Remaking The Working Class: Experience, Class Consciousness, and the Industrial Adjustment Process

Abstract

In this article, I examine the interrelationships between experience, class consciousness, and unemployment counseling in displaced workers' narratives about the process of industrial adjustment Focusing on the rhetoric of unemployment counselors and trainers, I argue that the hegemony of neoconservative and neoliberal interpretations of industrial restructuring and economic change are secured—to the extent they are—through a microphysics of power that operates through the agents and agencies of assistance made available to displaced workers. [male working‐class culture, deindustrialization, Canada, discourse, experience, power]