Class Condescension, Ethnic and Racial Stereotypes, and Symbolic Violence
The concept of structural violence enables a recognition of the violence that is perpetuated through, for example, inequitable social institutions and economic restructuring, both of which produce and reinforce inequality.
The concept of symbolic violence sheds light on the mechanisms through which these social divisions are made to be meaningful in the cultural arena. An important body of scholarship contends that classed social divisions are relationally constructed and that cultural taste and moral judgment are significant to the process of making class matter (Bourdieu 1984; Kehily and Nayak 2014; McDowell 2007, 2008; McRobbie 2004; Sayer 2005; Skeggs 2009).Employment is an important arena in which respectability is secured (Newman 2006; Valentine and Harris 2014). This is particularly the case for the construction of a respectable masculinity, as employment is a key arena for the construction of masculinity (Connell 2002) and as the traditional male breadwinner model continues to be influential for masculine identities (Willott and Griffin 1996). This plays out in the predicaments that young people today face: while decent work has become increasingly inaccessible for working-class youth, the problem of un(der)employ- ment is often explained in individualized terms that tend to blame youth themselves for their lack of work (MacDonald and Marsh 2005; MacDonald et al. 2010). Paid employment is cast in a misleading way as being the result of individual agency and willpower, within the grasp of a person's capacity to “strive” for a future. Those unable to secure work are cast as “skivers” and, hence, personally at fault (Newman 2006). Popular media accounts, political discourse, and even, to an extent, youth intervention schemes intended to assist the disadvantaged tend to represent workingclass youth as lacking “employability,” as displaying “unwillingness to work” and as having low levels of aspiration and ambition.
Thus, for example, policies targeting young people who are “not in employment, education, and training” (referred to as NEET in the UK) tend to interpret this status as a result of deficiencies of the young people themselves, rather than as a result of the lack of available job opportunities (Furlong 2006; MacDonald 2011). Furthermore, while NEETS are the focus of youth interventions, almost no policy attention has been paid to the problem of un (der)employment and the plight of young people who are cycling in and out of low-quality work (MacDonald 2013). Thus, what is essentially a “demand-side” problem requiring the creation of decent work for young people has been construed as a “supply-side” problem requiring investment in human capital in order to upskill and train youth or, worse, in a manner that constructs unemployed youth as lacking in “skivers,” lacking in aspiration (MacDonald 2013).The representation of the un(der)employed as “skivers” versus the deserving poor as “strivers” is part of a wider tendency to demonize the poor and hold them individually responsible for their own misfortunes (Jones 2012). Jones (2012) argues that in Britain, it has become socially acceptable to express disgust and disdain for poor people through disparaging labels such as “chav.” Jones argues that successive politicians since the Thatcher years have enacted policies which have “chavified” the masses, essentially impoverishing the poor by clawing back much needed social services and welfare systems at a time when deindustrialization and the restructuring of the labor market was devastating the opportunities of the working class. The combined effects of economic restructuring and government policies that render precarious those who are already suffering from the decline of work opportunities are downplayed in dominant representations of the working class. Instead, poor people are represented as feckless, lazy, and lacking in motivation and aspiration.
In addition to the widespread tendency to blame those who are unemployed for their predicament, a number of contradictory stereotypes associated with different minority ethnicities and nationalities shape the labor market experience of young men, positioning them in different ways.
According to the 2011 census, Swindon can be broken down by ethnicity as follows: 85.6% White, 6.4% Asian, 2.1% as mixed/multiple ethnicity, 1.4% as Black African or Caribbean, and 0.4% as others (ONS 2012). Swindon is home to the second largest population of Indian migrants from the state of Goa in the UK (McDowell et al. 2016). Interviews with managers and owners of employment agencies revealed that they held localized stereotypes of the working habits of different ethnicities and nationalities, which affected their hiring practices. Indian and Goan young men were considered to be particularly employable for low-wage work as they were viewed as hardworking and amenable to discipline. They were compared favorably to both young men of color of different origins and White British young men who were often depicted as unreliable and unmotivated. Young Polish men, however, were constructed as the most sought-after employees, as one agency owner explained:Indians and Goans just want to work, any hours and for minimum wage as long as they can work.... If you are looking at a Polish young male and British young male the work ethic will be with the Polish every time. They’ll turn up for work and they won't let you down.
Their willingness to work for a low salary is completely different. (A small number of quotations used in this chapter are drawn from a journal article currently under consideration for publication in the journal Gender, Work and Organization.)
These hiring stereotypes served to mask the complex social relations and structural conditions which perpetuate social inequality by attributing different work ethics and competencies of workers to static, naturalized categories of nationality, “race,” ethnicity, and gender. English working-class young men in particular are constructed as “skivers,” as undeserving of employment due to a lack of willingness to work, while ethnicized stereotypes construct migrant Polish and Goan workers a “strivers.” However, these “positive” stereotypes of Goan migrants as good workers in Swindon coexisted with negative representations of South Asians as associated with delinquency and crime.
The concept of multiple masculinities is useful in registering the diversity of masculinities which are constructed in relation to various femininities, but also other masculinities in any given context (Collinson and Hearn 1996). As is shown below, participants in our study often drew in ambiguous ways from the dualistic discourse of “strivers” and “skivers,” as well as from other contradictory racialized and gendered stereotypes, to construct their sense of selves.These taken-for-granted “truths” about different categories of people are a form of symbolic violence, an “order of things” which positions dominated groups in a divisive and competitively hierarchical way. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “symbolic violence” refers to social relations that are not widely thought of as particularly violent (Bourdieu 1977; Lawler 2011). This is because, by definition, symbolic violence refers to the masked violence of social relations, whose unequal arrangements perpetuate inequality and, while causing injustice and indignity to dominated groups, are nonetheless legitimized as self-evident, natural, and unavoidable (Bourdieu 1977). These social relations are accepted as the natural order of things, even by those who are affected negatively by them. It is “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 167).
Angela McRobbie (2004) develops the concept of symbolic violence to link it with the reproduction of gender and class inequality in relation to the shame inflicted on working-class women through “makeover” television programs. She illustrates how their humiliation is rendered socially acceptable in such productions. These shows present middle-class judgment and taste as obvious, attainable, and uplifting and, conversely, the lack of middle-class embodiment and poise as evidence of a mismanaged life and a poor grasp of appropriate self-presentation. These representations contribute to the “subtle practices of power directed to winning [working class women's] consent to and approval of a more competitive, consumer-oriented, modernized, neo-liberal meritocracy” (McRobbie 2004, p.
105).Lauren Berlant's development of the notion of a “cruel optimistic relation” is helpful in extending the idea of symbolic violence to show how an investment in an aspiration for social mobility and middle-class respectability through employment may undermine dominated groups under contemporary circumstances. As she defines it, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant 2011a, p. 1). It is not only stereotypical representations but also by the effects of global forces, including the shifting geographies of manufacturing and the rise of the service sector which influences young people's aspirations and that frame the individual stories of the quest for work that are presented below.
A small body of scholarship on youth culture and inequality is beginning to uncover the ways in which young people are relating to the stigmatization of class. Kehily and Nayak's (2014) research focuses on the work that pejorative labels and stereotypes do. They argue that “chavs” and “teenage mothers” serve as “figures of abjection,” that is, they are used to relationally construct moral boundaries of middle-class and White respectability. Kehily and Nayak argue that young people “contest, resist and struggle to overturn representations that cast them as “filth”, “scum”, “dirty whites” and even subhuman” (p. 164). In this chapter, a contribution is made to this body of literature by examining the extent to which symbolic violence is enacted on and bought into by working-class young men in relation to securing their approval and participation in a competitive neoliberal job market that positions them at the bottom of the hierarchy of eligibility, if not completely excluding them. Here the experiences of both a racialized young man and two White men are used to illustrate the complexities and contradictions in racialized and classed stereotypes of working-class young men.
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