This book offers a powerful rethinking of long-term unemployment, focusing on everyday lived experiences that reveal how unemployed men make sense of deindustrialisation and prolonged joblessness. The book foregrounds Bakhtin’s theory of resisting power through humour and dialogue, challenging prevailing psychological and individualistic narratives. It instead shows how men resist dominant activation discourses by voicing metaphors that reflect their embodied experiences.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a post-industrial inner city Work Club, the book combines photographs, quotations and vignettes to illuminate the loss of largely masculine employment. It offers a critical analysis of agency and discourse, with new perspectives on how unemployed men resist and cope with their circumstances in ways that are often overlooked by mainstream theories.