Youth,Work and ‘Career’ as a Way of Talking about the Self

Abstract

This article develops research on youth and ‘career’ beyond a focus on attitudes towards employment flexibility and towards an examination of the ideological role of work in the formation of youth identities. The article draws on a programme of research on the formation of young people’s working identities, and presents interview data in which young people discuss the meaning of ‘career’ and the significance of work in general. These data show that across divergent aspirations and family histories of employment, young people define ‘career’ in terms of the promise of self-actualisation through labour, and thereby position work as the key site for self-expression and the cultivation of personal uniqueness. This article therefore suggests that the notion of ‘career’ is a way that the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ is articulated on the level of youth identities, elevating self-realisation through labour as the goal of successful labour market engagement for youth.

Keywords

career identity youth

Introduction

This article explores the contemporary role of work in the formation of identity through a renewed focus on young people and ‘career’. The aims of the article are to reposition academic research on youth and career within transformations in the nature of work and in the relationship between work and identity in contemporary capitalism, and to empirically explore how the notion of career contributes to young people’s identities as workers. ‘Career’ is a narrative and ideological device that emerged during industrial capitalism and that defines working identities in terms of meritocratic upward progression (Young and Collin, 2000). However, contemporary career identities are formed within a post-Fordist situation in which labour market precarity coexists with the requirement to understand the self in terms of the accumulation of value (Skeggs, 2005). Working identities are where notions of value connect with the formation and experience of the self (Farrugia, 2019), and young people are now encouraged to view work as a realm of identity construction and passionate commitment (Kelly and Harrison, 2009). Contemporary ‘therapeutic’ cultures within late modern societies also emphasise notions of self-realisation and authenticity in the experience of the self at work (Potter, 2015). Shifts in the meaning of ‘career’ can therefore offer an insight into how work impacts upon identity construction in different eras of capitalism. There is an opportunity for a renewed attention to youth and career which goes beyond a focus on attitudes towards flexibility to interrogate how the contemporary meaning of career shapes the relationship between work and the self. That is the task of this article.

The article begins by examining the notion of career within the changing world of work for young people, arguing for a renewed focus on the meaning of ‘career’ to understand how identities formed within biographical experiences of employment are connected with broader shifts in the relationship between identity and work. In particular, the article approaches the concept of ‘career’ not merely as a biographical structure, but as a grammar of the self that provides a vocabulary through which contemporary youth articulate projects of self-realisation in line with the requirements of the labour force. In this context, the article shows the language of ‘career’ is a way in which young people talk about, and aspire to, a relationship with work in which work takes on an expansive role in the formation of the self, collapsing personal development, the cultivation of personal uniqueness, and the capacity to live a meaningful and satisfying life into the experience of work. The forms of personal investment and self-cultivation that are understood by young people through the concept of career also reveal tensions between the promise of self-realisation offered by the contemporary work ethic and young people’s experiences of employment and unemployment, positioning the notion of career as a way of understanding the consequences of the alignment between work and the self in precarious social conditions.

Understanding ‘career’ within the changing world of work

Contemporary research on youth and career focuses on young people’s biographical movements through employment. Concepts in social theory, such as the ‘destandardisation’ of work (Beck, 1992: 91–154), dovetail with notions of ‘flexible’, ‘boundaryless’ and ‘fragmented’ careers that span multiple employers or sectors (Arthur, 1994; Elchardus and Smits, 2008; King, 2003; Roper et al., 2010). These discussions are aligned with broader cultural and political shifts connected with neoliberalism, especially the increased political emphasis on the capacity for individuals to manage a precarious labour market in an entrepreneurial manner (Roper et al., 2010). The key focus in studies of youth and career has been the kind of working biographies that young people experience or aspire to, especially the degree to which they aspire to flexible or non-traditional careers spanning multiple contexts (Elchardus and Smits, 2008; Fenton and Dermott, 2006; King, 2003). While young people do not make strong personal identifications with particular industries or employers (Strangleman, 2012), neither do they appear to embrace notions of flexibility as celebrated in concepts of the new or boundaryless career. Most youth do not embrace flexibility and contingency despite having these experiences thrust upon them by the exigencies of the labour market (Andres and Wyn, 2010; Elchardus and Smits, 2008; Fenton and Dermott, 2006; King, 2003).

However, by focusing primarily on young people’s attitudes towards different objective career structures, this literature has failed to recognise the broader significance of ‘career’ as a concept with a long sociological history. The concept of career is an important part of symbolic interactionist sociology, where it was developed to theorise the relationship between cultural collectives and institutional structures on the one hand, and personal identity and biographical practice on the other (Becker, 1963; Blumer, 1963; Goffman, 1961). As reviewed by Barley (1996), this ‘dual ontology’ underpinned concepts such as ‘status passages’ and ‘vocabularies of motive’, which described how institutional structures produced identities through the biographical practices that differently positioned subjects used to navigate public life. This literature also showed that careers developed in ways that legitimated relations of subordination or exploitation, as well as giving meaning to linear upward mobility. When applied to work specifically, distinctions in the literature between orderly and linear as opposed to ‘disorderly’ careers described the difference between biographical experiences that followed a steady upward trajectory as opposed to fragmented or horizontal movement within institutional structures. More recently, narrative-driven and post-structural accounts of career have emerged which explore narratives used to make sense of and create professional identities (LaPointe, 2010; Slay and Smith, 2011). LaPointe (2010) introduces the notion of ‘master career narratives’ to describe cultural discourses that constitute identities formed within differently structured biographical experiences of work, in which career identities are produced within locally specific work contexts and through narratives that cite available discourses. Career is therefore a sociological concept used to explore the relationship between individual identity and collective social life in general, as well as an empirical object that is used to understand the specific identities formed through experiences of work.

In this context, the aim of this article is to shift focus away from young people’s attitudes towards precarity and towards the symbolic and narrative role that the language of ‘career’ plays in the formation of youth identities in their relation to work. Emerging during industrial capitalism, the notion of a ‘career’ has now become a way that contemporary identities are located in time and space within changing social contexts (Collin, 2000). Young and Collin (2000) have argued that the idea of career is now ‘flexible and elastic’ (p. 1), saturated with ideological and normative meanings that define the kind of working identities that are available to workers and that are particularly celebrated within a given historical moment. These identities support a meritocratic view of work as a realm where hard work is rewarded with upward mobility, but which also involves the normative expectation that workers should aspire to a career regardless of the occupational structures available to them. However, Richard Sennett (1998) has argued that the temporal coherence assumed by the concept of career is being threatened by the unpredictability of social life and the rapidly changing nature of the labour market. Nevertheless, ‘careers’ are increasingly offered to those whose experiences of work are remote to any sense of linear progression. The notion of ‘career’ can therefore be seen as a site where the ‘work ethic’ shapes working identities (Young and Collin, 2000).

This broader exploration of career resonates with the classical work of Weber on the protestant work ethic and the notion of ‘vocation’. Weber’s contribution to understanding ‘career’ is to situate the meaning of work beyond material benefit, approaching work in terms of a moral obligation that reflects changing forms of labour and production. The protestant work ethic offered salvation in the next life as a reward for a total commitment to work, whereas Weber’s discussion of the professions (Weber et al., 2004) suggested that these forms of work offer a sense of ‘vocation’, and of being passionately committed to work due to having been ‘called’ to a higher purpose. Weeks (2011) has extended the work of Weber to argue that the higher purpose of work has shifted from transcendence to the realisation of the self. While the protestant work ethic identified by Weber promised salvation in the next life as a reward for work, Weeks suggests that contemporary societies are characterised by a ‘post-Fordist’ work ethic which promises personal fulfilment and self-realisation through labour. In this sense, while Weber’s original work aligns ‘career’ with relatively privileged members of established professions, Weeks’ notion of the post-Fordist work ethic suggests that ‘career’ – in the sense of a project of personal development and identity construction through work – may have become a central feature of identity in contemporary societies in general, especially for young people.

