Tyneside Neighbourhoods E-Book

Daniel Nettle


• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field experiments. Nettle analyses these findings in the context of the cultural, psychological and economic consequences of economic deprivation, and of the ethical difficulties of representing a deprived community. In so doing the book sheds light on one of the main issues of our time: the roles of culture and of socioeconomic factors in determining patterns of human social behaviour.Tyneside Neighbourhoods is a must read for scholars, students, individual readers, charities and government departments seeking insight into the social consequences of deprivation and inequality in the West.

Leseprobe

TYNESIDE NEIGHBOURHOODS

Tyneside Neighbourhoods

Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One British City

Daniel Nettle

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2015 Daniel Nettle

This work and all is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Daniel Nettle, Tyneside Neighbourhoods: Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One British City. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0084

In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741885#copyright

Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

All external links were active on 2 December 2015 and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Open Data: The extensive dataset compiled by the author as part of the research project reported in this publication is freely available at https://osf.io/ys7g6

An archived version of the dataset, preserving the data in the form it was at the time of publication, is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/W9Z2P

Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741885#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-188-5

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-189-2

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-190-8

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-191-5

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-192-2

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0084

Cover image: Back lane, Newcastle upon Tyne. Photo by Daniel Nettle (CC BY 4.0).

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified.

Printed in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK).

Contents

1.

Introduction

1

Prelude

1

About this book

7

The city context: Newcastle upon Tyne

9

Motivations for the Tyneside Neighbourhoods Project

12

Competing narratives: Kropotkin versus the Mountain People

17

2.

Study sites and methods

23

The study neighbourhoods

23

Development of methods: General considerations

27

Description of datasets

36

3.

Mutual aid

45

Introduction

45

Round one: Social interactions in the streets

46

Round two: Self-reported social capital

52

Round three: Dictator Games

55

Close to the edge

59

The return of the lost letter, and other encounters

63

4.

Crime and punishment

65

Introduction

65

The spreading of disorder and the maintenance of antisocial behaviour

66

Littering and crime reports

68

The Theft Game

71

An experiment with information

75

The strange case of the norms effect that didn’t happen

79

5.

From cradle to grave

83

Introduction

83

Children’s use of the streets

84

Social trust through childhood

87

Social trust through adulthood

88

No country for old men

91

6.

Being there

95

Introduction

95

Perceptual experience and context sensitivity

97

An experiment with minibuses

99

The social diet

104

7.

Conclusions and reflections

111

Introduction

111

Summary and implications of findings

111

The economic grit and the cultural pearl

115

Structural change versus nudges

119

The ethics of representation and the value of ethnography

121

References

125

Index

133

It’s oh, but, aa ken well, ah, you me hinny burd,

The bonny lass of Benwell, ah, you, ah.

She’s lang-legged and mother-like, ah, you hinny burd

See her raking up the dyke, ah, you, ah.

The Quayside for sailors, ah, you me hinny burd,

The Castle Garth for tailors, ah, you, ah.

The Gateshead Hills for millers, ah, you hinny burd,

The North Shore for keelers, ah, you, ah.

There’s Sandgate for owld rags, ah, you, me hinny burd,

And Gallowgate for trolley bags; ah, you, ah.

There’s Denton and Kenton, ah you, hinny burd,

And canny Langbenton, ah, you, ah.

There’s Tynemouth and Cullercoats, ah, you me hinny burd,

And North Shields for sculler boats; ah, you, ah.

There’s Westoe lies in a neuk, ah, you hinny burd,

And South Shields the place for seut, ah, you, ah.

There’s Horton and Hollywell, ah, you me hinny burd

And bonny Seaton Delaval; ah, you ah.

Hartley Pans for sailors, ah, you hinny burd

And Bedlington for nailers, ah, you ah.

Traditional Tyneside song

1. Introduction

© Daniel Nettle, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0084.01

It’s like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder,How I keep from going under.1

Prelude

This book is a study of people’s social relationships and social behaviour in different neighbourhoods of one English conurbation, Tyneside. I define social behaviour in the classic biological sense, to mean things that one individual does that have consequences for another individual or individuals (Bourke, 2011; Hamilton, 1964). Thus, merely being present at the same place as another individual is not necessarily a social behaviour. Giving something to them, taking something from them, improving their environment or despoiling it are all social behaviours. Social behaviours can be further classified as prosocial, where the actor’s actions improve someone else’s situation, or antisocial, where they make it worse. For the most part, the book is based on comparative data from two particular neighbourhoods within the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, which I will call A and B. There is also some ancillary data from other parts of Tyneside. The book is based on several years of intermittent fieldwork by several people; I will say more about this later in the chapter. First it is worth saying something about how the long journey that has led to this book got started.

