The British Journal of Sociology 2007 Volume 58 Issue 2

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 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 identication as working class, and collective identication 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 stratication 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 reexive choice. Keywords: Builders; class bound; hierarchy; mindbody; masculinity; capital.

Introduction Mass nation-bound factory work was only a short moment in the history of the working class (Pahl 1984), and the majority of manual workers never worked in factories, nor for all of their lives (Cannadine 1999). Approximately half the working class were, and are, women, many traditionally working in proletarian service jobs and agriculture; and substantial proportions of working-class men worked in docking, mining, agriculture, shing, small-scale enterprise, the
Thiel (Corresponding author email: darrenthiel@hotmail.com) 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

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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 prices and 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 line enslaved by scientic and/or Fordist management techniques.After all,factories employed supervisors, technicians, labourers and warehouse workers (see Edwards and Scullion 1982). Viewing the working class as solely a product of deskilled industrial work is, then, surely unfounded. Cannadine (1999) argues that British social classes have never been culturally homogenous or politically aligned in any clear-cut way, but that class is a rhetorical device with which the British interpret hierarchy. What Cannadine underplays, however, is how class rhetoric has historically guided the social organization of hierarchy and, thereby structurally reinforced its conceptual existence. Moreover, class is not simply related to interpretations of hierarchy but is tied to symbolic bifurcations based upon the division of minds and bodies, mental and manual work, and clean and dirty work. These bifurcations are morally loaded (Douglas 1970; Skeggs 2004), structurally extant, and continue to infest class-bound classications, identications and cultures (c.f. Willis 1977; Croteau 1995). In this article I discuss the work, cultures and identities of a section of London building workers based upon participant observation of a Private Finance Initiative2 refurbishment of a series of National Health Service buildings in central London in 2003/4. I spent one year working with the builders, conducted 32 open-ended recorded interviews, and had many more informal conversations that I recorded in eldnotes. The builders cultures were embedded in a form of physical masculinity which was framed by a class-bound discourse related to the organizational structure of building work and linked to the modern discursive bifurcation of mind/body, mental/manual, and clean/dirty work. Class identities were not rejected but were largely overlaid by trade status differentials, gender, and ethnic identities. Class-based masculinity represented an over-riding collective value system, and functioned, in part, to deect any possible class stigma by appealing to socially embedded values of strength and protection. This masculine culture was tied to archaic tradition and it had not become de-coupled from modern economy, state and discourse. Physical masculinity was a fundamental source of capital and status which held a continuing functionality in contemporary builders lives, and which formed a fundamental backdrop to their personal and collective identities. History and technology In 1995, 1.5 million people were ofcially registered as working in Britains building industry (Drucker and White 1996), approximately 85 per cent of
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whom were manual workers and, of these, 98 per cent were men (Greed 2000). The building industry thus employs a substantial proportion of male manual workers. And, as the proportion of manual work decreases, builders make up an increasingly large section of the manual working class3 in twenty-rst century Britain. Before industrialization and the onslaught of mature capitalism, builders were workers who sold their labour in the marketplace, and whose work lives were clearly separate from their home lives. Building is thus a pre-industrial industry, and consequently the historical shift to industrialization and, indeed, to post-industrialization, had relatively little effect on building work. As I shall show, the specicity of the building industrys product led to a relative immunity 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 changed substantially. Building projects are no longer organized and regulated by trades guild groups, but by building contractors and subcontractors. The beginnings of subcontracting were entwined with the rise of building professionals in the seventeenth century (Higgin and Jessop 1965) and the birth of the general contractor in the late eighteenth century (Cooney 1955). Previous to this change, throughout the feudal era, building work was controlled and executed by master guildsmen who trained apprentices and employed journeymen. They monopolized building knowledge, controlling their own wages, work hours and recruitment patterns. At this time, large building works, for example, were overseen and organized by government and church clerks in consultation with master masons and carpenters, but the masters organized these works in a way that was more akin to work co-operatives than capitalist enterprises (Knoop and Jones 1967 [1933]). As Higgin and Jessop (1965: 39) argue, in the slow tempo of the guild system, design was not separate from construction as: The master artisans worked it out amongst themselves and with the client as they went along. Many building guildsmen held considerable status in their local communities (see Woodward 1995). However, in early modernity, the invention of the printing press, the rise of the professional, and the intensication of capitalism began to erode the guildsmens status and negate their traditional control over the building industry. Beginning in the seventeenth century, architects, engineers and surveyors were employed to plan, design and administer large building works. Design became separated from execution, and the power and mystique of the guilds began to be appropriated by an emerging professional middle class.
