Making Sense of Wales: A Sociological Perspective

Introduction

The opening of a new millennium seems to have thrown British intellectuals into a turmoil of introspection. Hardly a day passes without the publication of some new book, television series or newspaper article in which the nature and direction of British society, the state of the United Kingdom, and what it means to be British or to belong to one of the constituent nationalities of these islands, is put under scrutiny (Paxman, 1999; Marr, 1999; Nairn, 2000; Chen and Wright, 2000). These discussions mingle millennial angst with anxieties about place in the world, and more local concerns to do with the impact of political devolution, and European integration. Radically different views, each capable of gathering supportive evidence, are put forward: for example, on the one hand Britain is viewed as a tolerant society, open to new sentiments of multiculturalism, prepared to cede sovereignty to gain the rewards of closer harmony with Europe, and eager to embrace the gifts of globalization – a standpoint endorsed strongly by Prime Minister Tony Blair. On the other hand, in the light of events surrounding the murders of Stephen Lawrence and other victims of racial violence, and its responses to migration pressures, Britain is castigated for being riddled with institutional racism, and latent xenophobia. As a state, its boundaries seem to be becoming simultaneously more porous – vulnerable, if alarmists are to be believed, to floods of refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and tourists – and more compartmentalized, as formerly united nations prepare to go their separate ways. Either possibility throws existing ideas about Britishness and collective identity into disarray. These diverse accounts are echoed and built upon by politicians and others, who take from them competing conclusions about how policy should be shaped to deal with the problems they pose. Much of this excitement may be mere froth, but still it makes this a propitious time to consider the situation as it appears from within one of the fissile parts of the ‘kingdom’, Wales.

Like Britain as a whole, during recent decades Wales has undergone a series of profound, and often traumatic, alterations, leading to it being described as ‘a laboratory of social change’ (Lovering, 1996: 16). Economically, socially, culturally and politically, it is barely recognizable as the same place it was before; and this has precipitated a considerable industry of stocktaking analysis, as well as numerous attempts to project new and exciting directions for its future development. During its first few months of existence, the new National Assembly for Wales produced a flood of consultation papers, policy documents, and programme proposals intended to stake out a specifically Welsh conception of the style and aims of government, and of the problems which need to be tackled. Among those labouring hard to make sense of these changes has been a small number of social scientists and policy analysts who have made use of a range of sociological frameworks and approaches to try to bring order to the confusion. As well as reacting to the flow of events occurring around them, the interpretations they have proposed have also reflected inevitably some of the developments taking place within sociology as a discipline, its shifting priorities and intellectual frameworks. Often they have felt themselves to be marginalized by a concern with questions which others have tended to regard as peripheral to the main business; and yet what has happened in Wales could be said to be highly instructive and illuminating about some general patterns and influences of much wider interest. In many ways, indeed, the questions which have been pursued among social scientists with an interest in Wales have pre-empted some of the developments and topics that are now at the forefront of sociological debate.

The everyday themes of social life in Wales can be shown to be intimately related to a far more fundamental set of social processes and changes taking place across western society. There can be little doubt that these have necessitated a rethinking of some of sociology’s basic tenets. Classically, western sociology has organized itself around an analysis of ‘societies’, conceptualized as bounded units with relatively well defined and internally coherent structures. Whether explicitly, or more often implicitly, it has been assumed that these principal units for investigation correspond more or less closely with the framework of independent states, and that such societies normally have a publicly recognized national existence. Such a convergence of society, state, nation and people has been so readily presumed (Albrow, 1999) that it has come to appear natural, and very often this has meant that, in the absence of any serious reflection upon it, dominant common-sense conceptions have been allowed to take the place of more carefully thought out analytical models. Sociologists have been comfortable working with ‘ready-made’ entities like the USA, France, Japan and so on, treating them as convenient containers for the relationships and structures which they seek to explore. A particular preoccupation has been with the hierarchical arrangements of social classes and inequalities within such units. Relationships between states, and across international borders have been handed over to experts in international relations, while subdisciplines of regional studies and human geography have dealt with issues relating to subnational social formations.

All this has changed quite markedly. Many of these assumptions have dissolved in the face of increasing globalization, and the recognition of the complexity and multiplicity of contemporary social distinctions, especially those of gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity. There has also been an important ‘turn’ towards a greater emphasis upon the cultural processes through which members of societies create a sense of order and construct their own social arrangements. Consequently, at every level, the sociological map is being redrawn (Albrow, 1999; Urry, 2000). We have seen the emergence of new ways of thinking about society, and societies, which leave the old theoretical agenda behind. They include accounts of society as an ongoing process of ‘structuration’ (Giddens, 1984); as a set of flows and fluidities (Lash and Urry, 1994); as a constellation of networks and groupings (Castells, 1996). These shifts in the conceptual universe are matched by the frequency with which old social forms are claimed to have been transcended by the appearance of new, or ‘post’, forms: modernity by postmodernity, industrialism by post-industrialism, nationalism by postnationalism, and so on. With these transformations, attention moves towards new issues: identity, belonging, ‘difference’, locality, territoriality, hybridity, ‘complexity’.

However these are themes which are familiar to anyone who has worked upon or in ‘marginal’ contexts and ‘esoteric’ locations and tried to understand their social worlds. The ‘old’ topics resonate with the viewpoint of the centre: the classic sociologists, such as Durkheim, Weber and Parsons all spoke (although not necessarily uncritically) on behalf of the dominant national-state-society and its social order. To varying degrees, they blanked out the concerns, issues and experiences of the margins. More recently, partly related to the greater mobility and cross-national fertilization of the discipline, sociologists have been more eager to voice the views of the mobile, the residual and those who are in some way ‘different’ or outside the norm. Sometimes they have taken their inspiration from earlier figures who themselves held a more marginal social position, such as Marx and Simmel. It should be no surprise that sociologists, anthropologists and others with an interest in (so-called) peripheral places and distinctive cultures should be among those pushing for the reformulation or critique of the old ideas. In his work on Scotland, and nationalism, for example, McCrone has to consider the questions, what do we mean by a ‘society’, and is Scotland one? While Scotland plainly exists at a common-sense level, McCrone concedes that its status as ‘a meaningful sociological category is highly problematic’ (1992: 16) – is it a country, a place, a nation, a set of ‘overlapping networks of social interaction’, or what? Precisely because these questions arise, however, in a way which cannot be ignored or sidelined, McCrone can assert that ‘Scotland stands at the forefront of sociological concerns in the late twentieth century. Rather than being an awkward, ill-fitting case, it is at the centre of the discipline’s post-modern dilemma’ (1992: 1).

Ignoring the rhetorical hubris which goes along with the attempt to grab people’s attention for a neglected field, McCrone is surely justified in his claim that any serious examination of the Scottish case opens up enormous rifts in the conventional model of society as a self-contained and bounded totality, coterminous with the nation-state; in any case, he would contend that this conception is losing its raison d’être in the contemporary world. Exactly the same questions arise about Wales, as indeed they would about any other ‘society’ once we begin to think properly about its nature. It is a fact, for example, that virtually all existing nation-states have within them groups of people who deviate in quite radical ways, culturally, ethnically, linguistically or on some other vital criterion, from the supposed ‘national’ norm; few ‘societies’ are composed of anything like homogeneous memberships. Just as people in outlying parts of Britain will be continually irritated by metropolitan broadcasters’ assumptions that everyone has the same weather, so they will be reminded again and again that what seems natural and uncomplicated in social life elsewhere is strange or irrelevant to their own immediate experience and concerns. It is one of the pre-eminent tasks of social science to document and explain such differences.

So far as Wales is concerned, there is no shortage of commentators of various kinds prepared to rise to this challenge. But until recently, there was not enough, or enough sufficiently integrated work, upon these issues to warrant discussion as a distinctive contribution to social scientific understanding. One reason for this, it has been suggested, is because ‘to focus upon the analysis of Welsh issues and problems has been to run the risk of accusations of parochialism from the wider British social science community’ (Day and Rees, 1987: 1) among whom the theorization of ‘things Welsh’ has not been highly rewarded (Rees and Rees, 1980b: 31). However, it may be that the developments in sociological perspective just described have moderated the tendency to denigrate a concern with the ‘local’ and specific in favour of the general and abstract. Certainly there have been many who have argued that contemporary social developments compel us to pay much closer attention to questions of differentiation, diversity and particularity, and this in turn may have encouraged sociologists to be a little more self-critical with regard to their own social, geographical and national attachments.

Meanwhile, the pace of change in Wales, together with the delayed maturation of the social sciences in Welsh institutions of higher education, has served to stimulate a greater weight of attention from researchers, located both within and outside Wales, and this has encouraged some definite progress. An earlier contribution to the sociology of Wales lamented the ‘poverty of knowledge’ which afflicted analysis at that time: surprisingly little was known about the structure and composition of Welsh society (Rees and Rees, 1980b: 32) and there were large and important topics which were virtually unexplored. Hopefully, twenty years or so later, we are now better placed to make sense of Wales and its situation. It is true that sociologists with an interest in Wales remain thin on the ground, and even those who are interested also have other matters to which to attend. The sociology of Wales as such therefore lacks critical mass. It certainly does not bear comparison with the institutional strength and coherence achieved by Welsh history. Nevertheless, there has been sufficient impetus to enable the emergence of a reasonably coherent body of knowledge, which provides a more critically informed appreciation of conditions and developments in Welsh society.

Academically, there have been two especially important moments facilitating this. The stream of work in community studies which emanated from the Geography department of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth during the 1940s and 1950s generated a distinguished intellectual lineage with significant implications for the early development of British sociology (Day, 1998a), which continues to provide an essential point of reference for some current concerns. The activity of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Wales Study Group between 1978 and 1985 provided an invaluable forum within which a new generation of researchers were able to cut their teeth on questions about Wales, and formulate what amounted to a new research agenda (Day, 1979). Neither of these could be said to adhere to a narrow professional or disciplinary definition of sociology, and indeed this openness around disciplinary frontiers has been one of the strengths of the work that has ensued, and one on which the discussion that follows will trade. More latterly, the journal Contemporary Wales has played its part, providing a setting in which work by economists, geographers, political scientists, sociolinguists and others could be brought together to stimulate debate and ideas. One of the hopes expressed at its launch in 1987 was that the accumulation of knowledge and research would allow understanding to move beyond the level of stereotypes and images to get closer to the realities of the sea change taking place in Welsh economic and social structure. Social research and analysis, it was felt, should help temper some of the wilder excesses of prevailing selective and simplified accounts (Day and Rees, 1987). From the point of view of the development of a sociology of Wales, there has been a long enough period of exploration and discussion by now to merit an examination as to how far and in what ways this has been achieved. Having had the privilege and pleasure of participating in some of these developments, it is my aim in the chapters which follow to provide an overview and assessment of some of the main ways in which the social science community has dealt with the changing nature of contemporary Wales and Welsh society. Even with regard to the contribution of the social sciences, it does not purport to be an exhaustive account. There are many specific areas of work about which it has little or nothing to say – these include the nature and role of the family in Wales, relationships of age and generation, religion, education and popular culture. Either these are areas with which I am personally less familiar, and/or in which there is a less substantial body of sociological work to consider. A recent edited collection (Dunkerley and Thompson, 1999) provides a useful indication of the current state of sociological knowledge, and shows that there are still some significant gaps to be filled. Of course, there are also other ways of looking at Wales. Reference has been made already to the particularly strong contribution made by historians of modern Wales, and there are also important approaches from the perspective of literature and poetry (Humphreys, 1983; G. Jones, 1968; Curtis, 1988) which afford a different slant on questions of language, culture, identity and society. However, in addressing the main themes and strengths of actual sociological work on Wales, the discussion which follows may help identify some of the remaining areas of weakness and ignorance in our understanding of the issues facing Wales today.

1

Visions of Wales

In 1981 the annual conference of the British Sociological Association (BSA) was held at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. Around 300 members of the sociological profession met to discuss the topic of inequality. The conference organizers were taken aback somewhat when certain delegates asked if they could be given a tour of the local collieries. The nearest coal mines to Aberystwyth were some 80 miles away, a considerable journey by country roads, and would not normally have been thought part of the itinerary for any visitor to the locality. Despite their expertise in British society, and critical engagement with information and ideas about it, these visitors were responding to an image of Wales in which the mental landscape was dominated by winding gear, the blackened faces of miners and doubtless some associated scenery of rugby football and male voice choirs. None of these were at all significant in the daily life of most of the people who lived in this small Welsh rural seaside town; whereas to the sociologically alert, knowledge of some other aspects of life in Aberystwyth could have been highly informative.

For example, back in 1969, Aberystwyth had played host to the then Duke of Cornwall, who was learning the Welsh language at the university prior to his investiture as the Prince of Wales. The everyday use of Welsh was very much a feature of the town, and one which might be thought to be of interest to these social observers, though in fact most seemed to be unaware of its existence. Charles’s induction into the Welsh language was a way of trying to make him more ‘Welsh’, and so more acceptable to the people of Wales. However, the presence of a member of the British Royal Family in Aberystwyth had aroused intensely contradictory feelings among locals, angering nationalists but giving royalists something in which to delight. Doubtless both factions included some of those whose disapproval just a few years earlier had helped blacken the reputation of a Principal of the University College, Goronwy Rees, whose readiness to offer undergraduates sherry on a Sunday morning had affronted the lingering remnants of Nonconformist sabbatarianism. Rees got his own back by describing the town, with its twenty-two chapels, as a ‘sluggish backwater’ isolated from the mainstream of contemporary life; he depicted the University College as beset with difficulties arising from primitive and atavistic ‘Welsh tribal feeling’ (Rees, 1972: 248). Aberystwyth was still throwing up interesting questions about its social nature some years after the BSA conference, when the visit of the Queen to open an extension to the National Library of Wales occasioned a massive police presence, and the threat of student demonstrations forced the abandonment of plans for a celebratory lunch on campus.

Already we have the threads of a number of issues to do with Wales and Welshness, and what is special about it, taken from this particular local context. Aberystwyth is a thoroughly Welsh place, and contains clues to much that makes Wales distinctive; but it is not identical with every other Welsh place, nor can we learn all there is to know about contemporary Wales from its limited vantage point. In fact, a well-known Welsh political commentator who studied there some forty years ago remarked recently that in Aberystwyth, which seemed to him little changed, perhaps it was always 1959. So both time and place seem to be relevant considerations when deciding what lessons can be taken from this particular example.

The sociological question posed by these opening remarks is a familiar, but important one: how are we to move between the sorts of generality and theoretical proposition that lie at the core of sociology as a discipline, and the concrete specificity of a given instance, which in the end is what we might want to understand? How can we draw general conclusions without losing sight of the particular and unique? This is what I mean by the problem of ‘making sense’. The same question arises at a broader level of generalization when one thinks about Wales, as an entity, and what sociology can usefully say about it, or learn from it. Wales (like Aberystwyth) is a specific place, and signifies a very particular social formation. What kind of reality does it represent for the sociologist, and how is it usefully to be compared and contrasted with other such entities? What indeed is the appropriate sort of comparison to make? In the case of Wales, the answer is complicated because sometimes it is treated as a region, at others as a nation, and sometimes as part of a strange amalgam called ‘England-and Wales’. The points of reference which are used to bring out its particular characteristics vary widely, and change over time. There are times when, in the course of examination, its very existence seems to be in question, and frequently there is extreme puzzlement and dissension about its nature and trajectory. Book such as When was Wales? (Williams, 1985), the curiously titled Wales! Wales? (Smith, 1984) and Wales: The Imagined Nation (Curtis, 1986) convey something of this puzzlement. In fact, it has become almost obligatory in recent years to note how variously Wales is imagined, represented and packaged, and to acknowledge the confusion that exists about which of these accounts, if any, is closest to reality.

These questions are not peculiar to Wales, by any means, and yet they arise in a pressing way for anyone who wishes to understand it, presenting a challenge which until recently was not felt universally for all such particular societies. Many wide-ranging discussions of themes and topics in sociology such as class, race, gender, industrial structure and so on, have been produced, drawing exclusively upon information and relationships which refer to Britain, or even to England, without anyone finding this remarkable. It is as if the Englishness, or Britishness, of the example can be allowed simply to fade into the background, as an irrelevancy, a merely contingent feature, without in any way contaminating what is being learned. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, entire theories of affluence and the remaking of the working class were built upon the narrow base of a sample survey of workers in four Luton factories; Luton was treated as ‘prototypical’ of British experience (Goldthorpe et al., 1969) and British experience was regarded as self-evidently instructive for more or less anyone with an interest in social change. However, when a group of sociologists chose to turn the spotlight onto Wales, in the context of the BSA Sociology of Wales Group, they were faced immediately with the objection that there could not possibly be anything interesting or significant enough about Wales to warrant such attention – you might as well, said one critic, do the sociology of Norfolk!

