Redundant Masculinities? – Employment Change and White Working Class Youth: Antipode Book Series

The book focuses on a case study of young, white, male school leavers, based in the contrasting British cities of Cambridge and Sheffield. Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches as well as interviews with the young men over the course of 18 months, it looks at the level of anxiety unskilled school leavers suffer about their sense of themselves as men and as wage earners. McDowell's analysis brings together arguments about the social construction of identities and about economic restructuring to reveal that the so-called 'crisis of masculinity' is not what it seems.