White Working-class Boys Research Articles

Supporting white working class boys

Data suggests that white working class boys are among the lowest attainers in our schools. Matt Bromley considers why this is and what schools might be able to do about it

Violence as an Environmentally Warranted Norm amongst Working-Class Teenage Boys in Glasgow

This study aimed to contribute to knowledge about contexts of violent assault perpetrated by white working-class teenage boys in Scotland. Despite studies exploring Scotland’s adolescent street gangs, there remains a gap in research where the collateral damage caused by gangs to others of the same class, age, and gender has gone unrecognized. Drawing upon insights from qualitative interviews with young, male, former offenders in Scotland we found that violence contained a strategic logic designed to foster bonding to a delinquent group, whilst offering a celebrity status and manliness. The co-presence of a violent culture worsened the likelihood of ameliorating mentalities associated with anti-social behaviors, which appear endemic to masculinity. That context of violence is associated with the criminal offending of boys who, though they may not be gang members, were nevertheless ‘contaminated’ by the aggressive shadow cast by the protest masculinity of gang-conflicted territories in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

White working-class boys: The challenges of translating widening participation policy into practice

White working-class boys: The challenges of translating widening participation policy into practice

Review of Stahl's Identity, neoliberalism and aspiration: Educating white working-class boys

Review of Stahl's Identity, neoliberalism and aspiration: Educating white working-class boys

Narratives in Reconstituting, Reaffirming, and (Re)traditionalizing Identities

The practice of othering has been widely documented in sociological research relative to social networks, ethnicity/race, sexuality, and place. This article considers othering as a strategy to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm the habitus in a small, qualitative sample of twenty-three white working-class boys from South London, aged fourteen to sixteen years, who self-identified as Boremund boys. The research relied heavily on visual methods and Bourdieu’s theoretical tools to explore how images of transgression influenced the boys’ conception of their own identity as centered upon a distinct version of normative race, class, and gender or othering the nonnormative behavior within their locale. The data show how white working-class boys monitor and police what they perceive as a normative white identity. As a result, the habitus of the Boremund boys engages with complex work to reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of ordinary, white, working-class male in South London.

Aspiration paradoxes: working-class student conceptions of power in ‘engines of social mobility’

This paper examines the relationship between ‘aspiration’ and identity as rendered within discourses of power. Focusing on the deeply ingrained values of a group of 23 white working-class boys from South London (aged 14–16), the research critically considers the conception of power within a neoliberal era which produces both new subjectivities and new counter-narratives. The research examines a group of boys who fully acknowledge that post-compulsory education would enhance their power in society but who simultaneously articulated how accruing power made them feel uncomfortable. There exists a tension between the working-class values inculcated in the community and the neoliberal prerogatives of the school; as a result, their shared habitus engages in a continual process of reconciling competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be powerful.

The practice of ‘Othering’ in reaffirming white working-class boys’ conceptions of normative identities

ABSTRACTThis paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London.

White working-class male narratives of ‘loyalty to self’ in discourses of aspiration

This paper intends to show the processes and identity negotiations of white working-class boys surrounding their own learner-identity within a ‘raising aspirations’ rhetoric. The current dominant neoliberal discourse, which prioritizes a view of aspiration that is competitive, economic, and status-based, shapes the subjectivities of these young males. Focusing on the deeply engrained values of a group of 23 working-class boys from South London, ages 14–16, this research critically considers the conception of aspiration and persistent ‘educational underachievement’. White working-class boys in the United Kingdom are frequently labelled as having ‘low aspirations’ or, indeed, no aspirations at all. Through the use of habitus as a conceptual tool, the research intends to serve as an exploration of how the aspiration rhetoric influenced the boys’ conception of ‘loyalty to self’ and their sense of average-ness/ordinariness/’middling’. The boys’ habitus undergoes complex ‘identity work’ in order to reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of aspiration.

The Affront of the Aspiration Agenda: White Working-Class Male Narratives of ‘Ordinariness’ in Neoliberal Times

This article draws on accounts of white working-class boys (age 14-16) from South London in order to explore how they reconstitute their learner-identities within the ‘raising aspirations’ rhetoric. The current dominant neoliberal discourse in education, which prioritises a view of aspiration that is competitive, qualification-focused, and economic, shapes the subjectivities of these young males though there exist nuanced strategies of resistance. In an era of high modernity where youth feel increasing risk, the identities of young people are subject to tremendous change where traditional class and gendered boundaries are being subverted, reimagined, and reconstituted. Focusing on academic engagement as an identity negotiation, this research critically considers where young men enact strategies to construct themselves as ‘having value’ in spaces of devaluing where they reconcile competing and contrasting conceptions of aspiration.