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The intensication of the mass production of pre-fabricated parts also reduced the builders skill monopolies, and it was here that industrialization impinged upon builders power and status. Building parts (e.g. wood mouldings, bricks, or ceramics) were no longer made and fashioned in the builders workshops. Carpenters, for instance, no longer grew their own trees for workable wood. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, mass production coupled with the rise of building professionals and general contractors, squeezed the power and status that tradesmen had traditionally held, and began to move them from their status as a plebeian aristocracy into the ranks of the working class (see Price 1980).4 The rise of building professionals mirrored the rise of the middle class in general, and, associated with the ascent of the professional, mental and manual work began to become symbolically uncoupled from one another (c.f. Cooley 1987), amplifying middle-class difference and, thereby, power, which was further accentuated by the professionals training in gentlemanly conduct in the public school system. Gentlemen of knowledge, supported by the prevailing and dominant discourse of the enlightenment, began the symbolic genesis of class demarcation and domination (c.f. Day 2001; Skeggs 2004). The encroaching professionals symbolic monopoly of mental work conceptually separated work knowledge from its implementation, thereby relegating craft workers into the working class, forced to sell their casualized labour to undertake manual dirty work (Hughes 1958) at the symbolic nadir of stratied modernity. It was also with modernity that the British working class was born. Until recently, class was seen as the product of capitalism and industrialism, but post-structuralist theorizing now recognizes class as modern discourse (see Cannadine 1999; Day 2001; Skeggs 2004). This discourse is tied to the modern notion of the separation of mind/body and mental/manual, and the subsequent reorganization of workplaces into experts, managers, and workers experts exercising their minds to do clean work, and workers exercising their bodies and getting dirty in the process. The symbolic separation of minds/bodies can be seen as a fundamental division 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 organization and culture, and provided a symbolic backdrop for contemporary builders discourses on class. This is not to say, of course, that building work entails only the use of ones body. Building work requires both an abstract and embodied knowledge, and involves an almost continual mental-corporeal form of learning and innovation (c.f. Cooley 1987; Wacquant 2004). It is this complexity and necessity for innovation that has partly shielded building work from
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the onslaught of automation, bureaucratization and ensuing managerial domination.

Technology As regards machinery little need be said, for the building trade is not an industry that is being revolutionised by the introduction of mechanical appliances, nor is it likely that this will ever be the case. (Booth 1895: 134) Building work knowledge has not been monopolized by scientic management techniques, nor has machinery superseded manual labour in the performance of building tasks. Despite professionalization and the marketization of the building industry, the actual practices of building work have remained largely unchanged. The work of carpentry, brick-laying or plastering for example, is still based upon the handicraft skills of the past, and the tasks of these crafts remain very similar to those of their trade forebears (Kidder 1985; Woodward 1995). Mechanization did reduce the physical demands of building work to a degree, yet the ancient Greeks used wooden cranes, pulleys and lever systems, and, in pre-modernity, animals were used to move heavy objects much like the mechanical machinery of today. Since the 1960s, many handicraft tasks have also been mechanized by the invention of electric hand tools, but this, along with innovations in the design of building materials, sped up building processes, but did not alter the fundamental physical tasks required to build something. Buildings are immobile and must be constructed in the space in which they are consumed. To erect a building, builders move around that space applying the parts as they go along. Each time a new part is added, the workspace changes shape, altering its structure (Reimer 1979). The workplace is, then, in constant transition, making for a hazardous working environment (building is second only to agriculture for workplace fatalities [Health and Safety Executive 2003]) in which there can be little architecture of control (c.f. Foucault 1991 [1975]). These conditions mean that the knowledge of how to build something must be localized and heuristic the specic content of a task cannot be planned prospectively from a distance because building tasks are too complex and contingent. For example, to mend a broken window-frame, it would be almost impossible to predict in advance the complex nature of the wear and weathering of the wood a carpenter must make situated, pragmatic and heuristic decisions in order to repair it, and: [He] must decide a thousand times a day what is good enough where to place himself and his work among the almost innite possibilities of perfection or compromise (Reckman 1979: 76). Building 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
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tasks can be architecturally and bureaucratically planned, monitored and controlled. Whilst the construction of contemporary standardized new housing, for example, 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 the renovation and repair of pre-existing structures) accounts for less than 50 per cent of total building work (Department of Trade and Industry 2001) and a large proportion of new work is specialist, one-off work, which for the most part cannot be sub-divided, standardized or perfectly prospected in advance (Bresnan 1990). Builders also differ from industrial workers because they work on a building site only for short periods of the project and, when the build is complete, must move to another job in another geographic area. On average, a self-employed builder (60 per cent of building workers) works for a single rm for only 1.2 years (Harvey 2003). Employment practices are thus casual, and construction working life ephemeral.This provides builders with the relative freedom of not being tied to a single company, boss, or workplace location. The creep of modernity and the industrial revolution, then, did little to revolutionize building work, and even less to revolutionize builders (see below). It was this that prompted Engels to argue that builders: form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as nal ([1892] 1969: 31). And, I would argue, their position has changed little since.5

