A crisis of self-worth? Constructing meaning amidst economic displacement among rural, working-class men in America

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In America, labor market outcomes for men without a college degree have worsened considerably over the last fifty years. Even more recently, blue-collar sectors of the economy, which are occupied primarily by working-class men, have been slowing, with jobs in manufacturing plummeting. How have men reacted to these changed and changing labor market opportunities? Previous academic literature about working-class men, especially white men, have depicted them as angry and aggrieved. There is a similar thread of grievance in recent scholarship about rural America, a previously overlooked population that has received considerable attention since the rise of Trump in the 2010s, supposedly on the strength of rural, white support. Taken together, these threads of literature suggest that rural people—and rural, working-class white men in particular—are characterized by rage and resentment. This paper, using evidence from 58 white, working-class men from rural Pennsylvania, suggests that this previous work underappreciates the ways in which rural, working-class white men have adapted their sources of meaning in light of decades of disruption. The men in this study have a wide range of hobbies and commitments that are—at the least—diversionary, and are at most, generative and community-building. In a world where working-class work is often tedious, lacks meaning, and is poorly paid, men in this study have looked elsewhere for a sense of purpose. To the degree these men have unmoored their worth from work, they exemplify what Michele Lamont calls a “plurality of criteria of worth” (Lamont, 2019), a move in which workers find meaning in non-work spheres like family, church, friendship, and hobbies that re-centers their value away from the vicissitudes of labor market precarity.