‘Cohesion’ is a word that many inside and outside the academy will be familiar with. Governments and academics have long talked of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘cohesive communities’. The previous New Labour government employed the notion of cohesion as the backbone of its race relations and integration policy, which developed into ‘community cohesion’ after riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001. More recently, the 2015 Queen’s Speech mentioned measures ‘to promote social cohesion and protect people by tackling extremism’. Considering its wide use, it is important to explore how citizens interpret and view cohesion, particularly in deprived areas and those labelled as non-cohesive where policy in this area will have more of an impact on citizens’ everyday lives.
My recent article, “Cohesion as ‘common sense’: Everyday narratives of community and cohesion in New Labour’s Britain“, in Politics engages with everyday narratives of community and cohesion from the perspective of the citizen, in order to understand how discourses developed and reproduced in policy and political language impact on citizens’ understandings of the concept. It is based on a series of focus groups that were run in Bradford and Birmingham, and finds that participants internalise a specific notion of ‘cohesion’ that increases citizens’ responsibility without giving them the wherewithal to fulfil their new duties. This is achieved through constructing what Antonio Gramsci calls ‘common sense’, in which one particular way of doing things is presented and internalised as the only feasible option.
Participants discussed topics around community and cohesion, as well as their positions on government activity in these areas. In many cases, participants reproduced key discourses propagated by government. However, in a number of these cases participants also contaminated these discourses by using similar language but changing the focus and target. For example, New Labour policy emphasised individual responsibility and active citizenship. This permeated into the social consciousness, but participants were able to use this language of responsibility to implicate local and central government, implicitly altering the perception of power relations between state and citizen. In this way, participants were able to critique and problematize policy.
The article finds that carefully constructed policy language creates a strong discursive mesh that is difficult to challenge. Indeed, at points participants would discipline one another if they challenged particular discourses. Thus the small challenges that could be made to this language and discourse become very significant and provide heavily responsibilised individuals with a modicum of critical agency.
This article appears in Politics‘ Special Issue on Everyday Narratives. Read more from this Special Issue:
- “Who tells the story of war and peace: international actors, national elites or local actors?” by Roger Mac Ginty Roger and Pamina Firchow
- “How Ordinary People Talk About Terrorism” by Richard Jackson
- “If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism?” by Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister
