This chapter is based on the results of in-depth interviews with different types of landlords owning and renting residential property in Hackney and Islington. In Chapter 3 we argued that attempts to classify landlords have often been marred by inadequate conceptualisation; that analyses have tended to accept rather uncritically the convention of classifying landlords by the number of properties they own and their legal status. We then proposed an alternative classification of landlords based upon the differences in their historical, ideological and economic characteristics, and identified six causally structured groups. Here we focus upon each of these groups in turn, to show how the actual characteristics of individual members within a group combine to admit the possibility of emergent causal powers.

If we take seriously the idea that landlords may be considered as a series of structured groups then we should be able to subject such a notion to empirical scrutiny. Indeed this is the rationale for intensive research; it offers the possibility of investigating the structural relations that bind particular groups and identifies certain social practices that would very likely be glossed over in more formal, extensive modes of research. There are, of course, attendant risks connected with this approach.

The main purpose of this chapter is to show how the particular characteristics of local housing markets at a point in time, modify, realise or constrain the emergent causal powers landlords possess by virtue of their membership of a particular group. Whether and how the causal powers of different groups of landlords operate depends upon certain social conditions, that is, upon their interaction with certain kinds of contingent circumstances and events. This chapter will attempt to unravel several different strands of this type of explanation. The first strand is the association between the different groups of landlords, inscribed with potential ways of acting, and the three possible courses of action outlined in Chapter 2: reinvestment, disinvestment and informalisation, and their various sub-trends. Whatever strategy or strategies are pursued by groups of landlords cannot be known in advance of the second strand, the nature of the housing markets in which they operate. Landlords in our extensive study, with certain exceptions, mainly operated across two local authority areas – a geographical space that is differentiated by type of property, degrees of environmental attactiveness and by accessibility to a range of local goods and services. In turn these different characteristics affect the way in which rents and house prices vary across space and so rates of profit from reletting or sale.

Who were the 235 households in Hackney and the 302 in Islington who eventually gained enough points to rise to the top of the exceedingly long waiting lists in these inner city boroughs? Some of them had been registered on the waiting list for appallingly long periods, in one case almost fifty years, others for a few months only. Not surprisingly, given the overall levels of housing need in these two boroughs, the housing conditions of most applicants were appalling. The statistics in Table 1 delineate the general outlines of who lives in poor housing in the private rented sector in inner London. Colour and detail is added to the story by the case studies at the end of this appendix. The households in this sector of the housing market who eventually rise to the top of the housing waiting list are, in the main, people living in atrocious conditions of poverty. There are two main groups of people included in the samples. First, there is a group of what might be called residual or traditional tenants. These are very elderly households, single and married pensioners who have lived in the private rented sector all their lives. At the time at which they were setting up independent households, in the 1920s and 1930s mainly, the private landlord still housed the majority of British households.

In the preceding chapter we outlined our critique of the existing classification of the structure of private landlordism and proposed a new classification. In the succeeding chapters we present the results of empirical research into the structure of landlordism in two inner London boroughs – Hackney and Islington – at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, followed by a chapter that tackles the difficult question of policy recommendations to effect change in this sector of the housing market. In this chapter we outline the methods that we adopted in the empirical research. Before doing so, we wish to point out that in this type of social science research there are important interconnections between classification, empirical research and policy recommendations. Despite presenting the chapters in this order, the different processes are interconnected and we found it difficult to separate them completely.

In fact, the chapters follow a ‘logic’ of presentation rather than the overlapping sequence of our method of working. The reconceptualisation of the workings of the private rented housing market and those who organise and shape it did not take place in some autonomous realm separate from or prior to submersion in empirical detail. Working with a selection of secondary sources such as the publications of the British Property Federation, the Small Landlords Association, Shelter, government surveys, in particular Paley's Attitudes to Lettings (1978), and a number of academic sources, we built up a tentative understanding of types of landlords operating in the market.