Yet, why not? Unless they are to be understood as purely geographical expressions, places on the map, as indeed Wales was once notoriously described, both Norfolk and Wales seem to signify much more to people than this dismissive suggestion would warrant: in their different ways, they enter into people’s understanding of the world they inhabit, as having their own unique properties, and as representing various quite complex phenomena, with a historical presence and ongoing existence which makes them, in a variety of respects, real and effective forces in their lives. They are, Durkheimians might conclude, social facts, external and constraining. Arguably Wales is just as much a part of the ‘real’ world as Britain, or Europe, or indeed, Luton and Norfolk: so why should it be any less worthy of study? Need a special case be made for its consideration? The same question is raised by the editors of a recent volume about regional and local planning, when they draw attention to the over-reliance among British planners on evidence and examples from England, and the failure to appreciate developments in Wales and Scotland ‘as Scottish or Welsh phenomena, rooted in their national context’ (Macdonald and Thomas, 1997: 1). Generalizations are drawn from English experience which become misleading when extended beyond England’s boundaries, even if they are valid within them.

This implies that there is indeed something distinctive about Welsh planning, or at least planning in Wales, because it can be understood fully only from within the particular setting of a Welsh ‘nation’. Certainly once one moves from planning to the world of social policy and administration, Wales figures quite prolifically in the literature, legislation and ruminations of decision-makers, so that it would seem almost laughably absurd to question its existence or importance – it is simply there, manifest, for all to see, in the dense body of administrative acts, organizations and structures. There are whole libraries of material relating to Wales; and by now there is also a multiplicity of Welsh websites providing a different sort of confirmation of its existence. The ‘real’ Wales has its ‘virtual’ presence in cyberspace, as well as being represented in the thoughts and imaginations of social observers. If anything, the volume of discussion about Wales, and the range of forms which register its existence, has been increasing – because through the fact of devolution, Wales has assumed a new political as well as social significance, and gained new foci of attention. A salient example is the decision of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to commission a Welsh extension to its Household Panel Study from 1999 onwards in order to improve the quality of its dedicated information about Wales. This is a direct expression of the view that greater independence in decision-making needs to be backed up by more effective research and data collection.

Not everyone would agree with this conclusion. According to one deliberately provocative comment, ‘most of the Welsh never talk about Wales. For most of us, Wales is a team and a nice place from which to get a letter. It exists for the purpose of sport and sentiment’ (T. Williams, 1996). In its denial of any major significance to the issue, this is a minority view and, paradoxically of course, itself forms part of the very attempt to interpret and make sense of what Wales is all about with which we are concerned. Apart from anything else, it immediately poses some pertinent questions – who is this ‘us’ which is being referred to, and how accurate are the writer’s assumptions about ‘our’ views? While it is true that, for much of the time, most people wherever they are do not reflect consciously upon the nature of the society to which they belong, but simply go about the business of daily life, nevertheless occasions arise on which they do have to give thought to such matters. Arguably, such occasions have grown more frequent in recent years. Contrary to the view expressed, there are others who might riposte that, far from never talking about Wales, there are quite a number of Welsh people (and a few non-Welsh individuals) who seem to talk about little else. Indeed, Williams himself makes the point that there are now many who are able to earn quite a decent living out of doing so; and in the process they are very argumentative, producing a multitude of different impressions of the country. Perhaps the particular perspective of sociology can contribute something towards cutting through the resulting cacophony of voices.

MORE THAN ONE WALES

There are many efforts to make sense of Wales, and these produce many definitions and understandings of what Wales is about. This is not surprising, since it has become quite acceptable among sociologists now to recognize that there is rarely, if ever, one definitive version or story to be told. Rather, there are multiple realities, intelligible from differing standpoints and anchored in different sets of social experiences and social positions.

Among the positions that are likely to be relevant in their formation, we could include: place or territorial location; class, or position within a structured system of inequalities; gender; ethnicity or ‘race’; and generation. Each of these provides a vantage point from which people can and do see the world differently. Since people, individually and collectively, occupy all of these positions simultaneously, they are liable to create highly complex sets of understandings of their social worlds. A wide range of raw materials can be worked upon to produce these selective accounts, within which sometimes the same elements are capable of assuming very different meanings. They might consist, among other things, of a mixture of fragments of personal knowledge and direct experience, collective memories, cultural assumptions and lessons absorbed from education or the media. Often these can be encapsulated in quite specific images, such as are provided by artists and writers (Humphreys, 1995). However, the interpretation of these images usually requires the application of a considerably larger body of information and experience which enables access to their social meaning: to grasp what they are about, we have to be able to enter into the appropriate social world. The implication that a particular social world offers a preferable, or indeed, the only convincing angle of vision is often an inherent aspect of the way in which reality is construed: as well as a descriptive content, there is usually a persuasive element to images and analyses which tends to coincide with the furthering of particular interests or sets of purposes.

