Everyday Life in Austerity

Family, Friends and Intimate Relations

Sarah Marie Hall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030170943
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about the impact of austerity in and on everyday life, based on a two-year ethnography with families and communities in 'Argleton', Greater Manchester, UK. Focused on family, friends and intimate relations, and their intersections, the book develops a relational approach to everyday austerity. It reveals how austerity is a deeply personal and social condition, with impacts that spread across and between everyday relationships, spaces and temporal perspectives. It demonstrates how austerity is lived and felt on the ground, with distinctly uneven socio-economic consequences. Furthermore, everyday relationships are subject to change and continuity in times of austerity. Austerity also has lasting impacts on personal and shared experiences, both in terms of day-to-day practices and the lifecourses people imagine themselves living.

© The Author(s) 2019

S. M. HallEveryday Life in AusterityPalgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17094-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sarah Marie Hall¹

(1)

University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Sarah Marie Hall

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Approaching Austerity

[I]t’s probably been harder that I would have thought. But then, I know for other people it’s been even harder. You know, you look at the amount of people using food banks and the amount of people that are really, really struggling … I mean, it’s probably worse because we’ve got debt. But it’s hard because it’s just really, the cost of living’s gone up so much. (Laura, taped discussion, October 2014)

We’ve not suffered any unemployment, but we have seen it around and about. You kind of see and just notice that some areas are getting a little bit more deprived than they were … all of a sudden, some of the shops shut down and they were replaced by pawn shops or pound shops, and you just kind of saw the town centre decline, really. (Zoe, taped discussion, February 2015)

‘Austerity’ is now a term and an experience that many people in the UK are more familiar with than before. Where once applied to times gone by, entrenched in social memories of post-war conditions, it has become a commonplace identifier for contemporary UK society and economy. In its most stripped-down form, austerity refers to a specific set of actions and policies by the state: the reduction of spending on public expenditure with the precise aim of reducing governmental budget deficit. However, and importantly, it has a dual meaning. ‘Austerity’ is also a term to describe a condition of severe simplicity and self-restraint. As the above quotes from two of my participants suggest, and the rest of this book will reveal in more detail, these two meanings of austerity play out in everyday life, cutting across one another as much as they do across and between spaces, times and relationships.

These two quotes also offer an insight into the relational approach I take in this book. Laura and Zoe, who we meet again in later chapters, both situate their experiences alongside those of other people they know, in the particular and familiar context of their everyday lives. In this way, this book marks a departure from many previous writings on austerity, centring on lived, felt and personal impacts of austerity as they are encountered in everyday life. It responds to the critiques about the dominance of political and economic accounts in research about contemporary austerity, while at the same time offering alternative ways for theorising, researching and understanding lived experiences in austere times. It does this in three interrelated ways.

Firstly, I conceptualise austerity as a personal and relational condition. I argue that approaching austerity as a personal and social, as much as an economic and political, condition means that lived experiences and social inequalities can come to the fore. Here austerity is reframed and scaled according to everyday relationships and practices, taken from the ground up. Seeing austerity as personal does not preclude economic or political concerns; rather it shifts how these are named and framed. Subverting the usual voices and experiences upon which discourses of austerity are built, and ultimately how they are valued, makes space for acknowledging those people and communities at the sharpest end of austerity cuts. Furthermore, acknowledging austerity as a personal condition—rather than simply an ideology or inevitability—gives credence to the fact that it has very real and tangible impacts: a condition of severe simplicity and self-restraint. Austerity then also becomes a form of conditioning (also see Hitchen 2016), shaping ideals, futures and horizons, with the potential to change family, friend and intimate relations, presenting opportunities as well as obstacles.

Secondly, the book centres around feminist theories, methods and praxis, applying them to everyday life in austerity in new and innovative ways. Ideas around personal lives, family, intimacy, friendship and relationality have long been fruitful spaces for feminist thought and interventions. Drawing from feminist theories regarding gendered labour and responsibilities, critiques of ‘the family’, social infrastructures, politics and ethics of care, and ethnographic practice, I apply and develop these concepts accordingly. Situating feminist theories of personal relationships in conversation with geographical writings about austerity also means that economic, social and cultural theories are brought together in new ways.

Thirdly, by offering fresh ways of theorising everyday life through relationality, this book provides an alternative entry point into everyday understandings of austerity. I argue that not only do we need to understand austerity as a phenomenon played out and experienced in everyday life, but that there are specific aspects of everyday life that are important to understanding austerity’s effects. Austerity is more than a backdrop to the everyday lives explored in this book. Rather than being simply context, austerity becomes entwined within everyday lives and the relationships in which everyday lives are grounded.

This book therefore makes the case for thinking relationally about austerity, and of bringing together spatial and social theory as a cross-disciplinary approach. Focusing on everyday relationships and relational spaces—multiscalar and cross-spatial understandings of family, friendship and intimate relations—provides exciting opportunities for geographical approaches to everyday life in austerity. Using examples from across ethnographic research, I demonstrate how a relational approach extends current understandings of how austerity cuts through, across and between everyday spaces.

