Work and Identity: Historical and Cultural Contexts (Identity Studies in the Social Sciences)

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Author: Christine Wall | John Kirk

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Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Editors: Margaret Wetherell, Open University; Valerie Hey, Sussex University; Stephen Reicher, St Andrews University Editorial Board: Marta Augoustinos, University of Adelaide, Australia; Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, USA; David McCrone, University of Edinburgh, UK; Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University, USA; Harriet B. Nielsen, University of Oslo, Norway; Ann Phoenix, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Mike Savage, University of Manchester, UK Titles include: Will Atkinson CLASS, INDIVIDUALIZATION AND LATE MODERNITY In Search of the Reflexive Worker John Kirk and Christine Wall WORK AND IDENTITY Historical and Cultural Contexts Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor MOVING HISTORIES OF CLASS AND COMMUNITY Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England Margaret Wetherell (editor) IDENTITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY New Trends in Changing Times Margaret Wetherell (editor) THEORIZING IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ACTION

Identity Studies in the Social Sciences Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–20500–0 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Work and Identity Historical and Cultural Contexts John Kirk Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, UK

and Christine Wall University of Westminster, UK

© John Kirk and Christine Wall 2011 Chapter 1 © John Kirk, Christine Wall and Steve Jefferys 2011 Chapter 4 © John Kirk, Christine Wall and Jane Martin 2011 Chapter 5 © Steve Jefferys 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-58082-4

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 20

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to John Kirk (1957–2010)

Close friend, loyal colleague and exceptional scholar


Contents List of Tables and Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Part I

Work and Identity: Exploring History, Culture and Subjectivity

19

Chapter 1

Charting Historical Change: Work in the US and UK during the Twentieth Century With Steve Jefferys

21

Chapter 2

Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost: Working Life and Its Representations

46

Chapter 3

Identity in Question and the Place of Work

77

Part II

Work and Social Identity: Teaching, Banking and Railway Work

99

Chapter 4

Working at the Chalk-face: Articulating the ‘Teacherly-Self’ and Educational Change With Jane Martin

101

Chapter 5

Teller, Seller, Union Activist: Class Formation and Changing Bank Worker Identities Steve Jefferys

124

Chapter 6

Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails

149

Part III

Articulating Work Identities

177

Chapter 7

Something to Show For It: The Place of Work Memorabilia in Three Occupations

179

Chapter 8

Narrating Work Identity: Oral Testimony and the Place of Anecdotes

204

Conclusion

225

Appendix

232

Notes

233

References

238

Index

249 vii

List of Tables and Figures Tables 1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

American women’s membership (% of all women’s employment) of major US occupational groups, 1900–1950 British women’s membership (% of all women’s employment) of major British occupational groups, 1901–1951 Employment by status, occupation and sex in banking, teaching and railways, 2005 Men and women in professional and managerial groups by ethnic group, 1992–2000 (%) Average proportion of non-white workforce in companies by industry Teacher ethnicity by British region 2004 (as percentage of total teachers per region)

22

23

33 34 35 36

Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

Work identification British and US trade union membership (000s), 1900–1950 Trade union density (% of employed workers) in Britain and the US, 1900–1950 Numbers of US jobs (000s) in services and manufacturing, 1919–2002 Shares (%) of all US employment in services (including government services) and manufacturing, 1919–2002 UK jobs (000s) in services and manufacturing, 1921–2006 Shares (%) of all UK employment in services (including government services) and manufacturing, 1921–2006 Numbers of US teachers and finance workers (millions), 1950–2007 UK men and women’s employment (millions) in finance and public administration, health and education, 1978–2009 viii

5 24 26 28 29 29 30 31 32

List of Tables and Figures ix

1.9 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 5.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Trade union density (%) in the US and UK, 1950–2005 Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring Ministry of Labour and National Service Recruitment leaflet Trades union journal front covers Illustrations from careers literature Teaching trades union journal front covers Phase II (Rainy Day), Robert Mason, 1989 UK banking employment (000s) and interview cohorts, 1979–2006 Photograph 1 and photograph 2 Photograph 3 Photograph 4 and photograph 5 Photograph 6 and photograph 7

39 64 66 70 71 73 75 128 188 193 195 199

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank and acknowledge permission from the Imperial War Museum Collections to reproduce Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breechring, 1943, by Dame Laura Knight; The Lutterworth Press for the frontispiece to Teacher, 1965 and Haymarket Media Group for the photograph from Your Career in Teaching, 1970. We would like to thank Chris Coates, the TUC Collections librarian, for her help in accessing the archives of various trades’ union journals and the TUC Collections for agreeing to reproduce the journal covers in Figures 2.2, 2.3 and 2.5, with permission from the National Union of Teachers, Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and Unite. Phase II, (Rainy Day), 1989, by Robert Mason is reproduced with permission of the owner, Paul Lewis. We also thank Tim Strangleman for his contribution as Principal Investigator on the ESRC Identities Programme project, Does Work Still Shape Social Identities and Action?, which provided the material on which this book is based. We would also like to thank the following editors and publishers for permission to reprint work that had previously appeared in their respective journals. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Resilience and loss in work identities: A narrative analysis of some retired teachers’ work-life histories’, by John Kirk and Christine Wall in the British Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 2009, published by Routledge Taylor & Francis. Christine Wall authored sections of Chapter 2 which appeared in ‘Picturing an occupational identity: Images of teachers in careers and trade union publications 1940–2000’, in History of Education, 37(2) 2008, published by Routledge, and also Chapter 7 which appears in a slightly different form in ‘Something to show for it: The place of mementoes in women’s oral histories of work’, in Management and Organizational History, August (5) 2010, published by Sage. Thank you to everyone who gave up their time to talk to us about their working lives, this book would not exist without your wonderful stories. We would particularly like to thank the Series Editor, Margie Wetherell, for her support and enthusiasm in bringing this book to press. Thanks also to Philippa Grand and Olivia Middleton at Palgrave for their patience and understanding during unavoidable delays, and to our colleagues, Jane Martin and Steve Jefferys for their encouragement and valuable contributions. Lastly, thanks to partners and families: Helen and Bea for their constant optimism and Al and Dave for their love and care of John in his final illness. x

Introduction

I like doing my guard’s job at the moment because obviously when people come you talk to them and help them etc, and then it’s not long before they say to you, well how long have you worked, you know, on this job, so when you say 40-odd years, they’re absolutely astounded, and again, you see, it’s the culture now that, you know, people don’t belong to jobs any more. They’re just sort of ships sort of passing in the night and that’s expected of them. (Geordie, railway worker, male, 63) After the latest restructuring process had gone on I was summoned and told I was ‘unappointed’. (Max, Assistant bank manager, male, early retired, 55) Parents come in with a huge fear of school and at the same time a huge anxiety that we are not teaching their children as well as we could because the media tells them that we’re not, and so they’re very, they’re either very aggressive, or they’re very defensive and we have to work twice as hard now to bring them in at all, and at the same time, to say actually we’re doing a good job here. (Linda, Inner City Primary School teacher, 48) What is the importance of work? Much discussion in the late twentieth century in particular saw people’s work as something now inhabiting the past. Work’s importance had lost its meaning and significance in people’s lives. Despite its requirement materially, needing money from work to live, new modes of living stepped in instead to eclipse, the 1

2 Work and Identity

argument goes, its form – in the shape of consumerism primarily, but also in the notion of a new, post-industrial landscape mapped out by others. These themes are central to our book and will be developed in later chapters. Our key objective in this research, is to bring such claims as the decline of work under scrutiny, not to seek the things that might have replaced work. Our central approach to this was to go to source – workers themselves, both past and present. To do this we spoke with over 100 men and women; out of this emerged what we refer to as oral testimonies that offered to us a rich array of work-life histories. Work-life histories cannot, of course, be separated from wider cultural, social and historical histories that shaped and altered working lives. We examine the emergence of industrial capitalism in both North America and Britain, to post-industrial condition and the shift from national to global economies. Exploring ‘representations of work and workers’ tells other stories of work; while unpicking some theoretical perspectives that have grappled with the importance of work informs our book. Crucially, listening to workers’ testimonies take a central place and allowed us to explore the lived experiences of work through ‘structures of feeling’. Memory becomes one main location here, with older workers in particular. If, as the railway worker Geordie said at the book’s opening that ‘people don’t belong to jobs anymore’, our research and our place of testimonies in this book inevitably bring identity to the fore. The three opening quotes highlight how continuity and change can co-exist in the contemporary workplace. From the railway worker whose words reflect the astonishment of many people on meeting someone who has experienced continuous employment in a job that provides stability and enjoyment, to the redundant bank manager whose experience epitomises that of many who find work a constantly changing and precarious endeavour and finally the teacher who has to defend her status and practice against changes in public perception. The complexity of work in these three occupational groups and the experiences of those who work in them will be examined in depth over the following pages using the oral testimonies of workers as core to our interpretations. In this book, we see ‘work’ as both straightforward and complex and so our use of the term ‘work’ will be defined for our context. While we acknowledge that there are many examples of unwaged work, for example within the family as in parenting or caring for elderly or disabled relatives, and also many forms of un-free and indentured labour,

Introduction 3

the parameters of this particular investigation are set by the presence of some type of employer/employee contract and focus on a range of jobs found in three occupational sectors. Current usage of the term ‘work’, as Raymond Williams pointed out in Keywords (1983: 335), has arisen from the development of the productive relations of capitalism and shifted to describe the social relationship between employer and employee, so that the terms being ‘in work’ and its opposite ‘out of work’ include a sense of these relationships. So, while an employment contract, to a certain extent, sets the boundaries of our definition it does not, to any great extent, inform the content of this book, which focuses on the social identities of individuals and groups in the changing environment of the twentieth century workplace.

Work identities: Origins, method, theory Origins and methods This book emerges from research including over 100 work-life histories carried out with participants from the three main occupational sectors mentioned above. Overall we interviewed 36 retired people, 55 people who were in the middle of working life and 19 younger workers or people who were new entrants to the three occupations, with interviews taking place in London and the south east and in the north west. The majority of people spoken to were white British (see Appendix 1 for a complete breakdown by sex and occupation). There is then, a distinct bias towards the accounts of older people and many of the interviews were conducted in people’s homes allowing, in these cases, for a more reflexive account of working life. By contrast we found that those spoken to in the workplace gave shorter answers to our prompts: the pressure of a working day pre-empting any long conversations, but not precluding articulate insights into working life. These testimonies formed the core of the project and became the foundation to the construction of a theoretically informed empirical analysis on the topic of work and its contemporary meanings, its changing forms and altered or continuing traditions. The qualitative research methods centred primarily on oral testimonies; but we also analysed material from a range of archival sources, while interpreting discursive representations of labour and identities through film, television and other visual sources. Changing working lives mapped in this book show the presence of a range of intersecting experiences; these circumstances expose the individual worker as bound up in a set of social relations and organisational structures marked powerfully in gendered and generational frames and

4 Work and Identity

shaped through social position – both geographically and sociologically – and cultural traditions and forms, not least of these being the powerful visual imagery associated with different occupations. The choice of a white collar occupation, banking, a manual occupation, railway work, and a profession, teaching, allows an intimate view of historical change in three occupational areas that mirror the larger demographic and economic shifts of the twentieth century. These investigations, then, represent three occupations at the forefront of such change, albeit differently paced, over the last century. They also stand to represent similar changes to working life in other occupations and other national contexts. So, for example, bank workers across the developed world have experienced technical and contractual change together with new forms of gender segregation; teachers, a feminised profession, have faced greater state interference; while railway workers, representing blue collar and manual workers generally, have seen disruption of familiar patterns of work, including technical change, disruption of gendered hierarchies and greater instability. All three occupations reflect the increased ethnic diversity of the UK population; however our investigation of this was limited. For example, black and ethnic minority workers in transport in London make up over a third, and in some companies even higher proportions of employees, however we spoke to only one retired Caribbean railway worker who had moved to Britain in the 1960s. The small numbers of young people in our sample also meant that fewer non-white workers were interviewed as in London the population of young workers is more ethnically diverse than that of older workers. This means that this study cannot focus on every identity intersection found in relation to work. It does however provide a series of new ways of approaching the study of work that could be used in future research to specifically explore issues of ethnicity and race. This multi-faceted approach to interpreting work identity can be summarised in the organisational diagram below (see Figure I.1), where the lines are not causal, and therefore do not result in effects, but indicate the range of social and cultural fields intersecting with the experience of work. Theoretical context The use of oral testimony to paint graphic accounts of working life is not a new device. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1921) used oral accounts as well as those from textual sources and paved the way for this type of ethnographic sociological research. Later in the century Studs Terkel placed

Introduction 5 Figure I.1

Work identification Work Identification

Civic engagement and social action

Workplace social relations

Work Identities: stories, recounted and lived

Cultural representation and imagining

Family, generations, and social locations

Source: After Wetherell, November 2007

work and workers in the foreground through his radio broadcasts and his popular collection of oral accounts of working life in America first published in 1970, Working. The opening sentence of his introduction pulls no punches: This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. (Terkel, 1975: xiii) Work is revealed in his volume as an unremitting grind for those caught in its grasp with only the concluding testimony of a fireman hinting at the wider moral landscape of work engendering usefulness, comradeship and the commanding of respect from others. Terkel’s position recalls the 150-year old analysis of Karl Marx: work is the site of exploitation and alienation under capitalism. However the views of other nineteenth century commentators on work are being resurrected in the early years of the twenty-first century. Barack Obama in his presidential inaugural speech invoked the rhetoric of the work ethic in his pledge to ‘re-make America’. Referring back to the nineteenth century Protestant valuing of work as a redeeming and spiritually enhancing feature of life he praised the men and women who have, ‘struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life’.1 This work ethic was initially a Protestant/Northern European and then Anglo-American phenomenon and an example of the

6 Work and Identity

interconnectedness between the two countries that predates the ‘special relationship’ and economic entanglement of the post-Second World War years. Many influential preachers on the nobleness of work were British, most notably John Ruskin, but the words of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Smiles also resonated with the factory building and owning middle class of North America in the late nineteenth century (Rodgers, 1974). These positions on the nature of work: between taking pride in work and alienation from it, between forms of ownership and assimilation of work or of dispossession, existed in tension throughout the twentieth century and continue to co-exist today despite vast changes in the composition of the labour market in terms of workers and industries. The sociological literature on work is extensive and varied. It has been regularly reviewed under different themes that reflect both the preoccupations current at the date of the collection and of the reviewers themselves, with all having a common theme: dissatisfaction with the current theoretical understanding and methodological approaches to the study of work. By the 1980s a number of publications calling for a ‘fresh look’ or a ‘new approach’ to the study of work appeared. Patrick Joyce edited a collection of essays, The Historical Meanings of Work (1987) which aimed to clarify the mythologies of work, for example ‘Victorian values’, current in the intense debate on the future of work. He posed a number of historical questions; asking when did understandings of work shift from being associated with ‘pain and degradation’ to that of ‘dignity’, and when did the ideologies of supervision, efficiency and management eclipse the notion of work as essentially creative (Joyce, 1987: 2). He also called for a closer study of visual material arguing that icons and images had been central in creating representations of work in the twentieth century, and cites Ludtke’s study of photographs of work in Germany between 1900 and 1940 as a model.2 R. E. Pahl’s 1988 anthology On Work, was compiled in response to what he termed the naïve and simple polemics of ‘the future of work industry’, citing in particular the work of Charles Handy and Andre˙ Gorz.3 To refute these approaches he assembled a scholarly collection of essays arguing that although the nature of work remains complex, with constant changes in processes and social relationships, it also, paradoxically, has a remarkable consistency over time. Pahl did not anticipate a ‘farewell to the working class’ in the foreseeable future. A few years later the American collection, The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives (1990), edited by Steven Vallas and Karl Erikson, bemoaned the ‘balkanisation’ of the sociology of work into different

Introduction 7

departments, opposing theoretical camps and internal fragmentation and specialisation. They appealed for a renewal of interest in ‘forgotten terrain’ in the sociology of work, in particular the classical theme of the effect of work on the person. Vallas noted that despite the historical theoretical legacy of Marx, Weber and the Chicago School there had been few attempts to investigate the link between work and personality, or individual identity (Vallas, 1990: 344). Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writing in the same volume, dismissed the methodology of attitude surveys used in organisational sociology as reductionist and argued for a return to a sociology that permitted a broader understanding of the role work has in people’s lives and the under researched links between workplace culture and identity. While acknowledging the usefulness of labour process theory she considered many studies had resulted in ‘wooden’ formulations that omitted major concerns of workers. Epstein listed ‘security, conviviality, tradition, opportunity … and pay’ as missing from the analyses of labour process theorists; to this list we might add, meaning, self-respect, politics and identity. So, while applauding the use of Marxist theories and survey methodologies for enriching our understanding of economic and class inequality, she concluded that: In our quest for hard, measurable facts concerning work, we have forgotten to ask what conceptions people hold about work, whether or how people may identify with their jobs, and how the boundaries between the workplace and other spheres of life are experienced (Epstein, 1990: 90). Many of these questions were addressed through feminist analyses of women’s relationship with waged work. In the early part of the century this hinged on the necessity of women’s employment as integral to citizenship and autonomy. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) was, theoretically, committed to equal pay for women from 1888 onwards although in practice the sectional interests of trade unions were hostile and promoted instead the concept of the male breadwinner or ‘family’ wage. Women however, organised themselves in their own associations and teachers were prominent among these. There were many ‘first-wave’ feminists committed to ensuring that girls received an education suitable for employment and civic engagement.4 The concerns of industrial sociology were directed at full-time employment in the formal economy thus excluding housework, caring work, voluntary work, and work in the informal economy. With the birth of

8 Work and Identity

second-wave feminism a new generation of feminist sociologists made an immense contribution to theoretical debates on work. Ann Oakley’s, The Sociology of Housework, published in 1974 paved the way for an intense discussion on the concept of the ‘family wage’ and wages for housework both within the feminist movement and beyond. The position of women in capitalist relations of production and reproduction and in Marxist analyses of work was also examined in this period (Barrett and McIntosh, 1979). Throughout the 1980s feminist sociologists produced a body of work examining gender segregation (Crompton, 1997), occupational segregation (Cockburn, 1986) and skill (Walby, 1986) which counter-balanced the preoccupations of earlier industrial sociologists with the traditional male-dominated heavy industries. Another significant contribution was Hochschild’s The Managed Heart (1983) which introduced the concept of ‘emotional labour’ in relation to service sector workers, a concept which has been used in investigations of nursing, call centre workers and extended to include the idea of embodiment, breaking down the narrow boundaries of the old labour process debates to extend our understandings of the new worlds of work which emerged in the late twentieth century. Of particular note are two ethnographic studies of the factory floor written by women, Women on the Line (1982) by Miriam Glucksmann and Girl, Wives, Factory Lives (1981) by Anna Pollert. Glucksmann went on to suggest that the only way to theorise the contribution that women make to the economy is through her formulation of the ‘total social organisation of labour’, a system that overrides the dualisms of ‘work’ and ‘home’ to account for the whole amount of women’s work (Glucksmann, 1995). As our investigation here reveals, although the focus of the oral testimonies given was ostensibly on the workplace there were many instances when, for men and women, the conversation included the relationship between work, family and other commitments. By the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, academic debate and public policy discourse argued that the world of work had declined as a meaningful space through which to find a sense of self and identity. If, as we suggested earlier, work once offered secure lives and settled communities, from the 1980s it became marked by change and instability (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000; Gorz, 1999), or even by what has been termed the ‘end of work’ (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994; Rifkin, 1996; for an overview see Strangleman, 2006). Bauman argued that the present state of ‘modern’ work conditions ‘produced compliant and conforming subjects of the modern state’ (Bauman, 1998: 18);

Introduction 9

while others insisted that modern work had failed as a ‘source of social cohesion or integration’, so that ‘the “social bond” it established between individuals was abstract and weak’ (Gorz, 1999: 55). For these writers the ‘older’ industrial world of work – and its experiences, traditions, forms and institutions – had demised, while any desire for its return articulated little but nostalgia ‘for the age of full employment’ (Beck, 2000: 7). Putnam (2000) suggested that since the 1980s contemporary career structures and work practice had become increasingly individualised in relation to wider structures of family, community and society; while other voices pointed to a generational shift occurring within younger members of the workforce leading to a loss of long-term commitment to work, the work ethic and the ethos of public service (Casey, 1995; du Gay, 1996). The end of work, or at least the transformation of work, has also been identified under the term Brazilianisation, which confirms labour, as we suggest above, as essentially precarious and unstable. The increasing individualisation of work, in part constituted the new global risk society defined by Beck (2000: 82). Both Beck and Giddens (2000) saw these changes positively, even though Beck identified negative effects on individual biographies, with experience transformed by structural change. Nevertheless he stressed that these precarious conditions of labour constituted a ‘second modernity’ that still held the promise of a re-politisation of life conditions, a renewal of the place of civil society and a refashioned concern with civic work (2000: 132–62). The role of work is also examined through the writing of Sennett, and others like Lamont (2000). Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006), and The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) had questioned Beck and Bauman while not wholly rejecting, at the same time, the ‘decline of work’ thesis. We discuss Sennett’s position in greater detail in a later chapter, while work, women and the position of feminism has been briefly examined above, but will be featured in greater detail through notions of representation in Chapter 2. Recent writing by Andrew Sayer (2005) approached the subject of work in the context of subjectivity and identity formation and practice. The central issue of this book focuses on what Sayer describes as the moral significance of class and in doing so he underlines the continuing relevance of work to experiences and ideas of ‘self’, in turn echoing Sennett’s arguments while offering a challenge against popular notions on the ‘end of work’ enunciated in the late 1980s and 1990s. Understanding, or defining work has often seen it in instrumental terms (as a

10 Work and Identity

means to an end). Closely related to this, work has been judged as replaced by other modes of identity formation linked to, for instance, the significance of consumerism. Nevertheless, our analysis of work reveals in many testimonies that work provides forms of experience that fashions fundamental expectations, desires and hopes. Lamont’s writing on work identity established this view in consonant ways, while Sayer’s arguments maintain that notions of respect, recognition and dignity are, or can still be, achieved through the field of work, which constitutes identity and social action, expressing structures of feeling in the constitution of self and in a number of respects notions of community. So while recognition, in what might be seen as a Hegelian sense, entails mis-recognition in the exchange between self and other, conversely it implies modes of solidarity and camaraderie. If work holds the capacity or hope to shape the identity of individuals and groups, it may be that the importance of recognition and respect is vital in this context. It also raises question around the notion of commitment. Sayer views commitments as a crucial part in making up our character and without them we are likely to feel rootless and lost. Losing, or being prevented from pursuing commitments – within the workplace, as we will argue – can lead to powerful sentiments, even ones akin to the experience of bereavement (Sayer, 2005: 41). Any range of conflicts or affiliations in the workplace constitute powerful and sometimes overwhelming experiences for workers; so much so that ‘mixtures of ambition, struggle for self-esteem and emotional commitment … can have a huge impact on workers’ lives – at the extreme, prompting them to leave secure jobs and uproot their lives’ (Sayer, 2005: 42). As we earlier pointed out work has often been viewed simply in instrumental terms, but closer analysis and a keener listening discovers the various ways the place of work articulates more complex human experience. This is self-evident in personal experiences, but also with regard to the collective or public dimension and social interaction, and how one earns or acquires a sense of identity and moral worth through interactions with others. Sayer’s work on subjectivity draws extensively from Bourdieu’s thinking on social reproduction, most significantly through the concept of habitus. Bourdieu’s work is profoundly influential, and in this book his writing informs areas of our analysis. Bourdieu’s writing defined the internalised structure of what he called the habitus as a classifying mechanism for making sense of the world – embedded dispositions generating in the subject an almost spontaneous response to the world they inhabit. Therefore, when activated, dispositions constituting the habitus operate to reproduce the social structures that shaped actors in the first place, thus

Introduction 11

reflecting for Sayer the ‘habitat in which they were formed’ (2005: 24), and in the process reproducing identity and culture. Subjectivity is constituted in this way, for Bourdieu. Sayer has suggested that this ‘model of development is one of subconscious bodily learning through repetition and practice’. Yet Sayer’s main point insists, too, on a process beyond, or accompanying, this formulation, one that Bourdieu’s own position critically downplayed. So Sayer stresses the degree to which the habitus is also constituted through a level of rational, conscious monitoring based on ethical considerations. In this view, ‘embodiment and rationality are not as opposed as generally assumed’ (2005: 28). Sayer’s use of habitus touches on a similar conceptual form, but one that is closer and perhaps more germane to our dealing with the importance of oral testimonies and working lives: Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’. Williams’s concept combines the two cognitive processes of thought and feeling that Sayer had accused Bourdieu of disregarding in the development of his notion of habitus. Consequently, to investigate and analyse the oral testimonies engaged with in our work we have turned to Williams’s cultural analysis and in particular his notion of structures of feeling. Through this concept, we suggest, identity is interpretable as experience moving between the social and individual at once, the result of inevitable inter-subjective historical social relations and processes, and so the idea of identity and the production of culture, in Williams’s terms, lies in an acceptance of it as ‘a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ways of life’ (1977: 19). Thus structure of feeling draws to central attention the importance of ‘lived experience’, while seeing lived experience essentially as a process – here, consequently, the idea of structure of feeling as a way of seeing and experiencing emerges as a fluid and changing state: what Williams saw as ‘in solution’ (1977: 130–1). In this way Williams underlines the place and importance of agency, of action, a consideration largely absent in the concept of habitus. Williams defined structure of feeling as bound up with everyday, practical consciousness in a complex relation with official consciousness, or dominant forms – what he described as ‘fixed forms, or received interpretations’ (1977: 128). These forms entail hegemonic processes that continually shape understandings of society and the world; conversely, practical consciousness, in the end, is ‘always more than a handling of fixed forms … There is frequent tension between the received interpretation and practical experience …’ and this tension might be felt as ‘an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency …’ a marker of experience as it hovers at the very ‘edge of semantic availability’, and


articulation, and in significant senses at variance with ‘received interpretation’ (1977: 128–31). Structures of feeling express complex and potentially contradictory relations, and it is in such contexts that we explore oral testimonies that inevitably take variable forms – narratives shaping identity through lived experience and that then produces work-life histories. Williams at the same time saw structure of feeling as formed within a cultural framework of experience defined as dominant, emergent and residual. We suggest that this formulation – this mode of expressing both difference and sameness – can be introduced as a way of analysing generational responses that disclose significant changes but also important continuities across the occupations, but also through the processes of age, gender, class and race. Structures of feeling stands then as a mediating term to delineate the continuing interaction between the individual and the social. In the following chapters we combine what we call a linguistic/ discursive analysis with the visual dimensions of the research – both photo-elicitation techniques, and the examining and photographing of people’s mementoes recalling a working life. Chapter 7 is central to this focus and opens up our material beyond the parameters of spoken or written language alone. During the empirical work we found that a significant number of the research participants kept mementoes from their workplace. These memorabilia included tools of a trade, ephemeral leaflets and pamphlets, union mementoes, uniforms and badges, long service awards, gifts from colleagues, and photographs both formal and informal. Understanding these objects in relation to their place in the lives and homes of their owners and also in the context of the process of recording an oral history was helped by using insights gained from the disciplines of material culture studies, anthropology, and oral history. Sociological studies, with some exceptions, rarely touch on the material culture of work or work identities in relation to workplace artefacts particularly in the context of domestic, social space. Chapter 7 of this book provides new insights using this methodology. ***** This book is structured into three parts. Part I, looks at the wider historical and cultural contexts of both identity and work; Part II focuses on work and identity using oral testimonies from workers in the three occupations; Part III examines representation of the workplace and workers through a range of cultural forms.

Introduction 13

Part I, ‘Work and Identity: Exploring History, Culture and Subjectivity’, is introduced by Chapter 1, ‘Charting Historical Change: Work in the US and UK during the Twentieth Century’. Here the chapter begins at the end of Hobsbawm’s ‘long nineteenth century’, which saw the dominance of a capitalist market economy and widespread industrialisation of production alongside the formation of the institutions, structures and processes which were to shape working life for many over the following decades. However the emergence of global capitalism and the associated shift of heavy industry away from the US and Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century caused ruptures in both the experience of work and expectations of future work. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first two sections use historical statistics from the US Census Bureau and the British Census to chart and compare general changes in occupations and industries in the two halves of the twentieth century. Changes in the form of employment and labour market participation are also examined with a particular focus on the role of trades unions. Thirdly, the chapter examines employment relations in the US and Britain in the post-war period. The chapter concludes with review of recent interpretations of these changing patterns in the nature of work by sociological and historical commentators. In Chapter 2, ‘Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost: Working Life and its Representations’, the emphasis falls on how working life has been depicted within the field of cultural production, arguing that there have been key historical moments when the place of working life has been central in relation to understanding of identity and, by extension, notions of community and belonging expressed often in the context of nation. The chapter breaks into two sections, with section one taking three distinct periods from within the broader historical sweep examined here. These are: the 1930s; the post-war period of ‘affluence’ in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the moment of de-industrialisation set in train in countries like Britain and North America from around the mid1970s. Section two, takes gender as the central theme in relation to labour and work, and, covering a similar historical period to that in the first section, suggests that Raymond Williams’ notion of the selective tradition has some salience in relation to the depiction of women and work in the twentieth century. Representations of work, within these narratives, are set within a range of ideological frameworks that reflect broader cultural anxieties and concerns, as well as political hopes and fears, responses often embodied in the very image of the workers themselves. Narrative (in its broadest sense)


is here constituted as a socially symbolic act (Jameson, 1981), and tracing images of work from the inter-war period, for instance, reveals an iconography that encompasses both the ‘heroic’ manual worker and the destitution and loss resulting from unemployment. Thus narrative ‘fantasies’ of both individual and collective agency articulate the sphere of work as a place of potential liberation and identity formation, or as one of alienation and anomie – constituting narrative trajectories shaped by profound historical and social events and contexts. Chapter 3, ‘Identity in Question and the Place of Work’ examines notions of subjectivity and the role of work bound to identity formation. Though often thought of in individualistic terms, identities are lived and experienced collectively – people, it can be argued, come to realise themselves in wider social, economic and political contexts which powerfully shape notions of self, and in turn modes of identification and belonging (or of exclusion). Since around the 1980s, and in particular in the USA, the rise and development of identity studies, and of identity politics has taken a central role in cultural studies. This chapter, then, addresses three central elements to do with the place of work in relation to identity: the growing importance of identity and identity formation in academic study; the formation of identities in the specific context of work; the importance of recent studies around the idea of intersectionality for making sense of identities in the context of work. The chapter closes with a discussion of oral testimony in relation to work and identity; these brief extracts show how work identity is very often bound up with wider moral and ethical concerns around notions of commitment, recognition and respect (Skeggs, 1997, 2004; Sennett, 1998), thematic concerns relating to notions of civic action and the formation of identity. Part II, ‘Work and Social Identity: Teaching, Banking and Railway Work’, specifically addresses the oral testimonies. The post-Second World War period in Britain witnessed rapid changes in the field of education, with the 1944 Butler Act and free compulsory education for all up to the age of 15. These developments led, by the mid-1960s – and after much debate – to the enlargement of comprehensive schools, the major change in the structure and nature of compulsory education in Britain. By the mid-1980s, this had altered again with the attempts to re-introduce ‘choice’ for schools and establish a more market-oriented educational ethos. Consequently, teachers – often in mid-career, and here we suggest in common with bank workers in the 1980/1990s – have had to re-think once stable identities, and re-orientate themselves around the new needs and demands of an increasingly bureau-

Introduction 15

cratised and commodified education sector. What is witnessed, in this context, is the disruption of that narrative of the working self out of which identity emerges and is shaped over time. Thus, Chapter 4, ‘Working at the Chalk-face: Articulating the “Teacherly Self” and Educational Change’, examines a number of themes linked to generational changes in teacher identity and experience. In part, the article underlines the importance of ‘emotional labour’ in the constitution of the ‘teacherly self’. Using narrative analysis of the work-life histories, recorded using oral history methodology, we examine structures of feeling that turn on notions of emotional commitment, resilience and loss in relation to the occupational identity of teachers. In Chapter 5, ‘Teller, Seller, Union Activist: Class Formation and Changing Bank Worker Identities’, we see how moral and class identities were and still are being created and changed in the context of bank work despite a banking labour process that is evolving very rapidly. Where bank workers are concerned the chapter reveals a picture where the occupational status of many has been or is being transformed into back office, but customer-facing, call centre operators or, where they still work in branches, from counter staff with knowledge of and direct relations with individual customers to often inadequately trained and pressured sales staff. For most bank workers a direct personal relationship with customers, where it existed, has now largely disappeared. Maintaining such continuity has become increasingly difficult as both the workforce, customers and the activities carried out by banks have changed. The numbers employed across the whole banking, finance and insurance sector exploded during the course of the twentieth century, and particularly over the last 30 years: up from 2.5 million in 1978 to 5.7 million by 2007, a growth of 126 per cent, compared to the overall growth in employment in the economy of 12 per cent. The workforce has become significantly more feminised. Bank customers changed too: since the 1970s and 1980s virtually all manual workers have been paid, like white collar workers, monthly via a bank account. Banks finally had to provide a full service to all. Starting in the same period most of the ‘friendly’, ‘mutual’ and ‘building societies’ that had catered for locally-rooted, trustbased savings began to transform themselves into profit-making and taking banks, while the banks moved into the home loans and insurance businesses. How far has this expansion and diversification of banking weakened the relationship between work and social identity? This chapter discusses the ways in which ‘bank worker’ identity has been maintained. It argues that part of this surviving identity is still linked to moral and


social class-based definitions embedded in societal expectations. But in part, too, it suggests this identity is articulated and reproduced through trade union engagement and activism. The banking industry has long been the private service sector with the highest levels of trade union and staff association membership. This continues today, albeit at lower density levels than in the past, suggesting that union membership is one way in which strong company cultures are intertwined to form an occupational identity – although as before, beyond the ranks of the most active trade unionists, this ‘unionateness’ rarely manifests itself in pro-Labour political terms. Chapter 6, ‘Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails’, starts out by examining the railway industry. Prior to nationalisation of the railways in 1947 there had emerged a distinct occupational culture within the sector that had produced over 100 grades of railway work. Thus a railway career was often regarded as a source of pride, prestige and honour, and this worked to elevate train drivers to a super labour aristocracy. At the same time, company loyalties, prior to the nationalisation of the industry, were a central feature of work identification within the sector. Despite this, trade unionism featured as a powerful institution through which a railway identity emerged, with Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) and the National Union of Railway (NUR) (later the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)) central to the shaping of the railways and key figures in the wider labour movement. Following nationalisation, the Beeching Report of 1963 reduced staff numbers leading to widespread and radical changes in the industry, changes compounded by the introduction of diesel and the elimination of steam. With the passing of the ‘heroic’ age of steam, work identity changed for those once on the footplate: in the words of one critic, it ‘marked a point of no return in a driver’s relationship with both his engine and his employer’, Yet even with the passing of steam, the work identity of a train driver maintained its iconic status as a traditional male occupation, surviving even the profound changes caused by privatisation of the industry in 1994 which signalled a sea change in ideas of being a ‘railwayman’. Intended to introduce ‘market disciplines’ to fragment and discipline labour to more flexible and ‘realistic’ demands, privatisation resulted in the breaking up of the old British Rail and a return to franchise ownership of rail companies. This impacted on railway identities in a range of ways, and will form one important dimension of this chapter. The chapter examines the significance of work across generations, tracing the impact of lived experiences through Williams’s

Introduction 17

notions of residual, dominant and emergent structures of feeling to make sense of notions of loss, pride and recognition. Here, an emphasis falls on the place of class, gender and generation. Part III, ‘Articulating work Identities’, is focused on forms of narrative and representation. Consequently, Chapter 7, ‘Something to Show For It: The Place of Work Memorabilia in Three Occupations’, takes photographs of work memorabilia generated through the interviews, and reveals how they are used to enhance and build on the oral history accounts of work given by teachers, railway workers and bank workers. The objects saved by these workers can symbolise many years of work history and an analysis of work memorabilia has the potential to enhance oral history accounts in significant ways, complementing, or even transcending, a reliance of the oral record alone to describe a past or current work identity. The materiality of an object saved or taken from the workplace has the potential to not just prompt reminiscence but to also represent and express key identities, work processes and traditions. These objects also breach the secrecy of the workplace and the privacy of the home, making permeable the boundaries between these two distinct social spaces frequently described in opposition to each other and as having distinctly dual characteristics. This chapter firstly describes the methodology employed in photographing these personal mementoes of work and outlines some ethical considerations arising from this approach. Secondly, the photographs and testimony of some of those interviewed are presented. Interpretation of these accounts uses the theoretical tools of material culture to reveal how memorabilia do not just stimulate memory but, in themselves as objects, carry meanings about work. But rather than focus on an analysis of these objects the aim here is to describe, at the microlevel, the interactions between people and their memorabilia in order to elicit a clearer picture of the historical and contemporary identities associated with the three occupations. Finally the conclusion suggests that by focusing on memorabilia, and the ways in which they are kept and displayed within the home, future research might begin to explore how work identities are transmitted across generations, and fit into a wider social, class and occupational nexus. Chapter 8, ‘Narrating Work Identity: Oral Testimony and the Place of Anecdotes’, draws on perspectives derived from narrative analysis and cultural studies to explore oral testimonies of working lives, with a focus on a selection of workers. The main thrust of the analysis turns on an investigation of the position of anecdotes in the telling of work-life histories, considering how such modes of telling help unlock important themes around working life and social identity.


Anecdotes constitute a formative structural component of oral histories, containing value judgements, or in the terms of narrative theory, complexly articulated ‘evaluative accents’ (Volosinov, 1973: 31). The chapter suggests that such formations can be seen to express a ‘practical consciousness’ (Williams, 1977) often held in tension with fixed forms and thus expressing a disjuncture between dominant and subordinated meanings of the social. Consequently, the chapter argues that our conceptualisation of anecdotes can be stretched beyond their embeddedness in personal stories alone by placing them within wider historical and social contexts and by exploring some of the core conventions characterising the form (or speech genre, following Bakhtin (1984) and Volosinov (1973)). Through such analysis anecdotes are shown as more than simply accounts of personal experience but offer a glimpse of social structure – replete with evaluative accents, anecdotes emerge as kinds of morality tales, or authority stories, even historical documents (James, 2003: 171–2). Disclosing, in their telling, a powerful moral and ethical dimension, the anecdote enables us to think too about important themes touched throughout this book: the place of commitment, recognition and worth as these values manifest themselves in the telling of working lives. Furthermore, they articulate, on a number of levels, conceptions, understandings and expressions of identity across formations related to class, gender and race; suggesting, too, the important intersectional nature of these formations. Finally, anecdotes express structures of feeling that, in Raymond Williams’s terms, can be coded as emergent or residual, and consequently structure of feeling constitutes a further analytical tool central to our understanding of work identities and the meanings of work.

Part I Work and Identity: Exploring History, Culture and Subjectivity


1 Charting Historical Change: Work in the US and UK during the Twentieth Century

This chapter considers some dominant ideas concerning the changing nature of work over the twentieth century, many of which assume that economic growth and technological and occupational changes over the last century have undermined the traditional tensions in the nature of work: between taking pride in work and alienation from it. It sketches some of the empirical historical evidence available for Britain and America with the intention not to give an in-depth analysis and comparison of labour market statistics but more a contextualisation of the debates on the nature of work against a background of evidence and argument on the changing demographics of American and British work.

Work and labour market changes over the first half of the twentieth century Huge changes in the industrial structures of America and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century created a massive demand for ‘new’ workers. The main sources of this available labour were migrants (from agricultural areas and overseas), and ‘underemployed’ or ‘informally employed’ women and, in the US, non-white workers. Susan Carter’s contribution to Historical Statistics of the USA (2006) describes the greatest single change to the composition of the US labour market in the twentieth century as the growth of employment among women. While the total US labour force doubled to 59 million between 1900 and 1950, women’s labour force participation increased from 22 per cent to 30 per cent. In America the occupational changes began to make themselves felt differently for white and non-white women: thus while a third of white working women and half of all 21


non-white women were in domestic service in 1900, as Table 1.1 suggests, the major turning points, in terms of occupational structure were the First World War for white American women, and the Second World War for non-white women. As Wendy Bottero (2000) points out in her review of labour market change at the end of the twentieth century in Britain, women’s position in relation to paid employment exhibits both continuity and change: change in that more women are working but continuity in wage inequality because the majority of women are in part-time lowpaid employment. While there has been a decline in occupational segregation among full-time workers there has been an increase among part-time workers so that the traditional pattern of women employed in low-level, low-paid part-time work, particularly while they have young families has persisted throughout the century. The two exceptional periods when this pattern was disrupted to some extent were the World Wars. On both occasions high levels of state intervention were required to shift the engrained patterns of female employment. In Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century around five million women worked, making up 29 per cent of the total workforce, by 2000, the figure had risen to 13 million, 46 per cent of the workforce (Lindsay, 2003). Economic explanations for this rise in the numbers of women participating in the labour market cite the general shift from manufacturing to service industries together with the increase of automation and labour saving devices in manufacture and the introduction of flexible work hours as providing easier access to work for women. There is some argument over whether the increase of women in the workforce during the war years, especially in occupations typically perceived as ‘men’s jobs’ had any direct long-term Table 1.1 American women’s membership (% of all women’s employment) of major US occupational groups, 1900–1950

Professionals

1900 1920 1940 1950

Clerical workers

Sales workers

Semi-skilled operatives

White

Nonwhite

White

Nonwhite

White

Nonwhite

White

Nonwhite

9.9 13.9 13.8 13.6

1.3 2.5 4.4 5.9

5.4 23.5 24.8 31.3

0.2 0.6 1.4 4.6

4.0 7.5 8.0 9.5

0.1 0.3 0.7 1.6

24.9 23.1 21.3 20.2

1.7 6.4 7.5 14.7

Domestic workers NonWhite white 33 11.5 10.5 3.9

49.9 43.2 56.3 40.9

Source: Data from Table 3, Major Occupational Groups: Females 1850–1990 in Sobek, M. New Statistics on the US Labor Force 1850–1990, Historical Methods, Spring, 2001, 34(2): 74.

Charting Historical Change 23

effect on women’s employment. In a review of statistical evidence from the US Claudia Goldin (1991) concludes that ‘wartime work did not by itself greatly increase women employment’ in the following decades. However, Joshi et al. (1985), after examining the British evidence surmised that the experience of war work and the skills women acquired made many women more likely to remain in the workforce. This claim has recently been investigated in detail for the chemical and engineering industries where Hart (2009) found that the vocational training undertaken by women in these industries did confer long-term economic benefits in terms of their earnings. Generally, the changes resulting from women’s participation in war work were circumscribed in the post-war years by wartime policies, which shifted women out of higher paid men’s occupation into lower paid service and traditionally female sectors. In many cases this social engineering was not required as large numbers of women with families in full-time employment in 1944 indicated that they wanted to return to their homes when the war ended (Thomas, 1944, cited in Smith, 1984). But the post-Second World War years did see a significant increase in the numbers of married women entering the labour market. The general shift away from domestic employment for women over the first part of the century is shown in Table 1.2. Beginning in the early twentieth century these gender and occupational changes took place in societies that were beginning to experience growing democratic demands, both for the vote and for restraints on arbitrary management power at work.1 Socialist groups appeared in both countries, becoming institutionalised in the Labour Representation Committee, set up by the British trade unions in 1900, and in the Socialist Party of America, set up by the merging of different socialist groups in 1901. The first half of the twentieth century also witnessed Table 1.2 British women’s membership (% of all women’s employment) of major British occupational groups, 1901–1951

Professionals 1901 1921 1951

6.9 7.2 8.4

Clerks, typists

Commercial occupations

Textiles & clothing

Personal services

– 8.6 20.2

1.6 10.1 12.3

33.4 20.7 12.7

42.2 32.4 23.1

Source: Abstract of British Historical Statistics, B. R. Mitchell (1962), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Note: Census definitions for 1901 are taken from the 1911 Census, and those for 1921 and 1951 from the 1951 Census, as shown in Table 1.2.


moments of rapid radicalisation – after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and in periods of acute labour shortages – when strike waves took place and trade union membership grew rapidly among the semi-skilled workers increasingly needed to support evolving mass production technologies. However, in both countries and for most of the first half of the twentieth century, trade unionism as a whole was male-dominated and primarily based on craft workers or others who had undergone lengthy formal or informal apprenticeships. Among skilled workers in both countries ‘business unionism’ had a purchase it lacked among others who found it much more difficult to protect their labour markets through controlling entry. In America, as shown in Figure 1.1, total trade union membership jumped briefly immediately after the First World War to nearly five million, before experiencing a wave of repression and entering a decade-long decline. There was an upsurge of strike activity in the temporary conditions of labour shortages and high demand present at the end of the First World War, another after 1932 in response to legal changes and the election of Roosevelt on a New Deal programme that included ending much of the stigmatisation of trade union action and membership. The biggest strike wave of all occurred at the end of the Second World War. Figure 1.1 14,000 13,000 12,000 11,000 10,000 9,000

British and US trade union membership (000s), 1900–1950

British trade union membership

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

US trade union membership

1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 Sources: for the US: www.publicpurpose.com – Wendell Cox Consultancy (Demographia); for the UK: Table 1.4 in Barratt, C. (2008), Trade Union Membership 2008, London: National Statistics Publication, Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.


While the craft union-based American Federation of Labour (AFL) then attempted to keep the pent-up demand for unionisation under its own nearly all-white, all-male leadership, it failed. In 1936 ten unions broke away and formed an industrial union federation called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that specifically targeted some of America’s biggest companies such as General Motors, Chrysler, Ford and US Steel. Its aim was to recruit all workers within the same company to the same industrial trade union, and within ten years total union membership had tripled and the pattern of company-based collective bargaining was established. As Jefferys (1986) argues, although this very rapid growth undermined the stranglehold of skilled white males over the movement, its pace and achievement overtook the ability of the small numbers of Communist and Socialist activists to transmit and embed within it a broad class struggle perspective. Most of these politicised activists were rapidly promoted to run the huge new union machines, leaving highly inexperienced members behind without the ideological armour to defend both trade union independence and the politics of class solidarity. The ‘left’ leaders were thus left isolated in the anti-communist backlash that the American employers launched in response to the threat union presence and actions posed to their prerogatives from 1938 onwards and particularly at the end of the Second World War.2 In Britain the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was formed in 1868 by craft-conscious male trade unions similar to those who made up the AFL. However, some white collar workers also saw advantages in becoming trade unionists, primarily to pool resources to provide insurance and other mutual benefits. From the late 1880s strikes involving dock workers and women factory workers highlighted the possibility of trade unions recruiting more widely than just among the labour aristocracy. Within an urban political environment that was dominated by an antilandlord liberalism that opened up a space for social reform, socialism had gradually strengthened as a legitimate ideology. Similarly to what occurred later in America, after Roosevelt’s first election victory in 1932, trade union membership then grew particularly strongly after the 1906 Liberal election victory when the number of Labour MPs also increased from two to 29. At the end of the First World War, as in the US and around the world, a huge brief surge in union strike activity and membership took place. Unlike the US, where a political anti-socialist and anti-communist witch-hunt accompanied that growth and helped keep it from stretching far beyond the 10 per cent level, in Britain this was a moment of mass unionisation of semi and unskilled workers, reaching up to 45 per cent of all those employed.

26 Work and Identity Figure 1.2 Trade union density (% of employed workers) in Britain and the US, 1900–1950 50 British trade union density

45 40 35 30 25 20

US trade union density

15 10 5 0 1900

1905 1910

1915

1920

1925 1930

1935 1940 1945

1950

Source: Data from Table 2.1 Trade union density for Britain and the United States (%) in Booth (1995). The Economics of the Trade Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 13.

Figure 1.2 based on data compiled by Booth (1995) shows that in Britain trade unionism also declined massively in terms of density during the 1920s and in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, but only to a level of about one in four workers. Those who remained in trade unions included many in the traditional crafts such as time-served engineering workers, but also semi-skilled and unskilled workers in geographically or organisationally tightly bounded industries such as the docks, mining and the railways, as well as, in complete contrast with the American situation, growing numbers of public sector and white collar workers. Much of this cross-over between the unionising experiences of manual workers and the emerging white collar unions was carried by socialists in a national political context where the Labour Party entered government in 1924, 1929 and 1940. By 1950 trade unions in both countries were close to what were effectively their historic membership highs. Eric Hobsbawm would write a provocative essay 30 years later called – ‘The forward march of labour halted?’ – where we suggests the 1940s and 1950s could be seen as representing a form of ‘high point’ in collective industrial class consciousness in Britain. Yet although women had campaigned both within the


male-dominated unions and separately in women-only unions for equality and equal pay, trade union gender composition and politics of supporting the ‘male’ family wage had changed very little. In the UK, for example, the marriage bar had only just been formally dismantled in teaching and in bank work. Although there were many more of them than 20 or 50 years earlier, nearly all trade unionists in both countries remained male manual workers within a quite narrow group of very similar industries: transport, iron and steel making, manufacturing and mining. Within 50 years, both women’s participation and the industrial structure would be totally transformed.

Work and the labour market in the second half of the twentieth century During the second half of the twentieth century American women’s labour force participation rate rose still more dramatically, up from 30 per cent in 1950 to 60 per cent in 2000.3 This should be viewed alongside a similarly significant long-term change in the occupational balance away from predominantly manual occupations in the manufacturing industries towards white collar clerical and professional occupations alongside other more ‘manual’ activities in sales and personal services, many of which were in the growing public sector. In the 50 years after 1951, 80 million new service sector jobs appeared in the US economy and 15 million in the British. While both countries absorbed massive migrations in filling these jobs, women were the main gainers: eight million additional female service sector jobs in the UK compared to seven million additional male jobs in the sector; and in the US by 2000, of the 62 million working women 90 per cent worked in service occupations compared with 58 per cent of 71 million working men (US Census Bureau, 2000). Figure 1.3 graphs the way in which in the US service sector and manufacturing employment both fell slightly in the Great Depression and then expanded rapidly to 1944. From that point on their progression diverged. American service industries created nearly 100 million new jobs between then and 2002, whereas manufacturing employment that had grown to a peak of just 21 million in 1979, fell back to 16.7 million, just below its 1944 level in 2002. The data suggest that numerically at least, ‘Industrial America’ reached maturity in the mid-twentieth century. The figure confirms the massive expansion of services, but also underlies the point that despite an emphasis in some of the literature on

28 Work and Identity Figure 1.3

Numbers of US jobs (000s) in services and manufacturing, 1919–2002

120,000

100,000 Services sector jobs 80,000

60,000

40,000

20,000 Manufacturing sector jobs 0 1919 1925 19311937 1943 1949 1955 1961 1967 1973 1979 1985 1991 1997 Source: US Bureau of the Census: Annual data Online.