There is no simple, unmediated relation between explanation and policy; not, that is, in the sense that actual policy recommendations are determined by the type of explanation adopted. The adoption of a particular explanatory approach however, we would argue, does influence the scope and form of policy recommendations. Central to the realist-type explanation of decline in rented accommodation set out in the preceding chapters is the notion of diversity, the diverse impact of general processes of housing change such as rental disinvestment and investment within a variety of housing markets. In particular, we have drawn attention to the complex effects of the activities of different types of private landlords in different areas. And from this focus two relatively clear policy directions would appear to follow.

First, the need to devise policies which can discriminate between different types of landlords in order to meet the variety of rented housing need in different locations. Certain types of landlords, in particular commercial landlords, are unlikely to be in a position to provide secure, reasonably priced, rented accommodation whatever the rented housing need of an area. Other groups of landlords, however, may be in a position to adequately meet certain types of rented housing need in particular areas.

The private rented sector of the housing market, for all its overall decline, has remained an object of interest and fascination to researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Each, from their own perspective, have attempted to describe and explain the key attributes of this decline. What we hope we have done here is to provide a new perspective, a different way of looking at the changes that have taken place in this sector of the market since 1945. The arguments in this book cross established disciplinary boundaries. We draw upon evidence from many areas but if we are to be classified at all we fall into what may be termed the ‘new geography’ with its concern to link the particular to the general; that is to preserve both aspects of social change in one explanation. We attempt to explain the general decline of the private rented market in Britain, the wider processes of investment and disinvestment which lie behind the decline, without losing sight of particular form that the processes have taken in different local housing markets.

This book is the end product of an enjoyable research collaboration between the two authors over a six year period at the Open University.

The declining share of domestic property owned by private landlords has been a well-established feature of the British housing market for many years. Numerous general studies, conventionally relying on analysis by tenure, have documented, in more or less detail, this decline since 1914 (Cullingworth, 1963; Eversley, 1975; Greve, 1965; Nevitt, 1966). A figure of 90 per cent of all households living in privately rented property in 1914 is generally accepted as the basis from which the decline started, dwindling to a minority provision at whatever date the various studies terminate. However, private landlords still, in 1981, housed two million households, or 4.8 million people, a sizeable minority in itself and, in addition held vacant a proportion (2 per cent of all dwellings but 40 per cent of all vacancies in England and Wales in 1977 (Bone and Mason, 1980)) of the housing stock of this country, in anticipation either of reletting or selling. As well as being a sizeable, and highly contentious phenomenon – arguments about the pros and cons of residential letting, size of returns, concentration of housing problems in this sector are legion (Cullingworth, 1972, 1979; Murie et al., 1976; Short, 1982). We argued in the introduction that the dimensions of the decline of private landlords have not yet been adequately revealed, nor have the practices of landlords themselves been fully understood.

The background to the research reported here is located in two General Elections in Britain, 1964 and 1979. In the 1964 election, housing assumed a central political role, which indirectly can be traced to the activities of one west London private landlord named Rachman. Interest in Rachman was the by-product of the Profumo Affair, a ministerial sex scandal, which rocked the Conservative Government and led to its downfall in 1964 (see Green, 1979). Rachman and his rent collectors provided the key issue over which the 1964 election was fought: the poor physical condition of the housing stock, the absolute need for housing and the necessity for the state to intervene in housing to remove the worst excesses of the private provision of housing. In the early 1960s, private rented housing comprised approximately one-third of the housing stock in England and Wales, and in urban areas such as Greater London the majority of households were private tenants. At that time, private rented housing provision was a significant political issue.

It was not until 1979 that housing reappeared as a crucial election issue, but in the context of a radically new debate and a new set of policy issues. The focus of the debate over housing was no longer the problem of supply, the condition of the housing stock, but rather one of demand, the problem of tenure.

