Dig where you stand: Working life biographies as a challenge to the neoliberal classroom

Introduction

The journalist Aditya Chakrabortty greatly annoyed many UK sociologists when he used a Guardian newspaper feature (17 April 2012) to accuse them of failing to engage with the banking crisis and losing themselves in esoteric analysis, ‘forever churning out publications for their discipline’s top-rated journals’ rather than engaging in public debate. He counterposed this with earlier generations of social scientists such as Marx and Wright Mills. There was inevitably a spirited response (see the British Sociological Association website for the debate), but Charkrabortty had touched a nerve.

It is not our intention here to mount some sort of defence of the discipline as a whole but, rather, to develop an argument for the continuing importance of a sociology that has a radical and Marxist underpinning not only in terms of the research that is ‘churned out’, but also in the way it is taught in the classroom. Sociology neglects the delivery of its subject matter at its peril.

In what follows, we argue that the current economic, political and cultural climate is producing what we call a neoliberal classroom within higher education. We define what we mean by this and explore its ramifications for both teachers of sociology in the radical tradition of the discipline and for students, most specifically those from the working class. We will argue that the neoliberal classroom presents a challenge to those of us who continue to be concerned with the core concerns of sociology, i.e. social inequalities, particularly those of ‘race’, class and gender.

The focus for the analysis of this problem – and our suggested solution to the marginalisation of radical sociology in the classroom – lies in the sociology of work. Despite the great heritage of the study of work which places workers at its centre, we are currently in a period in which workers’ voices are being reduced from a shout to a whisper, and in which analysis of structural change is in danger of being reduced to the ‘analysis’ of individual choices mediated through arguments about identities. The point for some in sociology, it seems, has become to interpret the world, not to challenge and change it.

Individuals’ direct experience of capitalism may differ between men and women, and in relation to race and class as well, whether that experience of labour is paid or unpaid, in a workplace or in the home. The significance of, for example, women’s unpaid work as ‘housewives’ has been well documented (James and Dalla Costa 1972). Paid employment or the lack of it, nevertheless, necessarily focuses on a crucial way in which most people directly experience capitalism – at a workplace – and this subject matter needs to be at the heart of both researching and teaching a critical sociology. It is also important to note that the linkages between employment relations as a subject area and sociology provide a critical dimension to a field of study that is in danger of finding a new ‘natural home’ in human resource management programmes delivered in business schools. Internal markets in many universities can exclude staff from teaching between departments, which reinforces discipline isolation, and this in turn inhibits the cross-fertilisation of ideas, research and teaching strategies between those teaching employment relations and those teaching the sociology of work and employment.

There is little doubt that work and employment relations were at the forefront of a radical sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, as academic argument flowed through the labour process debates stimulated within Marxism and beyond by Harry Braverman’s (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capitalism. There was an equally close engagement between sociology and what was then called ‘industrial relations’ outside of academia, as strikes and conflict became consumed as part of daily life. The world was in the classroom and the competing arguments lined up.

Since then, the ground has shifted and the context for teaching sociology has changed in terms of the economic, social and political construction of the UK, but also within higher education, within sociology, and within the classroom. The real danger is that shifting grounds become quicksands that entrap and envelop critical sociology, and leave students with an understanding of structure and their own agency which rests upon a simple and ill-founded perception that social and political outcomes are the result merely of good and bad choices in a neoliberal marketplace.

In what follows, we want to examine the impact of neoliberalism in presenting barriers to critical sociological engagement through the development of what we call the neoliberal classroom, and to present a challenge to those problems within which the student and the worker is shifted from the margins to the forefront as active agents within capitalism. In doing so, we return to Wright Mills’s (1959) argument that private problems are not just private problems, but also, and very clearly, public issues. Or, to put it another way: that not only is the personal political, but that the political is getting increasingly personal.

