Dirty Work by Darren Thiel

Class in construction: London building workers,dirty work and physical cultures1

Darren Thiel

Abstract

Descriptions of manual employment tend to ignore its diversity and overstate thehomogenizing effects of technology and industrialization. Based on ethnographicresearch on a London construction site, building work was found to be shaped bythe forms of a pre-industrial work pattern characterized by task autonomy andfreedom from managerial control. The builders’ identities were largely free frompersonal identification as working class, and collective identification was fracturedby trade status, and ethnic and gender divisions. Yet the shadow of a class-baseddiscursive symbolism, which centered partly on the division of minds/bodies,mental/manual, and clean/dirty work, framed their accounts, identities andcultures. The builders displayed what is frequently termed working-class culture,and it was highly masculine. This physical and bodily-centered culture shieldedthem from the possible stigmatization of class and provided them with a source oflocalized capital. ‘Physical capital’ in conjunction with social capital (the builders’networks of friends and family) had largely guided their position in the stratifica-tion system, and values associated with these forms of capital were paramount totheir public cultures. This cultural emphasis offered a continuing functionality inthe builders’ lives, not having broken free from tradition or becoming an object ofreflexive choice.

Keywords: Builders; class bound; hierarchy; mind–body; masculinity; capital.

Introduction

Mass nation-bound factory work was only a ‘short moment’ in the history of theworking class (Pahl 1984), and the majority of manual workers never worked infactories, nor for all of their lives (Cannadine 1999). Approximately half theworking class were, and are, women, many traditionally working in proletarianservice jobs and agriculture; and substantial proportions of working-class menworked in docking, mining, agriculture, fishing, small-scale enterprise, the

Thiel (Corresponding author email: [email protected])© London School of Economics and Political Science 2007 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00149.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2007 Volume 58 Issue 2

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informal economy, and in the building industry (see, for example, Booth 1895;Mayhew 1861). In a large urban area like London, for example, high land pricesand river transportation taxes kept heavy industry to a minimum (Hobbs 1988).Even for those who did work in factories, not all worked on the production lineenslaved by scientific and/or Fordist management techniques.After all, factoriesemployed supervisors, technicians, labourers and warehouse workers (seeEdwards and Scullion 1982). Viewing the working class as solely a product ofdeskilled industrial work is, then, surely unfounded.

Cannadine (1999) argues that British social classes have never been cultur-ally homogenous or politically aligned in any clear-cut way, but that ‘class’ is arhetorical device with which the British interpret hierarchy. What Cannadineunderplays, however, is how class rhetoric has historically guided the socialorganization of hierarchy and, thereby structurally reinforced its conceptualexistence. Moreover, class is not simply related to interpretations of hierarchybut is tied to symbolic bifurcations based upon the division of minds andbodies, mental and manual work, and clean and dirty work. These bifurcationsare morally loaded (Douglas 1970; Skeggs 2004), structurally extant, andcontinue to infest class-bound classifications, identifications and cultures(c.f. Willis 1977; Croteau 1995).

In this article I discuss the work, cultures and identities of a section ofLondon building workers based upon participant observation of a PrivateFinance Initiative2 refurbishment of a series of National Health Service build-ings in central London in 2003/4. I spent one year working with the builders,conducted 32 open-ended recorded interviews, and had many more informalconversations that I recorded in fieldnotes.

The builders’ cultures were embedded in a form of physical masculinitywhich was framed by a class-bound discourse related to the organizationalstructure of building work and linked to the modern discursive bifurcation ofmind/body, mental/manual, and clean/dirty work. Class identities were notrejected but were largely overlaid by trade status differentials, gender, andethnic identities. Class-based masculinity represented an over-riding collectivevalue system, and functioned, in part, to deflect any possible class stigma byappealing to socially embedded values of strength and protection. This mas-culine culture was tied to archaic tradition and it had not become de-coupledfrom modern economy, state and discourse. Physical masculinity was a funda-mental source of capital and status which held a continuing functionality incontemporary builders’ lives, and which formed a fundamental backdrop totheir personal and collective identities.

History and technology

In 1995, 1.5 million people were officially registered as working in Britain’sbuilding industry (Drucker and White 1996), approximately 85 per cent of

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© London School of Economics and Political Science 2007 British Journal of Sociology 58(2)

whom were manual workers and, of these, 98 per cent were men (Greed 2000).The building industry thus employs a substantial proportion of male manualworkers. And, as the proportion of manual work decreases, builders make upan increasingly large section of the manual working class3 in twenty-firstcentury Britain.

Before industrialization and the onslaught of mature capitalism, builderswere workers who sold their labour in the marketplace, and whose work liveswere clearly separate from their home lives. Building is thus a pre-industrialindustry, and consequently the historical shift to industrialization and, indeed,to post-industrialization, had relatively little effect on building work.As I shallshow, the specificity of the building industry’s product led to a relative immu-nity to technological and managerial innovation.

History

Actual building work tasks have been little affected by the march of modernity(see below) but organizational and management systems for building changedsubstantially. Building projects are no longer organized and regulated bytrades guild groups, but by building contractors and subcontractors.The begin-nings of subcontracting were entwined with the rise of building professionalsin the seventeenth century (Higgin and Jessop 1965) and the birth of thegeneral contractor in the late eighteenth century (Cooney 1955). Previousto this change, throughout the feudal era, building work was controlledand executed by master guildsmen who trained apprentices and employedjourneymen. They monopolized building knowledge, controlling their ownwages, work hours and recruitment patterns.At this time, large building works,for example, were overseen and organized by government and church clerks inconsultation with master masons and carpenters, but the masters organizedthese works in a way that was more akin to work co-operatives than capitalistenterprises (Knoop and Jones 1967 [1933]). As Higgin and Jessop (1965: 39)argue, in the ‘slow tempo’ of the guild system, design was not separate fromconstruction as: ‘The master artisans worked it out amongst themselves andwith the client as they went along’.

Many building guildsmen held considerable status in their local communi-ties (see Woodward 1995). However, in early modernity, the invention of theprinting press, the rise of the professional, and the intensification of capitalismbegan to erode the guildsmen’s status and negate their traditional control overthe building industry. Beginning in the seventeenth century, architects, engi-neers and surveyors were employed to plan, design and administer largebuilding works. Design became separated from execution, and the power andmystique of the guilds began to be appropriated by an emerging professionalmiddle class.

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The intensification of the mass production of pre-fabricated parts alsoreduced the builders’ skill monopolies, and it was here that industrializationimpinged upon builders’ power and status. Building parts (e.g. wood mould-ings, bricks, or ceramics) were no longer made and fashioned in the builders’workshops. Carpenters, for instance, no longer grew their own trees for work-able wood. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, mass production coupledwith the rise of building professionals and general contractors, squeezed thepower and status that tradesmen had traditionally held, and began to movethem from their status as a plebeian aristocracy into the ranks of the workingclass (see Price 1980).4

The rise of building professionals mirrored the rise of the middle class ingeneral, and, associated with the ascent of the professional, mental and manualwork began to become symbolically uncoupled from one another (c.f. Cooley1987), amplifying middle-class difference and, thereby, power, which wasfurther accentuated by the professionals’ training in gentlemanly conduct inthe public school system. Gentlemen of knowledge, supported by the prevail-ing and dominant discourse of the enlightenment, began the symbolic genesisof class demarcation and domination (c.f. Day 2001; Skeggs 2004). Theencroaching professionals’ symbolic monopoly of mental work conceptuallyseparated work knowledge from its implementation, thereby relegating craftworkers into the working class, forced to sell their casualized labour to under-take manual ‘dirty work’ (Hughes 1958) at the symbolic nadir of stratifiedmodernity.

It was also with modernity that the British working class was born. Untilrecently, class was seen as the product of capitalism and industrialism, butpost-structuralist theorizing now recognizes class as modern discourse (seeCannadine 1999; Day 2001; Skeggs 2004). This discourse is tied to the modernnotion of the separation of mind/body and mental/manual, and the subsequentreorganization of workplaces into experts, managers, and workers – expertsexercising their minds to do clean work, and workers exercising their bodiesand getting dirty in the process.

The symbolic separation of minds/bodies can be seen as a fundamentaldivision linked to the increasing dominance of science (Rose 1999 [1989]).Into this division a series of other sub-oppositions ‘logically’ followed –mental/manual, rational/emotional, measured/impulsive, governing/governed,thinking/feeling, planning/executing, clean/dirty, high/low, middle class/working class. Such constructions permeated perception, social organizationand culture, and provided a symbolic backdrop for contemporary builders’discourses on class. This is not to say, of course, that building work entails onlythe use of one’s body. Building work requires both an abstract and embodiedknowledge, and involves an almost continual mental-corporeal form of learn-ing and innovation (c.f. Cooley 1987; Wacquant 2004). It is this complexityand necessity for innovation that has partly shielded building work from

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the onslaught of automation, bureaucratization and ensuing managerialdomination.

Technology

As regards machinery little need be said, for the building trade is not anindustry that is being revolutionised by the introduction of mechanicalappliances, nor is it likely that this will ever be the case. (Booth 1895: 134)

Building work knowledge has not been monopolized by scientific managementtechniques, nor has machinery superseded manual labour in the performanceof building tasks. Despite professionalization and the marketization of thebuilding industry, the actual practices of building work have remained largelyunchanged. The work of carpentry, brick-laying or plastering for example, isstill based upon the handicraft skills of the past, and the tasks of these craftsremain very similar to those of their trade forebears (Kidder 1985; Woodward1995). Mechanization did reduce the physical demands of building work to adegree, yet the ancient Greeks used wooden cranes, pulleys and lever systems,and, in pre-modernity, animals were used to move heavy objects much like themechanical machinery of today. Since the 1960s, many handicraft tasks havealso been mechanized by the invention of electric hand tools, but this, alongwith innovations in the design of building materials, sped up building pro-cesses, but did not alter the fundamental physical tasks required to buildsomething.

Buildings are immobile and must be constructed in the space in which theyare consumed. To erect a building, builders move around that space applyingthe parts as they go along. Each time a new part is added, the workspacechanges shape, altering its structure (Reimer 1979). The workplace is, then, inconstant transition, making for a hazardous working environment (building issecond only to agriculture for workplace fatalities [Health and Safety Execu-tive 2003]) in which there can be little architecture of control (c.f. Foucault1991 [1975]).

These conditions mean that the knowledge of how to build something mustbe localized and heuristic – the specific content of a task cannot be plannedprospectively from a distance because building tasks are too complex andcontingent. For example, to mend a broken window-frame, it would be almostimpossible to predict in advance the complex nature of the wear and weath-ering of the wood – a carpenter must make situated, pragmatic and heuristicdecisions in order to repair it, and: ‘[He] must decide a thousand times a daywhat is good enough – where to place himself and his work among the almostinfinite possibilities of perfection or compromise’ (Reckman 1979: 76). Build-ing work thus differs substantially from work on an assembly line, for instance,where the parts of a product are transported to a stationary worker whose



tasks can be architecturally and bureaucratically planned, monitored andcontrolled.

Whilst the construction of contemporary standardized new housing, forexample, involves the seemingly simple assembly of pre-fabricated parts,building projects almost always veer off from initial plans (see Bresnan 1990)necessitating substantial innovation and problem solving. Further, ‘new work’(the construction of new buildings in contrast to ‘old work’ which is therenovation and repair of pre-existing structures) accounts for less than 50 percent of total building work (Department of Trade and Industry 2001) and alarge proportion of ‘new work’ is specialist, ‘one-off’ work, which for the mostpart cannot be sub-divided, standardized or perfectly prospected in advance(Bresnan 1990).

Builders also differ from industrial workers because they work on a buildingsite only for short periods of the project and, when the build is complete, mustmove to another job in another geographic area. On average, a self-employedbuilder (60 per cent of building workers) works for a single firm for only 1.2years (Harvey 2003). Employment practices are thus casual, and constructionworking life ephemeral.This provides builders with the relative freedom of notbeing tied to a single company, boss, or workplace location.

The creep of modernity and the industrial revolution, then, did little torevolutionize building work, and even less to revolutionize builders (seebelow). It was this that prompted Engels to argue that builders: ‘form anaristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing forthemselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final’ ([1892]1969: 31). And, I would argue, their position has changed little since.5

Building contracting and trade clusters

At my fieldwork site, the build was undertaken by the main building contrac-tor, which I shall call ‘Topbuild Plc’, a contractor which, like building contract-ing companies in general, was a ‘hollowed-out’ construction company (Harvey2001) that organized and managed building construction rather than supplyingactual machinery or labour to do building. Topbuild only directly employedconstruction managers, quantity surveyors and other administrative staff. Alltradesmen, labourers and mechanical plant were subcontracted to Topbuild byvarious trade specific subcontractors.

