Introduction - Norbert Elias
A Theoretical Essay on the Established and the Outsiders
Preface
Considerations of Procedure
Neighbourhood Relations in the Making
Overall Picture of Zone 1 and Zone 2
The Mother-Centred Families of Zone 2
Local Associations and the ′Old Families′ Network′
Overall Picture of Zone 3
Observations on Gossip
Young People in Winston Parva
Conclusion
The Established and the Outsiders, is a reissue of a study carried
out in the 1950s, while Elias was employed in the department of
sociology at the University of Leicester. It is safe to say that it
has been rescued from obscurity as part of the collective effort to
publish as much of Elias′s oeuvre as possible.... [The book] is
worth reading today primarily for the light it sheds on Elias′s
intellectual development. Those interested in this aspect can read
the introductory chapter, which was written by Elias ten years
after the original date of publication for the Dutch edition. Here,
Elias uncovers what he considers a universal human theme in the
small community of Winston Parva on the outskirts of Leicester....
This particular case study is itself interesting in that these
established and outsiders are formed out of the same social class,
the working class of the British Midlands, on the basis of
neighbourhood and life-style, not relation to the means of
production or ethnic or racial differences. As in all his work,
Elias uncovers here structural regularities which underlie
historical variations in human behaviour.... Norbert Elias and his
ardent followers have done sociology a great service in publishing
[the book] which help[s] keep alive his interest in the long-term
processes of social change. The "civilizing process" will remain a
powerful research program for an historical sociology... capable of
generating interesting case studies like The Established and the
Outsiders.
*Acta Sociologica*
The Established and the Outsiders was first published in 1965. It
grew out of a study of a community near Leicester in the late 1950s
and early 1960s by John Scotson, a local schoolteacher interested
in juvenile delinquency. But in the hands of Norbert Elias, one of
the century′s great sociologists, this local study was reworked to
illuminate social processes of general significance in human
society generally - including how a group of people can monopolise
power chances and use them to exclude and stigmatise members of
another very similar group (for example through the poweful medium
of gossip), and how that is experienced in the collective
`we-images′ of both groups. Ten years later Elias dictated, in
English, a long new introduction for the Dutch translation of the
book. This ′Theoretcial Essay on Established and Outsiders′ spelled
out how the theory could be applied to a whole range of changing
patterns of human inequality: to relations between classes, ethnic
groups, colonised and colonisers, men and women, parents and
children, gays and straights. For many years it was thought that
parts of the English text of this important essay had been lost,
but they came to light in 1994 after Elias′s death in 1990, and the
essay is now published in English for the first time in this
volume.
*Stephen Mennell*
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