The neoliberal classroom: Shifting students

We hardly need to spend time in this journal examining the shifting ground of economics and politics in the last four decades. Globalisation, neoliberalism and the financial crisis are familiar terrain, as is the ‘halt’ of the forward march of labour from the high point of union membership in 1979, and the defeat of the miners in 1984/5. The former is part of the daily lives of today’s students; and the latter, something to be looked up on Wikipedia. We return to these points later, but it is necessary to briefly identify the key impact of these changes on higher education itself.

Two particular impacts are germane to our discussion: first, access, and second, delivery. In relation to access, the impact of fees is widely debated, and it is not our intention to repeat the arguments. However, it is clear that the expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s was associated with the growth in public-sector employment, and the widespread engagement of working-class adolescents in higher education and white-collar employment in substantial numbers for the first time. Both of those opportunities are in decline for the working classes.

A less discussed shift in access relates to mature students. The availability of grants, and, for some, access to tax relief, opened doors to expanding social science departments in this earlier period. Today, despite the blame culture and rhetorical demands from politicians for ‘up skilling’ and ‘retraining’, mature students with existing financial responsibilities face increased debt and a hostile labour market on graduation.

Our final point is even less noticed, and it is the decline of adult education as a specific area in higher education. There are ongoing and historic traditions of universities opening their doors to adult and working-class students often without formal qualifications. In one area, that of trade union education, this was sometimes associated with the former polytechnics, which delivered programmes with the TUC, or at certificate and diploma level alongside further education colleges. This was particularly important in providing a ladder of access for mature students with wide experience in the labour movement into degree-level education.

This takes us to the point of delivery. The classroom now homogenises around a pressurised group of A Level students looking for courses with employment outcomes. They no longer benefit from valuable interaction with mature students, who bring practical and critical perspectives of their own work experience into the classroom. Equally, potential mature students miss their opportunity to interact with a younger generation’s experiences and ideas.

These circumstances and government policy lead to a focus in the classroom that becomes hostile to critical thinking and discourse. Two factors become paramount: reaching targets,and delivering ‘employability’. Targets are, of course, the motor of neoliberalism, and at the heart of the political project in the public sector. Hospitals, doctors surgeries, schools and local authorities are driven by their targets (not by their ‘customers’, as the rhetoric would have us believe), and higher education now follows suit. Achieving targets in education generally promotes particular forms of learning and assessment that will have the ‘best’ outcomes: anything less than a 2:1 grade becomes a failure for the student, for the programme and for the staff member delivering ‘under-achieving’ modules.

Alongside this comes the focus on employability. For the mature student or postgraduate, this means a focus on professional programmes that deliver a recognised qualification in their field. Something that ‘might be interesting’ does not compete against something that ‘will be useful’. For undergraduate students, universities focus on employment (and employer) driven modules and, in many cases, specific ‘employability’ modules. This is not to downgrade, for example, modules that might develop IT skills or encourage the development of problem-solving strategies which may be equally useful to the individual as the employer. Rather, we are suggesting that they are not generally spaces for self-reflection, critical discourse or academic argument.

The neoliberal classroom: The shifting discipline

Sociology, of all the disciplines, cannot exist in any meaningful way outside of the world which is the focus of its study. The world changes, and sociology, needs must, changes with it. However, sociology remains a way of understanding the world, and often, of providing a critical or alternative analysis of what might seem to be common sense or simply the way things are. In doing so, it provides a framework for thinking differently both about the world we live in and ourselves as agents in that world. It is central to our argument and a point to which we return, that as Marx famously iterated, we make our own world, even if it’s not in the circumstances of our own choosing.

Sociology can be an intensely conservative discipline when it simply restricts itself to ‘explaining what is unchanging’ or making assumptions about progress and development. In our area of analysis, for example, Richard Hyman (1972) was famously able to write a book about the explosion of strike activity on the cusp of sociological predictions of their demise. History has now ended, we are told, when we are faced with a time of rapid change and the approach of a new world economic order, leaving aside impeding environmental disasters.

