Redundant Masculinities?: Employment Change and White Working Class Youth (review)

It has been nearly 30 years since Paul Willis's Learning to Labour was published. His analysis of resistance to the dominant middle-class ethos of educational attainment amongst a group of working-class "lads" has been a seminal work in studies of working-class culture, education, and labour. Still today, most studies in these areas continue to engage with the ghost of Willis, and Linda McDowell's Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class Youth is no exception. Unlike Willis' lads, whose resistance was rooted in a male working-class identity, McDowell suggests that the formation of these masculinities is threatened by the changing employment relations and opportunities in a post-industrial society. The book is based on a series of interviews over a two year period with 24 young working-class men in Sheffield and Cambridge. The locations were chosen to represent two contrasting UK labour markets — Sheffield as a former industrial centre in decline and Cambridge as a city with a much stronger tradition of service work.

McDowell begins her book with an impressive and very insightful review of the current debates regarding conditions of reflexive modernity and neo-liberal versions of a post-industrial economy. Rather astutely, McDowell highlights important insights that often get lost in the more ideologically-based debates on these issues, such as the irony of promoting a neo-liberal ideal of full employment in a retrenched workfare state, while individually sustainable employment is disappearing. McDowell describes how young working-class males are disproportionately affected by these labour market and welfare changes, given the loss of traditional industrial employment. At the same time, the British media has increasingly profiled young working-class men as pathological troublemakers, or as "yobs," "lads," and "hooligans." McDowell reveals these public images of troublesome working-class masculinity as a social construction that masks a far more serious labour market problem. She shows how the problems with "loutish" young men is constructed as an enactment of deviant masculinities, without an understanding of the socio-economic conditions that deny these young men the opportunities to fully express their masculinity through work.

As traditional industrial employment is being replaced by knowledge and service work, working-class males find themselves increasingly marginalised. They appear to be ill equipped to take advantage of either form of employment opportunities: they lack the education to move into knowledge-intensive jobs (the domain of the middle class) and lower tier service work requires emotional, feminine forms of labour, rather than the rough physicality associated with lost manufacturing jobs. However, McDowell argues that rather than addressing the political and economic roots of the problems facing young working-class males, both the British media and New Labour rhetoric and policy have put the blame squarely onto the young people themselves. At the same time, industries and welfare arrangements that might otherwise assist these young men have been gutted.

Following this insightful exposé, McDowell's analysis of her research data is somewhat disappointing. The analytical and theoretical concepts she developed in the early chapters should have formed the framework within which to analyse the narratives of the young men she interviewed. Yet, much of what she discusses remains surprisingly superficial. Perhaps the sheer magnitude and ambitiousness of her research is also partly its liability. For instance, the young men in Sheffield and Cambridge approached their first months in the labour market differently, with the Cambridge participants more likely to participate in various forms of formal training. However, this observation remains largely descriptive, leaving the reader to wonder what exactly might be the root of these differences. Similarly, the benefits of following research participants over a period of time are not fully realized in McDowell's analysis. We do learn how individuals drift in and out of jobs or training programs. But we are not really provided with any sense of why this takes place. Are these young men irresponsible "yobs" that are incapable of holding down a job, as the popular media would have us...