the analysis of issues with a less overt politics. A
case in point, and possibly one of the best
instances of this tendency, is the clutch of work
on social polarization that appeared during the
mid 1990s (Dorling and Woodward, 1995;
Hamnett, 1994; 1996; Hamnett and Cross, 1998;
Williams and Windebank, 1995; Woodward,
1995) about which I want to say a little more.
Taking much of its inspiration from the argu-
ments of Saskia Sassen (1991), from the outset
this debate has had strong connections with two
of the core concerns of social geography: the
changing nature of the class structure and its
mediation by particular welfare regimes. None-
theless, the primary issues for debate in this field
revolve around polarization as pattern, specifi-
cally key measurement questions of gaps in
income and/or income differentials and change/s
in the occupational class structure; polarization
as a characteristic of globalization (the New York–
London etc. comparison); and polarization at the
local scale. Occasionally within all this there is
some discussion of causal processes, particularly
in local studies or, for instance, in Breugel’s
(1996) insistence on the importance of transfor-
mations in gender relations to polarization. But
the emphasis remains on the particular form of
polarization – witness the prevalence of eggs,
dumb-bells, hourglasses and onions as the
prevailing metaphors.
This aside, one of the intriguing facets of the
polarization debate is the way in which it
engages with inequality. Running through much
of this literature is a thread that connects polari-
zation to inequality. At times this is explicit:
polarization is itself seen to expose social
inequality (Woodward); alternatively, income
differentials are represented as inequalities,
which in turn are elided with polarization
(Hamnett). This suggests that polarization is seen
to be revealing of inequality; that it maps it, charts
it, makes it visible. But inequality is primarily
understood in terms of observable, measurable
income differences and/or differentials. This
raises the question of whether polarization is
poverty research in another (more acceptable?)
guise – discursively recast, and in ways which,
by focusing attention on the façade of polariza-
tion, work simultaneously to mask/obscure and
to deflect attention away from the existence of
poverty.
Yet for much of the time within the polariza-
tion debate the thread which elsewhere connects
or elides polarization and inequality goes
unmentioned. Specifically this happens where
attention turns to class, and is connected intrinsi-
cally with the emphasis afforded to the occupa-
tional class structure. With its focus on acategorical, rather than relational, understanding
of class this is – I think – inevitable. For discus-
sions of numbers of professionals managers
and so forth and their relative growth, even com-
parative ones, leave little room for inequality.
Witness how bizarre, not to mention inappropri-
ate, the prospect of talking even in terms of
income inequalities (rather than the weaker
differences) amongst and between professionals
and managers appears. Yet the question this also
raises is to what extent a categorical representa-
tion of class might also signal a tacit erasure – a
means of enabling a shift away from relational
understandings with their intrinsic connections
with inequality. I say this because such a mano-
euvre has its attractions. Specifically, it allows
work on social polarization to connect with the
core concerns within class analysis for much of
the 1990s, namely the middle classes, and
because relational inequality is so transparent a
feature of polarization (in the sense that one class
is frequently directly employed by the other to
service facets of social reproduction: Gregson
and Lowe, 1994) that to focus exclusively on
middle-class occupational change seems at best a
deflection, at worst a recasting to fit the times. It
is a fashionable way of doing what might other-
wise risk being dubbed as deeply unfashionable.
More broadly, these presences and silences
around inequality within the polarization litera-
ture are indicative of a profound ambiguity:
about what inequality itself might mean; about
how we might talk about this; and about how this
might or might not figure within a reconfigured
class analysis. Polarization seems to be a way of
occupying this gap. Indeed, for its protagonists it
would seem to be an acceptable way in which to
talk about inequality – as an effect, observable,
measurable, controllable, tolerable even (within
limits), rather than as a relation, with all those
messy connections with power (and with prob-
lematic, not to mention unfashionable, words
like domination, exploitation and oppression). It
is a way of talking about poverty (and class)
without mentioning the(ir) name(s), in short an
avoidance that speaks. This suggests that ‘the
social’, as once understood and talked about, has
been evacuated from within, so much so that it is
little more than a trace, even in areas of research
where one might most expect to find its contin-
ued presence.
As the previous two sections have shown,
reconfiguration and evacuation have had pro-
found effects on social and cultural geography.
Indeed, currently it is possible to discern not just
the copresence of political-economic and psycho-
analytically inspired readings of ‘the social’
alongside empirical readings defined by theRECLAIMING ‘THE SOCIAL’ 493029-ch01.qxd 03-10-02 10:25 AM Page 49