The subcontracted building workers were an extraordinarily diverse groupof men. Their ages ranged from 16 to 69, and their national and ethnic back-grounds were similarly diverse. However, ethnicity in particular was clearlypatterned. During the field research I focused on 5 main building groups: thedirectly employed managers and quantity surveyors, and, a section of thesubcontracted builders: mechanical and electrical (electricians and plumbers),

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carpenters, painters, and labourers. Each of these groups, excluding themechanical and electrical workers, were characterized by clearly definedethnic and geographic boundaries. For example, all but one of the carpenterswere members of the diaspora of Kutch, a small area of Gujarat, India, and allbut one lived in one area of West London. Almost all of the labourers werefirst or second generation Irish, and predominantly lived in and around onearea of South London. The painters were a mixture of Irish, Scottish andEnglish, but they were all white-skinned, the vast majority living in an area ofNorth London. In addition, all the site management were white English andlived in Kent, a county adjoining London.

These clearly patterned geographical and trade clusters were the result ofthe highly informal nature of recruitment in the building industry, a patternwhich was embedded in the community networks of migrant groups and ofbuilders in general (see Graves 1970; Myers 1946; Zaretsky 1984). Informal,‘word-of-mouth’, links with other workers were necessary to obtain ‘good’jobs (Granovetter 1974), and working for Topbuild was considered a good jobin comparison with the building industry in general. Mechanical and electricaltradesmen were the only group that did not follow ethnic and geographicclustering patterns, ostensibly because of skill shortages and the legal require-ment of formal qualifications usually needed by those who sought employ-ment as plumbers or electricians, qualifications which do not transfer acrossnational boundaries. Recent migrant groups, or the informally trained, werethus in most cases (see Thiel 2005) excluded from mechanical and electricalwork, and their subcontractor was forced to advertise for tradesmen in thepress.

The presence of ethnic geographic and trade clusters indicated that thissection of the working population were not individualized and/or devoid ofcommunity support systems. Quite the contrary, they were embedded in his-torically enduring, tightly-knit reciprocally-based networks that providedinformation gateways to employment and, further, to housing, goods andservices (c.f. Boissevain 1974; Hobbs 1988; Portes 1995; Young and Willmott1990 [1957]). Rather than the demise of such communities, the insecure natureof employment and the structural exigencies of migration had forged them(see also Devine 1992; Grieco 1987).

Management and autonomy

Austrin (1980) points out that despite the genesis of unions lying in the build-ing industry, a closed shop has never operated in the British constructionindustry, and rates of unionization have always been relatively low. Part of thereason for this is the autonomy enjoyed by building workers, which negates theneed for formally organized collective action.6 High levels of autonomy also



make the management of building workers problematic. Consequently, themanagerial control system at Topbuild was characterized by an ‘indulgencypattern’ (Gouldner 1954) rather than by unilateral, technological, scientific orbureaucratic control.

In Gouldner’s analysis of Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), the‘sub-surface’ miners were indulged in their informal work cultures bymanagement. Absenteeism, lateness, pilfering, time banditry, and verbalintransigence were tolerated, and the miners exercised a large degree of col-lective control over their white-collar management. Gouldner argued thatindulgence was the result of both how dangerous the work was, and becauseforemen (the first line of management control) worked in similarly dirty anddangerous conditions, identifying with the manual workers rather thanmanagement. What he neglected to say, however, was how the physical spaceof mines and, the localized and contingent nature of mining work knowledge,restricted managerial control, providing a ‘space’ in which the miners couldassert their informal collective power over managers and bosses. LikeGouldner’s miners, the manual workers at Topbuild were also involved inquotidian, culturally-bound, collective action through which they informallyasserted their power over management.

As builders cannot be controlled through architectural, bureaucratic orscientific surveillance methods, building site management is characterized byan orchestration of works rather than a control of workers. Builders must be‘trusted’ to carry out their work via their personal or collective work ethics(see Steiger and Form 1991), and, to create trust, they must feel respected andbe indulged in their informal work cultures. At Topbuild, indulgence took theform of quasi-reciprocal relationships between managers, subcontractors andthe building workers. The builders would work largely unobserved if theyconsidered they were being awarded respect and ‘fair’ pay. The building sitemanagers and subcontractor employers did, of course, hold a power of dis-missal and wage payment over their employees, and it was this ‘market’ power(Ouchi 1980) that brought the manual workers to the workplace within thetimetabled hours of the week and provided a certain amount of managementcontrol over them. However, once at work, the working day was largelyordered by the builders’ traditional informal craft mores or, by what Ouchi(1980) terms, ‘clan’ relations.

Illustrative of this was the builders’ attitudes towards their work. The vastmajority said they enjoyed their work because they could see the product oftheir labour (see also Applebaum 1981; LeMasters 1975; Reimer 1979), theyfelt free to have a ‘good crack’7 (jocular and interesting ‘banter’) with theirwork colleagues (see Croteau 1995; Hodson 2002), and because they werelargely free to organize their own time during the working day.

The project manager at Topbuild, in talking about the labourers, describedhow the quasi-reciprocal worker–management relationships functioned:

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You can soon read people and how they’re going to perform for you ifthey’re on day work and, you know, and obviously, labourers. I know they doa bit of hanging around, a bit of swinging the lead every now and then, butI try and keep men I trust around me.And then when I want that little bit ofextra, in fact I know I’m going to get it, and they ain’t going to grumble orcomplain . . . . I’ve been on jobs that aren’t mine, just been there to help outand [labourers] they’re wandering around, standing leaning on the shoveland having the crack. You know, and I know you know . . . [But] what am Ifucking supposed to do, hold their hands? You’ve got to try and give peoplea bit of trust . . .

You have to strike relationships up here. People say, ‘oh you got to distanceyourself, wear a tie’ and fucking all that, ‘you’re the boss and they’re not’.But people resent that and they don’t, they fucking won’t work for you . . . Idon’t know quite what the word is, but it’s mixing it really. I think that works.A lot of people say it doesn’t, but in my history it works. You treat peoplewith respect, they treat you with respect, that’s mutual.