We started with Chakrabortty’s journalistic critique, which inevitably hit some targets. Sociology as a discipline has become engaged, on the one side, with the post-modern abandonment of the ‘meta narrative’ in its efforts to understand identity and celebrity, a route underpinned by a neoliberal focus on individual choice as the key explanatory variable. We make good or bad choices, and we become a celebrity or a ‘chav’. On the other side, we have the contribution of sociology to ‘evidence-based’ policy-making that focuses on quantitative methodologies that dig out the ‘facts’ for others to act on.

As the response to Chakrabortty equally shows, there are plenty of sociologists and much sociology that draws on the long-standing critical tradition deriving, in substantial part, from engagement with Marxist ideas. The critique of capitalism has not disappeared, but one difficulty it faces is in getting itself published. Academic journals have become formulaic in their demands for introductory literature reviews; accounts of methodologies; reviews of research findings and conclusions. When authors are asked to pay for publication, or to ask their institution to pay (should they have one), then the formula will become intensified and research, analysis and argument that does not fit becomes in increasing danger of being marginalised – a situation that is inevitably underpinned by the neoliberal targeting of the various research assessments that focus funding in fewer institutions,

The conservatism and the constraints have been consistently challenged by what some have called ‘liberation’ sociology. In this approach, areas of study are those that might benefit ‘under-privileged’ groups or focus on issues of inequality.

Feagin and Vera’s (2001) liberation sociology, for example, suggests that sociology needs to be shifted from those with power to those without:

as we move forward into the twenty-first century, we believe it is time for mainstream sociology to correct its skewed course so that the knowledge its practitioners generate can be placed at the service not so much of government and corporate policymakers but those of social groups and community organizations that seek to change the troubling and oppressive conditions in which they live. (pp. 241-2)

Outside of the particularity of liberation sociology, the discipline has also become particularly engaged with social movements in general, and social movement activism in particular. This has been particularly fertile ground for sociological critiques that cross borders, as social movements themselves often do, and has provided some space for geographers both to adopt sociological accounts and analysis and also imbue them with argument from their own discipline. This has been particularly evident in the field of work and trade unions (see Castree 2004, for example).

Equally, there have been texts that have engaged with a more critical tradition that has challenged neoliberal ‘myths’ (Bradley et al. 2000), or at least drawn attention to a wider critical literature (Strangleman & Warren 2008). Alongside this has been the emergence over the last decade of the Critical Labour Studies group and its annual conference, which emphasised the delivery of joint papers between academics and trade unionists to encourage critical engagement and to seek to embed research into practice.

A particular characteristic of this sociological engagement has been the identification and analysis of different world views as both a critique of the existing and an opening up of ideas of alternatives. Currently, this is most notable in the engagement with new social movements and the translation of that argument and analysis into practical ideas of ‘social movement unionism’. This has resonances with the engagement of academics in earlier debates that offered critiques through debates about workers control (for example, Coates and Topham 1970) but also alternatives as in workers plans (see, for example, the accounts in Beynon and Wainwright 1979, and Wainwright and Elliott 1982) and worker co-operatives (see for example Eccles 1981, Mellor et al. 1988). However, as Martinez Lucio observes in relation to those teaching work and employment today, whilst there may be a critique of ‘managerialism’, ‘talk of industrial democracy, cooperatives and self-management’ is no ‘more than an aside’ (2009: 93).

Whilst we welcome these developments and ‘liberation sociology’, we also see this as providing the potential for a marginalised ‘critical sociology’ that can be tolerated on the edges. Our argument here is that this critical edge is embedded in sociology as a discipline in itself, and it is in danger of being smothered. That danger is particularly focused on work and employment both within the discipline and in the related field of industrial relations, where Darlington (2009) and others are suggesting a parallel analysis and offering a significant response.

This ground shift that we are suggesting is occurring is challenging sociology and its delivery, particularly in relation to the sociology of work and employment, in two clear ways. First, work became marginalised as a subject area (along with class), to be overtaken, as we have suggested above, by identity and celebrity; and, second, workers’ voices began to disappear from research and the classroom and from mainstream sociology. This is not to argue that the subject matter has been abandoned – it clearly has not; but as Halford & Strangleman suggest, ‘the study of work has to a significant degree become disembedded from wider social theory … and eclipsed by other concerns within the sociological mainstream (2009: 812).

