Ideology, domination and unemployment

Criticisms of the neo-Marxist dominant ideology thesis tend to under-emphasize the role which ideology plays in legitimating and sustaining systems of inequality, and instead to privilege explanations based on the ‘iron cage’ of economic and political relationships. A serious problem with some neo-Marxist analyses is the rather crude conceptualization of ideology which makes them susceptible to attack. Using material collected in Belfast amongst Protestant and Catholic working class, employed and unemployed, married men, this article seeks both to recast the notion of ideology, in particular to suggest that ideology would be better conceived not as a coherent, self-consistent system of ideas, but rather as a possibly contradictory set of themes whose primary importance lies in their specific, changing and tactical relationships to typical forms of practice, and also thereby to demonstrate how powerful and pervasive is the ideological dimension of domination.