Title: Workers Not Wasters
First published: 1993
Description: Regular employment has a central place in the definition of masculine respectability in western industrial culture, and Workers Not Wasters describes the employment ethic in an ex-mining community in central Scotland. To be deemed respectable, however, appropriate consumption is as important an obligation as employment, and this study provides an ethnography of working-class consumption, using men's drinking as a case study.

It explores the strategies that men develop to retain their self-esteem in a period of recession, and examines how the experience of unemployment differs between generations, particularly highlighting the social deprivation of poverty. The result provides a rare glimpse into the cultural factors governing a community's response to unemployment.
Subjects: Consumption (Economics), Employment, Men, Self-esteem, Social aspects, Social aspects of Unemployment, Unemployment, Work ethic, Working class, Working class, scotland, Unemployment, scotland
Places: Lowlands, Scotland
LC classification: HD8399.S32 W53 1993