The project manager knew that the labourers did not work ‘flat-out’ all daylong, and he was reluctant to become authoritarian towards them, but, byindulging their informal work cultures, he maintained a workforce that wasloyal and reciprocal, or ‘mutual’, when he needed them to be. He saw it wouldbe unprofitable to apply unilateral pressure because they would not continueto work for him. Furthermore, putting pressure on labourers was difficultbecause it was extremely problematic to observe them; the project managercould not ‘hold their hands all day’. Even if he could observe and placepressure on them, open access to most building jobs ensured that they wouldbe able to leave the site and go to another job if labour was in demand. It was,then, co-operation that the management demanded, not control.

A labourer explained how part of the mutual indulgency system workedfrom his perspective:

This is how I like it, people we’re working with you see, like the managementteam talk to us on first name terms. Because you can go on other sites andwhat they do is look down through their noses at you,you know what I mean?Cos there’s a lot of snobbery in the building game you know. They sort ofthink, ‘labourer you’re a shit’ and all this business. But not with [Topbuild’ssite managers], they muck in with us, have a joke and a laugh you know.There’s a lot of people in the building that sort of, they think they are aboveyou, which there’s no need for it . . . What you gotta acknowledge, I find sortof, if someone’s passing you in the corridor, ‘morning, alright’, acknowledgesomeone you know . . . That’s what I like to be like, that’s like a relationship.

The labourer disliked what he perceived as snobbery. As Sennett and Cobb(1972) point out, social class may entail symbolic injuries; no one wants to be



seen as ‘a shit’ by virtue of their position in a class-based status hierarchy. Oneof the maintenance men expressed a similar view:

[Topbuild site management], they’re not bad people to work for are they?It’s not like ‘I’m a site manager and you’re a labourer’ is it? It’s like you’reall friends. You take the piss out of them, they take the piss out of you . . . Ithink they get more out of the men because they show the men real respectand if you got their respect they’ll give you it in return . . . It’s like [the sitemanagers], they say can you do this for them. They ask you to do somethingalmost as a favour, but you get some people and they are ordering you to doit, do this, do that. That don’t wash with me.

The maintenance man commented that the management would ask the mento do things rather than command them, ‘sort of as a favour’. If managementdid not conform to these expectations, conflict could arise, and, on buildingsites, conflict cannot be contained by bureaucratic or despotic methods. It wasthis quasi-reciprocity and, the ensuing perception of respect, which organizedthe relationships between managers, subcontractors and builders at Topbuild.As Burawoy (1979) points out, it is not hierarchy per se that frames workerconflict, but the way in which it is administered (see also Edwards and Scullion1982; Hodson 2001). At Topbuild, ‘mate management’ largely kept conflict toa minimum. In this respect, management hierarchy was hegemonic – its exist-ence mostly unquestioned. If managers managed in a way that enabledworkers to feel respected for their labour, status injuries were non-existent andconflict remained dormant.

Only one of the builders, a painter, expressed an entirely anti-managementattitude:

I am a firm believer in this and I will stand by it 100 per cent: it’s always beenthem and us . . . In the office, them and us, always. I’ve always said this, Iwouldn’t trust them. [The project manager], I would not trust him, I wouldnot trust that man with nothing. I wouldn’t trust him with my time keepingif I had a half a day off, I wouldn’t trust him not to tell [my subcontract boss]that I took a bit of paint home. I wouldn’t trust that man, that is a careerTopbuild man.

DT: But then [the general foreman] works in the office and he comeswalking in the canteen when you’re skiving and you just mess about withhim?[He] ain’t got a shirt and tie on has he? No, no, no, he’s not one of those, henever will be. I think deep down he’d like to be but I don’t think he everwill be . . .

The painter’s antagonistic attitude was misguided because the project managerdid indulge the builders in their time-banditry and pilfering to a large degree.

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The painter’s view was principally the result of his almost complete autonomyas a tradesman from the site management i.e. he possessed little actualknowledge of how the project manager managed because the project managerdid not, for the most part, manage the tradesmen at all. The painter’s attitudewas embedded in his past working life rather than in the everyday reality ofTopbuild. However, his distrust of a ‘shirt and tie’ was clearly affected byclass-bound sentiment.

Class-bound identity and organizational structure

Whilst there was little ‘industrial’ conflict between the workers and managersat Topbuild, worker–manager relations were framed by a dualistic discourseembedded in class-bound symbolism: ‘them and us’, ‘shirt and tie’, ‘beingordered’, ‘looking down’, and ‘snobbery’. Thus although builders could not beviewed historically as part of the ‘traditional’ working class – whoever theymight be (see Devine 1992; Pahl 1984), classed symbolism framed their per-ceptions, cultures and accounts. This was the result of the above mentionedhistorical changes in the building industry and their impact on workorganization.

The conceptual separation of mind/body guided building work organization,and, as Savage (2000) argues, class-bound identifications and work organiza-tion are intimately linked. In the organization of building work, abstractknowledge became conceptually separate from execution: architects, survey-ors and building site managers planned works, and labourers and tradesmenphysically constructed them. As a result, the builders drew a distinctionbetween themselves and the management, and this divide was expressed as‘being in the office’ or ‘being on the tools’. However, the site managers, ratherthan being seen as specifically white-collar workers by the manual workers,were rather in the position of non-commissioned officers (NCOs); those whooccasionally ‘muck in with us’ – an account immersed in the class-boundsymbolism of dirt.

The organizational structure of the Topbuild build was analogous to a mili-tary structure (c.f. Greed 2000) with some of the ‘troops’ rising through theNCO (building site management) ranks, but almost never above them into thecommissioned ranks of project directors and contracts managers. NCOs con-sisted of foremen (corporals), general foremen (sergeant), site managers(warrant officers), and the project manager (regimental sergeant major). Thecommissioned ranks were populated almost entirely by quantity surveyors (orthe suitably networked8). The military structure of Topbuild was, like themilitary itself, symbolically class-bound, and this was reflected in the builders’classed identifications.



