ABSTRACT

In the past decades major changes reshaped the labour market of industrial societies. Taking Germany as a case in point my research project tries to shed light on the issues of this cultural and economic marginalisation of unskilled work. In particular, it asks whether or what consequences these transformations had on the identities of semi-skilled male workers in the industrial sector. Drawing on Keller’s (2011, 2013) SKAD I argue that identities are shaped and reshaped by discourses. In addition they are formed in the lifeworld and through biographical events as well as the position in the social structure, which has a major impact on the self.

The methodological groundings for the underlying research design derive from the concept of subjectification, which is located in the SKAD frame of reference. Because SKAD’s focus on the discursive formation of subject and speaker positions, it was necessary to extend and adapt the actor categories of SKAD in order to examine the discursive situatedness of human subjectivities. I therefore argue that the reaction of social actors to discursively generated identity offerings has to be grasped as a process of self-positioning. Using the SKAD concept of interpretive schemes I furthermore examined the entanglement of the discursively constructed “ideal worker” and the workers’ self-narratives which became visible in the course of interpreting the interview data.