Working through Change (ii): Work-life Histories and Narratives of Class

Abstract

This chapter explores how practical consciousness is made discursive, perhaps through ‘unease, a stress, a displacement’, through which emerge ‘hidden internal polemics’ — a range of ‘evaluative accents’ which constitute variable levels of class positioning and represent some of the formative dimensions of working-class identity and consciousness. I will be focusing on railway workers primarily, considering the notion of a career, or work, narrative and how articulations of class at the point of production are also expressions of structures of feeling derived from wider cultural and historical formations and contexts. Understanding dialogics here is really about understanding historical process, and the work of those writers discussed in Chapter 5 provides a critical framework for doing this.