Class identities

Despite workplace autonomy, the absence of alienation from the product oftheir labour, and, for some, relative affluence, the builders, when asked, iden-tified themselves as working class. However, class itself was almost neverspecifically discussed. At Topbuild, tradesmen, labourers and NCOs collec-tively and primarily identified themselves and one another as builders (anoccupation that is commonly identified by others as working class). This clas-sification was further divided into identification with their trade, and that wasclearly demarcated by ethnicity. Furthermore, the trades were embedded in astatus hierarchy, with the dirty jobs of labouring and painting at the bottom-end, and the relatively clean job of carpentry at the other. As a paintercommented:

So, labourers, all right they don’t earn the money they should earn, but thenagain in my mind, you can turn it [the tape recorder] off now, they are toofucking stupid anyway . . . Let me explain myself to you . . . [a] painter is oneabove the food chain right, and labourers are one below him . . . .

Status hierarchy was based partly on the association of the moral division oflabour with dirt, and partly on the amounts of skill assumed to be involved inthe trades. However, some very physical and risky trades including scaffolding,groundwork or high-steel work were also viewed with esteem, but an esteemof a different kind from skilled and clean occupations; one submerged intraditional masculine values which tended to over-ride class-bound statuses inmany contexts (see below).

The quantity surveyors (commissioned officers) predictably identified them-selves as middle class when asked. They were, however, quite defensive, allud-ing to class snobbery (c.f. Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001), but in quitedifferent ways:

DT. Do you consider yourself middle class or working class?(Laughs) What a horrible question! I dunno. Where are the boundaries?Where are the boundaries these days . . . My wife would consider herselfmiddle to upper class because she’s a snob. Me, middle to lower I think.I’d hate to ever think that, because I came from a real working-classbackground . . . So I wouldn’t consider myself anything really . . . I’d hate toclassify myself as middle class, lower class or anything like that. I think that’swhy a lot of surveyors have problems in the [building] industry, they do tendto look or walk around site in a suit as if they should have respect justbecause they’re wearing a suit and they’re a surveyor . . . (senior surveyor)

A trainee surveyor also took a defensive view of his class status, but from adifferent angle contingent on his social background, and based on an allusionto the moral symbolism of dirt:

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In the job that I do, yeah middle. But I am, your bringing up another thing,that’s what annoys me as well, I mean straight away I come into a crowd ofpeople at home, especially my mum’s side of the family . . . without goinginto too much detail, they are extremely well educated . . . ‘Oh, I’m in theconstruction industry’, and straight away they’re like ‘ah’, you know what Imean . . . It really annoys me, really annoys me because straight away peoplethink like mud, shit shifter, like dirty you know.

When asked, and despite their difference, the surveyors identified themselvesas middle class. The ‘NCOs’ and ‘troops’ on the other hand, identified them-selves as working class and they were not at all defensive. A site manager said:

I’m working class yes. Quantity surveyors consider themselves middle classdon’t they? Because I think it’s a professional qualification QS, but it’sbullshit isn’t it? All it means is that the chief honchos sit in big leather chairslike Wing Commanders . . . No I don’t see myself as being middle class, notin the least. Definitely working class, wouldn’t even cross my mind until youasked the question . . . .

Regardless of his management level occupation, the site manager identifiedhimself as working class, alluding to military symbolism, but admitting thatclass categorizations were not a great issue to him. As Bottero (2004) argues,people tend to socialize with people who are socially similar to themselves and,consequently, they do not commonly reflect upon class difference – it does not‘cross my mind until you asked’. At Topbuild all of the builders (excludingsome of the surveyors and consultants) had classed-based accents and bodilydemeanors, and class difference was not a salient issue.9

The NCOs, who occupied a somewhat a ‘foggy’ objective class position,identified themselves as working class. The traditionally caste-bound carpen-ters also made allusions to being working class. ‘N’ had migrated from India toEngland when he was 11 years old:

[In the past] we used to go on the caste culture, now we don’t do that, well,it’s changed a lot . . . I’m a working class, yeah. I mean we have a caste forbarbers, we have a caste for shoemakers, we have a caste for every cunt. Butit’s changed . . .

‘M’, who had also moved to England when he was a child, offered a Hinduinterpretation of the class system, quite unprompted:

If you do good things now you will get good future, you might be born inwealthy family and have an easy life. I got a friend, his dad he’s a rich man.He has no problem in the future.Think about that, he’s born in good and weare born in working class. How come that guy born in wealthy family, howcome we weren’t in middle class? Because he did good things in anotherpast.



A painter, who was Northern Irish Catholic in origin, and who had arrived inEngland in the early 1980s, expressed a more Marxist view, also unprompted:

We’re chasing fuckin’ shadows, we really are, and we’re being used. We’renot even actually chasing them, we think we’re chasing them, but in actualfact we’re being used. Just part of the fuckin’ machinery. We’re being used,but they’re using us and we’re using them, everybody’s using everybody. . . It’s so unfair, I believe in a more equal world . . . It’s so unfair – class andmoney.

Because both management and migrant tradesmen identified themselves asworking class when asked, I ceased to ask the majority of the builders whatsocial class they thought they belonged to. This was partly because of theirsimple lack of everyday attention to the specific language of class, and partlybecause the question seemed tantamount to asking them what gender theythought they belonged to. Class referred to taken-for-granted signifiers whichhad lost visibility and appeared to require little examination.

All the three manual workers quoted above were not specifically part of theEnglish working class.Their views and identifications may testify to a legacy ofcolonial power of symbols of class (c.f. Cannadine 1999; Fanon 1967), or to themen’s acculturation into class-bound discourse. However, like Rex andTomlinson’s (1979) respondents, the members of recent migrant groups atTopbuild did not, in general, identify with class politics, but, neither did the vastmajority of the builders, whether they were recent migrants or not. The build-ers’ political views were diverse and often inconsistent, ranging from left toright and all shades in between (just as described by Tressell 1965 [1914]).Indeed, amongst the working class in general, and at almost any period in thelast three centuries, working-class political views have always been diverse (seeCannadine 1999; McKenzie and Silver 1968).10

Some of the builders occasionally made allusions to their labour makingmoney for other people, but they otherwise accepted their class position asgiven: class-bound hierarchy was hegemonic. Consequently class was not asalient collective or politicized identity, and the builders certainly did notidentify with one another as a single collective class grouping. Any semblanceof a broad class collectivity was fractured by gender and ethnic divisions,competition over jobs, and by income differentials and status distinctionsbetween the trades.

Physical culture

Moral status and masculinity

The builders’ view of class hierarchy was not predominately a material orinstrumental view, but a symbolic and moral one. Writers including Skeggs

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(2004) and Sayer (2002) view the moral discourse on class as stigmatizing tothe working class, and debates have ensued about the relationships betweenclass stigmata and class dis-identification (see Reay 1998; Savage, Bagnall andLonghurst 2001; Sayer 2002; Skeggs 1997). However, rejection of working-class identity labels may be gendered. A number of writers illustrate thatworking-class men resist such devaluation by elevating their physical abilities,strength, virility and duty as protectors and providers for their families (Bour-dieu 1986a, 2001; Pyke 1996; Sasson-Levy 2002; Sennett and Cobb 1972;Willis 1977). The builders I observed were proud working men, and any pos-sible stigma of class was largely overlaid by their autonomy in the workplaceand by an over-riding cultural value placed on a traditional class-basedmasculinity.

At Topbuild, masculine practices bore remarkable similarities to the‘shop-floor’ culture observed in many other class-bound areas of social life: thefactory (Collinson 1992; Collinson and Hearn 1996; Roy 1990 [1960]), the coalmine (Gouldner 1954; Wicks 2002), and in schools and on ‘the streets’ (Miller1958; Willis 1977, 1978). The builders’ informal workplace practices were char-acterized by general game-play, ‘having the crack’, ‘piss-taking’, time banditry,conflict with immediate naked authority, and real or theatrical bellicosity, all ofwhich were most frequently expressed and performed through the screen of abody-centered physical masculinity. It was a culture that spread out from theworkplace into leisure activities, and most saliently into the public house.Rhetorics about working hard, drinking hard, fighting hard, and fucking hardwere a dominant scaffold that underpinned and infused the builders’ publicculture.11 In addition to this, and despite it, masculine practices were framed bya strong code of group loyalty and normative reciprocity towards work mates,families and friends.

Expressions of class-bound masculinity have been objectified as a socialproblem for centuries, appearing perennially in writings of the past in descrip-tions of the mob and rabble; and in the present as: delinquency (in criminol-ogy), worker intransigence (in industrial relations), naughty boys (in educationstudies), and as exploitative patriarchs (in gender studies). These foci are aproduct of middle-class fear and constructed through the frame of their oppo-sitional middle-class ‘mental’ difference. Class-bound physical masculinity,with its basis in strength and protection is, however, not simply a working-classvalue, but one that remains extant in British society in general. This ‘subterra-nean value’ (Matza 1964), whose roots stretch deep into history, can still beseen in contemporary middle-class culture: films and sports focus on the bodyand celebrate the physical, and are, at least vicariously, enjoyed across thesocial spectrum, and not simply devalued in middle-class discourse. Even thegeneral devaluing of working-class physicality is contextual and contingent.Traditional masculinity is called for in times of war or disaster where ‘tough’risk-taking men are frequently revered and rewarded.



Bodily power and capital

[T]he popular valorisation of physical strength as a fundamental aspect ofvirility and of anything that produces and supports it (‘strong’ food anddrink, heavy work and exercise) is . . . intelligibly related to the fact thatboth the peasant class and the industrial working class depend on labourpower which the laws of cultural reproduction and of the labour marketreduce, more than for any other classes, to sheer muscle power; and it shouldnot be forgotten that a class which, like the working class, is only rich in itslabour power can only oppose to the other classes – apart from withdrawalfrom its labour – its fighting strength, which depends on physical strengthand courage of its members, and also their number . . . (Bourdieu 1986a:384)

Class is not solely a symbolic signifier of identity. Class-bound culture andpractice are linked to one’s position in the social structure (Bourdieu 1986a),and people are identified by one another as members of stratified socialpositions by virtue of such culture and practice (see Sayer 2002; Southerton2002). In this sense, class-bound masculine values were not simply discursiverhetoric, but were embodied in actual practice. Physicality got the builders jobs(particularly for labourers, but all builders must necessarily have a degree ofpragmatic physical fitness) and earned them respect from their work groupsand communities: a form of localized ‘physical capital’ (c.f. Bourdieu 1986b;Wacquant 2004). The fundamental basis of traditional masculinity, physicalstrength, was also a source of interactive power projected through a class-bound accent, bellicose speech and bodily demeanor. It was utilized to settle,or prevent, disputes, and it has historically provided a potent source of lever-age over their more powerfully positioned, higher-class, counterparts.

The builders’ bodies were, in this way, central to their life-projects andself-identities, not merely in terms of gender status or as a site of pleasure, butas part of their capital. Builders exchange their bodily labour for wages, andthis was ingrained in their culture (c.f. Willis 1977). Consider for example, oneof the site managers, who reflected on his recent change of career from generalbuilder to site manager:

You can’t really term it [site management] as earning your money. I alwaysthink to earn your money you’ve got to work hard for it. I don’t consider thisto be work, I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense but I think work,I would relate it to physical work you know. This is just the lighter end isn’tit, really. You really get paid extortionately for doing no real work, butyou’re paid for your knowledge aren’t you. It’s a strange thing to say, butusing your brain isn’t really working I think.

In conjunction with the centrality of physicality, the builders were frequentlyreferred to by the term ‘body’: managers, subcontractors and foremen would

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need ‘more bodies’ to do particular works for instance. This Foucauldian styleof reference to worker as a ‘body’ also reflected the builders’ own concerns.Physical masculinity, historically classed through discursive symbols of mind–body and mental/manual, were a fundamental basis of identification for thebuilders. This, coupled with the continuing functionality of bodily ability andpower, and, the symbolic demarcation of the working class as bodies, spawneda self-reinforcing dynamic whereby historical discourse and everyday actionreinforced one another.

Effected bodies and social capital

It was not simply ‘physical capital’ that the builders utilized to negotiate theirlives. Social capital (their communities of friends and family) was also funda-mental to their life trajectories, and these networks were riddled with thedisadvantages of their class and ethnic backgrounds. Almost all the builders(except some of the mechanical and electrical tradesmen) had learnt theirskills informally, on-the-job. They had found their way to and, been trained in,their occupations via their social network communities. Thus social and physi-cal capital, in association with major social change, had largely ordered theirpresent position in the stratification system, and they were aware of this.

