The Enkidu Summer Conference 2008: Storytelling, Memories and Identity Constructions

México City, 3 - 7 July, 2008

‘I Didn’t Realise There Were Jobs Like This’: Mature  Men, The New Labour Market,  and Male Worker Identity Transformation – A Psychosocial Perspective

Luis Jimenez

School of Social Sciences

Cardiff University

Reino Unido

This paper concerns the emotional legacy of the closure of a steel works in South Wales, which made its largely male staff redundant. In doing this, it  raises the importance of profound economic dislocation and the changes associated with globalisation for the study of working class male identities.  The closure of the steel works, the major employer in  this steel town, meant that the ex-steel workers had to face issues of loss, crisis, uncertainty and illness as well as the need to find new forms of work and life in other cities and different countries.

Based on  psychosocial  interviews conducted with 20 ex-steel men, their partners and  their sons at the time of their redundancy, the paper examines  the affective dimension of the experiences of coping with redundancy,  the transition into new forms of work and lifestyles as well as  the impact these  had on their working class male identities.  It also considers some sociological arguments on globalisation and labour market change and its profound impact on working class masculinities worldwide.

Namely,  the notions of a “crisis of masculinity”  and of a  “melancholic masculinity” are  reconsidered. It is argued that, although some of the men’s narratives show how the redundancies  were  indeed experienced as a crisis, this is clearly  age-related and that neither the ‘crisis of masculinity’ thesis nor the notion of a “melancholic masculinity”  adequately capture let alone deal with  the complexities of the kind of crisis that these men actually experienced and how  this was worked through in order for them to retrain and to find alternative forms of work and life.

Whilst  the younger workers’ narratives  (below 35 years old) conveyed their  experiences of  redundancy as a learning experience and as an opportunity to widen their work and personal  projects, those of  the older men revealed they  found it much harder to give up their accustomed masculine narratives which  often also combined strong psychosomatic responses associated with stress and chronic illnesses.  Despite these difficulties,  a considerable proportion of the older men (36 to 49 years old) also eventually managed to retrain and  found new forms of work, some of which also involve important changes in their male working class identities.  Furthermore, these men do not just see themselves as rational economic subjects/agents whose work skills only need to be constantly updated. Rather, we found evidence that some men also managed to critically think about  the rigidity of the available notions of their working class masculinities as well as  the limits of the neo-liberal discourse of plastic change and choice. This includes the hardship and the exploitive nature of their manual work and how as men they are often perceived merely as sets of skills and as categories of  income whilst often being expected  to be rather  stoic and to not complain about these but merely to conform and to aspire to be a good efficient worker and consumer.

Overall, many of these men  are now more aware of the relative importance of work and the wage form as part of their male identities.   They also consider as almost equally important their ability to stay close to their families and their local affective networks of kin, friends and neighbours and the importance of maintaining a better balance between work, health and personal life.