Pride and prejudice:: Discourses of normalisation in public and private accounts of home ownership

This paper fills a gap in the literature surrounding the social and economic consequences of the rapid and widespread growth of home ownership in Great Britain. Hitherto, the debate has focused on the causes and consequences of the 'residualisation' of social rented housing. It has been characterised by economic conceptions of power influenced by Weberian and Marxist social theory. Foucault's work on power has made few inroads into this debate. Drawing upon a reading of Foucault's work, it is argued in this paper that home ownership has been subject to a process of normalisation, and that this is at least as important as widely rehearsed coerced exchange and social exclusion arguments in explaining the labelling of social rented housing estates. Evidence for the normalisation of home ownership is presented through an analysis of selected landmark policy documents and in data collected as part of an ethnographic study of home owners in Bristol undertaken in the early 1990s. The paper contends that the normalisation of one form of housing consumption has been instrumental in legitimising the residualisation of social rented housing and that if policies to encourage social balance and area based regeneration are to be successful then strategies to challenge the power relationships constituted by these discourses are crucial.