It was evidenced from the oral life-histories of the builders, that all the‘troops’ and ‘NCOs’ accounted their lives as contingent upon external effects.These accounts highlighted a unified cultural perception shared by thebuilders. Only the quantity surveyors and consultants constructed their lifenarrative through stories of life and career choices, and they were the onlygroups that considered themselves middle class. Identification as middle classmay also entail the construction of one’s self as a reflexive and autonomousself-governing individual (see du Gay 1996; Rose 1999 [1989]; Skeggs 2004).Indeed, those who possess formal qualifications may have increased choices asto whether they can follow the careers that their qualifications unlock, or tochoose work that requires no formal qualifications if they possess suitablesocial networks.The working classes do not however have such a wide range ofchoices (Bottero 2005), and their capacity to adapt to major social changes iscramped in proportion.

Major social change formed a fundamental backdrop to almost all the olderbuilders’ life courses. For example, a number of them had worked in factoriesbut had been guided into building via their network groups following indus-trial restructuring and high unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s. The firstgeneration carpenters had chain-migrated to London following xenophobicAfrican nationalism in the 1970s. And the majority of the labourers had leftIreland in the 1950s or the 1980s, attempting to escape severe poverty andeconomic downturn. None of these structural exigencies had been under their



control. Accounting for their lives as contingent upon external effects wastherefore largely realistic and represented a ‘penetrative’ culture of sorts.12

The builders’ ability to negotiate and adapt to social change was limited bya lack of formal qualifications, money, high-capital networks, and by others’reactions to their ethnicities and cultures. Faced with social changes largely outof their control, the builders fell upon their predominant forms of capital –physical and social – that is, their embodied knowledge and their networks offriends and families. And, it was through these networks (and informal school,street, and workplace culture) that class-bound masculine values were trans-mitted, absorbed and maintained.

Using hierarchical discourse

Rather than rejecting or failing to identify with class-bound symbolism, thebuilders identified with it and, further, they used hierarchical symbolism toraise their own status and to distinguish themselves from one another.Throughtheir reverence for tough independent physicality, they (in general) felt neitherstigmatized nor exploited by the class system. Indeed they applied class-basedhierarchical symbolism to one another. As indicated by the painter quotedabove, a moral hierarchy was present between the various trades. Anotherexample of this practice occurred when I left my observation of the site officeto participate as a painter: the project manager said to me, ‘what do you wantto work with them for? Painters are the scum of the earth’.The term ‘scum’ wasonce again immersed in the class-bound language of dirt.

Outside work, in their neighborhoods, the builders considered themselvesa class above the ‘scrounger’ (unemployed), the ‘street criminal’, the ‘illegalimmigrant’ and the ‘asylum seeker’, categories that were frequently racialized.By comparison the builders were honorable working men (c.f. Kefalas 2003).They lived side-by-side with perceived disorder in their urban neighbourhoods(unlike in North America where tight ghettoization occurs. See Johnston,Forrest and Poulsen 2002). These groups struggled for jobs, housing, women,and street power, and, recent migrant groups were seen by almost all of thebuilders as a source of falling wages. As one of the carpenters mentioned:

I mean you pay an Indian labourer for £50 [per day] because he’s got ahouse, wife and children, he can’t survive on less. But you get an Albanian orRomanian or whatever, he’s living with 3 people in one room, he can do £20a day and he wouldn’t argue about it. Plus the physical fitness is different,they can work harder than the Asians because they’ve got more height orbody weight . . .

Demonized groups were commonly characterized through a hierarchicallyclass-based and/or racialized discourse, whereby ‘Dirt and waste, sexuality and

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contagion, danger and disorder, degeneracy and pathology’ (Skeggs 2004: 4)were of immediate concern. As one of the painters said:

Up there [in a local neighbourhood] are untold blacks . . . You could say itwas Nigeria or Africa because that’s what it looks like at the end of the day.We’re like the refugees up there . . . its just the geezers, they go roundthinking they got a chip on their shoulder, going round cussing people. Andlike if you got a crowd you gotta walk around them, if you bump into themthey’re gonna cause an argument and all that.

In this sense, the builders deflected aspects of a morally hierarchical discoursethat was applied to themselves by others onto those they perceived as belowthem. As Douglas (1970) argues, to feel good about ourselves we frequentlydegrade others, and, such degradation tends to be framed by bifurcated formsrelated to notions of good/evil. However, these forms collapse modern class-based and race-based discursive stigmata into one another, resulting in thepotentially degraded degrading others. It should also be noted that demonizedgroups were not necessarily conceptualized through repressive discourses asstigmatized races. The builders’ demons were frequently Eastern Europeanmigrants and asylum seekers who were viewed as hierarchically belowthemselves.

Conclusion

The difficulty of accurately planning building tasks and the highly complexand multiply contingent nature of building work, means that building workhas been affected relatively little by industrial technology or scientific man-agement techniques. Builders retain a large degree of workplace power andautonomy, and are able to view the product of their labour. Consequently,industrialization and post-industrialization did little to alter their workinglives.Yet the intensification of modernity and the industrialized prefabricationof building materials did alter the organizational structure of building work,reduced builders’ skill monopolies and labour market power, and symbolicallyrelegated building workers to ‘bodies’ undertaking ‘dirty work’. It was anorganizational structure that fed, in part, on the discursive de-coupling ofmind–body, and it framed the builders’ identifications.

Social class was not a primary identifier utilized by the builders, althoughmodern class-bound discourse did influence their perceptions, accounts andcultures. The specific term ‘class’ was rarely used, but moral evaluations basedupon the class-based division of minds/bodies, manual/non-manual, and dirty/clean, were utilized to classify themselves and one another. They thus held apredominately cultural and moral perception of class hierarchy rather than aninstrumental one.



As manual workers, the builders were symbolically delineated as ‘bodies’.The categorization was not purely symbolic but reflected the builders’ physicalemphasis: bodies were sources of power, knowledge, status and income. Thecentrality of the masculine body to the builders’ identities represented atraditional, almost pre-modern, form of masculine culture linked to their eco-nomic, social and political positions. This culture grew from both tradition andpresent-day functionality ensuing from their position in the social structure.Their cultures had not, therefore, broken free from tradition;13 their identitieswere largely ascribed by social background, present day reality, and genderand ethnicity, and, these were conceptualized through the screen of moderndiscourse.

