Builders: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the Construction Industry

By examining the organizational features of the building project and describing the skill, sweat, malingering, humour and humanity of the building workers, Thiel illustrates how the builders were mostly autonomous from formal managerial control, regulating their own outputs and labour markets. This meant that the men’s ethnic, class and gender-bound cultural activities fundamentally underpinned the organization of their work and the broader construction economy, and thereby highlights the continuing centrality of class-bound culture and social stratification in a post-industrial, late modern world. Thiel outlines the on-going connections and intersections between economy, state, class and culture, ultimately showing how these factors interrelated to produce the building industry, its builders, and its buildings.

Based predominately on cultural and economic sociology, this book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of gender and organizational studies; social class and inequality; migration and ethnicity; urban studies; and social identities.