ABSTRACT
The significance of employment in providing not only the necessary income on which to live, but also social status and psychological wellbeing, has long been established. A series of studies by Marie Jahoda has been seminal in this respect (1979, 1982). Jahoda’s contention that ‘work plays a crucial and perhaps unparalleled psychological role in the formation of self-esteem, identify and a sense of order’ (1979: 312) has been confirmed in other writings (Hayes and Nutman 1981; Sayers 1988). As far as young people are concerned, Wallace (1987) asserted the relevance of Jahoda’s findings and, on the basis of her study of young people on the Isle of Sheppey in the early 1980s, referred to ‘a growing divergence between the mainly employed and the mainly unemployed as they enter adulthood: in other words, a form of social polarisation . . . what seemed to be emerging were new divisions based upon whether young adults had access to a job or not’ (ibid. 221-2).
