Article
Builders, bodies and bifurcations: How London construction workers ‘learn to labour’
Ethnography 14(4) 412–430 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1466138112463656 eth.sagepub.com
Darren Thiel University of Essex, UK
Abstract This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the classbound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a preindustrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK. Keywords class-bound masculinity, Learning to Labour, builders, ethnic, the state, informal cultures, violence
Paul Willis’s classic ethnographic text, Learning to Labour, is based largely on the words and activities of a small group of ‘anti-school’ working-class boys – ‘the lads’ – at an inner city comprehensive school in ‘Hammertown’ in the then industrial Midlands of the mid-1970s – a time of high employment. Corresponding author: Darren Thiel, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Email:
[email protected]
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Willis’s overarching question is to ask why the ‘lads’ were apparently satisfied to enter low-paid, boring, and low-skilled manual work when they could be upwardly socially mobile into more fruitful occupations if only they refrained from messing around at school. Willis followed the ‘lads’ from school and into the workplace where he discovered that their anti-school subculture mirrored and prepared them for the culture and working life of the factory shop-floor. Willis suggests that the ‘lads’ messing around at school paradoxically supplied them with the values, culture and attitude to do, accept and valorize the unskilled manual work of the factory. Learning to Labour also outlines how the culture of the school was middle-class based, embedded in middle-class values of book learning, doing ‘mental work’, following authority, sitting still, being quiet and engaging with the formal school curriculum. The ‘lads’ rebelled against this by adopting the ‘shop-floor culture’ of their parents or, more specifically, of their fathers. This culture is seen to have evolved over the British industrial period as a way in which (male) manual workers collectively managed dull and tough manual work, overarching authority, and the broader, middle-class based, symbolic degradation of their position as unskilled manual workers. By adopting the shop-floor culture of their fathers, the ‘lads’ thus became mentally prepared for work in the factory through their cultural valorization of physical manual work and their feminization, and thus devaluation, of the ‘mental work’ of the school institution or the factory manager: only they – the tough ‘lads’ – could do such hard manual work. The middle class – or, in the ‘lads’’ terms, the ‘ear’oles’, i.e. the kids that did their school work – were simply not tough or man enough to do the manual work that the ‘lads’ had readied themselves for. The ‘lads’ thus elevated their self-esteem through adoption of the working-class based values placed on physical masculinity. Yet, paradoxically, this led to their failure in the formal learning world of the school and they thus remained working class. The parent culture they adopted, which had developed collectively over generations of industrial life in order to manage the degradation of manual work, had become the source of the ‘lads’’ domination. This article interrogates these ideas by reflecting on social history and my ethnographic analysis of the building workers at ‘Topbuild’. I argue that while Willis’s observations on the fundamental elements of working-class masculine culture and practice closely mirror the cultures and practices of the builders, these are unlikely to be tied to industrial work because building work, unlike that of the factory, is relatively varied, skilled, and autonomous. Building is a pre-modern ‘industry’ and it exists in a post-industrial world. At Topbuild, moreover, many of the building trade groups were migrants and the second generation – groups present but largely neglected in Learning to Labour – but who are shown here to share fundamental elements of this class-bound culture. This was despite the trade groups at Topbuild, who having found their work opportunities through ethnically-based social networks, were starkly divided by their ethnicity. What the men shared, however, in both their historical past and contemporary present, were their gendered and classbound relationships to the injunctions of the modern state – relations that were
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partial and antagonistic, framing the development of class-bound masculine culture and practice.
Ethnography In 2003/4 I spent 51 weeks as a participant observer working on and ‘hanging around’ a group of three interlinked building projects situated in central London. Each of the three projects was undertaken by the same groups of tradesmen and subcontractors and were organized by a main building contractor that I have called ‘Topbuild’. At the sites, Topbuild’s building site managers and quantity surveyors organized the building projects but the actual physical building work was carried out by a number of subcontracted building trade groups. Indeed, there were so many of the various subcontracted trade groups at the site that my fieldwork captured only those groups that were more or less permanently involved in the build throughout its duration (see Figure 1). Other trade groups, like glaziers, floor-layers or scaffolders, for example, came to the build for only short durations and worked in spaces and times bounded off from the main trade groups. As a result of that separation of activity, I worked in a number of roles on the site in order better to observe a number of the trades. I worked first as a labourer for three months; I then spent a period of participant observation in the building site office; and I spent the last two months of my fieldwork working with the painters. In-between these times I generally ‘hung around’ at the site, talking to the men, recording interviews with 32 of them, ‘mucking in’, and getting drunk with them in the evenings and weekends.
Cultural penetration, social reproduction and craft skill Learning to Labour argues that the ‘lads’ shared a class-bound notion that all manual work was deskilled, meaningless and homogenized. Willis saw this as an accurate perception of manual labour – a perception that had been generated through working-class cultural mechanisms which ‘penetrated’ ideology to see the deeper reality of their own situation. He cites Bravermanesque and Marxian support for the reality of this cultural penetration, i.e. that manual work was increasingly controlled, mechanized and deskilled alongside the development of capitalism. The ‘lads’’ view that all working-class jobs were the same was thus correct and real. If one takes a careful look at work in the British building industry, however, this is not the case because building work has been relatively immune to the Bravermanesque dynamics of standardization, mechanization and management control. Building continues to be based largely on pre-industrial handicraft skills whereby a bricklayer or carpenter today will undertake many of the same tasks as his medieval forebears (see, for example, Satoh, 1995; Woodward, 1995). As I have argued elsewhere (Thiel, 2007) the reason for such an historical continuity of building tasks is that buildings are big and non-standard, that building processes always
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Figure 1. Main participant groups involved in the fieldwork.
veer from plans, interact with the weather and gravity, are prone to go wrong, and are liable to the problem that parts frequently do not fit where they were planned to (see Bresnen, 1990). The consequence is that building work is too complex and nonstandard to be effectively bureaucratized, routinized and mechanized (cf. Weber, 1947 [1925]), and building tradesmen must continually adjust and adapt their parts of the build from moment to moment (see Reckman, 1979; Reimer, 1979; Kidder, 1985). Builders thus remain highly skilled and versatile and, as a consequence, they retain a high degree of autonomy from managerial control. At Topbuild, managers, foremen and subcontractors governed their workers in a fashion parallel to what Alvin Gouldner (1954), in his observations of gypsum miners, called the ‘indulgency pattern’. This meant that the builders were not despotically managed but, rather, were indulged in their informal desires so that lateness, pilfering, intransigence and time banditry, for example, were tolerated by their managers, foremen and subcontractors (see Thiel, 2012).
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Building work is therefore not much like factory work. This was graphically observed by ‘Mike Fixit’, one of the Topbuild labourers and maintenance men: My eldest brother works at [a] car plant. You watch them go into that factory – they go in there like they’re like robots. All go in on the hooter, all come out on the hooter. All clock-in at the same time, all clock-out at the same time. I couldn’t handle that. No fresh air, same place every day, all those rules, that’s not for me.
Additionally, and perhaps in relation to this, almost all of the builders told me in interview that they enjoyed their work. Take, for example, ‘Bill’, the mechanical and electrical foreman: I love being an electrician . . . I’ve always liked working and I get job satisfaction. All weekends I work at people’s houses . . . It’s just job satisfaction when . . . you know there’s a finished article.
Or ‘Bapu’, a carpenter: . . . I like to be the workaholic, I love the work! A lot of time I work the weekend as well. So I built a staircase, I made it myself, and the window as well, new window, I made it myself, you know what I mean . . .
Bill and Bapu enjoyed their creative tasks and felt attached to the product of their labour. As I shall explain below, they also enjoyed their autonomy at work. In this context, it should be noted that some of the ‘lads’ went to work in the building industries (Willis, 1977: 106). Not all of them entered the highly controlled and de-skilled work of the industrial factory and, consequently, their assumptions about the homogeneity of manual work were not ‘penetrative’ understandings of a deeper reality of class-bound occupations but were, rather, slightly misguided. Learning to Labour further suggests that because the ‘lads’ saw no differences between manual occupations, when they left school they ‘drifted’ into any manual work that they could get and they thus found employment by ‘chance’. Yet in the light of social network theory, particularly through the work of Mark Granovetter (1974), we now have a better understanding of how job chances are socially structured by social networks. Indeed, some of the ‘lads’ had found jobs through their friends and family. Likewise, social networks were vital for the builders at Topbuild, and this was highlighted by the men’s tight ethnic and residential formations at the site. For example, almost all of the carpenters were from one area of north-west London and were members of the diaspora of Kutch from northern India; all the labourers were Irish or British-Irish and lived in and around one area of south London; all the managers were white English and lived in Kent; and all the painters were white-skinned and lived in and around Enfield in north London. It was clear that ethnic and residential-bound social networks had guided the builders’ recruitment at Topbuild. Informal word-of-mouth news in their local
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communities had got the builders their jobs and, in many cases, also informal training in how to do those jobs. As Granovetter suggests, part of what reproduces occupational structure, and thus what helps to explain why ‘working-class kids get working class jobs’, is class-bound social networks – and not only working-class masculine cultures as is implied in Learning to Labour. Of course, as Willis has suggested,1 in the 1960s and ’70s there was such an abundance of unskilled factory jobs in the UK that informal networks were not always necessary in order to find them. This was echoed in a statement made by one of the mechanical electrical workers at Topbuild, ‘Trick’, when talking about his past as a factory worker: I left school at 14 and a half with nothing [no qualifications] but . . . I went straight into a car factory. I was there for about a year . . . [and I] went from that to doing temporary electrics, [then] I went to another firm making electrical re-winders in Cricklewood. It was amazing then [in the 1960s] because you could look in the local [news] paper and get whatever job you wanted, whereas now you wouldn’t get your foot in the door unless you had a piece of paper [qualification] from a college or something.
Nonetheless, despite the high employment opportunity of the time, informal and class-bound networks did direct some of the ‘lads’ into occupations other than unskilled factory work. Spanksy and Perce, for example, became builders, not factory workers, and Perce had been introduced to carpentry work through his family networks (Willis, 1977: 101). Social network chances had thus stratified opportunities within the working class itself – a matter which may be particularly relevant for those with no formal qualifications because network groups can train and vouch for people with no formal certificates of their ability (see Greiko, 1987). At Topbuild, employment opportunity was clearly framed by the builders’ residential location, ethnicity and migration history, which had led the various ethnic and residential groups into particular building occupations. Of course, however, it was not social networks alone that had directed the builders or the ‘lads’ into their occupations but, just as Learning to Labour suggests, class-bound culture had played a significant part. There are usually no shops on building sites and often no floors. Consequently, the builders used the term ‘on the tools’ as a shop-floor equivalent. They bifurcated their work-world primarily into those who worked ‘on the tools’ – the tradesmen and labourers – and those who worked ‘in the office’ – the building site managers and quantity surveyors. Here I examine the informal cultures of the builders working on the tools, but this should not be taken to mean that the managers and surveyors had not themselves adopted elements of working-class-bound masculinized practice. In the often tough, aggressive and dirty working-class-bound world of the building site, those who wore white collars felt that they often had to act in overtly masculine and bellicose ways (cf. Roper, 1994).
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In common with the ‘lads’ and with the words of Trick above, most of the builders ‘working on the tools’ at Topbuild had few, if any, formal school qualifications, and many told me about their ‘wild days’ at school. As ‘Aiden’, one of the labourers, said: At school I was sort of, sort of, in a way encouraged to leave [laughs], because my work wasn’t up to standard, in the wild days, sort of hopping school and taking chances, you know what I mean . . .
Leaving school early with no qualifications and drifting into their occupations was something almost all of the builders shared in common with one another and with Willis’s ‘lads’. Additionally, many aspects of the builders’ work cultures also had resonance with the ‘elements of the cultures’ so vividly described in Learning to Labour.
‘Dissing, blagging and wagging’: Informal cultures ‘on the tools’ at Topbuild The builders enjoyed their work for the benefits outlined above but they also liked their work because they had ‘the crack’ with their workmates. The crack – a term imported into London’s building industry by the large numbers of Irish working in it since at least the 19th century – equates to what the ‘lads’ described as ‘having a laff’, and this was also central to building site collective culture. Part of the content of the crack included what the builders, just like the ‘lads’, called ‘piss taking’. This focused on drawing out potential weaknesses in the object of the ‘piss-takes’ and was commonly wrapped up in a gendered hierarchy of meaning whereby weaknesses were regularly signalled by feminizing another’s actions. ‘Piss-taking’ took the form of, for instance, saying that someone was too weak or sissy to ‘hold their beer’, or that someone could not do their job properly because they were too weak or stupid. The builders also placed a stubborn and often aggressive value on their autonomy, which was expressed by their fierce reactions to what they considered as being pushed around or told what to do, and this too was very similar to the ‘lads’’ reaction to school authority. For instance, the builders would only do things if asked to, not told to. As outlined above, managerial authority had to be indulgent and involve elements of respect and reciprocity, otherwise it was rejected. This was expressed by ‘Bill’, the mechanical and electrical foreman: Then you get someone like John [the junior site manager] . . . he’s a right bombastic little bastard. And I get on with anyone normally, but him? It’s just when people turn round and say, ‘I want it done now’. Normally I’d do it, I’d say ‘Alright, yeah I’ll do it’. But when you get people saying, ‘I want it done now’, you won’t do it. I won’t follow his orders; I’ll try anything just to get up his nose . . .