The builders were tightly embedded in community networks, which wereorganized around historically enduring norms of reciprocity. They were net-works that were functional in their provision of information gateways to jobs,housing, goods and services. For the builders, making money was more centralthan conspicuously spending it, and the majority of their consumption wasfamily-centered or undertaken in the pub.

It should also be noted that the builders’ informal (and often intransigent)workplace cultures, adherence to body-centered masculine values, and embed-dedness in reciprocal social networks, mirrored other descriptions of working-class ‘industrial’ cultures.Yet, because the builders’ working lives were affectedrelatively little by industrialization, their cultures could not be seen as theproduct of that, but more likely as a continuation of pre-industrial plebeiancultures rooted in tight communities, norms of reciprocity, informal craftmores, and an almost feudal valorization of strength and protection (c.f.Thompson 1990, 1993). The conceptualization of working-class culture as theproduct of industrial work, then, might be quite misplaced.

(Date accepted: February 2007)

Notes

1. Funded by an ESRC Studentship (ref.:R42200134486). Thanks to Paul Rock andJanet Foster for their guidance throughoutand beyond the project, and to Dick Hobbsfor providing comments on a later draft.Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers atthe British Journal of Sociology whosechallenging suggestions hopefully helped tostrengthen the arguments in this article.

2. The Private Finance Initiative wasoriginally introduced in 1992 by the Conser-vative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Services in State departments were‘contracted-out’ to private bidders. In theNHS for instance, competitive tendering wasintroduced for ‘hotel’ services such as clean-ing and catering, and for the constructionand maintenance of hospital buildings(see Drakeford 2000). The PFI was part ofthe ‘new’ marketization of governance thatintended to make State services morestreamlined and cost effective though thecompetitive dynamics of market principles(see Rhodes 1997).

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3. It has been suggested that class and theclass system is no longer relevant in Britain’spost-industrial, socially mobile society (seefor example, Bauman 1988; Beck 1992;Giddens 1991). However, it must be recog-nized that, in 1991, 38 per cent of Britishpeople could be classified as manualworkers (Gallie 2000, from Bottero 2005) –a substantial proportion of British society.Moreover, whilst social mobility may havebecome ‘built in’ to the contemporaryemployment structure (Goldthorpe andMarshall 1992), that mobility continuesto be shaped by class background (seeBlanden, Gregg and Machin 2005;Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne 1987;Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992), and theworking class is largely self-recruitingbecause it is less likely that the middle classwill descend into the working class (Savage2000). Manual work and class inequality,then, tend to run in families, and Britishsociety is far from purely meritocratic orfree of the ‘old’ class structure.

4. Some contemporary builders continueto become part of the ‘working-class aristoc-racy’ by becoming business entrepreneurs.However, the Topbuild builders (excludingthe trade subcontractors) could not beviewed as part of this group because theypredominately made their living throughemployment as waged workers.

5. Many of the Topbuild builders hadcreated ‘for themselves a relatively com-fortable position’ in comparison to manualworkers in general. Their position was,however, under threat from excess laboursupply as a result of increased immigration.However, the builders’ economic positionwas, at the time of my fieldwork, largelyshielded from this threat because of theirsubcontract bosses’ embeddedness in theconstruction economy (c.f. Granovetter1985; Waldinger 1995. See Thiel 2005).

6. The low rates of unionization amongstbuilders may also be a product of tradedivisions between them, and because build-ers’ working lives are characterized byworking for many different employers inmany geographic areas, all of which reduce

the possibilities of collective identificationand action.

7. The term ‘crack’ or, ‘craic’, is Irishargot. Its common usage in the everydaylanguage of the builders testifies to the influ-ence that the Irish have had upon London’sbuilding industry and urban English culturein general.

8. It was not simply the subcontractedtrade groups that displayed nepotisticrecruitment practices, but higher positionswere also filled via social networking. Forexample, one of the site managers atTopbuild was the son of a Director of Con-struction at another building contractor. Hisposition as a site manager can be seen asanalogous to a second lieutenant who, ratherthan training as a quantity surveyor, waslearning his skills ‘in the field’.

9. During the writing of this article I tolda carpenter (unconnected to Topbuild) that Iwas writing about social class in the buildingindustry. He said that he thought it might beproblematic to do so because ‘Everyone onbuilding sites is working class. Even the sitemanagers and subbys [subcontractors] areworking class, so class isn’t anything thatanyone’s bothered about’.

10. The view of a politically homogenousworking class appears to be the product ofviewing the working class from a distance,often through the lens of middle-class revo-lutionary hope. Bourdieu (1986a) is moreguilty than most in this charge. His view thatthe working class are politically homogenousand do not speak ideas of their making, is, Iwould argue, a product of his distance fromthem.Working-class political homogeneity islargely a myth (see Cannadine 1999; andabove), and Bourdieu’s view that theworking class does not have opinions bearsno relation to their (mythical) inability tospeak, but, rather, their inability to be heard.The builders, for example, had many andvociferous views.Working-class perspectiveshave, however, been largely excluded fromhistory because they were rarely frozen indocumentation. Forms of music and song,however, remain a testament to their creativ-ity, opinion and voice, and many of these



forms have become co-opted by the middleclass.

11. The carpenters’ expressions of mascu-linity were slightly varied from the othergroups in this respect. They were able tocomfortably switch from expressions oftough masculinity and bellicosity to a moreHindu-bound gentility. Part of their abilityto make this switch may have been the resultof their perceived power of collective tough-ness, that is, their tight collectivity andnumber was feared and revered by the othertrade and ethnic groups at Topbuild. Thecarpenters also did relatively high statusand clean manual work. They thus had littlereason to so regularly dramatize theirstrength and toughness.

12. Early sociological research classifiedsuch structural-effect narratives as ‘fatalism’

(see Miller 1958). However, in my opinion,fatalism was a realistic interpretation oflives at the bottom end of the stratificationstructure. Economically deprived upbring-ings, negligible parenting, poor schooling,high rates of mortality, technological change,natural disaster and political uprising, hadaffected the builders’ lives, and their family’slives before them, and all such structural exi-gencies were largely out of their personalcontrol.

13. This is not to say that working-classculture has not become de-coupled fromsocial infrastructures and set loose asan object of consumption for others.Working-class culture might be robbed andre-enacted but, perhaps, not warn as dispo-sition (c.f. Skeggs 2004).

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