A psychosocial approach to shame, embarrassment and melancholia amongst unemployed young men and their fathers

Abstract

This paper uses a psychosocial approach to explore young unemployed men's resistance to work they describe as 'embarrassing' and 'feminine', in the context of the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys. In our psychosocial interview-based study, with young men as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, we found a community riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity, projected on to the young men in such a way as to almost scapegoat them. The experience of the young men was marked by embarrassment and shame. They feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community for not being able to find gender-appropriate work. IntroductionThis paper seeks to explore issues about shame, embarrassment, disillusionment, melancholy, traumatic loss, depressive anxieties, and their relative influence in the ways in which adult and young men cope with unemployment, the loss of manufacturing work and the ascendancy of service work, in the context of research carried out by the authors in an ex-steel community in South Wales. Our research started with a previous study on steel redundancies and its effects on worker identities (Walkerdine and Jimenez, forthcoming) in a town in the South Wales valleys, which lost its major employer, a steelworks, in 2002. This closure had a devastating effect upon the small town and while many young and older men managed to make the transition to other forms of work, some did not. In particular, some young unemployed men refused to take available work because it was considered embarrassing and feminine. Consequently, we received funding 1 to follow this up and conducted a second small psychosocial interview-based study of six young unemployed men (17-24) and their parents with the aim of further understanding the phenomenon we had encountered. For the young men and families we worked with, there was a great deal of pain and difficulty around this issue, with the problem well recognised by other members of the community. For example, stacking shelves in the local supermarket was considered too embarrassing to contemplate. These are young men who left school with no qualifications and therefore for whom no 'skilled' work is available. The range of unskilled work is very limited, but we were struck by the fact that the young men in our first

Learning not to labour: a micro analysis of consensual male unemployment

“…Such men appear, counterintuitively to findings presented in extant work (e.g. Jiminez and Walkerdine, 2011), to feel little if any sense of shame about their unemployment, and view their welfare reliance as non-problematic. Such men have learned and chosen to not labour and are thus "consensually unemployed".…”

“…In post-industrial Britain, many working class males endure a precarious if not redundant relationship with labour and, consequently, are forced to reluctantly rely on welfare for their socio-economic survival (Alcock et al, 2003), often with a sense of shame ( Jiminez and Walkerdine, 2011) and a collective, nostalgic mourning for an industrial past (Nayak, 2006) in which -to paraphrase Willis -working class men got working class jobs.…”

“…The proportion of British men in employment has declined from 92 to 76 per cent between 1971 and the current day (Office of National Statistics, 2013). This statistical decline has occurred predominantly among working class men who now -without the heavy industries they once worked in -exist, according to Blackburn (1999), as unemployed "victims" of post-industrialism, who experience psychosocial shame and embarrassment ( Jiminez and Walkerdine, 2011) and a lack of dignity (Sennett, 2008;Lamont, 2000) as they negotiate enforced unemployment and welfare reliance. The longer unemployment ensues, the more severe the challenges unemployed working class men experience:…”

Nurturing learning or encouraging dependency? Teacher constructions of students in lower attainment groups in English secondary schools

“…As accounts of Shildrick et al's (2016) interviewees illustrate, personal circumstances clearly impact on individual agency, but structural factors, such as industrial decline in the local area, can increase the likelihood of welfare dependency (Hutton, 1995;Standing, 2011) and communal or cultural factors can shape individuals' responses to welfare dependency across generations (Jimenez & Walkerdine, 2011;Walkerdine, 2010Walkerdine, , 2016. Similarly, there is also a range of past and present factors that may be contributing to a student's perceived low educational attainment (Pianta & Walsh, 1996) and his/her current placement in a lower attainment group.…”

“…This is because their agency is bound not only by broader socio-economic structures, but potentially also by cultural meanings and understandings of appropriate behaviour anchored in local histories (Walkerdine, 2010(Walkerdine, , 2016. These shared meanings may, for example, construct particular types of jobs as 'embarrassing' , and to be avoided even if that means being dependent on welfare (Jimenez & Walkerdine, 2011).…”