An Introduction To A Social-Network Approach to Social-Class. (Another Part of 'An Ethnographer in Paradise.')

When I was a kid, other neighbourhood kids would frequently make it over to our house. Sunday evenings were the best. We had a large garden, great for football, and my Dad was a willing host cum referee cum footballing-clown. In my memory I can, to this day, paint every nuance, every shade and sub-shade, of our Whalley Range evenings under darkening skies in early October when the kids came round to play. I can see the Manchester sky of purple-grey, the rained green of the grass and, of course, the obligatory blackbirds that sketch across every inner city memory.

Those times were good and bad.

I can still remember the names of the boys (mainly) and girls who hung around our big old house though, for the sake of propriety, they are changed here. There was fat, ambling Jimmy, two bags of shopping in his arms, always making his way back to his ne'er seen mum behind the closed curtains of their flat. There was Spike, the half-caste kid who was brilliant at football (though, stupidly, the teachers at our school told him not to show-off his skills), but talked of how his Dad used  "the belt."  There was little Kendra on her scooter. There was Wilkins whose head was cut open in a car accident we witnessed on Withington Road. There were the funny, funny Holly Brothers who shrieked with laughter and whose mum would never eat her own cooking. We'd see her eat alone, late-hours,  in the Whalley Range cafe.  There was Emily, well-spoken and with proud,protective parents. And then there were the children of the West family, whom we never invited in. They were violent, disturbed, gangster kids whose parents ran the brothel opposite our house. Sometimes the West kids would try to steal into our garden but my Mum and Dad always rebuffed them. Once, after they had mugged an old Spanish lady and left her bleeding in the road, I watched as my Mum and Dad tended to their victim, enduring the catcalls of the West kids as they did so. This is one of those memories that gets inked in without a trace of the romantic skies and flapping blackbirds.

I was probably about ten years old when this mugging happened. So were some of the West children. Some were younger. Indeed, I also recollect the youngest of that family breaking the headlights of a neighbour's car with a hammer. He was wearing a nappy as he did so. This was a long time before feral children became news-worthy. 

With adult eyes, huge complexities are revealed in the lives of all these children. If I continue with the West family for a little while, one stark point that stands out to me now is that the nappy-wearing, hammer-wielding toddler was probably acting upon instruction. Indeed, I recall as I write that the car subject to the attack was new, and owned by an elegant, West-Indian family who lived next door. It seems to add up now. But children are children, and families are families, and their psycho-social layers are hugely complex. One alternate light upon the West family is cast by their attendance at the English Martyrs Catholic Church. I never saw their monstrous Dad in there, but Mum and the kids sometimes made it. And I have one particularly distinct memory of the family's ashen-faced, younger daughter, knelt in the pew praying with great fervour. I can't remember me or my siblings ever praying like that. I can't remember any of our friends praying like that. We would nudge each other and fool around or else just stare glassy eyed and bored in the vague direction of the Priest. She didn't. She prayed. Shereally prayed. Now, again with my adult eyes, I wonder what motivated her. She'd have been about twelve or thirteen. I wonder. What was going on in her life?

Recently, I learned from a professional source that the West kids became real gangsters. Real, adult gangsters. I don't know what happened to the Holly boys, or to Kendra or Emily, or to Spike. I do know that Jimmy was doomed even before his childhood was out. After all, why did his mother choose to live in darkness?  Scanning forward, my family would move to the other side of the park in Whalley Range and then, eventually, to Formby. Many more kids came into our lives and many left. Some went on to great things, some to good things, and some to disaster. I won't expand for now. There is nothing statistically unusual in what I describe. Indeed the point is the normality of what I present to you. I am not claiming any special set of experiences for an inner-city kind-of kid. My point rests upon what I describe to you as being normal.

My point is this; when I look back on who succeeded, who failed, who lived and who died, from amongst my lifetime sample of childhood friends, I cannot in my mind, from this perspective, draw a correlation with poverty. The poorest kids were not necessarily the ones who met the worst fate. Indeed, down at this level, sometimes, the very poorest seem to out-perform the richer. Of course we need to bear in mind that this is Whalley Range, one street away from Moss Side, so we are probably within or just astride the poorest statistical sample-set as used by, say, the National Statistical Office. This brings statistical complexities into it and there is also a quantitative versus qualitative argument. But, whatever, to me it is important to say that 'poverty' was probably more of a symptom than a cause. I have always struggled to believe the relative-poverty argument because it just does not seem marry with the evidence of my own life. Of course, I wholly believe in the tragedy of 'absolute-poverty' as experienced in, say, Ukraine or Rural Africa, but in the UK, after Peterloo, after the suffragettes, after social security and in the ages of education, mass-media, pop music, mobile phones and internet, it feels that outside of recent immigrants, 'relative-poverty' can only be a symptom.

This is difficult territory, but there is a comments section below for any agreement or disagreement that may be engendered. I have deliberately built from personal experience and will, of course, accept the vision of a greater light.

Moving forward, the relatively high performance of many immigrant groups adds to my thesis. These groups were very much part of our Whalley Range landscape. We were tied to the Polish comunity, of course, and then, through schools, friendships, and eventually marriage, to the Irish. I've mentioned half-caste Spike and the West-Indian family opposite. There were Italians next door on one side and Russians on the other. Our second Whalley Range home was on a street that would, eventually, come to be populated by marvellous, warm-hearted Pakistani Muslim families. They worked huge hours, shared their growing wealth across family groups, and did well. They had businesses and Audis within ten or twenty years of landing in real poverty in the UK. The success of these families cannot be explained by a 'relative-poverty' thesis.

It seems to me that rather than 'relative-poverty' it is better to look at two inter-related factors. The first is the raw talent of individuals in poorer sections of society. It seems to me that the more talented are, if they accept a common-definition of social success, more likely to attain it and to progress up the social-ladder. However, it again seems to me, raw talent does not act in isolation. The second crucial factor is the social-network within which the individual talent is implanted. Understanding what makes a successful social-network seems to me to be a promising way of understanding how society works in the UK today. It might cast an alternate light on why some problems bed in over generations and resist improvements in the actual wealth of people and groups. In developing this, I have my own scratch formula to present across indices of aspiration, economic-power, knowledge-power and emotional-insight. I'll present all of this in a later blog. I'll also have a go at defining what I mean by 'social network' though you can take it from my examples above that the emotional bonds of nuclear and extended families will be primary.

For now, I'll remind you that I write in the South of France. Here, amidst the wealth of the Riviera, I contend, the power of social-networks is much in evidence. We all recognise it. Few would disagree with me in the context of Cannes or Monte-Carlo, success breeds success. Few would disagree that the sons and daughters of the rich tend to do well because of network effects like economic clout and knowledge networks. As these networks promote talent, few would disagree that they also insulate their young people against mistakes or lack of talent. The point I am making here is that success in the lower echelons of society is also, in some substantial part, a network effect. You need the right people, the right connections and the right knowledge around you.

More soon. 

Next: Little Wilson and Big Technology.