Beyond the Ghost Town? The “promising practices” of community based initiatives in Coventry

This article explores two major themes from a structure-agency perspective. First it focuses centrally on how access to the labour market has been influenced by divisions and identities, which it seeks to examine concretely through the case study of Coventry, a city that has undergone a rapid change from a manufacturing to a post-industrial city in the last two decades. Initially the remit of the Warwick University Sequal research team was to focus on class and gender, but given the multicultural character of the city we added “race” and ethnicity, and in practice could not ignore the messages in relation to age, health and disability that were coming through our research. Rather than seek to resolve long standing debates about how class, gender, race, age, etc. relate together and which are most significant, we have simply (1) emphasized the role of class relations because there are now in danger of being overlooked, (2) taken an integrated and holistic approach by adopting biographical methods which show how these play out in the lives of real people. Hopefully, this enables to follow C. Wright Mills (1959) and link “biography and history overall”, at least at the level of the city, the major influences examined over time are structural in their effects.