The boy in the corner?

Jonathan Ovenden discusses the dilemma of raising achievement in white working class boys and suggests using technology to reignite their enthusiasm for learning.

Habitus Disjunctures, Reflexivity and White Working-Class Boys’ Conceptions of Status in Learner and Social Identities

The article primarily explores the social class identification of 15 white working-class boys at a high performing school in a socially marginalized area of South London where academic performance was routinely depicted as crucial to economic and social well-being. The research aims to consider the influence of a high performing school on the boys’ identity and the relationship between their identity and their engagement with education. First, a brief background on white working-class boys ‘underachievement’ will provide the context. Second, Bourdieu's conceptual tools of habitus, institutional habitus and capitals are examined. Bourdieu's class analysis provides a useful conceptual framework to address (divided) working-class masculinities in a high attaining academic institution. Third, semi-structured interviews focused on academic self-concept, social class-identification and subsequent rationales, as well as participants’ identification of who they considered to be a student they admire, provide valuable insight into understanding habitus disjunctures and learner identities.

Supporting White working class boys

Of those groups eligible for free school meals in schools, one of the worst performing is White, British boys. Tom Welch has been involved in a project to discover what factors can help these students to buck the trend

Transitions to Work: Masculine identities, youth inequality and labour market change

In this article, the initial transitions of white working-class male post-compulsory school leavers in two British cities are investigated. In the context of economic restructuring, the decline of manufacturing employment, and the rise in young women's educational achievements, it has been argued that poorly educated young men are increasingly disadvantaged in the labour market. Indeed, this may be the first generation of young men in the post-war period that will experience downward mobility compared to their fathers. In an earlier article, the author explored the labour market aspirations of white working-class boys living on peripheral local authority estates in Cambridge and Sheffield and in their final year at school. Despite the decline of manufacturing employment, they hoped to enter typically 'male' jobs in, for example, the car industry in both cities and in the steel industry in Sheffield. In this article, the author explores their labour market experiences in the year since they left school and their sense of themselves as masculine workers in the context of debates emphasising a growing 'crisis' of masculinity.

WHITE HEAT: racism, under-achievement and white working-class boys

This paper examines students' experience of inner-city education in one of England's most disadvantaged areas. In particular, we reflect on the views of white working-class boys, a group that has recently been identified by policy-makers and the media as especially at risk of educational failure. These boys recognize the educational disadvantage they face on a daily basis, made explicit in a tangible lack of resourcing and institutionalized through selection systems (like banding and setting). These injustices are reworked through the students' perspectives, taking cues from national and community racist discourses of white victimhood. In this way, the white students view their educational and class disadvantage as a ‘race’ issue. It is concluded that this is an important but largely unrecognized way in which racism continues to work through a system that, despite changes in rhetoric, refuses to engage with the reality of racism as a deeply rooted and defining characteristic of the education system.

Children, School Choice and Social Differences

Research into school choice has focused primarily on parental perspectives. In contrast, this study directly explores children's experiences as they are going through the secondary school choice process in two inner London primary schools. While there were important commonalities in children's experience, in this paper we have concentrated on the differences. These, we argue, lay in (a) children's material and social circumstances, (b) children's individuality, and (c) the ways in which power is played out within families. However, despite both individual and family differences there remains a strong pattern of class-related orientations to choice. We also found that while the vast majority of children were actively involved in the choice process, the children's accounts highlight an important distinction between making and getting a choice. In this particular urban locale, there is less choice for black and white working-class boys than for other groups of children.

(IN) SECURE TIMES

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege.

Skill School Boys: Masculine Identity Formation Among White Boys in an Urban High School Vocational Autoshop Program

Through interviews and observations, I explore how a group of white working-class boys who have family traditions in auto repair construct notions of masculinity in a public-vocational-school autoshop class in Buffalo, New York. Many of the students in this group say that they plan to open their own garages on graduation. Although there are many facets to the production of a sense of manhood, I focus on the ways in which young white males in a restructuring economy narrate a sense of self grounded in the area of work on a multiethnic shopfloor—a sphere which they ultimately coconstruct around notions of the racially deviant “other.” At present, there is not a lot of literature on identity formation processes among youth who are trained in school to become trades-people, particularly in relation to jobs that are typically coded “male.”