Locality

There have been many debates within social science about the importance of locality in shaping people's experiences. In some of these debates, locality is the key concept used; in others, analysis is framed around ideas of community or neighborhood. All such terms carry with them different connotations, but equally all in essence are concerned with the ways in which the more or less local impacts the structure of social relationships in which people are involved. The term more or less local is deliberately vague as what different researchers take locality to mean varies significantly, depending on the research questions they are addressing. For some, the remit of the word or application of the concept is highly local; for others, the reference may be to a city or a larger conglomeration or even a region. Whatever the unit in question, the focal concern is with the relationship between the social and economic structure of relatively proximate geographical space on people's experiences and lifestyles, including their consumption practices.

Much of the early research into localities was driven by a concern to understand the basis of community solidarity, in line with popular—and longstanding—theorizing that community life had experienced significant decline with urban and industrial development. Oversimplifying somewhat, two main traditions can be identified within this perspective. First, there was research that focused on local personal and social connection. This research examined the extent to which individuals were reliant on others (family, friends, neighbors) who also lived in that locality and dependent on the institutions (shops, employment, leisure facilities) found there. Its dominant questions concerned the extent to which people were socially and economically embedded in localities, a matter which was inevitably differentiated by, among other factors, class, gender, and life-course position.

The second (linked) tradition was more concerned with the institutional relationships within a community. It focused more on the structure of the local social system, including organizational linkages and the mechanisms by which different groupings sought to protect their political and economic interests. Although much interesting research developed, especially in the mid-twentieth century, around this second perspective, its weaknesses became increasingly apparent. In particular, in the highly connected world of contemporary commercial society, it was recognized that people's life chances and lifestyles could never be properly understood through focusing solely on local social organization and institutional connection.

Despite such theoretical critiques, many of the core questions about locality remain important for understanding people's experiences. Notwithstanding the impact of globalization, the local—in its different formulations—still represents a prime site in which lifestyles are constructed and resources contested and consumed. That is, while many of the decisions that shape the social and economic character of particular areas are consequent on actions taken outside the local sphere, responses to these wider structural occurrences are often framed at a local or regional level. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized that the local now needs to be understood “through the lens of global relationships” (Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst 2005, 3). In other words, rather than rendering the local as unimportant, globalization adds fresh complexities to the patterning of local social, economic, and political relationships. As Doreen Massey (1991, 29) contends, we need to think in terms of “a global sense of the local, a global sense [Page 871]of place.” Her argument is that globalization does not equate to the homogenization of locality. Rather, the mixture of local and global in different localities is itself “yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place.”

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