Weeks’ (2011) arguments resonate with the way that the cultural imperatives of neoliberalism are reflected in contemporary youth identities and public discussions about young people and work. Young people are expected to form reflexive, individualised subjectivities and to be entrepreneurial in their navigation of precarious labour markets (Kelly, 2006). Youth is frequently discussed and problematised in terms of ‘aspiration’, in which problems such as unemployment can be addressed by encouraging young people to be ambitious and strategic about the future. More broadly, work is increasingly discussed through therapeutic or ‘self-help’ language which encourages workers to understand work in terms of self-actualisation (Potter, 2015), and dovetails with the contemporary emphasis on personal reflexivity that characterises contemporary identities (Beck, 2000). The empirical work of McDonald et al. (2011) with school students shows that young people now perceive work as a realm for the creation of an ‘autonomous’ self, and there is an increased focus among young people on the cultivation of their own ‘employability’ as a way of responding to labour market uncertainty (Kelly and Harrison, 2009). The aspects of the self that are considered economically productive by young people are also becoming increasingly expansive, with young people describing all aspects of themselves as intertwined with their identities as workers and with their engagements with work (Farrugia, 2019). While a ‘career’ characterised by stable and predictable progression has become more structurally difficult to achieve, notions of employability, personal value and self-realisation through work appear to be becoming increasingly critical to the identities of contemporary youth.

This article approaches career as a vocabulary for talking about the formation of the productive self and a discursive means by which to cultivate an identity as a value-accruing subject in line with the requirements of the labour market. Rather than focusing on biographical structures, the article focuses on the concept of career itself, and how this concept articulated the dynamics of work, identity and the work ethic described above. In this, the article develops literatures on young people and career, and on the relationship between youth, identity and work, into a renewed exploration of how concepts of career contribute to the formation of young working identities. The article explores the meaning of work and career in the identities of contemporary young people; the impact of young people’s actual biographical experiences of work on their working identities and definitions of career; and the relationship between career, working identity, and aspirations for different kinds of work.

Research design and methodology

The project that forms the basis for this article explored the formation of young working identities amid conditions of societal transformation. The project focused on the role of work in young people’s lives, their experiences of and aspirations for employment, and the rationales and meanings that young people draw upon in order to engage with education, training and the labour market. The project employed exploratory qualitative methodology based on semi-structured, biographical interviewing. Interviews discussed young people’s experiences of work, preferences and aspirations for present and future work, motivations for engaging with particular kinds of education, training and employment, and the role of work in narratives about a past and future self. These themes were situated within an autobiographical narrative of both real and imagined past, present and future working selves. Interviews lasted between 30 minutes and two and a half hours, with an average time of around an hour.

Fieldwork took place in 2016–2017 in two Australian regions identified as ‘youth unemployment hotspots’ in Australian social policy discourse (Brotherhood of St Laurence, 2014), with levels of youth unemployment at three times the national average. Australia is similar to other western capitalist societies in its elevated levels of youth unemployment and precarity connected with deindustrialisation and the introduction of labour market deregulation in the 1990s. The sample includes participants from a range of backgrounds and employment statuses in order to properly capture the diverse terrain of work that exists even in areas with relatively high youth unemployment. The sample included 74 young people, and included those still in education or training, those who were combining work and study, those who were working, and those who had experienced unemployment. The sample was constructed for maximum diversity in terms of educational qualifications, experiences of work in particular industries, and reported family background. Participants were recruited via educational and training institutions, community organisations, professional organisations, and recruitment companies and companies contracted to offer welfare services. Participants were aged between 17 and 29 and included 44 young women and 30 young men.

Data were analysed inductively using principles of thematic and narrative analysis (Riessman, 2001) to understand themes that emerged as significant across the data as a whole, as well as to understand the role of employment and labour in young people’s overall biographical narratives – that is, in the way that work and career contributed to their understanding of themselves, their pasts and their futures. Thematic analysis followed established coding processes in qualitative interview-based research, beginning with open codes to identify key themes and then refining these into subcategories to identify relationships within and between initial codes (Silverman, 2006). Narrative analysis focused on the meaning of key biographical events in relation to pasts and imagined futures, and therefore with the creation of identities that projected over time (Riessman, 2001). The analysis that follows is organised according to the level of experience young people had in work, and their experiences of employment and unemployment. These distinctions emerged as key factors shaping young people’s definition of career. Other differences in young people’s working identities are described in Farrugia (2019), especially in relation to social class and definitions of economic productivity. As is usual in qualitative research of this kind, the organisation of the analysis is therefore oriented towards theoretical elaboration, in this case developing the notion of career as a vocabulary of the self. It is not therefore based on a priori categories established prior to analysis.

Work as the basis for the self: The meaning of career

The language of a ‘career’ was raised spontaneously by participants as a way of talking about the ideal role that work would play in their life. Aspiring to a career (as opposed to a ‘job’) was key to young people’s aspirations for work and for their lives in general. The meaning of career had several elements in common across the sample, but varied in significant ways depending on young people’s experiences of employment and unemployment. This section begins with a discussion of young people interviewed while still in education or training, either in concert with part-time work or in preparation to enter the labour market. Their narratives establish the key elements of the language of ‘career’ as it relates to the self, and introduce the distinction between a career and a job from the perspective of young workers.

Young people in education and training

Indeed, most participants had some labour market experience already, despite still being in education, working casual jobs in the retail or hospitality industries while at school, university, or technical college (Andres and Wyn, 2010). Their attitudes towards these jobs tended to be ambivalent, describing them as a source of money to fund expenses and to achieve some degree of independence from their parents. However, the vast majority of participants – regardless of parental class background or particular occupational aspiration – nevertheless affirmed that they anticipated work would be central to their identities and expectations for future life satisfaction, and expressed a sense of deep anxiety at the prospect of working in ‘just a job’. This was particularly clear for participants who were in education or training, including those in their final year of high school (aged 17 or 18) and those in further education at university or technical colleges. As Robert¹ – a young man interviewed in his final year of secondary education – said: work should not be ‘just based around the fact of me living’. Instead, work should be something that was desired, enjoyed and definitive of a person’s biography, and it is here that the notion of career becomes central to participants’ working identities and biographical narratives.

In a discussion of the meaning of education in relation to contemporary notions of ‘employability’, Gerrard (2014) has suggested that the contemporary work ethic is combined with a ‘learning ethic’, in which workers are required to engage in self-improvement and ‘lifelong learning’ in order to invest themselves productively at work. This is reflected in narratives from participants who were interviewed while in education or training, for whom the notion of career is a way to articulate an anticipated future self that is successfully self-actualising through work. For example, Danielle was a young woman who went to school with Robert. Danielle’s mother was an interior designer and her father was in the military. Like Robert, Danielle articulated the significance of work and career in terms that were typical to many of the young people interviewed as part of this project, especially those still in education who were making plans about their working futures:

It’s not a job, it’s a life path, something that I can always work through and make my way up in the world as opposed to just working a job. I want something that’s always going to be with me. Not stopping and starting and changing kind of thing.

A job is more like working, to me it feels like working in retail, so it’s just the same thing every day as opposed to a career . . . I feel like a career opens more doors as opposed to just a job.

During the interview, Danielle described plans to study psychology at university, and in the quote above suggests that this field offers ‘a life path’ that was ‘always going to be with’ her, rather than merely a job, which is routine and transient. Here, and at other points in the interview, Danielle stresses that a career offers a stable pathway, and that stability is necessary for the meaning of a career. Like other participants, Danielle discusses the necessity of a career in the context of a broader emphasis on personal ambition in work – a theme that was repeated throughout interviews by young people with a range of family histories of work. Moreover, here career offers a way of positioning the self as aspirational and reflexive – a key aspect of young people’s contemporary relationship towards education and its relationship to the labour market. This also is reflected in the following narrative from Rose, who was 24 years old and had had some experience working in retail as well as periods of unemployment. Unlike Danielle, Rose described her family background in terms of longstanding disadvantage, and while she was estranged from her family, Rose stated that her parents had frequently relied on unemployment benefits for their main source of financial support. Rose was studying to work in disability support at a technical college at the time of the interview and, like Danielle, Rose positioned this as the beginning of a career that offered an experience of personal growth through work:

Like . . . you can work anywhere . . . you can do lots of things . . . but I feel like a career is something that will, like . . . that you can grow more in, you know?

As a young person in vocational training, for Rose the notion of career is a way of making sense of the present in terms of an imagined future of personal growth articulated and anticipated as arising through work. The notion of personal growth through work was common to a range of participants and was a major theme across young people’s discussions of career, which described the cultivation of an employable self in terms of increasing the value of the self through a passionate commitment to self-improvement. The following participant, Sarah – whose parents owned a small trucking business – had studied biology at university for one year before becoming sceptical about her job prospects after graduation and shifting to study community services at a technical college. Despite the fact that this pathway required a lower level of education than she had previously been enrolled in, Sarah described herself as an ambitious and career-minded person who was not willing to settle for ‘just a job’. While she was searching for retail work in order to support herself during her study, she described her chosen field in the following way:

[It’s] in an area that I want to keep advancing in, so keep getting better and, yeah . . . Like the retail jobs that I am looking for now, is still just a job, whereas I still want a career as well. I think that’s really important to me.

I’m doing [certificate in community services] at the moment, it’s – I don’t go to classes, or anything, they just give me a book, I read the info and do the questions and hand it back. I love it. I think this is the most that I have actually loved a course and been interested, and I can see it as a career. I have been doing it since March and I can still see it as a career, so that’s good. It’s important to me to keep studying and always, I guess, making myself better. When I have finished the Cert IV, I want to get like an entry-level job just so I am working, making money and can start the career and then keep studying. I’m going to study through correspondence and do a diploma and then hopefully a Bachelor, would be nice.

For Sarah, it is within the notion of career that the learning ethic is enacted in plans for future work. Notions of employability, self-improvement and personal development are intertwined in the pursuit of a career, which offers an opportunity for ‘making herself better’ through her aspirations for work. As well as growth, personal development and ambition, the notion of career was also described as basic to a sense of individual uniqueness. Chris, an 18-year-old young man, described career in terms of the finding of an individual ‘niche’, which facilitated feelings of uniqueness and underpinned eventual success:

Everyone’s got a niche, and I just think I just need to find a niche.

How are you going to know if you’ve found a niche?

You start kicking arse at it, probably . . . The niche is what makes you unique, I think. It sets you out from everyone else. I like the idea that everyone can stand out in their own way. If I didn’t have a niche or I had something—yeah . . .

Chris describes a ‘niche’ as a career that allows the cultivation of a distinct and unique sense of self, and experiencing work in terms of the cultivation of uniqueness is understood as necessary to success in working life. For Chris, the failure to find a unique niche in the world of work would amount to the impossibility of achieving success, and the impossibility of achieving the kind of individuated identity that the notion of career was seen to offer. In summary, therefore, for young people engaged in education and training, the notion of career describes a project of self-realisation in which the cultivation of a valued and employable self is a means by which to project the self into the future. Career therefore stands for successful self-realisation and personal uniqueness in the most general sense, and articulates with broader discourses of aspiration through which contemporary young people relate to work.

Self-realisation and institutional advancement at work

The emphasis on the cultivation of the self continues in young people who have completed their education and have some labour market experience, but among these participants this is discussed within institutional structures that become available upon employment and that can offer a sense of advancement. The following participant, Thomas, was working as a junior real estate agent after having done casual work in the hospitality industry and as a labourer. While Thomas’s father was a labourer, Thomas said that his hospitality and labouring work was not experienced in terms of ‘career’ due to the poor pay and the absence of an institutional hierarchy offering advancement. After two months working in real estate, Thomas described his relationship with his work as ‘who you are, not what you are’:

Oh well, I could get a quote, go home and put my head on the pillow. Tonight, someone can call me and say ‘I’m looking to sell my house’, so I’ve got to get up. How are you, what’s going on? . . . So, it becomes who you are, not what you are I suppose.

Now it’s the career, yeah . . . well, the bars and the scaffold, I more or less – you put them in the same category. The promotions didn’t pay working in bars and scaffolding, there’s no money in it . . . There was just sort of no ambition to keep going further with it. I sort of wanted something where I could just start here and finish up here. You know what I mean? Over a long period of time.

Here, Thomas’s identification with his job as ‘who he is’ is aligned with the availability of institutional structures offering advancement – that is, promotions leading to more status and financial remuneration. Rather than self-realisation in a broad sense, Thomas and other participants with a similar amount of labour market experience discussed personal development alongside the institutional hierarchies available in their jobs. Nicholas – whose mother was a teacher and whose father was deceased – also worked in real estate, although this time for almost a year. Nicholas described his work as his ‘lifestyle’ rather than merely his job, and emphasised the progression available within this form of work. For Nicholas, this was necessary for the experience of a meaningful life in general, both inside and outside of work:

Well, there’s clear defined progression in that sense. I mean, you start off in the PA, executive assistance, whatever role, and then – so probably early, not next year, the year after, so early 2017, I will probably start being an agent, a proper listing agent for things. You move up and then you will most likely look at buying into the business and things like that in the next five to ten years . . .

Well, it’s your lifestyle . . . Yeah, it’s a lifestyle, it’s about – it is, it’s your life. I’m now, you know – I’ve never had the idea of going to work at an hour, going home at an hour and then just – what are you doing with the rest of your life, you know? Your life has to have some sort of meaning and legacy. You have to do something, because, I mean, what else, what else are we here for?

In Nicholas’s narrative, institutional hierarchies, personal development and the possibility of meaning in life in general are all intertwined into a discussion and experience of career. For this young man, the notion of career is the means by which a personal investment in work is articulated within the hierarchies he is embedded within as a junior worker, and thereby aligns the personal development and self-realisation with the institutional structures of the workplace. In this respect, these narratives suggest that the discussion of career is a way that the post-Fordist work ethic is articulated within biographical experiences of employment and the forms of development that are available within institutional structures. Career is a way that institutional progression becomes self-realisation. The significance of structured progression is affirmed by Hannah, whose mother was a social worker and whose father worked in the trucking industry. Hannah had recently started work in the events and customer service team at a bank after working at a supermarket while studying at a technical college:

It feels like how everyone says do what you love, et cetera, et cetera. Here just feels completely different to [supermarket]. You actually want to come here and at the moment I’m wanting to learn and I can’t wait to already know everything about it and just already thinking about moving up and stuff, it just makes you want to do better and better. That’s definitely like a career and you see yourself doing it, not just for now. You see yourself doing it for ages.

I feel like it will be forever, but you never know. I feel like I can only just keep going up here . . . I’m only three days in, but as far as I know it goes supervisor, branch manager and then it goes up to your head office and then it’s your regional managers and your CEOs and then other sections and stuff like that. The tier is huge of how many people.

I feel like I’m good at it . . . It feels good. It makes you feel good when you’ve done something correct or you’re completely good at it.

Here, Hannah’s narrative of future ambition within the institutional structure available at her new job includes the pleasure of feelings of competence and success. The combination of themes of competence, success and the ‘love of work’ into narratives about career was common to young people working in many industries, including those like Hannah who worked outside of the established professions more usually associated with linear careers.

The requirement to ‘love’ or ‘enjoy’ work in order to live a meaningful life resonates with previous literature that suggests that young people now see work as a realm of passionate self-actualisation (Kelly and Harrison, 2009). In his work on the ‘end of career’, Potter (2015) argues that contemporary workers lack a discursive repertoire or shared way of talking about the self at work. However, the data presented in this article thus far suggest that the notion of career has become just such a discursive repertoire, which operates as a way of talking about the self at work precisely by collapsing the distinction between identity and work. The notion of career positions work as the basis for the formation of the self in an expansive sense, understanding work as the basis for the meaning in life, which is dependent on uniqueness and growth. The notion of career is therefore a way in which the cultural requirement to understand the self in terms of personal development and value is enacted, and aligns young people’s identities with the requirements of the labour market. In this way, the notion of career as articulated by these young people enlarges the significance of work to encompass the whole of a young person’s identity. What these data represent, therefore, is neither a disinvestment in work as a source of identity or an embrace of flexibility, but rather a full identification with career as the basis for a meaningful sense of self.

Experiences of unemployment: From career to getting through life

In the narratives above, the notion of career is described as a condition for the realisation of the self and a meaningful existence in the future. However, unemployment threatens this possibility, and creates the necessity for substantial revision of personal identity and of the relationship of the self with work. With this in mind, this section explores instances in which the language of career becomes impossible for young people to sustain due to experiences of unemployment. While these participants again varied in their familial histories of education and employment, they did not include any whose parents were tertiary educated or worked in the professions. The data from these participants show that while young people may initially express a desire for self-actualisation through career, experiencing unemployment means that these desires eventually give way to the necessity of work of any kind to maintain a decent life. Kara’s mother was a receptionist and her father was a labourer. She was completing a qualification at a technical college at the time of the interview and had been applying for entry-level hospitality work in order to get a start in this industry. Kara’s narrative below positions this kind of hospitality labour as part of a career in events, and her inability to successfully find work of this kind creates frustration that is not merely connected to unemployment or material deprivation, but to an inability to embark on the kind of personal development that the notion of career offers:

Yeah, I want it to make me happy and feel fulfilled and not just a job. I don’t want a job.

My career – I kind of have to start with hospitality kind of things and there’s people that are just doing those hospitality jobs to have a job. So it’s harder to get in there. There’s people that just want it, because they want money, whereas I want it because I need it to actually get to the goal. Which is frustrating, because that last interview I went to, a girl in my class actually got the job and she said after that I don’t actually like events anymore, so I was like that’s really annoying, because I would have used that job and it would have actually helped so much . . . I wouldn’t just be like, ‘Oh, this is just like a random hospitality job’, because I want money or because I need a job. It’s because I’d actually want it to progress more and not just be like this is the bare minimum that I’m going to do.

Applying for work while unemployed, Kara distances herself from those who want ‘just a job’, and justifies her value to the labour market in terms of her forward-looking and goal-oriented approach to work. She returns to the significance of career multiple times during the interview despite the unemployment that she has experienced in the time since completing her qualification. However, as periods of unemployment lengthen, young people’s narratives and definitions of work change. At the time of the interview, Mitchell had been unemployed for six months. Like Kara, Mitchell has maintained a personal investment in the notion of career. However, he had shifted from applying for jobs in areas that he felt he could ‘develop’, to searching for anything that was available:

I want to develop on something and actually make a living out of something that I’m interested in, instead of serving customers at a food outlet or something like that, that I’m not as passionate about. I say banking or cars or real estate.

I started off at more banking and admin, but now I’ve put in for the works, back at [supermarkets], I’ve put in for [fast food] and anything I can get. But, I haven’t heard anything back from any of them yet.

When I first moved up here, I was in that mindset of I want something I can develop. Then, as the weeks and months went on and I’m desperate, I’ll take anything at the moment and develop on something later.

For Mitchell, an investment in career gave way to desperation created by financial hardship, and a sidelining of career in favour of work in whatever was available. Indeed, while Mitchell discussed a stronger investment in ‘career’ than most participants who had experienced substantial periods of unemployment, his primary focus as articulated in the interview was not on career or on interesting work, but on finding any work as quickly as possible in order to pay off credit card debt accumulated while unemployed. In response, work was positioned not in terms of career and development, but in terms of personal dignity. Josh – who preferred not to discuss his family background and was estranged from his family – was a 24-year-old young man who had experienced multiple periods of unemployment in the years since exiting education and was working in part-time cleaning and detailing cars at the time of the interview. In Josh’s narrative, a discussion of learning at work is articulated alongside a desire for ‘decent work’, or work which offered respect and compensation in the form of a fair salary:

It’s got to be decent work.

So, what would define decent work to you?

A normal wage is supposed to be $20 an hour. For a young teen you would only get $10 to $13 an hour. You have to be paid for it . . . You have to get paid for the respect that you have done. You can’t just sit around and do nothing. You have to really pull work to a full potential.

I’m just happy learning what I’m learning now. I don’t have any plans myself for the future, for different work ethic at the time. The only time I think of that is when I start to lose my job.

While Josh appreciates the experience of learning new skills in this job, this is not articulated in terms of personal development or future aspiration, and he emphasises that he does not have plans for work for the future beyond remaining employed and being paid in a way that reflects the effort that he puts into work. Notions of career are remote from this discussion, which is primarily focused on the need for money and respect, as well as the ever-present possibility of losing the precarious work currently available to him. Josh spoke at length about the difficulty of finding work, and had worked multiple casual and precarious jobs. This was also the case for Steven in the quote below:

I almost had a job as a diesel mechanic. I’ve done work experience in shed building. I’ve done work experience in tiling . . . [worked at] the pizza shop just up the road. Yeah, anything will suit me, even if I’m not happy with it. As long as it gets me through life really.

Throughout the interview, Steven described multiple forms of work that he had been involved in, which was primarily exploitative, casual and ‘off the books’ labour that was either ended by the employer after a particular project was over, or, as in the case of a pizza delivery job that paid him a flat fee that did not cover his fuel expenses, ended by Steven due to the unacceptable working conditions that the job entailed. Steven returned to discuss the exploitative nature of this work a number of times during the interview, and primarily described work in terms of the risk of exploitation counterposed with the necessity of making a living. At this point, Steven’s experiences come close to the quote from Robert that opened the empirical analysis in this article – that is, that work is the basis for the bare fact of living and should not be invested with a significance that goes beyond material necessity. Steven’s abandonment of the notion of career represents a pragmatic adjustment to experiences of unemployment and exploitation at work.