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Similarly, just as described in Learning to Labour, there were numerous acts of time banditry, occupational fiddles and pilfering ‘on the tools’ at Topbuild, and a related severe demonization of the ‘grass’ or informer. Times of work, for example, were informally decided by the trade groups. No one ‘on the tools’ worked the official times, and their superiors knew this but indulged them. Materials at the site were commonly pocketed and pilfered, and often quite overtly, with the activities being accompanied by winks and jokes (cf. Mars, 1982). For example, as ‘Danny’, the labouring foreman, proclaimed one day while walking out of the labourers’ tearoom with a five-litre can of paint under his arm: ‘I wish Ernie [the painting subcontractor] would get some decent colours. The old lady don’t like these ones’. Additionally, a number of the men were working illegally. One of the painters, ‘Frank’, for instance, was claiming state benefits and working, and a number of the labourers were working on other people’s tax codes and National Insurance numbers. Other men traded stolen or contraband goods including smuggled cigarettes, pornographic movies and illegal drugs. These minor transgressions were also described as fundamental aspects of the ‘lads’’ culture in Learning to Labour. What can be seen, then, is that the informal culture on the tools at Topbuild clearly resonated with the counter-school culture of ‘dissing, blagging and wagging’ as described in Learning to Labour. In other ways, however, my findings diverge from a number of the claims made in Learning to Labour – specifically with respect to how these elements of class-bound culture were born and sustained, and with respect to what this culture did for the men. Indeed, a key question today involves how such a culture is sustained in a post-industrial world when it is claimed in Learning to Labour that working-class-bound culture reflected industrial work life.
Informal cultures as pragmatic solutions Messing around, ‘having the crack’ and ‘piss-taking’ transformed what could be hard and sometimes boring work into fun and play. As Donald Roy (1990 [1960]) has described, ‘fooling around’ is a method of making light of the psychologically and physically problematic aspects of manual work. While participating with the labourers, for example, it became very obvious to me why time banditry occurred. The work could be physically hard or very boring, and stealing time simply enabled physical respite, while having the crack was fun. Both time banditry and the crack manufactured excitement, transforming subjective perceptions of physical strain and boredom. Stealing time could also be a source of fun when done collectively, becoming a game of cat and mice with formal authority. Pilfering and fiddling could also be fun and exciting but, more importantly, it made extra ‘pocket money’ for little effort (cf. Henry, 1978). This too was a pragmatic measure if one considers how unstable the builders’ income was. The majority of those employed ‘on the tools’ in the UK are ‘falsely self-employed’ (Harvey, 2001), and all of the tradesmen at Topbuild were in that position. Being ‘falsely self-employed’ meant that the builders were officially self-employed but were the only self-employed group in the UK to have their tax deducted by subcontractors.
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In reality, self-employment meant that the builders were a hyper-flexible workforce who received almost no employment protection at all. They were paid by the day or by the hour; they could have work one day but be laid off with no notice and have no work at all the next day; they received no redundancy protection, and no sick or holiday pay. Such conditions of employment are akin to those of the early working class before the advent of the labour movement – a period of working-class history that was perhaps more usual and enduring than the rather short moment of mass working-class unionization – an observation that I return to below. Informal trading could thus be seen as a kind of ‘informal insurance’ collectively employed to help the men cope with the vagaries of their employment situation (cf. Hobbs, 1988; Willis, 1977). However, pilfering, fiddling and time banditry should be understood not only in the context of the vagaries of income and the boredom and fatigue that I have described but also as continuations of class-bound traditions that can be found in the builders’ pre-industrial and colonial cultures. Here, my argument once again diverges from Willis’s account, that views these cultural elements as derived solely from the conditions of industrial life.
