Crisis and moral economy in Roubaix

Abstract

The concept of « moral economy », developed by Thompson, Scott and others, appears to be very helpful when focusing on « social answers to the crisis ». Based on an ongoing collective ethnographic investigation in Roubaix, a former textile-industry city in the North of France, this article examines the articulation of this sociological concept, and the current socio-economical context in this type of de-industrialized, relegated areas. These lower class territories determine lower classes' everyday life, but lower classes reciprocally contribute in shaping these territories. Lower classes have to build strategies to survive, in a daily fight for material and symbolic re-qualification. Moral economies, built in the context of neo-liberal political economy, despite it and/or against it, have become the field of subjective composition and re-composition of lower classes.