Masculinity under construction: Gender, class, and race in the construction industry

Drawing upon two and a half years of fieldwork in the commercial construction industry, I explore in this dissertation the connections between gender, class, race, and the labor process. In contrast to previous ethnographies of construction work, I problematize the essentialist image of the building trades' worker, and as a result, am able to make roughly four claims about the body, ideology, and work in cultural and structural reproduction. First, I explore the role of the body in the reproduction of culture by drawing on the work of Schacter and Singer (1962) and Valins (1966). I demonstrate that the body is contextually conservative, insofar as it reproduces that which is already dominant in the culture. Secondly, I explore the culturally dominant ideologies about the industry's Insiders and Outsiders, and highlight the role that ideologies play in the perpetuation of unequal structures and practices. Thirdly, I examine the way that masculinities are understood, performed and contested. Specifically, I highlight the tensions between the performances of white, working-class masculinities as an attempted strategic claim to power, and their dangerous and even deadly consequences. Here I argue that we see both a wage of whiteness (Roediger [1991]1999 and DuBois [1935]1962) and a wage of masculinity. By reproducing their power over the white women and people of color “out in the field” of construction work, these white working-class men not only lock themselves into the existing class relations of capitalism, but also exacerbate them. Finally, I build upon current theories of the labor process as it is understood according to each of its primary definitions; that of the way that work is done (Marx [1867]1977) and the social relations of production (Burawoy 1979). By illuminating the connections of gender, class, and race within the construction industry, it becomes clear that the social relations of production cannot be extricated from the mechanical forms of work. That is, the way that work is done is both infused with and shaped by the social categories of those who do the work.