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http://www.diva-portal.org

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This is the submitted version of a paper published in .

Citation for the original published paper (version of record): Hearn, J. (2019)

Young Working-Class Men in Transition Sociology, 54(1): 202-204

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1 Steven Roberts Young Working-Class Men in Transition, Abingdon, UK, Routledge, 2018, £105. xvi + 224 pp.

Jeff Hearn, University of Huddersfield, UK; Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Örebro University, Sweden; University of South Africa

This text, arising from a PhD thesis, examines the lives of 24 young (initially 18-24 years) working-class, heterosexually-identified men based in three medium-sized towns in Kent, UK, and how they talked about their lives. The author emphasizes that the book is about the ‘missing middle’ (p. 4) of men neither disengaged from school/work nor professionally ‘successful’, living in less researched localities, addressing neglected aspects of working-class-ness and negotiated experiences. It concerns a specific group of young working-class men, namely those ‘moderately qualified’ and working initially in front-line retail employment.

The men (51 were initially “sourced”) were contacted mainly via national retailers and subsequent snowballing, though unfortunately the exact recruitment brief is unspecified here. The research began in 2009, and the author reports: “I met most participants once or twice before the research

began.” [my emphasis]. For me, such pre-interviewing meetings, apparently “largely to obtain their

‘buy-in’, discuss the research and logistics, and/or complete the screening questionnaire or consent forms” (p. 82), are very much part of research, fundamental to ([pro]feminist) methodology, and germane to what happened thereafter. The author notes that those met beforehand “were discernibly more ‘open’ and communicative than those I met on the day of the [biographical] interview.” Fifteen (“part of a group I had built good rapport with”) were interviewed a year later, and 14 had further direct or indirect (lurking) contact in 2016, through Facebook, Messenger and Skype, within what the author calls “online ethnography”. The interviews are the prime source, analysed through themes of educational experiences (chapter 5), work and (un)employment (6), domestic sphere (7),

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2 and emotions (8), along with individual case studies. The online material is used most in relation to emotions.

There is much of interest in the text, with much detail and many interview extracts. Roberts is especially interested in process, transitions (of different types), and “new forms of masculinity/ies”, including change in life circumstances, including moving onto various other work, such as military police, border force, window sales, delivery driving, phone sales, manual work, and computer work. He critiques much previous sociological reproductions, over-generalisations and stereotyping of working-class men. Instead, the heterogeneity of young working-class men, and by implication of working-class men more generally, is stressed. However, despite this, the qualifier, “working-class”, is repeatedly re-invoked, as when he generalises “working-class masculinity is already transformed in this respect [the organisation of household labour]” (p. 150). Indeed, in Chapter 7 Roberts dwells on those studies of working-class men that suggest that they may be more

egalitarian than middle-class men in terms of domesticity.

Roberts is good on ordinariness, normalisation of discontinuity in work (p. 132) under uncertain economic conditions, and shifting attachments to earnings, for some of lesser importance in early work careers, but later sometimes prompting job change to obtain higher wages. In writing on the men’s work in service occupations, in the context of deindustrialisation, he reports that “Men in my study positively embraced the demands of service work.” (p. 144) (even though some left such work), arguing that their habitus “predisposes them to accepting service work and being able to do it well” (p. 145), for example, through an “expanded repertoire of behaviours”, and “capacity and use of emotional capital” (p. 145). How much one can generalise from this specific, and shrinking (in the research process), group remains a question.

Roberts distances his analysis from Connell’s, largely reduced to a focus on hegemonic masculinity within what is labelled “Hegemonic Masculinity Theory (HMT)”, and seen as insufficient for his concerns. At times, hegemonic masculinity is interpreted as a certain more static type as in the breadwinner model; at others, changes in hegemonic masculinity, such as away from sport, are

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3 acknowledged, and some reference to “redefined hegemony”. The final chapter begins “A main contention … is that masculinity theorising to date, particularly … (HMT), has retained the

abstraction on which theory depends, but has done so from a narrow empirical base.” (p. 210). This is a very surprising statement, read internationally, as there is in mass of empirical studies making for the “ethnographic moment” and driving “masculinity theorising”.

In all of this, there is much less attention to gender relations as in the placing of men’s lives, talk, accounts and experiences in the context of individual and structural relations to girls, women and further genders. This relative absence is perhaps most pronounced in chapters 5 and 6, as implied when the author writes “they [the men] may have even exercised power in relations to female students (this did not emerge from the data).” (p. 113). The missing women in the text mirror, in an intriguing way, the lack of clear reference or relation to feminism in both the Foreword and the Series “blurb” (so-called Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities – perhaps not so critical after all?), of which this text is part.

Overall, I read the book as a rather homosocial text, much in the shadow of Paul Willis, along with Eric Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, Máirtín Mac an Ghaill and Karl Mannheim, with added critiques, of different kinds, of Raewyn Connell, Linda McDowell, Anoop Nayak and Michael Ward. The author appears to love his data, and seems at times to take some interview talk at face value. So, what is going here in this research, between the triangle of the young men, the researcher, and the preferred authors? How might interviewing partners, girlfriends, family members and so on, or applying more feminist theorising, change this? As such, the contrast of the men-centredness of this book with another recent post-PhD book, that by Longlands (2019), in which the feminist analysis of men and their partners is immersed in gender power relations generally, is striking.

The text is also very British – despite engagement with Bourdieuian habitus. There is reference to non-UK Anglophone literature, but relating more to “European” research that links more gender-equal domestic work/care with “women spending less time at home”, “gender gender-equal norms and opinions, gender-balanced income and resources [among couples], younger age, and non-traditional

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4 gender identity” (Scambor et al., 2013: 79-80, 91-92) would be of interest. Reading the book now in the context of Brexit politics, the resonance of some elements of methodological nationalism with wider political configurations is hard to ignore.

Longlands, H. (2019). Gender, Space and City Bankers. Abingdon: Routledge.

Scambor, E., Wojnicka, K. and Bergmann, N. (eds.) (2013). Study on the Role of Men in Gender

References

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