Building contracting and trade clusters At my eldwork site, the build was undertaken by the main building contractor, which I shall call Topbuild Plc, a contractor which, like building contracting companies in general, was a hollowed-out construction company (Harvey 2001) that organized and managed building construction rather than supplying actual machinery or labour to do building. Topbuild only directly employed construction managers, quantity surveyors and other administrative staff. All tradesmen, labourers and mechanical plant were subcontracted to Topbuild by various trade specic subcontractors. The subcontracted building workers were an extraordinarily diverse group of men. Their ages ranged from 16 to 69, and their national and ethnic backgrounds were similarly diverse. However, ethnicity in particular was clearly patterned. During the eld research I focused on 5 main building groups: the directly employed managers and quantity surveyors, and, a section of the subcontracted builders: mechanical and electrical (electricians and plumbers),
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carpenters, painters, and labourers. Each of these groups, excluding the mechanical and electrical workers, were characterized by clearly dened ethnic and geographic boundaries. For example, all but one of the carpenters were members of the diaspora of Kutch, a small area of Gujarat, India, and all but one lived in one area of West London. Almost all of the labourers were rst or second generation Irish, and predominantly lived in and around one area of South London. The painters were a mixture of Irish, Scottish and English, but they were all white-skinned, the vast majority living in an area of North London. In addition, all the site management were white English and lived in Kent, a county adjoining London. These clearly patterned geographical and trade clusters were the result of the highly informal nature of recruitment in the building industry, a pattern which was embedded in the community networks of migrant groups and of builders 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 job in comparison with the building industry in general. Mechanical and electrical tradesmen were the only group that did not follow ethnic and geographic clustering patterns, ostensibly because of skill shortages and the legal requirement of formal qualications usually needed by those who sought employment as plumbers or electricians, qualications which do not transfer across national boundaries. Recent migrant groups, or the informally trained, were thus in most cases (see Thiel 2005) excluded from mechanical and electrical work, and their subcontractor was forced to advertise for tradesmen in the press. The presence of ethnic geographic and trade clusters indicated that this section of the working population were not individualized and/or devoid of community support systems. Quite the contrary, they were embedded in historically enduring, tightly-knit reciprocally-based networks that provided information gateways to employment and, further, to housing, goods and services (c.f. Boissevain 1974; Hobbs 1988; Portes 1995; Young and Willmott 1990 [1957]). Rather than the demise of such communities, the insecure nature of 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 building industry, a closed shop has never operated in the British construction industry, and rates of unionization have always been relatively low. Part of the reason for this is the autonomy enjoyed by building workers, which negates the need for formally organized collective action.6 High levels of autonomy also
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make the management of building workers problematic. Consequently, the managerial control system at Topbuild was characterized by an indulgency pattern (Gouldner 1954) rather than by unilateral, technological, scientic or bureaucratic control. In Gouldners analysis of Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), the sub-surface miners were indulged in their informal work cultures by management. Absenteeism, lateness, pilfering, time banditry, and verbal intransigence were tolerated, and the miners exercised a large degree of collective control over their white-collar management. Gouldner argued that indulgence was the result of both how dangerous the work was, and because foremen (the rst line of management control) worked in similarly dirty and dangerous conditions, identifying with the manual workers rather than management. What he neglected to say, however, was how the physical space of mines and, the localized and contingent nature of mining work knowledge, restricted managerial control, providing a space in which the miners could assert their informal collective power over managers and bosses. Like Gouldners miners, the manual workers at Topbuild were also involved in quotidian, culturally-bound, collective action through which they informally asserted their power over management. As builders cannot be controlled through architectural, bureaucratic or scientic surveillance methods, building site management is characterized by an 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 and be indulged in their informal work cultures. At Topbuild, indulgence took the form of quasi-reciprocal relationships between managers, subcontractors and the building workers. The builders would work largely unobserved if they considered they were being awarded respect and fair pay. The building site managers and subcontractor employers did, of course, hold a power of dismissal and wage payment over their employees, and it was this market power (Ouchi 1980) that brought the manual workers to the workplace within the timetabled hours of the week and provided a certain amount of management control over them. However, once at work, the working day was largely ordered 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 vast majority said they enjoyed their work because they could see the product of their labour (see also Applebaum 1981; LeMasters 1975; Reimer 1979), they felt free to have a good crack7 (jocular and interesting banter) with their work colleagues (see Croteau 1995; Hodson 2002), and because they were largely free to organize their own time during the working day. The project manager at Topbuild, in talking about the labourers, described how the quasi-reciprocal workermanagement relationships functioned:
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You can soon read people and how theyre going to perform for you if theyre on day work and, you know, and obviously, labourers. I know they do a bit of hanging around, a bit of swinging the lead every now and then, but I try and keep men I trust around me. And then when I want that little bit of extra, in fact I know Im going to get it, and they aint going to grumble or complain . . . . Ive been on jobs that arent mine, just been there to help out and [labourers] theyre wandering around, standing leaning on the shovel and having the crack. You know, and I know you know . . . [But] what am I fucking supposed to do, hold their hands? Youve got to try and give people a bit of trust . . . You have to strike relationships up here. People say, oh you got to distance yourself, wear a tie and fucking all that, youre the boss and theyre not. But people resent that and they dont, they fucking wont work for you . . . I dont know quite what the word is, but its mixing it really. I think that works. A lot of people say it doesnt, but in my history it works. You treat people with respect, they treat you with respect, thats mutual. The project manager knew that the labourers did not work at-out all day long, and he was reluctant to become authoritarian towards them, but, by indulging their informal work cultures, he maintained a workforce that was loyal and reciprocal, or mutual, when he needed them to be. He saw it would be unprotable to apply unilateral pressure because they would not continue to work for him. Furthermore, putting pressure on labourers was difcult because it was extremely problematic to observe them; the project manager could not hold their hands all day. Even if he could observe and place pressure on them, open access to most building jobs ensured that they would be 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 worked from his perspective: This is how I like it, people were working with you see, like the management team talk to us on rst name terms. Because you can go on other sites and what they do is look down through their noses at you, you know what I mean? Cos theres a lot of snobbery in the building game you know. They sort of think, labourer youre a shit and all this business. But not with [Topbuilds site managers], they muck in with us, have a joke and a laugh you know. Theres a lot of people in the building that sort of, they think they are above you, which theres no need for it . . . What you gotta acknowledge, I nd sort of, if someones passing you in the corridor, morning, alright, acknowledge someone you know . . . Thats what I like to be like, thats 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
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seen as a shit by virtue of their position in a class-based status hierarchy. One of the maintenance men expressed a similar view: [Topbuild site management], theyre not bad people to work for are they? Its not like Im a site manager and youre a labourer is it? Its like youre all friends. You take the piss out of them, they take the piss out of you . . . I think they get more out of the men because they show the men real respect and if you got their respect theyll give you it in return . . . Its like [the site managers], they say can you do this for them. They ask you to do something almost as a favour, but you get some people and they are ordering you to do it, do this, do that. That dont wash with me. The maintenance man commented that the management would ask the men to do things rather than command them, sort of as a favour. If management did not conform to these expectations, conict could arise, and, on building sites, conict cannot be contained by bureaucratic or despotic methods. It was this quasi-reciprocity and, the ensuing perception of respect, which organized the relationships between managers, subcontractors and builders at Topbuild. As Burawoy (1979) points out, it is not hierarchy per se that frames worker conict, but the way in which it is administered (see also Edwards and Scullion 1982; Hodson 2001). At Topbuild, mate management largely kept conict to a minimum. In this respect, management hierarchy was hegemonic its existence mostly unquestioned. If managers managed in a way that enabled workers to feel respected for their labour, status injuries were non-existent and conict remained dormant. Only one of the builders, a painter, expressed an entirely anti-management attitude: I am a rm believer in this and I will stand by it 100 per cent: its always been them and us . . . In the ofce, them and us, always. Ive always said this, I wouldnt trust them. [The project manager], I would not trust him, I would not trust that man with nothing. I wouldnt trust him with my time keeping if I had a half a day off, I wouldnt trust him not to tell [my subcontract boss] that I took a bit of paint home. I wouldnt trust that man, that is a career Topbuild man. DT: But then [the general foreman] works in the ofce and he comes walking in the canteen when youre skiving and you just mess about with him? [He] aint got a shirt and tie on has he? No, no, no, hes not one of those, he never will be. I think deep down hed like to be but I dont think he ever will be . . . The painters antagonistic attitude was misguided because the project manager did indulge the builders in their time-banditry and pilfering to a large degree.
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The painters view was principally the result of his almost complete autonomy as a tradesman from the site management i.e. he possessed little actual knowledge of how the project manager managed because the project manager did not, for the most part, manage the tradesmen at all. The painters attitude was embedded in his past working life rather than in the everyday reality of Topbuild. However, his distrust of a shirt and tie was clearly affected by class-bound sentiment.

Class-bound identity and organizational structure Whilst there was little industrial conict between the workers and managers at Topbuild, workermanager relations were framed by a dualistic discourse embedded in class-bound symbolism: them and us, shirt and tie, being ordered, looking down, and snobbery. Thus although builders could not be viewed historically as part of the traditional working class whoever they might be (see Devine 1992; Pahl 1984), classed symbolism framed their perceptions, cultures and accounts. This was the result of the above mentioned historical changes in the building industry and their impact on work organization. The conceptual separation of mind/body guided building work organization, and, as Savage (2000) argues, class-bound identications and work organization are intimately linked. In the organization of building work, abstract knowledge became conceptually separate from execution: architects, surveyors and building site managers planned works, and labourers and tradesmen physically constructed them. As a result, the builders drew a distinction between themselves and the management, and this divide was expressed as being in the ofce or being on the tools. However, the site managers, rather than being seen as specically white-collar workers by the manual workers, were rather in the position of non-commissioned ofcers (NCOs); those who occasionally muck in with us an account immersed in the class-bound symbolism of dirt. The organizational structure of the Topbuild build was analogous to a military structure (c.f. Greed 2000) with some of the troops rising through the NCO (building site management) ranks, but almost never above them into the commissioned ranks of project directors and contracts managers. NCOs consisted of foremen (corporals), general foremen (sergeant), site managers (warrant ofcers), and the project manager (regimental sergeant major). The commissioned ranks were populated almost entirely by quantity surveyors (or the suitably networked8). The military structure of Topbuild was, like the military itself, symbolically class-bound, and this was reected in the builders classed identications.
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Class identities Despite workplace autonomy, the absence of alienation from the product of their labour, and, for some, relative afuence, the builders, when asked, identied themselves as working class. However, class itself was almost never specically discussed. At Topbuild, tradesmen, labourers and NCOs collectively and primarily identied themselves and one another as builders (an occupation that is commonly identied by others as working class). This classication was further divided into identication with their trade, and that was clearly demarcated by ethnicity. Furthermore, the trades were embedded in a status hierarchy, with the dirty jobs of labouring and painting at the bottomend, and the relatively clean job of carpentry at the other. As a painter commented: So, labourers, all right they dont earn the money they should earn, but then again in my mind, you can turn it [the tape recorder] off now, they are too fucking stupid anyway . . . Let me explain myself to you . . . [a] painter is one above the food chain right, and labourers are one below him . . . . Status hierarchy was based partly on the association of the moral division of labour with dirt, and partly on the amounts of skill assumed to be involved in the trades. However, some very physical and risky trades including scaffolding, groundwork or high-steel work were also viewed with esteem, but an esteem of a different kind from skilled and clean occupations; one submerged in traditional masculine values which tended to over-ride class-bound statuses in many contexts (see below). The quantity surveyors (commissioned ofcers) predictably identied themselves as middle class when asked. They were, however, quite defensive, alluding to class snobbery (c.f. Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001), but in quite different 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 herself middle to upper class because shes a snob. Me, middle to lower I think. Id hate to ever think that, because I came from a real working-class background . . . So I wouldnt consider myself anything really . . . Id hate to classify myself as middle class, lower class or anything like that. I think thats why a lot of surveyors have problems in the [building] industry, they do tend to look or walk around site in a suit as if they should have respect just because theyre wearing a suit and theyre a surveyor . . . (senior surveyor) A trainee surveyor also took a defensive view of his class status, but from a different angle contingent on his social background, and based on an allusion to 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, thats what annoys me as well, I mean straight away I come into a crowd of people at home, especially my mums side of the family . . . without going into too much detail, they are extremely well educated . . . Oh, Im in the construction industry, and straight away theyre like ah, you know what I mean . . . It really annoys me, really annoys me because straight away people think like mud, shit shifter, like dirty you know. When asked, and despite their difference, the surveyors identied themselves as middle class. The NCOs and troops on the other hand, identied themselves as working class and they were not at all defensive. A site manager said: Im working class yes. Quantity surveyors consider themselves middle class dont they? Because I think its a professional qualication QS, but its bullshit isnt it? All it means is that the chief honchos sit in big leather chairs like Wing Commanders . . . No I dont see myself as being middle class, not in the least. Denitely working class, wouldnt even cross my mind until you asked the question . . . . Regardless of his management level occupation, the site manager identied himself as working class, alluding to military symbolism, but admitting that class 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 reect upon class difference it does not cross my mind until you asked. At Topbuild all of the builders (excluding some of the surveyors and consultants) had classed-based accents and bodily demeanors, and class difference was not a salient issue.9 The NCOs, who occupied a somewhat a foggy objective class position, identied themselves as working class. The traditionally caste-bound carpenters also made allusions to being working class. N had migrated from India to England when he was 11 years old: [In the past] we used to go on the caste culture, now we dont do that, well, its changed a lot . . . Im a working class, yeah. I mean we have a caste for barbers, we have a caste for shoemakers, we have a caste for every cunt. But its changed . . . M, who had also moved to England when he was a child, offered a Hindu interpretation of the class system, quite unprompted: If you do good things now you will get good future, you might be born in wealthy family and have an easy life. I got a friend, his dad hes a rich man. He has no problem in the future. Think about that, hes born in good and we are born in working class. How come that guy born in wealthy family, how come we werent in middle class? Because he did good things in another past.
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A painter, who was Northern Irish Catholic in origin, and who had arrived in England in the early 1980s, expressed a more Marxist view, also unprompted: Were chasing fuckin shadows, we really are, and were being used. Were not even actually chasing them, we think were chasing them, but in actual fact were being used. Just part of the fuckin machinery. Were being used, but theyre using us and were using them, everybodys using everybody . . . Its so unfair, I believe in a more equal world . . . Its so unfair class and money. Because both management and migrant tradesmen identied themselves as working class when asked, I ceased to ask the majority of the builders what social class they thought they belonged to. This was partly because of their simple lack of everyday attention to the specic language of class, and partly because the question seemed tantamount to asking them what gender they thought they belonged to. Class referred to taken-for-granted signiers which had lost visibility and appeared to require little examination. All the three manual workers quoted above were not specically part of the English working class. Their views and identications may testify to a legacy of colonial power of symbols of class (c.f. Cannadine 1999; Fanon 1967), or to the mens acculturation into class-bound discourse. However, like Rex and Tomlinsons (1979) respondents, the members of recent migrant groups at Topbuild did not, in general, identify with class politics, but, neither did the vast majority of the builders, whether they were recent migrants or not. The builders political views were diverse and often inconsistent, ranging from left to right 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 the last three centuries, working-class political views have always been diverse (see Cannadine 1999; McKenzie and Silver 1968).10 Some of the builders occasionally made allusions to their labour making money for other people, but they otherwise accepted their class position as given: class-bound hierarchy was hegemonic. Consequently class was not a salient collective or politicized identity, and the builders certainly did not identify with one another as a single collective class grouping. Any semblance of a broad class collectivity was fractured by gender and ethnic divisions, competition over jobs, and by income differentials and status distinctions between the trades. Physical culture Moral status and masculinity The builders view of class hierarchy was not predominately a material or instrumental 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 to the working class, and debates have ensued about the relationships between class stigmata and class dis-identication (see Reay 1998; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001; Sayer 2002; Skeggs 1997). However, rejection of workingclass identity labels may be gendered. A number of writers illustrate that working-class men resist such devaluation by elevating their physical abilities, strength, virility and duty as protectors and providers for their families (Bourdieu 1986a, 2001; Pyke 1996; Sasson-Levy 2002; Sennett and Cobb 1972; Willis 1977). The builders I observed were proud working men, and any possible stigma of class was largely overlaid by their autonomy in the workplace and by an over-riding cultural value placed on a traditional class-based masculinity. At Topbuild, masculine practices bore remarkable similarities to the shop-oor culture observed in many other class-bound areas of social life: the factory (Collinson 1992; Collinson and Hearn 1996; Roy 1990 [1960]), the coal mine (Gouldner 1954; Wicks 2002), and in schools and on the streets (Miller 1958; Willis 1977, 1978). The builders informal workplace practices were characterized by general game-play, having the crack, piss-taking, time banditry, conict with immediate naked authority, and real or theatrical bellicosity, all of which were most frequently expressed and performed through the screen of a body-centered physical masculinity. It was a culture that spread out from the workplace into leisure activities, and most saliently into the public house. Rhetorics about working hard, drinking hard, ghting hard, and fucking hard were a dominant scaffold that underpinned and infused the builders public culture.11 In addition to this, and despite it, masculine practices were framed by a strong code of group loyalty and normative reciprocity towards work mates, families and friends. Expressions of class-bound masculinity have been objectied as a social problem for centuries, appearing perennially in writings of the past in descriptions of the mob and rabble; and in the present as: delinquency (in criminology), worker intransigence (in industrial relations), naughty boys (in education studies), and as exploitative patriarchs (in gender studies). These foci are a product of middle-class fear and constructed through the frame of their oppositional middle-class mental difference. Class-bound physical masculinity, with its basis in strength and protection is, however, not simply a working-class value, but one that remains extant in British society in general. This subterranean value (Matza 1964), whose roots stretch deep into history, can still be seen in contemporary middle-class culture: lms and sports focus on the body and celebrate the physical, and are, at least vicariously, enjoyed across the social spectrum, and not simply devalued in middle-class discourse. Even the general 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.
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Bodily power and capital [T]he popular valorisation of physical strength as a fundamental aspect of virility and of anything that produces and supports it (strong food and drink, heavy work and exercise) is . . . intelligibly related to the fact that both the peasant class and the industrial working class depend on labour power which the laws of cultural reproduction and of the labour market reduce, more than for any other classes, to sheer muscle power; and it should not be forgotten that a class which, like the working class, is only rich in its labour power can only oppose to the other classes apart from withdrawal from its labour its ghting strength, which depends on physical strength and courage of its members, and also their number . . . (Bourdieu 1986a: 384) Class is not solely a symbolic signier of identity. Class-bound culture and practice are linked to ones position in the social structure (Bourdieu 1986a), and people are identied by one another as members of stratied social positions by virtue of such culture and practice (see Sayer 2002; Southerton 2002). In this sense, class-bound masculine values were not simply discursive rhetoric, but were embodied in actual practice. Physicality got the builders jobs (particularly for labourers, but all builders must necessarily have a degree of pragmatic physical tness) and earned them respect from their work groups and communities: a form of localized physical capital (c.f. Bourdieu 1986b; Wacquant 2004). The fundamental basis of traditional masculinity, physical strength, was also a source of interactive power projected through a classbound accent, bellicose speech and bodily demeanor. It was utilized to settle, or prevent, disputes, and it has historically provided a potent source of leverage over their more powerfully positioned, higher-class, counterparts. The builders bodies were, in this way, central to their life-projects and self-identities, not merely in terms of gender status or as a site of pleasure, but as part of their capital. Builders exchange their bodily labour for wages, and this was ingrained in their culture (c.f. Willis 1977). Consider for example, one of the site managers, who reected on his recent change of career from general builder to site manager: You cant really term it [site management] as earning your money. I always think to earn your money youve got to work hard for it. I dont consider this to be work, I dont 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 isnt it, really. You really get paid extortionately for doing no real work, but youre paid for your knowledge arent you. Its a strange thing to say, but using your brain isnt really working I think. In conjunction with the centrality of physicality, the builders were frequently referred 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 style of reference to worker as a body also reected the builders own concerns. Physical masculinity, historically classed through discursive symbols of mind body and mental/manual, were a fundamental basis of identication for the builders. This, coupled with the continuing functionality of bodily ability and power, and, the symbolic demarcation of the working class as bodies, spawned a self-reinforcing dynamic whereby historical discourse and everyday action reinforced one another.

Effected bodies and social capital It was not simply physical capital that the builders utilized to negotiate their lives. Social capital (their communities of friends and family) was also fundamental to their life trajectories, and these networks were riddled with the disadvantages of their class and ethnic backgrounds. Almost all the builders (except some of the mechanical and electrical tradesmen) had learnt their skills informally, on-the-job. They had found their way to and, been trained in, their occupations via their social network communities. Thus social and physical capital, in association with major social change, had largely ordered their present position in the stratication 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 unied cultural perception shared by the builders. Only the quantity surveyors and consultants constructed their life narrative through stories of life and career choices, and they were the only groups that considered themselves middle class. Identication as middle class may also entail the construction of ones self as a reexive and autonomous self-governing individual (see du Gay 1996; Rose 1999 [1989]; Skeggs 2004). Indeed, those who possess formal qualications may have increased choices as to whether they can follow the careers that their qualications unlock, or to choose work that requires no formal qualications if they possess suitable social networks. The working classes do not however have such a wide range of choices (Bottero 2005), and their capacity to adapt to major social changes is cramped in proportion. Major social change formed a fundamental backdrop to almost all the older builders life courses. For example, a number of them had worked in factories but had been guided into building via their network groups following industrial restructuring and high unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s. The rst generation carpenters had chain-migrated to London following xenophobic African nationalism in the 1970s. And the majority of the labourers had left Ireland in the 1950s or the 1980s, attempting to escape severe poverty and economic downturn. None of these structural exigencies had been under their
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control. Accounting for their lives as contingent upon external effects was therefore largely realistic and represented a penetrative culture of sorts.12 The builders ability to negotiate and adapt to social change was limited by a lack of formal qualications, money, high-capital networks, and by others reactions to their ethnicities and cultures. Faced with social changes largely out of their control, the builders fell upon their predominant forms of capital physical and social that is, their embodied knowledge and their networks of friends and families. And, it was through these networks (and informal school, street, and workplace culture) that class-bound masculine values were transmitted, absorbed and maintained.

Using hierarchical discourse Rather than rejecting or failing to identify with class-bound symbolism, the builders identied with it and, further, they used hierarchical symbolism to raise their own status and to distinguish themselves from one another.Through their reverence for tough independent physicality, they (in general) felt neither stigmatized nor exploited by the class system. Indeed they applied class-based hierarchical symbolism to one another. As indicated by the painter quoted above, a moral hierarchy was present between the various trades. Another example of this practice occurred when I left my observation of the site ofce to participate as a painter: the project manager said to me, what do you want to work with them for? Painters are the scum of the earth.The term scum was once again immersed in the class-bound language of dirt. Outside work, in their neighborhoods, the builders considered themselves a class above the scrounger (unemployed), the street criminal, the illegal immigrant 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 the builders as a source of falling wages. As one of the carpenters mentioned: I mean you pay an Indian labourer for 50 [per day] because hes got a house, wife and children, he cant survive on less. But you get an Albanian or Romanian or whatever, hes living with 3 people in one room, he can do 20 a day and he wouldnt argue about it. Plus the physical tness is different, they can work harder than the Asians because theyve got more height or body weight . . . Demonized groups were commonly characterized through a hierarchically class-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 it was Nigeria or Africa because thats what it looks like at the end of the day. Were like the refugees up there . . . its just the geezers, they go round thinking they got a chip on their shoulder, going round cussing people. And like if you got a crowd you gotta walk around them, if you bump into them theyre gonna cause an argument and all that. In this sense, the builders deected aspects of a morally hierarchical discourse that was applied to themselves by others onto those they perceived as below them. As Douglas (1970) argues, to feel good about ourselves we frequently degrade others, and, such degradation tends to be framed by bifurcated forms related to notions of good/evil. However, these forms collapse modern classbased and race-based discursive stigmata into one another, resulting in the potentially degraded degrading others. It should also be noted that demonized groups were not necessarily conceptualized through repressive discourses as stigmatized races. The builders demons were frequently Eastern European migrants and asylum seekers who were viewed as hierarchically below themselves.

Conclusion The difculty of accurately planning building tasks and the highly complex and multiply contingent nature of building work, means that building work has been affected relatively little by industrial technology or scientic management techniques. Builders retain a large degree of workplace power and autonomy, and are able to view the product of their labour. Consequently, industrialization and post-industrialization did little to alter their working lives. Yet the intensication of modernity and the industrialized prefabrication of building materials did alter the organizational structure of building work, reduced builders skill monopolies and labour market power, and symbolically relegated building workers to bodies undertaking dirty work. It was an organizational structure that fed, in part, on the discursive de-coupling of mindbody, and it framed the builders identications. Social class was not a primary identier utilized by the builders, although modern class-bound discourse did inuence their perceptions, accounts and cultures. The specic term class was rarely used, but moral evaluations based upon the class-based division of minds/bodies, manual/non-manual, and dirty/ clean, were utilized to classify themselves and one another. They thus held a predominately cultural and moral perception of class hierarchy rather than an instrumental one.
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As manual workers, the builders were symbolically delineated as bodies. The categorization was not purely symbolic but reected the builders physical emphasis: bodies were sources of power, knowledge, status and income. The centrality of the masculine body to the builders identities represented a traditional, almost pre-modern, form of masculine culture linked to their economic, social and political positions. This culture grew from both tradition and present-day functionality ensuing from their position in the social structure. Their cultures had not, therefore, broken free from tradition;13 their identities were largely ascribed by social background, present day reality, and gender and ethnicity, and, these were conceptualized through the screen of modern discourse. The builders were tightly embedded in community networks, which were organized around historically enduring norms of reciprocity. They were networks that were functional in their provision of information gateways to jobs, housing, goods and services. For the builders, making money was more central than conspicuously spending it, and the majority of their consumption was family-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 embeddedness in reciprocal social networks, mirrored other descriptions of workingclass industrial cultures.Yet, because the builders working lives were affected relatively little by industrialization, their cultures could not be seen as the product of that, but more likely as a continuation of pre-industrial plebeian cultures rooted in tight communities, norms of reciprocity, informal craft mores, and an almost feudal valorization of strength and protection (c.f. Thompson 1990, 1993). The conceptualization of working-class culture as the product 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 and Janet Foster for their guidance throughout and beyond the project, and to Dick Hobbs for providing comments on a later draft. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers at the British Journal of Sociology whose challenging suggestions hopefully helped to strengthen the arguments in this article. 2. The Private Finance Initiative was originally introduced in 1992 by the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
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Services in State departments were contracted-out to private bidders. In the NHS for instance, competitive tendering was introduced for hotel services such as cleaning and catering, and for the construction and maintenance of hospital buildings (see Drakeford 2000). The PFI was part of the new marketization of governance that intended to make State services more streamlined and cost effective though the competitive dynamics of market principles (see Rhodes 1997).
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3. It has been suggested that class and the class system is no longer relevant in Britains post-industrial, socially mobile society (see for example, Bauman 1988; Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). However, it must be recognized that, in 1991, 38 per cent of British people could be classied as manual workers (Gallie 2000, from Bottero 2005) a substantial proportion of British society. Moreover, whilst social mobility may have become built in to the contemporary employment structure (Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992), that mobility continues to be shaped by class background (see Blanden, Gregg and Machin 2005; Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne 1987; Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992), and the working class is largely self-recruiting because it is less likely that the middle class will descend into the working class (Savage 2000). Manual work and class inequality, then, tend to run in families, and British society is far from purely meritocratic or free of the old class structure. 4. Some contemporary builders continue to become part of the working-class aristocracy by becoming business entrepreneurs. However, the Topbuild builders (excluding the trade subcontractors) could not be viewed as part of this group because they predominately made their living through employment as waged workers. 5. Many of the Topbuild builders had created for themselves a relatively comfortable position in comparison to manual workers in general. Their position was, however, under threat from excess labour supply as a result of increased immigration. However, the builders economic position was, at the time of my eldwork, largely shielded from this threat because of their subcontract bosses embeddedness in the construction economy (c.f. Granovetter 1985; Waldinger 1995. See Thiel 2005). 6. The low rates of unionization amongst builders may also be a product of trade divisions between them, and because builders working lives are characterized by working for many different employers in many geographic areas, all of which reduce
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the possibilities of collective identication and action. 7. The term crack or, craic, is Irish argot. Its common usage in the everyday language of the builders testies to the inuence that the Irish have had upon Londons building industry and urban English culture in general. 8. It was not simply the subcontracted trade groups that displayed nepotistic recruitment practices, but higher positions were also lled via social networking. For example, one of the site managers at Topbuild was the son of a Director of Construction at another building contractor. His position as a site manager can be seen as analogous to a second lieutenant who, rather than training as a quantity surveyor, was learning his skills in the eld. 9. During the writing of this article I told a carpenter (unconnected to Topbuild) that I was writing about social class in the building industry. He said that he thought it might be problematic to do so because Everyone on building sites is working class. Even the site managers and subbys [subcontractors] are working class, so class isnt anything that anyones bothered about. 10. The view of a politically homogenous working class appears to be the product of viewing the working class from a distance, often through the lens of middle-class revolutionary hope. Bourdieu (1986a) is more guilty than most in this charge. His view that the working class are politically homogenous and do not speak ideas of their making, is, I would argue, a product of his distance from them.Working-class political homogeneity is largely a myth (see Cannadine 1999; and above), and Bourdieus view that the working class does not have opinions bears no relation to their (mythical) inability to speak, but, rather, their inability to be heard. The builders, for example, had many and vociferous views. Working-class perspectives have, however, been largely excluded from history because they were rarely frozen in documentation. Forms of music and song, however, remain a testament to their creativity, opinion and voice, and many of these
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(see Miller 1958). However, in my opinion, fatalism was a realistic interpretation of lives at the bottom end of the stratication structure. Economically deprived upbringings, negligible parenting, poor schooling, high rates of mortality, technological change, natural disaster and political uprising, had affected the builders lives, and their familys lives before them, and all such structural exigencies were largely out of their personal control. 13. This is not to say that working-class culture has not become de-coupled from social infrastructures and set loose as an object of consumption for others. Working-class culture might be robbed and re-enacted but, perhaps, not warn as disposition (c.f. Skeggs 2004).

forms have become co-opted by the middle class. 11. The carpenters expressions of masculinity were slightly varied from the other groups in this respect. They were able to comfortably switch from expressions of tough masculinity and bellicosity to a more Hindu-bound gentility. Part of their ability to make this switch may have been the result of their perceived power of collective toughness, that is, their tight collectivity and number was feared and revered by the other trade and ethnic groups at Topbuild. The carpenters also did relatively high status and clean manual work. They thus had little reason to so regularly dramatize their strength and toughness. 12. Early sociological research classied such structural-effect narratives as fatalism

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London School of Economics and Political Science 2007