We would add that this ‘embeddedness’ needs to be related to social theory that is not just ‘wider’, but is also critical of the changing labour process and reflective of the views of those that labour.

Stewart and Martinez Lucio make this point succinctly:

Worker-based worker responses, once prominent in this debate within and without the labour movement, have become less audible … being out of earshot is linked to a more widespread shift away from the politics and texts of labour and its concerns. (2011: 328, 338)

One response to this from within sociology is the publication in the British Sociological Association journal Work, Employment & Society of the ‘on the front line series’ initiated in 2009 (Taylor et al). However, many of us have come to view research and teaching as being in opposition to one another, with teaching seen as a hindrance to research. In reality, good research draws upon the skills of pedagogy, asking the same questions of relevance, reliability, impact and so on (Graff 2003).

The neoliberal classroom: Class, culture and injury

Neoliberal policy and culture also affects the classroom in terms of its impact on the cultural understanding students have of the society in which they live, their attitude to education, and for working-class students, their sense of self-worth and positive identification with the working class.

Sociology requires that social action should be understood in terms of the relationship between agency and structure and what C. Wright Mills call the intellectual journey between the two. Further, the sociologist is ‘within’ his or her own work, reflecting on biographies, using them and reflecting on them in the work. The prevailing culture of neoliberalism and the policy and political context are entirely counter to sociological thinking and to Mill’s assertion that private tragedies can be properly understood as public issues. Under neoliberalism, choice is king and social inequality, criminality, vulnerability and social unrest are explained as the unhappy coincidence of thousands of bad choices, private tragedies and ineptitudes. We are all personally responsible for our own outcomes. In such a climate, social inequalities, even the structures of class, are frequently dismissed as the product of a series of poor choices or poor taste (Lawler 2008). Sociology, as a discipline, and in this hostile climate, must challenge the prevailing ‘habit of mind’ (Hoop 2009) that sees choice as the fall-back explanation for any or all social action.

An additional problem is that under neoliberalism, education itself becomes an intensively commercialised experience within which students must learn how to be good at ‘doing school’. Students must succeed by passing, but critical thinking and self-exploration becomes apparently pointless to many, and to some potentially dangerous.

Feigenbaum (2007) argues that in the neoliberal classroom, students are less likely to embrace critical thinking, and that this is perceived as being unlikely to deliver employment. A safer bet is to rely on textbooks or commercial aids to ‘passing’ exams so that they can gain credentials through which they can compete for employment. In our teaching, a student commented after reading the Communist Manifesto: ‘It’s taken three pages for him to say that: couldn’t he have said it in a couple of bullet points?’ The pressure to succeed and quickly, to complete and to take in only what is necessary is part of a wider neoliberal agenda about employment market competition and the marketisation of education. Rather than encouraging critical self-reflection, which is required by sociology, it is discouraged.

The situation for working-class people entering higher education is more problematic still. The hidden injustices of class and race which impact on sense of self, confidence and entitlement have been acknowledged (Fanon 1961; Sennett and Cobb 1972), but sometimes the impact of this are neglected by the left in favour or a materialist analysis of degradation. Those of us who teach working-class people see at first hand the impact of neoliberalism, and this has significantly worsened since the 1980s. The assault on working-class employment and culture that took place across Britain at this time has deeply affected the way working-class people develop their sense of self.

Many of the students who participated in the work described below grew up in North East of England communities that had experienced a ‘vindictive restructuring’ (Robinson 2002), in which once proud and self-reliant people were disciplined. The industries of coal mining, steel and shipbuilding were systematically dismantled. The consequences for those who grew up in the shadow of these defeats cannot be underestimated. The degradation of working-class culture, place and history and the material degradation of place led to stigma and humiliation (Stephenson and Wray 2005). Frost and Hogget (2005) write of the hurt inflicted on working-class people and what they call the ‘second hurt’ that stems from communities being blamed for their own failures. The current Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government’s attack on the welfare state and dependent ‘skivers’ exacerbates the damage. So, too, do the slurs that associate welfare dependency with criminality. In April 2013, the Daily Mail suggested that Mick Philpott (who killed his six children) was a ‘Vile product of welfare UK’ (Dolan and Bentley 2013), a point later supported by the Chancellor George Osborne in a week in which welfare payments were dramatically cut (Watt, The Guardian 2013).

The impact of social injustice on the individual and the class cannot be underestimated. Given the history of the working class in the North East of England in the past thirty years, it is unsurprising to find that working-class students experience and display the hidden injustices of class of which Sennett and Cobb wrote in the early 1970s (guardedness, self-doubt). The last 30 years have, however, greatly exaggerated these problems. It has become difficult to be working class and proud of it, to understand why local infrastructures are breaking down, and why communities and families appear to struggle to function. How possible is working-class pride in the circumstances described above? In the absence of a fair and sympathetic account of their class, many students seek to deny, resent or escape their class and their past. In many instances, higher education offers the opportunity to become a ‘striver’, and the critical self-reflection required by sociology might in fact be viewed as somehow counterproductive, even dangerous for those of this mind-set.

Teachers and students

Sociology is a reflexive discipline that aims to develop a critical awareness of the social world. Those who study [and teach] sociology are, at the same time, members of that world, and sociology aims to encourage self-reflection on the nature of our knowledge of the social. (QAA 2007)

‘Reflective’ and ‘critical’ are the key words in the Quality Assurance Agency benchmarks for sociology, but they encourage ‘awareness’ rather than action. We have also added (above) that those who teach, as well as study, are actively engaged in a social world which includes their own working environment, with its emphasis on research outputs as the career target and on improving degree classifications as the measure of classroom success.

The potential dichotomy between teachers and learners has been challenged at least since Paulo Friere in 1970, as has the potential for reflection to become no more than ‘awareness’ rather than as a stimulus for action.

For Friere, the pedagogy of the oppressed

must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. (1970: 48)

Note the importance here of reflection being allied to action (not simple ‘activism’, which can be incorporated into the current state of oppression). Freire goes on to distinguish an engaged ‘problem solving’ education with one that simply focuses on the transmission and banking of knowledge:

Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on ‘authority’ are no longer valid. (1970: 80)

We are working in conditions that are markedly different from those of South America in the 1970s, but Freire’s arguments that teachers and students are in dialogue is surely central to the teaching of sociology if it is to offer the critical self-reflection at its heart.

We have sought to develop a response to the neoliberal classroom by encouraging a sociological understanding of self and society, asking our students to ‘dig where they stand’ – that is, to explore their personal biographies and histories in relation to political and ideological change and with the support of critical social theory. The lens for this examination was work and employment. This was facilitated through the development of a first-year undergraduate module that we called ‘working lives’. Our aims were to confront the challenges that we identified above: of embedding an understanding of work within critical social theory; of engaging with workers’ voices from the students’ own world; of exploring the relationship of their own agency with the social structures they encountered through reflection and of developing research skills. In this way, we hoped to develop a critical self-reflection that stayed with students throughout their undergraduate programme, but also to open up the notion that sociology is about action and change. The sociological imagination changes individual lives, and we felt that it was important to begin with our own, first as a mechanism for making self-discussion safer, and second, as a way of challenging the neoliberal catechism of choices freely made by individuals.

Working lives

The three authors of this piece began the delivery of the working-lives module through their own sociological reflection on their own working lives. This served four key functions: first, to open up a space for dialogue in which the teacher was not a ‘hidden’ participant seeking the stories of others but not revealing their own. This module began with teachers talking about their personal experiences of work, paid and unpaid. This was in order to create a safer space for students within which they could discuss their own autobiography or that of others known to them. Second, the authors hoped to demonstrate that working lives are not simply a reflection of good or bad life choices in a neoliberal labour market place, but are constrained by circumstances. Third, it served to show how critical theory and, in relation to work, how Marxist theory can illuminate our understanding; and finally, how an understanding of theory is about changing lives (our own), not just raising awareness and informing understanding.

Our aim was to overcome what Graff (2003: 43) calls the problem of the problem; that is, to make visible what is often not recognised as problematic. Graff notes that his students often failed to grasp the relevance of a question put to them, and therefore questioned the need for analysis of what appeared to be straightforward, uncomplicated events. By taking a sociological approach to our own working biographies, we were acting – as Graff suggests we should do – like avant-garde artists, de-familiarising a familiar subject, and making what is unproblematic problematic. Our other aim was to create a teaching environment of mutuality and partnership. While we took responsibility for the module, its success was not all ours: we saw it as what Harvie and Philp call ‘collective in nature’ (2006: 10).

There is not the space, nor is there a point, to review our ‘life stories’ in detail here, but some brief discussion will illustrate the preceding points. The common ground was our working-class backgrounds and our entry into higher education, by different routes, as mature students with work experience. We had all been involved, one way or another, with the trade union movement. This is not simply a point about ourselves but also raises a related point about the teaching of the sociology of work: our routes into education meant that we had, in each case, periods of paid employment and direct experience of the labour process. The route into teaching today is much more likely to be via education, Ph.Ds and research publications, though of course, many will work to fund these activities. We do not seek to make a fetish of ‘work experience’, nor to devalue other forms of knowledge and experience, but we do want to suggest that the neoliberal classroom has much less daily access to ‘workers voices’ as mature student engagement with higher education becomes restricted or focused on the vocational.

Equally common to us was the way in which an engagement with Marxism allowed for the critical self reflection of our own class positions and had begun to give us explanations for our actions – for our working lives. Differences in gender, age and geographical origins offered contrasts, as did family backgrounds and the state of the labour markets that we entered. Where the similarities had generated reflections on Marx and class, the differences generated reflections on feminist theory and analysis.

Students welcomed the teaching team biographies for a number of reasons. The ‘ordinariness’ of our background encouraged those who doubted the validity of their involvement in higher education, typically mature students and those from a working-class background: ‘I thought, if a miner can do this, then I can.’

There were necessarily limitations in what we brought to the teaching – we are all white and heterosexual for example – which narrow the spaces for personal engagements and reflections with students. We were teaching in an academic institution in a particular regional location with its own history and industrial profile. Our work experience was not in the new ‘knowledge’ sectors of the economy, such as call centres or in retail. On the other hand, that is precisely the work experience that some students could bring themselves: retail in particular offers part-time work and direct experience of an often highly exploitive labour process.

A number of our students also come from mining families and, although they were too young to have experienced the 1984-5 strike, members of their family may well have been involved. The students themselves can also be tentative in offering the working life stories gathered from their research interviews. However, there were extraordinary stories, revelations and analyses that reflected our underlying purpose of locating ourselves as active agents in society, identifying the barriers and constraints we all face, and the way theory can help us understand and guide action.

Again, this is not the place to explore the student stories in depth, but rather to draw on some illustrative examples. In general, there has been a twofold response to our request for students to research working lives. Mature students have been more open to autobiography, while younger students have preferred to talk to a family member. The first might be more self-revelatory (as it was for the authors!), but the latter was equally revelatory with repeated assertions of the likes of, ‘I never knew that about my father/mother/sister’, and so on. The revelatory engagements with the previous generation for the younger students often showed how choices had been constrained, as in, for example, access to continuing education for women, or the limited work choices in particular localities such as mining communities.

The research laid bare the often thwarted attempts to provide protection from the vulnerability of capitalist employment. For example, some working lives revealed fragmented and often desperate attempts to avoid unemployment and underemployment. However they also revealed surprising levels of ingenuity and rule breaking. One remarkable piece of research that emerged from qualitative interviews with a convicted armed robber revealed his wish to move from ‘the underclass to the underworld’, his criminal ‘apprenticeship’ in prison and his career transition from petty criminal to money launderer. ¹ By contrast, a train driver spoke movingly of the emotional impact on his own life of suicides on the line. This coincided with the decision to represent others at work and become a union steward, and that in turn had prompted an interest in trade union education and ultimately higher education. This biographical strategy revealed what might have been the hidden details of the life stories of our students and/or those known to them, which reflected the wide diversity of human experience. The common denominator was the complex interactions between structure and human agency.