In around 2007 or 2008, I had a chance conversation with my partner on the subject of household refuse. I lived in the North East of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, whereas she lived in the West End, in the house we now live in together. Newcastle, like many cities, asks its citizens to divide household waste into recyclable and non-recyclable categories, collected on different days. I was uncertain, as I recall, about the proper categorization of some kind of plastic. I wanted to behave well and sort correctly, and was therefore anxious to have the right information about what the rules were. She said something to the effect that she wouldn’t expend too much effort on getting things like this right, since her bin would be quite likely to be set fire to anyway before it could be collected.

It turned out that her attitude was not without foundation. Various things did indeed get set ablaze in that part of Newcastle at that time, a problem that thankfully seems to have abated somewhat. Even when recycling bins did not burn, they would often be either kicked over or used improperly by someone else once on the street, resulting in a mixed load that the recycling lorry would refuse to take. Thus, she was absolutely correct in her assessment of the futility of expending much effort in the direction of conscientious recycling; such effort would end up being undermined by the action of others. Her lightly-made comment made a remarkable impression on me, for several reasons.

First, over the years I have thought a fair amount about the age-old question of whether people are basically good (helpful, prosocial, cooperative), or whether they are basically selfish. This question has a very clear answer: it depends. Humans have motivations to deliver social benefits to others, but these are not their only motivations, and the expression of these motivations is contingent and conditional. Most obviously, and as illustrated by the blazing bin example, the expression of prosocial motivations depends on expectations about what others in the population might (or might not) do. This means that if you want to understand when people will behave prosocially and when they will not, you need to know a lot about their ecology (what kinds of things are going on in the surrounding population?), and you also need to know a lot about human psychology (how exactly do the information-processing mechanisms that take cues from the local environment in order to adjust an individual’s social decisions work?).

The second reason that her comment struck me was that our respective houses were in the same city and only around 3km apart, yet clearly the behaviour going on around them was utterly different. Rubbish bins would never be set fire to where I lived. It was—and I mean this as more than a casual simile—like living in two different countries. Yet our two neighbourhoods shared the same language, ethnic heritage, national and local government, and judicial systems. In fact, the same council vehicles collected the refuse from the two places. This relates to the whole issue of the nature and scale of variation in human social behaviour, and in human culture more broadly. As social scientists, what should be our units of analysis: countries, cities, streets or individuals? How meaningful is it to talk about an English culture, when two samples of English people—two samples taken a 15-minute bicycle ride apart—give such different pictures?

Third, my partner had clearly and without much thought calibrated her actions to her ecology. She had a similar long-term developmental history to mine, and her fundamental social attitudes were the same as my own. Yet her neighbourhood environment had clearly caused her decision-making to change. Anthropologists call the process by which an individual’s social behaviour is shaped by the surrounding population acculturation. However, many descriptions of acculturation envisage a slow, perhaps linguistically-mediated process lasting many years, typically happening to children as they grow into adults. My partner had moved to the neighbourhood already adult; what had happened to her seemed more like an immediate cognitive response to a certain kind of perceptual experience. This raises interesting questions about which experiences are important in acculturation, and the timescale over which they act. If I moved to the land where bins go up in flames, would my behaviour change? If so, which perceptual inputs would be most important in causing the change, and how quickly would it occur if I had them? And if the change occurred quickly, how quickly could it be reversed?

If one tributary stream of this book was a longstanding interest in prosocial and antisocial behaviour, the second tributary was an interest in socioeconomic deprivation and its consequences. I haven’t told you, though it may not surprise you to learn, that the neighbourhood where recycling was overshadowed by arson was one where most people were extremely poor, whereas the orderly neighbourhood was one where most people were affluent. If there were large differences between our respective neighbourhoods in terms of prosocial and antisocial behaviour, we might be dealing with another instance of the near-ubiquitous phenomenon of the social gradient.

Social gradient is the term used by social scientists to describe any situation where the outcome we are interested in is patterned according to socioeconomic position, so that more affluent or high-status social groups look different from less affluent or lower-status ones. I may be coloured by the particular topics I have conducted research on, but social gradients strike me as the overwhelmingly salient fact about contemporary developed societies. If a Martian researcher asked me for a quick summary of how these societies work, I would give the following one: things work out differently for the rich and the poor. Social gradients have been described for many variables in the UK: birth weight, age at parenthood, paternal behaviour, breastfeeding, smoking, body mass, depression, and orientation towards the future, to name but a few (Adams & White, 2009; Nettle, 2008, 2010a; Pill, Peters, & Robling, 1995; Stansfeld & Head, 1998). Perhaps the most fundamental social gradient is that of life itself: the poor in the UK can expect to be alive several fewer years than the rich, and they can expect to be healthy for many fewer years (Adler, Boyce, & Chesney, 1994; Bajekal, 2005). Whether the gradient in the length of life is the cause or the consequence of all the other gradients is a delicate question. In my work, I have argued that there are often bidirectional relationships: poor people worry less about the long-term health consequences of smoking because they don’t think they will remain alive so long anyway, regardless of what they do, but this in turn exacerbates the already-existing gap in how long they will live (Nettle, 2010b; Pepper & Nettle, 2014).

Social gradients connect in a number of ways to the issues about prosocial and antisocial behaviour that I have already discussed. Some of the social gradients that have been documented directly concern prosocial and antisocial behaviour: there are social gradients in crime, in violence, and in pro-environmental attitudes, for example (Dietz, Stern, & Guagnano, 1998; Kikuchi & Desmond, 2015; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997; Shaw, Tunstall, & Dorling, 2005). Moreover, social gradients lead us once again to the question of the scale of variation in human culture. Because of social gradients, the variation within contemporary societies is often more striking than the variation between them. For example, Figure 1.1 plots women’s average age at first pregnancy for a number of countries, and then for two different groups of English women of White British ancestry: those who live in the most affluent decile of English neighbourhoods, and those who live in the most deprived decile. As you can see, the English women from the affluent neighbourhoods look like the average women from Switzerland or New Zealand. The English women from the deprived neighbourhoods behave like the average women of Guatemala or Kazakhstan. These groups of women often live just hundreds of metres apart, and yet we see that their lives are organized as differently from one another as Swiss women’s are from Kazakh women. This is immediately reminiscent of my short journey across Newcastle from the land of recycling to the land of burning bins.

Figure 1.1 Mean ages at first birth for women from a number of countries, and for White British women living the most affluent decile of English neighbourhoods (E1), and the most deprived decile of English neighbourhoods (E10). Data are reproduced from Nettle (2011b) and Nettle (2010a). NZ: New Zealand. Image © Daniel Nettle, CC BY.

Another connection between social gradients and prosocial behaviour comes from the fact that social gradients are not completely reducible to individual characteristics. Social scientists distinguish between an individual’s personal socioeconomic position, as measured by things like his income, educational qualifications and employment status, and the deprivation of the area in which he lives, which relates to the average income, education and employment of people in the surrounding locality. It is quite hard to tease apart statistically which is more important in social gradients, personal socioeconomic position (e.g. being poor oneself) or area deprivation (e.g. living in neighbourhood where many other people are poor). This is because the population of Britain is strongly assorted by income, so that most people living in neighbourhoods with many poor people are themselves poor. The best evidence suggests, though, that for many gradients, there is an effect of area-level deprivation above and beyond the effects of individual socioeconomic position (Ludwig et al., 2012; Pickett & Pearl, 2001; Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002). That is, there are consequences for one’s health and behaviour of living surrounded by poor people, above and beyond the consequences of being poor oneself. This must imply that our experience of what others in the immediately surrounding environment are doing is important for our own outcomes. This again links us back to social behaviour; indeed to the very definition of social behaviour as things people do that have effects on others.

My twin concerns with social behaviour and with socioeconomic deprivation were allied to a desire to get out of the office more. I had been doing epidemiological work for several years, and what this amounted to in practice was sitting in front of a computer. Although the scientific payoffs for desk work are often considerable, its capacity to expand personal horizons is limited: there is nothing quite like the messy improvisation of a primary empirical project for changing the way you think about the world. I thus decided—after considerable inspiration and advice from my friend Tom Dickins of Middlesex University—to undertake a systematic field study of two contrasting neighbourhoods within Newcastle, one very deprived and the other more affluent. The study aimed to be both ethnographic and ethnological. It would be ethnographic since it aimed to document, in detail, what life was like in the two study neighbourhoods. It would be ethnological, since I wanted to systematically compare the two, and try to explain why they might differ in the ways they did. I dubbed the project the Tyneside Neighbourhoods Project, partly as an homage to David Sloan Wilson and Dan O’Brien’s Binghamton Neighborhood Project in upstate New York (Wilson, O’Brien, & Sesma, 2009). The Tyneside Neighbourhoods Project ended up gathering data about many things, such as health behaviour, psychological wellbeing, and plans for the future. However, there was a core running through it that specifically concerned social relationships, social behaviour, and the cognition that underlies them. It is this core that forms the subject matter of this book.

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