Conclusion: Three Challenges to the Exportation of Sociological Knowledge

Abstract

We have seen plenty of evidence in the foregoing pages that the post-crisis politics of austerity, and the longer-term neoliberal orthodoxy from which they spring, hardly meet the criteria of ‘fairness’ set by those who pursue them. Far from the burden being shared equally amongst the populace or the capital-rich shouldering the greatest weight of government belt-tightening, as claimed, it is those lacking the resources valued within Western societies — the unemployed, the low-paid, those with fewer qualifications, the dominated — who suffer most, who disproportionately endure the agonising material and symbolic privations of economic crises and state retrenchment, who have their only modes of attaining recognition remorselessly devalued and who have their reasonable aspirations and hopes for the future closed down. Whether it is school pupils or parents forced to think of themselves as unconstrained, responsible choosers but without the social conditions to make the ‘right’ choices, first-generation university students battling the constraints of their inherited capital to attain the educational outcomes vaunted by the dominant, families struggling with the loss of that which once furnished some degree of self-worth or communities and modes of living disregarded or assaulted by the discourse and policies of the ‘Big Society’, this conclusion — a collective conclusion — holds firm.