From Labouring to Learning

Working-Class Masculinities, Education and De-Industrialization

Michael R.M. Ward

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137441744
• eBook ISBN: 9781137441751
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

Highly Commended in the Society of Educational Studies Book PrizeThis book explores how economic changes and the growing importance of educational qualifications in a shrinking labour market, particularly effects marginalized young men. It follows a group of young working-class men in a de-industrial community and challenges commonly held representations that often appear in the media and in policy discourses which portray them as feckless, out of control, educational failures and lacking aspiration. Ward argues that for a group of young men in a community of social and economic deprivation, expectations and transitions to adulthood are framed through the industrial legacy of geographically and historically shaped class and gender codes. These codes have an impact on what it means to be a man and what behaviour is deemed acceptable and what is not.

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Introduction

This book describes the lives of a group of young working-class men in a de-industrialized community in the South Wales Valleys (UK). Using a longitudinal ethnographic approach, I focus on how young men’s masculinities are performed across a variety of educational and leisure spaces and indicate how social, economic and cultural processes impact on the formation of identity. In detailing these processes, this study contributes to the literature on young masculinities by describing how place can impact on the formation of a masculine self and also how everyday experiences within specific places and spaces can shape the way education and schooling are viewed. Ideas and issues drawn from Erving Goffman’s work on the performance of self and the formation of social identity are central to the theoretical basis of the book, and the research adds to symbolic interactionist tradition. When applied to masculinities (and femininities), this framework highlights how gender comes into being through socially constructed performances which are acceptable in a given situation, setting or community, not as innate biological accomplishments but as dramaturgical tasks (Goffman, 1977; West and Zimmerman, 1987; Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009). This study is the first to look at these issues within a Welsh context, and the findings suggest that young men can only be analysed within separate historical and geographical contexts and through the social construction of gender within specific places. This focus on the local enables the complexity of multiple identities and fluid relationships in certain areas to be explored and to illustrate how young marginalized men deal with social and economic changes in different ways. The chameleonisation of masculinity metaphor, which is outlined in this book, is put forward in an attempt to understand these processes further.

At the centre of the study are the key questions which guided the research. How are young working-class men living in the Valleys adapting to change in insecure times and making sense of their position as they make the transition to adulthood? When young men are left with the historical legacy of industrial labour, do they perform and articulate traditional forms of masculinity in particular ways and by different means? In educational contexts, how do academic and/or vocational subjects impact upon specific classed masculine subjectivities? What are the broader social and spatial networks within the community (e.g. family, sports, nightlife, fast cars, music, sex) that mediate the identities of these young men and how do space and place impact who they can be and become?

Over two and a half years, I attempted to answer these questions by conducting fieldwork and following the educational and social lives of a cohort of young men (born between September 1991 and August 1992) in one town I refer to as Cwm Dyffryn.¹ From their last few months of compulsory schooling in the spring of 2008, to the autumn of 2010, when some of these young men entered university, I explore how these young lives are played out. To develop the study from the perspectives of the young men, methods such as participant observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews and ethnographic conversations with individuals and groups of boys, teachers, caretakers, receptionists, secretaries, bus drivers, parents and even (on one occasion) a baroness (who visited the central school site) were conducted (see Chapters 3–7). Areas of observation included taking part in different lessons, time in the common room, the library, the lunch hall and the playground, but also other educational arenas such Further Education (FE) college classrooms and vocational spaces, such as mechanical engineering workshops and stables used for equine studies courses. As Connell (1989) noted, research on schooling is usually confined to the school and has the potential to miss other factors and influences that impact on young men’s gender identities. Therefore in keeping with other researchers who have looked at multiple spaces of gender production (Nayak, 2003a, b, 2006), my research was undertaken across other arenas in order to provide a rich ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of their lives. This importantly led to a more meaningful and intricate understanding of how they understood and represented their world. Other regions of interaction including general ‘hanging out’ in the cars they drove, the fast food places they ate in, the pubs and nightclubs they drank and danced in, university open days and places of work such as sports centres, bars and supermarkets. I was also invited to attend sports events, to go shopping or to the cinema and important social occasions such as 18th birthday parties and on one occasion a lap dancing club (see Chapter 4). Online social networking sites such as Facebook were further used to communicate with the young men when away from the field. Finally, as the prologue made painfully clear, this also included the funeral of one of the young men from the study who died in a car accident.

