ABSTRACT
As Pahl (1988) argues, ‘work is becoming the key personal, social and political issue of the age’. Our lives are dominated by the need to do paid and/or unpaid work. A central problem in understanding work, relates to the ambiguity over its nature and meaning. The question ‘what is work?’ is not easily answered. For example, the preparation of meals might be a full time occupation for a chef, an unremunerated household task for a mother, something that is undertaken for pleasure and relaxation, or undertaken as a social occasion between friends (Pahl, 1988). It is not, therefore, the type of task or whether it is paid or unpaid but the social situation in which the task is done that determines what is ‘work’. At present, the social organisation of and the divisions between both paid and unpaid work are changing and young people are having to cope with the impact of many of these changes in the form of unemployment, insecure work or extended periods of training.