‘de-industrialisation’ in the post-Second World War era, there remain as many manufacturing workers today as there were 70 years ago. Of course, this is not to underestimate the huge relative change shown in Figure 1.4: in the twenty-first century, the percentage of American workers in manufacturing is now less than the percentage of services sector workers who work for local or Federal government. In Britain the picture was not dissimilar, although the starting point was different and the economy very much smaller. Figure 1.5, although based on less complete data than for the US, shows how both service jobs and manufacturing jobs expanded in total numbers through the first half of the twentieth century before diverging. Over 16 million new jobs were created in the services sector between 1951 and 2006 while, after reaching a peak and stabilising in the 1960s and 1970s, British manufacturing jobs declined continuously to 3.3 million by 2006, half their 1951 level. As in the US, the flow of employment into British manufacturing up to the end of the 1960s should not obscure the fact that the share of total employment in that sector fell drastically. But this is not the only

Charting Historical Change 29 Figure 1.4 Shares (%) of all US employment in services (including government services) and manufacturing, 1919–2002 90 80

All services

70 60 50 40 Manufacturing 30 20 10

Government services

0 1919

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2002

Sources: US Bureau of the Census: Annual data Online.

Figure 1.5

UK jobs (000s) in services and manufacturing, 1921–2006

25,000 Services sector jobs 20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000 Manufacturing sector jobs 0 1921

1931

1951

1965? 1978

1981

1991

2001

2006

Sources: 1921–51: B. R. Mitchell (1962: 61); 1978–2006: National Office of Statistics, LMS5, Workforce jobs by industry (2008). Author estimates for mid-1960s.

30 Work and Identity Figure 1.6 Shares (%) of all UK employment in services (including government services) and manufacturing, 1921–2006 90 80

All services

70 60 50 40 30 20 Government services 10 Manufacturing 0 1921

1931

1951

1965?

1978

1981

1991

2001

2006

Source: As Figure 1.5. Government services include the National Health Service and teaching.

difference with the American experience. As shown in Figure 1.6, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the UK was much more ‘European’ in its reliance upon the state sector. In the context of much stronger UK liberal-interventionist and social democrat political traditions than in the less state interventionist American polity, it is not surprising that the share of employment within the public sector (excluding the nationalised market-facing industries) rose above the 20 per cent level in the 1970s, a level it has never exceeded in America, and then stayed there. In the context of Thatcher’s resolution of the finance vs industrial capital tension within British capitalism in favour of the former, it is also not surprising that manufacturing employment also declined below the level of the public sector a good decade earlier than in the US: during the 1980s. Nonetheless, while the concept of ‘de-industrialisation’ clearly has much more purchase in Britain than in America, the three million workers who still worked in manufacturing in 2006 comprise one in ten jobs throughout the economy, and belie, in many urban areas of the UK, the blanket image of an ‘end of industry’. What differences in occupational distribution have these structural trends created? In both countries, women dominate the increase in the

Charting Historical Change 31 Figure 1.7

Numbers of US teachers and finance workers (millions), 1950–2007

18 16

Women teachers

14

Women finance

12

Men teachers

10

Men finance

8 6 4 2 0 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2007

Sources: US Abstract of Statistics, various dates. Teacher data exclude post-secondary; finance data include insurance and real estate.

numbers of white collar jobs. In the professional occupations huge numbers of women disproportionately entered the rapidly expanding education, health and finance sectors. Figure 1.7 shows two of the largest employment growth areas in the US between 1950 and 2007: the numbers of women working in the finance sector grew from 800,000 to 5.8 million, compared to male growth from 1 million to 4.7 million; while the numbers of women teachers grew from nearly 900,000 to 4.4 million compared to male growth from 300,000 to 1.4 million. In the UK women also entered these growth sectors in huge numbers. The data shown in Figure 1.8 cover the last 30 years and include all those working in education as well as in the broader public administration and health sectors. It shows how the 3.4 million women working in the public sector in 1978 grew to 5.7 million in 2009, compared with male employment growth from 2.2 million to 2.5 million. In the UK finance sector, in contrast to the US, while there was steady feminisation from 43 per cent in 1978 to 49 per cent in 1996, thereafter, with bank concentration, the downsizing of the retail banks and the extraordinary growth of merchant and speculative banking, women’s involvement fell back to 44 per cent by 2009. Male employment in UK finance in 2009 was two million higher than the 1.6 million employed in 1978, while women’s employment grew by just 1.6 million from 1.2 million.

32 Work and Identity Figure 1.8 UK men and women’s employment (millions) in finance and public administration, health and education, 1978–2009 16 14

Women public admin, education, health Women finance Men public admin, education, health Men finance

12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1978 1981 1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 Source: Office for National Statistics, Workforce jobs by industry, 2009.

Notwithstanding this overall increase in the numbers of women participating in the UK labour market, wage inequality persists in the form of the ‘gender pay gap’ despite employment legislation first introduced in the mid-1970s. Vertical gender segregation also exists within occupations with women found to dominate the lower grades and men dominating at executive and director level. Horizontal gender segregation also continues to exist between occupations with still very small numbers of women entering the traditional male sectors such as construction or other skilled manual occupations. Table 1.3 details the persistence of gender segregation in the UK labour market in the occupational areas studied here. In 2005 82 per cent of the lowest grade in banking, counter clerks, were women. Similarly for teaching, women make up 78 per cent of special needs and 85 per cent of primary and nursery teachers, posts traditionally associated with the ‘caring’ responsibilities of women. By contrast, there are so few women train drivers they are not picked up in national statistics at all. Alongside these structural changes the composition of the labour market in the post-war period, as well as seeing an increase in participation by women, also became more ethnically diverse. This coincides with an increasingly diverse UK population although there is not a

Charting Historical Change 33 Table 1.3 Employment by status, occupation and sex in banking, teaching and railways, 2005 Occupation Banking Financial institution managers and office managers Counter clerks Teaching Secondary school Primary and nursery Special needs Railways Train drivers

Male 000s

Female 000s

% female

Total 000s

184

219

54

403

38

178

82

216

175 59 18

205 335 64

54 85 78

380 394 82

16

–

0

16

Source: Labour Force Survey 2005.

straightforward relationship between diversity in the wider population and employment. Unlike the US, but with some exceptions such as the Somali community who began to settle in the 1880s, the largest numbers of Britain’s non-white ethnic minorities arrived relatively recently in the post-war period. Active recruitment by the government directed at the Caribbean resulted in immigration in the 1940s and 50s followed by immigration from India and Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these new arrivals held educational qualifications and had recent experience in white collar, professional and management positions, but widespread prejudice prevented them access to equivalent jobs in Britain: instead they were forced into manual jobs many taking semi- and unskilled jobs in manufacturing. In the north and north-west, 26 per cent of Pakistani men worked in the textiles industry compared with 2 per cent of the general population (Smith, 1977) and in 1966 only 8 per cent of West Indian men were in non-manual work compared with 33 per cent of white men (Iganski and Payne, 1996 cited in Heath, 2001). When the economic restructuring and de-industrialisation of the 1980s closed factories many of these workers shifted into self-employment, and self-employment remains a consistent feature of ethnic minority employment (Clark and Drinkwater, 2007). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s more non-white workers accessed white collar jobs, but there were considerable differences in the experiences of different ethnic groups, a characteristic which stimulated much research and interpretation (Modood and Berthoud, 1997 and Carter, 1999). Whereas some commentators


have interpreted the trend of self-employment as a positive indicator of upwards social mobility, others find the type of self-employment undertaken, in for example the precarious, low-paid work of taxi-driving, as merely a necessary survival strategy (Virdee, S., 2000). While ethnic minority women remain the group with lowest labour market participation rates the NHS recruitment drive in the early years of the Welfare State has resulted in black Caribbean women being the exception. Concentrated in NHS nursing careers they have high rates of employment and relatively good salaries (Dex, 2003, cited in Li et al., 2008). Pakistani and Bangladeshi women have the lowest rates of employment and it has been noted that they have very similar patterns of work to white women in the 1950s, taking jobs that fit around their core responsibilities of home-centred domestic work (Li et al., 2008). The other exception is the small numbers of Indian women who, through using the advantages of education, have secured high-level occupations in the professions: medicine, law and accountancy. Table 1.4 reveals the general trends of convergence between white men and Indian and black African men in professional managerial occupations and also highlights the exclusion of black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men. A similar congruity can be seen for white women and Indian women while the disparity between white men and black Caribbean men is highlighted by black Caribbean women’s similar proportion to white women. The Workplace Employment Relations survey (WERS), which is based on information collected from managers, trade unions and employees Table 1.4 Men and women in professional and managerial groups by ethnic group, 1992–2000 (%) Ethnic group White Black Caribbean

1992

1994

men women

1996

men women

1998

men women

2000

men women men women

23

12

24

14

25

14

14

15

27

15

8

6

11

9

11

11

11

10

14

13

Black African

17

6

18

10

22

7

7

8

26

8

Indian

25

12

21

12

27

14

14

14

28

16

Pakistani

13

10

12

6

12

6

6

8

14

9

6

–

8

–

7

–

–

–

17

–

Bangladeshi

Source: Tables 1 and 2 in Heath (2001) Ethnic Minorities in the Labour Market. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/cabinetoffice/strategy/assets/heathdata.pdf (accessed March 2010).

Charting Historical Change 35 Table 1.5 industry

Average proportion of non-white workforce in companies by

Industry Manufacturing Electricity, gas and water Construction Wholesale and retail Hotels and restaurants Transport and communication Financial services Other business services Public administration Education Health Other community services

1998

2004

% Increase

4.62 2.78 2.50 6.42 6.85 5.26 2.83 11.09 3.54 4.42 7.29 4.73

5.63 5.95 1.62 6.70 12.75 7.70 1.69 10.00 5.72 7.51 12.10 6.74

21.74 114.11 –35.07 4.41 86.18 46.39 –40.55 –9.84 61.67 70.12 65.98 42.66

Source: Urwin, P. and Bauscha, F. (2004) Changing Gender and Ethnic Diversity in the UK Workplace: What Can We Learn from the 2004 WERS? Centre for Employment Research, University of Westminster.

themselves, shows considerable differences in the rate of change between industry sectors. Table 1.5 reveals that while the utilities, hotel and restaurant and education sectors have seen rises in the proportion of nonwhite workers, construction and financial services have seen a fall in the proportion of ethnic minority workers. Looking at overall employment we find that up until the recession of the early 1980s there was very little difference in the employment rates of white men and ethnic minority men (Clark and Drinkwater, 2007). However the economic crisis resulted in an acute change with the employment disadvantage suffered by ethnic minority men, relative to white men, increasing from 2.6 percentage points in the 1970s to 10.9 percentage points in the 1980s (Blackaby et al., 1994, cited in Clark and Drinkwater). Since 1991, however there have been some positive changes with greater numbers of ethnic minority men in managerial occupations, as shown in Table 1.4. However these participation figures do not reveal wage differences and a recent comprehensive survey of ethnic minorities in the labour market concludes that, ‘while a higher proportion of individuals from many of the ethnic minorities may be in professional and managerial occupations, those who make it into such positions do not seem to be treated the same as the white group. Earnings penalties are still a fact of life for ethnic minorities in the UK labour market’ (Clark and Drinkwater, 2007: 47). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, while 90 per cent of the UK population is predominately white and white British (Census

36 Work and Identity Table 1.6 Teacher ethnicity by British region 2004 (as percentage of total teachers per region)

Inner London Outer London North West

White

Mixed/dual

Black or black British

78.5% 86.9% 98.2%

2.1% 1.6% 0.3%

10.4% 4.8% 0.2%

Asian and Asian British 6.3% 5.5% 0.9%

Source: DfES School Workforce in England: Teacher Ethnicity 2005.

definitions), this varies considerably between regions and rural and metropolitan areas. For example, in 2007 in London only 65 per cent of the population was from white groups (Dunnell, 2008). But this diversity is not reflected in the range of jobs done by non-white groups. Of the occupational groups studied here 34.9 per cent of TfL’s Transport for London permanent workforce was composed of black and minority ethnic group (BME) employees in 2008.4 However in the education workforce, as Table 1.6 shows, the majority of teaching staff are white whereas the population of non-white school pupils at primary level in London in 2007 was 53 per cent (2008: 5). One of the most recent pieces of research comparing racial/ethnic progress in the labour markets of Britain and the US showed that both men and women in both countries experienced considerable difficulties in finding employment even though many had higher qualifications than their white counterparts. The author noted that, ‘while signs of optimism do exist the overarching story is the salience and persistence of ethnic disadvantages. Much more must be done to realise the American dream and, similarly, to break through the British sclerosis’ (Li, 2010: 34).

Employment relations in the post-war years In both the US and Britain, the increase of service sector jobs in the 1960s and 1970s was a highly significant structural turning point for work identities. These were the decades when the growth of services sector and non-manual jobs accelerated dramatically. Since then, improvements in living standards became increasingly dependent on the occupational skills involved in the provision and delivery of services. Coincidentally, since then rates of economic growth slowed and the entry of more global competitors created pressures on employers in


both the US and Britain to renegotiate the wage-effort relationship on more favourable terms to the employers. The outcomes in terms of employment relations were huge. Following the political defeat of the left within the American trade unions during the ten years that followed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, American unions effectively drew a line around their proselytising efforts. In the 1950 Treaty of Detroit signed by the American car workers with General Motors, the most ‘progressive’ unions publicly declared an end to their ambitions of seeking a social welfare net for all workers (covering pensions and health coverage as in Britain) and instead indicated they were essentially only interested in organising within ‘successful’ companies – and companies that their ‘business unionism’ would help become successful (Lichenstein, 2002). Over the next two decades American trade unions only maintained their one in four share of the labour force and then, from the mid-1970s, when British trade unionism was still expanding, they stopped growing numerically and began a nearly continuous decline. There was a limited expansion into the public sector. The organising activity of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis where he was assassinated in 1968 was a turning point. One of the few unions to support the civil rights movement it grew to over 250,000 members by 1970, and after embarking on a wide range of mergers in the following decade, reached one million members by 1978. AFSCME’s 1981 equal pay strike in San Jose sparked a widespread movement, but American unions as a whole remained largely corralled within the giant firms of the US mid-West and NorthEast, and when these began to falter in the 1980s and 1990s, so did the unions. From the 1950s through to the 1980s most large US unions had more or less retained their memberships; their officials had retained their belief in ‘business unionism’ and did not see any reason to change any of their largely protectionist practices; and US managements had effectively institutionalised them in ways which largely limited their ability to mobilise on any except the most narrow of issues. With the rise in unemployment, increased international competition, and major restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s, including accelerating relocation to the sunbelt states to avoid the union premium, all of this changed. In the private sector trade union membership grew with the economy up from 13.5 million in 1950 to peak at 18.5 million in 1974. Then over the next three decades it fell continuously until by 2006 membership was below 8 million.5 In the 1980s manual worker real hourly wages entered a lengthy period of decline so


that many workers could only survive by taking more than one job, while at the same time the numbers of ‘safe’ occupations fell. A new generation of 1960s former civil rights and Vietnam War activists began to appear in middle-level leadership positions that could see that the immobility of the AFL-CIO’s business-friendly anti-leftist leaderships in face of structural change was a recipe for continuing decline. They argued the importance of bringing black workers into the leaderships of the unions and to broaden out the definition of the trade union movement’s concerns to articulate more clearly the needs of unorganised, lower paid and highly exploited women, Hispanic and other migrant workers. From this layer of activists came a new ‘organising model’. This assumed there were essential differences with the employers and that rank and file-level organising could use this opposition of interests to mobilise workers and recruit to the union. In 1995 a new leader was elected President of the AFL-CIO. John Sweeney had formerly been President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the very few to have grown over the previous ten years. But since then union decline continued, despite a much tighter labour market, with several union leaders arguing that the AFL-CIO had still not made a big enough break with its conservative business union past. In 2005, following Bush’s second election victory, the result was a split: a group of unions headed by the SEIU but without Sweeney and calling themselves Change to Win broke away with approximately 40 per cent of the AFL-CIO’s membership (including), and committed themselves to devoting 75 per cent of union dues to organising. Figure 1.9 shows that in Britain, trade union membership rose to an historic peak at the end of the 1970s, with over half of all employees in membership. In 1979 the registrar of trade unions reported 13.2 million members, up from 9.3 million in 1950. The difference between the two countries in the 1970s is largely explained by huge growth in white collar trade union membership in the UK. During the decade of the 1970s, which saw the miners defeating the Conservative government in both 1972 and 1974, British trade unionism broke out of its earlier concentrations among manual workers in industry and in a handful of public services, and spread among managerial and professional workers and into the service sector. The 1980s, however, saw the onset of an even more rapid decline than in the US. This was occasioned by two linked developments: first, the return of a fiercely anti-trade union Conservative government in 1979 and its achievement in 1984–85 in defeating and humiliating what was until then the UK’s strongest trade union, the mineworkers; and second, the major policy turn that rolled

Charting Historical Change 39 Figure 1.9

Trade union density (%) in the US and UK, 1950–2005

55 British trade union density

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15

US trade union density

10 5 0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Sources: BERR, Trade Union Membership 2008, London: HMSO.

back the state from its support of manufacturing capital and rolled it into supporting financial capital through deregulation of banking and privatisations. The result of the defeat inflicted upon the miners was that the rest of the British trade union movement went into organisational and ideological retreat. By the end of the 1980s the TUC reversed its earlier scepticism and embraced European social policy as a potential saviour of workplace rights. There were some trade unionists that were more sceptical of the turn to ‘partnership’ with the employers than others, but nearly all recognised that the unions had too little power or influence to make pure business unionism work. The employers simply did not need it – although some of them could see its advantages. Even ‘partnership’, therefore, was influenced by the trade union weakness and this required a mood change for it to end. There was therefore no serious criticism made of partnership in the trade union movement until New Labour had completed its first term of office. In 1997, the election of a ‘New Labour’ government had apparently helped halt the precipitous decline of union members at 7.8 million, but ten years later it had fallen a little further down to 7.6 million. Much of the decline in union membership was concentrated in the private sector. Between 1993 and 2006 private sector union membership declined from 24 to


16.5 per cent, while public sector density declined from 64.4 to 58.5 per cent (Blanchflower and Bryson, 2009). Some trade unions borrowed directly from the American ‘organising model’ in order to try and win recruits among ‘new’ migrant and younger workers; some became increasingly critical of New Labour for not fully restoring trade union or implementing European rights in full. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with new administrations in the US and the UK and economic problems on a global scale, trades unions are entering a new era.

Sociological positions and historical interpretations What meanings can be attributed to these changes and what outcomes resulted? In America McCarthyism in the years following the Second World War had a major effect on work sociology. Between 1945–46 there were four US Congress investigations into communism with the numbers increasing each year until 1953–54 when, at the height of Senator McCarthy’s influence, there were 51 (Jeffreys, 1986: 29). Very few academics stood alongside increasingly isolated scholars such as C. Wright Mills, whose critical analyses of the ‘community of interests’ of America’s power elites and of American trade unions as the ‘managers of discontent’ reflected both his own ‘sociological imagination’, capable of relating ‘private troubles into public issues’, and an awareness of the significance of social class.6 The mainstream American sociologists of work largely turned instead to the slightly safer arena of Parsonian functionalism.7 Talcot Parsons, whose psychoanalytical view of human behaviour was influenced by Elton Mayo, offered a convincing systems approach to the structure and organisation of society that was embraced by many pluralists who were opposed to the authoritarianism of what appeared to be the only alternative: Russianstyle communism. In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation financed a huge international programme aimed at extolling the values of both American pluralism and managerialism as opposed to the class struggle ideologies rooted in Marxism. Based at the universities of Chicago and Princeton, and led by John Dunlop, Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers it involved 90 academic researchers in the US and overseas and gave birth to 36 books and 42 articles and papers, including Dunlop’s Industrial Relations Systems (1958) and Kerr et al.’s, Industrialism and Industrial Man (1973). Dunlop’s assumption was that shared ideological values would enable industrial relations conflicts over the distribution of resources and power to be contained and balanced between employers and


workers. These functionalist and technological theories of ‘industrial society’ provided the deterministic prediction that the technological imperatives of mass production would draw virtually all societies down a similar path to that followed by the US, leading to a not dissimilar ‘pluralistic’ industrial society constructed around a consensual capitalist ideology. The shift to large scale industry created corps of professional managers and mass labour whose dealings were or would come to be governed by networks of bureaucratic rules and collective bargaining, most probably overseen by a liberal democratic state. The state would intervene through Keynesian economic measures to facilitate full employment, to sustain demand for industry’s products, and to ensure the social reproduction of the workforce, but industry itself would necessarily be granted substantial operating autonomy. In Britain the presence both of a mass Labour Party that occasionally articulated a critical socialist rhetoric and of a mass trade union movement spawned a different sociological debate than in the US. Although there was some anti-communism, and a huge investment in attempting to embed into Britain the practices of American managerialism that involved productivity campaigns and visits to the US, neither the critical academic left, nor the trade union left were ever isolated as completely from ‘public opinion’ as they were in the US. The actual effect that these campaigns had on British productivity is open to question. Tomlinson (1991) considers it negligible, with the employers confident that they had no intention of changing management practice in a seller’s market where they were enjoying high profits. Carew (1987) on the other hand, credits the wholehearted support and active promotion of productivity by the trades unions as the means by which the American system of scientific management became generally accepted in British industry. Some explanation of the persistence of wage inequalities between men and women, skilled and unskilled, and various other groups of workers can be gained from an analysis of the definition of skill in relation to employment. In 1980 the feminist sociologists, Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor argued that: Far from being an economic fact, skill is often an ideological category imposed on certain types of work by virtue of the sex and power of the workers who perform it (Phillips and Taylor, 1980). The following decades saw this claim investigated by feminist sociologists and historians to produce a substantial body of work on gender,


skills and technology in a range of industries including, textiles, engineering, potteries, clerical work and many others. Perhaps the most convincing explanations are rooted in historical investigation. The common British notion of skill, as the ability, usually physical, to fulfil a particular task or activity in the workplace in order to produce a given output, can be traced from the eighteenth century, from Adam Smith through Ruskin to Braverman. It is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon notion, used in a similar way to ‘know-how’ and ‘technique’, the worker with ‘skill’ being understood to possess know-how appropriate to the task in hand (Clarke and Winch, 2006). Later in the twentieth century Harry Braverman perpetuated this notion, associating skill with the mastery of a craft described as the: … combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practised manual dexterities required to carry out a specific branch of production (Braverman, 1974: 443). ‘Skill’ is here again an individual attribute, the physical and mental dexterity of an individual in performing a task in the work process, and this definition underpinned Braverman’s arguments on the degradation of work and consequent ‘de-skilling’ of workers. The main difficulties with this notion of skill are that it defines skill through the output of individual workers so that skill is seen as embodied, and therefore frequently bound up with notions of masculinity. The association of independence and manual work are deeply rooted in British society resulting in workers viewing themselves as ‘free agents in control of their own destinies’ (Burnett, 1974: 17). Conversely, this understanding also explains the corrosive effect of persistent unemployment. However Robert Steinfeld (2001) has argued that the survival of master-servant laws in nineteenth century Britain, first introduced to control worker mobility in the aftermath of the Black Death, allowing the fining and imprisonment of workers who broke contracts with employers, describes a labour market comprised of ‘unfree’ workers. Indentured labour and coercive contracts were also found in early canal building and agricultural labour in mid-nineteenth century (Way, 1993). Steinfeld (1991) also claims that ‘free’ labour, meaning the ‘right to quit’ in the US has quite different origins from that in Britain, first appearing in America in the early eighteenth century and becoming the dominant mode in early nineteenth century – as a consequence of the American Revolution and the resolve to abolish slave labour and extend suffrage.


But whatever the origins, the contemporary worker’s ‘right to quit’ or ‘jack in’ a job is also constrained by wider labour market conditions. In the post-war period the British government’s commitment to a policy of ‘full employment’, although arguably not as widespread as some commentators have asserted, provided many male workers with ample opportunity to behave as ‘free agents’. This brief period of industrial strength and worker representation ended in the 1970s. In the eyes of many commentators, the coming to power of the Conservative Party in Great Britain under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 heralded the most profound break within British political culture since the post-war consensus following 1945. How deep this rupture was has been the subject of considerable debate. The Conservatives’ determination to stress the fight against inflation, their anti-public spending rhetoric and abandonment of the nostrums of full employment had, in fact, been taken up by the Labour government as early as 1976, in the face of a growing economic crisis set in motion (on both a national and international scale) in the early 1970s with the first major post-war recession in 1973. Even so, ‘Thatcherism’ would accelerate the shift away from the collectivist ethos of post-war Keynesianism and the welfare state. This shift was driven by an emergent New Right politics eager to exploit the growing contradictions of social democracy and to construct, over the latter period of the 1970s up to Thatcher’s victory, an alternative vision of British society, a new political ‘common sense’. Thatcher dressed most of her rhetoric in the language of national interest, but anti-union legislation, welfare and social security cuts and oppressive police presence to break strikes became the staple fare of her regimes once in power, underlining the discrepancy between the ideological rhetoric of anti-statism and how it worked in practice. Lynne Segal has argued that Thatcherism ‘has one clear goal in relation to the working class: to destroy workers’ militancy and undermine support for the trade unions’ (Segal, 1982). Ralph Miliband noted that Thatcher’s policies constituted ‘the most formidable assault that has been mounted on organised labour, and the working class in general, since 1931’. He argues that this attack stems from ‘an almost irresistible wish to “confront” trade union power and militancy, and to lead a crusade against this particular incarnation of un-British evil’ (Miliband, 1980). There followed, in the earlier years of Thatcher’s first administration, a series of Employment Acts that substantially reduced the rights with which British unions had been collectively endowed since 1906.


Stuart Hall noted that Thatcherism cut across divides and conflicting interests, including class interests, by deploying, amongst other things, ‘the discourse of “nation” and “people” against “class” and “unions”’ (Hall, 1988) Thatcher’s purpose was to construct a broad cross-class base, to build a consensus that would marginalise areas of opposition or resistance towards a free-market economic transition. This position rested upon an anti-collectivist, free-market stance that interpellated individuals across class lines. But trade unionist, ‘Reds’, and elements of the ethnic population were constructed as the potential ‘enemy within’, a threat to the British way of life. Thatcherism set out to construct a new political subject in her ideological project. This was ‘to introduce new forms of social identity … to discredit those summoned up within the social democratic ideologies which it displaced’ (O’Shea, 1984: 20). The sovereign individual was only to identify with the nation, or the national interest. These policies combined with the sudden and rapid rise in unemployment with the recession of the early 1980s, and the wave of government inspired de-industrialisation, led to a mixture of fear, demoralisation and division, or fragmentation, within the British workforce generally. The effects of de-industrialisation strategies would be speedily apparent, with results felt not just in the return of 1930s-style unemployment and the balance-of-payments deficit, but in a real human cost and in the ravaging of the social fabric itself. The traditional industrial areas and large cities were the worst hit. De-industrialisation’s effects were profound, undermining stable environments and relationships and cutting the path towards what some commentators by the late 1980s were calling ‘New Times’. The fall-out of this kind of economic reconstruction leads inevitably to a reinforcement of unequal economic status on a geographical level, exploitable for ideological purposes. Doreen Massey highlights these developments as being directly government led, rather than simply the workings of market forces. Witnessing the polarisation of poverty, she asserts that ‘the growing social inequality in Thatcherite Britain is not just reflected in, but is moulded by, its unequal geography’ (Massey, 1988: 25). London, and the South East, less badly hit by the harsh economic recession of the early 80s, came to represent Thatcher’s much lauded ‘economic miracle’. Overnight, images of the working-class man seemed to lose all resonance with the ‘flat-cap’, as the new myth of the upwardlymobile Essex-man came into play. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see Thatcherism was not quite the hegemonic project it was made out to be. Yet many


economic aspects of the Thatcher project continued in the policies of ‘New Labour’ throughout the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Currently the conditions of work for the majority of workers, particularly the generation about to enter employment, are precarious. European migrant workers as well as non-white immigrants suffer labour market discrimination despite the knowledge that there is no evidence that immigration has any adverse effect on resident workers. Some investigations have found the obverse is true: immigration enhances wage growth (Dustmann et al., 2008) but this does not impinge on media reports contributing to the fear that immigrants take residents’ jobs. Weakened trade unions have in many cases been unable to respond to the new challenges of a changing workforce especially in ‘global’ cities like London and instead the workplace has given rise to new social networks based on faith and community groups (Wills, 2004). Despite outlining here the huge transformations in forms of employment and working practice evident over the past generation in particular, it still remains the case that work and the workplace hold a powerful presence in people’s public and private lives.

2 Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost: Working Life and Its Representations

Critics have suggested that as the twentieth century unfolded the novel form begin to encode a ‘powerful valorization of work, a commitment to the importance of labour’ (Klaus and Knight, 2000: 3), and this structure of feeling is present even in negative depictions of work, as in the context of unemployment, a condition found in writing from the 1930s and, more recently, the 1980s. But representations of work and workers have never been restricted to literature; indeed literary fiction in Britain during the course of the twentieth century rarely engaged with the everyday lives of the working class, hence George Orwell’s view that ‘if you look for the working class in fiction, especially in English fiction, all you find is a hole’. Despite Orwell’s view, it is the case that ‘parables’ of labour, of work, have found articulation in cultural production, and this articulation has often been most pronounced at moments of perceived change. Examining narratives from the twentieth century to the present considers the ‘valorization’ of work; however, we focus not only on the novel, concentrating instead on other discursive practices that provide ‘parables’ of labour. Raymond Williams, in Keywords (1983), traced the variable and unfolding meanings of work, noting that the specialisation of work to paid employment was ‘the result of the development of capitalist social relations’ (1983: 334). He suggested ideas of work evolved historically to become primarily associated with being either ‘in or out of work’, and thus in a ‘definite relationship with some other who had the control of the means of productive effort’ (1983: 335). He added that ‘work then partly shifted from the productive effort itself to the predominant social relationship’, in the process being associated increasingly, in developing capitalist economies, with paid time (1983: 335). Williams worked towards an understanding of the modern develop46

Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost 47

ment of the division of labour, a primary mechanism in the context of emerging industrial capitalism – a way of organising (paid) work that Adam Smith, even as early as Wealth of Nations, identified as the nature of the capitalist labour process itself (on this see, Shiach, 2004), a process of production that seemed to regard work through a quantitative lens rather than a qualitative one. Following Smith some years later, this would be Marx’s point in his early writings. For him, by the mid-nineteenth century, work under capitalist relations of production disclosed an essentially contradictory condition – a potential source of meaning and constitutive of human subjectivity itself, while, at the same time, primarily an instrument of accumulation through (in Marx’s terms) expropriation, which would compromise any liberating potential embodied in the act itself. Marx, particularly in the Grundrisse and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, insisted that labour was the essential human act that constituted in his terms ‘species-being’ (personhood, or character is now the terms most likely used) underlining the creative dimension (or, at least, the creative potential) embodied in work. Beyond production for human need alone, work was constituted by, but also constitutive of, human creativity and therefore the fulfilment of what Marx called the ‘species-being’. This ‘species-being’ becomes alienated, however – ‘thwarted’ – in and through capitalist social relations. This distortion of labour, where the worker is alienated and divided from the product, is elaborated in Marx in great length and is central to his very understanding of subjectivity, as we call it now. From the philosophical explorations of human emancipation, he and Engles later inscribed work and workers in a different rhetorical mode in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, with its narrative of flight from exploitation and ‘inauthenticity’ in the necessary act of social revolution itself. Desire is encoded within such discourses around the working, or labouring subject – a kind of yearning that work free of exploitation might fulfil the promise of human potential. Marx, in Marshall Berman’s view, was one of the first great modernists in his belief in the human subject to ‘create himself’ (generally a ‘him’ in Marx). The ‘hope’ of labour, we might say, constituted a source of freedom for the modern subject, if free of alienation. Weber, writing a little later, was more circumspect: for him, a bureaucratic rationalism becomes capital’s prescriptive ordinance (Weber’s ‘iron cage’), enshrining the technocratic dominance of capitalist modernity. The question arises: can work make you free, or does modern work constitute the iron cage that denies individual autonomy (Shiach, 2004)? With the unfolding of the twentieth century, this perspective found expression at different registers.


Susan Brook, in her analysis of cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s, points to the fate of the male working body as exposed in a range of fictional texts from the early 1900s to the present. Representations of work in such early modernist films as Chaplin’s Modern Times (1932) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) reveal the worker, in Marx’s terms, merely subjected to the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’. This compulsion breaks bodies: thus, Chaplin is seen working on the assembly line, performing work in movements that are ‘jerky and machine-like, until his body is literally swallowed up by the cogs and wheels of the machinery’ (Brook, 2007: 4). In Metropolis the worker is victim of the labour process, bowed by exploitation, and Brook points to ‘the shuffling gaits and bowed bodies of the labourers who toil in the underground city, and who are fed to a machine that is shown – literally – as a monster’ (Brook, 2007: 4), and articulating work as little more than a false imposition on human subjectivity and freedom. In this depiction, Marx’s critique of capitalism’s degradation of work and, by extension, of human nature, is confirmed, though it is shorn of Marx’s revolutionary dialectic.

Documenting the place of labour in the inter-war period Representations of workers and work took another, and more pronounced, trajectory following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which plunged western economies into deep depressions, an economic slump. In the capitalist world a crisis of work, or of worklessness, came to dominate the social and political agenda. There emerged, on both sides of the Atlantic, cultural responses to the developments, an attempt to document, highlight, and make sense of the crisis emerging. In the US, the photographic work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) signified a powerful engagement with the meaning of work; the work of the social documentary movement unfolding in Britain responded in a similar political vein. The period witnessed a renewed interest in working-class life, exemplified in the preoccupations of projects like Mass Observation, and the rise of ‘documentarism’ with the work of John Grierson, Tom Harrison and Humphrey Jennings. Here middle-class cultural production, clearly sympathetic to working-class concerns, made a conscious alignment with the call for social change (for a good account of this see, Highmore, 2002). Thus British documentary of the 1930s was in a strong sense an ideological project. Driven by Grierson, documentary was to be harnessed for political ends in, as Dodd and Dodd describe it, ‘the construction of a national culture’ (Dodd and Dodd, 1996: 39). For Grierson argued that, ‘film can really bring the outside world alive to the growing citizen … can


serve an interpretive function. It can provide that necessary umbilical to the community outside’ (Aitken, 1998: 43). Film has an integrative function here; a project designed to reveal the nation to itself during the beginning period of technocratic modernity, the perceived growth of mass society and the presence of an increasingly interventionist state. The films in the early period from 1929 to 1934 developed a distinctive aesthetic that offered ‘representations of aspects of workingclass and rural culture, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of craft skills’ (Aitken, 1998: 19). For Grierson the aim ‘was to exhalt human toil and civic virtues … to magnify the unconscious beauty and the physical effort involved in labour’ (1998: 49). Thus ‘work as a physical activity, embedded within the social relations of the small production unit, and the rituals and techniques of skilled labour, emerge as a recurrent theme’ (1998: 19). Here lies the ideological orientation of the early documentary Drifters (1929), and it is an orientation found in the overall oeuvre of the movement. Politics (social democratic in formation) and aesthetics (often modernist by inclination) are inseparable in this view – the narrative ‘fantasy’ explored in these representations turn upon the tension between the centrality of labour as a source of identity, alongside what was seen in a film like Drifters as the potentially alienated (or alienating) condition of labour under conditions of capitalist modernity and the impersonality of new mass production systems. Thus the parable provides a tension between tradition and modernity developed in the work of social documentary and explored through both its form and its content. Drifters is a silent, four-reel film depicting at a very straightforward level the work process: the coming and going of boats and men into and out of the harbour with their catch, the labour of netting fish, the intimate social relations of work at sea. What is allowed to emerge is a narrative of mutuality – work depicted, contained and embodied within the constricted space of the trawler, symbolised a co-operative endeavour. But throughout there existed also a desire to articulate what Terry Eagleton has referred to as the ‘ideology of the aesthetic’ (c1990) – the production of a narrative of harmony between man and machine, man and nature: a harmony that underlines the importance of the working body constituted through productive interaction with the machine (see also Aitken, 1998). Here, the film-makers aspired to demystify in two senses: first, through the work process and its own ‘traditional’ technology, and then through the ‘intimacy’ of the workers themselves. In Drifters the stress falls on representations of generations of working-class men engaged in the work of fishing, underlining the way the older men


work carefully to pass on the skills and traditions they learnt from their fathers (Aitken, 1998: 22–3). It is clear, here, that these were powerfully gendered representations, with work identity achieved in a resolutely masculinist context, and the division of labour between men and women fixed, essentialised – men occupying the public sphere, women the domestic realm (if seen at all), within the social relations of community. In the analyses in Section One this tendency is made evident throughout. The many social documentaries produced for the General Post Office (GPO) aspired to ‘speak for the people’: principally for working people during a contradictory period of social and economic development. As we have already indicated, the Grierson approach encouraged, though often obliquely, national social integration and, in turn, the nation’s renewal as an ‘organic’ community framing the emergence of a society shaped by an idealised sense of the need, but also the desire, for work. We see this symbolised in narratives like Night Mail, which we will examine in a moment. First it is worth considering another social documentary, Coal Face (1936). Coal Face opens with ‘hard’ facts: ‘Coalmining is the basic industry of England’, we are told through a male voice: ‘750,000 men’ work at the pits across the country, in dangerous conditions to produce the ‘nation’s prosperity’. Benjamin Britten’s musical score is incorporated at the same time to back the 12-minute documentary; supported by the lyrical choral setting of voices ‘chanting’ in the background, articulating details of labour and descriptions of work experience in a libretto written by Auden. Grierson describes miners’ conditions below ground, and the production of ‘40 million tons of coal sold every year for domestic use … 10 million for electrical power … 12 million for locomotives … 54 million for export … 85 million for industry’. Middistance camera shots capture the streets and houses of mining villages, and the superstructure of the pit itself: the turning machinery, and the coal-filled locomotives coming and going. The men themselves then occupy the screen as they march through the yard to be lowered to the coal-face itself, and all the time the formal commentary and quiet chanting supports, interacts with, the images. Throughout the tight, fastmoving modernist style, Cavalcanti as director constructs a montage of machinery and men interacting at work, bound to an industrial landscape And the trek of the men from surface to coal-face and back after the shift, expresses a mode where both narrative form and content – in distinctively modernist style – underline the struggle for the dignity of work while revealing the ever-present danger the men have to tolerate under ground. These are parables of labour, community and class. The story


reveals some central concerns of the movement under Grierson, ones that found innovative expression in such films like Coal Face. Night Mail (1936) maintained the dominant structure of feeling – the overall ideological orientation, or what Williams would have called ‘deep form’ shaping its narration. Night Mail (1936) presented again a Griersonian intention of representing the desire for social integration, finding expression through the narratives of working people (again, primarily men) bound to the labour process. The swiftly moving train is designed to represent the efficiency and modernity that enables the GPO to send news throughout the nation. Auden’s celebrated poem, and Britten’s score, speeds the train through the night, its movement connecting the geographical, social and ‘existential’ space linking the nation: the southern town of Bletchley to the northern cities of Crewe to collect more letters and parcels – echoing in some respects E. M. Forster’s notion of ‘only connect’ – before the relentless movement over the border towards Glasgow, ‘as all Scotland is waiting for her’. Night Mail is chiefly a message – a story of movement and connection: essentially, of communication itself, in the form of the train and the men’s journey, in the connection between people, and embedded in the function of the film itself. The formal structure of the documentary – unlike the more strictly modernist form of Coal Face – is less dominant; instead a linear narrative style shapes the film, nearer to the social realism more recognisable in this period. Hence the voice of workers and their evident labour remains central, where interaction between the men guarantees an efficient work practice and commitment that unifies them; while the train and the tracks imply an integrated nation with common aims accentuated through its effortless direction and speed. Progress and advancement enunciates modernity itself, and as with the earlier documentaries covered here, the journey emblematises that all people have a role and a requirement to perform it. Thus, the ‘naturalisation’ of labour relations suppresses any notion of possible contestation between work and capital, suggesting in turn that the nation itself has a place for everyone with everyone in their place. This inevitably situates workers within the frame of a dominant culture, or hegemonic structure of feeling, and one that underlines the desire for the politics of consensus. The narrative conventions and thematic emphases shape the important ideological thrust. These narratives have early antecedents in depictions of workers and the working class in the late nineteenth century narratives of Victorian ‘social explorers’ who ventured into ‘Darkest England’, travelling into the unknown to see how workers and


the poor actually lived (Dodd and Dodd, 1996: 42). Grierson himself believed that it was more necessary to investigate ‘the jungles of Middlesborough and the Clyde, than the native customs of Tanganyika and Timbuctoo’ (Aitken, 1998: 81). Partly driven by conscience, the objective still sought to attain knowledge of the Other, and this relates to the deep form, as Williams would term it (1981: 23), of the narrative. Therefore, what social documentary reveals here, in both form and content, is the desire and hope for harmony, something that – in a time of crisis – might be achieved by ‘explaining’ one class to another through posing heroic work, and by making that work heroic, or at least indispensable to the nation, and thereby underlining the value of the worker. Aitken sees this as bound up with the ideological agenda of social reform and an emergent – soon to become hegemonic – social democratic politics following the end of the Second World War. Through these parables, work becomes the drive belt through which social cohesion and integration might be found; in the end, becoming an imaginary resolution to real conditions of existence. In this context, documentary realism reveals itself as much artifice as ‘fact’.

Full employment, the affluent worker and after Since George Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, Wigan has changed from barefoot malnutrition to nylon and television, from hollow idleness to flush contentment. In the market-place commerce (‘brisk buying and selling’) had replaced politics (‘angry speakers’ and ‘hungry listeners’) (in Laing, 1986: 56). The social documentary movement of the 1930s was constituted in the main of middle-class intellectuals, reacting to both national and international developments, while seeking in a number of instances to ally themselves with workers and the trade union and labour movement. Its articulation began to represent a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, orientated politically around a broadly social democratic consensus, and operating from institutional bases within the dominant culture, developing cultural work often in conscious alignment with the needs and aspirations of the working class (Highmore, 2002). Economic slump, social fracture and the imminence of world war constituted the wider background to this.


In parables of labour like Drifters, Coal Face and Night Mail there occupies a central position. The ideological impulse apparent here is that work gave individuals a stake in society, and the absence of work and community constituted an affront to human dignity. Though the writing of the social documentary movement was diverse, the quest to elevate or dignify labour remained an important element of the project, most evident, too, in the work of George Orwell. His careful depiction of miners in The Road to Wigan Pier (1936) reflected in its own way what was becoming an emerging structure of feeling, reflected in Orwell’s determination in that narrative to align himself with the ‘downtrodden’ and to insist on the dignity of labour, most famously embodied in two much quoted descriptions of work and workers, of home and belonging: shown in the resilience working-class family in the home; in the heroic labour of coal miners in the bowels of the earth. ***** The welfare state emerged with the post-war settlement after 1945. It was a victory for those social reformers who articulated culture in affirming many political ends and aims during the inter-war years. The newly emerging politics was constructed upon consensus, uniting the mainstream political parties around a Keynesian platform of economic growth and public spending. Consolidated within that consensus was the need for full employment – the right to work acknowledged that the unemployment of the inter-war years could no longer be countenanced. But following the war years there was also a return to tradition where work was concerned, and this meant that the armies of women workers who operated factories and ploughed fields in the absence of men were, by and large, returned to the home, the domestic sphere. This objective was inscribed in the call for a living wage for men, so that women would not need to compromise their domestic duties by taking up paid labour (see Campbell, 1984). Yet the centrality of the new welfare state also eclipsed the centrality of work in narrative forms fictional and non-fictional (our social documentaries, for instance), through a heightened emphasis on consumerism, as the opening quote to this section here suggests. If Grierson elevated the working class for their ‘heroic’ capacity to labour, the new priests of consumerism viewed them quite differently. Mass consumption was to be crucial in driving the new economic order. Here, the dignity of labour was superseded by the sovereignty of consumption


and the consumer. Identity through work became increasingly overshadowed by an affirmation of the self and meaning in life through the acquisition of goods. Fredric Jameson identified this as bound up with the emergence of postmodernism, as the new ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, whereby ‘the economic preparation of postmodernism or late capitalism began in the 1950s, after the wartime shortage of consumer goods and spare parts had been made up, and new products and new technologies (not least those of the media) could be pioneered’ (1981: xx). Iconographically, this heralded a distinct shift in ‘parables of labour’, particularly those that embodied work as definitively ‘productivist’ – at the coal-face, for instance, or the obverse of this expressed in either representations of, or active participation in, unemployment marches. The late 1950s produced a new rhetoric of both class and work, then; this was one articulated, and both celebrated and lamented, through the delights of shopping. This placed women at the heart of a range of discourses invariably linked to the home, thus affirming their place in the private rather than public sphere. At the same time, the labour of housework – celebrated repeatedly in advertisements for household goods and appliances – was rarely depicted as work at all. Feminism exposed this anomaly later in the 1970s – pointing to the unpaid labour of the ‘housewife’. What is of interest is the ways this labour is narrated within a 1950s/1960s orientation directed through a consumerist imperative. What becomes evident is that women’s work is never done because it is never done – it is constructed as not work. In Britain the ‘age of affluence’ marked, too, the moment of new wave cinema and the emergence of ‘new realism’ in fiction. Celebrating, or exploring, working-class culture became a characteristic of this work, and novels that focused on working-class life were adapted for cinema, attracting large audiences and breaking new ground in both the content and form of mainstream film (see Laing, 1986; Brook, 2007). Some of these films picked up on working life in important ways. If pre-war narratives of labour had lamented its absence then post-war narratives of full employment offered a new perspective on work’s importance. This was symptomatic of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel of working-class life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, later made into a film of the same name. Mike Savage identified manufacturing work and workers in this period as bound up with a trope he labelled ‘rugged individualism’ (Savage, 2001). This suggested a new space for making sense of ‘parables of labour’, contradicting the dominance of consumerism, marking work as the domain of the ‘rugged individual’.1


These narratives can be seen as ‘coming of age’ stories, which was in some respects how commentators at the time viewed the trajectory of the working class in the new welfare state. The rugged individualism Savage has identified offered a representation of the male proletarian that rejects, or contradicts, the narrative of embourgeoisment (for instance, Zweig, 1975; Hoggart, 1957; for commentary see Laing, 1986); instead a worker autonomy and new-found confidence emerged. This construction was predicated on the independence and relative security the new age of full employment guaranteed workers.2 Therefore images of the downtrodden (but dignified) workers of the 1930s yielded to the confident figure of Alan Sillitoe’s lathe worker, Arthur Seaton. Seaton, epitomises the ‘rugged individual’ identified by Savage. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958/film, 1960) showed work for the newly affluent proletarian as a means to empowerment. As Arthur kills time towards the close of the working day, finishing off the last of his orders, his ruminations proffers a sense of control over his own destiny: Nine ’undred and fifty four. Nine ’undred and bleedy fifty-five. Another five more and that’s the lot for a Friday. Fourteen pounds three and tuppence for a thousand o’ these a day. No wonder I’ve allus got a bad back – though I’ll soon be done. I’ll lark about a bit then, go and talk to the women – or the viewers. No use working every minute god sends. I could get through it in half the time if I worked like a bore, but they’d only slash me wages, so they can get stuck! Don’t let the bastards grind you down. That’s one thing you learn … (1958: 37). The scene emblematises the gulf between inter-war unemployment, the immediate post-war austerity, and the brave new world of the emerging 1960s. Work empowers Arthur – and by implication other working-class men, too – even if that empowerment is forged through a constant struggle with the labour process itself, and the attempt of the bosses (the ‘they’ of the narrative) to impose their order on him. But Arthur is empowered, too in another respect: by enabling him to be and to contradict that postwar subject/consumer identified by the period’s cultural commentators. This does not cancel out Arthur’s identity as a worker, and his place at the lathe remains absolutely central to him: Arthur reached his capstan lathe and took off his jacket … He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a gentle thump. Looking around, it did not seem, despite the infernal noise


of hurrying machinery, that anyone was working with particular speed. He smiled to himself and picked up a glittering steel cylinder from the top box of a pile beside him, and fixed it into the spindle. He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan, drew back the capstan, and swung back the turret onto its broadest drill. Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat onto both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap in front of the moveable brass pipe, pressed the button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror (1958: 25–6). This description apparently captures Arthur as the independent, ‘rugged individualist’ Savage described in his argument around working-class identity. His limited control over the process of production, in both extracts, leads one critic to suggest a particular relation to work whereby ‘Arthur does not live in spite of his work, he lives through it’ (Hitchcock, 1989: 66; see also Kirk, 2007). Work becomes bound up with masculinity and class in such narratives in a range of ways; ways that not only mark the importance of relations of production (issues of power), but the question of individual and collective identity forms through structures of feeling. In a later novel, The Death of William Posters, published in 1965, Sillitoe introduced us to another Seaton-like character. Consonant themes emerge too: the alienation of work, the seduction of consumerism, and, in this narrative, a view of the demise and desiccation of community. But work, then, is key to Frank: he rails against the alienations of factory work, the processes of which he and his comrades are now powerless to control. … I’m what they used to call a mechanic, but I was beginning to see further than the end of my nose. I was also what the gaffers call ‘a bit of a troublemaker’, but for years they were baffled by me because I was also a good worker. I could get anybody’s tools and take their machine apart as well as the charge hand, and I had many hints that if I stopped being such a keen member of the union, life would be easier for me as far as getting on went. But I saw too much injustice to accept that. I knew which side of the fence I stood on, and still do (1965: 98). It is possible to identify the status and place of class politics at the point of production in the shape of a union activist. It is equally instructive to observe that Posters later gives up the struggle for what he appears to see as more worthwhile, or perhaps more ‘authentic’, struggle to find the self.


In the end it is the alienation of work, and the uniformity and systematised nature of industrial capital that must be rejected. Frank’s view of life is coloured too by the promises of affluence and the dubious rewards of welfare capitalism. The worker is now predominantly addressed as a consumer – of goods, of leisure, of images: here the guarantee of selfworth lies in the possession of things, such as the ‘telly’, for instance. Frank, far less ambiguously than Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, articulates a narrative of labour lost in the new welfare state. Frank rejects this in all its manifestations and the narrative then reproduces that individualistic perspective found in the earlier novel and in other examples of Sillitoe’s writing. A working-class structure of feeling depicted in the character of Frank represented value and recognition through the act of work and through community, something erased by the ‘modernisers’ of the welfare state, thus marking consumerism and conformity as the social norm. Traipsing his local streets before his departure, he notes: ‘Streets in all directions had been cleared and grabbed and hammered down, scooped up, bucketted, piled, sorted and carted off. Where had the people gone? Moved onto new estates, all decisions made for them’ (1965: 63) defined a sense of loss referred to earlier in this chapter – it is a collective loss (‘them’) and a political loss also (‘decisions’ suggesting control over their own lives) destined to corrode the political hopes and potential of workers and the working class.

End of work: ‘Viewing’ labour and ‘the end of work’ The return of mass unemployment to Britain in the 1980s transformed working lives. In Britain, the combination of de-industrialisation and Thatcherite neo-liberalism brought an end to the age of full employment. The impact of the changes led to a re-shaping of both the terrain and experience of work, transforming working lives through processes of flexible employment, de-industrialisation and out-sourcing and impacting profoundly on areas of the country built around industrial labour, and in these contexts the iconography of work altered dramatically, too. Television drama attempted to capture the effects of these developments. In 1982 the BBC broadcast Boys from the Blackstuff, a drama serial by Liverpool playwright Alan Bleasdale. Set in his home town, the series mapped the effects of the transformations on the five male characters. The five piece drama explored the consequences of factory shut-downs, the re-emergence of mass unemployment, and the impact on individuals, families and communities. It constitutes a final narrative of work, but we come full circle here, in the context of ‘labour lost’.


