Further After Industry: Post-Industrial Societies, Futures, and Transformations

Five years after the highly successful special edition ‘After Industry the economic and social consequences of deindustrialisation’ (Frontiers in Sociology, 2021) the problems associated with the rapid decline of industry in the UK have worsened. Furthermore, the sociological challenge of understanding and responding to such changes has increased.
In this second iteration we identify three key themes for consideration:
● The politics of the ‘left behind,
● Culture and identity after industry,
● Education, employment and policy.
While many accounts of post-industrial life focus on what has been lost here, we wish to explore how the future might be moulded and what might come next for those communities and will ask what visions of the future, they have and how they will face future challenges and find possible solutions.
While deindustrialisation swept away certainty for many, post-industrialism offered the prospect of improvement in people’s lives. The post-industrial era would focus on services, amplify knowledge-based industries, demonstrate the positive power of the market and competition and bring technological advancement – a future world of education and work that would be smarter not harder, fairer and easier. Work would be meaningful; education would be accessible and skills would create opportunity boosting social mobility; technology would solve problems; society would be more equitable and prosperous.
The reality is different and more complex. Though technology has brought many positives not least in health with many living longer and more actively, the promise has not materialised as predicted. Inequality is growing; much employment is insecure and/or low-paid; technology has created new stresses, surveillance and challenges; the world is more networked, interconnected making markets more volatile; the education system more narrowly focused, marketized driven and by performance metrics that offer limited socio-economic value and ignore values. Secure and relatively well paid and previously ‘male work’ has been replaced by knowledge and service work, heralding insecurity and poor wages.
In the UK the economic impact of Brexit combined with a cost-of-living crisis and years of austerity has compounded the impact of deindustrialisation and led to a shift in the politics of place. The sense of identity and pride associated with many industries has vanished along with them and in its place a hankering for a perceived past persists alongside new forms of identity, including an othering of those felt not to have a place or strong connection with visions and narratives of the future. Communities and people are fragmented.

Through the theme of the Politics of the Left Behind, we seek contributions that critically examine the politics of the transition to post-industrialism and (re)emergence of left behind places. Taking the UK as an example, the shift from the late 1970s onwards towards a neoliberal, financialised and rentier form of capitalism shaped the nature of this transition and, as Massey (1991) argued, produced profound processes of spatial restructuring. Under New Labour, a coherent programme to address deepening spatial inequalities in post-industrial areas was largely absent, representing a failure of a ‘left-wing’ government to confront the causal dynamics of deindustrialisation and the consequent weakening of the organised working class and its social and political base (Byrne and Ruane, 2019). More recently, debates about ‘left-behind’ places have intensified following the vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the collapse of the ‘Red Wall’ in 2019, highlighting how a sense of political abandonment is embedded in uneven socio-economic conditions and opportunities (Telford, 2022, 2024). Wistow (2022) draws attention to how the politics of ‘loss allocation’ has resulted from the relationship between the social contract and the political economy and how it has structured post-industrial landscapes through deeply embedded and patterned spatial inequalities. In this context, and in one of the most centralised and unequal societies in the OECD (Raikes, 2019), the apparent turn towards Reform UK and right-wing populism needs to be understood as a response to long-term processes of uneven development, state restructuring, and the erosion of political representation in these communities.
We welcome contributions on this theme from the UK and beyond to explore similarities and differences in the trajectories of politics after industry and how these relate to debates around ‘left behind’ places.
Culture and identity: in the editorial for the first special edition in 2021, we wrote “Industries change, develop; adapt and sometimes disappear altogether. However, it is clear that the ways of life, attitudes towards work, family and community; practices and expectations for both men and women, they helped to establish, endure. They remain as “industrial structures of feeling” Williams (1973). For good or ill they persist and that persistence is significant. Understanding “Post-industrial” places is not just a matter of charting economic change. To meaningfully understand we have to explore processes of social and cultural transformation.”
Tomeny explored this in his paper on the Durham Miners Gala. I examined how situation comedy dealt with themes of class and transforming identity. Jean Spence showed us how Jimmy Kays struggled as a working-class artist in the Durham Coalfield. Williams (1973) argued changes to class culture are complex and occur via an interplay the “emergent” and “residual working” class. This process remakes and reproduces the relations of class in new and novel forms. Class relations do not fundamentally alter but their form changes.
“By residual I mean that some experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue cultural as well as social of some previous social formation. By “emergent” I mean first that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances, and experiences are continually being created. But there is a much earlier attempt to incorporate them because they are part-and not yet part of effective contemporary practice” (Williams, 1973, p. 10–11).
Cultural change then is not a fast process. Transformation instead happens gradually but also relentlessly. It is easy to forget that the working-class culture of the mid to late 20th century itself which we often perceive as stable and well established itself only emerged from the turbulence of industrialisation on the 19th century. This changed ways of living, politics, the work place, family structures the list is endless. This economic and cultural shift was what E.P Thompson called “The Making of the English Working Class”
The previous edited collection largely focussed on the decline of residual working class culture, in particular what has survived through the trauma of deindustrialisation. We are seeking to consider the role of culture and the lived experience of post industrialism with a particular focus on what comes next, what futures are there for post-industrial communities. Now is the time to shift attention and ask not just what is emergent but what has actually emerged and whether it can be understood as post-industrial and within our existing frameworks on class. In other words, can we now talk about the making of a post-industrial working class?
Education, Employment and Policy: we seek contributions that ask what education, employment and policy might look like if they genuinely served post-industrial communities. The promise was that education would open doors, create social mobility and policy would ease the transition from the industrial to the knowledge economy. The reality is different. Through neoliberal logics, the marketisation of higher education has produced institutions shaped by metrics and competition (Radice, 2013), oriented toward narrow economic and employability agendas at the expense of the critical, adaptive sensibilities that wicked problems demand (Bowman et al, 2024). Giroux (2014) identifies this as neoliberalism's direct assault on higher education, hollowing out its capacity for genuinely critical thought - what Barnett (2019) calls a "malign thoughtlessness". As Bauman (2000) argued, we inhabit a condition of liquid modernity - one of rapid, disorienting change – yet education and employment policy have largely prioritised short-term indicators over what communities actually need.
Employment in post-industrial areas remains disproportionately insecure, low-paid and precarious, while the rise of AI brings new pressures on labour markets that policy is struggling to keep up with. Formal education has struggled to equip people for this landscape, and the burden has often fallen on community-based and informal learning to fill the gap. We welcome contributions on this theme from the UK and beyond, engaging from a range of perspectives, both empirical and theoretical. The aim of this theme is to be future-facing, moving toward possibility and away from retrotopia (Bauman, 2017), though all critically engaged work on this theme is welcome.