Austerity in the UK

Contemporary austerity in the UK is a particularly interesting case, inextricable from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the period from 2010 onwards. When the crisis hit in 2008 (the result of a subprime mortgage crisis in the USA, based on a culture of risky lending on mortgages by banks) the impacts were felt in the financial, housing and retail sectors as much as in homes, communities and workplaces. Triggered by a ‘credit crunch’ and global economic recession, the UK economy officially entered into a recession that started in early 2008 and ended in late 2009. The damage unleashed by the recession on the national economy, such as unemployment, firm closures and reduced tax revenue, was adopted by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government as a justification to implement their austerity agenda, with the ostensible purpose of restabilising state finances.

Fiscal cuts to public expenditure to the tune of £83 billion were announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the June 2010 Emergency Budget. Measures included ‘slashing local government budgets in England by 27 per cent, benefit caps, the removal of the spare room subsidy from housing benefit (“bedroom tax”) and £8 billion of cuts to the social care budget’ (Hall 2017, p. 303; also see Butterworth and Burton 2013; JRF 2015; Hall et al. 2017). In 2015, the Treasury announced a further £12 billion of cuts to social security spending to be applied by 2019/2020, including reducing caps on household benefits to £20,000 a year, limiting Child Tax Credits to two children, and removing housing benefit for young people aged 18–21 (Hall 2017; HM Treasury 2015).

In the UK as well as in the USA, Republic of Ireland and parts of southern Europe, austerity remains as an economic and political condition as well as an ideology. Austerity is not a fiscal inevitability. It is a political choice and economic agenda that can have deep and long-lasting personal and social consequences. And although the personal effects of living in austerity have been skirted in most political discourse, personal responsibility was actually key to crafting the political argument for austerity following the recent recession.

More specifically, the response to the recession was named and framed as a result of the interconnections between a growing culture of personal credit reliance and government over-borrowing. Though it makes for an imprecise and misleading metaphor, individual/household and state debt became quickly conflated in political discourse on the Global Financial Crisis and recession, entangling credit users with austerity policies and creating a ‘framing [that] suggests culpability on the part of those affected’ (Elwood and Lawson 2013, p. 103). The UK public ‘were situated as being doubly responsible; simultaneously blamed for a culture of debt, borrowing and spending on credit, while at the same time urged to consume to lift the economy out of crisis’ (Hall 2015, p. 141; Hinton and Goodman 2010).

However, the impacts of austerity go beyond political and public discourse; they are real, and felt, and lived. Austerity exposes, exacerbates and exploits socio-economic unevenness. In targeting public institutions, social welfare and care infrastructures (sectors dominated by female labour and receivership), austerity is also a distinctly gendered ideology, process and condition. Put simply, ‘women have been disproportionately affected by these cuts as a result of structural inequalities which means they earn less, own less and have more responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work’ (Hall et al. 2017, p. 1; also see Charles 2000). Women are also the key beneficiaries of state welfare (also referred to as benefits or social security) and, as illustrated by Fig. 1.1, changes to these systems can lead to various gendered inequalities. Further social and structural inequalities are highlighted and aggravated by austerity, including but not limited to class, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, age and faith, and the points at which they intersect. In this book I touch upon some of these concerns, with focus on gender as the fulcrum upon which the social differences and inequalities in my study pivot.

Fig. 1.1

The unequal impacts of changes to social security on women in the UK (from Women Count (2018) by the Women’s Budget Group, see https://​womencount.​wbg.​org.​uk/​)

In spite of the social and spatial significance of austerity, much geographical and wider social science literature continues to be heavily focused on austerity as economic, financial, political and urban. Furthermore, this analysis is commonly levelled on institutional, national, regional and international scales. Such work offers critical insight into analysing and debating the causes and aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and recession, particularly problems of broader economic systems, their governance and organisation, and how austerity policies play out in global markets and city politics. I expand upon this in further detail in Chap. 2. Suffice to say there are important contributions to be made pertaining to the everyday impacts of the economic downturn and subsequent period of austerity in the UK. I now explain the importance of a focus on everyday life, and the influential ideas and literatures that have shaped my own approach to the everyday.

Everyday Life

The everyday is an interdisciplinary endeavour—crossing geography, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and further—and it falls in and out of favour and fashion quite readily. Writers on the everyday argue that everyday life is a space of possibility, comprised as much by material environments as political encounters. While without a specific disciplinary home, contemporary writings on everyday life often cite one of two authors, which for many reading this book will likely have already sprung to mind.

First is the French Marxist philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre, author of the classic Critique of Everyday Life (1991 [1947]). He argued that la quotidienne is characterised by routine, repetition and regularity, punctuated by occasional breaks that made tasks bearable. Drawing upon the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Family, Friendship and Intimacy: A Relational Approach to Everyday Austerity
• 3. Everyday Social Infrastructures and Tapestries of Care in Times of Austerity
• 4. Austere Intimacies and Intimate Austerities
• 5. The Personal Is Political (and Relational)
• 6. A Very Personal Crisis: Family Fragilities and Everyday Conjunctures in Austerity
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter