Youth in the New Economy: The Post-Fordist Self

Author(s):  
David Farrugia

This chapter theorises youth within the dynamics of labour, value and selfhood characteristic of post-Fordism. This is youth in the ‘new economy’ in which precarious employment co-exists with a ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ that positions work as a realm of self-realisation for contemporary workers. The call for self-realisation through labour has also changed young people’s relationship to the labour force. It is no longer enough to work – one must become a worker, and youth is the time at which young people are under most pressure to respond to this social injunction. For the purposes of this book, this means that the relationship between youth and work must be approached in terms of the cultivation of the self as a subject of value to the labour force, rather than merely in terms of the accumulation of resources, skills and qualifications.

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farrugia

This article explores the practices through which young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the post-Fordist labour force. In this, the article goes beyond an existing emphasis on young people’s ‘transitions’ through employment, to a focus on the practices through which young people are formed as labouring subjects, and therefore on the relationship between youth subjectivities and post-Fordist labour force formation. Theoretically, the article builds upon increasingly influential suggestions in studies of post-Fordism that the formation of post-Fordist workers now takes place through the conversion of the whole of a subject’s life into the capacity for labour, including affective styles, modes of relationality, and characteristics usually not considered as productive dimensions of the self. In this context, the article shows that whilst young people form themselves as workers through practices that are not specific to institutionalised definitions of education and labour, these practices – and the modes of selfhood they aim to cultivate – vary in ways that contribute to classed divisions within post-Fordist societies. In this, the study of the formation of young workers offers a critical insight into the way that the formation of subjectivities intertwines with the disciplinary requirements of post-Fordist labour in their classed manifestations.


2020 ◽  
pp. oemed-2020-107149
Author(s):  
Marissa Shields ◽  
Stefanie Dimov ◽  
Tania L King ◽  
Allison Milner ◽  
Anne Kavanagh ◽  
...  

ObjectiveTo examine the association between labour force status, including young people who were unemployed and having problems looking for work, and psychological distress one year later. We then assessed whether this association is modified by disability status.MethodsWe used three waves of cohort data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth. We fitted logistic regression models to account for confounders of the relationship between labour force status (employed, not in the labour force, unemployed and having problems looking for work) at age 21 years and psychological distress at age 22 years. We then estimated whether this association was modified by disability status at age 21 years.ResultsBeing unemployed and having problems looking for work at age 21 years was associated with odds of psychological distress that were 2.48 (95% CI 1.95 to 3.14) times higher than employment. There was little evidence for additive effect measure modification of this association by disability status (2.52, 95% CI −1.21 to 6.25).ConclusionsYoung people who were unemployed and having problems looking for work had increased odds of poor mental health. Interventions should focus on addressing the difficulties young people report when looking for work, with a particular focus on supporting those young people facing additional barriers to employment such as young people with disabilities.


Author(s):  
Iryna Hrynyk

Abstract. The article carries out theoretical and empirical analysis of features of personality᾿s self-identity by means of fashion. It presents theoretical analysis of the main approaches to the interpretation of fashion and its evolution in the process of social development and describes the content characteristics of fashion as a social and psychological phenomenon and its impact on the individual identification and self-presentation. It has been determined that fashion is an important mechanism of self-presentation and identification of the individual with a certain social group. The author clarifies the scale of the fashion influence on the self-identification and self-presentation of the personality and its possible consequence revealing the psychological mechanisms of young people᾿s interest in modern fashion. The empirical study of the role and influence of fashion on self-presentation among students has been carried out. According to quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results obtained factors and the relationship between them have been singled out, which are the key to the self-identity of personality. It is confirmed that the studied groups of students perceive fashion as a means to emphasize their individuality; they have a clear need for material well-being, prestige, popularity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
David Farrugia

This chapter summarises the empirical findings of the book and explores the theoretical consequences for studies of youth, work and social inequality. The key argument is that the relationship between youth and work has been transformed by post-Fordism, and that young people have been re-positioned as the ideal post-Fordist subjects through their engagement with the contemporary labour force. In this sense, work has become a site for the production of youth as such – not merely an employment market that young people must ‘transition’ into, but a set of biopolitical practices that constitute the basic conditions for youth identity. In the process, young people’s definitions of themselves have become intertwined with their capacity to produce value at work. Class does not manifest merely in the biographical inequalities that structure youth transitions, or in struggles for status and symbolic value. Instead, class inequalities are manifested in the practices, ethics and forms of selfhood that are mobilised when young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the labour force. The book therefore offers a paradigm for understanding the formation of young people as workers, and the production of unique forms of classed identity manifested in the post-Fordist work ethic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Kevin McQuillan

As rates of population and labour force growth slow in Canada, the country faces important challenges in promoting economic growth and sustaining prosperity. Among the most important public issues are increasing labour force participation rates among groups with low or declining rates of work and reforming education to better prepare graduates for the jobs of the new economy. At the same time, Canada needs to respond to the shifting geography of work. The concentration of employment in a limited number of major urban centres is driving young people to seek work in high-cost cities, while many smaller cities and regions face the prospect of economic and demographic decline.Alors que les taux de population et la croissance de la population active ralentissent au Canada, le pays devra relever d’importants défis pour promouvoir la croissance économique et maintenir la prospérité. Les plus importantes questions d’ordre public porteront, entre autres, sur le taux de participation, au sein de la population active, de groupes présentant des taux d’emploi faibles ou en déclin et la réforme de l’éducation afin de mieux préparer les diplômés aux emplois de la nouvelle économie. Le Canada doit, en même temps, aborder la géographie changeante du travail. La concentration des emplois dans quelques grands centres urbains pousse les jeunes à chercher du travail dans les villes où le coût est élevé, alors que les villes plus petites et les régions sont confrontées au déclin économique et démographique.Mots-clés : population et environnement; climat; utilisation d’énergie; pointe de population


2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bagnoli

In order to research the identities of young people in contemporary Europe I designed a participatory project which relied on the application of a multi-method autobiographical approach. The project fully involved the young participants as co-researchers, assigning them a guiding role, and allowing them to provide the identity narratives which were most significant to them, in their own terms. The multi-method autobiographical approach that I present here was designed so to study identities as dialogical constructions, on the basis of a holistic ‘self+other’ model, which assumes that the dimension of dialogue and the relationship with the other from us are fundamental in the process of identity definition. Main aim of the approach was encouraging reflexivity, and it offered a variety of media for the young participants to narrate their life-stories. Centring on the production of a one-week diary, it involved also two open- ended interviews, as well as the use of visual methods, the projective technique of the self-portrait, and the collection of participants’ own photographs. The young people responded enthusiastically to this methodology, which sometimes also empowered them over their lives. Its flexible and open structure effectively allowed them to guide the research in the directions they wanted, being sensitive to their own preferred ways of self-expression. The use of written and visual methods significantly widened the area of research, accessing data that might have been difficult to gather otherwise.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95
Author(s):  
Alina Zaharia

The main objective of this research consists in studying psychosocial aspects of the relationship that is established between the level of the quality of self image and self-esteem in adolescents. Self-esteem play an important role in the self image of teenagers and young people. Teenagers with a high level of self-esteem have clear and stable views about themselves, talk about them in a consistent, positive way. Teenagers with a low self-esteem have the feeling that they do not know too well each other and talk about them in a unreliable and ambiguous way. They are also pretty reserved in initiating social contacts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Evans-Lacko ◽  
Susanne Stolzenburg ◽  
Petra C. Gronholm ◽  
Wagner Ribeiro ◽  
Marianna York-Smith ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa Shields ◽  
Tania King ◽  
Stefanie Dimov ◽  
Anne Kavanagh ◽  
Matthew Spittal

Abstract Background Young people with disabilities have poorer labour force outcomes than their peers without disabilities. Existing studies typically assess disability at one time point, obscuring potential variation in the experience of disability over time. This study aimed to identify trajectories of disability during childhood/adolescence and assess associations between trajectory membership and labour force status in young adulthood. Methods Group-based trajectory modeling was applied to disability status information from Waves 2-7 (age 4/5 to 16/17 years) of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children; labour force participation (employed, unemployed, not in the labour force (NILF)) was measured at Wave 8 (18/19 years). Two logistic regression models assessed the relationship between trajectory group membership and labour force participation, adjusted for confounders. Results Four trajectory groups were identified: low (75.5% of cohort), low increasing (9.7%), high decreasing (10.9%), and consistently high (3.9%) prevalence of disability. Compared to individuals in the low trajectory (reference group), individuals in the consistently high trajectory had increased odds of being NILF at age 18/19 years (AOR 3.48, 95%CI 2.14, 5.68). Individuals in the low increasing trajectory had increased odds of unemployment at age 18/19 years compared to the reference group (AOR 2.93, 95%CI 1.91-4.48). Conclusions Results suggest that early experiences of disability among young Australians may differentially impact future labour force outcomes. Key messages Additional supports to prepare young people for the labour force should focus on individuals with consistently high or increasing prevalence of disability trajectories.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
David Farrugia

Contemporary research on youth and work is focused on young people’s transitions into employment – on the question of who gets which jobs and when do they get these jobs. In this it is neglecting the relationship between work, productivity and the self, or the status of young people as labouring subjects who must produce value through their work. This has also led to a limited view of the nature of social class, which has come to focus on the distribution of economic and cultural resources that may be exchanged on the labour market to the exclusion of work as a uniquely significant site for the formation of the classed self. Taking up these conceptual problems is the task of the book.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document