Redundant Masculinities?

Employment Change and White Working Class Youth

Linda McDowell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405105866, 9781405105859
• eBook ISBN: 9781444355598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Redundant Masculinities? investigates the links between the so-called 'crisis of masculinity' and contemporary changes in the labour market through the lives of young working class men.

• Allows the voices of poorly-educated young men to be heard.
• Looks at how the labour market is changing.
• Emphasises the social construction of gender and racial identities.
• Dispels popular myths about the crisis in masculinity.

1

Introduction: Young, White, Male and Working Class

There is a virtual invisibility of the voices and concerns of adolescents and young adults in academic debates.

(Signs editorial 1998: 575)

This book is a study of gender as a social, cultural and economic force but also of individual young men and their lives in particular places. It is about ‘the way particular men created their manhood within the limits of their time and place’ (Rotundo 1993: x) and about meaning, power and the construction of identity at a particularly significant moment in the lives of young men: as they finish compulsory schooling and start to think about their future working lives. As Connell (1994: 14) has argued, ‘masculinities and femininities are actively constructed, not simply received’. Similarly, people are not just at the mercy of the social and economic transformations that have restructured the labour markets of British towns and cities in the last two decades or so. While these transformations may have affected the life chances of individuals, often for the worse, and changed the set of opportunities that are open to young people at the beginning their working lives, individuals and social groups are also agents in their own construction and in their responses to altered circumstances. My aim is to challenge the too-common assumptions in the media and also in social policy that working class young men, adversely affected by economic change, are idlers, layabouts or ‘yobs’. I want to show instead the often admirable efforts made by many young men on the verge of adulthood, and with few educational or social advantages, to acquire and hold down a job and to construct lives imbued with the values of domestic respectability, while negotiating the complex and often contradictory expectations associated with working class masculinity.

In the chapters that follow, the interrelationships between different forms of social inequalities and the ways in which they are lived out in local areas in different towns are investigated through the lens of a year in the lives of 24 young men who finished their compulsory schooling in the summer of 1999. For young people leaving school this is the beginning of a period of transition in their lives as they decide on their next steps. It is also a key moment when inequalities between young people begin to become particularly significant. Despite the huge class inequalities that are evident in the British school system (Adonis and Pollard 1998; Mortimore and Whitty 1997; Rutter 1979; Sparkes and Glennester 2002), until the age of 16, all children, theoretically at least, must attend full-time education and all of them sit the same set of school-leaving examinations. At 16, however, while most young people remain in the educational sector, a minority of young people, predominantly from working class families, leave school and begin to search for work. Twenty-five years ago, when Paul Willis (1977) investigated the lives of a group of young men living in a Midlands town, a majority of 16 year olds left school as soon as they could. In 1977, less than 25 per cent of the age group continued their full-time education, whereas at the end of the century, almost two-thirds of all 16 year olds stayed in full-time education, and many others were involved in some form of training. What was once the start of a transition into the labour market for most young people has now become exceptional, as the majority stay in full-time education and strive to attain the credentials that are increasingly important in gaining access to well-paid and permanent employment.

At the same time as the educational participation patterns of 16-year-olds changed, the labour market had also been transformed by the shift from manufacturing employment to the dominance of service-sector occupations. The types of work that most of Willis’s lads had walked into in 1977 – unskilled manufacturing work with relatively good rates of pay and some prospect of security – had virtually disappeared by 1999. For most 16-year-olds now, casual and insecure jobs in the service sector – in fast-food outlets, in shops and restaurants, as waiters, in bars, as cleaners – are what is widely advertised. This type of service-sector employment that increasingly dominates the labour market of most British towns and cities, provides fewer opportunities for steady and reasonably well-paid work for men than the manufacturing sector used to. Indeed, in a paper less often quoted than the 1977 book, Willis (1984) himself had noted that the prolonged period of unemployment in the early 1980s in Britain was affecting the traditional transition from school to the labour market, particularly for working class young men. He argued that in the early 1980s young men without a steady job were becoming less attractive to increasingly independent young women, and so not only was the transition into work disrupted but so too was the usual path into heterosexual relationships, marriage and family life: the correlates of the dominant version of masculine adulthood. His prescient arguments were, however, not to become common currency for a further two decades when the anxieties about young men’s successful attainment of heterosexual masculinity had become widespread. As I shall demonstrate later, in the UK, in contrast to the USA where race and ethnicity is a key part of the fin de siècle crisis of masculinity, these anxieties focused in particular on young white working class men who were portrayed as a social problem in school, at work and in urban public spaces.

The increasing dominance of service employment in contemporary Britain and, indeed, in the advanced industrial nations of the world in general, has been recognized as significant for more than poorly educated young men looking for work. A set of new debates about the changing expectations of employment and the impact of new working patterns on personal identity now dominate the academic and policy literature. These debates emphasize the growth of risk, uncertainty and insecurity in the labour market (Allen and Henry 1997; Bauman 1998; Beck 1992; Elliott and Atkinson 1999; Giddens 1991), even the potential corrosion of character in contemporary workplace relations (Sennett 1998), rather than the achievement of the status and respect that was traditionally associated with waged employment, especially for men. Waged employment, identified as a core element in the social construction of a masculine identity (Connell 1995), has altered in its nature and form and, in particular, in its associations with masculinity. Service-sector work, especially at the bottom end, demands care, deference and docility as key attributes of a desirable workplace identity – characteristics that are more commonly identified as feminine than masculine traits and it seems that women rather than men are now preferred employees (Bradley, Erickson, Stephenson and Williams 2000; Duster 1995; Leidner 1991, 1993). Indeed, for many men, and especially young men at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there seems to be growing evidence of a reversal of long-standing relationships between gender and achievement, as girls’ rates of achievement at school and at university improve, and between gender and employment chances that previously positioned girls and young women as the underachieving and disadvantaged group (Arnot, David and Weiner 1999). Men, it is claimed, are the new disadvantaged, trapped in relationships of dominance and aggression that penalize them in the public and the private spheres. Disadvantaged in the service sector, rejected as marriage partners as rates of divorce rise and women remain single longer, even biologically redundant as new technologies alter the social relations of reproduction, it is small wonder that growing numbers of men feel out of place in the new millennium. For young men in particular it is a difficult time to negotiate the transitions to adulthood and pathways to employment when traditional ways of becoming a man are increasingly less available.

In this book I investigate the ways in which the coincidence of these changing material circumstances and theoretical debates about new relationships between employment and gendered identities are affecting the attitudes and aspirations of young men in two British cities as they contemplate their transition from school to labour market participation. The particular group of men that I focus on is white English 15- to 16-year-olds with low educational achievement. There are several reasons for this focus. This group has perhaps been particularly adversely affected by economic change, but they are also currently neglected – indeed discriminated against – by social policy-makers. Young people’s eligibility for welfare benefits such as income support and housing benefit has been eliminated and they are also excluded from the new workfare programme introduced in the United Kingdom in 1998 – the so-called New Deal – which requires 18- to 24-year-olds to participate in workfare schemes in return for income support. A further reason for the focus on young men is the spread of debates about masculinity from arcane theoretical papers into the popular imagination. Since 1997 or so, there has been a consistent argument in the media that young men are facing a crisis of confidence. The popular and broadsheet press concur in their view that young men are a ‘lost generation’, caught, according to a comment in a Sunday broadsheet, ‘between the Nineties New Man and New Lad’ (Ardlidge 1999:13). The comments are repeated elsewhere in the media (Hill 1997; McInnes 1997) and are the topic of popular books about masculinity in the USA, from Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) to Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000); in Stephen Biddulph’s Manhood (1994) in Australia; and in the UK, where the radio psychiatrist Anthony Clare (2000) weighed in with his book On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. The arguments about crisis are variously supported by statistics about the rising rate of suicide among young men and, especially, by figures that demonstrate the relative successes of young women both in school-leaving examinations and in access to higher education. Boys and young men also truant more, offend more and are both more violent themselves and more at risk of violence than young women. While these latter differences are not new, the opening gender gap in educational performance at the age of 16 certainly is. Combined with the rapid rise in feminized service-sector employment opportunities in the majority of British towns and cities, masculinity is coming to be seen as a disadvantage rather than an advantage in labour market entry.

At the centre of the book are the voices of two groups of young men, whom I interviewed three times in the 12 months after they left school. One group lived in the northern deindustrializing town of Sheffield, the second in the expanding science-based and service-sector market town of Cambridge in East Anglia. As the comment at the chapter head suggests, there has been a perhaps surprising absence of the voices and opinions of young people themselves in these debates about gender and crisis, whether in press stories or in the work of social scientists. This absence persists despite the recent expansion of studies of childhood, school life and the transition to adult status (see e.g. Ashton, Maguire and Spilsbury 1990; Furlong 1992; Irwin 1995; Krahn and Lowe 1991; Lowe and Krahn 2000; Raffe 1988). It has been partially countered, however, by two recent British school-based studies of young men in secondary schooling (Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman 2002; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000), and a third study by Stephen Ball, Meg Maguire and Sheila Macrae (2000) following school leavers born in 1979 and 1980 into the labour market. In all three cases the research was undertaken in London. This latter book is similar in its aims to my work, although the so-called crisis of masculinity was not an explicit focus and the participants, of both sexes, came from a range of class backgrounds. In the other two studies, both of which focused explicitly on the social construction of masculinity during the transitional years of adolescence, the boys who were interviewed had not then left school. The boys interviewed by Stephen Frosh and his colleagues were aged between 11 and 13. The 44 boys whom Mike O’Donnell and Sue Sharpe interviewed were in year 11, and so aged 15 and 16, the same age as the boys in this book were when I first talked to them. O’Donnell and Sharpe asked their participants about work prospects, although in neither of these studies were the young men followed into the labour market, nor did they address geographical differences between local labour markets. All three of these excellent empirical studies provide a useful comparative basis for the work reported here.

It is now a common theme in recent ‘transition’ studies that childhood is a social construction that is historically and geographically specific (Aitken 1994; Aries 1962; Coffield, Borrill and Marshall 1986; Jones 1995; Jones and Wallace 1992; Katz 1991, 1993; Matthews and Limb 1999; Ruddick 1996; Valentine 1996, 2000; Winchester and Costello 1995). Further, it is recognized that in complex post-industrial societies the notion of transition itself is increasingly inappropriate as individuals pursue multiple and complex paths, sometimes concurrently (Coles 2000; Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Irwin 1995; James, Jenks and Prout 1998; MacDonald 1997, 1998), in times when the risks of failure are great, but chances of individual success are also correspondingly greater, less tramelled by conventional social markers such as class position or ethnicity (Beck 1992, 2000). In comparing the lives of young men in two cities I want to explore how these ideas of complexity and risk take different forms in particular places as individual choices are made in the context of geographically specific and differentiated sets of opportunities in the labour and the housing market. For young working class men, however, the risk society is not one in which more optimistic debates about individualization (Giddens 1991) or about new forms of aestheticized workplace performances (Bauman 1998) have much relevance. Rather, the structural constraints of economic transformation seem ever more likely to limit their options to poor work and membership of the expanding numbers of the working poor.

These young men were born in 1982 and 1983 when the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ that had such an impact on the lives of the working class in Britain was at its height. During the 1980s and early 1990s, as these boys moved through primary school into their secondary education, the impact of authoritarian populism and the New Right (Hall 1988; Hall and Martin 1983), of neo-liberal social and economic policies (Gamble 1994) and the deregulation of capital, restructured the social, economic and political landscapes of Britain (Hutton 1996). Welfare spending was cut, directly affecting many of the families in which these boys grew up, growing school choice adversely affected schools in poorer localities, and devolved budgets from the local education authority directly to schools made it harder for many schools to balance their budgets (Gamble and Kelly 1996). In the labour market the decline of employment in the manufacturing sector was marked and its impact felt most severely by men in northern towns such as Sheffield (Turok and Edge 1999). But in all cities, the gap between the poorest inhabitants and those with the greatest income and wealth and opportunities grew, affecting the boys growing up in Cambridge as well as those in Sheffield (Gregg and Wadsworth 1999; Hills, Le Grand and Paichaud 2002). One consequence of this growing polarization was an increase in the number of children living in poverty. In 1992–3, when these boys were 10, a third of all children in the UK were poor (Oppenheim 1998), including among them some of the boys whom I interviewed. This combination of economic transformation, labour market changes, welfare state restructuring and growing inequalities means that ‘young people now grow up in social, economic and political conditions radically different to those encountered by their parents’ generation in the post-war years of relative prosperity and social cohesion’ (MacDonald 1997: 20).

A general culture of individualism and an economic policy based on the supposed superiority of individual effort was a marked feature of the Thatcher years, perhaps best summed up in her claim that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, then, at a time of growing risks and uncertainty, people increasingly were held to be accountable for their own futures (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992). As these working class boys began to approach the end of their school lives, new Labour gained power but, despite the introduction of a number of innovative policies to improve the living standards of the poorest members of society, including the right to a minimum wage, the notion of individual effort continued to dominate economic and social policy, accompanied by a strong belief in the moral superiority of labour market participation for the largest possible number of people (McDowell 2001b; Peck 2001). At the same time, consumerism became an increasingly significant part of the social construction of identity, increasing the disadvantages of poor working class teenagers for whom many of the iconic goods of contemporary style were out of easy financial reach. In circumstances in which access to employment and consumption – key elements of the social construction of masculine identity – became increasingly uncertain for young men such as the ones whose lives are the focus here, questions about the pathways from school into early adulthood and the associations between employment, consumption and gendered identities gain increasing salience.

Theorizing Gender, Ethnicity and Class: Difference and Inequality

In recent years, questions about social identity have been at the forefront of the social sciences in exciting new theoretical work about the construction of difference. The notion of ‘difference’ and its significance in distinguishing ‘self’ from various culturally defined ‘others’ has dominated debates in many disciplines. In this work – loosely grouped under the heading of ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-structuralist’ – earlier notions of a stable, immutable sense of identity, typically rooted in social class position, have been disrupted. The significance of other dimensions of identity, especially gender and ethnicity, and their interconnections, has been recognized, as well as the provisional, tentative nature of identity which is theorized as an ongoing performance, variable in space and time, albeit regulated by social norms and cultural expectations (Butler 1990; Evans 1997; Friedman 1998). This approach to identity is sometimes termed a ‘relational perspective’ in which identity is theorized as a contingently defined social process, as a discursively constituted social relation, articulated through complex narratives. Thus as Somers (1994: 635) has argued:

Narrative identities are constituted by a person’s temporally and spatially variable place in culturally constructed stories composed of (breakable) rules, (variable) practices, binding (and unbinding) institutions, and the multiple plots of family, nation or economic life. More importantly, however, narratives are not incorporated into the self in any direct way; rather, they are mediated through the enormous spectrum of social and political institutions and practices that constitute our social world.

This quotation nicely captures the connections between material structures and social practices, as well as the complex and variable ways in which identities are plural and dynamic. Somers also insists on the significance of place – a recognition that has been of great significance for geographical understandings of social identity. Identity is constructed through social interactions in specific locations which themselves both reflect and affect the construction and performance of particular identities. For young men on the verge of leaving school, their sense of themselves as masculine, and increasingly as independent, is constructed through the intersection of institutional rules and acceptable (or unacceptable) behaviours in the school, the local streets, their homes and potential workplaces that construct and constrain them in their everyday lives as classed, gendered and raced subjects.

In the following sections I explore in more detail approaches to understanding gender, class and ethnicity as relational processes, endeavouring to spell out the interconnections between masculinity, class position and whiteness that construct the young men in this book as a complex and hybrid group whose ethnicity and gender – as white men – endows privilege in certain spheres, but whose age and class position – as working class adolescents – locates them as subordinate. Although class, gender and ethnicity are mutually constituted, for conceptual clarity and ease of presentation, I first address the burgeoning literature on masculinity.

Theorizing masculinity

For some years now there has been a recognition that masculinity, as well as femininity, deserves theoretical scrutiny. A large, and still rapidly expanding, literature has accepted the challenge, laid down initially in feminist theorizing, of defining and mapping the multiple ways of being a man. This literature has begun to explore from a range of theoretical perspectives the complex dynamics of power and identity and the relationships between class, ethnicity, age and other social characteristics that situate men in relationships of power and inequality with women and with other men in different ways in particular places and in different historical circumstances (Whitehead [2002] provides a useful summary of the different perspectives). In the early work on gender, especially in psychoanalytic approaches, femininity and masculinity were theorized as binary opposites – woman is what man is not, even absence or lack – and so women are defined as emotional compared to the rationality of men, the inferior other to the dominant masculine One. This binary construction, albeit reversed, still distinguishes some of the recent popular texts on masculinity (including Biddulph 1994; Bly 1990; A. Clare 2000) where the problems of men are analysed in terms of their inability to tap into their emotions, compared to women’s intuitive sensitivity to their own and others’ emotional needs.

