Abstract
This chapter draws on a series of interviews with young working-class men in a former industrial heartland in the English Midlands. It explores the responses, coping strategies and alternative narratives of self that were mobilized by these men in the face of profound and systemic economic and social insecurity. It focuses on their responses to a diverse range of existential challenges in which they mobilized an apparently limited and unconventional range of cultural and economic capital via petty criminality, fragile social networks and street capital to formulate and maintain a defensible self-identity.
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Mahoney, I., Kearon, T. (2018). Formulating the Postindustrial Self: The Role of Petty Crime Among Unemployed, Working-Class Men in Stoke-on-Trent. In: Walker, C., Roberts, S. (eds) Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63172-1_4
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