Previous work examining the experiences of unemployed youth has also documented an attitude of day to day ‘getting by’ that is oriented towards material survival in the present (Ball et al., 2000; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005). Understanding these processes in relation to the notion of career, however, gives this attitude a new significance. Abandoning the notion of career as a way of making sense of the self also represents a movement away from an identity that is based on notions of personal development, uniqueness and self-actualisation through labour. The outcome is a form of disadvantage in which young people are excluded from the forms of personal identity that are most widely celebrated in contemporary societies. When work becomes a risky, unpredictable and contingent basis for the bare fact of living, it becomes impossible to understand labour as a process that attributes value to the self. As a result, employment shifts from a realm of self-actualisation to an area in which the self must survive and maintain personal respect while being alert for exploitation and denigration. While unemployed young people are encouraged by employment service providers and welfare agencies to formulate and follow aspirations for a career, their actual experiences of employment and unemployment mean that work is no longer approached in these terms.

Discussion

Previous literature has identified different career structures, measured attitudes towards workplace flexibility and identified ‘master narratives’ that characterise different career and employment situations (Arthur, 1994; Elchardus and Smits, 2008; Fenton and Dermott, 2006; King, 2003; LaPointe, 2010; Roper et al., 2010). In contrast, this article has theorised career not merely as a biographical structure, but a discursive resource for crafting the self in line with the post-Fordist work ethic. In this, I have explored the meanings that young people attribute to ‘career’, and how the language of ‘career’ shapes their relationship with work. The analysis presented in this article suggests that the significance of notions of career for contemporary young people may have intensified despite the objectively precarious nature of the youth labour market. Regardless of their family’s occupational or educational history, young people aspire to ‘careers’ rather than jobs, and working a mere job would be a personal disaster for the young people quoted in the first parts of this article. In this context, career has become a vocabulary for talking about the cultivation of the self, and therefore a way of responding to the neoliberal imperative to work on the self as a way of navigating the labour market. The notion of career now stands for the deliberate cultivation of employability, self-improvement, personal development, uniqueness, aspiration and passionate commitment. In the notion of career, young people articulate ambitious, self-realising subjectivities and live up to distinctions between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ that are a longstanding part of the role of career in the ideology of the work ethic (Young and Collin, 2000). ‘Career’ may itself be seen as a kind of master narrative of the self, in contemporary capitalism. It is a critical part of the post-Fordist work ethic (Weeks, 2011) and represents the increasingly expansive role of work in the creation of youth identities.

As well as broader social changes connected with post-Fordism, this article also shows that the meanings attributed to work and to the notion of career change using biographical experiences of employment and unemployment. Career is therefore not a static concept in young people’s lives, and young people make sense of the work ethic in different ways depending on their experiences of work. When still in education and training, young people aspire to a career in a general sense. Career begins as an abstract concept that stands for personal development into the future and aspirations for a satisfying life free from the drudgery of having to work ‘just a job’. For young people in the early stages of employment, career becomes more closely aligned with workplace structures. In this way, the notion of career is a means by which young people align their personal worth and value with the structures of the labour market and the institutional hierarchies they enter when they work. A focus on career also sheds new light on the impact of unemployment on young people’s identities and relationship with work. Experiencing unemployment eventually changes the meaning of work in young people’s lives, from a realm of self-realisation to an environment of risk and possible denigration. In this context, young people abandon the notion of career and adopt a language of ‘getting by’ reminiscent of earlier work on disadvantaged young people’s experiences of unemployment.

For this reason, researching career means more than tracking changing biographical structures in relation to the labour market. Understanding ‘career’ means researching shifts in the ideological meaning of work and in the way that the work ethic interacts with institutional structures in the formation of youth identities. These include the increased focus on self-realisation in the culture of late modern societies and the increased focus on cultivating ‘employability’ and personal value as a way of navigating labour market precarity (Kelly and Harrison, 2009). While these processes are taking place despite the increased levels of structural insecurity that prevail in the labour market, the contemporary grammar of career creates coherence amid precarity by elevating the realisation of the unique and individual self as the end point of successful labour market engagement. It is in this sense a way that the post-Fordist work ethic is articulated on the level of young people’s subjectivities in precarious social conditions, mandating a love of work and a personal investment in labour as a way of cultivating the self as a worker.

Footnotes

Funding

This article was supported by an ARC DECRA award (DE160100191).

ORCID iD

David Farrugia

Notes

David Farrugia is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on youth, employment, labour and identity. He is the author of Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self (forthcoming, Bristol University Press).

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