The first episode to be transmitted from the series was called ‘Jobs for the Boys’. In this piece the central characters Chrissie [Christopher], Yosser, Loggo, Dixie and George Malone come together at the dole office to complete the ritual of signing on for unemployment benefit. The opening shot is of a busy Department of Employment Office. The titles are kept to a minimum and the Boys are introduced individually signing on beneath a poster proclaiming ‘Thirty Years of Progress in Social Security’. The close-up head and shoulder shot of each character as they come to sign on positions them framed behind a wire mesh grille that divides the D.O.E. clerk from the claimant. The ritual ‘interrogation’ by the clerk accentuates this sense of detention, or captivity, that the wire mesh separating worker and ‘non’ worker also implies. And it is through images such as these that the viewer comes to understand the gravity of the change occurring in the world of work, with the return of mass employment. The scene continues: Clerk:

It seems from your files, Mr. Todd, that one of our inspectors has visited your house on two separate occasions during the past ten days without receiving an answer. Chrissie: Ah, what a shame. Clerk: You were out? Chrissie: Looks that way, doesn’t it? Clerk: Can you tell me where you were? Chrissie: I might be able to if you tell me when you called. Then the employment officer asks: Clerk: Look, have you got a job, Mr. Todd? Chrissie: Oh, yeah, I just come here for the company and the pleasant surroundings. Clerk: (Patiently, and not without sympathy) You haven’t answered the question. Chrissie: (Looking away) I haven’t worked in over a year. Clerk: Right, Mr. Todd, that’s all. As Chrissie moves away, the clerk adds, ‘We will, however, be making further visits to your house in due course’. The contrast between Chrissie, and Arthur Seaton, who stood as an icon for the age of affluence of the 1950s and 1960s, stands stark. Chrissie’s comment that ‘I haven’t worked for over a year’, underlines this change, and the narrative, over the following five episodes, examines the tragedy of this. Thus work itself is the ‘absent cause’ here, and as the series unfolds


the implications of this are revealed in family breakdown, poverty, loss of self-esteem. As the drama unfolds, we see that what little work the Boys do acquire is effectively ‘no work’, or work in its most ‘distorted’ or alienating form. Thus the first episode sees them working illegally on a building site whilst officially unemployed through the state. When Chrissie tells the boss Malloy, ‘Yeah, I know, it’s all well an’ good [having some work] but it’s not legal an’ things are bad for me down the dole. I want a job … I wanna be a working man again’, the place of work in constituting a sense of identity appears writ large; the implications of this for notions of masculinity stands prominent, exposing a muted masculinity constituted powerfully upon his acceptance of the role of breadwinner. Throughout the series loss is signified iconographically – the separation of the friends as they seek individually some kind of work; the physical decline of community and spaces of labour; the arrival of containers ships transforming the massive docks, in turn making men redundant; and the inevitable dereliction of the giant Tate and Lyle sugar beet factory constituting the closing shot of the television series and signifying the decline of an emblematic structure of the city, that of work and production and identity. This is the final image of the opposition power/ powerlessness registering the fickle character of capital and its accumulation processes, and by extension, its power to subordinate others to its own ends. Work identity, then, can be seen as embedded in culturally determined depictions of masculinity and femininity; in this way, crisis becomes coded through male experience, articulating structures of feeling that more often than not marginalise female characters overall in the unfolding events embodied in these parable of work. The next section of this chapter will address that anomaly by examining representations of work and the position of women.

Section Two Elizabeth Chaplin (1994) deftly summed up how visual representation, including an implied recipient, both articulates and contributes to social processes: … representations articulate not only visual or verbal codes and conventions but also the social practices and forces which underlie them, with which we interpret the world (1994: 1). This understanding underpins the approach taken here, where certain key visual representations of work are examined and interpreted in the


context of changes and continuities in the twentieth century labour market in Britain. At the beginning of the century the visual representations of work, for progressive modernists as well as the more traditional trade union movement, was embodied in the heroic figure of the male manual worker. The nineteenth century writings of John Ruskin played no small part in meshing together understandings of work, aesthetics and ethics which have been examined and illuminated in great detail by Tim Barringer (2006). Ruskin considered work the defining factor in a man’s identity and his distinctive vision of the noble worker first appeared in the text of On the Nature of Gothic Architecture, published in 1854 as a chapter in The Stones of Venice. Here, Ruskin used powerful rhetorical descriptions of physical labour in his argument against the separation of intellectual and manual work and for the dignity of manual labour. This ideology of noble manual labour was visually interpreted in Ford Madox Brown’s widely reproduced painting Work. This allegorical painting is a paeon to the active, muscular bodies of a group of navvies digging a trench in the foreground of a densely populated canvas, which includes the figures of Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice as bystanders. While Ruskin has been criticised, among other things, for being historically inaccurate, especially in his fanciful descriptions of medieval working practices his powerful rhetorical writing, abhorring the effects of the division of labour, and the appalling working conditions found in mid-nineteenth century factories and sweatshops, resonated with the growing trade union movement (Unrau, 1981). The nineteenth century craft trade unions wholeheartedly assumed Ruskin’s depiction of the noble, autonomous skilled worker: made graphically explicit in many of the union banners, in particular those of the craft trade unions. Membership of a craft union was exclusive and dependent in the completion of an apprenticeship, which conferred the status of skilled worker and it is this process of skill acquisition that became increasingly controlled and male-dominated in the nineteenth century (Clarke and Wall, 2010). While the means of acquiring skill became regulated, the notion of skill itself, as discussed in Chapter 1, was widely understood as an individual attribute, consisting of the physical and mental dexterity of an individual in performing a task in the work process. This notion of skill is integral to visual depictions of work which foreground the male heroic worker, rendering women invisible, and contributes to the myth that the ‘manual skill and dexterity’ required for the work itself is inextricably and somehow ‘naturally’ bound up with notions of masculinity (Clarke and Winch, 2006).


But if manual work for men was depicted as noble, for women it was perceived as degrading. Powerful etchings of women miners and child factory workers were used as propaganda to campaign for the abolition of child and female labour underground in the early nineteenth century in much the same way that the social documentary photographers of the 1920s and 30s used images to reveal the effects of unemployment, poverty and overcrowding in the slums of Britain. After the protective legislation of the nineteenth century removed women from the dangers, and potential immorality, of working in close proximity to men in manual occupations, images of women workers emerged again in the early years of the twentieth century which depicted them as weak and defenceless: representations that had significant impacts on social policy and trade union organisation. Debra Thom has pointed out the ambiguity of many of these images, in particular photographs of burly women chain-makers taken in 1912 to support their campaign for higher wages. They argued that as their work involved both skill and strength and they were therefore entitled to a skilled male wage, but Thom concludes that the most effective images in the struggle for better conditions were those that could read most clearly as portraying women as victims, not heroic workers (Thom, 1989). Photography continued as a powerful medium used to portray work throughout the first half of the century partly because of the use of small, lightweight cameras manufactured in the 1930s enabling the rise of photo-reportage, which in Britain, found a popular audience through Picture Post. This mass-circulation magazine featured ‘dayin-the-life’ type stories as well as full-length special reports. Humphrey Spender, one of the early members of Mass Observation, joined Picture Post in the late 1930s after working with Tom Harrison on Mass Observation’s first major project in Bolton. While for Harrison, photography was just another method of recording the ‘truth’ of everyday working-class life, for Spender, public school educated and architect trained at the Architectural Association, the whole enterprise was fraught. He later described in his autobiography his unease at taking ‘intrusive’ photographs of people without their permission (Spender, 1987). As Mass Observation was chronically short of funds none of his photographs of Bolton were published at the time, although the archive is now freely available and contains evidence in the composition of many of the photographs of Spender’s discomfort and fear of being noticed. The archive does contain some photographs taken inside a textile mill, where the spatial segregation of men and women into different parts of the mill and different tasks can be clearly seen.3


In the United States Lewis Hine’s documentary photographs of child workers in the 1920s were used as evidence for the abolition of child labour by the National Child Labor Committee. Hine went on to celebrate the working man in his series of photographs depicting the building of the Empire State Building in the early 1930s (Hine, 2001). These images, of men stripped to the waist, hauling on taut cables and working at great heights, became important elements in the creation of the iconography of the heroic American worker. While the heroic worker was also the subject of American art in for example Diego Rivera’s mural for the Detroit Arts Institute on industry commissioned by Henry Ford, it is noticeable that fewer images emerged in twentieth century Britain, where the manual worker held not a heroic status in the popular imagination but an ambiguous one: defined by class rather than skill. Miners are a notable exception and it might be the case that the image of the miner, immortalised in Bill Brandt’s photograph, blackened from coal dust and emerging into the daylight after an underground shift, was the iconic representation of the heroic, male manual worker in Britain: a worthy comrade to Lewis Hine’s construction workers in the US. But this would be to ignore the origins of this particular representation, the way in which it has been co-opted and used in different historical and political contexts and its current salience in a postindustrial culture. Raymond Williams’ notion of the ‘selective tradition’ (1977: 115–20) can be used here to interpret the changing visual representations of work in the twentieth century: their ambiguity, fragility but, at different times, power in shaping discourses of work. Williams’ reveals how ‘an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present’ are ‘powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’. Williams is speaking here of the selective tradition in the context of hegemony, explaining his use of the term as ‘a specific, economic, political and cultural system’ (1977: 110) one which orders the everyday practices, values and experience of living but one which also must be seen as ‘the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes’. This framework is particularly useful for understanding the way in which certain images of work have remained current, and others subordinate, in discourses describing the British worker and workplace. It is particularly useful in highlighting the changing role of women in the workplace and the post-Second World War lacuna of their representation, for where Williams uses the term class above it is possible to interpret the selective tradition equally in terms of gender.


In Chapter 1 we noted that the biggest single change to twentieth century labour markets was the increased participation of women, albeit in part-time work and in gender segregated occupations. There were two periods when these patterns of occupational segregation were disrupted, the two World Wars, when in the absence of men, women took on traditionally male jobs. In both cases state intervention proscribed their roles and the temporary nature of their employment. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the implementation of the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (1942), resulted in the termination of employment for all women who had been employed in men’s work during the war (Smith, 1984; Clarke and Wall, 2010). For a significant number of women this was not welcomed, particularly those in industrial sectors that had previously been dominated by men, for example the railways and engineering which paid wages far higher than the average woman’s salary. The brightness and vivacity of the visual propaganda produced by the government to promote these new opportunities for work on the Home Front belied the reluctance of both employers and trade unionists to employ women in a range of occupations previously barred to them. One of the most enduring images of women at work on the Home Front during the Second World War is the painting by Dame Laura Knight of ‘Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech ring’ first exhibited in 1943 (Figure 2.1). It is an iconic propaganda image used to promote women’s recruitment into munitions work at the height of the war. However, in comparison with the equivalent US icon ‘Rosy the Riveter’, a cartoon of a woman war worker with sleeve rolled-up to reveal clenched biceps emphasising physical strength, Knight’s painting depicts not brute strength but the skill of a young woman whose whole body is engaged with great concentration and focus on an intricate task. Here is a figure attending a complex industrial machine, not alone but part of a factory floor where other women can be seen in the background clad in overalls and also intently engaged on manual tasks. But this is not an assembly line; Ruby is undertaking skilled engineering work to create a single component, work usually done by men. The painting foregrounds the lathe, the different parts picked out in detail, the light glinting from the edges of the hard metal components and coils of metal waste. Ruby is subservient to the machine – her whole posture, gaze and the steadying position of her hands is focused on the machine process while the machine itself dominates the foreground of the painting. There is a tension in her concentration: perhaps an awareness of being


Figure 2.1 Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring, 1943, Dame Laura Knight, RA (IWM Collections)

picked out, observed, and served up as an item of war propaganda. It’s not entirely clear why Ruby was chosen, she is quoted as saying her sister was doing the same kind of work, but she was described as ‘outstanding’ by the factory manager who reported to the Ministry of Munitions that she had completed the usual eight year apprenticeship training in only two years and was capable of undertaking the most skilled task on the factory floor.4 Many wartime employers were of course, keen to publicise the fact that women were capable of undertaking skilled work as it undermined the basis for the male skilled wage, only attainable after an extensive apprenticeship. This picture is very different to the image of Arthur Seaton’s relationship with his lathe described by Sillitoe in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and mentioned earlier: his relaxed confident indolence compared to her taut attention. Knight was already an established artist before the outbreak of the Second World War, the first woman artist to become an Academician


since the foundation of the Royal Academy; she later painted the Nuremberg trials. In 1939 the War Artist’s Commission commissioned a series of paintings from Knight of work on the Home Front; one of these was of Ruby Loftus at work in the factory in Newport, South Wales. Knight was offered a fee of £75 to undertake the painting but she successfully negotiated for £100 to cover her expenses of staying in Newport in order to paint Ruby on the factory floor (Dunbar, 1975: 160). She took just under four weeks to complete the painting (Ruby’s wages were between £5 and £6 a week). The painting was widely publicised and exhibited at the time, and currently, starting in 1943 at the Royal Academy, the following year at Newport Museum and Art Gallery and most recently in April 2009 as part of the exhibition ‘Witness: Women War Artists’ at the Imperial War Museum North. Knight’s attention to Ruby’s pink blouse, her green hairnet and her perfectly manicured nails go some way to reassure potential women recruits that they could do a traditionally male job and still maintain a traditional femininity. As well as this she appears to be working in an all female environment, with just one man, white-shirted and waist-coated working in the background. The painting thus succeeds in being both celebratory and reassuring. The scene in this painting is a far cry from some of the photographs of women working in traditional ‘male’ jobs held in the IWM archives. There were thousands of women who worked in the construction industry, especially at this particular point in the war in 1943, when there were acute labour shortages and with the entry of the US into the war the building of aerodromes and troop accommodation became urgent. Very few of these photographs were used as propaganda: they depict poor working conditions, and in some cases exhausted looking women. But shipbuilding, and the job of welding in particular, was promoted through a large amount of visual material including many photographs in booklets, and pamphlets produced by the Ministry of Labour and National Service in 1943. The poster in Figure 2.2 echoes Cecil Beaton’s wartime photographs of the Tyneside shipyards in which he succeeds in portraying shipbuilding as a glamorous and exciting occupation. Knight’s realist depiction of a woman factory worker, part of a tradition including Ford Madox Brown, William Bell Scott and other nineteenth century painters of industrial Britain, depicts the singular activity of an individual engrossed with the task in hand, the Ruskinian ideal of work temporarily signified by a woman. The personal narrative of Ruby Loftus herself fits into broader patterns of post-war expectations for women. Her experience as an engineering worker on the Home Front and her brief moment of publicity did not act


Figure 2.2 Ministry of Labour and National Service Recruitment leaflet (TUC Collections)

as a life-changing event and although she was offered further training to gain a qualification in engineering she turned it down in favour of marriage and emigration to Canada to work on a fruit farm. The engineering job was an aberration, a wartime expedient only, and this was true of wider changes to the British labour market, which, at the end of


the war was being prepared for the re-entry of de-mobbed male troops and a return to traditional patterns of occupational segregation. By the 1950s, fashion as in the New Look emphasised gender differences and the message of marriage, motherhood and domesticity was uppermost in both government literature and popular media, especially women’s magazines. This period, seen as an oppressive era when women were forced out of the workplace and back into domesticity by many feminists (Briar, 1997; Boston, 1987; Wilson, 1980) has recently been re-examined. Kirsten Skroog (2009) has researched how the views of the housewife were given a voice during the 1950s via BBC Radio and how the tensions between home and work were aired. Throughout the 1950s there remained a labour shortage and many thousands of women stayed in the workforce. According to census data in 1951, 42 per cent of women of working age were in employment and this increased to 58 per cent by 1981; but women dominated the part-time labour force and were also segregated into a narrow range of occupations (Walsh and Wrigley, 2001). Despite their continued and increased presence in the workforce the paradoxical disappearance of the visual representation of women as workers, has close parallels with the way in which women were portrayed in post-war films. In the words of Melanie Williams, ‘when it was no longer necessary to inscribe women’s importance to the war effort for the propagandist purposes of exhorting them to participate, they disappeared from the action’ (Williams, 2009). She suggests that the 1950s were a period of great amnesia, while women ‘forgot’ the freedom of their wartime experiences in order to conform to the postwar norm of a ‘good’ woman. Williams discusses in depth the role and performance of Sylvia Sims as the nurse in Ice Cold in Alex noting the iconic position of the nurse in 1950s Britain and the ability of Sims to convey the tensions and paradoxes of post-war femininity. Not only was the nurse a heroine of the new National Health Service she also conveyed the image of a modern, professionally skilled young woman as well as retaining the ‘feminine’ qualities of nurturing and caring. Throughout the 1950s and 60s the nurse was a key figure in popular romantic fiction published by Mills and Boon, and, as Spencer (2005) points out she also figured in the extremely popular career novels aimed at teenage girls. These novels set within a narrow spectrum of possible careers, with nursing and teaching figuring prominently, conveyed clear messages on the importance of staying on at school to gain qualifications, on appropriate behaviour in the workplace and always ended with the heroine getting her man up the aisle. They also placed


great emphasis on dress, deportment and ultimately how to ‘be’ a woman in post-war Britain where ‘woman’ was widely represented as, white, middle class and heterosexual.5 The paucity of visual material that might be termed ‘iconic’ in representing women as productive workers in post-war Britain entailed a change of emphasis from looking for popular imagery to the specific ways in which occupations are visually represented. To this end the archive collections of trade union journals held at the TUC Library provided a rich source of visual material, which in its entirety can be seen as part of the material culture of an occupation as well as representing the ideals and aspirations of organised, collective labour, perhaps most clearly in the union banners – in the nineteenth century these proclaimed the rights, skills and virtues of members through a careful assemblage of female allegorical forms representing for example, industry, art, justice and truth, while today they are more likely to consist of figurative social realist compositions representing the diversity of their membership.6 But we approached the collection with one main question: what would the images produced by trade unions reveal about work in the occupations they represented? Because of the size of the collections, in most cases a weekly or monthly journal or newspaper was produced, we decided to analyse only the front covers, being aware that this approach was highly speculative in terms of reception: it is not known how union members received and understood these cover images, but we went ahead with the expectation that even if the magazine was not read the cover would have been glanced at and a momentary response to the dominant image would have been made. However, this assumption itself must be treated with caution as Peter Cunningham commented, in his oral history research, he encountered one male teacher who recalled reading his copy of The Teacher in reverse, turning to the jobs pages first and reading backwards towards the front, just as he read the sports pages first in his daily newspaper (Cunningham and Gardner, 2004). In terms of answering our main question, the content of the images on the covers revealed very little information on workplace practices, technology, social groups, spatial layouts or anything much to do with the pragmatics of work. In fact, we found that the cover images infrequently depicted the actual work of union members preferring instead to use visual metonyms for the occupation they represented. By evoking a close association between the image and its direct relationship with or connection to that which it signifies it is understandable why trains are found on the front cover of the train driver’s Associated Society of


Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF)’s journal The Locomotive, school children on the covers of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) journal The Teacher, while throughout the 1960s the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), featured the architecture of bank branches from around the UK on its front covers (Figure 2.3).7 This material was examined overall and in chronological sequence, resulting in a coalescence of narratives. The aesthetics of the covers reflected the changing styles in graphic design over the last century – but this incorporating as it does – layout, font, format – whether tabloid, broadsheet, or magazine is inseparable from the story of how a particular union chooses to present itself to its members and also to outsiders. Embedded within these two strands are the exclusions/ inclusions and marginalisation of various workers and workplaces: despite the direct recruitment drive in the Caribbean during the 1950s, 60s and up to 1970 no images of black workers appear on any of the transport unions’ journals until the 1980s. The ubiquitousness of teaching as a suitable career for girls in the post-war years, promoted as a career which could fit around the core domestic duties of a mother, prompted a closer examination of the ways in which the profession was visually represented. Three legislative changes in the immediate post-war years also created a favourable labour market for women in education: the abolition of the marriage bar (1945), the raising of the school leaving to 15 (1947) and the 1956 Burnham Settlement which accepted equal pay for teachers (phased in over six years). In the 1950s and 60s it was perfectly possible for women to take a break from teaching to raise a family and then return, at least to classroom teaching, at a later date (Evetts, 1989; Martin, 2006). The visual portrayal of women working as teachers in careers literature by the largest teachers’ union, supported this understanding and was limited, over the entire post-war period, to a set of stereotypical images depicting them in caring, nurturing roles (Wall, 2008). Teacher, a careers book published in 1965 made up almost entirely of photographs by Patrick Ward. The book contains starkly lit, black and white compositions, the staple of social documentary reporting, depicting a highly gender-segregated profession. The first three photographs in the book have no captions at all, apart from the title page, and are of women teachers therefore directly reflecting the female segregation of the profession. The text of the introduction, which immediately follows these images, describes teaching as more than a profession – as a ‘calling’, and makes explicit the nature of this vocation by stating that ‘the teacher takes over from the parent in certain spheres of a child’s life at the age of

Figure 2.3 The Schoolmaster and Woman Teacher’s Chronicle, 1962 © NUT; The Locomotive Journal, 1954 © ASLEF; The Bank Officer, 1962 ©UNISON (TUC Collections)

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Figure 2.4

Frontispiece from Teacher, 1965 © The Lutterworth Press. From Your Career in Teaching, 1970 © Daily Express/Cornmarket

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five …’ (Ward and Baker, 1965). This text is juxtaposed to the very powerful black and white photographs of women teachers relating intensely and intimately with their pupils. There is no photograph of a male teacher until roughly a third of the way through the book and this is an image of a male physics teacher demonstrating a technical experiment to a small group of boys (Figure 2.4). In a similar way, a visual analysis of the front covers of the journal of the largest teaching union the NUT, disclosed a set of gendered portrayals of the nature of teaching. In the period between 1940–1962, 12 women and 14 male teachers grace the front covers (overall 54 per cent of the cover images were of schoolchildren). All of the women are pictured in relation to pupils, in contrast to four images of male teachers that do not contain any children at all. The depictions of women teachers from these decades are consistent in their composition: they were usually depicted in close physical proximity to the children, rarely standing at a blackboard or at a distance from the children unless teaching dance or physical education, and never portrayed alone or without any accompanying schoolchildren. The women teachers, bar one photograph, are never depicted outside the defining, and confining, architecture of the classroom or playground, neither were they shown in relation to their colleagues. None of them are seen using any type of technical equipment compared to four front covers of men respectively, using a film projector, assembling a telescope, inspecting woodworking tools and using audio equipment to teach deaf children. This imagery, a set of noticeably recurring, thematic compositions associating the role of female teachers with motherhood, persisted throughout the 1980s and up to the end of the twentieth century (Figure 2.5). It suggests an enduring image of women in traditional feminine roles in relation to both primary and older schoolchildren and also reinforces, through the absence of any alternative imagery, the idea of technical competence as a male attribute. At the same time of this general absence of any defining image of woman as a productive worker, the imagery of labouring men as heroic was disintegrating. Representations of the miner’s strike in 1984 also introduced an element of regionality into the visual language used to describe work. The proliferation of images in the press of striking miners, from the strong left-wing communities of South Wales and South Yorkshire in particular, was now juxtaposed with the white collar economic success of London and the South East typified by white male bankers, cementing Thatcher’s contempt for manual work. But the success of the financial and commercial sector in London was still dependent on manual work and the boom of the late 1980s saw a large number of building

Figure 2.5 The Schoolmaster and Woman Teacher’s Chronicle, November, 1955 © NUT, The Schoolmaster and Woman Teacher’s Chronicle, January, 1960 © NUT, The Teacher, June 2000 © NUT (TUC Collections)

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projects change the skyline of the city of London. One of the largest of these was the development of Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, a project that included the positioning of large pieces of public art as an integral part of the private development of public space. In much the same way that Lewis Hine was hired by Empire State Incorporated to document the building of the skyscraper, the painter Roger Mason was engaged in 1989 by the developer Stuart Lipton to create a painting of the construction site at Broadgate, Liverpool Street for his office. Mason went on to produce a large body of work, much of it focused on the steel construction workers and engineers at work. He spent many hours on site and the resulting oil paintings reveal his profound respect for the construction workers. The paintings depict workers, ‘grave and intent, their figures attain[ing] at times an unselfconscious dignity’ (Cork, 1990). The developing company, Rosehaugh Stanhope, bought some of the paintings to hang in the foyer of their office headquarters and one was purchased by the construction trade union Union of Construction Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT). Thus, even at the end of the twentieth century the power of nineteenth and early twentieth century notions of noble masculine, and skilled manual work were still salient in painterly representations of modern work and workplaces (Figure 2.6).

Conclusion This chapter has been concerned with the historical representation of work in Britain, and in North America. The differing forms of narration examined here represent modes of expression that take as central themes the place and significance of work. Identity, as the chapter title suggests, can be seen as both ‘lost and found’ through the individual and collective experience of labour, as well as through the forms – genres – and traditions long engaged with narratives of work. Raymond Williams stated that although historical work can recover evidence that can illuminate reductive, hegemonic versions of the past it is of little use and will remain marginal unless ‘lines to the present, in the actual process of the selective tradition, are clearly and accurately traced’ (Williams, 1977: 116). This is a tall order and has only been partly successful in this attempt to reveal the powerful role that narrative forms such as documentary, the novel and film, and the impact and force of visual imagery has taken in shaping the way work is perceived, and also experienced, at different historical moments in the twentieth century.


Figure 2.6

Phase II (Rainy Day), Robert Mason, 1989


What has become clear is the extent to which cultural representations intersect with historical and political contexts. The phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ used by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a political speech in 2007 was taken up as a rallying call by construction workers at power stations early in 2009 striking against the use of migrant workers. These strikes were widely photographed with Union Jack flags prominently displayed on picket lines and reported in the rightwing press in ways which took for granted the association of nationalism and xenophobia with resident, white working men. But the story ‘migrant workers taking our jobs’ in this case proved too simple, as it emerged that the dispute focused partly on resentment of ‘foreign workers’ but also on the fact that the oil companies were paying them very low wages thus undermining the local agreement. Wider fears that the strikes foreshadowed a political shift to far-right fascist groups failed to materialise and the complexity of working life was largely underestimated by media commentators. Work is a site for social exchanges and relations not found in familial and domestic spaces, it is often a place of contact between people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. What we find in narratives such as these are tensions and contradictions, ones that still signal common hopes, expectations and desires around the experience and formation of work. This particular ‘narrative of labour’ articulates structures of feeling ‘in solution’, enunciated through key thematic emphases such as recognition and respect, signifying the continuing importance of work in the constitution of both individual and collective identities. The intersectionality implied here reveals possible new forms of identity positions and social relations. This offers rich ground for further research that questions hegemonic, or dominant – often media constructed – narratives of working life.

3 Identity in Question and the Place of Work

The rise of identities Work is declining in social primacy. Social meaning and solidarity must, eventually, be found elsewhere (Casey, 1995: 2). It means everything [teaching], it’s huge, I’m in an amazing position, you know, I count my blessings every day (Andrea aged 26, secondary school teacher). Studies of identity have not centred to any consistent extent on the importance of work, or the place of work in the context of identity formation and practice. Outside the sub-discipline itself of work sociology, or the more technical preoccupations of employment studies, the significance of work identity has been less a focus of attention than that of identity as understood and explored in relation to the importance of race or gender or even – if profoundly diluted since around the 1980s – questions of social class. Since the 1980s, the very concept and idea of identity has been pluralised becoming re-constituted and re-presented as identities. The growing influence of postmodernism shaped this event, compounded by a growing concern with ‘otherness’ in academic spheres in the United States in particular. In this emergent view to read identity through the notion of ‘essence’ became radically challenged in key areas of postmodernist thought: fixed notions of gender, class or ‘race’, for instance, was discarded as ‘essentialist’ thought, while at the same time it came to be coded positively by other radical (and sometimes postmodernist) thinkers concerned with the significance and struggle for notions of recognition.1 The purpose of this chapter is to map some 77


forms through which identity and culture has become central to understanding social change in radically altering times, particularly from the 1980s. Furthermore, our second aim will then be to place such arguments and perspectives in the context of work and working lives. We ask, does work – indeed, had work ever – constitute experience that is fundamental in shaping identity formation; is this important in understanding identity and culture in more general terms; can we make some sense of cultural and social change as expressed through the concepts of residual or emergent structures of feeling.2 ***** Identity Studies might be seen as synonymous now with the earlier evolution of Cultural Studies and this is a reasonable view. An embryonic Cultural Studies made prominent in Britain through the seminal writings of Raymond Williams (1958/1963), Richard Hoggart (1957) and E. P. Thompson (1963), was itself concerned with identity, too, though chiefly in the shape of working-class formations and class consciousness. We noted in the previous chapter British intellectuals’ pursuit of the working class, engaging with the writing of the social documentaries of Grierson and his colleagues, and their efforts to define workingclass lives and communities in hard times. Identity emerged here through the sharp lens of material hardship and want, workers often revealed as victims of exploitation and dispossession. Working-class identity was not necessarily something to be celebrated or embraced, but to be in some senses overcome. The post-war settlement in Britain and the ‘age of affluence’ – as we explored in Chapters 1 and 2 – re-formed ideas of class. This meant that the work of Williams and Hoggart was forced to address how class might be addressed and understood in a purportedly classless context. Affluence was deemed as eroding class loyalties and affiliations, the argument went; yet class, as Hoggart and Williams revealed, meant more than economic relations and was instead, or also, constituted in and through ways of living and being, conveying a political hope that beckoned the emergence of socialism. This was an argument employed to counter notions of classlessness, underlining the centrality of workingclass, or plebeian, cultures in the formation of culture and society (see also Thompson’s formative work, 1963), disclosing a preoccupation with class as cultural expression and identity. Questions of class continued to probe the importance of culture, and by the 1960s the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) expanded this further and with significant and growing influence.

Identity in Question and the Place of Work 79

The work of Stuart Hall and colleagues there became prominent, marking its arrival later with Hall and Jefferson’s important compilation, Resistance through Rituals (1976). Cultural Studies established itself as the serious study of ‘everyday life’ – still chiefly concerned with, at this point, working-class consciousness and communities. In turn, identity was unravelled primarily through culture – culture as formations, as traditions and as expression. Thus taking culture to pertain to a ‘whole way of life of a group or class’, meant analysing ‘the meanings, values and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of belief, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life’ (Hall and Jefferson, 1976: 10). Resistance through Rituals showed how sub-cultures could be understood in relation to those ‘parent cultures’, but related, too, to the dominant culture itself as the dominant constitutes ‘the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole’ (1976: 13). Youth sub-cultures nevertheless were still seen to ‘exist within, and co-exist with, the more inclusive culture of the class from which they spring’ (1976: 14). Though beginning to develop radical new understandings of identity, then, Cultural Studies remained wedded to class. In the British context it was the studies of Paul Willis that kept the intersectionality of class, culture and work at the centre. His Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids get Working-Class Jobs (1977) offered a compelling account of schooling and the working class, following closely on the back of Resistance through Rituals. Willis intention was to ‘look at young, non-academic disaffected males and their adaptation to work as a crucial and privileged moment in the continuous regeneration of working-class cultural forms in relation to the most essential structure of society – its working relations’ (Willis, 1977: 2). So at the outset, Willis argued ‘that it is their own culture which most effectively prepares some working-class lads for the manual giving of their labour power. We may say that there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism’ (Willis, 1977: 3). Having ‘penetrated’ the façade of the education system, the ‘tragedy is that these forms of “penetration” are limited, distorted and turned back on themselves, often unintentionally’ (Willis, 1977: 3). There was a very important difference distinguishing Learning to Labour from many of the studies emerging from the CCCS in this period. This lies in the direct attention to the question of identity formed in key ways through work – the central experience of working-class boys as they move from ‘boy-hood’ to the adult world of employment. For Willis – more so than others in the CCCS – the relationship of work, class and


identity formation shaped experience fundamentally. Work, then, held a centrality that was fixed firmly between the experiences of alienation and agency – work might constitute a powerful presence offering an anticipated future signalled by a shift from subordination to the possibility of collective control. But increasingly throughout the 1980s gender and race came to dominate arguments around the identity question itself, but one leading to the pluralisation of the concept of identity. Consequently, and at one influential level, the trope of identity in Britain found a new paradigm to emerge under the rubric of ‘New Times’. This characterised a newly dominant strand in British Cultural Studies that focused far less on class, or the centrality (or not) of work (not that it ever fully did), highlighting other modes for fixing, or celebrating, or investigating the role of identity. This was bound up by dramatic changes throughout the 1980s and 1990s in social and economic life; changes that, for commentators like Hall, required a shift in understandings of the social and cultural traditions, and the place and politics of work, too, in influencing the formation of identities. Hall (1992), and others such as Paul Gilroy (1987), saw that the rise of globalisation, along with an increasing concern with multiculturalism, trans-nationalism and mass migrations meant a clearer focus on the role of national identity so that, in the context of the new experiences of ‘border crossings’, notions of some kind of homogeneous national identity could or could not be sustained. Any significance that accrued to ideas of class and class formation and traditions – bound to work or not – increasingly fell away. In this context, Hall made his view clear: ‘there is no question that the relative decline of the centralised nation-states, with their incorporating cultures and national identities, implanted and secured by strong cultural institutions, which claimed to be able to subsume all differences and diversity into their imagined unity, opens up profound fissures and ambivalences within the discourse of the nation-state’ (Hall, 1992: 355). A new mode, or modes, of thinking identity/identities would have to appear, and Hall insisted that ‘the capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century’ (Hall, 1992: 361). Hall’s sense of an end of collective solidarities – of nation, or of class in particular, and its traditional understanding in relation to community life and work formations and traditions – mirrored the cultural shift in New Times towards a stronger emphasis on individualism, on consumption and on a perceived cosmopolitanism leading inevitably to the politics of ‘difference’. In his, New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (1989), Hall flagged up ‘the proliferation of models and


styles, the increased product differentiation, which characterises “postFordist” production’, reflected in the ‘wider processes of cultural diversity and differentiation, related to the multiplication of social worlds and social “logics” typical of modern life in the west’ (Hall, 1989: 129). ‘Diversity’, ‘differentiation’, and ‘multiplication’ constitute the major tropes that underpinned Hall’s analysis; one signifying a new way of seeing cultural identities in (postmodern) times. A form of ‘closure’ is expressed here – a move, or transformation, from any deep concern with class, work or community towards a consumerist ethic and culture coming increasingly to the forefront of discussions of subjectivity. Observers of Hall’s approach regarded ideas of identity constituted as ‘diversity and differentiation’ as bound up in turn with the emergence of a new individualism, a perspective developed in particular by sociologists Ulrich Beck (1986) and Anthony Giddens (1991), where they point in particular to the erosion of class identities in the condition of ‘late modernity’. This assertion revolved around idea of reflexivity, denoting the self-authoring of the subject free from, the argument implies, any wider structural constraints, thus enabling the subject to ‘make themselves’ as they please – part of what Giddens defined as ‘reflexive modernity’ (1991). One critic described this shift as a transition towards a free ‘individualised society of employees’ (Beck, 1986: 100), where it appears that individuals travel on some semi-structured, fluid terrain through which identity is decentred, self-fashioned and plural, and class consciousness, for instance, yields to a contingent ‘project of the self’ (on this see Savage on class and individualism, 2000; also Skeggs, 2004). Beverley Skeggs has been critical of the growing centrality of these approaches. She identifies the rise of the new individualism, embraced across a range of academic disciplines and articulated in the wider field of culture, as part of an ideology of mobility (Beck, 1986), a position that assumes the self-authoring of the subject free from any wider structural constraints (Skeggs, 2004: 71). The increased importance of identity is seen through acts of consumption and the lens of individualism. This is bound up with the hegemony of neo-liberal, free market ideology (see Harvey, 2006; also Kirk, 2007). The ideology of individualism thus becomes naturalised, linked to a sense of a newly formed social terrain marked by mobility, where more ‘traditional’ identity formations become eclipsed. Understanding identity has shifted markedly, then, from earlier Cultural Studies’ preoccupation with class formations and identities shaped through collective articulation that could make the place of work still a central formation and experience (as marked earlier by Willis, 1977). In


Skeggs’s view, this contemporary stress on individualism is seen as having intensified into a kind of compulsory individualism; so that, for her, the theories of both Beck and Giddens do little more than ‘reproduce the consumer market rhetoric that not only promotes individualism as necessary, but also makes it a moral prerogative’ (Skeggs, 2004: 57). Indeed, Giddens, sounding somewhat like Samuel Smiles, now insists that ‘we are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’ (1991: 75). While the ‘proliferation’ of identities, the centrality of ‘difference’, proclaimed in Hall’s analysis, echoes to some real extent the dominance of a new individualism too and the rise of globalisation. The fluidity of identity in ‘new’ times becomes, then, the new ‘common sense’ in both mainstream sociology and the area of contemporary Cultural Studies and an increasingly separating Identity Studies. But identity shaped or formed in the key contexts of work finds little salience with contemporary scholars concerned in the main with culture as consumption or with questions around the influence of popular culture. In the discussion so far we suggested how Cultural Studies initially formed with the aim to explore the meaning and significance of class and culture. By the 1990s, however, a perceived flux of identities and its multiplicity dominated in numerous fields of study, while identity shaped by other formations around gender, sexuality, race remained important, too. Through these intensifying concerns with identities through difference the experience of work and community, of work and identity, was sidelined. This development is examined further now.

Identity: The individual and collective relation to work Only in relatively rare cases can a permanent identity be defined, let alone secured, through the job performed (Bauman, 1998: 26). Well, when you’ve had full day and you go somewhere and you’ve achieved it and nothing’s gone wrong and you’ve got back and you feel like you’ve done something, achieved something and everybody’s happy. And sometimes a passenger comes and says thank you driver, you feel good (Jim, aged 56, train driver). In The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998), Richard Sennett examined the changing experi-


ence of work in North American cities. His book opened with an anecdote regarded essential to underline the nature of structural and experiential change of working life in the late twentieth century in North America. Sennett began his account by telling the tale of a father and son: Enrico, the working-class father, a janitor, and Rico, his son, upwardly mobile, working at executive level and earning an executive’s salary. Though a janitor all his life, Enrico had, for Sennett, nevertheless ‘achieved a measure of social honour’ (1998: 17). Enrico had ‘carved out a clear story for himself … his life thus made sense to him as a linear narrative. … The janitor felt that he had become the author of his life, and though he was a man low on the social scale, this narrative provided him with a sense of self-respect’ (1998: 16). Rico, however, must operate within this period of a ‘new’ capitalism, constituting the emergent world of a ‘flexible’ labour. His material rewards were greater than those humble remunerations accrued by his father, yet his own career narrative remained fraught with anxiety and troubled introspection, fuelled by the ever-present fear of ‘downsizing’, so that in the end Rico ‘feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his inner, emotional life adrift’ (1998: 20). Rico told a different story, then, where the narrative voice emerged as increasingly hesitant and unsure, faltering in the construction of a linear trajectory that should have marked the external trappings of success he disclosed. Sennett underlined the way shifts in economic forms and structures transformed the existential or experiential – the everyday lives of the working people with whom he spoke. Identity formation in the context of a working life was a central thread yet one untangling and thus revealing the way work confirmed (or not) a sense of place, as in Enrico’s case. It now fostered self-doubt and anxiety in the shadow cast upon Rico by contemporary capitalism’s practice of ‘downsizing’. Reading Enrico’s testimony we might detect a type of working-class pride operating, one grounded in an embedded sense of position, we would argue, in part manifest through the notion of a job well done, earning him a position in society. Andrew Sayer (2005) suggests that the rationale for working-class pride – which is what this amounts to – lies in the occupancy of a kind of moral high ground which is the ‘consequence of lack of any undeserved advantage’, and that ‘merits … cannot be attributed to the accident of birth and inheritance but have been achieved in more difficult circumstances than those enjoyed by the better off’ (Sayer, 2005: 181). This structure of feeling sustained


Enrico and marked his understanding of a working life as integral to the process of self and identity through time. His son, Rico, now must grapple with different circumstances. Sennett suggested that the flexibility characterising modern work rendered it precarious; more than this, though, any identity derived from work appeared diminished, so that ‘Rico’s deepest worry is that he cannot offer the substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character’ (1998: 21). The substance of Rico’s working life, according to Sennett, ‘faced an eclipse, in turn shifting his moral compass and any normative points of reference, and this was encapsulated to a major extent in the phrase “no long term”’ (1998: 24). ‘Dis-embedded’ from any wider processes of social interaction, pitched into a precarious employment setting, Sennett witnessed the decline of commitment, and the growing dominance of ‘weak ties’, where fellow citizens no longer stand as ‘a long-term witness of another person’s life’ (1998: 22–4). Sennett claimed that one of the ‘unintended consequences of modern capitalism … is that it has strengthened the value of place’, but this is so because ‘all the emotional conditions we have explored in the workplace animate that desire: the uncertainties of flexibility; the absence of deeply rooted trust and commitment; the superficiality of teamwork; most of all, the spectre of failing to make something of oneself in the world, to “get a life” through one’s work. All these conditions impel people to look for some other scene of attachment and depth’ (1998: 138) – of identity formation and interaction. Therefore, the implication is that such attachment can no longer be derived from work. Identity finds articulation through alternate forms, as we suggested above when examining the rise of ‘new’ individualisms. Sennett implied that work itself can no longer take a significant role in shaping identity, a view echoed by a number of commentators (for instance, Bauman, 1998). Reflecting upon this, work might be seen to stand at the periphery of identity practice in the contemporary configurations of the self. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) argued that any ethical dimension that might have motivated a working life – in short, the work ethic, with some sense of purpose – has been eclipsed by an increasing preoccupation merely with the material fruits of labour through wage differentials and the capacity to consume. Work as a ‘life project’ no longer holds purchase, he claimed (1998: 21–2); thus work, it seems, is coveted as a means only to ‘enrich’ rather than ‘ennoble’. But, following Sennett, Bauman


identified changes of late capitalism that fundamentally refashioned the structures and processes of work, whereby ‘a steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly-structured working career is no longer a widely available option’ (1998: 27), and thus lasting social relations and identity forms built through work wane. Sennett described work in this context as ‘identity light’ (1996: 75), resulting in ‘weak ties’, with superficial social interaction enacted through commitment-free networking activities (1996: 24). The idea, then, of identity shaped through the presence, or centrality, of work is powerfully contested here. If the ‘moral’, or ‘ethical’, dimension of work has declined, according to Sennett’s and Bauman’s arguments, any significant meaning ascribed to work has faded from view, it could be argued. Thus the argument that ‘work is declining in social primacy’ (Casey 1995: 2) finds a deep resonance. Yet, MacKenzie et al. (2005), writing some time later, offered a different view on work and identity in contemporary times. Their research underlines what they see as the continued ‘importance of employment (felt sharply in its absence, too), as well as the contribution of occupational identity’ to both individual self and class identity, and that this should be ‘returned to centre stage within the debate. The common pattern of lived experiences is essential for explaining the development of common identities’ (2005: 836). Work, they suggest, should be central to subjectivity. What they refer to as the presence of an identifiable ‘common pattern’ of course echoes the significance of both Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling, or to what Bourdieu defined as habitus. Here, work, and social interaction, denote central analytical, experiential and conceptual categories for exploring and understanding identity. Thus the shared experience of work, the researchers suggest, informs the constitution of social collectivity (2005: 836), so that ‘work as a collective experience, not just in terms of the presence or absence of union organisation but in terms of the shared experience of the labour process may act as a basis for group identity’. This is especially so ‘where the work is demanding, dangerous or highly skilled’, because here ‘individuals can develop a strong emotional attachment to their work’ (MacKenzie et al., 2005: 836; Kirk, 2007, 2008); a condition that can find – and historically has found – strong community networks and ties. But it has also raised questions, again, around the place of gender in relation to work. To support their views, MacKenzie and his colleagues point to Metzgar’s (2000) writing on life in a North American steel plant. Work formations and traditions, such as trade unions and community bonds and institutions, contribute to the necessary ‘material well-being of the steel workers


and, importantly, act as a means to and reflection of community and class solidarity’ (2005: 836). Even where occupation is taken away – as with the closing of coal mines, or steel plants – Metzgar showed workers continued reliance on the space of (a former) livelihood for those seeking to deal with closures and the sense of loss as almost a kind of bereavement (2000: 31). Identity formation – and this relates to Sayer’s idea of recognition in relation to self and work – remains in place; a sense of collectivism is maintained, in some cases strengthened, as a response to deeply fraught times of upheaval and transition. Once again, such arguments contradict the view that work-based identity practices embodied in structures of feeling no longer persist or define lives – or that the objective conditions that produce class formation and work identity, do not have important subjective dimensions, too. Such modes of identification may be bound up with generational determinants that can articulate such responses as ‘residual’ structures of feeling. But, as we have already said, residual does not mean ‘archaic’, nor suggests the notion or sense of ‘redundant’. Instead, sustaining and nurturing a residual structure of feeling ensures that working people preserve a sense of self-respect despite the painful loss of work. Thus they are, as in the title of Daniel Wight’s 1993 study of redundant industrial workers in Scotland, still ‘workers, not wasters’. Daniel Wight conducted his ethnographic study in the 1980s, concentrating on an industrial village in Scotland, and there he focused on how men maintained their sense of selves in the wake of industrial decline and de-industrialisation. He identified ‘the striking cultural similarities between the northern English working class and the inhabitants of Cauldmoss [a pseudonym], illustrating how much more important their common experience as an industrial proletariat has been in shaping their culture than have national characteristics’ (c1993: 2–3). One conclusion he drew from his research was that ‘the recent concern with postmodernism among many sociologists illustrates how the theoretical interests that arise from the metropolitan subculture in which most social scientists live can prompt debates largely irrelevant to other sections of the population’ (c1993: 3). Much the same could be said in the context of the ‘end of work’ debate.3 Wight’s argument about the place of work in terms of self-respect raises key questions in the context of identity formation, we argue. Andrew Sayer echoes this, too, in terms that figure for him the centrality of class subjectivities. He argues that class matters not only because of ‘differences in material wealth and economic security, but also because it affects our access to things, relationships, experiences and practices, which we have


reason to value, and hence our chances of living a fulfilling life’ (Sayer, 2005: 1). Indeed here, we argue, work has a centrality as it constitutes towards feelings of self-respect and self-worth. A location in which the need and desire to commit and relate oneself to work is not uncommon, and is indeed sometimes a central performative act. It is pertinent to the feelings and affects of ‘recognition’, where work and identity practice foregrounds feelings of fairness, respect, dignity and recognition (Sayer, 2005: 42). We would argue that when people seek recognition for the work that they do, for instance, this recognition is not always demanded in terms of monetary reward alone: self-respect, and the place of recognition – from fellow workers in particular – may be the primary motivation for those involved at the workplace.

Work identities: Intersectionality, self, community It is through narration that the axes of identity and subjectivity become explicit … how a person perceives or conceives an event (and speaks about it) would therefore vary according to how she is culturally constructed, what she identifies herself with and/or differentiates herself from (Ludvig, 2006: 249). But as it turned out we, like me mum, when she was in the insurance, she became a trade union rep and my sister’s very active now with Unison (Linda, aged 33, bank clerk). We began the question of identity from within the context of early Cultural Studies in Britain. Class formations and traditions had been central in this emergent study: from the work of Hoggart (1957), for instance, to Hall et al. (1976) questions of class was central. From the mid-1970s, however, new identities occupied the space of Cultural Studies, taking on with greater vigour issues of gender and race, while the subject of identity on American campuses focused increasingly on the meaning of difference, a position that both contradicted and confirmed the importance of identity. Following this we moved on to the issue of work in the contexts of identity and the context of ‘shifting times’, and the question of work and identity was examined as both collective and individual formations. Where was the workplace, and who were the working class in all this and in changing times? This followed on with the arguments of Sennett and MacDonald, and the claims and counter-claims of how far a working life still shapes social subjectivity, identity and civic action.


But the exploring of working life remains characterised by considerable complexity. Nevertheless to eclipse concern with work identities remains untenable, we suggest. Instead, we see work identity inevitably intersecting with other identity formations. To understand some of this complexity we consider the concept of intersectionality to illuminate the continuing relevance of work and identity practice. Interest with the concept of intersectionality is relevant to us; we see power relations operating across a spectrum of social locations and can be seen to interact in significant and formative ways. At the same time, we suggest that even where tensions exist, as constitutive elements of a work identity, key and identifiable thematic emphases coincide across the identity spectrum shown, ones held in common among the workers themselves. Structures of feeling helps us consider this proposition, allowing us to identify experiences and values – what we might call evaluative modes of thinking and speaking – that are bound to assertions of commitment, recognition and respect, and which, in themselves, play a significant part in individuals’ expectations and understandings of working life. In previous chapters we have suggested that work identity has been bound up historically with conceptions of class. Therefore work and identity, at some fundamental level, is linked to economic positioning within modes and relations of production, a case still pertinent today. Yet it is clear that understandings of work identity in the everyday is complex, too, inter-cut as it inevitably is by other identity formations structured around notions of gender, race, and sexuality, and around place and space, involving relations which have been historically significant in shaping work identities in Britain and the United States. But proponents of intersectionality argue that the concept itself enables an approach to identity that does not reduce people to one thing at a time, but aims ‘to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it’ (see Phoenix, 2006: 187). From the perspectives of feminism, Brah and Phoenix (2004) have spoken about its uses for understanding how women are situated across a range of subject positions that intersect through lines of gender, race and class. Ontologically speaking, such an approach enables identity to be viewed as complex, more than one thing. Thus social positions emerge as relational (Phoenix, 2006: 187). This view sidesteps tendencies inherent in aspects of identity politics that essentialise self and other in homogenising discourses that appear to leave scant space for what we might call more fragmented, perhaps contingent, or simply multifaceted selves. Intersectionality offers, the


argument goes, a way out of the additive and politically fragmentary tendencies of identity politics (see Phoenix, 2006: 187–8). Yuval-Davies (2006) underlines this position by suggesting that any discussion about the significance of intersectionality can be ‘constructed as a debate between identity politics and transversal politics or between the recognition/ distribution models of the politics of difference’ (2006: 195). Notions of recognition are important in considering the complex relations to work articulated by subjects, as has been argued by Andrew Sayer. For YuvalDavies though, being oppressed, say, as a black person is inevitably intermeshed, in concrete experience, with other social divisions, such as class (2006: 195). To ignore this is to turn to a type of essentialism grounded, for instance, in notions of Blackness or Womanhood, a politics that elides divisions within these identities as well as existing, or potential, commonalities, affiliations or alignments with others. Thus, in relation to shifts in feminism, for instance, intersectionality theory can complicate and refine former discourses built around a critique of women’s oppression – as women – in a male-dominated world. Prins summarises this view by suggesting that ‘intersectionality constitutes a critical alternative to identity politics insofar as, next to differences between groups, it also takes into account intra-group differences’ (2006: 278). The concept, then, can provide a tool of analysis for understanding some of the tensions and divisions within the context of the workplace and between workers themselves. But exploring intersectionality means still separating out different levels of analysis, and recognising, in terms elaborated by Yuval-Davis, that ‘social divisions have organisational, intersubjective, experiential and representational forms …’ and these become ‘expressed in specific institutions and organisations, such as state laws and state agencies, trade unions, voluntary organisations and the family …’ involving ‘specific power and affective relationships between actual people, acting informally and/or in their roles as agents of specific social institutions and organisations’ (2006: 198). Moreover, social divisions have deeply subjective factors impinging on daily lives, too, including experiences of ‘inclusion and exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage, specific aspirations and specific identities’; and, finally, they exist at the level of representations found in a range of discursive contexts and ideological modes (see also Brah, 1996). Here, we are chiefly concerned with the first two emphases of the above discussion – that is organisational factors and subjective ones. What is interesting is how gender and class, race and age, intersect in specific workplace contexts and how this is articulated through feelings and in more structural forms. First, in a broadly organisational


sense, in the way divisions and differences emerge as power relations in workplace contexts, to be managed and overcome by workers themselves; secondarily in a more subjective sense, where structures of feeling, in the manner described by Williams, interact in the concrete practices of everyday working life.

