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Counting civil society: deconstructing elite participation in the provincial English city, 1900–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2013

NICK HAYES
NICK HAYES*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
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Abstract

With few dissenting voices, the historiography of twentieth-century urban civil society has been relayed through a prism of continuing and escalating elite disengagement. Within a paradigm of declinism, academics, politicians and social commentators contrast a past offering a richness of social commitment against a present characterized by lowering standards in urban governance. Put simply, the right sorts of people were no longer volunteering. Yet the data for such claims is insubstantial, and the applied methodology flawed. What are lacking are detailed empirical studies which offer flexible measures of status across a range of voluntary and political activities, so that we can better understand the social trends of urban volunteering across the first 50 years of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 287 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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