The article intends to identify the different thematic paths followed by studies and research on the working classes during the eighties, until faced by the rising of a new unifying subject - the ways of life. This shifts the emphasis from the conditions of life and the political-institutional actions of the working class to daily practices and representations, the different traditions and routes of male and female workers, proposing an approach which, at the crossroads of Sociology with Social History and Cultural Anthropology, redeems the heterogeinity of the constituion and the differentiating experiences of the working class .
working class; ways of life; daily practices; experience; culture; heterogeinity