These quotes from student responses indicate the impact of the module:

It was only when I started to put a timeline together that I started to see that there were certain things that were happening outside my life that was having an effect on my life … Working lives was the module that made me understand sociology … this was something that drew it all together … this is what I’m actually here to hear … I didn’t really understand what sociology was until I understood that it’s about experiences; it’s about how my experience is different from somebody else’s experience, but all that experience is within.

The impact of the module initially came from your (and Dave and John’s) sociological insights but that was only as a means of demonstrating that within one’s own personal history lies the constraints and opportunities one is born in to, which gave me the permission to explore my own life. The sociological theories then fell into place. My initial response to listening to your work/life stories was that it was indulgent, (one of the reasons that it took me so long to decide on doing a biography), however, by having the comparison of two or three different accounts highlighted the differences and sometimes similarities that was experienced even though you were born within different time periods and were geographically separated. This led me to questioning my own life and the structures that shaped my experiences within a sociological context.

Inevitably, we cannot claim the same impact for all students, and there were cases during our follow-up interviews of students who barely remembered the module. This is unsurprising in any cohort of students, and we can only hope that something did make an impact with them!

The second part of the module asked students to view discussions of work beyond the sociological literature (Strangleman and Warren 2008). This served the dual function of enabling students to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of, for example, a picture, piece of music or film, and also enabling us to explore a world beyond the confines of our own experience. It was not uncommon for students to choose pieces to discuss that were either beyond their experience historically, or took place in another country. For example, there were discussions of photographs of field workers in Africa, the dust-bowl literature of 1930s North America, and both superheroes and sex workers in film. In this, staff and students were exploring the creation of the social world through the interpretation of those who present that world in different media. Again, we are allowed to be critical and develop theory from the common starting point of ‘real life’s not like that’. Or maybe it is.

Conclusions

We have come some way from our starting point and from Chakrabortty’s challenge to sociologists to get real and recognise the economic reality around them. There is plenty of evidence from the response on the BSA website to show that there are those who are critically engaged, and we also recognise the continuing contribution to the sociology of work that exists within a critical and questioning framework. Nevertheless, the argument is not without substance or lacking a sharp point.

We can’t argue that, for example, the analysis of ‘celebrity’ is out of step with a world, or at least a media, that often seems dominated by such celebrity. We might even, without cynicism, reflect on the tough working life and labour of a catwalk model. However, we need to locate this within critical social theory and arguments that challenge a neoliberal ideology that life is just a series of good or bad choices. Inequality remains structurally embedded in a global capitalist economy, and the majority of the world’s population continues to struggle on in poverty and with little control over their own working lives. Our working lives module was not simply intended to bring forward ‘stories’ or only encourage self-reflection, as important as we regard that as being; it was also designed to get students to ask questions themselves. In doing so, they are drawn to answers embedded in critical sociological traditions rooted in Marxism. Exploitation, inequalities and wealth and power and class relationships have not gone away, and they are clearly expressed in the workplace.

History has not ended, and neither has a Marxist analysis joined it in the dustbin. Economic exploitation, political disempowerment and social inequalities remain central to all our experience of the world. Sociology has the power to generate a ‘sociological imagination’ rooted in personal reflection on the ways in which ‘private problems’ are also public issues. However, it needs to be more than that: it needs to provide an edge to analysis that comes both from critical social theory, and equally from the lived experience of its teachers and students. We do not simply need to analyse the current crisis or even help others to do that; we need to invite the crisis into the classroom (or reveal that it’s in there anyway). We then need to do what the best sociology has always done: explore the alternatives not simply as an interesting set of narratives, but as a guide to action and change.