In the opening chapter, I discuss the background to the study by looking at the changing transitions from school to work that have overtly affected young working-class men since the late 1970s and the impact this has had on contemporary forms of masculinity. I then turn to focus on the perceived ‘crisis’ in masculinity or the ‘war on boys’ that has accompanied these changes and the role sociology has played in understanding and theorizing men and masculinities. To conclude the chapter, I consider the part my own biography has played in shaping this study, before describing the structure of the rest of the book.

Changing transitions from school to work

The end of compulsory schooling is a key period of transition, when young people make decisions about their futures and when social inequalities really begin to sediment. When the school-leaving age in the UK was raised to 16 in 1972, many young people, especially working-class men (Willis, 1977), left school at this age. But with de-industrialization and shifts in the mode of production to other countries, entry to the labour market at 16 has now become the exception rather than the norm. The majority of young people in the UK (and in other countries in the global North) now continue in education not only to gain qualifications which will supposedly make them more employable, but because there are few other options available to them.

Since the late 1970s, the education systems of countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have undergone major reforms leading to education and training becoming key strategies within economic and social policy. McDowell (2003) emphasizes these differences in the UK, reporting that in 1979, 47% of adult men had no formal qualifications, compared to 61% of adult women. By the end of the millennium, things had altered with only 15% of adult men and 21% of adult women being without qualifications. In keeping with the trends of OECD countries, educational polices by the Welsh Government such as The Learning Country (Welsh Assembly Government [WAG], 2001), Learning Country, Learning Pathways 14–19 (WAG, 2002) and The Learning Country 2: Delivering the Promise (WAG, 2006a) have been implemented with the intention of transforming the 14–19 curriculum. The Welsh Government sees this as a key area that will shape the country’s economic and social future providing a highly skilled workforce. Alongside more young people ‘choosing’ to continue in post-16 education in the UK, there are also more young people entering university than ever before. However, middle-class young people have been the chief beneficiaries of such changes (Reay et al., 2005; Bradley and Ingram, 2012), and there are still more working-class young male school-leavers in the UK without qualifications or with the lowest levels of educational attainment than almost any other group (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000; Gillborn, 2009).

As de-industrialization has continued, working-class young men are no longer likely to be ‘learning to labour’ (Willis, 1977) but ‘learning to serve’ (McDowell, 2000) in different industries to those in the past. The performances of a masculine self which accompany these newer industries are highly contradictory to what came before (Kenway et al., 2006; Walkerdine, 2010; McDowell, 2012). The service sector has, to a certain extent, replaced many of the former industries that would have employed those who left school at the earliest opportunity, but these jobs require different skills and attributes from those they replaced. On the one hand, there is the low-paid, low-skilled and repetitively unrewarding work found in telephone call centres, fast food outlets, shops, restaurants, bars or as cleaners, whilst on the other hand there are the high-paid, highly qualified, high-tech service jobs that are said to typify the ‘knowledge economy’. The first version of service jobs lack mobility, security and some would argue satisfaction and the majority of these do not require high levels of qualifications. Some are often ‘outsourced’ to low-wage economies in poorer countries in the global South, such as India or Bangladesh. The second version of service jobs are based on higher educational qualifications, smaller in number and financially secure. But in times of recession, even these could be seen as being at risk and there is no guarantee of a ‘job for life’ in any sector of the economy. Accompanying these changes, a new set of theoretical debates has emerged in sociological theory and in policy discourse over the last two decades. This literature has sought to explore how the transformation of the labour market has impacted upon both employment and personal identity highlighting the growing uncertainty, insecurity and risk many people face in post-modernity (Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 1998; Beck, 1999; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). As access to education and employment opportunities become gradually more uncertain, the impact this has on the social construction of masculine identities, especially for marginalized young men, becomes increasingly important.

Crisis in masculinity?

The changes in status and forms of employment patterns have also been accompanied by a common assumption that appears to have developed in the media and public policy since the mid-1990s indicating that there is an apparent ‘crisis’ in contemporary forms of masculinity or a ‘war on boys’ across the globe (MacInnes, 1998; Clare, 2000; Hoff-Sommers, 2000, 2013). Men, it has been claimed, are now the new disadvantaged. In 2010, The Times² newspaper dedicated a 35-page special publication to this ‘crisis’, and the discourse reared its head again in public debate in the spring of 2013 after a speech by the then UK Labour shadow public health minister Diane Abbott (Syal, 2013; Roberts, 2014). She argued that ‘Britain’s Crisis of Masculinity’ was a result of economic and social change, greatly affecting male identity and that as a result there was a great lack of respect from men towards women and overt homophobia in contemporary society.

A further persistent media discourse suggests that it is now girls who are achieving in schools and becoming the more advantaged group to the supposed disadvantage of boys (Weiner et al., 1997; Epstein et al., 1998; Martino and Meyenn, 2001; Segal, 2007; Francis et al., 2012). These arguments of ‘crisis’ are reportedly additionally manifested through uncertainties around social roles, sexuality, high rates of suicide, truancy levels, the use of violence by young men and a lack of male role models (Tarrant et al., 2015).³ Yet, what some studies have shown is that the loss of well-paid, secure, industrial and manufacturing jobs which has deeply affected the towns and cities that relied on these industries overtly disadvantages some subgroups of men over others (see MacLeod, 1995; Anderson, 1999; Arnot, 2004; Kenway et al., 2006; Weis, 2006, 2008; Ward, 2014). A second body of literature would argue that not all men are suffering this ‘crisis’ equally. In regard to educational achievement, in particular, there has historically been an issue with working-class white and black boys who have tended to achieve less well than their more privileged counterparts (McDowell, 2007; Nayak, 2009; Skeggs, 2009; Ingram, 2011). Further, there seems to be an implicit blaming of girls, teachers and feminists for this ‘crisis’ (Weaver-Hightower, 2008; Lingard et al., 2009) and a neglect of the fact that a large number of working-class girls are also not achieving the top grades. Further work by Gillborn and Mirza (2000) and Gillborn (2009) show that the biggest differences in educational outcomes are more to do with class and ethnicity combined, rather than gender (see also Francis, 2000; Francis and Skelton, 2005; Skelton and Francis, 2009; Roberts, 2014).

Despite this recent ‘moral panic’, we must view these arguments with a degree of scepticism. First, this concept continues to suggest an overly simplistic view of gender which only portrays masculinity and femininity as ‘natural’ differences between men and women (Connell, 1995). These ‘supposed’ opposites are formed through biological differences, psychology, social functions and aspirations. Second, as men still tend to operate all the key positions of authority and control throughout society through church, finance, education, media, government and forms of world power (Connell, 2009), these issues may not really be linked to a ‘crisis’ of masculinity at all, but more to one of social class inequality. Furthermore as Morgan (2006) asks, what does the term ‘crisis’ actually infer? Does the term refer to individual men or is it linked to all men? Does it apply to certain forms of masculinity or only dominant forms of masculinity? As Beynon (2002) has suggested, this ‘crisis’ is also not a new phenomenon, it is just the latest expression of a long debate going back over the past few centuries; Beynon lists the Boy Scout movement as just one example of an institution that was organized to ‘rescue men’ and equip Britain with the right type of men, fit to build an empire around at the start of the 20th century. Connell (1995), in addition, offers a list of other challenges to masculinity which have gone back even further to the Renaissance period, the growth of commercial capitalism and the development of war in Europe.

If such a ‘crisis’ does exist, it has roots in a number of political, social and economic areas that do not affect all men equally. Connell’s (1995) ‘crisis of the gender order’ could be a better term as the practices of patriarchy are certainly by no means under threat. What is clear is that the development of a ‘crisis’ discourse overtakes other issues of poverty, racism and structural inequalities that impact on wider society. Furthermore, alongside these issues, there appears to be a lack of understanding that the definition of masculinity is a continual changing process over history and within and between different times, cultures and places.

The sociology of masculinities

Sociologists have approached masculinity as a multiplicity of different gendered practices enacted by men, whose bodies are assumed to be biologically male.⁴ Early in the 20th century, psychologists and psychoanalysts became increasingly concerned with distinguishing between men and women (Connell, 1995; Kimmel, 1996). As a result, a ‘normal’ adult came to be defined in terms of their adjustment to their own ‘sex role’ (Pleck, 1987). Sociologists such as the structural functionalist Talcott Parsons (1954) increasingly saw these ‘sex roles’ as fundamental to the ordering of families, the economy and wider society. These ‘sex roles’ created a strong distinction between men and women, and Parsons suggested that any deviation from the roles of women as primary caregivers and men as breadwinners would create ‘role strain’ and ultimately weaken society. However, there were also other scholars writing at the same time, who although they did not address the issues of masculinity or gender directly, did indicate that there were differences within, as well as between, the sexes. As Goffman (1963: 128) states:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports…Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself – during moments at least – as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior.

It is clear that some, like Goffman, were beginning to highlight that a more nuanced approach to gender was required. Although first wave feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1989), had begun to challenge ‘sex roles’ towards the end of the 18th century, and the suffragette movement in the UK continued to fight for gender equality in terms of voting rights for women in the 1910s and 1920s, it was not until the growth of the women’s movement in the 1970s that feminist theorists really began to explore and challenge ‘sex role’ theory. Some feminists began analysing how power was embedded in these ‘sex roles’ and how relations between men and women were social, rather than natural, and therefore an identity formation ultimately created through patriarchal inequality (Hartman, 1976; Delphy, 1977; Kessler and McKenna, 1978). Pascoe (2007: 6) suggests that Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976) and Nancy Chodorow (1978), working within a psychoanalytic framework, argued that contemporary masculinity:

is the result of a family system in which women mother. Identification with a mother as primary caregiver provides much more problematic for a boy than for a girl child, producing a self we understand as masculine characterised by defensive ego boundaries and repudiation of femininity.

Feminist psychoanalytic theorists associated masculinity with a search for independence and separation from a feminine ‘other’.

The feminist movement directly influenced the growing literature on the sociology of masculinity (Tolson, 1977), and as Morgan (1992: 6) put it, ‘feminism provided the context, the overall set of assumptions within which the current studies of men and masculinities’ were conducted. As an area of study, research on masculinities did not really develop until feminists began to challenge taken-for-granted political and social traditions, thus offering radical implications for men (Brittan, 1989). Nonetheless, it was with the publication of ‘Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity’, the paper by Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1985), that a new model for understanding masculinities really began to emerge and illustrated how masculinity was linked to power relations amongst men, as well as over women. This paper highlighted the links between masculinity and heterosexuality, emphasizing that not all men were equal players in the patriarchal oppression of women. This enabled masculinity to be defined not as one single character trait (returning to a theme Goffman initially highlighted 20 years previously), but as a form of domination and as collective male practice.

Since the publication of Carrigan, Connell and Lee’s (1985) and Connell’s (1987) significant contribution, a growing body of sociological work has developed that has sought to understand patterns of masculinity and has changed understandings of gender throughout the social sciences and the humanities. Kimmel (1987) and Messner and Sabo’s (1990) edited collections, alongside David Morgan’s (1992) persuasive book, Discovering Men, underlined the continual importance of feminist scholarship for studies on men and masculinities. These texts further indicated that it was vital to begin to understand that there were a number of masculiniti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Valleys: History, Modernity and Masculinities
• 3. The Valley Boiz: Re-Traditionalizing Masculinity
• 4. The Geeks: Studious Working-Class Masculinities
• 5. The Emos: Alternative Masculinities?
• 6. Working-Class Masculinities in Vocational Education and Training Courses
• 7. Jimmy the Chameleon: Multiple Performances of Self
• 8. Conclusion: Growing Up into Uncertain Futures
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: ‘Doing’ Ethnography: Understanding, Researching and Representing Young Working-Class Masculinities
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• References
• Index