In baldly economic terms, neoliberalism refers to a model of capitalism that favours open, deregulated markets and a diminution of state involvement in social and economic affairs compared with the norms established by the Keynesian consensus that emerged after 1945. The spirit of competition, so celebrated in and central to this economic-cum-political formulation, extends to individuals, who become simultaneously the repositories and drivers of state goals (Roberts and Evans 2013) through a project of responsiblization. Neoliberal imperatives, then, ensure that inequality is legitimized by making clear that the poor and the socially immobile are to blame for their plight, having failed to work hard enough to achieve the desired material gains. The unchallenged dominance of neoliberal capitalism and its spread across both the industrialized and the âdevelopingâ world has been the motor of growing levels of inequality in recent decades. Contrary to the rhetoric of its proponents, the pressure on capitalists to increase profits has led not to a trickle-down of wealth but to fewer jobs, lower pay and less security for most workers (Lindisfarne and Neale 2016). Working-class menâthe subject of this bookârepresent one group within the workforce whose social position has been visibly transformed by neoliberalism. During the golden age of postwar affluence, the wide availability of skilled manual employment in countries such as the UK underpinned a respectable form of working-class masculinity rooted in a strong work ethic and generations of labour politics (Willis 2003; Collinson 1992; Savage 2000). With the replacement of industrial sector jobs by unemployment, underemployment and hyphenated forms of work in the new service sector, however, working-class men have become more and more peripheral, with even those who have retained a position in skilled manual labour finding themselves worse off than their fathers were relative to the rest of the workforce (Roberts 2013a). In this context, the ability of working-class men to play the role of breadwinner , which had been, and continues to be, a central plank of dominant constructions of masculinity across the world (Cornwall 2016), has been significantly undermined.
In Anglo-Saxon and Western European countries there has been a tendency to interpret such developments as constituting a â crisis of masculinityâ. Academic work has engaged critically with this discourse, noting it to be cyclical over the centuries, regularly emerging at points of social change and/or economic downturn (Roberts 2014), usually anchored in a mourning of supposedly lost male dominance (Petersen 1998; Griffin 2000), and often lacking in nuance as the language of crisis commonly shifts to be applied to all men regardless of class background (Roberts 2014). Yet the notion of crisis prevails in popular texts and as a common but very powerful trope, which, in the words of Financial Times journalist Janan Ganesh (2017), is now apparently an âuncontested fact of lifeâ. In popular writing, Faludi (1999), among many others, prominently argues that the working-class male in contemporary USA is the foremost victim of neoliberal economics, while the likes of Farrell (1993), Garcia (2008) and Bidulph (2010) have written on the pressing need to now contend with and understand how men compensate for feelings of increasing powerlessness. As Carroll aptly argues, however, by ignoring the roles played by women and ethnic minorities in underpinning the franchise on opportunity enjoyed by white men through the second half of the twentieth century, such interpretations fall into a pernicious â white victimhoodâ (2008: 264). Indeed, the sense of injury to newly disenfranchised white working-class men has been mobilized to explosive effect in recent years in a number of right-wing populist political movements across the world (see e.g. Pilkington 2016), as will be discussed further below. Nevertheless, while recognizing the wider gender and racial inequalities that surround these transformations, it is undeniable that working-class men have been among the losers of neoliberalism, and that their experiences of, and responses to, the changes they have faced warrant significant attention, not least because of the ways they have been exploited.
The label of âlosersâ may not immediately correspond with some of the ways working-class men have been depicted in popular culture in recent years. As Fleras and Dixon (2011) point out, a string of unscripted ârealityâ television shows such as Deadliest Catch, Ax Men and Ice Road Truckers all appear to celebrate the heroism of blue collar workers by depicting them in a series of formulaic scenarios that emphasize core components of masculinity. The men in all of these shows variously provide important resources for society and provide for their families by overcoming danger, managing risk, taming the wilderness and tackling feats of endurance, while enjoying male camaraderie and condemning those who shirk responsibility. Ironically, then, this apparent remasculinization âvalorizes a form of working-class manual labour at precisely the moment when such labour has all but disappearedâ (Carroll 2011: 79). However, on closer inspection, this apparent celebration of white, blue-collar masculinities is simply a commodification in which the lives of working-class men are thoroughly depoliticized for the vicarious enjoyment of audiences, with messy issues such as job security, fair wages, and health and safety removed (Fleras and Dixon 2011: 593). The ideological work that blue-collar reality TV characters thus do (here, in concealing their own exploitation) is further explored by Carroll, who points out the ways in which working-class self-made men such as the Teutels in American Chopper are co-opted into the wider culture of neoliberal citizenship , with its core messages of self-help, discipline, a distaste for welfare , and the notion that hard work can get you everywhere.
This idealizing and whitewashing of blue-collar masculinity for middle-class consumption could be interpreted as a form of adulationâan attenuation of the putative losses suffered by working-class men under the postindustrial service economy (Carroll 2008: 268). However, it is in relation to the dominance of neoliberal sensibilities valorizing notions of self-authorship that working-class men have more often been positioned not as neoliberalismâs heroes but as its enemies. In the context of an increasingly pervasive rhetoric of responsibility, flexibility and self-improvement that has come to dominate life domains from employment and education to health, consumption and leisure (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2014)âaspects of what Foucault would call neoliberal governmentalityâworking-class men are often pathologized as backward for being either unable or unwilling to move with the times. In contrast not only to the hyperreal characters of blue-collar reality TV but also to historic representations valorizing their authenticity and resistance (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2014), working-class men are frequently positioned within popular and policy discourses as part of the newly abject (Francis 2006; Tyler 2013), as perpetuating the danger, disorder, dysfunction and decay that are associated with more disreputable forms of white working-class identity (Rhodes 2011; Skeggs 2004), and especially masculinity (Haylett 2001; Webster 2008). Indeed, another branch of the class voyeurism of reality TVâthe âpoverty pornâ epitomized by shows such as Benefits Street and Life on Benefitsârevels in âunderclassâ depictions of men as âwelfare-dependentâ, feckless petty criminals who are usually absent fathers.
This tendency to use working-class identity as a repository for anti-social attitudes and attributes reached its apogee in 2016 when the comfortable status quo of liberally minded voters in the UK and the USA was rocked by populist right-wing political movementsâBrexit and Donald Trumpâs presidential campaignâwhose success was roundly blamed on the racism and xenophobia of a backward white working class, left behind by globalization and resentful of multiculturalism. In reality, of course, it was not only working-class people who voted for Trump and Brexit; as Pilkington argues in her recent ethnography of the English Defence League, âracism is not the property of extremist groups or misguided individuals but of us all. That racism remains a defining dimension of social relations is self-evidentâ (2016: 5; see also Lawler 2005). Her account of white working-class resentment and anger at becoming âsecond class citizensâ to ethnic minority groups perceived to be favoured by the welfare state thus challenges and deconstructs the tendency to make racism âthe problem of the ignorant working classâ (Lentin 2008: 500, in Pilkington 2016: 5).
In a similar vein, studies of the ways in which working-class men have responded to the challenges wrought by neoliberal transformation have rejected common tropes about their disaffection, disengagement or essential difference, pointing instead to the cultural, structural and institutional barriers they face when engaging in the forms of âself-inventionâ the economy now requires of them. In the sociology of education, for example, working-class young men have been seen to respond positively to the shift towards an economy demanding âbrainsâ over âbrawnâ, but continue to be failed by a system in which their aspirations cannot overcome their lack of resources (Reay 2001; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2014; Walker 2010). In the sphere of employment, men have been found to embrace forms of work in the new service sector apparently too feminine for them to contemplate, but still have no ladders to take them beyond the insecurities of entry-level jobs (Roberts 2013b; Lloyd 1999). In work on âstreetâ masculinities in the UK and elsewhere, young men continue to look for sources of recognition and respect among groups of their peers, but maintain a desire to follow mainstream channels of success (Archer and Yamashita 2003; Barker 2005). Following these studies, this collection aims to draw together and build on perspectives that problematize pathological accounts of working-class men as the enemies of neol...