This book has examined the relationship between inequality and social citizenship through the everyday accounts of notionally equal citizens in austerity Britain. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the phenomenological significance of inequality and social citizenship (for example, Andreouli and Howarth, 2013; Chase and Walker, 2013; Howarth et al, 2014). Against the backdrop of increased social fragmentation, this book has examined how citizens perceive and negotiate the material and status hierarchies that condition their lives. In doing so, it has sought to establish whether and how individuals experiencing relative deprivation and affluence develop distinctive modes of reference, attachment and engagement when it comes to welfare and social citizenship.

The chapters comprising this book have shown that poor and rich citizens make sense of their material and figurative position in different and patterned ways according to their respective social location and experience of inequality. These differences give rise to fault lines in the subjectivity and political agency of social citizens, which need to be understood within and as contributing towards systemic processes of inclusion and exclusion. Having said that, the distributional and figurative implications of this are far from linear or one-dimensional. As noted by previous studies, public orientations towards welfare, citizenship and inequality are often ‘complex, ambiguous and contradictory’ (Dean, 2004; Orton and Rowlingson, 2007: 40; Humpage, 2015). Within the context of rising structural inequality, the experiences, attitudes and practices of the general public are no less complicated and this book has shown that citizens make sense of and legitimise their own relationship to the welfare state and others through manifold cognitive and social processes. These processes are structured by the multiple private and public spaces that social citizens occupy in their everyday lives. The identities and associations that develop as a result can be weak, diffuse and fleeting but they can also be concentrated, lasting and strong (Isin and Wood, 1999). The diverse subject positions acquired, assumed and appropriated in contemporary everyday life give rise to complex attachments and orientations. This complexity is negotiated at the individual and collective level and a ‘person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position’ (Davies and Harré, 1990: 46).