‘All that is Solid?’ : Class, Identity and the Maintenance of a Collective Orientation amongst Redundant Steel Workers

This paper explores the importance of class andcollectivism to personal identity, and the role this played during a period ofpersonal and collective crisis created by mass redundancy in the Welsh steelindustry. The research findings demonstrate the importance of occupationalidentity to individual and collective identity formation. The apparent desireto maintain this collective identity acted as a form of resistance to theincreased individualisation of the post-redundancy experience, but rather thanleading to excessive particularism, it served as mechanism through which classbased thinking and class identity were articulated. It is argued that thecontinued concern for class identity reflected efforts to avoid submergence inan existence akin to Beck’s (1992) vision of a class-free ‘individualisedsociety of employees’. These findings therefore challenge the notion of thepervasiveness of individualism and the dismissal of class and collectiveorientations as important influences on identity formation