In recent scholarly works, however, a more complex notion of masculinity is common. As Martain Mac an Ghaill (1996b) has documented in his survey of work in the area during the 1980s and 1990s, a wide range of literature about masculinity was published, drawing on sex roles, psychoanalysis and power theories, in disciplines including sociology, criminology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history and cultural studies (see e.g. Brittan 1989; Brod and Kaufman 1994; Clatterbaugh 1990; Connell 1987; Craig 1992; Dollimore 1991; Edley and Weatherell 1995; Edwards 1994; Hearn 1992; Jefferson 1994; Middleton 1992; Sedgwick 1994; Segal 1990; Sinfield 1998; Tolson 1977; Weeks 1991, 1989). Within this literature there was a common focus on the relationship between structure and agency, or society and the individual, as well as on the interconnections within and between gender, sexuality, class, ‘race’, ethnicity, nation, age. The ‘starting point [was] that masculinities are problematic, negotiated and contested within frameworks at the individual, organizational, cultural and societal levels’ (Mac an Ghaill 1996b: 2). In a forward-looking conclusion Mac an Ghaill suggested that the agenda for future research should include unpacking the complex links between masculinities, sexualities and power; analysing the cultural production of masculinities within local institutional sites; exploring the contextual contingencies, confusions and contradictions of contemporary forms of masculinity; and, in particular, making problematic dominant forms of heterosexuality in a male-dominated society. Building on his agenda, recent analyses, many of which have adopted an ethnographic approach, have addressed the complex constitution of masculinities in a wide range of different sites and locations (see e.g. Barrett 1996; Collinson andHearn 1994; Connell2000; Craig 1992; Edwards 1994;Kerfoot1999; Massey 1995; McDowell 2001a; Middleton 1992; Nardi 1999; Poynting, Noble and Tabar 1998; Segal 2000; Sweetman 1997; Walker 1998; see also the useful surveys in Whitehead 2002; and Whitehead and Barrett 2001).

The focus on multiple masculinities and their specificity owes a great deal to the pioneering work of the sociologist Bob Connell who has been a key theorist here, as well as producing a whole range of stimulating empirical work about a range of masculinities. In a recent book (Connell 2000), pulling together not only his own work over a decade and a half but also summarizing the field more generally, Connell suggests that the new social research on masculinity is defined by a set of key propositions or arguments that emphasize both the variations, across time and space, in the construction of masculinities as well as evidence of hierarchical social relations, not only between men and women, but within and between groups of men. The first of his propositions is that masculinities take multiple forms, constructed differently across cultures and in different time periods as well as across a range of spatial scales. Thus there are both large- and small-scale, relatively enduring as well as more flexible, differences in what it means to be a man. As Connell (2000:10) notes, there are ‘different ways of enacting manhood, different ways of learning to be a man, different conceptions of the self and different ways of using a male body’. For young men, this emphasis on learning how to be a man is a key part of the transition from childhood to adult manhood. Differences between social constructions of masculinity not only vary between nations – as Gilmore (1993) has illustrated in a cross-cultural review of manhood, in some non-western societies generosity, selflessness and nurturing are masculine attributes – but also between and within particular spaces and social settings. Research on schools (Ball, Maguire and Macrae 2000; Connell 1989, 1994; Dixon 1997; Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman 2002; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000; Segal 2000), for example, has shown not only how you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Plates
• Tables
• Preface
• 1: Introduction: Young, White, Male and Working Class
• 2: The Rise of Poor Work: Employment Restructuring and Changing Class and Gender Identities
• 3: The Contemporary Crisis of Masculinity: It’s Hard to Be(come) a Man
• 4: Living on the Edge: Marginal Lives in Cambridge and Sheffield
• 5: Leaving School: Pathways to Employment and Further Education
• 6: Actively Seeking Employment: Committed Workers and Reluctant Learners
• 7: Uncertain Transitions: Accidental and Incidental Workers, the Excluded, and Escape Attempts
• 8: Performing Identity: Protest and Domestic Masculinities
• 9: Conclusions: What Is to Be Done about Boys?
• Postscript: Two Years Later
• Appendix 1: Research Methodology
• Appendix 2 The Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index