Since the significance of the various positions people occupy can change over time and in the light of circumstances, the resulting perspectives are not hard and fast, nor are they always totally distinct and separate from one another. Rather they are produced and reproduced in an endless process of conversation and negotiation, at times mingling quite promiscuously, at others becoming more sharply defined and distanced. Participation in this conversation does much to sustain the sense there is something worth discussing. As a discipline, sociology makes its own important contribution to this process, lending qualified support to some positions, helping to undermine others, often putting itself forward as an especially ‘authoritative’ version of reality. This claim is made on the grounds that sociology is more explicitly informed by theory, more closely tied to evidence, and more consciously self-critical, than many of the competing perspectives. It is not always a claim that is justifiable because, like everyone else, sociologists have their own axes to grind.

The sociologists who came to Aberystwyth with their ready-made images of Wales were simply responding to one very strong vision of Wales, maybe the one that at the time was most resonant and widespread outside Wales. Its appeal to them probably also owed quite a lot to their own political and ideological preconceptions as sociologists: it was perhaps their preferred image, best fitted to how they felt Wales ought to be. It is a vision that projects a powerful conception of a proletarian Wales, dominated by a strong and well-established industrial working class, symbolized above all by the mining industry. The figure of the ‘coal smudged, cloth-capped Welsh miner’ has served as a ‘universal icon of working-class radicalism’ (Adamson, 1998). As we will see, at best this is a gross oversimplification of any actual state of Wales, but it is the Wales that most people believe they know something about, represented most obviously, in its often clichéd version, in books and films like Richard Llewellyn’s How Green is my Valley and A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, and by a wealth of other artistic representations. It forms the backdrop, conscious or implicit, to a great deal of the work which has been done on Wales over the past few decades, a considerable amount of which is concerned to gain some distance from, and perspective upon, the underlying set of experiences and relationships that are implicated within it.

Like other visions, it is circumscribed both historically and geographically, and it is capable of taking on somewhat mythic proportions. There have been times when it was propagated assiduously, because it served a particular purpose. It is a version of Wales dating from the industrial revolution, which was the decisive moment in the formation of modern Wales. It crystallized in the first half of the twentieth century, and by now it has faded almost entirely into history. It is also a conception which never applied to the whole of Wales, but which had its strongest realization in the valleys of south Wales. It was the experience of the South Wales Coalfield in particular that generated much of the social fabric, and the associated political and cultural traits, upon which it draws. Between 1750 and 1911 the population of the coalfield area grew at a phenomenal rate, expanding by about a million and a half, and assembled itself into its characteristic working-class communities. As the leading historians of the coalfield comment, ‘the sociological ramifications of the mining communities were, by no means, without complexity’, but their fundamental feature was identified well enough by the miners’ leader Will Paynter as ‘the integration of pit, people and union into a unified social organism’ (Francis and Smith, 1980: 34). Having grown up in the region, Smith provides his own personal endorsement of such a vision: ‘I could define my Wales in terms of pithead winding gear, domino rows of terraced houses falling down hills that pass for mountains, and the thin defiance of a brass band on the march. The clichés are too close to the truth for most of us to avoid them’ (Smith, 1984: 3). Once again we see in this comment the almost imperceptible shift from direct individual experience to assumptions about what applies to ‘most of us’, as we are invited to participate in an act of shared recollection.

The reason why this particular image would attract specifically sociological interest is that it is already quite familiar. Such an organization of an entire community around a particular form of work and its demands has played a central part in the sociological construction of the idea of a ‘traditional’ working class, the general features of which are well-known and much described. Although the classic studies were produced outside Wales (Dennis et al., 1956; Young and Willmott, 1957; Jackson, 1968), the Welsh experience of industrialization fed, seemingly without difficulty, into the production of this wider sociological model of a distinctive class situation and pattern of communal organization. This was encapsulated brilliantly by David Lockwood in his classic article on working-class images of society (Lockwood, 1966) and explored further by Martin Bulmer and others (Bulmer, 1978; Davis, 1979) throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was against this benchmark that Lockwood and Goldthorpe were to develop their account of working-class affluence and its effects. Part of the subsequent story of Wales is about how affluence and material change has rendered this vision obsolete, although in fact economic decline and deprivation have had at least as much to do with its demise.

