How do young workers elaborate a sense of social location in the absence of class vocabulary? Which categories, points of comparison, and moral principles of evaluation structure social identities among young workers? And more precisely: How do ‘classed’ vernaculars of self understanding differ in accounts of the workplace, local living environments, social change, politics, and the self?
Following Lamont (2000), my contribution comparatively reconstructs systems of categorization, or ‘deep structures’ (Stinchcombe 1982), of the abovementioned domains of self understandings among German manual workers of the Millenial generation. The overall study draws on nearly fifty interviews with German manual workers and sociocultural professionals (following Oesch). For the workshop, I would focus on a sub-sample of rural workers in manufacturing and small crafts, triangulated with interviews with urban workers and rural professionals.
Manual workers and sociocultural professionals were selected to allow for a critical elaboration of diagnoses of a ‘new cultural cleavage’ (Bornschier 2014, Kriesi et al. 2012): This cleavage, based on vertical and horizontal forms of stratification, is said to express itself through questions of national demarcation/integration, driving a wedge into the potential left-wing coalition of these populations on the ‘old’ distribution/market or ‘class cleavage’.
Cleavage theory would expect social identity categories among the two populations to feature strong, group-like boundaries aligned with principles of demarcation/integration (e.g. ‘communitarianism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’). My interviews interrogate and add nuance to this claim. Elements of the new cleavage feature in culturalized interpretations of an ‘opaque class structure’ and political conflict over migration. But while middle class professionals draw strong cultural boundaries based on education, workers are much more ‘materialist’ than culturalist interpretations suggest, including when criticizing migration. Nationalism is made salient by the risks of transnational production and a national framing of economic competition. Different logics structure ‘classed’ categorization in different domains.