My central concern in this thesis is to extend understandings of how the social categories of rurality, gender and class are implicated in subjective meanings and the claiming of worth (associated with paid work) for a group of rural-based wine production workers. However, this concern does not reflect a relativist stance whereby all gendered, classed and rural experiences are read as equal but different, as this would deny symbolic and material inequalities. The core research question is: What gendered classed and rural subjective meanings do women and men production workers in the wine industry give their working selves? A key impetus for this study was my desire to represent working people's lives through a dynamic model of class, gender and rurality that overcomes the limitations of analyses which portray the lives of people, who have limited access to dominant symbolic discourses and processes, solely through the lens of deficit models of class and gender (Savage 2000, 2005; Skeggs 2004a). The overall methodological approach stressed the 'qualitative'. A feminist interpretation of constructivist grounded theory methodology framed the research (Charmaz 2000). Data generation involved two in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a sample of 16 workers (8 women and 8 men) based within the production function of a rural-based corporate wine organisation in South Australia. In the first interview I used a life history orientated approach and in the second I used a semi-structured interview schedule to examine the workers' current working lives, reflecting an understanding that rather than merely having experiences, 'subjects are constituted through experience' (Skeggs 1997). Interpretative analysis (using NUDIST) of the data re-orientated my engagement with established analyses of rurality, gender and class in order to build new, empirically-driven understandings of how multiple social categories are implicated in lived experiences. Preliminary data analysis led me to engage with Bourdieu's (1984) key concept of economic, social and cultural capitals as an analytical tool to examine how rural, gendered and classed lived experiences gave meanings to these workers. I have also paid attention to Skeggs' (2004a) argument that contemporary 'class making' involves uneven value attribution, the conferring of use values on practices and goods, engagement with inscriptions of value (inscription of lack of value and contestation of this), and critique of 'undeserved' exchange-based capitals as well as unequal access to exchangeable capitals. Skeggs' theoretical contribution has been extended to gendered and rural processes to examine how workers claim worth (as a worker) through these as well as classed processes. An exploration of the workers' family and work-based trajectories (including family historical ties to the local wine region, educational experiences and working trajectories) demonstrates the multiple ways in which class, gender and rurality are involved in lived experiences. The data highlight the ongoing influences of accrual of capital values (both use and exchange) tied to family upbringing and working trajectories, while analysis of current meanings of work provides greater detail on how the workers engage with value attribution of capital values, claiming worth in their work through challenging 'undeserved' capital values of winemakers, managers and technical experts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/284050 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Hoon, Elizabeth |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | EN-AUS |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Elizabeth Hoon 2007 |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds