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

Drawing historical comparisons between the 19 th century and the present, this paper describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a re-emerging notion of 'noblesse oblige' that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to religious figures who ostensibly self-sacrifice for the good of everyone else. This generates a form of charismatic authority that affords the super-rich an influential space from which to spread a 'theodicy of privilege'-legitimating their elevated economic position, shielding growing wealth concentration from criticism, and sanctifying the claim that individual mega-wealth is collectively beneficial. Through its contribution to and facilitation of the inegalitarian status quo, this theodicy engenders various forms of structural violence. Here we explore the mechanisms that enable wealthy donors to position themselves as apparent benefactors of humanity, including a reliance on metrics that appear to justify the claim that targeted philanthropic expenditures can and are reducing global wealth and health inequalities, but which raise unanswered questions surrounding the actual effects of the outcomes claimed.

Debates over the constitution and operation of economic markets tend to neglect their empirical variability and frequently fail to recognize the specific qualities of labour and contract markets. Based on one year’s participant observation on a London construction site in 2003/4, this article demonstrates how labour and contract markets were informally regulated and reproduced, characterized by alternative exchange forms that sometimes involved illegitimate practices. Chains of informal social networks, their mores and methods of association and exchange, closed down the markets to competition and framed the development of ethnic stratification patterns. The patterns were locked in place by strong social ties that had formed in relation to the highly deregulated construction marketplace, and which came to constitute it. This revealed the construction economy as predominately socially embedded in a ‘moral economy’ that was ultimately underpinned by violence, putting into question numerous claims from the economic sociology of markets.

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This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the class-bound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a pre-industrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK.