ABSTRACT
Taking in interviews at two points in time and a Facebook ethnography, this chapter considers young working-class men’s labour market biographies and explores how various employment orientations, attitudes and situations have changed or stayed the same over a period of seven years. The chapter identifies how a turn to service work, and the emotional labour it entails, is a normative feature of the contemporary young working-class masculine habitus. This sits at odds with previous generations’ dispositions but is an entirely intelligible practice. Such work, though, is part of turbulent employment trajectories, with the turbulence – rather than the work content – destabilising the relationship between work and identity. In such circumstances, some of the young men subscribe to conventionally masculine ways of demonstrating autonomy and control and pursuing status.
