The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men
Journal of Economic Perspectives
vol. 33,
no. 2, Spring 2019
(pp. 211-28)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.Citation
Edin, Kathryn, Timothy Nelson, Andrew Cherlin, and Robert Francis. 2019. "The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33 (2): 211-28. DOI: 10.1257/jep.33.2.211Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- J12 Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
- R23 Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics
- Z12 Cultural Economics: Religion
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
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