The previous chapter traced the structured but uneven decline of the private rented housing sector and argued that three processes, disinvestment, investment and informalisation, were significant in accounting for the changing pattern of private renting. In this chapter we turn our attention from the processes themselves to the agents who are involved in these processes. It is clear that private landlords are a diverse and heterogeneous social group and much of the literature on landlords and the rented housing market has attempted to reveal the diversity of their actions in the market place: the extent to which tenancies have been converted from unfurnished to furnished, the lack of amenities in rented housing, the number of improved properties, the extent of sales to owner-occupation, and so forth. Such studies, as noted in the previous chapter, have indeed contributed to our understanding of the changes that have occurred in the rented housing market, but they have often left us with little detailed knowledge of who is actually carrying out these actions or why they were undertaken. There is a methodological gap between the exhaustive detail with which landlords' activities are plotted and the analytical skills used to classify the nature and characteristics of different types of landlords.

We selected our sample for the intensive and extensive surveys from the records of households who had recently been rehoused by their local authority from the private rented sector into council accommodation. This gave us a sample of lettings in which a complete or partial vacancy had been created as, at each address we selected, at least one household space had been vacated in the recent past.

When an individual or household applies for rehousing by a local authority, details of that household's personal and housing circumstances are recorded. These include information about family structure, the applicant's employment circumstances and housing conditions. For those applicants living in the private rented sector the landlord's name and address, if known, is recorded, as well as the name of the agent or other person to whom rent is paid. Thus these records provide a list, albeit partial and incomplete, of a proportion of the landlords who own property in these boroughs.

The sample was chosen from a list of those households who had been registered on the housing waiting list for varying lengths of time, and had been rehoused by Hackney and Islington over a two year period, ending in May 1980 in Hackney and September 1979 in Islington.

There is a certain irony in the decline of organized labor and the problematic status of federal labor policy. Although union contracts protect fewer workers from employers' arbitrary decisions, and the National Labor Relations Board appears less reliable in protecting workers' rights as defined by collective bargaining agreements, employers' discretion regarding the treatment of their employees actually seems to have narrowed over the past decade. At the local level, experiments with new forms of labor–management collaboration in nonunion settings have sometimes involved considerable commitment of employers to the welfare of their workers; quasi-union conditions are typical in these settings. In union situations, there have been attempts to broaden workers' discretion in the production process in the hope of increasing labor productivity (witness the partnerships between the United Auto Workers Union and General Motors Corporation in the Saturn Project and the NUMMI plant).

At a broader level, there have been important state-level public policy innovations in nonunion labor–management relations, especially involving limits upon employers' rights of dismissal. Many states have modified the applicability of employment-at-will, the common law doctrine controlling employment relations in nonunion, noncollective bargaining situations. As proscribed in the leading case Payne v. The Western & Atlantic Railroad (1884), employment-at-will provides employers with the right to hire and fire for any reason or no reason, at whatever time they desire. Originally, employment-at-will was simply a practice, legitimated by case law as opposed to statute.

We have come a long way in this book. It began with a brief statement on the importance of a community-oriented perspective for understanding the current crisis of organized labor, and moved quickly to two case studies which sketched some of the basic issues. This relatively simple presentation of the book's underlying thesis was replaced chapter by chapter with more complex interpretations of the intersection between unions and communities. In this way, other ingredients were added to my thesis and were evaluated in terms of their significance. Included were analyses of the impacts of geographical and economic restructuring and the tensions involved in orchestrating international union solidarity. From empirical models of unions' performance in representation elections through to detailed case studies of institutions and the status of labor law, my goal was to illustrate the many different ways of understanding the union–community connection.

At the outset I noted that no one test of the union–community connection would be introduced to demonstrate its utility for understanding the current crisis of organized labor. In this sense, I do not claim to have proved my case, as a simple-minded empiricist might want me to proclaim. Indeed, the various ways shown of conceptualizing the union–community connection should be reason enough to suppose that any one test would be inadequate. Nevertheless, by itself each way of illustrating the union–community connection provides an empirical perspective on the problems facing the American labor movement.