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‘It’s a small little pub, but everybody knew everybody’: pub culture, belonging and social change

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posted on 2024-03-21, 10:26 authored by Thomas Thurnell-ReadThomas Thurnell-Read
Public houses have long served an important social role in the United Kingdom, yet in recent decades the conditions under which they operate have changed dramatically. While research has examined adaptations in the pub sector, there is little analysis of how this relates to social change as experienced in the lives of individuals and communities. Pubs are therefore a useful topic of sociological inquiry. Using focus groups data, this article examines how people experience the changing form and function of pubs reveals insights into perceptions of social change. Findings show that participants were aware of how pub culture has changed over recent decades and that this was linked to perceptions of wider social and cultural changes in society. Talking about pub going was a means to express dynamic feelings of belonging and attachment, particularly where they arise at the intersection of personal life changes and wider social transformations.

Funding

Campaign to End Loneliness

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy

Published in

Sociology

Volume

58

Issue

2

Pages

420-436

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Publication date

2023-07-28

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0038-0385

eISSN

1469-8684

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Thomas Thurnell-Read. Deposit date: 3 August 2023

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