Informal cultures, ‘moral economy’ and alienation from the state I have taken the term ‘moral economy’ from Edward Thompson’s social historical writings. In a number of articles on early modern England, Thompson (1971, 1990 [1975], 1993) points to the existence and sustenance of a plebeian culture based on notions of common right, reciprocity, and moral, rather than market, exchange. Similarly, as Jason Ditton (1977b) has argued, pilfering and fiddling might also be seen as a continuation of these pre-industrial cultural mores. At Topbuild, aspects of informal work culture, like informal trading or providing employment chances through networks of friends and family, clearly resembled Thompson’s moral economy. Furthermore, as I have indicated, a number of the builders worked illegally, some were operating tax fiddles, others pilfered objects from work, and others traded in stolen, contraband and pilfered goods. These features of the builders’ work lives were both the cause and effect of pre-industrial informal cultures which were, and continued to be, a product of the builders’ class- and ethnic-specific relationships with the dictates of the modern state. By regularly engaging in minor illegalities, the builders were distancing themselves from the legal injunctions of the modern state. They were, to some degree, hiding from its reach, and they could not thus rely on it very much for security and protection. For example, if one was claiming state unemployment benefit and simultaneously working, he could not call on the state for employment protection if unfairly treated or dismissed. In historical terms, living at a distance from the modern state is characteristic of much of the history of significant sections of the English working class. As Thompson (1990 [1975]) shows, 18th-century modern legal systems altered the focus of law from protecting persons to protecting property. Some sections of the working class would, of course, have welcomed this
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limited state protection but, as large sections of the emerging class would have owned little, formal law and the state is likely to have meant little to them. Additionally, as both Thompson and Ditton argue, the modern state and its formal laws and regulations imposed on many of the traditional rights and moral economy of the masses. This, as Thompson (1993) argues, led large sections of the English working class to hold a problematic and estranged relationship with the state, thereby alienating them from its proscriptions (see also Polanyi, 2001 [1944]).
Migration, ethnicity and class-bound culture It was into this British class-bound landscape that, in the history of migration to London, various ethnic groups arrived. The majority of migration to London has been from Britain’s ex-colonies, and it can be assumed that in, for example, colonial Ireland or India, the enforcement of English law and state systems would also have been received by many as non-existent, alien, or illegitimate, imposing itself onto local cultures and customs. Indeed, the history of colonial governance shows its mechanisms to have been largely despotic (Agozino, 2003; Fanon, 1968) and often piecemeal (Stoler, 2009), and thus unlikely to command hegemony over many of the colonial masses (cf. Gilroy, 2002 [1987]). Moreover, upon immigration to London most migrants found themselves within the ranks of the working classes (Solomos, 2003), thereby being placed within similar relationships to political economy as their more indigenous fellows. As Bourdieu (1984) shows, those living life at the nadir of stratification systems are likely to develop ‘cultures of necessity’ whereby habits and practices, framed by particular relations to fields of economic and political power and opportunity, ossify into pragmatic cultures that provide localized sources of security, stability and status. Working-class-bound masculinity can be seen as one aspect of the culture of necessity which, amongst the builders at Topbuild, was largely shared by the various ethnic groups because of their similar class-bound social positions as manual construction workers and their shared history of antagonistic relationships to the modern state. For these men, a ‘rough’ corporeal masculinity generated valuable pragmatic advantages in the historical past and in the contemporary present.
Corporeal masculinity, ‘rough presence’ and manual work Living life in a problematic relationship to state proscription with, at best, a ‘begrudging legitimacy’ (Reiner, 2010) towards the law and its agents, is key to understanding the expressions of working-class masculinity so vividly described in Learning to Labour. As I have mentioned, Willis outlines the ‘lads’’ masculine reverence for manual labour and their delineation and demeaning of mental labour as feminine. This mental–manual bifurcation permeated the ‘lads’’ identities and social activity whereby their corporeal potential was continually expressed and performed in the school. Significant aspects of these performances involved forms
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of violent theatrical posturing, or what Willis calls a ‘rough presence’ (see also Willis, 1978). Rough presence was something that I could not fail to notice at Topbuild. Most of the builders performed this in the company of their informal groups both in and out of work, and it held a central value to them. The presence signalled a violent potential of bodies – it was a form of embodied bellicosity – and it is something that has been described by a generation of criminologists suggesting that workingclass masculinity is characterized to some degree by real and symbolic bellicosity (see, for example, Hobbs, 1994; Messerschmidt, 1994). As an example of this, take an encounter I witnessed between ‘Perry’, a painter, and ‘Bapu’, the carpenter group elder: Bapu would sometimes enter the painter’s canteen to ask if he could take one of the ‘dirty papers’, by which he meant the Sport, a soft pornographic daily ‘newspaper’ regularly consumed by some of the painters. The canteens of the trade and labour groups at Topbuild were littered with copies of semi-pornographic newspapers – the Sport, the Star and the Sun being particular favourites. These tabloids were almost badges of working-class masculinity, celebrating men, practical straight-talk, sport and youthful female bodies. Bapu, however, living in a tightly-knit and quite pious community, was apparently too shy or ashamed to buy these publications though he ostensibly enjoyed the titillation provided. One day when I was working with the painters, Perry and I entered the painters’ canteen to find Bapu holding a copy of the Sport. Perry said in a straight-faced but perhaps jocular fashion: What are you doing in here you thieving old bastard? Oh the fuckin’ Sport! Shouldn’t you be praying or something, not playing with yourself? Go buy your own [news] paper you dirty old bastard. Keep coming in here and nicking our stuff, I’ll phone immigration and get you deported if you ain’t careful. (field notes)
Bapu stood up straight, expanded his body size, looked Perry seriously in the eye and replied in a possibly threatening tone: ‘You wanna go to hospital you bastard?’ Perry gave no reply. The event provided one amongst many occurrences of the expression of heterosexuality, bellicosity, piss-taking, and racism. I cite this example in particular because Bapu was a committed Hindu, the carpenter group elder, and one of the most congenial people one could hope to meet. He may not be considered a masculine actor in an Anglo-Western sense but, because building sites can be rough, tough and aggressive places, and Bapu had worked on them in London for over 30 years, similar to the other first generation Kutchi carpenters, he had adapted to this world. As for the second generation who had grown up and been schooled in inner city London, they were perceptibly, through their accents, argot, and corporeal dispositions, carriers of a British urban street culture that mixes and melds elements of predominately white working-class, Jamaican and broader black transatlantic culture (see Gilroy, 1990). This characteristically urban working-class-bound bellicose and corporeal street culture that ‘exhibits
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a seamless and organic fusion of black and white sensibilities’ (Gilroy and Lawrence, 1988: 141) was also carried by some of the younger labourers and painters. In Learning to Labour, Willis explains expression of rough machismo as a way in which the ‘lads’ creatively etched meaning onto their future as manual workers – they were celebrating and posturing their ability to do hard work and distinguishing themselves from women and ‘ear’oles’ who were deemed too weak to do this. Toughness was the ‘lads’’ distinction and it fuelled their self-esteem. I would not deny that such performances augment self-esteem and produce a self-concept that may valorize manual work, but such performances also had other values and practicalities.
Pragmatic bellicosity and the state Living at a distance from the clutches of formal law and state proscription means that modernizing the entirety of the English and colonial masses was not as straightforward as has been claimed by a number of sociologists and historians of modernity. In contradistinction to some interpretations of, for example, Foucault (1991 [1975]), general illegalities were never eradicated by the march of modernity (see Ditton, 1977a; Henry, 1978; Mars, 1982) and, as Learning to Labour clearly shows, mass formal education did little to formally discipline much of the working class. The informal cultures and traditions of a significant section of the contemporary English working class may then be seen as a continuation, adaptation or adoption of pre-industrial and colonial cultures – and not a result of collective industrial cultures as argued by Willis. Now, part of these class-bound traditions involves managing conflict, like in the example of Bapu above, in a very direct, summary and corporeal way. This, I argue, is because formal law, historically, offered large sections of the working or colonial classes little protection both in and outside of work. These features, moreover, continued to form fundamental exigencies to the builders’ cultures, identities and activities in their community and work lives in the present. A clue to this observation can be found in Elijah Anderson’s (1999) examination of the actual and symbolized violence embedded in the street masculinity of African-American residents of inner-city Philadelphia. Although an extreme case – Philadelphia has exceptionally high rates of violent crime – it is an enlightening one that provides clues to understanding some of the exigencies of contemporary class-bound masculinities. Following the historical sociology of Michael Mann (1986), Anderson argues that in areas where formal law is blocked or lacking, informal cultural forms arise for protection. In Philadelphia where formal law had, for many, broken down, a masculine ‘code of the street’ emerged in its vacuum – a cultural form collectively developed to protect individuals from actual or symbolic attack. Such attenuated relationships to state proscription and its laws are also central to understanding the builders’ class-bound masculinity,
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and this was highlighted clearly by one of the painters, ‘Frank’, while talking about his son’s schooling in intercity London: I don’t want. . . [my son] to be scared to go out on the street, to be scared that someone is gonna come along and do him if that’s what it’s going to be like. Anybody hits him, hit them back! I don’t care if you bite them or hit them with a lump of wood, you hurt them . . . There’s no way I’m letting him get bullied at school. Because if you don’t stick up for yourself you’ll go to secondary school and get bullied even fucking more.
