to a free market ideology. At the time of the Peckham interviews the policies were in circulation but have since been retired from public party discourse. Austerity policies have been directly linked by sociologists and in other disciplines to disproportionate impacts on, among others: working families with children, women of colour and pensioners. The legacy of austerity policy changes and sociological commentary continues to date.

The following report analyses attitudes to the economic in the context of these two intersecting policy strands – austerity and The Big Society. The method taken is a grounded theory approach to the secondary analysis of nine transcripts taken from ‘The Middle Classes and the City’ (2012) study. Analysis draws upon Strauss and Corbin’s (2008) procedures with particular use of: questioning, comparisons and negative case analysis.

Foucault’s theory of the modern state’s governmentality can be used to understand Peckham in 2012, at a time when the regulatory ‘instrument’ (Foucault 1977: 22) of fiscal intervention (in the form of welfare cuts) intersects the proposed ‘counter-conduct’ (Foucault 1977: 6) of civil society imagined in ‘The Big Society’ – that will, Foucault predicts, ultimately prevail over the state as we know it. It is a place where one participant (doctor, 20’s) suggests there is ‘nothing to particularly, to kind of rail against’ (P25) despite the landscape of public sector cuts. The statement is highly suggestive of the operation of subtle techniques that, Foucault suggests, allow the state to manage the collective in this way.

In my analysis I set out to understand how recession is factored into participant’s description of the present and projection of the future and to gauge participant’s attitudes to austerity policies through the transcripts. I find evidence of acceptance of Foucault’s stripped back state, one which delivers the ‘essential function of ensuring the security of the natural phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to population’ (birth, etc) (Foucault 1977: 58).