Research into the experiences of men who worked in reserved occupations in Clydeside during the Second World War reveals that plurality was undoubtedly a highly significant feature of their masculine subjectivities, and also that the needs of daily life represented a fundamental and arguably overriding influence on their subjectivities. A range of ‘imagined’ subjectivities, both continuous and shaped by wartime events and discourses, were highly relevant to male civilian workers on and around the Clyde, but the influence, prominence, and immediacy in their lives of the people and places of their everyday existences, often contradictory and yet relevant to men before, during and after the war, meant that they possessed an inevitably continuous, inexorable sense of personal agency. Indeed, the frequently contradictory nature of interviewees’ narratives exposed the ‘living’ relevance of this sense of agency. James Joll described ‘the helplessness of man in the face of the inexorable processes of history’, but this research rejects this notion of ‘helplessness’ and has argued instead for the capacity of individual human beings to survive such ‘inexorable processes’ intact. V. S. Pritchett wrote in 1946 of the wartime shipbuilder:

The question of how the experiences of men in reserved occupations in wartime Clydeside relate to discourses of wartime national and social unity has been at the heart of this research, and I would assert that lack of a completely free choice of environment, and being ‘caught up’ in a ‘world process’ did not, for male civilian workers, ultimately mean that individuals also lacked a sense of personal independence and agency.

Shelley Trower has argued that voices, as revealed in oral testimony, were once far more closely bound to particular localities than they are in the present day, and also noted that sense of place is rarely stable and unchanging.