What Frank describes was the lore amongst boys at tough schools and on the streets of urban London. His fear of his son being pushed around and bullied led Frank to instil a bellicose disposition in his son as a very practical mechanism for handling potential violence. It was in this way that bellicose culture, resistance to fear, and refusal to be pushed around was installed at a young age within the working-class family (cf. Hobbs, 1994), and it was highly pragmatic. Masculine bellicosity was also pragmatic in terms of builders’ employment relations, and not just in terms of the street or school. For example, it is rare to be employed with a formal contract in building. Wages, hours of work and work duration are, in my own decade of experience of the British building industry, almost always decided verbally and informally. Mostly, moral norms about the association of work with wages meant that the builders’ expectations of payment and conditions of work were met (cf. Durkheim, 1960 [1893]). Yet, if the agreements were broken, workers relied on the threat of violence to get paid, and the shadow of this threat partly underpinned all informal agreements within the builders’ associations. As one of the older Irish labourers, ‘Mickey T’, said when talking about a job he had had in the past: I got an old van like, and I’d charge the whole gang to pick them up . . . I’d pay them out their wages on a Friday as well . . . One week they didn’t get paid so they all came at me with picks [laughs] . . . I drove them all down to the agent’s [contractor’s] offices and they took their picks in with them and confronted one of the directors. ‘Oh, oh, a mistake’, he says. He went straight down to the bank with these rake [lots] of blokes following behind him with picks . . .
The London building industry, because of its basis on informal agreements, the presence of transgressive practices, and the social backgrounds of many builders, brought it about that formal law had lost much of its impact. In its place lay a summary informal lore of which masculine bellicosity formed a major ingredient. This, through history and intergenerational social immobility, had thus come to be a habitual and valorized aspect of the builders’ class-bound culture (cf. Bourdieu, 1984: 372–96). The pragmatism of masculine bellicosity was, aside from the class-bound history that delineates the working class as mere bodies (described below), also a major element of the reason why working-class-bound culture is body-centred.
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Bodies were sources of power because they could threaten violence, and they were also sources of skill because of their ability to do building work. These class-bound bodies thus held skill, did work, enforced informal agreements, and prevented victimization. It can be little wonder, then, that working-class masculinity is body-centred. These conditions also illustrate why the Irish labourers and the Indian carpenters alike also displayed bellicose dispositions in certain situations – their positions in the English stratification system, and the kinds of social relationships underpinned by it, meant they experienced similar attenuated relationships to the state. The first-generation carpenters were, however, slightly different in this respect because, as the above example involving Bapu illustrates, they were able to regularly switch from expressions of tough masculinity and bellicosity to a more Hindubound gentility. They were, though, perceived by the other trade and ethnic groups as holding a high level of collective toughness; that is, their tight community and number was feared and revered by the other groups and the carpenters were perceived as not to be messed with.
Bodies, bifurcations and the middle class I have so far suggested that the class-bound cultural reverence for physical masculinity described in Learning to Labour was not creatively developed against a backdrop of industrial life but that it stretched deeper into colonial and workingclass history and was not only formed against a backdrop of working lives but community lives also. Class-bound masculinity should thus be understood with reference to some sections of the working classes’ alienation from the modern state in both the past and the present. Of course, in pre-modern Europe summary justice and embodied power were the norm rather than the exception. As Norbert Elias (1983 [1969]) describes, it was with the rise of a nascent Western middle class struggling to enter the royal courts in the 16th and 17th centuries that embodied power became cut loose from social life and was consequently devalued. Only in highly contrived and isolated courtly life, coupled with the ensuing power of the new class, did mental ability become practical and revered (outside of the mystical at least) (see also Huppert, 1977). It was, then, the Western middle class, and not the industrial working class, that invented morally loaded mind/body–mental/ manual bifurcations. This was in order for the nascent middle class to raise their status and, indeed, to make a new status universe where mental and physical ability became separated and bifurcated (see Cooley, 1987; Day, 2001), mental ability demarcated as cerebral (Rose, 1999 [1989]) and etched with extraordinary value. Here, both colonial subjects’ and manual workers’ skills and values became deemed corporeal and were diminished in dominant discourse to a symbolic position more akin to instinctual animals than rational humans (cf. Skeggs, 2004). As Braverman (1974) rightly suggests, the ascent of industrialists and professional classes stole craft knowledge from many trades, mechanizing, bureaucratizing and standardizing craft skill. It was here that many craftspeople were relegated
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to mere bodies – appendages to machines and management systems. In these industries, managers and professionals become the ‘minds’ – the important and valorized people in production. Yet, as I have suggested, these class-bound processes did not happen fully in building because building workers to this day retain large elements of skill. However, similar processes did happen in a symbolic if not an ‘actual’ sense. The history of English building charts the emergence of the architect and surveyor professions in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it illustrates how these professional groups tried to split and wrestle ‘mental work’ from building trades people (Higgin and Jessop, 1965; Knoop and Jones, 1967 [1933]; Shelby, 1964). These professional groups attempted to separate the design of buildings from their execution, and they were, to a degree, successful. In this emergent discursive realm, professionals designed and trades people executed. This situation remains today but is partly a fiction because even architects’ written plans, for example, continue to need to be ‘verified in the field’ by building tradesmen (MacVicar, 2009) and, as I have mentioned, building plans almost never go to plan (Bresnen, 1990). The result of the rise of building professionals was, however, the symbolic relegation of building workers from the plebeian aristocracy and into the manual working class. Here, trades people adapted and adopted class-bound body-centred cultures – despite their being very skilled and necessarily using a combination of ‘mental’ and manual skills to undertake their work (cf. Sennett, 2008). My argument suggests thus that the ‘lads’’ and the builders’ reverence for manual strength was not solely creatively developed through working-class cultural evolution against the backdrop of industrial work, as Willis argues, but, rather, they simply revalued archaic, pre-modern, status values. These kinds of values are what David Matza (1964), in the context of the USA, has called ‘subterranean values’ based on toughness, physical skill, autonomy, and excitement, and which broader North American society tacitly desires. Subterranean values may actually be a representation of masculine subterranean values rather than values per se, although Anglo cultural representations do indicate that toughness, physical skill, autonomy and excitement are popularly desired. This can be observed in the content of so many Hollywood films and, of course, on the sports field. However, because the Western middle class formed dominant education systems, partly to discipline their sons into mental courtly culture, this institution devalued older corporeal strength values and relegated them to specific arenas like the sports pitch, boxing ring, or battlefield. This, and its discursive shadow, has been much to the detriment of the value of working-class cultural capital in terms of its ill fit with formal education systems (Bourdieu, 1986) and its contribution to the reproduction of the class structure.
Reproducing class in a post-industrial world This article has offered both support and critique for the thesis described in Paul Willis’s classic monograph Learning to Labour. It has argued that
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Learning to Labour neglects the effects of class-bound social networks in reproducing the class structure which, in a post industrial world with far fewer manual work opportunities than in the past, is likely to become increasingly important to obtain ‘good’ employment opportunities. I have also questioned the assumption in Learning to Labour that all working-class occupations became unskilled, highly controlled and dull across the march of modernity. Building work has been largely immune to standardization, mechanization, bureaucratization, and thus tight managerial control, yet very similar work cultures were present at Topbuild’s building site as in Learning to Labour’s ‘Hammertown’. These cultures could, moreover, be detected in the actions, habits and dispositions of a number of the migrant workers at Topbuild, suggesting that shared social exigencies framed their development almost regardless of ethnic diversity. English working-class-bound masculinity was thus not shaped solely or even primarily by industrial life but by pre-industrial and colonial lives, and it is a continuation of a form of moral economy that results and resulted from large sections of the working and colonial classes becoming, and being, alienated from the injunctions of the modern state. Moreover, because much of the working class continue to be – and are, perhaps, increasingly – alienated from state proscription, the fundamental bodily elements of their culture continue to be reproduced. The insecurities generated by both actual and symbolic victimization have spread out through working-class life and come to frame the cultural dispositions of many sections of the contemporary English working class. Migrant workers and their children who join their more indigenous fellows in a class-bound position in UK society thus also adopt these cultural forms – partly as a result of the everyday reality of living at the symbolic nadir of the British stratification system and partly a result of a shared history of antagonistic relationships with modern Western state systems. Class-bound social networks and the reproduction of social conditions that frame class-bound culture highlight, then, a large part of the reason as to why class-bound culture, the class system and ensuing patterns of social inequality continue to be reproduced in a post-industrial, global and multi-ethnic England.
Acknowledgements Original research was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship (ref.: R42200134486). Thanks to the comments of participants at various places where I presented this article in 2010 and 2011, to the reviewers at Ethnography, and to Paul Rock and Janet Foster for their help throughout.
Note 1. Comments made by Paul Willis at the 2010 annual UK ‘Ethnography of Work’ conference where I first presented this article.
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Darren Thiel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His research interests include class, ethnicity and social stratification, and crime and globalization. He has published work in all these fields.
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