Oral testimony: Articulating working lives I thought I would probably make a difference to particularly black boys that were not achieving at all so that was one of the main, I suppose, reasons for going into teaching (black male teacher). It makes me feel safe within this community because I feel that I’m a face; I belong here (black female teacher). I mean they were shovelling coal on steam trains and this sort of thing and I think, yeah, and [laughter], I feel, you know, I feel a fraud sometimes (white male train worker). The following extracts from oral testimonies are designed to illustrate key arguments relevant to the interaction of identity and work. They underline, too, the importance of gender and ‘race’ in the formation of identity in and through a working life.

Identity on the line First we listen to a male train driver, Ian, who is aged 57. Ian became a railway worker in his 40s, finally fulfilling what he called a childhood ambition. We ask him how well he felt he fitted in during the early days on the job. Ian: Well, um, I became aware of that when I first moved to Linton, when I found myself going up to the depot and when we were having a break there, I was, I … the area didn’t have their own restaurant up there at that time, so we were sharing with what was the – the local train’s – staff, and you could feel the atmosphere as soon as you walked in. There was silence, you know, and, you know, these people are older people who saw me at Linton, doing the work that they would have been doing. You know that’s …


IV: Before privatisation? Ian: Before privatisation, yeah, that’s right. I mean, privatisation has winners and losers, and I, [unclear] I went from a winner of it, I’ve gained from it, other people lost out, you know. And, you’ve got to feel for them, you know, I can quite understand how they feel, and how they, you know, I’d have been all set aback as well, if I’d been in that position. IV: Did you manage to get through that sort of coldness, and actually get to talk to any of them? Ian: Oh yeah. Oh yes, you did. I mean, a lot of them were okay about it, it was just odd ones of those that just sort of, you know, obviously felt, um, annoyed about it and, um, yeah … IV: Again, talking about that, was there, when you started work, were there any older men who sort of taught you the tricks of the trade, or helped you in any way, or did you feel that you were on your own? How did you find out about things? Ian: Um, there was a mixture. There was some older people there who would fall over themselves to sort of help you, and point things out. Other people there, you were the newbie [new arrival], you know, [other workers could say] I, I started as an engine cleaner and worked my way up, sort of thing. And I’m suddenly coming and doing what they’re doing right now anyway, and, that’s, you know … There wasn’t a lot of that, [unclear] and, and a lot of those are now gone, because they’ve, they’ve sort of retired, and … But there were, there was a fair bit of it when I first started. And, even now I still feel like the new guy, I’ve been there over ten years now, I still feel like the new guy sometimes, you know, and when you get into conversations and people will talk about, you know, they joined in ’63 or something [laughter] and – well, perhaps not ’63 but certainly, you know, in the ’60s – and I mean they were shovelling coal on steam trains and this sort of thing and I think, yeah, and [laughter], I feel, you know, I feel a fraud sometimes, you know. Ian recounts a period early in his work-life history, shortly after joining the railways. He was recruited after the public owned industry had been privatised in 1993, and prior to this he had worked elsewhere in the industrial sector, but in more white-collar work. Partly as a consequence of this, and at this point in his story, his work identity sat somewhat precariously. He situates himself, and is situated, he feels, in


a marginalised position, and this is placed in the context of the practice of seniority and its demise following privatisation. The concept of time on the job leading to automatic progression – which is essentially what seniority boils down to – felt cancelled out by new work practices that were introduced in part to intensify competition between workers following the privatisation of the system. Ian is acutely conscious of this; it places him uncomfortably both inside and outside the work culture he had long aspired to enter. This seems to compromise his work identity. Any straightforward identification of himself as a worker is unsettled, and he experienced this in an almost embodied sense, through affect: you ‘could feel the atmosphere’, he tells me. The silence he describes is telling, also. The linguist Valentin Volosinov’s (1973) understanding of inner speech’s place in the constitution of consciousness reminds us that silence is rarely the existence of nothing at all: inner voice discourse fills the space in consciousness left over when no-one speaks or is speaking, and here Ian implies that the silence is occupied by the voices of the workers whose position he now feels he has taken, or usurped. Ian appeared troubled by it, hence his ‘troubled’ talk. Troubled words – or troubled talk – (on this concept, see Wetherell, 1998; Taylor and Littleton, 2006) become most evident in the final extract taken from Ian’s testimony. What I mean by this revolves around what he perceived to be, at this point in his work-life testimony, his difference from other workers. He told us: ‘I’ve been there over ten years now, I still feel like the new guy sometimes, you know, and when you get into conversations and people will talk about, you know, they joined in ’63 …well, perhaps not ’63 but certainly, you know, in the ’60s – and I mean they were shovelling coal on steam trains’. His desired identity as railway worker, and more specifically, as a driver, remained constrained. The constraint was evident in the discursive orientation of his testimony at this point. One way of thinking about this is through the concept of available narrative conventions with which to speak (work) identity, and Ian hints at this himself when he told us that ‘[other workers could say] I, I started as an engine cleaner and worked my way up, sort of thing’. Although not all of his fellow workers responded to him in this way (indeed many of them would have been too young to have experienced steam), the sense that he cannot narrate these experiences, or feel part of them and the accepted narrative forms with which to construct a work-life history as a railway worker (simply because he did not start his working life on the railways), indicated a lack of resources, or what Bourdieu might call cultural capital: resources that would legitimate, or add credibility, to his


own self-perception (and the perception of him by others). This narrative mode in this instance is to do within ‘origins’; it indicates a bona fide beginning (the apprenticeship) that secures a sense of place or belonging. And as the apprenticeship, traditionally, is linked with the ‘journey’ from boyhood to manhood, a conception of gender subtly insinuates itself as a powerful identity relation in Ian’s understanding of his position as a ‘railway man’. As Mike Savage has pointed out (2000), manual labour had an important historical significance in the context of the British labour force. He highlights the importance of apprenticeships as key institutional processes ‘by which boys became both men and skilled workers and thereby members of the working class’ (Savage, 2000: 128). The dilemma implicit in Ian’s testimony, therefore, hinges upon whether or not he has earned the right to call himself a railway worker at all. This has ramifications for him as a worker and thus, if only implicitly, calls into question his class identity, too. But a further dimension looms with regard to gender. If the apprenticeship – serving one’s time – is coded as a masculine event (at least seen as such historically), then there emerges a sense of deficit here, and that is implicitly coded and experienced in terms of masculinity (with sleeves rolled up, and ‘shovelling coal’). As Ian said, ‘yeah, and [laughter], I feel, you know, I feel a fraud sometimes, you know’. What this extract appears to turn around are notions of entitlement. His talk was ‘troubled’ in part because achieving recognition as a worker in a largely male-dominated occupation once involved the rites of passage of a long apprenticeship, and that particular experience was formative, too, at least historically, in the constitution of a type of working-class masculinity, one that Ian suggested he has not achieved. Hence class and gender intersect in subtly defining ways. For Ian, this was disturbing – troubling – as it threatened that necessary condition of recognition and worth that, as a worker, he desires and values.

Classing identity and colour Geoffrey is a black man in his 30s. Born in South Africa, but a resident in the UK for 20 years, Geoffrey chose to become a teacher. We asked him why he made that choice: Geoffrey: It’s a hard one to say really but I suppose I thought I would make a difference. Having gone through school and having seen exemplary teachers and all, I thought


I would probably make a difference to particularly black boys that were not achieving at all so that was one of the main, I suppose, reasons for going into teaching. Geoffrey referred to inequalities specifically in terms of ‘race’, or ethnicity, speaking more particularly of black boys here, and their perceived failure to achieve in school, and there exist a complicated amalgam of reasons behind this. We go on to ask: IV: You spoke about wanting to make a difference for young black kids who perhaps don’t get a break. G.: Yeah. IV: Where did that desire come from, do you think? G.: Well I suppose I’ve come from South Africa, and having gone to what I suppose is private school, there wasn’t much support given to black students as it were, and there weren’t any role models at all; no black teachers at all … well at least at the school that I went to. And coming here and seeing that same scenario being repeated, I suppose I thought that perhaps I could … well put in … one thing I could do as well was try and provide that difference I suppose. IV: What do you remember about your own school then? What sticks in your mind about that? G.: To be quite honest being one of only three black students at the school and I suppose in a way not being taken seriously I suppose. I suppose yeah; not very good memories I suppose, yeah. [Laughing] Not very good memories, but yeah, not being taken seriously and being sort of judged that I would go to a certain level and not beyond that I suppose. Yeah, that sticks quite a lot in my mind really. ‘Not being taken seriously’ appears to understate here the experience of racism and exclusion. This could be regarded as a response undercutting the seriousness of what is being described, although the nervous, or perhaps uncomfortable, laughter suggested to us otherwise. The pain of being judged simply by the colour of one’s skin is apparent, too, in the use of repetition – ‘not being taken seriously … not very good memories …’ and that he might attain ‘a certain level and not beyond that’ not only underlined the invidious effects of discrimination, but the abiding nature of being labelled inferior at such a formative stage in life. This, of course, is emphasised by his closing comment that,


‘yeah, that sticks quite a lot in my mind really’. He goes on to explain: G.: I’d say that was the general attitude, yeah. It was sort of a time when schools were being forced to take on black students and I was one of three, and a first of all the schools as well that I went to, so in a way I would say they were not really quite used to having someone different come to the school. But I felt they sort of assumed I would probably go up to a certain level and nothing else. The presence of colour clearly over-determines the teachers’ responses (at least some of the teachers) to Geoffrey. This experience is in key senses formative and informs his actions later in life when he decides to become a teacher. ‘Making a difference’, as he termed his motivations now is in part a response to ‘not being taken seriously’, during his own schooling, to being labelled as only able to go so far ‘and not beyond that’. Geoffrey conceded that on graduating he would, if he had a choice, ‘stick to this kind of school which is where I think I will make the most of a difference. Yeah, I think I prefer this sort of school I suppose; yeah.’ His reasoning was spelt out: G.: I suppose at the end of the day if I could touch just one person, say from a situation, a school setting like this where half the pupils think they won’t achieve anything, if I could make one person realise that they have got all the chances within them to excel and compete with the best of the pupils in the very good schools, I think that would be a job well done for me I suppose. There may be a strong strain of idealism but it is an idealism based not on a form of romanticisation of his role, or the children he worked with, but on an understanding of the difficult contexts in which he and they operate and the pain of his own experience of education as a pupil.

Identity formation and the ‘teacherly-self’ An emphasis on feeling or affect, underlines questions on the concept of ‘emotional labour’, a situation that in part distinguishes, we argue, what we define elsewhere as the ‘teacherly-self’ (see Kirk and Wall, 2009). Here, the concept emphasises what we call an affective dimension of teaching,


one which enables a view of the importance of emotional labour in teaching, and how such emotions become situated in the discursive responses articulated in oral testimony. The importance of emotional labour suggests that ‘feeling’ acts as a vital mode of cognition helping encode experience as value-laden expression where meaning becomes embedded in forms and intonations reflecting practice. Though it is the case that discussions of emotional labour has been couched in negative terms, it is nevertheless possible to argue that in the context of teachers’ working lives, and their identity practice, there is a resource reflecting more ambiguous responses and what are often positive feelings and actions. Angie, (43) is a black woman teacher in Home Economics. Her worklife experience was defined early in our discussion. She seemed to suggest that her work also provided in key ways a feeling of belonging, and of camaraderie: ‘I’ve become part of the infrastructure … you know, the structure of this community.’ This came to be interconnected with the importance of recognition, something she experiences through her position as a teacher, providing a mode of understanding identity in this context through the notion of the ‘teacherly self’. But she also talks of her work as giving her a sense of security, too, within her own community. She explains: ‘It makes me feel safe within this community because I feel that I’m a face; I belong here. So you go out there and if there’s a gang of boys, if that one doesn’t know me, the other one knows me.’ Identification – or feeling identified – is one key feature of her working practice and identity; there emerges then an ‘emotional commitment’ felt through work, one powerfully informed by a structure of feeling with wider identifications, too: connections embedded in the social interactions of community, class and culture, and bound to historical formation drawn on the historical experience of immigration. Andrew Sayer has discussed the concept of commitment as something that emerges ‘through continued immersion in relationships and activities, and through embodiment’ (2005: 40), and this experience finds expression through both work and community, something she expressed clearly throughout. Here, then, the ‘teacherly-self’ is bound up with Geoffrey’s earlier responses, and it drew to the foreground the place of ‘race’ in Angie’s testimony. She told us: You are sort of thrown in the deep end and you just got on with it, but the colour for me was not an issue because I’m black, but I don’t see myself as the black teacher. I see myself here as a person doing a


job, and the black does not create a barrier for me because the pupils are pupils. Angie insisted that colour – the conceptions of ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’ – is not the central mode of identification she chooses to accentuate. For her ‘pupils are pupils’, as she is ‘a person doing a job’, there to create opportunity and to offer care rather than find or accept barriers herself and others. Further on we saw how her place at work extended to her position in her wider community, confirming earlier views on this. Her work identity supports her position in her community, forming and also nurturing social action: I’m respected in the community and people asked me to be involved. So I’ve lived round there for all the years I’ve been here, so people know me round there, and they think ‘oh yeah, Angela’s a teacher, we’ll go over there.’ I do everybody’s passports. If people want letters to write, they’ll come to me if they need help, that sort of thing. Her utterance provides evidence of civic involvement through social action – agency shaped by her work and through her position as a teacher, then ensuring a sense of embeddedness within the wider community. The idea of emotional labour might provide the opportunity for multiple experiences: this constitutes the significance of recognition and commitment articulated within her testimony. This asks for an attention to language as utterance – the enunciation of what Williams defined as structure of feeling expressed through the affects of practical consciousness.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have attempted to unfold some of the central arguments shaping approaches to identity practice and formation in the field of culture and within the context of work. We argue – in concurrence with the writing of MacKenzie and his colleagues examined earlier – that work, while still remaining in obvious respects a necessity, represents also and in significant ways one of those practices that people seek, care about and desire to value and be valued through: and this, we argue, was uttered in variable ways in the brief extracts of testimonies figured above. If our earlier debates in this chapter concerning the demise of work pertain, then an important means of valuing oneself, others and the


wider world has in turn been radically eclipsed. And the ramifications of such outcomes for the individuals concerned have been found in many encounters in workplaces and in workers’ own homes, as we show later. They were discovered, too, in the voices of workers in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World (1999). Testimonies documented by Bourdieu and his team are not only articulations of pain and loss, anger and frustration: as argued elsewhere in this book these are important in forming a sense of the self. The brief extracts from our work-life histories examined revealed structures of feeling that grapple with, and in turn articulates, such experience and its affects. Despite the inevitable complexity involved in these cultural and social fields, we continue to argue that work remains central to identity formation, and this will be investigated at greater depth through the testimonies of workers in the chapters to follow.

Part II Work and Social Identity: Teaching, Banking and Railway Work


4 Working at the Chalk-face: Articulating the ‘Teacherly-Self’ and Educational Change

In this chapter, we focus on a group of male and female teachers, working at both primary and secondary, and ranging through generations but with a principal focus on teachers following 1945. The new Labour government, following their successful election victory, made education universal, transforming teachers’ working lives. Following the change to comprehensive schooling following the 1960s and early 1970s, the majority of established teachers experienced significant structural changes imposed on their profession, particularly from the 1980s with the implementation of the national curriculum, and associated introduction of testing, inspections and league tables stamped by the Thatcher policies and continued more recently by the New Labour government in power in Britain from 1997. In our initial study of 40 teachers we recognised that teacher identity – much like identity per se, as we have already discussed – is never ‘pure’, one that does not take on an acceptance of other markers of identity formation articulated through language and experience that underlines concepts of ‘age’, ‘class’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and most pertinent for our discussions, ‘the place of work’. In this chapter we examine the following dominant themes in relation to teacher identity: notions of commitment in new post-war conditions in education and the formation and expression of resistance and recognition in the field of education, both important constituents of the work identity of teachers. ***** Earlier sociological investigations of teacher identity employed similar methodologies. One of the most substantial pieces of research around this subject is MacLure’s work on teacher identity, published in 1993, 101


which was based on a project conducted with serving teachers that ran from 1987 to 1990. Central to that project, in terms of methodology, was a set of semi-structured interviews – 69 in all – with teachers in both the primary and secondary sector. These interviews took place in outer London, East Anglia and the north of England, and sampled teachers from both rural and inner-city schools. MacLure’s project assessed the impact of policy changes on the working lives of teachers, and she cited media stories highlighting the detrimental effects of change in work experience in such terms as ‘teacher burn-out’, ‘innovation overload’ and ‘de-professionalisation’ (1993: 313). Her study addressed these developments through a series of interviews with teachers – what we call in this book ‘work-life histories’. In her research, MacLure argued that identity should be regarded as ‘a continuing site of struggle … [and] should not be seen as a stable entity – something that people have – but as something that they use, to justify, explain and make sense of themselves in relation to other people, and to the contexts in which they operate. In other words, identity is a form of argument’ (1993: 317). Therefore claiming identity, she contends, is ‘also inescapably moral: identity claims are inevitably bound up with justifications of conduct and belief’ (1993: 318). Rejecting ‘the idea of an essential or “substantial” self …’ MacLure prefers ‘the notion of identity as a set of discursive practices’ (1993: 318). Thus, there is a denial of a ‘core’ identity, what we might call here a ‘teacherly-self’, that can be ‘common to … all or most of the project teachers’, and instead her research ‘looked at how identity was claimed, talked about and otherwise used by the teachers for particular discursive purposes … exploring the categories which people chose in order to explain themselves, and how these categories were used in the construction of identities’ (1993: 317). So while MacLure points to the significance of context, these contexts ‘were not predictive in any simple way of individual teachers’ attitudes, expectations or practice’ (1993: 318). To some extent, this process undermines the view of a stable teacher identity, one in which the private self and public persona are indistinguishable (see Woods and Jeffrey, 2002), a view accentuated by perceptions of the teacher as committed public servant with a clearly defined career trajectory and place within the wider community, shaping what we might call a relatively homogenous ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) marked by affinities and affiliations with each other and with a wider public based on a relationship of trust. MacLure suggested here a far more explicitly poststructuralist view of identity than the one implied by our work in this book, seeing instead identity as shifting, fluid and dis-

Working at the Chalk-face 103

cursively produced, the product of altering discourses around what it is to be a teacher.1 Woods and Jeffrey’s (2002) later research both confirms and contradicts this position. They identify two significant contexts for their findings. First, like MacLure, they flag up the importance of organisational, institutional and structural changes within the workplace from around the 1980s especially. Secondly, and at a more macro level, they consider this as inevitably bound up, too, with the deep and profound changes perceived to have occurred in the western world from around the 1980s and which have impacted on the fabric of everyday life in a range of ways. Here, they gesture towards Giddens’s (1991) arguments discussed in Chapter 3. Giddens points to a global shift in the condition of western societies whereby social relations become disembedded from local contexts – through an increasingly singular and dominating globalisation – leading to ‘their rearticulation across infinite tracks of time-space’ (Giddens in Woods and Jeffrey, 2002: 88). This leads to ‘ontological insecurity’, and, we would add what we call epistemological doubt. In other words, there emerges a disorientation with regard to everyday understanding of the life-world and our place within it, compounded by a sense that such changes cannot be significantly influenced or controlled by workers and citizens, and this structure of feeling is encapsulated in Ulrich Beck’s notion of the ‘risk society’. We have already discussed the influence of this perspective in the book’s Introduction as well as in other subsequent chapters. Moreover, following MacLure’s analysis, Woods and Jeffrey regard the profound structural changes in education as key to understanding the altering self-perception detected in the teachers they speak to in the mid-1990s. The effects of the deep structural changes described above result in a new stress on ‘economic rationalism, an emphasis on marketability, on efficiency … the growth in management systems and audit accountability and an attack on moral systems, such as childcentredness’ (2002: 90), which revise education’s priorities and purpose and thereby affect teachers’ self-identity and positioning in the field. Consequently, teachers – often in mid-career – have had to re-think once stable identities, and re-orientate themselves around the new needs and demands of an increasingly bureaucratised and commodified education sector. Woods and Jeffrey largely concur with other commentators (Nias, 1989) that teachers once enjoyed a stable sense of self, one in which, as suggested above, their personal and public identity coincided, and which in Salaman’s (1974) definition describes a holistic occupational


identity. Forming the core of this – and here Woods and Jeffrey are talking chiefly about primary teachers, though such observations are equally pertinent with regard to secondary education – produced a practice of teaching which was overridingly child-centred and holistic, dependent upon a great expense of ‘emotional labour’ with the notion of ‘trust at its centre’: trust as a key feature of work relationships with fellow teachers, with pupils and with parents (2002: 93). This represented a ‘humanistic’ approach to teaching, definable by key qualities and concerns: vocationalism, commitment, recognition and respect. These are then, vocational structures around work practice and not only emotional categories felt and experienced. Thus the notion of structure of feeling frames an important moral and ethical dimension to which we will return. The impact of new policy making over the past 25 years or so meant a radical reassessment of what the teacher meant – a cut into notions of what we call the ‘teacherly-self’. The marketisation of learning, the introduction of the National Curriculum, and the use of inspection and league tables began to erode the principle of child-centredness in the name of accountability and results (Woods and Jeffrey, 2002: 92). Teachers came to view this outcome as a growing disregard and disrespect for professional judgement leading to a loss of trust. Thus an established ethos of teaching is undermined – new policy initiatives from central government expose the teacher and chip away an evolving identity, and this is marked by a new emphasis on how they are valued and this stress falls on ‘competencies, such as subject expertise, coordination, collaboration, management and supervision’ (Woods and Jeffrey, 2002: 95). We have already touched on this. Therefore, the structure of feeling – what Raymond Williams would call evidence of a ‘practical consciousness’ – which constituted the ‘teacherly-self’ is forced into conflict with new ‘official’ forms, or consciousness, which profoundly contradict established ways of ‘going on’. What in fact seems to emerge is a widening alienation of the worker from the ‘product’ – in this instance, the pupils. This leads to a project of reassessment, retrenchment, or outright rejection or abandonment by teachers, as they engage with the newly prescribed role, classed by Woods and Jeffrey, as an ‘assigned identity’ (2002: 96). The insistent emphasis on results, on quantitative measurement of teacher ability, leads almost to a sense of persecution, too. Woods and Jeffrey quote one of their interviewee’s responses to this new dispensation: ‘every [news]paper you open tells you you’re not good enough, that we’re responsible for society’s ills’ (2002: 97). There thus emerges a strong sense of loss in many of the com-


ments recorded by Woods and Jeffrey, as teachers strive to adjust and come to terms with change. This feeling of loss, or failure, derived from an erosion of their autonomy in the workplace, triggered doubt about their own abilities, as well as a ‘feeling of de-personalisation in a commodified world’ (2002: 97). For some teachers this loss turns into a sense of failure and an inability to combine the new ‘assigned’ social identity with their core identity or teacherly-self. Critics have documented what they refer to as ‘identity passages’ of teachers under acute stress as they move through the ‘traumatic separation from the old identity and the structures and cultures that sustained it’ (2002: 170). This experience is somewhat akin to that described by Giddens above: a sense of disembeddedness in relation to the life-world, or lived experience. Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling is informative here. We employ Williams’s theoretical frame in a number of areas throughout the book. Raymond Williams’s formulation of ‘structure of feeling’ offers a framework to explore the shifts in teacher identities. In our exploration of the work-life histories of teachers who have lived and worked through the profound socio-economic, political and cultural changes of the late twentieth century we suggest here that Williams’s concept is particularly apposite. Here, a stress on feeling is significant in thinking about the concept of ‘emotional labour’ distinguishing the ‘teacherly-self’, thus the concept of structure of feeling emphasises the affective elements constitutive of understanding and in comprehending teaching as work. Moreover, structures of feeling are complex and variable; as we have already shown, Williams defined this variability within a framework he terms dominant, emergent and residual, and we will use this formulation here as a way of analysing generational responses that disclose significant changes but also important continuities. We have found these exact co-ordinations in the previous chapter.2 As we have underlined before, structure of feeling constitutes a mediating term to define the continuing interaction between the individual and the social, articulating social change and working lives. Whereas Woods and Carlyle (2002) explained the ‘self-renewal’ of individual teachers in response to the stress of imposed structural and cultural change whereby ‘a new personal identity is constructed, mostly through relocating and modifying the teacher role’ we would argue that the teachers we spoke with demonstrated considerable resilience in maintaining their personal identities as teachers (or their teacherly-selves). This resilience derives from the continuity of a residual, historical structure of feeling that determines the notion of a teacherly-self as embodying the characteristics of caring, vocation and child-centredness. These personal


characteristics became enshrined in educational policy with the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967, famous for the opening sentence of Chapter 2, ‘At the heart of the educational process lies the child’. The Plowden Report, in relation to primary schooling, can be seen as part of a post-war consensus, developed by both educational practitioners and academics, on the most effective way to educate young children. This consensus began to be eroded by political intervention during the 1970s (Rhodes Boyson’s series of Black Papers) cumulating in the 1992 Report, Curriculum Organisation and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools, which dismantled most of the earlier framework for teaching set out in the Plowden Report. However, it is evident from our oral testimonies that the earlier structure of feeling continued to form the identities of many teachers despite the often traumatic changes in the language, culture, and organisation that determined the way in which teachers were now instructed to go about their work, at both primary and secondary level. In the following testimonies we explore the significance of work in the public realm and we consider the formation of the ‘teacherly self’.

Post-1945: Teachers, citizenship, the state and narrating the ‘teacherly self’ The following testimony was given by retired primary school teacher Susan, the only child of working-class parents who were intent upon securing the best opportunities that they could for her, they were proud of her achievement in becoming a teacher. At the end of her interview, however, she recalled alternative early ambitions. She hankered after being a librarian but assumed her parents could not afford the four-year university course that this required. Working out the possibilities, she considered ‘for a girl it was often teaching or bank work and I didn’t want to go into a bank’. Susan taught in the rural mining communities that she had known all her life, stated that she had been on strike once and attended a conference as a delegate’s wife. Her teacher identity was contingent, detailed as a matter of class and gender. ‘I made the decision that I would stay as a classroom teacher because I wanted to be able to encourage my own children, have time for my own children and my husband.’ Her social action she linked discursively to involvement in out-of-school activities like school trips. Susan met her husband, Ray, at a social event organised by the NUT. His mother and uncle were both teachers and his sister also went into teaching. Unlike Susan, Ray was a career teacher and went on to a


primary school headship. For him, the notion of a community school was a central aspect of the context within which teachers work though he did not think it mattered whether they opted to live ‘in or out’ of the neighbourhood. In his account, the links with ‘community’ were through events such as school sports. Saturday mornings were devoted to ‘football teams and whatnot’, weekday evenings to school cricket. He was at pains to emphasise that he saw this as ‘the only way of doing the job’. We see here a ‘residual’ teacher identity, with the virtues of care, dedication and self-investment, which he believed in. Ray went on: IV: But you must have been approachable? Ray: Oh, I’m sure I was, yes. IV: Which … which says something about your kind of manner of being a teacher, or being a professional? Ray: I’m sure it was, yes. IV: And is that something you consciously cultivated? Ray: No. Never did. IV: In the sense that you thought that was the best way of doing the job? Ray: Well, I didn’t think it was the best way. To me, it was the only way of doing the job. IV: Do you want to just explain that? Ray: Well, if, if you’re a teacher, you’re responsible for these children. You, you’ve got to educate the children, but at the same time you’ve got to bear in mind that the parents have a, a role in this and if, if you can talk to parents as if they’re human beings on your level, then you get on far better and, and your results are far better with the children. You’ve got to be Mr Good Guy, but you’re not Mr Good Guy consciously. IV: You mean you’re not doing it as a kind of …? Ray: Of strategy? No, you’re not. It’s just who you are. What appears essential here – and in much of the conversation – is the observation that being a teacher is ‘just who you are’. It constitutes a firm affirmation of identity, marking the ‘teacherly self’. He went on to insist that the role of teacher involved developing a rapport with parents as well as children. He explained: ‘you’ve got to educate the children, but at the same time you’ve got to bear in mind that the parents have a role in this and if you can talk to parents as if they’re human beings on your level, then you get on far better and your results are far better with the children’. He thought the policy changes


of the late-1980s had de-professionalised teachers, making them ‘slaves to the system’ in contrast to the autonomous professionals of his generation, taking control of their own work. The metaphor Ray uses powerfully reflects a sense of disempowerment felt among many teachers. This structure of feeling emerged through the testimony of another retired teacher, Paula. Although experiencing a long career in education, her work-life history was overwhelmingly composed of recollections centred on her final years. Paula is a retired teacher in her late 60s. She entered the teaching profession in 1963, as a maths teacher in a comprehensive school, one of the first to come on stream. She recalls that ‘it was a new school and, um, lots of new people coming in, people who wanted to teach in comprehensive schools mainly …’ Describing the experience as ‘a nice introduction to teaching’, she stayed at that school until her children were born and she took an eight year break from the profession, keen to return because, she told us almost apologetically, ‘I have never done anything else other than teach’. Her return to teaching found her accepting a position in a pupil referral unit, teaching children excluded, or long-term absent, from school for a range of reasons – the term used at the time, she remembers with disdain, was ‘schoolphobics … the education officers would be picking them up or if it was middle-class parents they would be knocking on the education officer’s door’. This was to begin a period of considerable achievement in her working life alongside a demoralising struggle, finally leading to her early retirement from teaching. What Woods and Jeffrey describe as ‘assigned identities’ are ideological impositions, the result of social relations within particular contexts of work. In the context here of radical restructuring, these teachers are asked to take up roles/identities contrary to the ones defining them for the bulk of their careers. As we will see a range of responses emerged. But we also felt that a sense of commitment in this context expresses a propensity toward resistance to the instrumentalising of the profession, a struggle often encountered among our respondents. Notions of struggle mark work-life histories significantly. Paula is no exception. Building a referral unit at the school became central to her work; she insisted that ‘we were very, very successful and what we needed was more room …’ and despite the success, and the clear need, funding issues meant that ‘we begged and borrowed everything’. The metaphors here reflect the tenacity needed to secure even relatively basic equipment. The notion of ‘begging and borrowing’ perhaps more powerfully suggests the marginalised nature of the undertaking, but also the commitment of those


involved, a commitment that embodies notions of emotional labour hard at work here, and something we discussed in an earlier chapter. Embodiment comes through also in a different sense in the following comment. Reflecting on working with ‘difficult’ children Paula was constantly asking herself: Paula: What am I going to do now? How far can I go? How much can I push this child and, you know, what’s happening at home? Although the kids … We were … It was very close. We were all very close to these children. IV: So you must have felt very committed to the children. Paula: Completely. Her ‘closeness’ to the children reflects an emotional tie that binds them both figuratively and literally. This emotional tie manifests itself in caring for the young people in her unit and creating a classroom environment where children could feel ‘totally secure, safe, understood and relaxed’. In doing this Paula reiterates the main points that made up the ideology of education implicit in the comprehensive system where she started her working life in the 1960s and the child-centred ideology of the Plowden Committee, demonstrating a seamless continuity between ideology and practical consciousness. Concerned for the child’s well-being both in the educational context and at home, she is constantly assessing how progress can be maintained, and this is coded in metaphors of momentum: how ‘far’ can she go, how much can she ‘push’ the child side. But her actions are always shaped by encounters with external bureaucracy – the anonymous ‘Them’ Paula often referred to, in opposition to the ‘We’ of herself and her fellow teachers in the unit – and thus the work-life history is composed dialogically reflecting the nature of manifest social relations. Yet her working life becomes increasingly more stressful as cuts in the education budget force her to take on two very different cohorts of children: those too frightened to go to school and those excluded for disruptive behaviour. IV:

You kept working through what sounds like quite difficult conditions. Paula: Very. Very. I mean, because I knew … Because it went right back to my own experience at school, although I had a happy home background. I was just, you know, a little mouse, really, in a big school. But it … I just knew what it felt like. Or, no, I


didn’t know what it felt like but I, I had a sense of what it must have felt like, um, but those, the kids that I dealt with had the most horrible things happen to them. So I had really no idea but, you know, I was … I, I’d had a sense of what was going on and … But with, with this colleague’s support, she gave us ammunition as well to fight our corner to say, no, we cannot have these two very, very different groups of very needy students together but that battle we lost because the money was coming with the excluded students and there was a lot of publicity and there was a lot of pressure from everyone to get these kids. We didn’t have enough room, there wasn’t enough sports. You know, it just was awful. So in the end what we did was, or what I said was, okay, they’re not all coming together, I’m going to have part-time education for all of them. One lot would come in the morning, one lot come in the afternoon … Empathy, clearly, is the dominant form of commitment expressed in the opening remarks. But further on metaphors of conflict underline the experience of struggle. Paula spoke of needing ‘ammunition … to fight our corner’, even though, in the end, the ‘battle’ was lost, and then a deep sense of frustration, and failure begins to emerge. Arguably a sense of failure is felt more strongly, the more deeply emotional labour is involved in workplace interactions. After Paula left, the pain remained. Asked if she ever went back, she replied: Paula: I haven’t, can’t bear to go back – but the whole of that area now is, is a London Transport garage. So they extended … I don’t know if you know. And the, the garage is on the corner and next to it, before the shops, was a building that was the child guidance centre and the careers office at different times. And that was our building and they knocked it down. So we had … So, what does that say about …? She still feels a sense of ownership – ‘that was our building’ – though the breaks and hesitations of her response indicate the necessary emotional nature of her feelings.3 The themes of commitment can define work identities and the development of the ‘teacherly self’, we have been suggesting. We see this in another example. Judy was in her 50s, still working, and head teacher at a primary school in the north of England. Her father was a relatively


prosperous businessperson who she described as ‘a little to the right of Attila the Hun’ and her mother was a ‘homemaker … True blue Conservatives’, so that to her parents ‘Margaret Thatcher was God’. Privately educated from the age of four to 18, Judy’s journey toward teaching began when she received a particularly bad school report at the age of 13. ‘I wasn’t entirely impressed with the teachers that I’d had at school, up to that point and remember quite clearly, thinking, well I know that I’m going to do it better than that.’ Judy joined the NUT as a student teacher and said the politics was the most exciting aspect of her time at training college. ‘Not politics with a capital p, politics with a small p, just talking about and being involved with people with so wide views of the world.’ A union activist and conference delegate for 22 years, her sons would joke that ‘they were making their own tea when they were four’. Whereas Roy joined the head-teacher association, Judy had not since she ‘wanted to stay with the grassroots’. Politics was something she chose not to discuss with her parents since it caused distress but she believed ‘unions are there to defend the rights and conditions of service of members’. She resigned from the Labour Party because she disapproved of their education policies in government but her allegiances had always been ‘union first and Labour politics second’. Leaving the Party had upset her and she could never imagine not voting because ‘women fought long and hard for the vote therefore we should use it’. From the vantage point of the present, Judy’s activism was an important part of the story she told. Allied to her professional identity, it was there in work that she undertook as a primary head, representing a group on a number of local education bodies outside school hours. She also described her participation in amateur dramatics. Judy: I’m not a churchgoer and in fact I think, again, life experiences. I’m not a believer, I was brought up to be the, I would now call myself, I can never remember which way around it is, whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic, I’m not sure. I think there probably is something out there, so that makes me an atheist doesn’t it [overtalking], yeah. Maybe I just want to be an atheist because I like the sound of the word better, so I’m never … Yeah, it does sound better than agnostic, now, anyway. I’m not a member of the church but I do and have over the years been member of the community groups and as a younger teacher went to Drama. You know, sort of amateur dramatic stuff. There’s a limit of how much time you have


really [overtalking]. I do get myself involved at, I’m very good at not, I think I’m not going to volunteer but then nobody else does so I do. IV: Why, why do you think you do that? Judy: Because I can’t bear the thought of not having, of not me personally, this is a little bit sad really, I think. A lot of it I do through the people and that’s down to my mum probably. My mum is, that’s the experience I’ve got from my mother, that she’s a great promoter of people and representing people; which is why she’s ended up doing what she does and getting what she’s got, I think; through voluntary services. That was because my dad wouldn’t let her work so she went through voluntary service but she’s, you know, did a tremendous amount. She taught me that if you can’t put up [unclear], so you don’t have a right to be a member of a community unless you’re willing to be involved in that community and you, so I guess, yeah, she’s probably responsible for me joining the Labour Party at some point [laugh]. She’d be horrified. Her testimony preserves a deep sense of indebtedness to her mother, a committed volunteer, whose social practice afforded her a particular structure of feeling crucial to the making of her political journey and leading towards civic engagement, but formed primarily through work. As for the teacher unions, the professionalising project with regard to the degree of control exercised over work, remained an expectation. Summing up, Judy defined herself as a career teacher. She ruminated on the redefinition of teacher professionalism that had occurred during her working life, evidenced by the post-Education Reform Act (in 1988), of collective bargaining and proliferation of new routes into teaching, all of which added to the differentiation of the workforce. This has been reflected powerfully in the previous testimony. In Judy’s view, this represented a retrograde step. Despite this, she remained adamant regarding the necessary public view of teachers and schools as central to the community: Judy: Well, you know some can interfere, you know, you can have community involvement or you can have community interference and community isn’t just parents … and we are important because they’re nurturing the future of our community. Every school is essential to its community, whether or not the community knows you’re this because you are nurturing the heart of that community, the children.


IV:

That relationship building that you just mentioned, is that what the meaning of teaching is then? Judy: Yes, building quality relationships and enabling other people to learn about themselves in order to be able to build relationships with others, yeah. I would probably say it is. It’s not some philosophical … Teaching the young of the world. It’s about knowing yourself and being able to communicate clearly with others.

‘Occupational action’: The question of ‘roots’ in postmodern times Other project teachers we interviewed, those who became teachers in the 1980s and beyond, accepted new governmental guidelines and new national objectives and curriculum more readily. However, in defining their own occupational identities many sought to re-appropriate the discourse of what Ivor Goodson calls practical and reflexive professionalism. By which he means a body of knowledge ‘concerned with the intricate definition and character of occupational action, in this case the practice and profession of teaching’ (Goodson, 2003: 126). A major plank of the rhetoric builds on the standards agenda pushed for by central governments, but in reworking a commitment to active care for students some related it to a belief in social practice and moral purpose. In this sense, it connects with broader social agendas of equity and emancipation. This was particularly evident in the narratives of those working in ethnically diverse inner-city schools. In respect of public sector professionals, it is important to note the past/present relation evident in their over-representation within the ranks of what are termed new social movements. Activism is not confined to a narrowly political domain and some of our respondents clearly sought out teaching because it allowed them to pursue their values and projects by means other than protest. The idea of teaching to change was present in the cross-generational narratives. Some took up the language of Christian rescue to express their belonging and commitment to elements of their work. For example, Amy, a young English teacher in an inner-city secondary school in the north-west spoke of her charismatic evangelical church as constitutive of her current identity and practice as a teacher. In her words, ‘it is a massive part of who I am as a teacher and I try to, like I do try to pray about the school and pray for the kids that I meet and I try to kind of show them the good side of being a Christian, you know’. Teaching is a vocation, rather than a job – although, so far, with our older respondents,


our testimonies have reflected a deeper commitment and responsibility that this terse description implies. Nevertheless it was clear that Amy loved her work, because it also satisfied her need to feel that ‘you can make a difference’. To put it another way, she continued: Amy: There are quite a few kids in this school who come into my classroom and they have an absolutely awful time at home and probably in quite a few of their lessons, but I just think for that hour that they’re in this classroom I want them to have a really good time. I want them to feel like they’ve learnt something, feel like they’re proud of themselves and feel like I’m proud of them and yeah, that could really make a difference. I do love my subject and, you know, I love the texts that I teach and stuff like that, and I like, I love it when kids get enthusiastic about a text. Curriculum development and professionalism is the driving force in this situation, albeit powerfully informed by deeper roots in her religious faith. Her belief propelled her toward teaching and extra-mural welfare work with the homeless and destitute. A further example addresses the work-life histories of a teaching couple working in another urban secondary school in the north-west of England. Alison defined her social background to us as middle class. Her father was a mechanical engineer and she grew up in what she defined as an affluent suburb, attended local Roman Catholic schools with university and teacher training thereafter. She met her future husband at university, at the Christian Union. Her first teaching post was in an inner-city area characterised by various levels of social deprivation, including a strong gang culture. As Art teacher, she took pride in the fact that her second cohort of GCSE students was the highest achieving the school had ever seen. She also got increasingly involved in extra-curricular activities, putting on school productions in the face of negativity from many colleagues, coaxing the children with sweets and biscuits to stay after school. Alison went on to work in a single-sex (boys) school before rejoining her previous head teacher in her current school, of which she was now Deputy Head. Looking back, Alison recalled that her family always saw her as a ‘mother-earth type character’ and her testimony pointed up religious influences underpinning the decision to teach. ‘I mean I am quite a spiritual person and I think that this is what I was always meant to do … providing some stability for these children and the community.’ Her


definition of a good teacher was ‘someone that cares’ and she found a mentor in a previous colleague who had been appointed head teacher of her present school before she rejoined him as a member of staff. It is telling that she describes him as ‘like some angel’, wanting to ‘make a difference for children in this area’. Alison: I think, maybe, I’m the kind of person who needs to be needed and if you were in that type of environment you wouldn’t be needed, you’d just be a commodity. You know, just the same as a computer or television or [laughs] something else that was just there to perform in front of them. Where in an inner-city school you are definitely needed. You are needed for everything [laughs]. My shoe has fallen apart, can you put some super glue on it, can you fix my coat, the hoods falling off, being a textile teacher that comes all the time. And then you’ve got, you know, the level of things like I’m pregnant or I’m being abused at home and all those sort of disclosures that … you know, are really important to some children, it’s important that we’re here and that we’re approachable and that we’re stable in their lives. These children don’t have any stability in their lives. They’ve got no real role models and it’s important … for me, looking at it on what makes me tick, I need to be needed. That’s the kind of person that I am. And that’s how I get up every morning, the fact that I’m needed by my family and the children in this school. That’s why it never occurs to me not to come to school. And that’s not because I particularly enjoy every day, because some days are horrible. But you don’t enjoy every day at home when you’re cooking and doing the ironing and things like that, but it doesn’t occur to me not to do it. It’s the same thing really. IV: So there’s a real level of commitment? Alison: Yeah. In her blueprint for education she sought to promote a vision of learning that was community-based, lifelong, and directed toward social equality. As she put it, ‘I’d like to see school, what we call a full service extended school with doctors’ surgeries and health clinics, dentists, child care, even a shop on site.’ Her husband, Tony, was a mature entrant to teaching. He did not come from a traditional working-class background but he, too, felt propelled


to work in urban schools in working-class areas. In common with Alison, this came down to a sense of duty, a notion of commitment. More than that, he talked about the special quality of teacher-pupil relations in a school where many of the children were from single parent households and he played the role of a father figure in their lives. When we ask him what he feels is the general public’s perception of teachers, he tells us: Tony: It’s way off. Both ways. I get really, really annoyed when people think we come strolling in at nine o’clock and, you know, are off at three o’clock, having spent most of the afternoon lolling around the staff-room reading The Guardian, drinking coffee. And at other times people’s perceptions … I mean, generally people’s perceptions of teaching, if it’s not that, then they think that you’re up till one o’clock in the morning marking and preparing lessons. And it’s not that either. I’m not saying that we don’t spend … you know, and there are times when you are rushing around. But they have the idea that you’re either doing that or you’re just flat out all the time, which it’s not. Tony evokes the standard stereotype of the secondary, state school teacher – that they work short hours (accompanied by long and generous holidays), and lean inevitably to the political left: liberals at best, dangerous radicals at worst. He wants to complicate, indeed reject, this image, though. Then he takes this a step further, shifting from perceptions of teachers to people’s general stigmatisation of children who attend ‘rough schools’, in inner-city locations. The historical residues and ideological constructs which attach to such places, producing cultural and social assumptions that invariably work to define those dwelling within particular social spaces, constitute a process of ‘Othering’. Diane Reay (2004, 2007), encodes the ideological effects of such discursive structures as a feeling of dwelling, or existing, within ‘negative emplacements’. She adds that ‘spaces and places are not simply sets of material social relations; they constitute cultural objects and as such are invested with powerful associations and emotive resonances’. Perceptions of place are never ideologically neutral, but marked by historical, cultural and social coordinates that shape and reshape understandings or notions of community, and of others, and these in turn powerfully interact with everyday, lived experience. Tony picks this up later: Tony: And also the perceptions of what they think the kids are like, especially in an inner-city school … And that I could really


scream at. They [other people] have no idea. I mean, I play rugby and I go to the rugby club and people say stuff like, you know, oh, how do you do it. I don’t know how you do it. And they’ve got this like admiration for something that actually … I mean, you’ve probably seen … Yes, there are some that are very challenging because they come from challenging backgrounds, but the massive, massive overall majority are so lovely. And it’s such a pleasure to teach them and to be with these young people. And they have this idea that I’m walking in dodging bullets and being attacked on a daily basis, and it’s nothing of the sort, you know. I’ve been away on two of the school trips when they’ve been short of adults to go, and I went away with the kids there, you know, and they were real inner-city kids, but still lovely, still very, very humblingly generous about things … One thing that stuck out for me was … the kids were on, we’d be on a coach, and they’d have like a pack of sweets. I think they were very poor kids. They wouldn’t expect to see more than one or two, but they’d share out amongst … And also, they shared out amongst the year groups. It wasn’t like everybody’s in their form … At my school, everybody … you never spoke to anybody a year above you or a year below. Here the people around them, they just shared … they wouldn’t expect to see more than one or two sweets themselves out of it. They expected to share. My school was really well off, and you might expect … and including me. I’m not saying I’m any better! You might just about give the person next to you a sweet … Or you might even just sort of half-heartedly … Want one? No! Okay, fine. You know! I mean, people at my school could peel oranges in their pockets! And yet they were very, you know, a lot of people were extremely wealthy who went to that school. And yet the generosity of these kids was really humbling. The hyperbolic use of the metaphor ‘dodging bullets’ works to underline the gulf between the perceptions of those outside and the experiences of Tony from within: encounters that are largely positive. Interestingly, one way he chooses to articulate this is in terms of the generosity of the children, despite their own material, economic lack – ‘I think they were very poor kids’, he informs us – and contrasts this with his memories of his own schooling at a more affluent institution, saying ‘people at my school could peel oranges in their pockets! And yet they were very,


you know, a lot of people were extremely wealthy who went to that school.’ Opting to work in a poor area, then, is an act of engagement for this teaching couple, and this implies – as the reference to ‘evangelical’ suggests – a notion of vocation as ‘mission’. We have come across such sentiments, or structures of feeling, in earlier discussions, and have related it to notions of commitment, which are embedded in teachers’ actual working practice – this refers to ideas of emotional labour, for example, as we considered in Chapter 3 and earlier in this chapter, too, with Paula.

Making connections and making a difference over time Ways of thinking assume a habitual form that resonates with Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ across time as it is lived by different teaching generations. We suggest here that testimonies from contemporary teachers indicate a form of civic idealism, too, found in a complex radical habitus, or conceivably a newly emergent structures of feeling, bound up with certain basic concepts such as recognition and respect, underpinning a notion of the educator as potential change agent. In this case, a notion of a radical tradition in state education addressed to a range of problems. This becomes evident in utterances that force us to think about the interplay between, say, habitus and examples of reflexivity – or the way the concept of structure of feeling embodies both modes: the notions of reflexivity and habitus. John, now in his 60s, knew he was going to become a teacher from a very early age and has reflected on the conditions that influenced his decision: a set of constraints arising from his background as a workingclass boy growing up in a working-class area. IV:

Were there any family expectations that you would become a teacher? John: No, I always knew I was going to be a teacher from a very young age and later in life, you know, when I was thinking back to that, I think it might be because it was one of the few professions that I actually had contact with, you know. I came from a working-class family and a working-class area and the only, if you like, professionals that I saw, as part of my life, were teachers and occasionally doctors. So I didn’t realise that there was a much wider scope than that. But even so I had a push to be a teacher anyway, at that time, it looked


like a very interesting job compared to anything else I could see around. Apart from a ten-year period spent teaching in Africa, John has always taught in urban schools and currently has a post in an inner-city school in one of the most disadvantaged areas of London. However he considered that the introduction of the national curriculum coupled with a regime of inspection had stifled his ability to deliver a liberal education. As he put it: John: From the children’s point of view I think, you know, we had a wider vision before and think that vision has been narrowed down. Before we wanted to get children interested in literature, we wanted to make them into readers, we wanted them to be creative writers, now we want them to do … I don’t know … know that there are 12 different techniques of persuasive writing and these are the 12 techniques and can they spot them when they’re reading, can they use them when they write? And there is a difference. He went on to say: Yeah, that idea there of outcomes, we used to think of children as being people that we wanted to help grow into be adults and as part of that there’d be, you might not agree with the term, but things like character building and social responsibility and things like this and now, I think, we are talking more in terms of their skills for the marketplace, you know. I don’t know, ITC skills, they have communication skills, they have a whole list of different skills which suggests to me that we’re no … we’re not really so interested in that … in them as a whole person, we are just interested in the skills that they are going to take to the workplace. So John is no longer a classroom teacher, instead he co-ordinates the teaching of English as an additional language so that he can be ‘the man who helps the kids from abroad’. He works alongside new arrival children in other people’s classes and spends much of his time helping them after the end of the school day. In this way he is maintaining his connection to his core belief in the values of an educational ethos that assumed and promoted the development of the child into an active and responsible citizen.


But this ‘structure of feeling’ is not in any strict way residual, or confined to a generation of teachers nearing retirement – it was also found in the words, actions and practice of a young male primary teacher in his mid-20s. During a long interview, Max, in a similar way to John’s comments above on ‘skills for the marketplace’, revealed how he had quickly become disillusioned with the ideology of the market, with input replaced by output as the key evaluative rule of education. Max: It just seems to me … from what I’ve been hearing from other teachers as well, it’s becoming a lot more target based, assessments, targets, a lot more focused on, you know, and a lot more pressure on the teachers as well for your kids to make this, this amount of progress. All this sort of assessment, all these computer programmes, we’ve had training on them, you know, it’s … just seems that … it’s the pressures, the shift, the focus is not onto the children’s learning, but it’s more coming on the children’s achievement and whether they make the … those points of progress throughout, you know, each year and stuff like that. And if they don’t, why not? And, you know, is that, you know, and then the focus goes back on the teacher; well what is the teacher doing wrong. It’s becoming a lot more, I don’t know, it’s not … it feels more like a business. It feels more like it’s some sort of company and you’re reaching your quota and you’re reaching your target rather than a school. Contrary to the dominant performance indicators in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, he believed teaching to be an intuitive act and placed great emphasis on the school as an organic entity. Inseparable from his twentieth century past, reflecting on his own experience of primary education enabled him to compare the current system with a time when the schooling pedagogic process placed more emphasis on the child. Max: And I always remember from school, primary school really quite fondly. IV: Your own primary school. Max: My own primary school, I mean, there was issues there, I was … I got bullied at, at one point, but most … for the majority of it I remember it fondly. I mean, we did all these topics and I learnt … I found learning fun and there’s a lot more play involved, a lot more sort of like finding things out and I just


really enjoyed it. And now, I mean, you come in and you’ve got … you’ve got to fit that in, you’ve got to fit that in, and you’ve got to squeeze a RE lesson in somewhere, and, you know, if … if … it’s just, just getting everything taught that’s meant to be taught is a … is a huge effort … Here, even though not all of Max’s experiences as a young school boy were positive he is able to reflect on the experience of his education in relation to his own practice as a teacher. Politicised reflexivity, a feature that Bourdieu under-valued, is an extension of his teaching practice – it encodes, conversely, the concept of structure of feeling. All of which makes it possible to speak of a radical habitus too, however, and demonstrate its complexity. In the following passage Max encapsulates this complex process as he arrives at his personal, core reasons for being a teacher and his present position in opposition to current pedagogic hegemony. … When I was at school I felt the standards were a lot higher than they … than they are now. And that was a lot of topic-based work and, you know, there wasn’t a curriculum and, you know, you just, you taught … I got taught, you know, to read, write, do all these sums. I learnt about the world and then about, you know, all these different things, I got a wealth of knowledge at primary school and it was fun doing; it was fun getting there. And now it’s a whole lot for them to learn and take in and it’s not so much fun any-more. And I’m … I, I mean recently I’ve come to be a bit sort of demoralised by the whole thing, it’s a sort of like I’m teaching these poor kids and [sigh] it … I mean, it’s, it’s hard work. And the thing that gets me through to the end of the day most of the time is just being there, teaching my class and knowing that I’m making an impact on their lives. So maybe some of them their homes lives isn’t so great, but then come to school they’ve got a safe learning environment; sometimes they get to have fun; when I’m … when I’m allowed to let them have it. [laughs] And, yeah, that, you know, that gets me through, the actual teaching and the actual, the impact it’s having on the children, that’s why I do it. That’s why, you know, that’s why I’m a teacher and all this other stuff that comes with it is, is just too much. I mean, I do understand the need for assessment and need for there to be standards and targets to be met but it seems like to me that it’s becoming a bit too much now. In the inner-city area in which Max worked, where for some children their home lives were not supportive of education, he was clear that


his role as a teacher was to create a positive impact on children’s lives through creating a safe environment for learning. As part of this commitment to the children in this poor neighbourhood, he also taught at a Saturday school funded by the educational charity Support and Help in Education (SHINE). SHINE was set up in 1999 in order to assist underachieving pupils in disadvantaged metropolitan areas by extending the school week through running small classes for pupils focusing on enriching the curriculum and raising the expectations of these children. Max’s participation in this scheme, in the context of his self-description as a teacher highly critical of the effect of the present school regime on children’s experience of education, demonstrates the radical habitus in action, something we refer to in our discussion with younger railway workers. This action describes a resistance to the rhetoric of ‘blame’ attached to teachers and an unquestioning allegiance to private philanthropy while at the same time acknowledging the importance of his trade union as a necessary defender of his employment rights.

Conclusion One argument of this chapter is that both past and present teachers talked about ‘making a difference’. Historically, the caring and nurturing that characterise acts of teaching mean that they were and are involved in a variety of committed projects and essentially the sense of civic idealism was part of this context. ‘Postmodern’ teachers might express themselves in terms of a kind of entrepreneurial culture and may no longer share the vocabulary and presuppositions of moral citizenship with regard to the ‘teacherly self’; but the aims of education, which many of our teachers brought forward, sought to unify moral and material means and ends. These teachers saw their roles as educating for a working life, educating for an ‘inner’ life and educating for a communal life as a citizen. The work of teaching determined a number of actions and response. To make sense of this we refer to the notion of teacher resilience, whereby a set of values – understood, as we have argued before, as a structure of feeling – is something that endures across generations and this can partly be explained by the importance of ‘emotional labour’ in teaching. This relates to one key theme we have referred to throughout and will again: commitment and its relation to working selves and working lives. Thus one new entrant told us: ‘I kind of feel like it’s a vocation [teaching] and it should be a vocation really … I feel very much at home here. It’s like a family, you feel valued.’ This leads to a


valuing the self through work, through commitment, which in turn leads to recognition. Some responses in our testimonies embraced a broad ethical egalitarianism, sometimes critical of the capitalist society in its social and moral effects; but in only a very few cases was it addressed to the collective advance, for instance, of working-class communities, though this will be discussed again in Chapter 8. In our assessment of the testimonies here however, it is possible to suggest that, wittingly or unwittingly, that many in their testimonies still subscribed to the notion of the cultural elevation of the masses.

5 Teller, Seller, Union Activist: Class Formation and Changing Bank Worker Identities

The occupational structures of advanced industrial societies have been shifting rapidly towards service industries and towards non-manual occupations associated with the manufacture, distribution and consumption of ‘knowledge’ over the last 30 years (Brynin and Longhi, 2007). For some, this evolution has been interpreted as representing ‘the end’ of work (Rifkin, 1996) or of work as playing a key moral role in the creation of class and of social action (Sennett, 1998). Global shifts have led to a supposed corrosion of stable employment, the ending of the ‘job for life’ and the creation of flux and general instability. Contemporary working conditions under post-industrialism have thus been seen as helping produce ‘compliant and conforming subjects of the modern state’ (Bauman, 1998), and as failing to be a ‘source of social cohesion or integration’ (Gorz, 1986). The consequences of this transition have become increasingly important in the social sciences as many of the traditional, often male, industries have collapsed, female participation rates have risen and a growing gap has emerged between the generation whose world views were shaped by the experience of full employment and the generation whose views matured under high levels of unemployment and job insecurity. These arguments, depicting an atomised society with few roots in the workplace, have had a considerable impact, underwriting assumptions of a rise of ‘individualism’ and feeding into explanations of the decline of trade unionism and of social action generally. Little systematic empirical work seems to have taken place, however, to ground what we will characterise generally as ‘post-industrial theories’ of identity and social action. This chapter critically discusses the appropriateness of these interpretations in relation to UK bank workers. The function of the banking, insurance and finance sector concerns both the least and the most material of products or services: wealth and money. It 124

Teller, Seller, Union Activist 125

is clearly a contemporary ‘knowledge’ sector of the first order, but it also has a long tradition of being an occupation with a particularly conservative workforce, in both a social and political sense.1 Their co-operation with capital was frequently rewarded culturally and materially through social mobility for significant numbers of manual working-class and lower middle-class children. At the same time the sheer size of the banks and of many of the ‘white collar factories’ in which their staff worked combined with resistance to their dominant autocratic paternalism to generate a high degree of collectivism compared to most other private sector white collar workers. Continuous independent trade union organisation began in 1918 with the establishment of the Bank Officers’ Guild in what was, after the women who had worked in the sector during the First World War vacated their posts, a 95 per cent male white collar and clerical occupation. The banks responded to this assertion of employee voice by founding staff associations and finally, by only recognising the union for negotiating purposes as late as 1967 after it had shown its capacity to mobilise bank workers through a series of token strikes. Even today these ambiguities are reflected in the continued dualism of representation within the sector where despite the mergers of some independent staff associations with BIFU from 19992 others still compete with the now sole remaining independent trade union covering the industry (Blackburn, 1967; Morris, 1986; Jefferys, 2003). These characteristics make the now equally divided occupation between men and women a particularly interesting group with whom to investigate the role work plays in shaping social identity and action. It enables us to confront the issues of whether and how ‘post-industrial’ work and the ‘new’ workplace have affected the shaping of occupational identities and any associated solidarities. To understand fully the role of work in the formation of the individual and collective identities described in the life story narratives recounted and lived by our interviewees appears to us to require insights into four discrete though overlapping influences or processes: the cultural representations of identity; the social interface with other employees and the employer at work; the formative influences of family, gender, generation and social class; and the ways in which individuals participate in social action and civic engagement (Kirk, 2007).3 This chapter begins by sketching some elements of the changing contexts of banking and the work it involves and how they have impacted on the identity formation processes. This helps us understand better the economic, skill set and symbolic limits or boundaries of the industry, and the extent to which these are permeable. Next we examine the ways in


which bank sector social identities are socially constructed through the interplay of external social forces/formations turning around co-ordinates of gender, class and race (and some generational pressures/divides), with ‘internal’ or experiential components derived from work practices. This involves both looking at cultural representations of bank workers, and at how bank workers’ identities are influenced through the social relations operating within the firm. Finally, we show that the development of occupational identities from company-based commitment to a wider bank worker occupational identity is often associated with the presence or absence of trade unions. Despite the acknowledged far-reaching transformations in bank worker working lives, we detect the presence among our recent start interviewees, as well as more strongly among our mid and end career and retired interviewees, of a sense that both individual and collective identities are still being significantly shaped by work.

Transforming bank work Traditionally, banking was a large ‘protected’ economic sector focused on quite specific local labour markets. Banks were built like temples to dominate high streets up and down the country. They were managed exclusively by men who expected total obedience as one of our former Lloyds bank interviewees described it: Lloyds was always looked upon as like a gentleman’s bank, and everything was done … It was almost old-fashioned, and it probably continued to be old-fashioned, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. I’m not criticising it for this, I’m just saying it’s a fact, really. But it was … Your boss was a gentleman, and if … you know, if you agreed something with him, or my … certainly my bosses were anyway, if you agreed something with them, and you did it, and everything was okay. Now, like so many other sectors of the Western industrialised world, they have become targets of the globalisation process and come under pressure to offer enhanced short-term shareholder value and many premises have been sold off to make room for the higher turnover franchises of KFC and McDonalds and assorted bars and hotels. Yet with the rising numbers of home-owners, privatisation of public industries, national and European banking and insurance de-regulation and the globalisation of world trading relations, if banks have deserted some high streets, the huge finance buildings that now tower over the City


of London and Canary Wharf demonstrate that the banking, insurance and finance sector has continued to grow in importance. The sheer scale of this financialisation is difficult to grasp: by 2001 the daily global volume of monetary exchanges was 50 times greater than the daily world trade in goods and services (Grahl and Lysandrou, 2003); in the UK financial services now provide one in five jobs, compared to one in ten 25 years ago.4 Employment in banking, insurance and real estate rose from 726,000 in 1948 to 1.6 million in 1977, a growth of 126 per cent. In the three following decades, growth in finance employment continued at the same rate. Across a broader sector definition, including all finance, insurance, real estate and business services, the numbers of employees rose from 2.5 million in 1978 to 5.8 million by 2008, compared to the overall employee growth in the economy of 12 per cent. From being almost entirely male 100 years ago, the sector has also become increasingly feminised. Over this last 30 years of rapid growth the proportion of women employees across the whole sector has risen from 45 to 47 per cent while remaining strongly vertically segregated (McDowell, 1997).5 Partly driving the sector’s overall growth were a series of structural responses to globalisation with considerable consequences for identity formation. These were the blurring of differences between the retail banks and the building societies (previously the only provider of mortgages), the increasing overlap between the banks and insurance providers, the conversion of most of the mutual banks (former building societies) into for-profit retail banks,6 the appearance in all of the retail banks of significant private merchant banking investment activities and a huge bank merger movement. These developments had considerable impact on banking employment and the greater permeability of the industry’s boundaries (Regini, 1999). With banking and stock market liberalisation in the 1980s, employee growth in the retail and merchant banking industry (financial intermediation excluding insurance and pension funding) grew 26 per cent to peak in 1989 as illustrated in Figure 5.1, where we have also indicated the temporal location of two of our interviewee cohorts, the mid and late career group and the recent starts. This helps us understand the different formative contexts of the two groups. In the early 1990s banking employment numbers fell before appearing to stabilise and in the first seven years of the twenty-first century they averaged 622,000.7 How might this rapid growth in banking employment in the 1980s, the subsequent higher level of job uncertainty in the 1990s, and continuous technological and labour process change have influenced occupational

128 Work and Identity Figure 5.1

UK banking employment (000s) and interview cohorts, 1979–2006

700 675 650 625 600 575 550 525 500 475 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005

identity formation? Globalisation effectively pressured banks to secure an optimal size for maximum profitability and shareholder value via rapid growth including takeovers and mergers and then downsizing. One woman who had worked her way up to a City position managing part of the bank’s property assets described why she finally left at the age of 51: One restructure too many. The first restructuring in the 80s it was awful. That’s the first time I’ve ever known anybody who has been made redundant and that really brought everybody up with a short sharp jolt because we never expected that. And then we did another two, and the one before the last one was like Chinese torture. We had this huge chart put up on the wall and every now and again they’d fill a name in, in a position, and this went on for two years. This rollercoaster experience had two consequences on identity formation: many company identities were changed, and so did their ethos. Many ‘jobs for life’ bank workers found they had new employers, new managers and new company cultures. Workers for the Midland Bank, for example, which in 1918 had been the largest bank in the world, found themselves under completely new management in 1992 and were re-branded in 1999 as one of the Far-Eastern originating HSBC’s 83-country international network; while another non-UK bank, the National Australian Bank Group, bought the regional Clydesdale and


Yorkshire ‘brands’ in 1987 and 1990 respectively. Lloyds and the former mutual TSB workers found themselves navigating in the new waters of a merged Lloyds-TSB in 1995; while since 2000 National Westminster Bank employees are now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Company identity, always a key component of bank occupational identity tended to become less robust. Globalisation also shifted the ethos of the retail banks from seeing themselves as a somewhat exclusive public service – providing guaranteed repositories of people’s savings – to selling products to a mass consumer market. The exchange of confessional secrets across a grill required considerable ‘professional’ communication skills and trust, with a reliance upon what can be termed ‘emotional labour’ by female counter staff. It implied a continuity of staff and customers, yet maintaining that continuity has become increasingly difficult as the bank workforce, customers and the activities have changed. One mid-career male bank worker who started work in 1991 described the process in these terms: I think where the customers used to go into the branch to get proper customer service, it’s all about sales now, sales, sales, sales, and it’s not about being looked after. The relationships between bank staff and bank users were transformed. The levels of face-to-face staff interface with bank users declined and in many cases work was transferred from branches to call centres. By 2000 it was estimated that 132,000 UK finance workers were employed in call centres (Bain and Taylor, 2002). This shift towards call centres and the simultaneous mass spread of cash points was not unambiguous for the banks. One 51-year-old who had first become a BIFU rep in 1979 explained the impact of the change: The, the banks were very much in the community. Now it’s about having cash machines everywhere and, and most people never have to go into their bank, their bank branch, and the banks are starting to regret that because what they’re realizing, is it’s more difficult to sell to people if they don’t come over your, your doorstep. So, it’s backfired on them. Obviously they got huge cost savings closing all those branches and downgrading them, but what they’ve lost is that face-to-face opportunity for people to, to sell. So while the broader product range on offer in the banks requires that each point of customer contact is transformed into a sales opportunity,


the face-to-face contacts have diminished. The bank users became customers, while bank staff increasingly became vendors, and more and more often telephone sales staff. An insightful study in the late 1990s coined a phrase that has stuck to describe this international trend: ‘from tellers to sellers’ (Regini et al., 1999). The same worker quoted above went on to say: I remember when I was in the branch that you got explicit instructions really on how to stitch your customer up and just sell them services that weren’t even suitable for them. But you had to reach the branch targets. I know from my experience every branch and every sector in the bank was driven that way. Which, I think that’s probably had a knock on effect why individuals don’t feel happy working for the bank. His identification with a kind of moral economy for bank work and what is ‘right’ was challenged. The implication here is that through insisting that their employees increasingly instrumentalise their relationships with service users, banks may be weakening employee trust in their employers. The presence of a moral economy has not been eroded for this new 21-year-old call centre worker speaking in 2007. He hesitatingly described his awareness of and doubts about having to achieve a target of 3 per cent of the roughly 400 customer queries he received each week being referred on to other more specialised sales operators: You know. I guess it was … they were always looking for sales. So you never say, ‘I’m not comfortable with that’. You would say, ‘I need some training’, or something like that, you know? The one thing is we were encouraged to be positive and responsive. I don’t know … Another viewed ‘new banking’ as: Too much like a shop. Not enough like a bank. Until as late as the mid-1990s the employment relations systems in place in most UK banks could still be described as ‘bureaucratic paternalism’ (Blackburn, 1967; Morris, 1986; Contrepois and Jefferys, 2005). Their paternalistic regimes encouraged and sustained bank worker commitment to one specific company and its banking history, but they were not benign. Blackburn (1967: 78) reported the existence of an


‘unofficial agreement between the clearing banks not to employ anyone who has worked for another bank’. The banks remained organised in large measure in the same way as the bureaucratic armies that served as the role models for large organisational structures before the First World War: the headquarters staff came from the country’s wealthy elite; below them was an officer corps of entirely male managers who had made their way up from the bottom; they expected total obedience and discipline from their non-commissioned male officer supervisors and from their largely female rank and file. Firm cultures were clearly demarcated one from the other, and workers were expected to buy into the one where they worked. Women workers had entered banking in greater numbers after the Second World War, making up nearly half of all clearing bank staff by the mid-1960s, but even after the formal end of the marriage bar in the 1950s, they remained corralled in lower paid occupations and were not offered training. A retired male bank manager confirmed that the bank labour force in the 1970s remained segmented: They were very keen in the past [that] you received a banker’s exams, then, so that you could get on. They didn’t impress that on the girls, they took the blokes. A retired woman manager confirmed how in the early 1970s women were still largely kept in back-office routine functions and how male clerks resisted their access to the counter: Oh well I went on to the dizzy heights of going onto the counter and I loved that as well. And I liked, I liked meeting the people and that was hard work because you were humping cash bags around and goodness knows what else. We were really quite, well it was unusual for girls to be on the counter even then, this is what, early 70s I suppose. And the chief cashier, he was a grumpy old man, and he objected when the accountant said to him that two girls were going on counters, me and another girl, and he didn’t like it. While some of this sexism was swept away with the huge demand for new female labour in the 1980s, as McDowell (1997) confirms, the industry remains highly gendered to this day. However, in the new world of smaller work units, de-layered management structures, national and international bank mergers, takeovers and near collapse that set in from around 1990, the country (and banking’s)


occupational structure has changed. The proportions of ‘higher managerial and professional’ and ‘lower managerial and professional occupations’ among the national workforce rose steadily from the 1970s to 13.2 and 28.5 per cent respectively in 2001 and to 15.0 and 30.8 per cent by 2007.8 These increasingly university-educated workers are now under the control of professional HR managers rather than of the paternalistic ‘blue-eyed boy’ networks that kept distinctive bank cultural employment features alive. One union official described how the ‘inch and a half thick’ Branch Bookkeeping Manual had been replaced in Lloyds TSB by: … the Health and Safety Manual which is about three inches thick, People Policies and Practices which is the same thickness, and the Guide for Managers which is the same thickness. So, managers are very much told what to do, how to handle it. For instance, HR problems, disciplinaries and grievances, first thing a manager has to do, ring the HR call centre, log the case, get a reference number, get advice on how to take it forward. The driver now is a culture of performance targets. A 55-year-old male senior manager’s feelings of commitment to the bank changed rapidly when he was subjected to the direct thrust of performance targets that effectively eroded trust relations: I’ve worked for the bank for 37 years, and for 35 of them, I pretty well enjoyed it, pretty well. And the last two years I’ve absolutely detested. I’m not in … I’m not in a sales environment, where I can miss-sell something, so that’s not a problem, but I am targeted, and the targets are such that I have to drive my staff to work 50, 60 hours a week to get their targets, because if they don’t get their targets, they’re put on a plan, a recovery plan, and if you don’t recover, we’re going to sack you. And that’s it. Every meeting starts: ‘This is what I want you to do, and if you don’t do it, this is what’s going to happen to you’. The same analysis but also explicit regrets about the way target setting conflicts with the provision of ‘customer service’ were presented by a 47-year-old woman call centre team manager with 11 years’ experience, ‘Everything’s “you’ve got to achieve targets”’. The technological changes that have enabled the setting and measuring of performance targets also impacted significantly upon training and skills, another key component of occupational identities. From a skillbase associated with a limited set of activities and human-focused rela-


tionships, the contemporary bank worker’s range of skills as a more or less expert personal computer operator and ‘seller’ became much more generic and potentially more transferable. This structural loosening of the occupational boundaries of bank work was accompanied by a standardisation of human resource management processes and procedures, including the generalisation of target-setting and performance-based salaries. As a whole our three different cohorts of interviewees confirm this picture of dramatic change: the occupational status of many of them has been or is being transformed into back office, but customer-facing, call centre operators or, where they still work in branches, from counter staff with knowledge of and direct relations with individual bank clients to often inadequately trained and pressured sales staff. For most bank workers a direct continuing personal relationship with users, where it existed, has now largely disappeared. In this, perhaps, classic ‘postindustrial’ industry what are the meanings workers still attach to their employment, and how are these associated with social identity and action?

Cultural influences upon bank worker identities Work identities arise from the intersection of four discrete, if overlapping, influences: cultural representations, work social relations, social location (family, generation and class) and civic engagement. Our argument here is that these interact with the context outlined above to produce bank worker identities with different weights or degrees of clarity. In this section we illustrate the ways in which society constructs the notion of ‘bank work’ even before an individual starts work. Let us start with the new recruit to banking. What is their vision of the occupation or employment they are entering, and how have these representations changed between generations? Until very recently indeed, becoming a ‘bank worker’ was commonly a symbol of social probity and pride. The association between ‘banking’ and a strong moral code derives from its original social function: to persuade individuals to trust the ‘notes’ issued by the banks in exchange for deposits. It meant joining a highly moral workforce capable of transforming daily encounters with ‘temptation’ into banal routine procedures, and gaining a high social status ‘job for life’. A retired woman bank clerk told us: When I joined it was a steady job. You knew it was a job for life, if that’s what you wanted.


Of a period ten years later, a late career woman bank worker who entered bank work in the early 1980s, repeated that in ‘those days it was a really good job to have’. She described: If you said to somebody, ‘You know, oh, I’m going working for a bank’, it was like, ‘Oooh, you’re going working for a bank!’ And it, literally, was a really good job to have. Another ten years on, an interviewee who started work at 16 in 1991 confirmed: Nobody really in my family worked for a bank at all. Really, thinking about it, it’s what you’re taught at school. And you work for a bank you get this idea that it’s a good job. And you’re going to get security. I know it’s quite strange to say that as a 16-year-old, but I do remember thinking that this is gonna be a good safe job for me. And I just wanted – I didn’t want to work in a factory. Today, in contrast, it might be hypothesised that the mass consumption of financial services would have significantly reduced the sense of distinctive status and sense of security with which bank work is viewed. There is certainly no longer a tendency to regard bank work as providing a ‘job for life’, particularly for those younger workers in call centres. One 47-year-old woman team manager who started working full-time in the mid-1990s when her daughter went to secondary school, having previously worked for Tesco’s and McDonalds confirmed this sense of change with reference to a changed public perception: I think it’s different now to when I first joined the bank, because I remember my mum being like really impressed that I was working for a bank. Oh, Ann works for a bank – she was really impressed. Whereas I now work at the call centres and most, quite often a lot of our advisors, if a customer rings in they ask where you are, and you say Stockport and they’re quite shocked, you know like you’re not in India or … Yet she immediately qualified the extent of this change by stressing her own expectation that working for a bank should still be seen to something different: Yeah, I don’t think there’s a … I think there should be status with it, and I don’t think there is.


Equally, a recent start 21-year-old interviewee who joined a bank call centre in 2006 explained that for him there still remained a status and options difference between a bank and non-bank call centres: I started off looking for something to do with my degree, but there wasn’t anything, and I didn’t want to work for free, so I started looking at anything I could do. The initial plan as anything but call centre and they kind of, eventually, they wore me down until I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it’. I chose to work in a bank, because I always thought the call centre, you don’t get a life … It wasn’t sort of my ideal, but I thought to myself, what with a bank there are multitude of things you can do, so at this point I just wanted to see what there was and, in the, in the end I’ve learnt about mortgages, which is where I am now and where I’m fairly pleased with most days (laughter). This ‘fairly’ positive image of the stability, prestige and opportunity presented by a bank is still being reinforced in some of the local newspaper headlines we have observed, such as ‘Campbeltown (Lloyds TSB) bank worker celebrates 30 years’ and ‘Barclays Bank worker retires after 40 years’. And the continuing societal assumptions of probity and commitment behind the term ‘bank worker’ mean it is still newsworthy to see the occupation linked with ‘high life’, fraud and theft, as in these other examples of local headlines: ‘Bank worker denies “high life” fraud’ (Lloyds TSB), ‘Frimley bank worker cleared of fraud plot’ (HSBC), ‘Bank worker in card fraud’ (NatWest), ‘Bank worker steals £40,000 from ATM’ (Royal Bank of Scotland). The influence of these cultural representations of bank work is, however, under challenge from the casualisation of the labour market for new entrants, as well as from the shift to call centres. One 51-yearold male bank trade union officer emphasised the impact on cultural representations and lived identities of the structural differences between bank branch work and call centre work: I see the public still have a great deal of respect for bank people as they perceive them, which is, in the main, people who work in branches, frontline staff, counter staff. I think they have a huge amount of respect for those people. But, it’s different when


you … they don’t see call centre workers, for instance, as bank clerks, and call centre workers don’t see themselves as, as bank clerks. The cultural patterning effects (‘good job’, ‘job for life’, ‘job with prospects’) described above are thus nearly absent from these next two testimonies. In 1995 a 37-year-old woman who had just stopped working part-time at McDonalds when her second child started secondary school recognised: I hadn’t actually thought about joining the Co-operative Bank, it was a simple as, there was a fantastic advert in the Evening News and somebody had left it on the table in the restaurant, and it was a picture of a pyramid and it just said, would you like to …? And that sort of drew me so I applied for the job but I did have the job at McDonalds of paying all the charity money in at the bank – we used to use the Co-operative Bank which was on Peter’s Gate – so I used to go there two or three times a week, so I’d got to know them in there. A 29-year-old woman recent start described how she ‘fell into’ a bank at 21, immediately on graduating from university because someone else at the supermarket she was working at to make ends meet told her they were looking for people: When I first immediately finished my priority was to get any job, just because I was, you know, living 300 miles away from Mum and dad and, you know, I needed to pay the bills. So I just basically looked for anything and everything really. And then I, I thought, once I’d got that job I’d just think that would be like my stepping stone in then getting another job, and you know, going somewhere else, which didn’t happen … What kept them as bank workers and did they want it to be a permanent identity? We asked all employed interviewees where they saw themselves working in five years’ time and would they consider changing occupations? Yes, maybe. I mean, to be honest, with all the experience I’m getting in business I’d be happy to go and maybe teach business, or, I mean at any level to be honest, I quite, I just quite fancy teaching


to be honest … I’m still sort of like an 18 year old, still sort of like, ‘what do I want to do with my life?’ you know. Sometimes it bothers me, because sometimes I sit there and just think, ‘Oh, why I can’t I just make up my mind what I want to do?’ And then at other times I’m sort of, oh well, there’s plenty of time, I can do it. Whether or not she stays in the bank will also be influenced by social location issues, such as the fact that her mother was a teacher and by the extent to which her age provides her with mobility opportunities, but also by her degree of embeddedness in the bank’s culture and social relations. These cover the whole gambit of human resource policies, ranging from dress codes to ethics, the extent of work autonomy and respect she receives as well as her status, salary and working conditions.

‘Performing’ bank worker identities In this section we describe a few of the ways in which bank employment itself reinforces a sense of bank worker identity. Much of this internal behavioural patterning or socialisation is quite conscious. Several of our male interviewees – from across the three cohorts of retired, mid/end career, and recent start bank workers – referred to dress codes. In part these narratives are a way of asserting an individual’s mobility away from the manual working class. One male mid-career bank worker whose father had been a boilermaker felt ‘fantastic’ because he could go to work in a suit at the age of sixteen: I was just thinking, because I had seen in my family, my dad was out of work quite a lot and I was always told that get a job in a bank and you’ll have secure employment. And I thought ‘that would be good for me’, and I wanted to wear a suit as well. I know it sounds bizarre but I just wanted a job that I could wear a suit … My mum had to take me and buy me a suit and it was specially made. Yeah, I felt fantastic, because I was wearing a suit. I remember that. Dress codes, however, also fulfil a socialisation role encouraging workers to identify more strongly with their colleagues of the same grade. One recent start bank call centre worker was informed that ‘smart but casual is the official thing’ and ‘a collar has to be worn’. For


him it was a way of identifying with his colleagues and of raising his own morale: I really like it. Even in the call centre, we’re smart. I do like working in a shirt and tie, or a suit as well if it’s any sort of weather for that. Well, I’ve got a couple. Finally, these codes also support the perception of what a bank is to users or visitors. In another investment bank subsidiary of a major international bank there had been ‘dress slippage’ so although the mainly male workforce is supposed to have ties on, about one-fifth do not conform. A recent start told us that the origins of the bank’s ‘dress down’ code for Fridays were in the 1990s when several people started leaving to set up internet companies where they could be more relaxed. Friday’s dress down, and that’s – dress down – so that’s supposed to be ‘smart casual’. However, in recent years ‘it’s changed a bit …’ The interviewee presented the argument with a degree of ambiguity: Equally, the other side of it is, you know, it is a bank. It is supposed to be presenting a formal image to people who come round. So, it’s back to the suit and all that. As a result, every so often, he added, senior managers now make threats against those wearing jeans: And it’s, uh, there’s threats every now and again, you know. They’re going to, because about 10 per cent of people wear jeans on Friday and you’re not supposed to. So they don’t like it; so they occasionally try and remove it, but, yeah, it’s broadly, broadly adhered to … a lot of banks went to being completely, wear whatever you like, and some have moved back. ‘Performativity’ operates potentially in two ways: self-identity and corporate identity. In these and several other ways the building blocks of an abstract occupational identity were and are present: a bounding of the industry’s field of operations – although we have noted previously that its boundaries are being extended to include sales as a


key activity; group pressure to embrace collective symbols and to adapt new values; and a significant socialisation process of new recruits in the acquisition of new skills and behaviours. Identity as ‘performativity’ is partly about technical competence marking work boundaries. It is also acknowledged as being an emotional state articulated through subjective experience. This reluctance to recognise and wholly assume a work-generated social identity was reflected in other recent start interviewee responses. Overall, it was clear that the longer people had worked in banking the more likely they were to accept the identifier influences as a natural and even obvious part of their identities. This was particularly so for the men we interviewed. This may reflect the sexism and reinforced glass ceilings in the industry (McDowell, 1997), but it may also flow from differently gendered expectations of work. However, as we show in the next section, the extent to which these identity processes and influences gel into a broader identity awareness and social action requires something more than employment longevity and masculinity.

Work identities and social action The cultural representations and internal socialisation processes and influences upon bank worker identities described above are not constant. They vary over time and in the ways in which they intersect with the social class, geographical location, gender, age and religious or political convictions and personalities of our interviewees. There were, however, discernible patterns and perhaps also trends. Thus among our interviewees we suggest the presence of three broad shapes of worker identities: those who see their work as just ‘a job’; those who develop an occupational identity, seeing themselves as identified with a specific bank or as having a common occupational identity with most or all of those who work in banks; and those who see this occupational identity as a broader identity as a worker who happens to work for the banks and who has a broad sense of social solidarity with workers across the board, with the UK and overseas. Among these interviewees there was virtually no ‘we’ – bank workers – reflected in (at least as yet) their narratives concerning social identity and social citizenship. If another job came along in another industry it did not appear to be a challenge to the individual to move on and away. The occupational habitus (Bourdieu, 1999) appeared


to have been kept separate from other life choices and from civic involvement. With a number of interviewees, a similar matrix of identity-shaping processes and influences appeared to have different outcomes: the work identity that emerged in these individual narratives had more clearly defined boundaries and tended to be linked to patterns of social engagement. The individual might actively seek a closer company identity, participate in out-of-hours company-based social activities and pursue promotion or qualifications and training whose combined effect was to embed themselves more closely in the firm. A ‘thicker’ work identity membrane enabled them to see themselves as workers for a specific company, particularly when they worked in branches and directly with bank users, or as generic workers with a quite narrowly defined technical skill such as traders. Individuals with such a ‘thicker’ work identity sets of references were more likely than those with thinner sets to join a staff association or trade union. Union adhesion was an individual statement of four different but linked senses of belonging. There were cases of adhesion where individuals joined because they were asked to by someone in authority who worked close to them and because they wanted to formalise their own group identity. Only in the Cooperative Bank was there no choice, since until the 1980s it was a closed shop. In a lot of cases the individual’s choice of staff association or trade union was directly shaped by bank policy. Up until the mergers between BIFU and several staff associations that began with the Barclays Group Staff Association and NatWest Staff Association – forming UNIFI in 1999, the clearing banks systematically encouraged their employees to join the staff associations that they had had such a strong part in founding in response to the creation of BIFU/NUBE’s forerunner, the National Bank Officers’ Guild in 1918. A retired woman interviewee’s experience was commonplace for the 1960s and 1970s: Well I was in with a glorious thing, a ladies guild, when I first joined … it’s a staff association or the union or whatever but it was called ‘the ladies guild’, it was terribly tweed [laughter]. We had the ladies guild and then that was abandoned and we all just got put into the staff association, not the union, we didn’t join the union. There is a union, there was a union, but we just joined the staff association, our accountant didn’t encourage us to join the union. However, as NUBE’s membership among male clerks doubled to over 50,000 between 1945 and 1964, many of the new male members


became active recruiters of the new generation of members that joined in the bank expansions of the 1960s and 1970s. A retired Barclays manager remembered: One of my friends who used to be in the union said that on his first day the chief clerk signed him up for two things, one for the Institute of Bankers and the other was the union (laughs). Those who joined the staff association or trade union in this way took a very small step towards social action. Their adhesion confirmed a narrow occupational, company or limited work group identity and made it more probable, but by no means certain, that they might use the language of ‘we’ and see the union as a means of positively acting on their behalf within the workplace environment. One 63-year-old retired woman bank worker thus joined NUBE ‘right from the word go’, seeing its function as ‘to protect our jobs’. Yet her commitment was not about using union services, nor about responding to a union strike call: I never went on strike. They did call a strike, and I never went on strike when they called a strike because I didn’t agree with, um … at the time I wasn’t … Some people did but I didn’t. But I stayed with the union right to the bitter end. [laughs] I paid my dues. Rather, as for many bank workers, it was her commitment to occupational identity, to the discourse of ‘our jobs’ and a significant ‘we’. Among this smaller group of bank workers who articulated a ‘thicker’ sense of work identity, there were several for whom the intersection of these background occupational influences with their particular social location or a key event effectively constructed what might be described as a radical habitus (Crossley, 2003). Within that space or moment of radicality, what was otherwise a passive occupational identity could be transformed into a much more articulate social identity and even into social action. The process was never automatic, and the temptation to reconstruct an over-determined account from personal narratives of a handful of individuals whose identities were transformed in this way must be resisted. One former credit card centre worker who subsequently worked for BIFU and then UNIFI up until its merger with AMICUS recalled the unionisation triggers for him being the firm not paying him for a bank


holiday in 1972, soon after he had started as a temporary worker, and the local presence of someone actively trying to organise the union: Because, during that temporary period, they didn’t pay me for a bank holiday, and I thought that was a bit, not on really, so I went and found out what union organisation there was there. And there was, there was a couple of people knocking around, usually ex’[member]s. There was an ex-docker who worked there, there was a sort of car park attendant; he was busy organising, agitating … The trigger grievance could thus be individual, but commonly it is also collective. A 34-year-old Lloyds-TSB worker took on the job of a union health and safety rep in her Service Centre because she was asked by the previous post-holder. But the reasons she accepted were framed by a sense of fairness: There was loads of changes going on at the Service Centre which I didn’t like, um, the way they were treating staff and everything, but I wanted to know if they were, to be honest, I was intrigued to see if they were allowed to do what they were doing. And, at the time, um, so when I saw that I thought, yeah, I’ll get involved. And that was basically it, that I just didn’t like the way people, not me particularly, because to be honest, I, I’ve, well, to tell truth I feel like I’ve always had quite a good relationship with management, I never get into trouble or we saw each other and we sorted it out. But I didn’t like the way some people were being treated. It was just the way they, they’d started employing temps instead of employing people. But they were just changing their hours all the time and I just felt sorry for them. But they couldn’t do that with me because I was on an old contract. I just wanted to, to be, the reason, the main reason I got involved was just to see if they were allowed to do what they were doing by law. In this case she recalled that some of management’s actions were ‘legal’, but others were not. Of course, the framing of what is unfair at work reflects a dynamic combination of the individual ideological stance with dominant contemporary commonsense thought. Thus the fourth strong influence on union adhesion and subsequent levels of union activity and commitment to social action was the individual’s family, political or religious


context. It is as if, for many, an individual’s justification of an active sense of social citizenship – or at least of a receptiveness to such an identification – is forged in the home and the local community. There are thus some apparently quite clear associations. A 37-year-old bank manager explained it directly as his father’s influence: Yeah, I mean, my dad was always a big union, union guy so I sort of actively pursued the union thing, so I’ve been a member of the union since I joined the bank. A woman who returned to work in 1983 aged 37 after having children confidently volunteered for a union rep position in the Cooperative Bank within six months. This was not a problem for her because of her family background: Didn’t worry me, because I came from a union family. My dad was always a big trade unionist, I mean I came from a trade union background, family, work, you know, socialists, so that wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t a problem for me, and I’d only been there about six months, I suppose, and the trade union official was giving up the job, and just asked if anybody wanted to take it on, and I said, oh yes, I will. A 33-year-old former Lloyds worker who is now a trade union official in another union explained the ‘mind set’ his father passed on to him. His father used sometimes to take him to the union office to pay his boilermaker union subscriptions was also an active Labour Party member: Oh, staunch, yes. Staunch Labour. Yes, my dad was. Leaflet dropping yeah, for the election, yeah. Yes, I was always, I suppose brought up in that mind set that unions were good. I remember, I was about 10 or 11 when all the miners’ disputes were going on. He was very heavily supportive of the miners’ campaign. Another 51-year-old former Midland Bank worker who became a union official was asked to join the union in his first month and did so. His family background involved contested access points to socialisation within a union activist perspective: My mother was a Socialist, not active, but her beliefs were Socialist. My father was a staunch Conservative. His father worked down the


pit, and he was a staunch Labour man and union man. My dad’s youngest sister was staunch Conservative. His eldest sister was the first female President of one of the catering unions of which there were dozens and dozens, so we were a right mix (laughter). He went on: I can still … I mean, I can still hear my mum just, ‘Will you two stop arguing about politics!’ He was a Daily Mail reader. I wouldn’t have it in the house, you know. It was strange because you had my dad and our Beryl on one side, my granddad and our Ollie on the other. No one ever came down in the middle. You chose one path, or you chose another, but at least you made a choice. For him, the choice was about political beliefs and values: It’s what I felt inside. It’s what I still feel inside. What emerges here is the articulation of a structure of felling bound up inevitably to histories shaped by ‘objective’ factors and events, but deeply lived experiences, too.

Bank work as a social-class identity and the problem of transition So as a bank worker, I didn’t feel that there was any connection with that [the concept of public service], but as I became more involved in the union, then I recognised there was, I think, a responsibility really. Several of our interviewees told us how their initial commitment to join an organisation of employees to take on some form of representative role led to their becoming an active trade unionist within the section or across their whole workplace, and how that bank-wide or union-wide view helped transformed their world view. A 33-year-old Lloyds-TSB former bank manager and union activist described how he had initially been proud of seeing himself as a ‘Lloyds worker first’ and ‘a bank worker second’. Later, as he became socialised into the union, he started to see the connection between banks and notions of public service, as suggested in the above comment.


Indeed, the broader political and social trade union environment had a big influence on him: I think it did change my mind set and a lot of my views, and make me mature as a person really was that the opinions and what I had at the union and it made me think in a different way. Because I was probably quite selfish really. For him and others as their level of experiences broadened from a workplace-focus to the whole of their bank, and then, through trade union education, regional meetings and conferences, to the whole of the bank sector, they progressively abandoned their earlier ‘company’based identity and saw themselves much more broadly as ‘bank’ or ‘finance’ workers. One former activist recalled how for her around 1987 (coincidentally near the height of Thatcherism): And also there was a big opportunity in those days, for learning, through the sort of big education programme within the trade union movement really, and I also saw it as probably a chance to learn other skills and you know, I just saw it as a learning opportunity as well as, I don’t know, I never really thought I was going to be a big activist. It was just that somebody needed to do it, and I thought, oh yeah, I’ll do it. The new ‘we’ being fashioned by these ‘learning opportunities’ was by no means automatic in all cases, but where it did have an impact it broadened the sense of identity to at least the whole banking (and perhaps finance) sector. This new identity also spoke directly to the need for social action. Participation in the construction of a local network of activists was itself a significant social action commitment, as indeed was participation in regional or national union activities. And at conferences these commitments were often presented as involving an international as well as national solidarity. One 34-year-old woman union seconded rep in Lloyds-TSB described the experience like this: Yeah, I feel like I work for, even though I don’t work for the bank, but I feel like, in my heart like I work for the union. From starting with a ‘bank worker’ identity she had developed a union identity. Asked about what other activities she got involved in she


clearly spelt out the association between social action as a trade unionist and other forms of citizen participation: I’ve been on a couple, you know, I might get involved in, I went to Bournemouth a few months ago with the union just to, to march in front of the Label, because it was during the Labour Conference. Um, but no, not really. I mean, I’ve just signed up to be a, a governor at my son’s school, which is kind of, perhaps I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t of been in the trade union. The effectiveness of the union as a means of articulating bank worker identity may be under challenge through the shift of the main bank worker trade union to a general union identity. One HSBC 37-year-old branch bank manager summed it up like this: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean obviously I think the role of the union’s changed dramatically over the last 20 years. When I joined, it was a bit more of a stronger organisation, more people were in it, it was more specific to the bank. I mean, subsequently it’s now an industry thing as opposed to just banking, so in itself it’s diluted. The organisational identification problem is illustrated by an interviewee in his 40s who had been a member of the NatWest Staff Association before it merged with UNIFI. As the interview extract shows, the now RBS manager is not even aware of the name of the new organisation, and (like others we interviewed) is not even certain that he is still paying union dues: Q: Um, did you, er, when you went into the bank, did you join the union or staff association, or … A: Um, yeah. I did. Yeah. I’m sure it was called the NatWest Staff association at the time, which … eventually became BIFU, which I think, the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union, and then I think is now part of Unison [sic UNIFI]? Q: Amicus, I think. A: Amicus. Well, was it Unison [sic UNIFI] then Amicus, or did them two merge? I can’t remember. I tell you what, it’s a good question, is that, because I actually, I’ve thought this a number of times over the last few years, and I never get round to checking. I actually don’t know whether I’m still a member of that union or not, which is probably, er, er, a stupid thing to say. But certainly, I did join … And, as I say, I used to pay … I’m sure at one stage, I was paying a


tenner a month, and I’ve never actively cancelled it, so I imagine I’m still a member. Um, I don’t know what that says, but, er … Well, yes. I did join a union. Yeah. This interviewee reflects the lack of a sense that the current rebadged trade union UNITE has the potential to continue to act as a reinforcer of occupational identity in the way that the Staff Associations, BIFU and UNIFI did in the past.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the particular meanings of work and occupational identity and to question more fully the notions of declining or rising identification with work over time. From the lengthy conversations we held with 36 bank workers who started work in the industry in the 50 years between 1958 and 2006 it emerged that the workplace, and identification with work, not only featured very highly in the lives of the men and women who had begun work before the 1990s, but also that it continues to do so. This is despite recent arguments suggesting that people now look to activities outside work, for example to consumer-oriented activities, as a source of identity. Among older workers the major transformations that have occurred to bank work and to the banks over the past 25 years have clearly both fed a certain nostalgia for the past and have been the source of frustration and sometimes of clear resistance to the erosion of a public service ethos and moral economy.9 There is some evidence in the narratives of these older end career workers that they feel less valued for what they have done traditionally. When many of them started work they were often seen to rise ‘above’ their parents through gaining a stable ‘job for life’ in a white collar occupation known for its specially friendly treatment of its workforce in the way of low and accessible mortgages and bank loans at a time when credit was still hard to get. Yet at the same time the work regime was far from being a ‘golden’ age. Several workers told us of the endemic sexism of that period and of the strongly paternalist employment relations. Today ‘cheap’ mortgages for bank staff no longer exist, and almost anyone in regular employment can get access to credit; equally, even call centre workers in many areas of the country now have degrees and the older workers feel that their status as ‘respectable’ white collar workers has been eroded. As their sense that the company was committed to them has weakened, and along with this the recognition and respect they feel is their due, so their commitment to the company fell away reciprocally. Yet in many of the mid and end career bank workers this more critical


approach to their immediate employer represented the clearer assertion of a culturally and internally driven ideal type of moral economy of banking with which they identified. The recent starts in banking we interviewed do not share or care particularly about any nostalgia. There is still a lingering sense that bank work has a higher status than other forms of retail sales, and a definite acknowledgment that ‘City jobs’ are good ones. From some of them we also saw the recreation of a moral economy of banking with a focus on ethics and green investments and a questioning of customer manipulation. Yet the younger bank workers in call centres definitely do not start with the vision of bank work as a ‘job for life’, and those working in branches and regional or central administrative locations are noticeably more ready to consider alternatives to banking. In some ways the combination of technological innovation and a qualification inflation process has alienated both older and younger workers: older workers feel undervalued since their leadership roles and autonomy have been limited through a technology that can measure and control their activities; younger workers, often doing some of the most repetitive Taylorist tasks, feel undervalued since they are often more highly educated than their supervisors and managers. Perhaps the biggest difference between our generations of interviewees is this. Up until the mid-1990s those who started bank work tended to feel they had made a kind of culturally regarded positive choice that would be important in their subsequent lives. There was a commonsense view that bank work was a ticket to upward social mobility for many daughters and sons of manual workers. Those who started more recently were less likely to report holding this view from the start of their employment. In some cases they already feel they hold the ‘ticket’, through having a university degree, in others they don’t have the positive anticipation since their own family backgrounds are already white collar or lower professional. Does this mean that bank work no longer provides an important or key locus of ‘social meaning and solidarity’ as argued by the ‘end of work’ authors cited in the introduction? The evidence we have presented above suggests that work remains a major source of meaning and belonging. It is certainly the case that ‘thicker’ work identities are less common among our more recent starts. Yet by examining life histories of those who worked through the last three or four decades of very rapid structural change, we see that work identities ‘thicken’ with the time people spend in the occupation, and that the reach of social action provided by these identities has always varied according to the social relations and context.

6 Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails

The railways provide a different context to both private sector banking and public sector education that will be the focus of the following chapter. The sector was nationalised in 1948, and then ‘sectorised’ from 1982 and finally sold back to private industry from 1992. It throws up very interesting questions about worker identification and alignment, and how such affiliations and commitments, important categories for understanding work identity, survive radical change of this kind. Thus the chapter breaks into two sections. In the following introduction we provide the historical evolution of the railway network in Britain, examining the emergence of the railway sector from a group of private companies, its nationalisation and then its return to private hands. Following from that we concentrate on oral testimony, considering responses to profound structural and organisational change and how this has impacted on notions of worker identity across the sector. Here we consider residual, dominant and emergent structures of feeling in relation to the experience of work and the role of identity in an occupation conveying a particular and distinct identity for those within the occupation and those beyond. We investigate in this chapter the importance of gender and generational factors and the shifting senses of work identity on the railways over time. We consider, also, the continuing role of trade unionism that will be examined through testimony, and the place it takes in relation to the constitution of working self and notions of social action. ***** The railway network in Britain was at the height of its monopoly over transport in the early years of the twentieth century: in 1907 there were 149


19,500 miles of rail routes and all the major London termini had been built (Wolmar, 2007: xii). The railways have also inspired generations of writers passionate about their subject to the extent that the historiography of railways has more titles than the system had route miles in its hey day. Christian Wolmar cites George Ottley’s, Bibliography of British Railway History as listing 25,000 entries. Some of these commentators have equated the advance of civilisation with the achievement of a national railway system with the result that by the end of Queen Victoria’s reign: Every kind of trade, industry and commerce had progressed from the steadily improving services the railways provided; and steady employment was found for large numbers of men, most of whom spent a lifetime working on the iron road, sons followed fathers for generations. The Industrial Revolution had set Britain on the pinnacle of technical and industrial understanding both at home and abroad; and the Age of Reform had brought a new level of social justice and a better life for working people, side by side with railway progress. (Ferneyhough, 1975: 155) The aristocratic landowning class did not share this perspective, even though they frequently raised considerable sums through charges levied on the railway companies for building routes through their estates. Their distaste was expressed in the words of John Ruskin, who had only one attitude to the railway: he was against it. Despite an admiration for the steam engine and the inventiveness of men who designed it Ruskin perceived the railway as ‘an instrument of the devil; an agent of modernism, disruptive of the peace, the beauty, the civility and the natural harmony of the world’ (Mordaunt Crook, 2003: 129). For the ruling classes, the impact of railway travel was feared because it might ‘encourage the working classes to aspire to things beyond their true position in life’ (McKenna, 1980: 22). The early railway companies, operating in the first half of the nineteenth century, were managed along military lines with former army officers employed to shape large numbers of men into efficient organisations. Workers were recruited from the services as well as from the towns and countryside, with many ex-farm labourers attracted by the higher wages and steady employment and favoured by the employers as a ‘docile’ workforce (McKenna, 1980: 27). Employees were treated sternly for infringements of many rules laid down in the Company

Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails 151

Rule book and great loyalty was expected in return for steady employment and its associated benefits as ‘servants’ of the railway company. Not surprisingly labour organising was viewed with displeasure, as tantamount to mutiny, and none of the railway unions were recognised by the employers until the 1910 national strike. A report by a Royal Commission into the dispute imposed a complicated system of grades on the workers, which was ultimately to the disadvantage of worker solidarity as there were frequent opportunities for management to play off one grade against another (Wolmar, 2007: 204). A few years later, in 1913, three smaller unions amalgamated to form the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), while the steam locomotive drivers, the aristocracy of the railway labour, remained separate in Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) which is still in existence today. During the First World War the railways had been under the control of a central Railway Executive Board (REC) composed of managers from the largest of the many railway companies. This unified system was funded to operate far more efficiently than the conglomeration of small companies and paved the way for post-war re-organisation, including plans for nationalisation that were not realised (Gourvish, 1986: 14). Instead the period between the World Wars was a time of rationalisation of the railway system with many of the smaller companies merging under the stewardship of the newly formed Ministry of Transport. In 1920 there were 178 railway companies which had, by 1923, with the exception of a small number of independent companies, merged into four large regional companies covering the whole of the British Isles. These regional companies, all of whom operated separately into their own London stations, were known as ‘The Big Four’ and remained as such until nationalisation in 1948. Compared to technical accounts there are fewer volumes on the history of railway labour with the most comprehensive being The Railway Workers by Frank McKenna published in 1980. McKenna depicts railway work as systematic exploitation of labour, citing accounts written by railway workers from the mid-nineteenth century up until the 1960s, where the hardships and long hours of work at all levels from clerical to engine cleaning are described in detail. The huge number of fatalities among workers, the docking of wages for minor infringements of the ‘rule book’ and the callous indifference of the companies who employed the men and boys on very low wages makes up a bitter history of unfair treatment of workers which carried on until nationalisation. However he notes that the railway industry was ‘the first paper-dominated industry’ and demanded a high standard of literacy so that the history of industrial


relations is also ‘the story of how the staff turned a managerial demand for literacy into a means of their own social and political betterment’ (McKenna, 1980: 232). This highly literate workforce also developed an extensive slang language, railway talk, which was, and still is, highly inventive, humorous and full of ‘a rich store of vigorous and colourful phrases’ (1980: 234). Other histories, while acknowledging the brutality of the working conditions, celebrate the all-masculine world of the railways in terms of forging a distinct identity as a railwayman through enduring and rising above the hardships of working life to reap the rewards of camaraderie, tradition and the railway as ‘a way of life’.1 The early military model of operating the railway system transferred to a rigidly enforced hierarchical system of advancement within both manual and clerical occupations. At the top of the manual grades was the elite corps of the locomotive engine drivers. This position was reached, during the days of steam and up until the 1960s, only by those men, usually in their 40s and 50s, who had started as lads in the sheds as engine cleaners and worked their way up the grades from cleaners, to firemen, to drivers. Many, of course, left as R. S. Joby describes: The railway companies took on far more youngsters that they could possibly promote later, thereby obtaining a cheap labour force to do the mucky jobs about the shed, amid the ash, oil, coal dust and soot. Those who survived their initiation were likely to become railway men to the core (Joby, 1984: 69). Porters, passenger guards and goods guards, signalmen, station staff and other ancillary staff were also subject to gradual promotion through incremental grades, but, as with those who worked principally with rolling stock, also experienced long shift work and arduous duties. R. S. Joby in The Railwaymen positions the moral aspects of public service as a central component of railway identity, ‘service may be a derided word … but that is what railwaymen give and have given for 150 years’ (1984: 8). Male hierarchies were maintained by seniority and tradition: In the largest sheds a fireman dare not enter the drivers’ room except to make a request or deliver a message. Moreover, … benches were reserved by seniority and tradition, and woe betide an interloper (1984: 80). The quote above refers to the 1940s and the days of steam trains but our research discovered through the testimony of a female driver that


this structure of tradition and seniority was still in place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Her story (see Chapter 8) of subverting the habitual seating plan of the all-male dining room is both amusing and revealing of the strength of tradition in the railway sector. This was encouraged by the early railway companies, who favoured the sons of existing employees for jobs over external applicants, fostering a sense of loyalty to both the railway and the company. Thus railway work ran in families, with sons following fathers and uncles into work through word of mouth recruitment and with older members of the family seeking out positions for young boys. Employers strengthened company loyalty through tied cottages and company housing built around workshops and yards and giving rise to major railway conurbations like Crewe and Swindon. Military discipline, recruitment through male networks, the heavy manual labour associated with the maintenance and running of steam locomotives and the legacy of the Victorian ethos of separate spheres for men and women all combined to make railway work an exclusively masculine domain: except at times of extreme labour shortages. While McKenna includes first-hand accounts from women who became railway workers during the Second World War, R. S. Joby fails to acknowledge their contribution to the industry at all, an unsurprising omission given the resistance to their employment by both employers and unions. This deliberate oversight is rectified in Helena Wojtczak’s meticulously researched book Railwaywomen, which charts the role of women employed on the railways over the length of the twentieth century. A year after Britain had entered the First World War the railways were severely undermanned but although women were already working in war production in other previously male-only occupations there was resistance to them taking up railway jobs. As Wojtczak succinctly explains male objections fell into three categories: chauvinistic, economic and protective of railwaymen serving in the forces (Wojtczak, 2005: 45). When, in 1915, the REC lifted the ban on women applying for railway jobs, listing a set of conditions that were deeply unequal with the sole intention of protecting male rates of pay, there were, even so, far more applicants than positions. In July 1914 women made up only 2 per cent of the railway workforce, this had risen to 11 per cent by November 1918, equivalent to over 65,000 female staff, which by 1920 had fallen back so that women made up only 4 per cent of the workforce (Grier et al., 1921: 106; Wojtczak, 2005: 107). The passing of the Restoration of the Pre-War Practices Act in 1919 saw the majority ejected from their jobs and directed back to traditional employment, mainly in domestic


service, shop or clerical work. Even at the time, the justice of this was questioned: There can be no doubt as to the justice of restoring the places of men who went away to do war service. There is doubt as to the justice and advisability of permanently excluding women from work which they have proved themselves able to do (1921: 86). At the outset of the Second World War the recruitment of women into jobs formerly occupied by men followed in much the same way, if rather more quickly, as the previous war. The terms and conditions of their employment were a set of restrictions agreed between the NUR and the REC, which ensured that their employment was temporary, they earned lower wages than their male counterparts, and they were largely excluded from supervisory and managerial posts. At no point in either the First or Second World Wars were women allowed to become locomotive drivers or firemen. At the end of the war the numbers of women employed in rail transport declined very rapidly, between 1946–7 over 50,000 women left their ‘temporary’ war jobs, although, as Wojtczak has pointed out, many objected to their forcible ejection from jobs they loved. Many thousands managed to remain throughout the 1950s, partly because railway wages had dipped in comparison with other industry sectors and consequently male recruitment decreased, but their numbers dwindled towards the end of the 1960s. Between 1945 and 1947 public ownership of the Bank of England, cable and wireless, civil aviation, coal, electricity, and road and rail transport were carried through by the newly elected Labour government. As in the First World War during the Second World War the railways had again come under the control of the REC and post-war nationalisation was almost a forgone conclusion – only resisted by company directors determined to extract as much compensation as possible. The railway system had been used extensively throughout the war but without any investment and a vastly inflated price was paid for the ‘worn-out rolling stock’ and the rest of a ‘mature, stagnating industry’ (Wolmar, 2007: 267). Shareholders in the old companies were given £900 million worth of government stock which held British Railways responsible for annual interest payments of £27 million (£675 million in 2007 prices): a condition which hampered investment over the whole period of nationalisation (Wolmar, 2007: 266–7). Many rail trade unionists had hoped to achieve greater worker control after nationalisation but were disappointed by Herbert Morrison’s com-


mitment to the Public Board, as were the miners and other workers in other industries which were part of the wave of nationalisations that occurred in the early years of the Labour administration. Instead, the unions were nominally represented on the REC by former General Secretaries of the rail trade unions, but, as members of the Board were required to be employees, trade union officials had to cross over the line from worker to management in order to take up their places (Gourvish, 1986: 123). The railways were not given autonomy under nationalisation but were part of the British Transport Commission, along with roads and waterways. Structurally, there was very little change to the organisation of the railway system: six regions were created out of the old ‘Big Four’ companies with the old formalities and hierarchies of the former companies still in place. Wolmar notes that British Rail (BR) headquarters in the 1960s had five different canteens for the various grades (2007: 282). There were three unions covering railway employment in the early post-war years, the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) (in 1990, the NUR joined with the National Union of Seamen to form the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, RMT), the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) and the Railway Clerks Association (RCA) which changed its name in 1952 to the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA). Industrial relations were complicated by ASLEF remaining aloof from the other two unions, and from the wider trade union movement, and so the unions brought claims individually to the British Transport Commission (BTC). Between 1958–60 the Guillebaud Inquiry undertook a wide-ranging investigation into the relative rates of pay of railway workers including comparability with other nationalised industries. The results published in 1960 confirmed the unions’ claims that they were underpaid resulting in wage increases and a re-organisation of wage structures into 14 grades (Gourvish, 1986: 242). Industrial peace was short-lived however for in 1961 Richard Beeching was appointed Chair of the BTC ushering in a period of cuts and rationalisation of railway services including many thousands of redundancies. After the departure of Beeching in 1965 BR was frequently depicted as inefficient and poorly managed and during the early 1970s, a time of great militancy across all British industry, there were many disputes and strikes. Despite its handicaps, including a slowness to electrify lines and an attachment to making and running steam locomotives well into the 1960s, BR began to improve, in business terms, in the 1980s. At this point it was down to only 121,000 employees, a fifth of those at


nationalisation and in the run-up to privatisation, ‘provided comparatively safe, improving services, began to revolutionise marketing and showed greater attention to customer care’ (Gourvish, 2002: 450). However, privatisation of nationalised industries was a key part of the Thatcher administration even though in the case of the railways it led to, ‘an unprecedented fragmentation of what had been a highly integrated business; raised issues of safety over profit; and created a change which was by far the most unpopular of all the privatisations’ (Gourvish, 2002: 366). For many railway workers it also threatened to sever their traditional loyalty and dedication to the workplace and their wider sense of duty and public service. As one driver, Jim, said: You see the thing is with railways now, you can do a hundred of great things you know, things you needn’t do, things you do to help people, passengers, get the train on time. You feel and sometimes you feel proud of what you’ve done and you done one wrong, do one thing slightly wrong and they jump on you. They don’t know who you are till you do something wrong. *****

Gender and generation: Testimonies of lives on the rail In what follows we have chosen respondents from retired workers, workers in their late 20s and 30s and those in their early 50s to form the central focus here. This provides an insight into generational perspectives on working lives. The following work-life histories provide a focus on the historical shifts in relation to work within the industry, and while the significance of age supplies an important dimension to working life on the railways, gender inevitably constitutes a key thematic and structural concern: explored, as it will be here, from within an industry that was dominated traditionally by men. i) Recollecting a working life in the public sector Roy is 70. He began his working life in 1950 at the age of 15. We sat in the front room of his semi-detached bungalow, in the suburbs of Manchester. We switched on the recorder, and we began by asking why he chose this kind of work in the first place. Roy: Because my father, he worked on the railway then and he did 50 years. His brother did. My uncle and my grandfather did.


Int: Roy:

Int: Roy:

He [his father] completed 50 years, so there’s a strong railway connection. So, of course, when I came to leave school, the first thing I did was apply for a job on the railways. And you were pleased about that, joining the railways? Oh yes, I mean it was always taken for granted that I would become a railwayman. Actually I knew when I’d leave school what I was going to do, yes. Right and that is the influence of past generations? Without a shadow of a doubt, yes.

He told us that his first job was as a ‘train recorder’. This involved writing into a bounded book the total traffic during a shift, working with and alongside the signalman himself. Roy: Well, the main purpose of the train recorder was to maintain what we call the train register book. And trains were recorded on the block instrument. And I was introduced to the signalman and he looked at me a bit stern. He was only about 50, but I was only 15 so he looked very old to me and he seemed very stern. And you realised too that you were working with him and for him, and that to a large extent keeping that train register book was essential to him. And you formed a great deal of respect, especially when he went out of his way, which he did, to teach you the rudiments of the job. Having completed that I was then taken on rules and regulations by the block inspector, who passed me out and then passed me out to work in the signal box and then that’s when I became a fully-fledged class four signalman. Int: Was that a training period you just described? Roy: The six weeks was, yes, and then a couple of weeks training in the signal box and that was it. I took over then. As we’ve already shown, Savage (2000) has argued that manual labour had always expressed an important historical presence in the context of the British labour force. Thus he highlights the importance of apprenticeships as processes ‘by which boys became both men and skilled workers and thereby members of the working class’ (Savage, 2000: 128). This role of apprenticeship, in making men of boys, has clear gender implications for any young woman attempting to enter a traditionally male-dominated industry, something we cover a little later. But by making this transition, Roy was keen to offer close detail


of his initial training, which led to taking control of his first signal box. His recollection barely stalled throughout our exchange. We asked how he fit in and felt about the work: Int: What were the aspects that you really enjoyed and how did you feel about work? Roy: The work itself, I mean for instance, the signal box at Altringham North … it had 72 levers. Now, I did tell you earlier on how important that train register book was, but Altringham North signal box was that busy that you were exempt from recording on the early and late turns, because you simply hadn’t got the time to do it. You were up and down the signal box and it was the sort of place where you’d look at the clock, it was half past seven and you’d look half an hour later and it was half past nine, time had gone by so quickly. And it was a great job. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was a mixture of traffic, there was freight, there was new electric trains, it was great. Traditionally, railway occupations could offer workers a degree of autonomy from management impositions. In the earlier days of steam this was particularly so, helping forge ‘strong traditions and customs associated with self-help and mutual improvement’ (Savage, 2000; Strangleman, 2004), echoed in Roy’s opening memories of work. Roy’s story confidently maintained and extolled the move into work and adulthood, reflecting what was perceived by many working-class boys of his age as securing, through the railways, a ‘job for life’. Roy was keen to underline central throughout his work-life history, the ‘deep presence’ of his work in shaping everyday life and ‘lived experience’ (Williams, 1977: 125). Roy: Money didn’t worry me until in 1958 I met a girl in the Railway Club, who later was to become my wife. We got married in 1962 and I got a mortgage, which was this very house that we’re in now. ’64 my son was born, ’66 my daughter was born, so money did count then. Fortunately for me, in the summer months they used to cancel rest day workings and put you into the general pool, so you could earn extra money like that. Money was tight, but I thoroughly enjoyed the job. Roy’s testimony confidently mapped his move from ‘boy to man’ through work, experience made discursive as ‘practical consciousness’.


Through memory Roy articulated a structure of feeling that foregrounded the social, historical and cultural contexts through which men of his generation was shaped, while shaping the place and continuation of ‘tradition’ in turn. Work becomes here a defining part of cultural identity: traditions and institutions underlined below express these key cultural meanings of work: Roy: There was, yes, there was a great sense of ownership. And, of course, by then too the Railway Club … that’s where I met my wife, that had opened so in that respect the Altringham Line, the old MSJ & A as it called, was very much a family concern. They were all there when we went into the club, so you … you met up. You got to meet everybody. All members of the staff association and they all used to go in there, signalmen, drivers, guards, the lot. Int: And that was an opportunity to form relationships, well obviously with meeting your wife, but also mates, as well. Roy: Exactly. Incidentally my wife’s father was a driver [laugh]. Int: As well, so it’s sort of embedded …? Roy: Yes, all part of everyday life. These comments reflect in some important respects Portelli’s taxonomies for understanding workers’ testimonies – the ‘collective worklife narrative’ seen as a deep form, characterised by emphasis on neighbourhood, the workplace and on the significance of community in shaping self (Portelli, 1997: 70). These relationships represent ties that bind, embedded in a working-class experience where everyday existence produced an intimate culture of proximity, a structure of feeling where work/leisure, the public/private, the individual and the collective intersect. Expressed through Roy’s testimony is a particular historical formation. The economic transformation following the post-1979 neoconservative’s move to the ‘free market’ established the historic shift in work experience identified by many critics and articulated by workers themselves in many of our interviews across the chosen occupations. So, as Roy’s testimony unfolded, his narrative of work underlined the decline of nationalised industries occurring in the Thatcherite 1980s. What had been a dominant structure of feeling shaping railway work and its cultural affiliations and traditions since the Second World War was, by 1990, transformed by the privatisation of those industries. Although moving towards retirement by this point of our talk, and


with Roy having taken a more supervisory level, he still remained in the trade union and a ‘railway man’. Int: The unions had lost a lot of their powers hadn’t they under the Thatcher years? Roy: I’ve always been a strong Trade Unionist. I never joined the Transport Salaried Staff’s Association. During the signalmen’s strike, and we’d been privatised by then and by then I was management range, they called me in one day and told me that they wanted me to go and work a signal box and I refused point blank. I said, there’s no way I’m working a signal box and they put a bit of pressure on, so I said, right you try and do this, I shall be in touch with the Daily Mirror and point out that I last worked a signal box in 1969. Roy maintains a sense of work autonomy aligned with a collective affiliation to his comrades at a range of levels, and underlined his loyalty to them in difficult circumstances. Even close to the end of his working life, the formative experience of work remained central: Roy: As I explained to you before, it went beyond the bounds of work even into my leisure time, and with the Union. Int: So it took much of your life, your work? Roy: Yes it did. I was happy doing it, yes. Out of this testimony a specific workplace culture and feeling shapes consciousness in complex ways. But we might ask whether such structures of feeling survived in younger railway workers, given the changes in the industries as well as the purported demise of class shaping identity formation, too. We ask, then, if it is the case that ‘no two generations speak the same language?’2 We will examine this further on; in the meantime we stay with our second retired worker by addressing Billy’s testimony. Billy was waiting on the doorstep to meet us as we got out of the cab taken from the station. Over a cup of tea, and before we set up the recording equipment, we talked about things we had in common, children and grandchildren growing up in London and our fears for their safety and futures. The interview then began after we had created a tentative and fragile sense of connection across the divides of race, gender and class.


Billy worked as a signalman on London Underground. Born in Jamaica, he arrived in London as an immigrant when he was 22. His first job was clearing snow on the city streets. Billy: Well, when I came here, three days after I got here, I went to the Exchange to get a job and the only job they had was to clear the snow. And I took it. Yeah, I worked with them for, for a year and a half. When asked how and why he moved to the railway, he replied: Billy: But I was walking around looking for jobs and I saw the advert for Edgware Road. And I went there. I went there to be, to be recruited as a Direct Guard … I was welcomed, welcomed by everybody. Now it doesn’t matter what your creed or colour was, I was welcomed by every, everybody. See, so … and, and if I didn’t enjoy it, I would not have spent 37 years there. No, I wouldn’t. Cos I like the job, and it was, it was challenging. No two day it was the same. You always have a different challenge, challenge each day. Billy worked nights – ‘I did permanent nights for 20 years’ – initially ‘because I had a young family’. His account of work experience stressed throughout the importance of mutual support essential, for him, to bound workers together. Billy used the notion of ‘family’ to reinforce this conception as a key place in work relations: Billy: Oh, yeah. I was very passionate about the work. It was really interesting and it was, it was hands on. Because you were in the cabin alone, now you’re your own boss. If anything goes wrong you speak to the controller, you speak to the station manager and someone would be there, straightaway, to give you an assistant. You only got split second to make that decision. But as right or wrong, you have to make it. But it wasn’t, say well, right, you shouldn’t have done that, boom, you’re out the door. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that, because when I joined it, it was like a family circle. Everybody know everybody on the station you’re working, and if you, if you have a problem, they would help you sort it. Billy seemed determined to underline the notion of comradeship from the start. Thus a kind of nostalgia – as with Roy at times and, of course,


a result in part from a both men’s retirement status – formed these initial responses. An obvious difference between the retired men lay with the experience of colour, however. Yet Billy appeared determined to underline its relative ‘meaningless’ for him. Instead, he stressed collective modes of identification predicated on experiences refracted through the prisms of both race and class. Billy’s testimony, up to the concluding exchanges we had together expressed what might be called complex solidarities (Kirk, 2007) amid evident difference. For Billy night-work held a seemingly unique resonance for him. The spaces of work then appeared to come alive for Billy; it stood no longer as an inevitable public space, but represented a space where the workers could ‘overlook’ the space through exploring their shared knowledge of the ‘way things work’. Billy: I enjoyed it. ’Cos we used to go round at nights and we’d visit the station and walk, walk the tracks and we used to phone up the takeaway and we would order a meal and we would sit there at night and have a meal and talk about different things on the railway, you know, for the night. Int: So you’d talk about the job? Int: If, you know, if something happened during the, during the day, and it was passed on to us, we would sit down and discuss it at night, and see if there would be a solution for it, if it reoccur, you know, and how you would go about it. You know, things like that. Billy told us that he was forced to retire early due to ill-health. But he continued to return to his workplace after that. Billy: Whenever I go to London and I’ve got a couple of hours to spare, I will go up the room and spend time with the boys up there and have a chat with them. Int: Do you miss the work? Billy: Yes. I loved my work. We had prompted Roy with the same question. He replied: Roy: I was happiest when I was a signalman down here, the sheer work of it, and the responsibility of it was great. The ‘sheer work of it’ suggest a kind of ‘purity’ intensified the experience of action – physical enactment and mental calculation, embody-


ing labour as both ‘performativity’, and ‘doing what comes natural’. A structure of feeling embodies a work ethos here; in turn, this reflects an experience, as Bourdieu has argued, of ‘going on’, or a ‘system of practical, axiological schemes … of morality made flesh’ (1993: 86). Williams’s structure of feeling offers a different, more subjective, perspective; here the insistence on agency undercuts Bourdieu’s stress on simply reproduction in the process of ‘morality made flesh’. Both Roy’s and Billy’s narratives of working lives signal for us, too, the wider context of the post-Second World War period of modernisation, with the arrival of the welfare state and the nationalisation of industries like the railways, promising security through work and through state intervention in key aspects of everyday life. As we have already suggested previously, this mode of existence would change, and we shall examine that below. ii) Work identities in transition: Stalled somewhere between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Andy, 53, is a signal worker in the north-west of England … We begin by asking why he chose the railway industry after school. Int: Andy: Int: Andy:

You say your dad was a signalman too? Yes. Did that influence you? Yes, I think, really, looking back now. I went on the railway and I, sort of, loved the job, well felt part of it and it was a way of life, really.

Andy began by describing his work as a ‘way of life’, embedded in a sense of tradition (his father had worked all his life in the industry), but also in a commitment to a type of work he ‘loved’. We followed on, typically, by asking about the move from school to work. Andy: Well, I went to the grammar school but I left at 16, you know. Int: Did you not have thoughts of maybe going to university or something? Andy: Well, no, not really. I’ve passed clerical exams and management exams on the railway, entry exams, but basically, I liked the job I did. It was a way of life and it was just magic, really, you know. The metaphor ‘magic’ implies a kind of ‘enchantment’ for Andy; the act of work as an experience standing almost beyond the ‘ordinary’ or


‘everyday’ for him. Work is represented as a ‘way of life’; working life and non-working life intersect feelings and experiences of identity and self. It is possible to see personal experience and social structure as inevitably bound together – and at this stage, in the early 1970s, a sense of continuity in the railway industry predominated despite deep transformations in the previous decade and the Beecham Report: ‘A lot of things never changed on the railways for many, many years. So, it was good, you know.’ This reflects the way Roy felt. Continuity constructs a sense of tradition for Andy, articulated through structures of feeling as a complex cultural and social experience and practice. Talking of his entry into what he calls a ‘work/wages’ world, he described the early ‘learning’ of work alongside older colleagues. Andy: There was eight signal boxes in the 11-mile of track. It was quite a lot of boxes because nearly every one of them controlled a level crossing, you see. That’s why there’s so many boxes and people used to be on the same shift very often. The regular men, you stayed on the same shift, you’d be on two-ten, the others would be on two-ten and then you’d be on earlies the next, next week and so on. And people got to know each other well, you know, and you had a telephone circuit then, which you used to call an omnibus circuit where every box was connected up. And it was, you know, some shifts, they spent a lot of time having a chat between trains and it was good camaraderie, I suppose is the word, you know. Everybody was on that same phone circuit. It wasn’t too bad really and then, you had other railway workers, like the trackmen. You’d get the same man who worked on the track and you got to know them quite well. They’d come up for a brew or they might be working, doing a bit of work on the line and so on. And everybody knew each other, you know, but gradually that started being whittled away. Yeah and it’s just changed now. Andy described the ‘phone circuit’ that allowed exchanges during shifts, creating and reinforcing in turn what he named as ‘good camaraderie’. Working life ‘in the box’ sustained for him both individual and collective recognition; a practice, he added, not only between signal workers on the line, but with other workers: ‘like the trackmen … they’d come in for a brew, or they might be doing a bit of work on the line and so on. And everybody knew each other.’


But the emergent political and organisational changes of the 1980s affecting the commitment to work became evident in Andy’s testimony. The privatisation of nationalised industries characterised the Conservative Government throughout their period of power, so that by the early 1990s the railway industry had become profoundly fragmented, operated by separate private owners. Earlier Roy’s testimony had marked this out in the closing episode of his working life. For Andy these changes occupied the central period of his work-life history: Int:

You’ve been talking quite a bit about change in the railways following privatisation. What’s the most significant effect on your job and the way you see yourself as a railway worker? Andy: You know, it’s hard to say. I think it’s more driven by assessment. We get assessed every three months. The people that I work with now, I don’t know them. The lads come on, they go to the boxes next door to me, within six months a lot of them are after promotions. You just don’t get the same feel of the job. You see things never changed much on the railway for decades and people went on the railway, just slotted into it and that was the way we worked. Today, I mean, the railways probably one of the better employers. If you get a job on the railways, you keep your nose clean, you’ve got a fairly secure job. Now, those days have gone now, so it’s a meaner, keener world, you see. And there isn’t the same loyalty now [in railways]. I don’t think I have the same loyalty to these who are running the railway because, to be honest, I don’t have a great deal of respect for some of them, you know. Or they don’t seem to have the feel for the railway and the traditions of the railway. You’re just a number, a commodity, everybody’s a commodity really. Int: So you think that’s broke down the sense of collective identity? Andy: And I think, in a way, they would rather, if they could, get rid of you and bring in all the new staff and train them into this new company-bloody-thinking. And I think that’s the same in a lot of industries now. There is evident a growing ambivalence regarding his working life compared to the responses expressed in Roy’s and Billy’s histories. At the same time, Andy felt, younger workers express attitudes bound up


more and more solely with the individualised conceptions of ‘career’. Andy’s response to this was not unique in relation to his own generational formation, and we came across this many times with others. Reflecting on his work-life experience now, in our discussion, Andy viewed work as both significant and present yet at the same time eclipsed, undermined by structural and cultural transformations rapidly altering a working life once experienced as a ‘way of life’. Towards the end of our talk, he spoke of his ‘feelings’ now towards his work: Andy: I still like the railways, I still buy lots of railway books, nostalgic, you know. I have enough professional pride in my job to believe that I want to do the job safely, you know but the thought of staying on now until I’m 65 or even 60. I think to myself, I don’t think I could stick this now, you know. I don’t feel … I don’t have the same feel. I just don’t have the same feeling of the job … The love of the job has gone, largely gone but not totally. The railway itself will always be a part of me. I feel as though when I don’t fit in or I feel that, you know, it may be time to quit while you’re ahead and go. Go with honour, you know. My mate, he has finished after 41 years. Nobody a bigger railwayman than my friend, Pete, he got fed up with all the crap and he jacked it in. Int: How old was he? Andy: A bit older than me, 56. But you’ve got to soldier on really. You don’t look forward to going to work now, like you used to do, definitely not. I don’t think they have that same feeling for the job. They don’t have that labour of love, the feeling for the job. In Andy’s testimony, an erosion, or breaking, of tradition stands out – this differs, significantly, to the responses mapped earlier from retired men. Thus he speaks of ‘going with honour. My mate, he has finished after 41 years. Nobody a bigger railwayman than my friend, Pete.’ For Andy this almost amounts to what Williams’s talked about as a ‘knowable community (1958: 351) and its decline. Thus articulating through lived experience a structure of feeling now definable as ‘residual’, for Andy the decline in tradition, the re-organisation of the railways through privatisation, rendered the ‘meaning of work’ more and more distanced and estranged.


iii) Gender: Contested positions After the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 the entrenched antagonism towards women working on the railways manifest in the refusal of BR managers to engage them in what were considered ‘male’ grades became illegal. But there was no sudden influx of women, working in an extremely unwelcoming environment. As the testimony of Sheila below shows, it would take a toll on anyone. Sheila (43) spent 20 years as a rail guard. The nature of the depot referred to here is marked by a tradition constructed around a particular type of working-class masculinity, partly a product of the work itself, though evidently characteristic of this workplace in particular. Sheila: I’d walked into that interview room with those three men interested in what they were going to say and how they were going to get out of it. By the time I left I was absolutely determined to become a guard because of their attitude and I didn’t like being called a female and I didn’t like their attitude that no woman, no woman ever, could ever be, uh, competent enough or strong enough, or whatever, to be a guard or a driver. Sheila went on to describe the difficulties of trying to learn and train for the new job as a very young woman when under constant scrutiny and harassment from her male tutors and fellow trainees. Sheila: It was a week’s course, um, at Southampton, actually at Eastleigh, Eastleigh Training Centre. All men in the class except me; there was about 30 men and me. I was the only woman there who had ever been on a guard’s course at Eastleigh, or indeed anywhere, so there was much merriment about that. Sheila’s reflections at this point materialised at a particular and significant moment in her work-life history: the point where she felt she had to counter entrenched attitudes if she was to establish on equal terms her own identity and presence as a railway worker. Her narrative is one shaped around a confrontation with ‘authority’, then – not in this instance the management or the boss, but with a male dominated regime. In a number of our female testimonies we found expressed by women workers a necessary struggle against conservative, male working-class


attitudes. Resistance then emerged as affective and powerful response contesting dominant forms. Sheila: When a man was doing something everyone just stood around, looking in every different direction, chatting, you know, rolling a fag, smoking a fag, whatever. Whenever I had to do anything they stood in a semi-circle and watched every single move I made, which made me so nervous. And the thing was, I mean even when I was having to lift up a coupling, they were all standing round going, she ain’t going to do that. She’s out the door, mate, yeah, she’s out the door, yeah. She won’t be in tomorrow. And I was … I could hear it, you know, although it was kind of muttered; I could hear them saying all these things. I was still only 19 years old and it really drags you down … hearing all that kind of stuff. But I did it all and I got through it; I got 79 per cent in the exam which was not the top marks but it wasn’t far short. Williams would regard this as testimony expressing a structure of feeling that articulates a presence – one symbolised by the incursion of women into a male dominated domain. Marking presence – which, in a sense, turns on denying gender differences at the same time as enunciating them – relates quite explicitly to some of the central themes articulated in our testimonies and that are of key significance with regard to the place of work: emphasising themes of recognition and respect that we alluded to earlier, particularly in Chapter 3. We asked how she ‘embedded’ herself in the workplace despite feeling sidelined, feeling as ‘not belonging’, it seemed: Int: Was this very much part of your life then? Sheila: Oh, totally. It’s not just a job; it is a total lifestyle and you end up that, because of the funny hours you work, all the people you, you spend time with are people from work. It just happens gradually; you don’t mean it to happen. But it does happen and, and then you find that you actually prefer to spend time with your workmates than anyone else because they kind of … there’s the understanding of each other’s job. And so, because of that, all my friends turned out to be men. A working identity is shaped in this instance by a gender identity that refuses to be ‘hidden’.


We spoke to Liz around the same time. A train manager, age 50, she lives in Greater Manchester. We wanted to know why she took up work in the railways. Liz: I did eventually give up the part-time jobs. I kept them on for a while even though I went working nights. That was too much. So I got the job working carriage cleaning nights and then I, I’m still there today. On the railway. Int: Was this in the family? Liz: My dad he did 47 years on the railway. Liz followed in her father’s footsteps and that of her younger brother, confirming that railway work can constitute and uphold family tradition, as once found in former railway towns like Crewe or Swindon and certain locations within the Manchester area. Liz began as a night cleaner, working the carriages – ‘ten o’clock at night, finished six o’clock in the morning, six nights a week, one night off’. Liz: Very demeaning job, a job that had to be done but again people I work with: ooh wow, various ages, varying descriptions, a lot of the characters. It was a good old-fashioned get in, get stuck in, get the job done, what has to be done, and then let’s have a cup of tea. Job well done, job finished. Int: What time did you start and what time did you finish? Liz: Ten o’clock at night, finished six o’clock in the morning, six nights a week, one night off. Int: Those were set hours? Liz: Set hours. It were, it was shift work on the railway then was two-ten, ten-six, six-two, rotating round the clock. Enunciating working-class pride and resilience here in the notion of a ‘job well done’ is not uncommon. Liz’s talk of character from within this framework is also about what ‘gets you by’ in working conditions which might be seen to deprive people of dignity and thus of personhood itself (see Sayer, 2005). Liz had only contempt for the effects of the privatisation of a public service. Following Andy’s comments, once again we hear the negative sentiments.


Liz: The thing people may not understand, why do people stay 47 years in a job; 30 odd years in a job. You’ll never see that in these youngsters’ lifetime. They’ll never see it. They live in a disposable world. We joined a company, a railway company. Why have people stayed all their life? Why did they say, like I did, I’m going to do this children for one year to get us on our feet, then I’ll move on; and in 2006 I’m still on it? Because it’s a community. I joined it. It’s an extension of your family. Liz embeds her response by interconnecting themes to do with pride, respect, commitment and recognition, as we’ve already shown in other reactions. Sayer, discussing class identity in relation to work, regards responses such as these as ‘struggles to establish self-worth’ (Sayer, 2005: 133–4). Here, he denotes the rationale for working-class pride lying in the occupancy of a kind of moral high ground because then ‘success’ ‘cannot be attributed to the accident of birth and inheritance but have been achieved in more difficult circumstances than those enjoyed by the better off’ (Sayer, 2005: 181). Working your way up or on, from cleaning person to train driver or guard leads to a sense of self that is a recognition of self and identity based on staying the course. There is a political dimension here, too, as Liz makes quite clear: Liz: I am a union member. I’m a union activist and I think it is so important that we have a union because it gives us a voice … I can’t whip down to Downing Street, knock on Number Ten and say, have you got a second? I’d love to. I do write letters which … you know, because I get quite cross. But my union is my voice to be heard. iv) Younger workers and the impact of privatisation Many workers, under the age of 30, entered a railway industry altered profoundly by privatisation. Restructuring – in terms of organisation, ownership and structure – which rail privatisation wrought proved profound, especially for those workers who began their working lives when British Railways was a nationalised industry. Testimonies from retired workers revealed a less direct impact of privatisation as retirement approached, thus new modes of working touched less powerfully on work experience and practice. But Andy, only in his early 50s, articulated sensitively the effects of the transition period from nationalisation to privatisation, revealing the detrimental effects for many men of his age. Gender remains key throughout these testimonies, under-


lined further through our exploration of Sheila and Liz’s testimony. This section follows and examines attitudes of younger workers who have only experienced a ‘privatised world’. Geoff is 29, and a guard. Leaving school at 18, he worked in the local supermarket, then five years on he joined the privatised railway system. He told us: Geoff: It was the end of July, start of August ’98. They said, yes, we’ve got jobs for conductors in the Manchester area. Oh, that’s lovely, yeah, you know. I actually drove down to Rail House. Int: You were relieved to be back in work? Geoff: Well, I was happy about getting the job. I was … I was obviously over the moon. The reason … I mean the reason why was because I was fed up with being on the dole. It was seen to me as a proper job as opposed to a two-bit filling up shelves thing. I knew that there was a responsibility, a serious responsibility involved in the job. Geoff’s response contradicts some perspectives that notions of ‘real’ work – ‘a proper job’ – no longer compelled workers to seek them out. As he said, he did not want ‘the dole’, nor more time in the supermarket, but desired work with ‘meaning’. He explained how closely unionised the workplace was: ‘the, the coverage and the, um, representation afforded at X Station is second to none. It’s a very, very, very strong, strong station’ – providing institutional structures enabling workers to resist coercion. Int: How did you feel about joining the union, then? Geoff: The union had a presence in the face of effective representation and it was kept up to date and the, the information was there and there were clear benefits to being in the trade union, clear benefits. Geoff returned to the union theme, defining for him the meaning of collective action in the context of trade unionism. Int:

Do you experience a potential kind of conflict between management and the workforce, then? Geoff: There is conflict. When management turns into intimidation, bullying, not rewarding the effort put in, that sort of


thing, I get very annoyed about that and that’s the thing which really gets my … gets my back up. And seeing people trying to devalue the job. Both the manager and the union representative/worker are intent on enunciating potentially conflicting positions that turn upon their antagonistic class relations – thus one is focused upon upholding company rules and regulations, while the other is fixed on ensuring workers’ rights. Thus Geoff later took a role as a union representative, conscious of the micro-struggles of worker power/subordination at the workplace. But it is not merely linked instrumentally to workplace politics. Int:

So what drives you to do the work that you do with the union? Geoff: If you take union work and Railway work to one side completely then the, the skills I’ve gained from being a union rep, delegate, conferences, learning, that sort of thing, have helped and they have influenced me to make certain, certain decisions. I want to make sure that whatever I do, I do it to the best of my ability, that I can turn round at the end of the day, look at myself in the mirror and say today was a good day. As long as I can do that everyday I’m happy. The importance of doing work ‘to the best of my ability’ is also bound up, as he later explains, to involvement at a social/civic level. To an extent this echoes Roy’s action through his work on the railway that extended, through tradition, beyond just the workplace location. Int:

So you work on the Residents Forum or you worked on the Residents Forum? Geoff: I worked on the Residents Forum. It was Residents Forum about housing stock round here and I didn’t like the way it was going so I went and derailed it. And, you know, I wouldn’t considered doing that if I hadn’t … hadn’t been a union rep.

‘Derailing’ the forum is an appropriate metaphor, integrating politics in the contexts of both the civic and of occupational situations. Finally, we turn to Mark, 27, who began as a Station Assistant at London Underground almost by chance after attending an open interview session with a friend. We asked him about that.


Mark: I’ve been there now for coming up to seven years. And a lot of people say they join the Underground for a couple of weeks, or by mistake, and they end up staying for the whole of their careers. Forming bonds with his colleagues was quickly established, reminding us of the story Billy told us earlier: Int:

Did you find you tended to socialise with the people at work or did you keep old friends? Mark: I do see old friends, yes, I do see old friends. But the Underground’s very weird. There’s something about it. It can be such a horrible job. I mean, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been thrown down escalators. I still come back the next day. And that kind of goes with the kind of the socialising, because it’s very, very close knit, you know, and the majority of staff are fiercely protective of everyone else they work with. It’s quite, I’d say it’s quite unique. Mark told us that joining the union as something performed ‘naturally’. Later testimony revealed family tradition and political affiliations playing a key role in this, too: Mark: I’d always joined a union. And I was going to branch from day one. My father, my grandfather and my great grandfather were trade unionists stroke communists. So I was kind of brought up with that anyway. So I was always really interested. I did some work with the Communication Workers Union when I was in the post office. The place of traditions and alignments mark a social history in this brief description, and reflects Mark’s own embeddedness in political affiliation and commitment. As Geoff had replied in a previous testimony: ‘there is conflict. When management turns into intimidation, bullying, not rewarding the effort put in, that sort of thing, I get very annoyed.’ Earlier on, Roy had spoken in similar terms, resisting intimidation from management. Mark’s union work and affiliation was then described in multiple ways. He told us that, ‘I collect union badges, badges from other unions, and


shirts with logos, got quite a few of them. I usually do keep anything to do with that.’ And he adds: Mark: A couple of the branches are led by gay or lesbian people. Last year at our AGM we had, I think it was two or three out of our six were women delegates. We don’t really care who you are, as long as you can do the job. Who you are or what you do in your spare time or the colour of your skin is really irrelevant. But I think the press like to portray it as, you know, the old fat, white bloke talking about football and smoking fags, which is untrue. Work identity is achieved both through structured association in a continuous work process and through effective and affective union (and personal) networks which, to some degree, replaced the social clubs described by Roy, but ended by privatisation of the railway. Nevertheless: Mark: We meet up every Friday, call it ‘the Friday Club’, meet up at the Royal [a pub], to kind of discuss what’s going on. Discussing ‘what’s going on’ signifies a continued political orientation that potentially makes space for the evolution of ‘organic intellectuals’. Here, trade union work plays a powerful role in shaping work identity at a collective level, where continuity fosters a radical habitus. Through training courses for new workers the union fosters a sense of identity – bound, in Mark’s case, through the relevance of familial structures of feeling – that relates to the industry and work: a worker in a complex structure of labour relations rather than individual employees in a private or privatised form. Mark: You need to know what’s going on. I think a lot of them [other workers] really do underestimate the power of the union, especially my union. As in, we don’t take any rubbish whatsoever. And I think they kind of – a lot of them kind of underestimate it. Embedded in practice, and the product of historical formation, a radical habitus emerges through work-life histories as definable structures of feeling that has the potential to ‘facilitate … the taste


for contention’ (Crossley, 2003: 77). Both Geoff and Mark narrated contestation with management imposition, along with the determination to find control over working practices, while the interaction with fellow workers reveal the ‘taste for contention’ shaping work identity and social action.

Conclusion What’s the point of research then? What’s going to come out of it? (Liz) The privatisation of the railways proved the most telling event for railway workers in our mid-to-late age range. For these workers a structure of feeling finds expression around the loss of identity that, for some, was signified through appearing part of the ‘family’ that represented British Rail, a ‘family’ that was ‘broken up’. Such structure of feeling seemed to be uttered in a language restrained by the very structures of change Liz rejected, thus articulating a sense of ‘resistance’ suppressed, signifying, again in Williams’s term (1977) a residual form dialogically in contest with the dominant. Yet Liz’s testimony, of that generation, disclosed the true meaning of Williams’s term ‘residual’. Residual structures of feeling do not necessarily signal an identity or culture that is ‘stalled’, but instead proffers a critical perspective on hegemonic norms in the present state. Liz showed this; while the other interviewees also showed a variable resistance to privatisation, especially when new structures and power dynamics devalue worker knowledge and this coloured many testimonies of workers of all grades. However, many railway workers found meaning in their working practice, coded still, through notions of recognition and the desire for commitment, and this appears oriented towards a strong, and continued, sense of public service (despite organised privatisation). This sentiment also conveys notions of civic action that operated beyond the ‘footplate’. We asked another respondent, Rob, if his work meant wider attachments and engagements with community – work identity reinforcing the approach to civic action. To our question he replied: Well it’s … well it’s a funny thing. But the one thing I say I don’t do is social [socialising] at work. I do everything else, sort everyone else’s problems out, disciplines, harassment’s, problems and etc., etc., but I don’t do social.


Then Rob added: I’ve got a neighbourhood watch meeting tonight. The set of allotments at the back here, I used to be Chairman of the Allotment Society, but I’ve not got as much time as I had. I used to be a member of the Labour Party, but the RMT got kicked out of the Labour Party, so I ripped my card up. I mean, I … I still … I used to attend the local ward meeting and I still do actually, even though I’m not a member, because my wife’s still a member. I actually know the councillors quite well, so I … I will … I will campaign for Labour as opposed to getting somebody else in, because there isn’t a viable alternative. I did the Rail Against Privatisation march, that started in Glasgow or Edinburgh that went down to London. I think there was 23 days of the main cities. We marched into the … we didn’t march all the way, leave that to the Jarrow marchers [laugh], but we marched into each city …

Part III Articulating Work Identities


7 Something to Show For It: The Place of Work Memorabilia in Three Occupations

Photographs of work memorabilia generated through the interviews are used here to enhance and build on the oral history accounts of work given by teachers, railway workers and bank workers. The objects saved by these workers can symbolise many years of work history and an analysis of work memorabilia has the potential to enhance oral history accounts in significant ways, complementing, or even transcending, a reliance on the oral record alone to describe a past or current work identity. The materiality of an object saved or taken from the workplace has the potential to not just prompt reminiscence but to also represent and express key identities, work processes and traditions. This chapter firstly describes the methodology employed in photographing these personal mementoes of work and outlines some ethical considerations arising from this approach. Secondly, the photographs and testimony of a teacher, a bank worker and a railway worker are presented. Interpretation of these accounts uses the theoretical tools of material culture, together with oral history interpretations, to reveal how memorabilia do not just stimulate memory but, in themselves as objects, carry meanings about work. This interrelationship between individual experience and the social past of the workplace, however conceived, and its nuances and contradictions is explored through combining the oral stories told and the storyteller’s interaction with the work memorabilia retained. Finally the conclusion suggests that by focusing on memorabilia, and the way in which they are kept and displayed within the home, future work can begin to explore how work identities might be transmitted across generations, and fit into a wider social, class and occupational nexus.

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Approaching an interview with objects Sociological studies in this area, focusing on workplaces and the social identities derived from these, rarely touch on the material culture of work. There are some exceptions, for example the role of artefacts and mementoes in the workplace has been touched on in the area of organisation studies and work identity in Elsbach’s study of the effects of hot-desking. She found that artefacts that were personally selected and prominently displayed on desks and workstations were important to an employee’s core sense of self and their absence threatened workplace identities (Elsbach, 2003). Susan Halford, in her research on the spatiality of workplaces and the effects on individuals and teams, has referred to Baldrey’s suggestion that the personalisation of workspaces with photographs and artefacts is a form of individual resistance to the imposed restrictions of organisational space (Halford, 2004). Lyn Pettinger has recently used material culture theory in her study of retail workers and the way they engage with, and arrange settings for, objects prior to their consumption, arguing against a simplistic definition of retail work as purely service work (Pettinger, 2006). But there appears to be a lack of material written on work identities in relation to workplace artefacts and in the context of domestic, social space. Workplace memorabilia, regarded here as artefacts and mementoes kept from workplaces and stored in homes included; tools of a trade, ephemeral leaflets and pamphlets, union mementoes, uniforms and badges, long service awards, gifts from colleagues, and photographs both formal and informal. Understanding these objects in relation to their place in the lives and homes of their owners and also in the context of the process of recording an oral history was helped by using insights gained from the disciplines of material culture studies, anthropology, and oral history. Material culture recognises that the material existence of objects, their weight, texture, size, colour, and their mode of production whether handcrafted or mass-produced, articulate information about the social practices implicit in their production. Thus it is possible to understand the role of objects as forming a bridge between mental and physical worlds (Miller, 1987: 99) and as also having agency in that they stimulate social effects and social action (Gell, 1998). This study considers the role of artefacts, not so much as cultural objects, but as an integral part of the telling of an individual life history. Valuable observations into the mechanisms of the narration of identity in relation to objects are found in Janet Hoskins ethnographic study

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of the Kodi people of Eastern Indonesia. She found that ‘more important, intimate and “personal” accounts of peoples’ lives’ were obtained when she asked them about objects (Hoskins, 1998: 2). The stories told about domestic objects were a vehicle for selfhood and a reflection of the owners’ life, told in a manner Hoskins terms ‘a distanced form of introspection’. The society described in her study is extreme in the way in which objects are invested with great significance for representing both the collective past and for storing individual biographical memory but has been useful to this research in relation to methodology and interpretation. Her definition of a biographical object as a personally meaningful possession as opposed to a public commodity, gift or heirloom echoes the work mementoes in our study. In particular, the objects saved from work by the two women did not confer identity or status through the means of their attainment or consumption, they were not farewell gifts from colleagues or long service awards from employers but personally chosen and kept mementoes. As such they were also distinct from reminiscence objects used in eliciting life stories, which are usually manufactured commodities, often museum pieces, typical of a particular historical period. Hoskins work focused on objects that were hoarded and kept and how they facilitated a narrative of the self through the vehicle of the object, a method with strong similarities to the work undertaken here. In the context of an oral history interview Joanna Bornat points out that ‘identifying the dialogic and interrogative nature of oral history helps to remind us that participation involves agency and decisionmaking and that the interview is essentially an interactive process involving two parties, each with their own agendas and purposes’ (Bornat, 2001: 230). In this case the object introduced into the dialogic process of the interview became, in some sense, a third party in that it stimulated certain emotional responses and memories. It was however, under the control of the participant who chose when and how to present their memento into the ongoing interaction between interviewer and storyteller. The personal testimonies recounted here are composed of memories of former working lives. As Maurice Halbwachs argued, the articulation of memory is also a dialogic process constituted through dialogues with members of social groups, for example family or occupational cultures (Halbwachs, 1992). James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s Social Memory follows on from Halbwachs in stating that ‘one remembers one’s childhood as part of a family, one’s neighbourhood as part of a local community, one’s working life as part of a factory or office


community and/or a political party or trade union … and these memories are essentially group memories’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992: ix). Further they contend that the act of remembering is articulated in the form of a narrative which in itself is shaped by the conventions and styles of a culture that are in the end social and historical, and this too defines the act of memory as collective. However, they are also alert to the problem of individual memory in relation to the social world and warn that a conception of memory prioritising the collective past might ‘render the individual a sort of automaton, passively obeying the internalised collective will’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992: ix). The tensions between personal and public remembering, and its cultural, social and psychoanalytic interpretations have been investigated in great detail by numerous commentators.1 For example the oral historian Alessandro Portelli’s work on memory recognises it not as a mere ‘depository of facts’, but as an ‘active process in the creation of meanings’ (Portelli, 1997: 52). Thus people don’t simply recall in some spontaneous fashion the contents of a life lived but are shaping and composing remembrance, reviewing it, constructing it in the light of subsequent experience, which involves relationships of all kinds. In our interpretation of the testimonies recorded we relied heavily on the work of Raymond Williams (see Introduction and Chapter 3), in particular because of his concepts of lived experience and structures of feeling, whether dominant, emergent or residual (Kirk and Wall, 2009). Williams’ recognition of the importance of individual lived experience, albeit constrained, limited and shaped by dominant, hegemonic ways of seeing, provides a space for individual dissent and struggle with formal and systematic beliefs (Williams, 1977: 132). Anna Green has recently written an essential and succinct critique of the theories relating to memory arguing strongly for recognition of individuals’ ability to engage constructively with competing ideas and beliefs (Green, 2004). The oral histories of the three workers recounted here demonstrate that their lived experience of the workplace lay at the centre of the stories they composed to illustrate their positions in relation to the changing organisational practices of their employers. Interviews have long been used in sociological research investigating organisational change and conditions of employment and quotes and sometimes quite lengthy extracts from transcripts are frequently used to support the arguments of the researchers. Rosemary Crompton used the work history of ‘Noreen’ who entered banking in 1951 to illustrate the gendered institutional processes within banks resulting in distinct career routes for male and female entrants (Crompton,


1989). Shorter quotes from a number of interviewees where work-life histories were taken were used by Halford and Savage in their research on restructuring in banking and local government in the early 1990s (Halford and Savage, 1995). However, our intent was to move away from conventional sociological methodologies and instead use two main approaches: oral history accounts combined with analysis of the importance of work memorabilia. This was in order to position the work-life histories gathered in the foreground of the research rather than as evidence for any particular theoretical argument or cultural script. Above all, and to paraphrase Joanna Bornat (2004) we wanted to present people’s working lives in their own words so as to maintain their authority as eyewitnesses to occupational and organisational change over their life course and the unique perspectives made possible through the personal testimonies of those who have had time to reflect on the past. We asked participants in advance whether they wanted to bring or show anything that held some significance for them in relation to work and, where permitted, these items were photographed. At the end of the interview arrangements were made for the transcripts to be returned for comments but very few people took up this offer: the three participants interviewed here declined. Interpreting the transcripts and photographs was of necessity multidisciplinary and methods derived from oral history, visual culture, material culture and narrative analysis were used. Much of the memorabilia was visual, in particular photographs, both formal and informal, of former workplaces and colleagues. In some respects the method here was a variant on photo-elicitation interviewing (PEI) pioneered by Douglas Harper in the 1980s. Harper’s approach was typically based on a small number of case studies enabling him to build up relationships with the participants over a period of time and use either researchergenerated images or archive photographs in the interviews (Harper, 1987). PEI has also been used successfully where photographs have been made by the participants themselves, and later discussed in the interview (Clark-Ibanez, 2004; Mizen, 2005). Our approach, in consideration of a large sample and with time for only one interview session with each participant was to ask people in advance whether they had any memorabilia of work such as photographs, certificates, farewell gifts or souvenirs, to bring to the interview. We let the point at which these memorabilia are introduced to the interview arise from the work history being told and at the instigation of the participant, usually towards the end, and where there was informed consent we photographed the participant with their possessions. In some cases


photographs had been carefully placed in albums and so the telling of a work history was accompanied by the story told by the photo album (see Kuhn and McAllister, 2006). The power of visual imagery in producing and maintaining occupational and corporate identities has been analysed elsewhere but evidence for this was also found in the personal collections of the interviewees (Wall, 2008; Heller, 2008). Interestingly, and unexpectedly, as it had not been written in to the research methodology from the outset, we found that some people retained an extensive range of artefacts from their working lives – from documents and photographs to large and small physical objects that were retrieved, legally or otherwise, and either stored or displayed in the home. However, of the many people who contributed the stories of their working lives to the project there were only a small number, 20 in all and only seven women, where artefacts, usually photographs, were integral to the interview. In retrospect, using oral history, objects and photography together, as a method, was unpredictable – sometimes taking photographs and recording did not coincide, sometimes the photographs we took were of such poor quality they were unusable, sometimes issues of anonymity meant that the photographs could only be used as part of the fieldnotes, and at other times the introduction of a camera into an intense telling of a story seemed like too much of an intrusion. However, in a few cases it was extremely successful and part of its success lay in the fact that the interviewee gained control of the interview process, noticeably gaining in confidence in the telling of her or his history while handling the objects saved from work. Most importantly, our awareness of the dialogic nature of the interview led us to understand that these stories were, in many cases, only rough outlines of the deep complexities underlying working lives that were almost always precariously balanced between exploitation and fulfilment.

