on those groups for whom the changes have appeared most profound: the high-income earners returning to live in the city – the gentrifiers – or those who suffer multiple deprivations as a result of economic restructuring. Seemingly absent from many accounts of urban change are those places where, at first glance, the effects of change have been less pronounced: low-income, working class neighbourhoods where most people continue to get by, albeit in the context of a harsher, and less secure political economic context. In light of this apparent silence, this paper draws on interviews from Wythenshawe in South Manchester, to examine how low-income mothers cope, live and labour, in a rapidly changing city, as they perform paid work at the same time as ensuring the social reproduction of the household.

Introduction There is little agreement over what the Onew economyO is: its size, in financialand employment terms; its impact on the work men and women do inside andoutside of the formal labour market; or its geographical implications. And yetdespite this lack of conceptual and empirical clarity the term Onew economyOhas found its way into all manner of publications, from government press releases, white papers and more populist journalistic accounts of contemporaryBritain through to high social theory.At the same time, and in the context of concerns about equal opportunities,the desire to retain highly qualified female employees and more generally tofacilitate and raise female employment rates, interest in flexible working, workÐlife balance, and reconciling work and family life has grown among tradeunions, corporations and government. These issues are related because thegrowing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), as part ofthe emergence of the Onew economyO, appears to be extending the temporal andspatial boundaries of paid work, allowing people to work more flexibly and sopotentially reconcile paid work with other activities, including unpaid caring.And yet, ICTs are also conducive to more intense and longer working hours,with more critical interpretations of the Onew economyO linking it with pre-carious, fragmented and insecure working patterns, all of which could make itmore difficult to effect workÐlife balance policies and realize equal opportuni-ties. Moreover, changes in educational attainment levels, lifestyle choices andfamily formation, together with the changes in working arrangements, have

Political representation of ethnicized and other identities is a complex process, whereby identities are constructed and shaped through the competing claims of different collectivities. In the article I explore this process through a case study of a local authority community development project for Asian women. The analysis demonstrates that institutions are not neutral spaces in which contestations over collectivity are played out, but exert a constitutive impact upon the identities produced. Current theories of fluidity and instability in identities mean that collective identities must be staked strategically and contingently, determinant upon the political strategies appropriate within given institutional contexts.

This paper applies social network analysis to three case study social movement organizations based in the north of England: a local Labour Party branch, an environmental group, and a conservation group. Using a postal survey of members, we chart the extent of ties between members of these three groups, indicating how each group has its own internal social dynamics and characteristics that are related to the nature of the movement organizations themselves. We explore how the network structures interrelate with the socio-demographic structure of the membership of the three organizations, and we show there are important differences in the way that core members of the three organizations are recruited compared to those who are either peripheral or isolated. Our paper is the first to analyse the networks of whole populations of case study organizations in the UK, and can therefore be read as developing the potential of social network analysis for case study research and for understanding social movements. Analytically we argue it is important to distinguish two different types of ways that networks are important. They can be seen as offering resources for mobilization, or they can be seen as providing a means of integrating particular types of individuals into organizations. It is this latter sense that offers a more fundamental role for network analysis, and we argue that it offers an important way of developing insights from resource mobilization theory by relating them to Bourdieu's provocative arguments regarding the exclusiveness of the political field.

Growing numbers of women with children living in western cities are entering the labour market, raising new questions about changes in the allocation of the tasks of social reproduction between household members and others and about the effects of the increasing time women now spend in the workplace. As Manuel Castells noted over 25 years ago, women’s unpaid labour has long been essential, not only in the domestic arena, but also in patching together facilities separated in space. The spatial layout of cities, with its specialized and segregated land-uses, only works, he argued, if women’s unpaid labour is available to connect urban locations. But many women now spend many more hours in the labour market, replacing their former domestic labour with a range of commodified goods and services as well as by help from a range of related or unrelated others, sometimes but not always remunerated and/or by state-provided or supported services. This article examines the consequences of the growth of women’s employment in Britain and the concomitant decline of the old breadwinner family, the growth of workfare policies that assume all individuals are available for waged work and the rise of commodified caring. The arguments are illustrated by empirical examples from interviews undertaken with middle-class mothers in waged work in London and Manchester in the UK.

This Note uses the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) to consider the changing volume and distribution of voluntary association membership (and hence social capital) in Great Britain. We aim to supplement Hall's study of trends in social capital published in this Journal with more recent and longitudinal data. This allows us to show that whilst the volume of social capital is not declining, it is becoming increasingly class specific, and that its relative aggregate stability masks considerable turnover at the individual level. These findings are significant for current debates on social capital.