ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Britain and explores the marginality of working-class young men in a service-dominated economy where youth unemployment rates are high. It also focuses on a recent empirical exploration of patterns of exclusion and the consequences for young men on the margins of the labour market, shows how their construction either or both as yobs and as failures, in official discourse and in their own narratives, exacerbates their labour market marginality. The financial crisis in 2008 made brutally evident how hollow were about claims of continuous economic growth on the basis of 'new knowledge' industries including financial services. MacDonald makes strong claims about the willingness of young people on the margins of the labour market to search for and persist with employment, even in boring ill-paid jobs; we found an alternative rhetoric to the stalwart clinging to a view that being a man means labour market participation.