The main characteristics brought together within the ideal type of the traditional working class included the centrality of male manual labour; subordination in the workplace and wider social structure; class consciousness; close family connections; and strong communities with a distinctive culture and pattern of social life. Along with other areas of heavy industry such as central Scotland and northern England, Wales provided the supporting evidence for this description, and Welsh workers in turn accounted for a significant portion of the British working class. Of course, it could be argued that there were aspects specific to Wales which had to be taken into consideration – including, for example, an especially well-developed sense of class solidarity, and a high degree of political unanimity. Francis and Smith note how

this forging of a consciousness was hastened by the social geography of the narrow steep-sided valleys. Housing tended to be cramped and terraced and the ribbon development prevented the establishing of a physical civic centre to the communities, a feature which could have countered the hardening class identity. On the contrary, the few social amenities, particularly the institutes and their libraries, were overwhelmingly proletarian in origin and patronage. (Francis and Smith 1980: 8)

Not for the last time, we find the social features of life in Wales apparently growing out of the landscape it inhabits. Furthermore, it is asserted, the institutions of these communities remained firmly in the hands of the working people themselves, since ‘from the chapels to the free libraries, from the institutes to the sports teams, the control was a popular and democratic one’ (Francis and Smith, 1980: 34).

Compared to other areas, such features might lend working-class existence within Wales a special quality. Nevertheless, the fact that the greater part of the account applied indifferently throughout industrial Britain (and beyond) provided one reason to play down the possibility of a distinctive Welsh sociology. If all the key features were common and only some of the trappings were different, then there was little of real significance to say about Wales as such: it merely exemplified in an especially stark, and perhaps developed, way the general nature of a class and its historical experiences. This was a view that could be taken even from within; one autobiographical account discounts both the personal and the geographical relevance of the events described because

for the greater part of the story, the scene would differ little if it was set in any one of the older industries of the country … the setting in the coal-mining industry and my personal involvement in it is not the important feature of the record; it provides the local colour only. (Paynter, 1972: 9)

This generalizing impulse, so central to the sociological perspective, helps create precisely the expectation which led to predictions that, since the whole working class of Britain shared a common fate, increasingly it would leave its local variations, and ‘regional’ identities, behind, making them of merely parochial or historical interest. The reasonableness of this expectation is something which will have to be examined in due course, but it suggests Wales holds a special place, if at all, only for its vanguard position in a wider pattern of change. Unsurprisingly, the notion of Wales as the locus for a mature industrial proletariat which in its formation and attitudes conformed well to theoretical expectations has held a particular appeal for sociologists with Marxist leanings, who have seen its ‘militancy’ embodied most profoundly in its ‘Little Moscows’ (Macintyre, 1980).

We have here then one starting point from which to think about the nature of Wales, what makes it different and how this has developed. The idea of Wales in people’s minds takes on a particular inflection because ‘in ways which have no real parallels in, say, England, an integral part of such popular constructions embodies a powerful set of images of the social relations characteristic of the industrial Valleys’ (Rees, 1997: 100). Put more crudely, in the words of the Welsh Affairs Committee in 1988, we are presented with an image of ‘short dark men singing hymns in the shadow of slag heaps’ (cited Humphreys, 1995: 143). In other words, a part becomes a token for the whole as the nature of Wales is read off from knowledge (real or imagined) of the valleys. This is partly because these images correspond to a set of real and formative experiences, and partly because a variety of individuals and groups have seen in them something which appeals strongly to their interests and preferences.

From this initial sketch, we can identify a set of attributes which, for a given period of time, appear to have defined some of the basic features of Welsh society: predominantly working-class, well-organized, self-assertive, intensely solidary and politically Labourist. With these go all the associated characteristics of the conventional working-class way of life as depicted by Lockwood and others: it is localized, strongly marked by gender divisions and patriarchal power, with horizons restricted by the material limits of powerlessness and subordination. It has the virtues of mutual support and egalitarianism, but the vices of conformity and inhibited enterprise.

Ideal types of this sort are intended only to provide useful approximations to empirical truth, and they do so by accentuating key aspects and stripping