Memories of work 1: bank worker and teacher For the two women interviewed here, a bank worker and teacher, retirement entailed packing up and putting away work memorabilia out of sight. In relation to Hoskins’ work on the agency of biographical objects it would seem that these women interviewed actively ‘put away’ their work identities on a return to home-based life. These items were then deliberately unpacked in the presence of the researcher as part of the telling of their work histories. Asking women to tell us of their working lives gave them the opportunity to talk primarily about


the role of waged work, and its meaning, in their lives. Interpreting these testimonies gave rise to the finding that the majority of women we spoke to, unprompted and at varying points in the interview introduced the subject of work in relation to current or potential family responsibilities despite the question itself not being asked. In the following examples both retired women described themselves as putting their families first and choosing work that fitted around their domestic responsibilities but their testimonies revealed the ways in which work intruded into their entire lives so that this imagined boundary between the two spheres of work and home was never impermeable. Pam, retired bank cashier aged 67 Pam invited me to her home for the interview and had got ready some folders containing papers she had saved from when she had been in work that she had neatly stacked on the kitchen table. These she had retrieved from the attic ready for my visit. She gave a fluent and detailed account of her working life from the age of 16 when she left school in 1958, despite protesting when I first approached her on the phone that she didn’t think she had anything to contribute to the research. So, we can start at the beginning then … My first job. Pam had travelled up from Essex to the City for her interview in 1959: And it was daunting, because it was a huge, marble building, huge doors, and a man on the door to show you even where the lift was, and to take you up to your interview room. Loads of staff around; very formal. She continued by describing those first years in the bank; starting in the machine room, and after three or four years progressing to the ledgers. These were handwritten with debits, credits and interest on accounts all calculated in her head without getting down off the high chair at the ledger desk and going to use the bank’s one and only ‘adding machine’. Later, as a counter cashier she described using a brass shovel to scoop up the coin, her own set of scales at the side of the till and wooden pots in which the coins were stacked. She remembered the French polished mahogany bank counter and contrasted this with the rough wooden chair at the ledger desk where she had to be careful as she got down in


case she laddered her stockings. She described having to dress smartly and being scrutinised by the chief clerk from his desk surrounded by glass and positioned, Behind the counter, in a very prominent place, so that he could see all the office, in one view … He could see the backs of the cashiers, but the faces of the customers … This first part of Pam’s working life ended when she got married at the age of 23 and stayed out of the labour market for 16 years while she brought up her children. But her connection with the social world of the bank continued because she had married a bank manager and this involved attendance at a constant round of dinners for bank customers as well as civic duties such as charity work. She was also part of a large social group of bank employees who met for parties and theatre visits and this included children’s parties so that the social world of the bank spilled over into all aspects of her family life. She returned to work as she put it ‘by the back door’ getting a job as a cashier in a local agency bank where, ‘they didn’t interview me or see me, or anything. They knew me anyway from social events …’ She found that everything had changed. Even the money had changed because by then it was decimal currency, however she remained in work for another 15 years as a cashier because she ‘didn’t want to go any further’. She went on to say: No, I didn’t want to go up any higher. One bank manager in our family was enough, really, I thought. And then we started to have to sell; products and insurance, and all sorts of other things, and then it became a chore. Here Pam pinpoints the wider change in banking practice from ‘telling to selling’ and the point in her own working life when her job became ‘a chore’. Pam was able to date this to the early 90s, a time with a high turnover of staff, especially managers, the introduction of targets and the start of keeping records on clients – ostensibly for a database but also used as a means of targeting clients for specific products. This was also the time when computers were being introduced, but Pam and her colleagues, all older women, were denied training in the new technology by their young, male manager. Pam’s understanding of her work role was based on the idea of banking as a public service where the customer was ‘the most important person’. She described the younger


workers as being able to meet the new roles expected of them because they had never known anything different. Because they don’t know any different they can do it. And they can probably be trained to do it quicker and easier than we were. We always used to say, well you’re either a saleswoman or you’re not. And they would say, well you could be trained, you can learn. But I don’t think you can when you get over 50. [Laughs]. I don’t really think you want to. If you don’t want to be a saleswoman, you won’t be. If you’d wanted to be one, you would have been one when you were younger. And I think the youngsters that do come in now know that it’s going to be a sales-orientated job. But Pam’s explanation also reveals a particular stance towards her job, an ethical stance. Using ‘we’ in the second line she aligns herself as part of a particular generation and gender, in opposition to the ‘they’ of the organisation that wants to retrain her group in alignment with a changed set of company objectives. In her shift from first to second person narrative, a device often used in literary fiction, she repositions herself as narrator of her own personal story to a viewpoint where she can generalise from her individual experience to include a wider social group, including the listener, who acted in full knowledge and with agency in their choice of occupation. She, and other women like her, are still the same people that went into the job in the 1960s – it is the job that has changed. At the end of this first part of her account of work Pam turned to the folders on the kitchen table next to her. She produced a photograph taken in the mid-1960s when she had been seconded as a trainer of new entrants to the bank, a post she held for few years (Figure 7.1, photograph 1). It was mounted in a white embossed folder with a printed signature at the bottom, the mark of a professional photographer and clearly belongs to the genre of class portraits where teachers are positioned in the middle surrounded by their pupils. It is also a corporately produced image, likely to have been published in a company magazine to demonstrate the bank’s in-house training, and dates to a time of great tension between banking trades unions and staff associations. Pam gazed at this photograph without any comment. She is seated centrally surrounded by the young trainees and I prompted a response by admiring her suit. She told me her aunt, who was a ‘tailoress’, had made it: and that was all she had to say. I, in turn, was fascinated by the carefully composed postures of those young women seated in the front row,


Figure 7.1

Photograph 1 and photograph 2


with their hands clasped in their laps and their knees carefully positioned, representing a wider set of social conditions that constrained and controlled what was appropriate in young women’s behaviour in the 1960s. It is also a portrait of young people who had positively chosen the respectable occupation of banking, and who were not part of the ‘counter culture’ of the 1960s so often used as a shorthand in cultural and historical accounts of that decade. Next she showed me some postcards of bank training centres based in large country houses that had belonged to her husband (see Figure 7.1, photograph 2). She commented: I went to an open day at [H], and saw some of the rooms, and the bathroom, which was attached to one of the rooms, which had one of the trainee manager’s, maybe, using it; the bathroom was as big as this room. [swings arm out to refer to the size of her kitchen.] These residential courses were created for future male managers and had the dual function of training in bank procedures and also in the social skills necessary for the civic functions and dinners expected of managerial staff. But Pam, entering the bank in the 1950s when there were segregated career routes for men and women, had only experienced these training centres as a visitor on a guided tour. Throughout her account of her working life however, she seemed acutely conscious of how her spatial surroundings supported the organisational structure of the bank, mentioning the intimidating architecture of Leadenhall, the highly polished mahogany counter compared with the rough wood of her ledger stool and the careful positioning of the chief clerk’s desk to enable surveillance of both cashiers and their clients. It was at this point that Pam turned to a large folder and said, I’ve got some assessments. This is when I started being fed up of the bank. I’d done the same job for 15 years and now they’re starting to query what I’m doing. She took out a stack of papers, which turned out to be her appraisal forms dating back to the 1990s. As she held these pieces of paper she gave an account of what had finally precipitated her into leaving and the way in which she did it. And this [appraisal form] would have been the last, probably towards the end, probably the last one I did. And this was at the point when


the whole of the bank was being turned over, and everybody within the bank was having to be interviewed for their job. All the jobs were being re-invented, if you like, and we were all having to be reinterviewed for the job we wanted to do. i.e. the job we were doing. And at that point I decided I’d been sitting in the same chair for 15 years, and I really wasn’t going to be interviewed by somebody my son’s age. And I, that’s it, I’m away. So I then, this chappie was standing in for the actual manager at the time, a female manager who was on maternity leave, and he, I said to him, I’m not going to be interviewed for my job. You had to actually apply for your job. You had to do it on a computer, which we didn’t know how to do, and you had to be interviewed just the same. So I said, I am not doing that. I am leaving. And he said to me, well if you’re going to leave Pam, could you perhaps wait until after October, when we get a little bit straight and we get a few more staff in? And I said, no, I’m going. Bye-bye [laughing]. By saving these appraisal forms, ‘And there was a lot of anguish went into these things’ as Pam told me, the objects of so much pain and humiliation, perhaps she had regained some control over her past and over the cause of her resignation. The act of holding them in her hands prompted the story of how and why she left the bank, a story composed as a type of victory tale in which she managed to leave work on her own terms and with her dignity intact. These were important documents for her as was her first letter of acceptance by the bank telling her what her salary was going to be. When I asked if I could take her photograph she wanted to be seen holding this letter, an object of great personal significance but one that did not seem to transcend generations for, as Pam told me, her daughter couldn’t understand why she still had it. Pam later sent me the photos of her last day at work. The content revealed much about that last job and her leaving story; the high-tech architecture of the bank, the tools and apparatus behind the counter, the care with which her colleagues had decorated her position at the counter on her last day with balloons and banners, the farewell cards placed beside her work stations, and the grin of the young male manager. Her final, and perhaps only, act of defiance was to leave on her own terms. After Pam’s official retirement she went back to work as she put it; ‘on the odd occasion to help them out, when they were desperate … I could just do a week, and then wave goodbye again.’


Paula, retired teacher aged 67 Paula had also prepared for her interview by getting out of storage a box containing items she had kept from her working life as a teacher. She had referred to this in a phone conversation as ‘evidence’ of her life spent as a teacher otherwise, she said, ‘there’d be nothing to show for it’. The major part of Paula’s working life had been teaching in, and eventually running, a pioneering unit for children who were unable to cope with mainstream school. Her commitment to these pupils was absolute, despite increasingly difficult conditions imposed by lack of funding, and re-organisation within the education authority that employed her. The period of time covered by her working life also saw major government controlled changes in educational practice and policies. The child-centred philosophies of the 1970s and professional identities of teachers were compromised with the introduction of the National Curriculum and the use of inspections in the name of accountability. The continual battles with the education authority to ensure funding and the frequent changes of premises weighed heavily on Paula and she ‘jacked it in’ and left teaching feeling bitter and cynical at the age of 58 but she returned to work for a different authority for a few years until she was 60. These final years were happy and fulfilling: … I went and worked for another authority for the last two, well, no, not, for, I think, three or four years, but up until I was 60. I left it when I was 58 and I went to work for [B] in their home tuition service … and so there were children there that were youngsters, adolescents, who were suicidal, who’d been in hospital, who had broken something, who had been excluded, whatever reason, who were out of school and I went to work there. And I have to say that the last two years, the last three years, rekindled my joy of teaching whereas I had become really quite crabby and disillusioned. Many years in the profession had made her aware of cyclical fashions in pedagogy and how many of her practices and successes were unrecorded. As she put it: … they’ll come up with a bright idea and then somebody will say, oh, that’s a good idea and, you know, you hear these things. Well, we were doing that 20 years ago. Well, where is the evidence that you’ve looked at what we did and you’ve pulled out the good things that we did and you discarded the things that didn’t work? There’s


never any evidence. It just goes like that and nobody ever seems to learn any lessons. She told me that she sometimes wished she had trained as an architect because she liked planning, buildings and design, and also because as an architect she would have had tangible objects to look back on in retirement. Instead she said: But what does a teacher have? A teacher has memories, a teacher … I mean, obviously I know what a teacher has: a teacher’s got the new next generation but … I’m not saying it’s not there … it’s just that you don’t see it unless they come back and say, ‘Hi, miss’. Throughout the telling of her story Paula referred frequently to the spatial settings and architecture of the places that she was expected to teach in with a clear recognition of the importance of spatial design on children’s behaviour. For example she mentioned the importance of entrance and reception areas, good visibility and space for non-teaching rooms. Perhaps most important, in terms of material culture, was her description of how to create a good learning environment. And it was only by, by creating a very sort of, um, nurturing, um, primary school set-up in a sense that you could get these kids because the classroom was full of their paintings and articles and very much like a primary school classroom would be because that’s the only room we ever had. So we made it a nice room. Um, because this is what these kids needed … they needed this space where they felt, ah, totally secure, safe, understood and, relaxed and then when you starting untying all those knots, then they’d learn. They won’t learn otherwise. This explanation of providing a suitable place for learning suggests that Paula’s classroom was an extension of an ideal domestic setting and also places her in a relationship characterised by emotional commitment and caring, in effect, in loco parentis to the children in her charge. The personal care taken in welcoming often very frightened children into the classroom was extended to the design and arrangement of furniture and decorations: an engagement on her part with the materiality of the schoolroom in order to mediate the experiences of those children who associated school with fear and panic.


Figure 7.2

Photograph 3

After over an hour of talking, and towards the end of the interview Paula started to take out folders of photographs from the box, carefully mounted into albums or individually framed (see Figure 7.2, photograph 3). As she started to unpack her box of memorabilia she told me how important photography had been while working with these children, how she always had photographs of staff and current pupils on the wall so that newcomers could immediately see who everyone was and also for some children who had never possessed any photographs of themselves. Although I was told I could not take photos of the children she had taught, as it ‘wouldn’t be fair’ and so she was still, decades later, very protective of them. However, I was allowed to photograph Paula while she remembered and narrated each individual child’s story. She then retold aspects of her story again through the agency of her memorabilia; giving the relationships she had described earlier material reality in the carefully packed mementoes and photographs she took out of the box. In a series of mounted and annotated albums she showed me an alternative family history that ran parallel to her own: mealtimes, Christmas parties, holiday outings, family groups – all


belonging to the children she had taught. The interview carried on for another hour with some repetition as photographs reminded Paula of different stages in her working life but also in some instances with greater emotion and more information. Particularly so when she found a photograph of the manager who had failed to support her fight to keep the unit open in the face of re-organisation: ‘that’s her – she was the one!’ During the interview it emerged that Paula had brought up her own two children while she was running the special unit, and how that had limited her energy for any activities other than work, except for being a member of a local choir, mainly because the work itself and the relationships with her pupils, took up so much of her energy. You couldn’t help but do all sorts of other things for these kids. You weren’t just teachers. I mean, I, [sighs], got kids out of prison and kept kids out of prison and that sort of thing … But she was also closely involved with the parents and families of the children she taught from whom she received, ‘a lot of gratitude and respect’.

Memories of work 2: rail worker This visit to the home of a retired railway signalman provides a strong contrast to the previous two subjects. In this case, signs of his former occupation adorned every room of his house. Ted had worked as a signalman on London Underground for 34 years before taking early retirement in 2003 at the age of 52. Ted’s narrative of his working life was confident, almost rehearsed, and he spoke, almost unprompted, for over an hour about his work, recounting many stories about the social world of the railway, both at work and outside working hours. He talked fondly of his time in the union, being known to management as a ‘Trotsky’, the eight years he was a RMT representative, the importance of going on a week long residential union course and how it had increased his self-confidence. He also made clear his commitment to the principle of an integrated public transport and his conception of himself as ‘a worker not a manager’. I wondered whether this eloquent account needed any further prompting from the material objects that Ted told me he had collected over the years, but accepted his invitation to view them. His collection was housed in a small room containing a scale model railway which ran around two sides of the room at waist height, above this hung three glass boxes containing scale


Figure 7.3



models of buses, while the rest of the space was taken up by two bookcases full of railway and public transport books and magazines and a small computer table. The windowsill and floor housed a neatly displayed collection of railway memorabilia (see Figure 7.3, photographs 4 and 5). These items formed part of larger collections of transport memorabilia, a hobby which supports an entire social world of its own with clubs, markets, websites and exhibitions, but Ted told me that even though he was a frequent visitor to exhibitions he had never publicly exhibited his own collections. Ted had earlier, described how, as a young man wanted to become a busdriver, hence the collection of buses in glass cases, but after training as a signalman had changed his mind. T: I think once I became a signalman, I thought I’d rather do this than go out on the buses. IV: What did you like about it then, that made you have that change? T: I don’t know. It’s … I think being on my own, because I’m quite happy on my own. I like my own company. I like other people’s company as well, but … and it was interesting because you were working a service. If the service was disrupted, you could work with colleagues either side in the control room, get the service back, and it was nice just being in the little signal box. I mean, this one didn’t have any hot water. There was a cold water tap outside. There was no toilet. You had to go down the other end of the station. There was a gas stove inside with a kettle that held about four or five gallons which was constantly on the boil, and there was hardly any room to move in there. But it was quaint. First Ted showed me the album of photographs he’d taken during his last few days at work. The front cover had been carefully given the title, ‘Farewell to Reading Street’, picked out in relief by decorative pins. The album was full of pictures of work colleagues and some of Ted himself sitting at the control desks. Then Ted started to explain the function of the objects arranged carefully on the windowsill, picking each one up in turn: The whistle’s from Northfield … you used to have a whistle. If you needed to get someone, you used to push that and it would blow a big whistle.


That is a driver’s key, a reversing key. You used to put it in and push it forward to give you forward power or pull it back to give you reverse power. This went on as Ted explained things and I took photographs. Then he picked up from beside one of the bookcases two large pieces of hardboard that fitted together to display a hand drafted diagram of a part of an underground line that had at one point been inside a signal box. All the junctions, signals and stops were marked in different colours and there were circular holes where the small lights that indicated the position of a train on the track would have been. The act of holding the boards out for me to photograph prompted Ted to describe in great detail, the actual work process of signalling. While he was doing so he started to shuffle his feet and sway, in an abbreviated version of the movements made while pulling signal levers, his body involuntarily remembering the physical process of work in a signal box he had undertaken for so many years of his life, a process he described as becoming ‘natural’ (see Figure 7.4, photograph 6). Later he had moved to the central control room for the London Underground, a highly mechanised and different work environment where he was surrounded by colleagues and sometimes, on occasions he considered inappropriate, management as well. T: I think it becomes natural. You think, but you … you’re looking at the diagram, you know where the levers are, so you’d work them like that. There’s … one of the things they said when you were in the training center … they said, you pull a lever and the signal doesn’t change from red to green, you go through all these different checks, is the lever fully reversed, have you got point indications, those are the things you check. And when you read it, it takes 30 seconds and you think you’re going to do that? When you do … when you pull the lever and it doesn’t go, you hook up, look down, you’ve done … done all your checks like that. IV: I was struck … earlier, when you said the managers were all sort of chatting at the back of the room in rush hour, what it did feel like in rush hour then, when you’ve got a lot of lights flashing and a lot of trains moving past at an incredible rate? T: I think … you don’t look at it like that. You … if you look at … if you start thinking that way, that ever red light on there is a


train with a thousand people in, you start thinking, well, if I’m holding it up and that … you don’t really think like that. And you get … concentrate on what you do. You could hear these people at the back making a noise, but that’s background noise. You could be doing your job, talking to the chap next to you, and another conversation with someone over there and someone behind you. You can have three different conversations and keep on top of them with the background noise and still keep the service running. But that was a lot through … you know, in the later years … IV: Well, that’s years and years, isn’t it? T: Yeah. I mean, when you’re new in there, you’re just sitting there staring at the diagram and panicking and hoping it’s all going to run well. [Laughter]. One interpretation of what Ted described above is that it is an example of Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, a distillation of his lengthy time spent in the job of signalling into an intense focusing on the task in hand during which he is aware of ‘background noise’ but does not let it interfere with the immediate task in front of him. A little later I asked Ted whether the company he worked for had given him a leaving do, or any long service awards – like the proverbial clock. In fact Ted did have a clock and a barometer that he’d chosen from a catalogue using a points system for the length of time he’d been employed. While I was taking photographs of these two gifts, earned after 25 years service, which hung on the wall in the dining area of Ted’s house he told me about his company send-off. A very long anecdote, interpreted in Chapter 8, which, in a similar way to Pam’s story ended with Ted walking away from the workplace that had changed almost beyond recognition to the one he’d entered as a young man – but on his own terms and with his dignity intact. The union send-off, a party in a pub, had been far more important to Ted than anything his employer organised. Walking into Ted’s house I was immediately struck by how prominently the record of his working life was displayed – the walls of the dining area were hung with framed railway posters, together with the clock and barometer signalling 25 years service and, given pride of place, the framed union poster, signed by Bob Crowe, given as a farewell gift (see Figure 7.4, photograph 7).


Figure 7.4



Conclusions We found that the showing of these objects was an integral part of the story of an individual’s working life, with these objects enhancing, complementing, and even transcending oral accounts in that they held the potential to stimulate affect – love, nurturing, protectiveness, pride, and also the embodiment/performance of former work practices. In all cases, these objects were part of a complex dialogue, structured to some extent by our questions, but created by the interaction between object, speaker and listener. The key themes emerging from this combination of visual and oral approaches were; a sense of loss, the importance of memorabilia, the place of commitment and the need for recognition. The stories told by the two women as they unpacked their mementoes revealed the intensity of their emotional involvement with their workplaces, both positive and negative. As Paula unpacked the box of things kept from work she remembered the name, background and personality of every child who had passed through her unit. The stories she told me of their lives were a demonstration of not just her memory but the strength and depth of her feelings for her pupils and that particular part of her working life. In Pam’s case the photographs of the social world of the bank elicited a distanced introspection and telling of her work history until the moment when she held the appraisal forms in her hand. There was then a change in her bearing and manner as she embarked with emotional intensity on a very different type of story, one of personal anguish and pain at the erosion of her selfesteem in an organisation that had mistreated her. This former pain was transformed through the telling of a story that ended in a victory for Pam and the maintaining of her own personal dignity and work identity in relation to opposing organisational values. Both women through the telling of their work-life histories achieved a sense of composure in relating final episodes of contentment after periods of persistent problems at work. For Pam this was achieved by returning post-retirement, to work on her own terms and for Paula through working at a school where her pedagogical outlook was reaffirmed. In both cases the retrieval of memorabilia and the handling of these objects had released intense emotions about a past working life of which there was no longer any trace in their immediate surroundings. Both women stated early on in their interviews that their work, after marriage, had to ‘fit around’ their domestic responsibilities implying a separation of the home as a core and the workplace as periphery.


However as they continued with their stories it became obvious that this had not been the case for either of them. In fact, both recounted the interconnectedness of work, family and community life: neither of these women experienced work and home as separate spheres. Fundamental to each account was the memory of ‘lived experience’ in the way in which both started work as young women with a particular set of ethical dispositions. These were held dear throughout their working lives resulting in them both having dissenting roles in relation to organisational change and, using Raymond Williams’ formulation of ‘structure of feeling’, a residual position. Terry Eagleton has referred to a residual structure of feeling as an ‘active element in the present’ and that ‘residual forms of culture stand in opposition or as alternatives to a dominant culture and formation which will not accommodate its values or needs’ (Eagleton, 2000: 123). Both women lived through profound changes to working life as the dominant and hegemonic organisational cultures shifted during the 1980s and 90s resulting in their residual ‘structure of feeling’, grounded in a particular way of approaching work, becoming functionally oppositional. However Eagleton’s formulations allow for the residual to become emergent, as part of a future that challenges the dominant culture of the present, a resolution that, on an individual level, was achieved by both women. The methodology used here, where material culture and oral histories are combined as a base from which to analyse past workplace identities, workplaces and their connection to present selves, has the potential to add to existing sociological investigations to include the nexus of social relationships, both historical and current, that coalesce around certain objects. These artefacts, made and brought home, gifted and kept, or taken, breach the secrecy of the workplace and the privacy of the home, making permeable the boundaries between these two distinct social spaces frequently described in opposition to each other and as having distinctly dual characteristics. The homes of both women were full of evidence of their familial relationships, with grandchildren’s photographs and drawings given prominent positions in kitchens and living rooms but, while reminders of their own former working lives had disappeared from the domestic environment, they had not been completely discarded but preserved in a few carefully chosen mementoes. Daniel Miller has suggested that the home is now, the single most important site for material culture studies (Miller, 2001). The incorporation of this approach into histories of work and workplaces would appear to have the potential for making explicit the complex relationships people have with work over their life course


and, where possible, making public the personal mementoes and narratives of working life. The obvious difference between the occupations of signalman and bank clerk and teacher is the nature of manual work on railways, with the railway nostalgia movement providing a means of expression for the loss of certain working practices and occupations. While, in terms of material culture and work practices, the same could be said, for banking, Pam’s brass shovel kept from the 1960s and used for shoveling coins was not displayed on the mantel piece but stored away, hidden in the loft. But there is still a strong occupational culture associated with railway work and this applies to both white collar and manual staff. It also contributes to the work identities of both men and women. One former female railway worker we spoke to had kept many items of significance, for example uniform badges, as well as writing the definitive history of women in the railway industry. The unions, both ASLEF and RMT play a major role in education including the historical significance of the railways and the fostering of worker identification with an industry rather than a company. All the railway employees we interviewed socialised mainly or entirely with other rail workers – citing the difficult hours and shift work as the main reason, but these work-based friendships continued, for the men at least, after retirement. As well as the unions selling railway artefacts there is a vast internet-based marketplace for railway memorabilia and collectors also gather at exhibitions and shows where many of the consumers of these products are current and former railway employees. The way in which women rail employees identify with this industrial culture is reminiscent of the women weavers interviewed by Miriam Glucksmann and reported in Cottons and Casuals (2000). These women, in doing work not constructed as purely ‘women’s work’ and in which they worked alongside men on a relatively equal basis explained their work identities first and foremost as weavers. They were compared with women who undertook casual work as washer-women or cleaners who, even though their weekly hours in paid work were similar to those of the women weavers, described themselves with some pride as ‘mothers’ or ‘wives’. The weavers, on the other hand were reticent on questions about domestic labour but spoke fluently of their workplace skills and abilities (2000: 55 and 64). The women interviewed here, although very aware of their positions as women in a male-dominated workplace, spoke with pride of their sense of belonging to the strong industrial culture of the railways (see Chapter 4). For Ted, the material culture of his former workplace based on its strong occupational culture, enabled


a continuation of his work identity post-retirement through the social activities, which accompanied the maintenance and addition to his collection of work memorabilia.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the generous hospitality of Paula, Pam and Ted, who invited me into their homes and allowed the publication of these photographs.

8 Narrating Work Identity: Oral Testimony and the Place of Anecdotes

The chapter, then, focuses on narrative analysis and aspects of cultural theory to explore oral testimonies of working lives that expand further some of the central themes already examined in our earlier chapters, drawing from a selection of workers from the three occupations that have been central throughout. The main focus of the analysis turns on an investigation of the place of anecdotes pertinent in the recounting of work-life histories through what we have been calling lived experience that appear, at one level, stories of individual events. And yet, as with many other instances, the individual and the collective – or social – experience dominate in significant and complicated ways. Anecdotes offer condensed but insightful perspective on this; ‘snap-shots’ of a wider canvas, or historical and existential landscape. This underlines the importance of oral testimonies. In many ways, it reflects Paul Ricoeur’s (1996) suggestion that narrative is the principal way human beings cope with the experience of time/temporality, a way of achieving a sense of order or account of human action or experience. Thus the chapter explores how modes of ‘telling’ reveal, unlock – while in other instances, perhaps conceal – central themes around the role of work and association with wider social identity formation and social action.

Narrating identity through oral testimony But it seems funny to tell you that he [the head of the company] gets a quarter of a million pounds, and I get two hundred quid, and I’m the supervisor, so the lads don’t even get that, who’s actually doing the work for him. So yeah, fat cats as they tend to call it, but I don’t 204

Narrating Work Identity 205

really like to call names, I like to call it what it is, it’s like people getting mugged, I like to call it assault and battery, that’s what’s happened. Mugged seems to belittle it (Brian, railway worker, 59). Oral histories, Alessandro Portelli tells us, can be approached in at least two ways: first by insisting that life stories are true, that they provide a glimpse into ‘actual experience’; secondly, that seeing such narratives as essentially verbal artefacts means accepting stories as shaped primarily by and through the act of enunciation itself. He then explains that ‘the impossible dream of attaining absolute “authenticity” or “lived experience” blinds us to the fact that we have at hand something which bears at least a formal relationship to the subject’s experience. After all, the telling of one’s life is part of one’s life … the problem is not what is the relation between life and story, but rather what is the place of story within the life’ (Portelli, quoted in James, 2003: 158). Elsewhere, writing on oral history as memory texts, Portelli argues that what is important about remembering is that it is not passive, not a mere ‘depository of facts’, but should be regarded as an ‘active process in the creation of meanings’ (Portelli, 1997: 52). This is the act of placing story within life. In the act of giving it form, actors do more than simply recall in some spontaneous fashion the events of a life lived: instead we shape and compose memory – reviewing it and constructing it in the light of subsequent experience, lived at the level of self but always in some sense articulated in wider collective alignments that include relationships of all kinds. There is a distinct dialogic orientation in this action. Articulating memory, or remembrance, finds structure in and through a range of historical discourses and cultural forms that express both the social and individual: the expression of self is inevitably positioned in the presence of ‘Others’ – in many instances constituting hegemonic or dominant relations. ‘Impersonal’ social and cultural forces inscribe the past and the present indelibly with their mark. In turn, this presence is shadowed by ‘vernacular’ accounts of history, of a life lived, or in the continual process of living. Indeed, one central raison d’etre of oral history has been, for many practitioners, a desire to counter-act, or answer back, dominant versions of the past that represents narratives of a dominant culture masquerading as ‘all our truths’. Alistair Thompson made this point in his discussion of remembering, where he argued ‘that the apparently private process of composing safe memories is in fact very public. Our memories are risky and painful if they do not conform to the public norms of versions of the past’ (Perks and Thompson, 1998:


301). Thompson speaks here of the way a ‘personal’ structure of feeling becomes affected by an already dominant public expression, which constitute social and cultural forces that are in part the product of cultural hegemony. Therefore composing ourselves through storytelling is an inter-subjective – discursively and dialogically formed – relationship, engaged with perceived dominant narrative modes of communication legitimated by mainstream culture. This implies the presence of hegemonic forms, or of a set of codes and conventions – or fixed ideological modes – made available for speaking about primary aspects of experience, bound to historical contexts. In his own work Thompson elaborates further on some of the implications of this through the term composure, fashioned as a means of thinking about both form and content in oral testimony. It is relevant here in two ways: the context of anecdotes and their positioning and emergence; and the evidence and signification of ‘structure of feeling’. Composure has wider ramifications, too, beyond the particular association only with memory or reminiscence given to it by Thompson. The idea of composure implies notions of the self as an ‘ongoing project’, thus composure stands as a metaphor for how people see their own lives and give those lives shape and meaning to themselves and for, or in response to, others. This implies that the concept of composure represents more that an act shaped by recollection, or by memory alone. Composing the self is not merely a way of imagining, or re-imagining, the past, but of making sense of the present and situating oneself within it. For Thompson, ‘we compose memories [or ourselves] which help us to feel relatively comfortable with our lives, which gives us a feeling of composure’ (Perks and Thompson, 1998: 301). To this, he adds that ‘we seek composure’, and through this ‘an alignment of our past, present and future lives’ (Perks and Thompson, 1998: 301). Portelli’s view is echoed here: composure represents the ‘place of story within life’, or, perhaps more accurately, about the act of ‘story-ing’ one’s life. In the ‘story-ing’ of a life, language – or utterance (Volosinov, 1973) is central to the form and shape of oral testimony. Raymond Williams stated the centrality of language long ago. Thus he argued that ‘a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world’ (1977: 21), and in his discussion of language in Marxism and Literature (1977) he underlines the idea of practical consciousness expressed through language as a means of stressing the importance of experience and its discursive practice through narrative. The Russian linguist Valentin Volosinov emphasised also what


he called ‘inner speech’, and in this sense consciousness is language, producing an internal dialogue with self and ‘others’, shaped by and through what he labelled ‘utterance contexts’ (Volosinov, 1973: 33–8). Williams figured the argument similarly where he argues that ‘what we have is a grasping of reality through language, which as practical consciousness is saturated by and saturates all social activity, including productive activity’ (Williams, 1977: 37) so that ‘a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world’ (1977: 21). Thus language represents, as we have discussed before, ‘living evidence of a continuing social process, into which individuals are born and within which they are shaped, but to which they then actively contribute, in a continuing process. This is at once their socialisation and their individuation’ (Williams, 1977: 37). Though reflecting in some key ways the notion of habitus – a concept that describes processes of social reproduction, as enunciated by Bourdieu (1984) – Williams stressed instead his own conceptual frame of understanding through the idea of structure of feeling. In our introduction, and following in later chapters, we have drawn on the relevance of structure of feeling. Williams, in his earlier work, saw the concept as a way of illuminating social meaning in art and literature; he then extended it as a method that would explore wider cultural practice, historical process and identity formation, underlining the importance and relevance of lived experience and its complex articulation. These perspectives look upon language as a potential site of conflict through which a flow of identities, values, beliefs and meanings are embedded, silenced or affirmed. Meaning always comes to us already inscribed with the habitual relations marking the social, though these ‘dynamic forces are not simply linguistic ones; they are produced by historical forces that are external to language but which act partly in language’ (Dentith, 1995: 35). These historical forces render language a site of dispute, embodied in the very notion of the dialogic, where narration enunciates its form beyond the presence of a single voice, a single meaning, or ideological orientation. Bakhtin (1981) contrasts this ‘natural’ tendency within language, or of discourse broadly speaking, with what he identified as monologic structures and inscriptions that strive to fix normative meanings and this strategy is characteristic of powerful groups or classes intent on asserting a particular way of seeing and thus maintaining ideological control (see Bakhtin, 1981). In the context examined here – oral testimonies of workers reflecting on workplace experience and the significance of a working life – important understandings and meanings about these experiences have to


find expression within existing ideological frameworks. It is here that structures of feeling – a set of values, or way of seeing – may be articulating a practical consciousness that in complex ways challenges or contests fixed (official) and hegemonic forms. And as a consequence, oral testimony, using the form of anecdotes, can be seen as ‘speaking for more than itself’.

Anecdotes: ‘Telling tales’ and other intentions Anecdotes constitute a formative structural component of oral testimonies. Their place within testimony represents, we might say, a form of storytelling that incorporates, and at the same time foregrounds quite deliberately, a story within a ‘story’, or work-life history. Critics have highlighted the ‘essential artfulness’ (James, 2003: 160) of oral testimony. Yet such discursive practices and their ideological orientation, also reflect ‘in fundamental ways the narrator’s relationship with dominant social models’ (2003: 160). In relation to Williams’s broader cultural analysis outlined earlier, there is a correspondence between this relationship with the dominant and how we understand the important distinction Williams made between practical and official consciousness, and between dominant, residual and emergent structures of feeling. Embedded in anecdotal forms are value judgements, or to be more precise, and to stay with the terminology of Volosinov, clearly articulated ‘evaluative accents’ (1973: 31). Such accentuation can be seen to express a disjuncture between dominant and subordinated understandings of the social, and therefore, for Volosinov, the concept of evaluative accent manifest in language forms contains the crux of meaning in communicative exchange. Subsequently, our conceptualisation of anecdotes, and the structures of feeling out of or through which utterances emerge, requires a move beyond the condition of personal stories alone. To do this, we need to consider some of the core conventions characterising the form. Anecdotes are said to ‘focus on a single episode or scene … [with] a tendency to limit action to two principle actors. As a corollary, anecdotes tend to be heavily dialogic in construction, often culminating in a punch line in the form of a striking, especially reportable, statement rendered in direct discourse’ (James, 2003: 170). This means recognising that anecdotes and their construction can take testimony beyond any individual experience made available and into a glimpse of social structure – utterances replete with evaluative accents, anecdotes emerge as kinds of morality tales, or authority stories, even historical documents (James, 2003: 171–2).


Disclosing, in their telling, a powerful moral and ethical dimension, the anecdote enables us to reflect further on important themes and topics. These include how we make sense of such concepts and experiences as commitment, recognition and worth; of feelings and structures constituting what might signify value and meaning in the telling of work-life histories. Thus, in James’s terms, anecdotes ‘express in a synthesised form, on a local scale, the transgression or acceptance of hegemonic values’ (James, 2003: 172), and seen in this light they contain both ‘a social and individual register: they are about proper and improper behaviour, responsible and irresponsible actions, about the way the world is and the way it ought to be’ (James, 2003: 172). On a number of levels, anecdotes can express the place of identity formation; they carry a powerful ideological resonances bound up with understandings of power and powerlessness, the notions of self-esteem and respect, and to the desire of people (primarily as workers, in this instance) for recognition and worth.1 In what follows, we will take workers from the three occupations studied in the book so far: a female train driver, a 40-year old male teacher and a male retired signalman on the London Underground. For the purpose of anonymity the names of interviewees have been changed, as have other identifying features. If we accept James’s view that anecdotes can express forms of transgression, and a rejection of hegemonic values, then it is possible to read anecdotes in the contexts of work experience and of gender formations. Consequently, we begin with the testimony of a woman train driver, Ann. Ann works out of a notoriously traditional railway depot – a tradition largely constructed around a particular type of workingclass masculinity, embedded in the nature of the work itself as well as the nature of the workplace. The work of driving a train has, until relatively recently, been a male province. Ann, in her mid-30s, has worked on the railway for 12 years, driving for five of those years. Here she responds to a question about the attitudes of the men towards her when she started work. She told us, laughing: Ann: Yeah, it’s very intimidating at first but, you know, I’m kind of big enough and ugly enough and even more so now to, you know, ignore comments, you know. I mean I still get them … you bloody women you shouldn’t be on the railways. She went on: Ann: I believe that they [the train company] were scrutinised under the Equal Opportunities Act and they were saying, you know,


why are you not employing any people off the street? Why are you only offering your positions to experienced drivers? And so the big ugly finger was pointed at them and they decided to do something about it and it was quite interesting because until then the depot was I’d say 99 per cent white Anglo Saxon, heterosexual, male, and then all of a sudden [laughs] there was actually quite a few of us from [X company] who applied and there was myself, Karen, and a very good friend of mine Alan, who’s gay, who all got the job, so you can imagine how, it was this kind of oh my God, who are all these people? And yeah, I do have a tendency to stand out a little bit in a crowd, I don’t know why. And yeah, it was a bit of a shock to their system and a few of the people I used, a few of the drivers I used to work with at X had come from Y and they’re going it’s the worst depot to come in off the street and drive trains, they are so conservative and, you know, old book, you know, old rules and old fashioned, that you know you’re going to have a hard time and … IV: Were they right? Ann: No it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of people who, you know, they wouldn’t, they didn’t think that it was actually appropriate for me to actually sit in the mess room, you know. There’s nowhere else to go so what am I supposed to do, stand outside the door and watch? So one day I came in [laughs], it’s like this around the table and this guy came in and says, [Scottish accent] You shouldn’t be sitting there, that’s the XXX man’s chair. XXX man’s the guy who drives the rescue loco, the rescue locomotive just in case, international rescue, gives you an idea of the level … and I went: Oh, I’m so sorry does it have your name on it? You shouldn’t be sitting there [in accent]. I’m terribly sorry, I’m terribly sorry, and I just like got on my knees and bowed and I said, I’m sorry, I’m not worthy, [makes action of repeatedly raising arms above head as if worshipping a god] I’m not worthy [laughs], at which point he sort of like went bright red and walked away. Everybody thought it was quite funny so luckily I got away with that, sort of like broke the ice, but yeah these are things you have to contend with. The significance of the anecdote in this instance rests not so much in the actual interaction itself, but in what it confirms in terms of identity


practice. It is, as we will see in another respondent’s testimony later, what can be defined as a form of self-representation – it is a performance, accompanied by mimicry and humour, but it remains one that insists on a presence: that of the identity of the worker/actor herself. Ann carefully composes the scene, providing some context of the workplace, before constructing the anecdote proper. The anecdote is, essentially, one shaped around confrontation with ‘authority’ – not in this instance the management or the boss, but with a male dominated field where understandings of ‘place’ and ‘position’ are fixed by a range of practices and assumptions that have acquired over time the status of ‘common sense’. Thus we hear: ‘I believe that they [the train company] were scrutinised under the Equal Opportunities Act … the big ugly finger was pointed at them and they decided to do something about it and it was quite interesting because until then the depot was I’d say 99 per cent white Anglo Saxon, heterosexual, male’. There is a studied clarity in Ann’s description – a precision that works to set the scene for the presentation of the anecdote itself, a process, we suggest, operating strategically to intensify its significance. The act constitutes in part that act of composure that Thompson argues typifies oral testimony, flagging up the ‘importance of story within life’, to use Portelli’s definition. In turn it reveals how anecdote operates more precisely as a Bakhtinian form of ‘speech genre’: a form within the nature oral testimony; a structural component, then, with important ideological orientations. Emplotment – the structure of the narrative – turns on the transgression of space. This is the space of the canteen, where drivers rest up; but it is also a very particular space – that seat occupied ‘traditionally’ by the male worker. Ann has to negotiate what is, in effect, a male centred space, and her course of action is to meet any objections openly. As she says, ‘There’s nowhere else to go so what am I supposed to do, stand outside the door and watch?’ Transgression, then, takes two forms. In the first instance by making porous the boundaries of male designated space; secondly, and perhaps more tellingly, in her refusal to accept her male colleagues insistence that she is out of place. But it is the nature of the refusal that is pertinent. To contest authority she employs sardonic humour. When told it is the man’s chair, her response is not to consider moving but to ask, ‘does it have his name on it?’ When countered with the same reprimand, she alters tack. When her initial riposte fails to register – ‘does it have his name on it’ – she turns to parody. This involves not only a discursive response – ‘I’m sorry, I’m not worthy’ – but also action that embodies her


act of resistance to male authority with ironic and hyperbolic gestures of obeisance and submissiveness. In Bakhtinian terms – embedded in the notion of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin, 1984a) – she renders ‘common sense’ nonsense (understood here through a Gramscian perspective on hegemonic modes that fix social effects as forces of nature, as ‘just the way things are’). This is verbal parody profoundly embodied, and through this gestural practice ridicule in the end robs her male colleague of speech, of the capacity to react, and thus of conserving (even, possibly, reversing it) the status quo. The function of anecdote in this testimony is evident, we suggest. It emerges in the narrative at a particular and significant point in the work-life history; the point where she has to encounter entrenched attitudes if she is to establish on equal terms her own identity and presence as a driver. Thus the narrative, as I suggested earlier, is an anecdote that contests authority, and it is the mode of contestation that is of very real interest, as I suggest above. Mikhail Bakhtin’s arguments in Rabelais and his World (1984a) throws some light on what is happening; specifically Bakhtin’s formulation of the carnivalesque and its place as a key cultural form and ideological intervention. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais underlined the cultural place of carnival in later Middle Ages and Renaissance culture. Representing a popular form of the people it functioned to violate societal norms and values through a cultural expression that ridiculed authority figures through humour and elements of the grotesque, embodied in physical gesture and comportment: in turn symbolically undermining authority’s power. As described by Simon Dentith, carnivalesque reproduces ‘within its own structures and by its own practice, the characteristic inversions, parodies and discrownings of carnival proper’ (1995: 65). Establishing her presence within the male-dominated environment of the canteen, and thus her presence as an equal in terms of her working identity and presence, Ann’s ironic and gestural riposte – while not using the low humour of the bodily grotesque identifiable in other key modes of carnivalesque – operates to insist on an axis of equivalence between the male drivers and herself and a refusal to accept their norms. As she says, ‘Everybody thought it was quite funny so luckily I got away with that, sort of like broke the ice’, and the metaphor used here of breaking ice suggests the fast frozen social relations of the workplace setting that had been long the domain of male workers. Thus one key significance of anecdote in testimony is the marking out of important moments in a working life, and these can range from celebratory events where


identity is affirmed, or ‘won’, to stories of defeat and sometimes despair. ****** We take this further by turning to Dave, a Head of Department at a school in the North-West of England, in an inner-city area marked by various levels of social deprivation. I spoke with him on a number of occasions during my time researching at the school. But our lengthiest conversation was during an extended lunch break, during which he spoke about his formative experiences and outlined in a number of brief anecdotal forms the ‘meaning’ of teaching for him. We talked briefly about his experiences at university before starting to teach. Then I asked: IV:

So, how did it feel then, being there for the first time in front of class? Dave: It was like, here you go, here’s your timetable, there’s the key, all right, you’ve got year eight, year nine, year ten, they won’t give me a year eleven and the lower sixth level, brilliant, shut the door, it’s my world, and it was all about me and these kids and although it was a grammar school, there was some tough working class kids there who weren’t super urbanified, if you know what I mean, and again, I recognised, you know, I said I recognise you when I was your age, you know, I’d have been in your gang. From this early experience, in a relatively affluent though socially mixed area, he moved into a more definitively inner-city location. In part, this was to relocate to a different city, but the purpose ran deeper: Dave: It was more a homecoming, I felt at home, you know, even if I had a much more comfortable upbringing than any of the kids there [the new school]. IV: In what sense? Dave: It [his own background] was working class, although it was the good stuff of working class. It was the sixties, it was the peace dividend, and that’s how I was brought up, you know, we had woods and we had parks and we had whole generations growing up together from really similar … I mean where I grew up it’s just all Catholics, when I say really


similar, you know, we were together from six months old, in one way or another, from nurseries and play schemes and all the way up to sixth form and I noticed that wasn’t there, it was much more fractured … because they’re not working, but it’s only there but for the grace of God, and this is ’91 [1991] this, but all I saw was a mess … there’s not even a pub, let alone a youth club, there was nothing, you know, this was an estate where someone’s front room is the only shop on the estate. I’ve been aware that I was in the middle of it, and I was one of the people who were supposed to be changing it, or at least teaching … and I think that has driven me. Anecdote, according to James (2003), is one means of mediating a dialogic exchange between self and other. It represents a form of narrative that either discloses or obscures an event, dependent upon the utterance context and both social and individual experience. A central feature of Dave’s testimony forms a kind of moral tale, bounded once more, or interpretable again, through Volosinov’s (1973) notion of ‘evaluative accents’. In the previous testimony Ann undermined masculine authority at work – through her challenge to it – through carnivalesque dialogic modes. Dave’s testimonies differ in configuration, however. For instance, in these early ‘tales’ the anecdotal frame fashioned events as personal experience – ‘I’ve been aware that I was in the middle of it, and I was one of the people who were supposed to be changing it, or at least teaching … and I think that has driven me …’ – articulating the moral aspect of the tale he told. Closer examination, however, witnesses a narrative form that mapped both individual and social history within its telling. His present-self began emerging early as an extension of his past-self, in our discussion together; this enabled a structure of feeling spoken through a type of recognition and alignment embedded with ‘significant’ others – family, particularly fellow teachers and the pupils, too. His self-representation here might be regarded as one worked through the idea of a ‘rebel’ (as is evident on numerous cases of ‘resistance’ to authority, again an anecdotal form), but his narration consistently brings into focus more than the sole significance of ‘self’ alone. Structure of feeling plays a crucial mediating role in the discussion – as it has in much of this book – incorporating in its conceptualisation those almost unconscious, or spontaneous, feelings or affects of lived experience interacting with the cognitive, or reflexive, dimension


Andrew Sayer (2005) has used to delineate identity and action. Therefore, as Williams stated, when used appropriately structure of feeling as consciousness can be seen as ‘not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelated continuity’ (Williams, 1977: 132). In this context the mechanism of anecdote enables the inter-relation of thought and feeling to expose tension in the narrating of work identity and self. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that teachers ‘who come from working-class backgrounds, may feel propelled to work in urban schools because of stereotyping and prejudice that they may have encountered while they were at school, college or even in their teacher training’ (Maguire, 2005: 431). This may be a form of riskreduction, according to Maguire, avoiding ‘working in a school where they feel uncomfortable …’ though ‘on the other hand, they may be choosing to work with children who they see as like themselves’ (431). Dave’s storytelling highlights identity and class experience and position; through anecdotal form it is possible to identify Volosinov’s concept of ‘evaluative accents’ through discursive exchanges that stand as both product and production of structures of feeling. Below, the nature of anecdotes finds expression again in the following exchange. It takes the form (once more) of a single scene/episode advanced by Dave, while revealing a dialogic exchange as a dominant structure. Dave told of encounters with ‘impatient middle-class teachers who think that pupils should be more like them’. His response reveals a story that confirms the dialogical form of ideological ‘dispute’. Here, then, he is responding to those he defines as ‘middle-class teachers irritated by “unruly” pupils’: Dave: I told them, well, change your job, because you’re taking the money that we could be spending on somebody who would love to teach here with these kids, so you’ve got to have your eyes wide open, you can’t sentimentalise, which a lot, you know, I’ve seen a lot of middle-class, well-meaning students come in, I want to make a difference in the inner-city, and I say, well stop using words like inner-city … You can’t change the kids by wanting them to change, you’ve got to show them, because you might be the only person in their life who’s ever said this, you know. In a previous chapter we have talked of ‘emotional labour’. In the field of teaching this can be seen to be formed, or informed, through a


structure of feeling embedded in the cultural interactions of community, class and culture traditions. For Dave, a historical formation sustains a reaction to the present. Thus he tells us, ‘I would defend my right to define myself as working class, Thus he told us: I would defend my right to define myself as working class you know, because I don’t think that does leave you, because it’s not just about where you come from, it’s about how you see the world around you and the connections that you make.’ Dave’s testimony reflects, to a significant extent, Diane Reay’s view that ‘if you have grown up working class you know that the solution to class inequalities does not lie in making the working classes middle class but in working at dismantling and sharing out the economic, social and cultural capital which go with a middle class status’ (Reay, 1997: 23). Narration draws attention to the individual and social whereby in key ways working life and experience intersects the two fields, while anecdotes bring to the surface embedded structures of feeling central to the tensions of lived experience. Dave’s testimonies shift continuingly between self and other, between past experience and the present; while the quality of anecdotes as ‘performative acts’ shows ‘the dialectic of the narrated and narrative event, and the importance of performance in the production of narrative meaning’ (see James, 2003: 160–83). Performance is embedded in the form of the utterance and utterance context itself; this means that the anecdote as utterance form ‘is riddled with the consciousness and political unconscious of the speaker, the social over-determination therein, expected or misperceived response … the immediate social context in which the utterance is (re)produced’ (Hitchcock, 1992: 7). Thus language, intention and ideology are inextricable in such conceptions. Intention is not only some individual act of speaking or creating because it always embodies a directed-ness towards objects and addressees (and an assumed response from them), yet always in a discursive environment occupied by the intentions of others. Bakhtin and Medvedev (1985) regarded the process as essential in both constructing and re-presenting the social world. Opposed pressures keep language mobile and can transform it. As Hitchcock (1992) insists, ‘dialogics does not make for harmony, according to Bakhtin, but for dissonance [and] to track the sociality of language is to analyse social struggle’ (Hitchcock, 1992: 5). Anecdotes can be regarded as performing in this way, constituting ‘a mediation of social conflict at any one moment in history’ (Hitchcock, 1992: 5). Being part of a trade union, here, is a political act as well as an individual choice, and that impulse derives primarily for Dave from family and class tradition.


Dave: I would never not be in a union and I would never not abide … I would have to leave the union if I didn’t agree with the decision, but not by attacking the union, and I think that is something that, although mum and dad were not radical, they would always say, ‘no you don’t, it’s the union, it’s all you’ve got’. I remember a time when I was very young, and there was a strike at the factory, the engineers were on strike, my mum worked there, because the engineers were on strike, no one was working. There was no strike pay, because my mum was just laid off, there was no money, and I found out years later we came that close to being evicted, that we were on school meals and we didn’t know we were on school meals. I just thought we were spending time at my Aunt’s house, but that’s because my dad was working as a cab driver and my mum was working in a bar to try and you know, make ends meet, and you just do it. They were on the picket line every day and we don’t know. It comes from that, without it being big, without it being banners and you know, waving cards, but it’s something root and branch, it’s part of your make-up. Memory is a defining feature of oral testimonies, finding articulation through anecdotes that foreground specific lived experience that matter. Dave’s story above – indeed, throughout – has been an intricate weave of past and present signalling memory as not passive, not a mere ‘depository of facts’, but ‘an active process in the creation of meanings’ (Portelli, 1997: 52), and this signifies an important feature of anecdotes. Memory constitutes to the self; ‘the way memories of the past are generated and understood by given social groups [and individuals within social groups] is a direct guide to how they understand their position in the present’. In this view it becomes the case ‘that one can, in fact, barely separate social memory from an analysis of the social at all, and that, conversely, any analysis of social identity and consciousness, could become an analysis of perceptions of the past’ (Fentress and Wickham, 1992: 126). Composure as storytelling – as Thompson defined it, the reconciling of past and present, in the endeavour to find, and articulate, a narrative, or anecdotal form, that ‘fits’ – once again becomes significant in the narrative account, and Dave’s testimony strongly confirms Fentress and Wickham’s view. If there is an element of nostalgia colouring the anecdote, it should be seen as nostalgia as critique (Kirk, 2003, 2007), representing what Raphael Samuel described as ‘an active shaping force’ for making sense, so that ‘it is dynamic … dialectically


related to historical thought, rather than being some negative other to it’ (Samuel, 1994: ix–x). In a range of contexts we have noted the ways Andrew Sayer (2005) draws on such concepts as recognition, respect and commitment to explore the effects of difference, and here this approach offers one way to think about our respondents’ work-life histories and in this instance their subjective embedding in anecdotes. Sayer views commitment as central to social action; as something that emerges ‘through continued immersion in relationships and activities, and through embodiment’ (2005: 40). This can be juxtaposed to preferences, where ‘we are generally willing to substitute something else for what we prefer … commitments can’t be sold or swapped for something else … I am committed to certain people, ideas and causes and can’t be bought off, for they are ends in themselves, not merely means to other ends’ (2005: 41). It is formative in Dave’s commitment to teaching and to pupils. Ball (in Day et al., 2001) explored teacher identity through the prism of two analytical concepts he calls situated and substantive identity.2 Dave’s anecdotal forms reveal to some extent Ball’s structural form and Dave’s relation to his role as a teacher. Taking Ball’s construction here, it is possible to regard a situational identity as a malleable, more contingent self, and the substantial identity as a kind of ‘master-narrative’ of the self finding confirmation through anecdotes, drawing attention to the ways working as a teacher plays in sustaining identities. ****** Commitment to work and the work place is not a ‘natural’ response, even though the significance of work holds a central experiential form for producing identity practice and action. The world of work can become a major location in which the need and desire to commit oneself to something lies in the world of work, thus it is not uncommon in this sphere for people to perform ‘beyond the call of duty’. Sayer sees commitments (either in the workplace or outside it, in other contexts of social or individual action) making up ‘our character and without them we are likely to feel rootless and lost. Losing, or being prevented from pursuing commitments we have already formed’, he tells us, ‘leads to something akin to bereavement’. Work remains a key, often formative, experience and any range of conflicts or affiliations in the workplace constitute powerful and sometimes overwhelming experiences for workers: this was expressed in our Introduction, articulating Sayer’s view that ‘mixtures of ambition, struggle for self-esteem and


emotional commitment … can have a huge impact on workers’ lives – at the extreme, prompting them to leave secure jobs and uproot their lives’ (2005: 42). Our final example below is that of a former railway worker and in a number of ways his response confirms some of the arguments made throughout the book. In this example the anecdote, once again, belongs to the category of authority story, which, as I have already suggested, represents the interaction between the narrator and someone of greater social standing and power. I have also suggested throughout that anecdotes act to condense a range of feelings: a way of managing disappointment, a means of stating a presence, and a way of existing, as one critic has put it, in the eyes of others (James, 2003) when, in some significant sense, that existence has been erased, or is under erasure. Some of these orientations have been evident in our previous discussion, as they are in the following. Ted is a retired signalman. In Ted’s story – and in contrast with Ann’s but evident in Dave’s – we read an anecdote that contains much more clearly defined class connotations through an encounter between a committed and life-long trade unionist and management. Talking of industrial action, he told us: Yeah it was all done through the union. It was the NUR at the time. There was a threat of strike … I’ve done a few strikes, because I was sort of 100 per cent strike action that I did on the underground. I was also out and a lot of managers, later on, they used to say, you’ll be out … I had a reputation, yeah. I was called Trotsky [laughing]; I went in red and things like that … This section of his work-life narrative is taken, however, with the story of Ted’s retirement, his last day at work, and his ‘send off’. In itself, then, a particular work-life testimony – in some senses a ‘universal’ one as, sooner or later, most workers will have this precise tale to tell in some form or other. Ted is talking about the commemorative gifts the company provide for long service, and this leads up to the retirement event proper. Ted: But one was a watch and you could have three, so you could have three of one, a two and a one, or a three, which was something like … I think a sewing machine was one of them. So I picked that, that was a two, and a barometer was one, so I got that as well.


IV: Twenty-five years service? Ted: That was twenty-five years. And then when … after I left, because it had changed to the different Lines, you had Bakerloo, Central, the Victoria, those ones together, and Northern, Jubilee and Piccadilly went together. The Bakerloo, Central and Vic, they had a do for people who had retired and people who’d been given awards and we went to a place in the West End, an old courthouse which is now a restaurant, and they had the upper room and it was all Bakerloo, Central and Northern … er, Victoria, so I went as Victoria. My friend who I’d been friends with for a long time, he went because he was on the Central and they started off giving people awards for doing their job … basic things, you get an award now if you do your job properly and that. And when it came round to the retirement ones, we all queued up in order, because they had … I’ve got a certificate upstairs … I got the certificate of that, and the manager who was actually telling … you know, introducing everyone, he had it all written on paper, but he didn’t … he started to talk because he knew some of the people, and he come up to me and he said, I can call you John, can’t I? I knew him a long time ago, but I mean I don’t think he sort of remembered and that, and I said, yeah, that’s all right. I’m 34 years and one month [on the job], I said. That’s very good, he said, and ‘we’re really sorry to lose people like you. You mean so much to the job. We’d rather you had stayed … all the bits of bullshit like that, and how wonderful it was and we really don’t want you to go, but you’ve gone and we wish you well … what depot were you a driver at’, he goes. IV: No! Ted: Well, that’s … that just shows you, that just shows you, yeah. IV: So there’s no real connection? Ted: No. And we all stood there and had our photos taken and I ain’t got a copy or anything, so … IV: You didn’t bother? Ted: They didn’t even … they said they’d send them off. IV: What, they didn’t? Ted: No, I never got mine. IV: So you’ve never seen the record of that farewell? Ted: No. IV: So it all felt like a front?


Ted: Yeah. I mean, after … because it was a free bar, a few of the others had … one of them had had a bit to drink and he’s a nice chap, I kind of liked him, he was there with a few girls and he come up to me, all slurring and his arms around me, oh, we don’t want you to go, you shouldn’t have gone, and all that. And I said, well, I’m going now, I’m going home. The anecdote is expressed in direct, or reported, speech, with the evaluative section of the tale built around this key exchange. The coda of the tale – the moral point – lies in the punch line, of course, which in this case relies on the interviewer’s already established knowledge for us that John had been a signalman all his working life and not a driver. The recounting – and conscious crafting – of this anecdote becomes not only a way of deflating the authority of the manager by in essence making a fool out of him, but as a way for Ted to claim his own moral authority. It figures as a form of self-representation connected to the desire to assert his worth, a claim to recognition denied in the manager’s obtuseness and this is summed up for Ted in the exact time he spent on the job and which he makes a point of enunciating: the figure of the 34 years and one month. The key point in the exchange with ‘authority’ is one that is critical in relation to work identity, and to wider themes of dignity and respect. In the story a central point lies in the case of mistaken identity, so that in this instance we might say that the manager had quite literally failed to recognise Ted at all in their encounter. Consequently, as we might expect considering Ted’s trade union commitment, this anecdote exposes the crassness of the manager, the boss, and this is embedded in the punch-line, exposing the manager’s cant and hypocrisy. At the same time, Ted also provided a glimpse for the listener of significance of a working life in shaping identity in both the past and the present. His anecdote expressing a moment of confirmation that expressed a ‘real’ sense (as in a form of ‘authenticity’) of self, formed by a lifetime of political struggle at the point of production. Ted’s has been a long struggle not only for recognition, but also for dignity at work. In this he retains dignity and re-affirms agency by leaving on his own terms, when and how he wants to, and it is through this act that agency is regained and retained, along with a sense of worth as both a worker and trade union activist. These ‘subjective’ responses this chapter has explored draws to readers’ attention the qualities, attributes and actions that had been formed and valued and expressed in our three respondents’ anecdotes.


For Ann its action was to claim recognition – and also a form of acceptance she knew to be due – and this is reflected in different ways in the other two testimonies. This is articulated through the forms of narrative orientation, tone and content. In a comparable way in their discussion of language use, Bakhtin and Medvedev (1985) highlight the significance of what they called evaluative accents inevitably embedded in the utterance. They define this as part of ‘a theory of social evaluation’, which ‘applies to every utterance as a historical speech performance, and not just poetic work’, constituting a ‘performative act which is shaped by and helps shape the historic moment’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985: 126). It is not too difficult to see this formulation as in itself a potential definition of anecdote. If social division and power relations find expression in the utterance then such relations mark inevitably language and the presence in the utterance (as anecdote) of accentuation – what Bakhtin also refers to as the ‘dialogic angling of the word’, which implies an orientation and a manner: in the end, a point of view that accentuates social evaluation. Within the ‘logic of social evaluation’ exists a deep moral economy revolving around co-ordinates of self and other, the individual and community. Thus ‘evaluation is social; it organises discourse’, so that ‘even the inner utterance (inner speech) is social; it is oriented towards some possible audience, towards a possible answer, and it is only in the process of such an orientation that it is able to take shape and form’ (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985: 126). The anecdote can embody such tendencies in heightened ways, and this then requires an attention to language as practical consciousness foregrounding the real value of oral testimony as a means of exploring not only the individual within the social, but, equally significant, how social relations run inescapably through individual narratives as well.

Conclusion That’s another thing, you see, I think, I don’t think, you talked about people being valued. I walked round school and I’d make a point, if I passed by children I’d ruffle their hair, or just pat their shoulder or their back, or eye contact, smile, and they knew that they existed to me, I’d recognised them, they were there. Not said anything, but it, for that minute, they were the focus of my attention, that for them was important. If children are bad, for whatever reason, and you can find one thing that they do well, and praise it, it gives them a feeling like they’ve not known for ages, they might


not know for another long while, but it motivates them, pushes, it gives that little impetus. Praise (Graham, retired primary head). In the testimonies examined here the form of anecdote stands as a ‘genre’ that reflects key moments in a working life. This tendency is a formative one and it echoes in the notion of answerability, which resembles Raymond Williams’s (1977) notion of alignment that, according to Zandy (2004), ‘allows us to penetrate some of the dynamics of relationships within working-class texts as they affect readers’ (Zandy, 2004: 86), but also to engage with and understand class, or workers’ narrative responses to the experiences of a working life in the form of oral testimonies (on ‘answerability’, and its origins, see Bakhtin, 1981; Hitchcock, 1991). Peter Hitchcock terms ‘answerability’ as a constitutive feature of working-class expression, standing as ‘a form of social responsibility that allows workers to “speak” to one another across a range of discourses, discourses of memory, of experience, of alienation, of solidarity’ (in Zandy, 2004: 86). There is a performative dimension to oral testimony, but not an event empty of its ‘authenticity’. As we have suggested already the anecdote embodies, in condensed forms and affects central to testimony, felt desires and expectations around bound to the experience of work and working life. Thus anecdotes represent forms that suggest the ways actors might express structures of feeling as individual experiences in interaction with others. Consequently, to follow some of Sayer’s arguments is to imply that anecdotes can convey a set of norms, or normative judgements, pertaining to what matters to people. To some degree this involves articulating what Sayer called a ‘definition of what is good’; constituting narratives about ‘who people want to be, what they want and can expect to make of their lives, part of which … is a struggle to form and pursue commitments and to get access to the means for doing so’, so ‘in the process, they are simultaneously struggles to establish selfworth’ (Sayer, 2005: 133–4). The anecdote as discussed in this article constitutes a form through which to articulate such desires and actions. In their composure we might encounter an inevitable tension between hegemonic ways of seeing; this corresponds to Williams’s definition of practical and official consciousness, as a potential site of contradiction. Social actors, in the very process of composing the self, use the range of conventions and forms available within the culture: conventions that must, in some significant, meaningful, sense correspond to experience. Lived experience is not accessed, in this view, in some unproblematic sense, removed from hegemonic forces, but exists


in a dialectic relation with them as practical consciousness, and becomes articulated then in modes that have an important relation to counterhegemonic forms (Kirk, 2007). Finally, the open-endedness, a certain un-finishedness, that might be seen to define oral testimony could well be confirmed or contradicted through the operation of anecdotes. Anecdotes strive frequently, I would argue, to have the final word, disclosing a desire to secure meaning, interpret an event and mark subjectivity; yet, as we have seen, tensions still inevitably press in. Bourdieu’s comments on methodology in The Weight of the World (1999) suggest that testimony constitutes the intersection of points of view and their shifting nature as they contest or affirm meaning (Bourdieu, 1999: 3). We can relate this in significant ways to Volosinov’s notion of language interaction and the place of ‘inner speech’, or Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘hidden internal polemic’ (Volosinov, 1973: 76; Bakhtin, 1984: 208) as always the product of sociohistoric forces. Meaning emerges in and through these structures and utterance forms. Consequently, anecdotes in oral testimony can be seen to represent ‘stories’ indicative of lived experience; as structures of feeling uttered as possible newly emergent voices, or as residual but still pressing ones, yet always bound up in a key relation and necessary engagement with the dominant.

Conclusion

She said, I can’t imagine you teaching in a class, she sees me on a Saturday night, all having a great time. And then she was just absolutely gob smacked. She said, you know, I really am envious of the satisfaction you get from your job. (Sophie, 26, teacher) The whole ethos now? Debt. I mean you wouldn’t have dreamed those days of getting somebody into debt! You know I think the whole ethos of the industry has changed, to a sales environment and not a service environment. It’s a case of you’ll have what we give you [customers] and not what you actually want. (Glennys, bank worker, 59) Am I happy I joined the railways? Well, like anything, sometimes, especially if it’s cold and don’t like getting up doing shift work sometimes, but on the whole yes, I do like it a lot. (Samuel railway guard, 48) The core of this book has been the oral testimonies of work and workers in three different occupations. These testimonies were situated and understood in their particular social, collective and occupational formations, institutions and traditions. Out of our findings we argue that these individual narratives of work and identity contest ideological generalisations and the dominant ‘grand-narratives’ on the changing role work plays in people’s lives and its place in the shaping of individual and collective identities. Consequently a more complex and detailed account of the historical and contemporary significance of work has shown that these experiences still figure in fundamental ways 225


as a site of identification, in the lives of most of the men and women with whom we spoke. We knew that profound changes in the context of work over the last 30 years was beyond question, and a vast number of the testimonies shared with us in this book confirms this in a number of ways. One of our key findings revealed quite clearly the continued importance to people of work, highlighting the ways work shapes our social interactions and daily exchanges, and complex sense of self. This intersects with feelings of belonging, found in our testimonies through a range of narrative forms of storytelling and in the form of objects and memorabilia that linked to personal experience and collective expression representing, in some instances, a lifetime of work. The radical changes we have referred to can be seen through the altering place of gender as one instance, in an emergent new labour market dynamic, forming a crucial position of this experience to contemporary working lives and identity practice. From the end of the Second World War and up until the oil crisis in the West in 1973, a set of assumptions about waged work revolved around an expectation of ‘lifetime work for men, the centrality of waged work in the social construction of male identity and the expectation of rising incomes for the majority of households supported by the male breadwinner’ and the outcome of this was the ‘dominance of masculinised and class-based forms of organisation’. In the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the feminisation of large parts of the labour market re-shaped it to a degree hitherto unseen. As shown in Chapter 1, this was concomitant with the transformation of the economy from manufacturing to service industries, in a restructuring of the labour market. As industrial work rapidly declined and the service sector increasingly predominated, the roles, expectations and experiences of men and women altered in turn. An outcome of this was an emerging tension for many groups around perceptions of self, and of place and of identity. Concepts of masculinity came into focus through the notion of ‘crisis’, with men increasingly encountering a sense and experience of powerless and ‘placeless-ness’, a sense of redundancy in a world where traditional roles dissolved, and accepted routes from school to the workplace blocked or closed. From this sense of ‘redundancy’, and, quite literally, an exit from the labour market, there emerged a profound sense of loss, as the modes of work performed by men over generations simply disappeared. Following this perceived loss of work, recent research has argued for other ways of thinking about identity in the context of the decline of traditional labour and of identities historically formed from such tradi-

Conclusion 227

tions. Anoop Nayak (2003), in a study of post-industrial spaces and places, has explored the ways young working-class men negotiate the transitions to ‘manhood’ in radically altered socio-economic landscapes, ones radically different to those traversed by their parents and grandparents before them. Traditionally, as we have shown, workingclass men made the trek from school into some form of manufacturing (Willis, 1977; Savage, 2000), and despite the poor quality of some of this employment it was at least seen as providing a ‘job for life’. Deindustrialisation confounded this; factory work declined, unemployment became a central feature especially of young working-class men’s lives in the 1980s, or an expanded service sector offered very different kind of work to these young – work shorn of the ‘masculine’ security of previous work practice and position, with its regular wage, male camaraderie and sense of ‘place’. Thus, the Post-Fordist labour market has not only worked to delay and interrupt tradition youth transitions, but it has also worked to make them more complex. The transitions young men now make are characterised not only by a ‘feminisation’ process of work experience, but by the celebrated notion of individualisation in the narrative of work, where older working-class formations, traditions and alignments melt into air following the collapse of traditional work. We have argued here that it is necessary to reject any simple and straightforward acceptance of the transition from an identity shaped by work to the idea of identity formed primarily through acts of consumption: one dominant position that had formed key arguments within a range of discursive fields. In our work we did not find evidence, either empirically or theoretically, that revealed any straightforward acceptance of, or passive resignation to, new work practices or relations. Instead, in our oral testimonies complex structures of feeling spoke of people’s resistance to hegemonic modes and processes which seek to shape their lives by controlling the nature and affects determining work and shaping ones actions within it. Andrew Sayer, in his exploration of identity in The Moral Significance of Class (2005), speaks of class and the necessity of recognition in constituting the self and this remains pertinent in the broader context of work and work identity. Embedded in our testimonies we hear the presence of work relations as deeply experiential events, marking the place of work as crucial to subjectivities. As we have already insisted, work and identity foregrounds both moral questions and political issues that point to concepts of fairness, respect, dignity and recognition, actions and feeling constituting collective acts of expression through structures of feeling.


This is the effect, or affects, of both representational strategies and lived experience. Within structures of feeling – those ‘meanings and values that are actually lived and felt’ (Williams, 1977: 134 – evaluative accents (Volosinov, 1973: 147) dialogically shape understandings of self and other, produce alignments and commitments to ways of being, acceptance or rejection of dominant meanings made and established within hegemonic structures and processes. This is bound to ‘feelings’ and experiences of work; it constitutes utterances expressing how working-class people manage the resources found to handle such experiences. This may involve – and historically, has involved, as has been articulated in many places in this book – the telling of stories, and the construction of narratives, employed to counter hegemonic discourses and confirm self. Structures of feeling denote the presence of lived experience through practical consciousness. This concept flags up the presence of historical continuities and the articulation of cultural values, expressive of alignments and solidarities that engage both the past and present and open out to what may appear as newly emergent experiential forms, or structures of feeling ‘in solution’. The place and significance of work – seen as both presence and absence – remains crucial to this understanding, bound to other modes of identity formation around class, but also generation, gender, sexuality and ‘race’. The relevance of ‘race’ and ethnicity we have already pointed to in our Introduction. Later chapters explored the interaction of these identity forms articulated through work and their expression expressed in wider contexts. As in other research contexts, the concept of ‘race’ or the notion of ethnicity is complex in ours too. Stuart Hall viewed the place of ‘race’ as containing no validity. Indeed he said that there was no longer any essential ‘black’ subjectivity and that to seek a black identity simply reiterated the ‘bad old essential white subject’ (Harris and Rampton, 2009). For Hall identity should only be approached discursively and as situationally-placed and thus contingent. In our own overarching context – the place and meanings of work – identity is probably better perceived, as we suggested in Chapter 3, as constituted through notions of intersectionality, though not exclusively. To return to ‘race’, Gilroy talked of social and cultural interactions that finally overcome race, creating ‘this convivial culture, racial and ethnic differences … that have been able to become “ordinary”’ (Gilroy, 2006). This echoes Raymond Williams who claimed long ago that culture is ‘ordinary’, though in that subtle argument culture and identity was formed around the idea of class. This culture (of the working class, primarily, for Williams) was viewed as a formation figured through

Conclusion 229

difference but defined principally by a mutuality, a type of solidarity (labour and of community). We argue that this concept fits appropriately in the context of work identity. Although our research found fewer black workers to interview (we show this in our Introduction), the men and women who chose to talk spoke of work as a place of selfaffirmation, where difference was expressed through their capacity to ‘perform’ labour, but also in the desire for recognition through work and the act of commitment through self and towards others. Work is a space for interaction not only through gender and generation, but through relations of ‘race’ and ethnicity, something we found in the utterances of black workers in teaching and the railway industry. But this subject requires further investigation and exploration, examining the different locations of work and community, for example rural and metropolitan, and the importance of intersectionality. Bourdieu’s important work around habitus has already been invoked in our study. His concept of sens pratiques constitutes a practical sense of everyday life, that which makes our actions meaningful and that links to the notions of ethos – a kind of spontaneous way of acting in the world embodied and articulated through the habitus which relates then to the acquisition and operative use of capitals: cultural, economic, social and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1986, 1999). Yet notions of the habitus, as Sayer’s work argued (2005), appear primarily to figure identity through reproduction, disabling the possibility of transition or change (but see also Crossley, 2003, discussed in Chapter 6). This then relates to the importance of social action and notions of agency in the context of work. We found the conception of social action derived from work-based identity emerged in a number of contexts. Both historically and in the contemporary moment, conceptions of civic engagement and social action find expression through trade union work, which can, in turn, propel workers to involve themselves in wider community activity. In Chapter 6 we focused on the possibility of ‘organic intellectuals’ as active individuals in the work place and within trade unions. A number of our oral testimonies articulated the place of social class as both occupational and cultural formations, conveying utterances that often framed a commonly felt structure of feeling. The role and function of trade unions still provides a political class identity, which is often reinforced by cultural modes of identification disclosing class codes and connotations. This can be expressed in very clearly enunciated class politics (as perhaps expected in the railway industry), whereby individual utterances are framed through collective modes of understanding, and thereby notions of a class-in-itself,


for instance, become coded in more radical terms as potentially a classfor-itself (see also Chapter 5, where Jefferys suggests this in relation to bank workers). Secondly, identity formed in and through class and work is made manifest through what we call more ‘mundane’, everyday, communicative interactions that nevertheless enunciate class consciousness, or identity formation, at a range of levels (Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 1997, 2004, and Rampton, 2006). These forms of identification speak class while at the same time significantly interacting with other identity forms. In practice, much of the research underpinning this book was a cultural analysis of the field of work, and in this context the inclusion of visual information did not jar or grate but became an integral part of the research process. Thus, visual sources have not been ‘add-ons’ but indispensable components in our description of social worlds. Throughout this book we have treated visual images as ‘social facts’ (Trachtenberg, 1998) and as ‘social data’ (Harper, 1987) enabling us to incorporate them not merely as illustrations of particular events or practices but to acknowledge their role in actively contributing to formations of social and work identities. As such they have been important in reconstituting historical contexts, one of the most obvious examples being that of gender bias in recruitment and careers literature. However the photographs kept as part of participants’ work memorabilia and generated through the interviews became crucial in helping describe individual identities and the strength and/or weakness of their affiliations with different locations of identity formation, for example workplace/social class/occupation/union. They also provide information on workplace rituals as in the leaving do, the long-service award. Most importantly, methodologically, was the photo-elicitation effect on the interview process when the handling of photographs prompted emotional accounts of former work, events, people and places. As part of this the tellers of the stories recounted here frequently asserted their individual stance in relation to dominant discourses of work. It was at these points that we felt that we had been most successful in creating a place where, in the words of the oral historian Anna Green, we were able to ‘re-assert the value of individual remembering, and the capacity of the conscious self to contest and critique cultural scripts or discourses’ and ‘explore those points of conflict and rupture in people’s lives that create confrontations with discourses of power’ (Green, 2004: 42). In conclusion we argue that work remains central to our lives. In one sense this is blindingly obvious. In our societies needing to work is central ‘to live’ – the need to eat, to shelter, to love. For most adults

Conclusion 231

work is crucial whether it is present or absent, in the form of a job market that is open to some, but closed to others. Yet this description fails to acknowledge the complexity of work and the affects of working life. In our study we have attempted to foreground this in the wider historical contexts, discursive practices and oral testimonies that we mapped out. In our conversations on the experiences of working lives we found responses that revealed ‘confrontations with discourses of power’ and yet many narratives that revealed work as a space for identity formation to take effect, and for the interaction of social action and collective endeavour.

Appendix 1 Interviews made between 2005–2008 by age, sex and occupation

Appendix 1 occupation

Interviews made between 2005–2008 by age, sex and

Banking

Railways

Teaching

Retired

6 men 5 women 11

11 men 1 woman 12

8 men 5 women 13

36

Mid/end working life

8 men 12 women 20

14 men 3 women 17

8 men 9 women 17 (+1 return)

55

4 men 1 woman 5

3 men 1 woman 4

3 men 7 women 10

19

Young workers/ new entrants Totals

36

33

41

Total

110

Note: Fifty-two interviews including one return interview were made by John Kirk. Forty-eight interviews were undertaken by Christine Wall and the remaining nine were made by the other team members, Tim Strangleman, Jane Martin and Steve Jefferys. Twenty interviews included some form of visual material or memento as part of the conversation.

232

Notes Introduction 1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/obama_inauguration/7840646.stm accessed on March 10th 2010. 2 See Die DDR im Bild: zum Gebrauch der Fotografie im anderen deutschen Staat, herausgegeben von Karin Hartewig und Alf Lüdtke. Published: Göttingen: Wallstein (c2004). Later Lüdtke edited The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, N.J., Chichester: Princeton University Press, c1995). 3 The publications and ideas that originated the idea of an end to work have been reviewed by Tim Strangleman in ‘The nostalgia for permanence at work?: The end of work and its commentators’ (2007), Sociological Review, 55(1): 81–103. See also Charles Handy (1984), The Future of Work, Oxford: Basil Blackwell; André Gorz (1986), Farewell to the Working Class, London: Pluto Books. 4 See Jane Martin (2007) ‘Thinking Education Histories Differently: Biographical Approaches to Class Politics and Women’s Movements in London, 1900s to 1960s’, History of Education 36: 4–5, 515–33.

Chapter 1 Charting Historical Change: Work in the US and UK during the Twentieth Century 1 Women were universally given the vote in 1920 in the US and in 1928 in Britain; men were given universal access to the vote in Britain in 1918, while property-related restrictions on the suffrage of non-whites (men and women) that had been introduced since 1870 had formally enfranchised former slaves were only finally removed in the US in 1964. 2 See chapter 2 of S. Jefferys (1986), Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3 US Bureau of the Census, No. HS –30. Marital Status of Women in the Civilian Labor Force: 1900 to 2002. 4 TfL Workforce Diversity Report (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/ corporate/Item05-Workforce-Diversity.pdf accessed March 2010). 5 Data from www.publicpurpose.com – Wendell Cox Consultancy (Demographia). 6 See C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (c1948); and The Sociological Imagination (1959). 7 In 1951 Talcot Parsons was denounced as a Communist to J. Edgar Hoover, an allegation he denied by affidavit in 1954. In 1949 Clark Kerr signed the antiCommunist loyalty oath required by the University of California but opposed the dismissal of those who refused to sign. Kerr became UC Berkeley’s first chancellor in 1952. 233

234 Notes

Chapter 2 Narratives of Labour and Labour Lost: Working Life and Its Representations 1 ‘Rugged individualism’ also attempts for Savage to capture the ‘I’m alright Jack’ individualism that purportedly complemented a kind of working-class machismo marking a newly confident shop-floor belligerence of the post-war years. Other such representations emerge in novels and films like John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) and Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960). 2 It’s worth pointing out that the transformation in economic life suggested was not as straightforward as some commentators suggest. The Journal of Contemporary British History devoted a whole edition to a critique of the subject, titled ‘Contesting affluence: An introduction’, guest edited by Shinobu Majima and Mike Savage in December 2008. 3 These photographs can be viewed online at http://spender.boltonmuseums.org.uk 4 The personal story of Ruby Loftus emerged as part of a Home Front Recall oral history project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and undertaken by Newport Museum and Art Gallery. Some of the stories are available on the internet at www.wartimenewport. 5 See Ruth Watts review of Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s, Stephanie Spencer (review no. 689) URL:http//www.history.ac.uk/reviews/ paper/wattsr.html 6 The TUC Collections are housed at London Metropolitan University and can be visited by appointment only. A large amount of material is accessible online at: www.unionhistory.info/. 7 The bank union NUBE formed in 1946, became BIFU in 1979 and affiliated to the TUC – which marked a change from a small pocket-sized journal to the radical format of a broadsheet newspaper. After BIFU merged with AMICUS its occupational connection was broken – reflected in front covers that refer back to the allegorical forms of the nineteenth century to communicate generalised aspirations of the union. The ASLEF journal, again pocket-sized, did not feature a group of workers in close-up on a front cover until 1970 and these were the all male crew of the London- Newcastle train that had just broken the best recorded time for the journey. The RMT, formerly the NUR, however had a tradition of radicalism and published a weekly broadsheet newspaper throughout the whole post-war period until 1998/9 when it stopped publishing for a year and then reemerged into the digital age with a website, and a magazine style journal showing Jimmy Knapp and a laptop on the front cover of the first issue. This journal, like those of most unions, is accessible on the web with clear photoreportage single page images on the front.

Chapter 3

Identity in Question and the Place of Work

1 For an acute critique of the absence of economics through the privileging of recognition, see David Harvey’s (1993) ‘Class relations, social justice and the

Notes 235 politics of difference’ in Keith, M. and Pile, S. (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity, London: Routledge. Here, however, recognition, and its relation to understanding identity and work, inevitably draws economics, in a broad sense, into our arguments. 2 Identity politics is an area of considerable contestation. Skeggs has talked about the importance of appearance in term of identity and recognition and the understanding of the self in the context of class. She argues that ‘some groups are denied access to economic and social resources because they are not recognised as being worthy recipients’ (Skeggs, 2004: 129), and in the process of this ‘de-recognise’ themselves. This is a mode of symbolic violence which constitutes and reinforces class, also impacting on the place, and the experience, of work identities and dispositions too. See also Sayer, 2005. 3 Much could also be said about the ‘absence’ of women in the ‘end of work’ debate, too. Indeed in previous discussions of the place of women in early Cultural Studies, McRobbie (1980) pointed to the absence in both Willis (1977) and Hebdige (1979) of any serious discussion of women in relation to sub-cultural resistance.

Chapter 4 Working at the Chalk-face: Articulating the ‘Teacherly-Self’ and Educational Change 1 These are positions on identity that were explored in greater detail in Chapter 3. 2 We do recognise that there were some misgivings at the time regarding Plowden’s strictures, and these are mapped out by Ken Jones in Education in Britain (1994), but he also argues there that there existed enough of a consensus around the report to take ‘the ideas developed by progressive educators … to the height of their influence’ (84), within the education sector and particularly concerning teacher training. 3 This might be viewed as ‘backward’ nostalgia. But we have argued elsewhere (Kirk, 2003) that nostalgia, or what can be called ‘nostalgic memory’ represents a symbolic act of recovery: of neglected experience, forgotten voices, silenced groups.

Chapter 5 Teller, Seller, Union Activist: Class Formation and Changing Bank Worker Identities 1 Even at Labour’s high water mark in the 1997 General Election, of BIFU rank and file members only 34 percent voted Labour while 32 percent voted Conservative. See Jefferys (2003). 2 The National Union of Bank Employees was formed in 1946 by a merger of the Bank Officers’ Guild and the Scottish Bankers’ Association; NUBE changed its name in 1979 to reflect the grown of the finance sector, becoming the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union (BIFU). In 1999 BIFU merged with the Nat/West Staff Association and Barclays Group Staff Union to form UNIFI. In 2002 the Woolwich Independent Staff Association (WISA) merged with UNIFI. In 2004 UNIFI merged with Amicus, and in 2008 Amicus merged with the TGWU to form Unite.

236 Notes 3 Between 2005 and 2007 the authors interviewed 11 retired bank workers, 18 who were in the middle or towards the end of their working lives, and seven who had begun work in banking within the last ten years. Of the 36 bank worker interviews, 18 were women and 18 men. Those we interviewed work or had worked in London, Manchester, South Wales and Glasgow and were contacted by us through snowballing techniques initiated in each location through one or more trade union contact. One-third, however, were not trade union members. 4 In 2003 the UK accounted for 27 per cent of the total earnings of the investment banking industry in Europe (ONS UK 2005 Yearbook: 463). 5 OECD National Accounts CD Rom, 1999. 6 The number of building societies fell from 273 in 1980 to 64 in 2004 (ONS 2005 Yearbook). 7 Data for 2001–2006 from UK Annual Statistical Abstract, 2006 and Groeningen dataset for 1979–2000). 8 Office of National Statistics, Labour Force Survey, Table 20: Employees and Self-Employed by socio-economic classification, 2007 9 Nostalgia may be evident, but not necessarily ‘reactionary’.

Chapter 6

Tracking the Place of Work Identity on the Rails

1 See for example, The Railwaymen, 1984, R. S. Joby; Life on the Lines, c1984, J. H. Farrington, the large number of autobiographies and memoirs mentioned earlier and also histories of the railway trade unions, The Railwaymen. The History of the National Union of Railwaymen, 1963; P. S. Bagwell; The Lighted Flame. A History of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers, 1950; N. McKillop, and A Hundred Years of the Locomen’s Trade Union, 1980, B. Murphy. 2 Williams uses this term when discussing structures of feeling.

Chapter 7 Something to Show For It: The Place of Work Memorabilia in Three Occupations 1 There is a very large literature on the interpretation of oral histories, the best starting point being the collection of essays edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, The Oral History Reader. The tensions between individual and collective memory and the social role of public remembrance are investigated in two further key works edited by Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone in the Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative series, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory and Regimes of Memory.

Chapter 8 Narrating Work Identity: Oral Testimony and the Place of Anecdotes 1 In The Weight of the World (1999) Bourdieu addresses the potential for such violence in the interview relationship. There he suggests the need for reflexivity; indeed a ‘reflex reflexivity based on a craft, on a sociological “feel” or “eye,” which allows one to perceive and monitor on the spot, as the interview is

Notes 237 actually taking place, the effects of the social structure within which it is occurring’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 608). He underlines this by insisting on what he calls ‘active and methodical listening’ on the interviewer’s part (Bourdieu, 1999: 609). He seems to be suggesting that such a mode of reflexivity deflects the danger of epistemic violence in the interviewer-interviewed/observerobserved relationship, and this is an ethical position as well as a recognition that such strategies are bound up with epistemological issues, too, in the sense of exploring and unearthing some of the essential truths of a person’s life (see also Kirk, 2007). 2 We have already touched on this in relation to teachers. MacLure (1993) rejected the idea of a substantial self as constituting ‘the idea of an essential or ‘substantial’ self …’ MacLure prefers ‘the notion of identity as a set of discursive practices’ (1993: 318). We have questioned this position in the course of this book. Thus we have employed the concept of emotional labour on a number of occasions to foreground structures of feeling which turn around emotions of failure and loss. Such feelings lie within the very nature of the utterance itself used to address change and continuity in a working life – thus reflecting Volosinov’s (1973: 106) understanding of the utterance engaging with the altering evaluative purview of the actor. Experience lies at the very heart of language in this conception, expressing structures of feeling which the technique of oral history as method powerfully reveals.

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Index accentuation, 208, 222 activism, 16, 111, 113 affluence, 13, 57 AFL-CIO, 38 age of affluence, 54, 58, 78 American Federation of Labour (AFL), 25 American Federation of State, 37 anecdotes, 208–13 anti-landlord liberalism, 25 apprenticeships, 93 assigned identity, 104, 108 Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), 151, 234n7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 212, 207, 216, 222, 224 balkanisation of work sociology, 6–7 bank work cultural influences upon identities, 133–7 identities and social action, 139–44 new recruit, 133 performing identities, 137–9 as a social-class identity, 144–7 transformation, 126–33 Barclays Group Staff Association, 140 Barringer, Tim, 60 Bauman, Zygmunt, 84–5 BBC, 57 Beaton, Cecil, 65 Beck, Ulrich, 9, 81, 103 BIFU, 234n7, 235n2 ‘Big Four, The’, 151 Blackburn, R. M., 130–1 Black Death, 42 Bleasdale, Alan, 57 Booth, A., 26 Bornat, Joanna, 181, 183 Bottero, Wendy, 22 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10–11, 98, 163, 207, 224, 229

Boys from the Blackstuff, 57–8 Brah, A., 88 Brandt, Bill, 62 Braverman, Harry, 42 Brazilianisation, 9 Britain non-white ethnic minorities, 33 women’s employment, 21–2 British trade unionism, 38–9 British Transport Commission (BTC), 155 Britten, Benjamin, 50 Brook, Susan, 48 Brown, Ford Madox, 60, 65 Brown, Gordon, 76 bureaucratic paternalism, 130 business unionism, 24, 37 call centres, 135, 147, 148 capital labour, 47 capital modernity, 47 Carew, A., 41 Carlyle, D., 105 Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 60 Carter, Susan, 21 Cavalcanti, A., 50 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), 78 changes in industrial structures, 21–7 Chaplin Charlie, 48 Chaplin, Elizabeth, 59–60 civic idealism, 118 class, 87 moral significance, 9 Coal Face, 50–1 colour segregation, 93–5, 96–7 commitments, 10, 110, 218–19 communism, 40 community, 88–90 complex solidarities, 162 composure, 206 as storytelling, 217 249

250 Index Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), USA, 25 Conservative government, 38, 43 consumerism, 10 Cooperative Bank, 140 Corrosion of Character, The, 82–4 County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), 37 cover images, 68–9 craft union, 25, 60 Crompton, Rosemary, 182 cultural patterning effects, 135–6 Cultural Studies, 78, 79, 82, 87 culture, 228–9 Cunningham, Peter, 68 Death of William Posters, The, 56–7 de-industrialisation, 28, 30, 44 Dentith, Simon, 212 deregulation of banking and privatisations, 39 desire, 47 de-skilling, 42 dialogic nature of oral history, 181, 184, 207 dignity of labour, 53 division of labour, 47 documentarism, 48 documentary, 48–9 dress codes, 137–8 Drifters, 49–50 Dunlop, John, 40 Eagleton, Terry, 49, 201 Elsbach, K., 180 emotional labour, 8, 15, 95–6, 104, 105, 109, 110, 122, 129, 215 empathy, 110 emplotment, 211 Employment Acts, UK, 43 employment relations in post-war years, 36–40 end of work, 8–9, 57–9, 86, 148 Engles, Friedrich, 47 Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs, 7 Erikson, Karl, 6 ethnic minority employment, 33–5 evaluative accents, 222

family wage, 8 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 48 feminisation, 226 feminism, 7–8, 54 Fentress, James, 181, 217 films, 49 financialisation, 127 Ford, Henry, 62 Ford Foundation, 40 free markets, 159 full employment, 52–3 gender segregation, 32 in railways, 167–70 see also women workers General Motors, 37 General Post Office (GPO) documentaries, 50 General Strike (1926), UK, 26 Giddens, A., 9, 81, 103 Gilroy, Paul, 80, 228 globalisation and banking, 127–9 Glucksmann, Miriam, 8, 202 Goldin, Claudia, 23 Goodson, Ivor, 113 Gorz, A., 6 Green, Anna, 182 Grierson, John, 48, 52 Guillebaud Inquiry, 155 habitus, 10–11, 118, 140, 229 Halbwachs, Maurice, 181 Halford, Susan, 180, 183 Hall, Stuart, 44, 79, 80–1, 87, 228 Handy, Charles, 6 Harbison, Frederick, 40 Harper, Douglas, 183 Harrison, Tom, 48, 61 Hart, R. A., 23 Hine, Lewis, 62, 74 Hitchcock, Peter, 216, 223 Hobsbawm, Eric, 26 Hochschild, A., 8 Hoggart, Richard, 78, 87 horizontal gender segregation, 32 Hoskins, Janet, 180–1

Index 251 hot-desking, 180 HSBC, 128, 146 identities, 11 class, and colour, 93–5 individual and collective relation to work, 82–7 intersectionality, 87–90 rise of, 77–8 see also individual entries identity formation and teacherly-self, 95–7 identity politics, 235n2 ideology of the aesthetic, 49 immigration, 45 India, 33 individualisation, 9 individualism, 80, 81–2 inner speech, 207 instrumentalisation, of relationships, 130 intersectionality, 88–90 inter-war years, 53

learning of work alongside older colleagues, 164–6 Lloyds, 126, 129, 143 Lloyds-TSB, 144, 145

Kerr, Clark, 40 Keywords (Williams), 46 King, Martin Luther, 37 Kirk, John, 56, 81, 85, 125, 162, 217 Knight, Dame Laura, 63–5

MacKenzie, R., 85 MacLure, M., 101–2, 237n2 managerialism, 40, 41 manual labour, 93, 157 manufacturing jobs, 27–8 Marx, Karl, 47, 48 Mason, Roger, 74 mass consumption, 53 Massey, Doreen, 44 Mass Observation, 48, 61 mass unemployment, 57 material culture, 12, 17, 68, 179–80, 201 Maurice, F. D., 60 McCarthyism, 40 McDowell, L., 131 McKenna, Frank, 151, 153 Medvedev, P., 216, 222 memories of work bank worker, 184–90 railway worker, 194–9 teacher, 184, 191–4 memory, 217 memory texts, 205 Metzgar, J., 85 Midland Bank, 143 migrants, 21, 33 Miliband, Ralph, 43 Miller, Daniel, 201 Mills, C. Wright, 40 miners, 62 moral economy, 130 Morrison, Herbert, 154–5 Myers, Charles, 40

Labour government, 43 labour of housework, 54 Labour Party, 26 labour process theory, 7 Labour Representation Committee, UK, 23 Lamont, M., 10 Lang, Fritz, 48 language, in oral testimony, 206

narration, 207, 216 narratives, 49–52 National Australian Bank Group, 128–9 National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), 69, 140–1, 235n2 National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), 155, 234n7

James, D., 208, 214 Jameson, Fredric, 54 Jefferys, S., 25 Jeffrey, P., 103, 104 Jennings, Humphrey, 48 Joby, R. S., 152, 153 Joshi, H., 23 Joyce, Patrick, 6

252 Index National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), 151, 124, 155 National Union of Teachers (NUT), 72 National Westminster Bank, 129 NatWest Staff Association, 140, 146 Nayak, Anoop, 227 neo-liberal, free market ideology, 81 New Deal, 24 New Labour, 39, 45 New Look, 67 New Right politics, 43 New Times, 80 NHS recruitment, 34 Night Mail, 50, 51 North America, 83 Oakley, Ann, 8 Obama, Barack, 5 occupational segregation, 21–2, 63 official consciousness, 11, 208, 223 On the Nature of Gothic Architecture, 60 oral histories, 181–2, 205 see also individual entries oral testimony, 90–3, 204–8 see also individual entries organising model, 38, 40 Orwell, George, 46, 53 Othering, 116 Ottley, George, 150 Pahl, R. E., 6 Pakistan, 33 Parsons, Talcot, 40 partnership, 39 paternalism, 130 performativity, 138–9, 163, 223 Pettinger, Lyn, 180 Phoenix, A., 88 Phillips, Anne, 41 photo-elicitation interviewing (PEI), 183 photographs/photography, 61–2, 183–4 Picture Post, 61 Plowden Report, 106, 109 pluralism, 40 politicised reflexivity, 121 Pollert, Anna, 8 Portelli, Alessandro, 182, 205

post-Education Reform Act, 112 post-industrialism, 124 postmodernism, 54 practical consciousness, 11, 18, 97, 104, 158, 206, 207, 222, 228 Prins, B., 89 privatisation, 156 Putnam, R., 9 race and ethnicity, 93–5 Railway Clerks Association (RCA) see Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) Railway Executive Board (REC), 151, 154 railways, 149–56 gender and generation, 156–75 nationalisation, 154–5 privatisation, 156, 170–5 Reay, Diane, 116, 216 recognition, 218, 222 reflexive modernity, 81 reflexivity, 118 reflexivity, politicised, 121 remembering, 205 Resistance through Rituals, 79 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, 63, 153 right to quit, 42–3 Rivera, Diego, 62 ‘Rosy the Riveter,’ 63 Royal Bank of Scotland, 129 ‘Ruby Loftus,’ 63–5 rugged individualism, 54–5 Ruskin, John, 6, 60, 150 Salaman, G., 103 Samuel, Raphael, 217 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 54, 55–6 Savage, Mike, 54, 56, 93, 157 Sayer, Andrew, 9, 10, 83, 96, 183, 215, 218, 227 schooling, pedagogic process, 120 Scott, William Bell, 65 Second World War, 24, 154 Segal, Lynne, 43 selective tradition, 62 self, 84, 88–90

Index 253 self-employment, 33–4 self-representation, 214 Sennett, Richard, 9, 82–4, 87 sens pratiques, 229 service sector jobs, 27, 36–7 Sex Discrimination Act, 167 shared ideological values, 40 Sillitoe, Alan, 54, 56 Skeggs, Beverley, 81, 82, 235n2 skill, 42, 60 Skroog, Kirsten, 67 Smiles, Samuel, 6, 82 Smith, Adam, 47 social action and bank work identities, 139–44 social collectivity, 85 social documentary movement, 52–3 socialism, 25 Socialist Party of America, 23 social positions, 88 Somali community, 33 species-being, 47 Spender, Humphrey, 61 Steinfeld, Robert, 42 structures of feeling, 10, 11–12, 88, 102, 105, 118, 163, 214, 228 subjectivity, 10–11 Support and Help in Education (SHINE), 122 Sweeney, John, 38

Trades Union Congress (TUC), UK, 7, 25 trade unionism, 24, 25–6, 171–4 trade unions black workers leadership, 38 transgression, 211 Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA), 155 Treaty of Detroit (1950), 37 troubled talk, 92

Taft-Hartley Act (1947), USA, 37 Taylor, Barbara, 41 Teacher, 69 teacher identity, 101–2 teacherly-self, 95–7, 104–6 teaching, 69–72 humanistic approach to, 104 occupational action, 113–18 post-1945, 106–13 television drama, 57 Terkel, Studs, 4–5 Thatcherism, 43–5 Thom, Debra, 61 Thomas, W. I., 4 Thompson, Alistair, 205–6 Thompson, E. P., 78 Tomlinson, J., 41

wage inequalities, 41 Wall Street Crash (1929), 48 Ward, Patrick, 69 wartime work, 65 women in, 22–3 Weber, Max, 47 welfare state, 53 Wetherell, M., 92 West Indies, 33 white and non-white women occupational changes, differences in, 21–2 white collar workers, 15, 25, 26, 125, 147 Wickham, Chris, 181, 217 Wight, Daniel, 86 Williams, Melanie, 67

UNIFI, 140, 146 union adhesion, 140, 142–3 UNITE, 147 United States service sector, 27 trade unionism, 37–8 women’s employment, 21–2 unwaged work, 2–3 utterance contexts, 207 Vallas, Steven, 6, 7 vertical gender segregation, 32 visual images, 230 visual representations of work, 59–60 see also memories of work; photographs/photography vocational training, 23 structures, 104 Volosinov, Valentin, 92, 206–7, 208, 224

254 Index Williams, Raymond, 3, 11, 46, 62, 78, 105, 163, 206, 228 Willis, Paul, 79 Wojtczak, Helena, 153 Wolmar, Christian, 150, 155 women’s employment, 7, 21–2, 30–1, 63 women weavers, 202 women workers images, 61 in banks, 131 in railways, 167–8 in teaching, 111

Woods, P., 103, 104, 105 worklessness, 48 Work (painting), 60 Workplace Employment Relations survey (WERS), 34–5 workplace memorabilia, 180, 230 see also memories of work Yuval-Davis Nira, 89 Zandy, J., 223 Znaniecki, Florian, 4

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