ABSTRACT
Young people and work: change and continuity Youth researchers have had a long-standing interest in patterns of work and worklessness among young people, and traditionally many studies in the field have been concerned with processes of employment integration
and social reproduction as manifest in early careers. Indeed, the transition to employment has frequently been one of the most active and visible areas of youth studies. One of the earliest studies of the integration of young people into employment was carried out by Norbert Elias in the early 1960s with his primary interest being the investigation of workplace socialization and the adjustments made by new workers in order to fit into a new set of social relationships (Goodwin and O’Connor, 2005). This early work on young people and employment was carried out within a context in which large sections of the population were engaged in traditional manufacturing industries. Most young people moved from school to full-time employment at the age of 15 or 16, and females left their jobs to start families in their early twenties. The transition from education to employment was typically regarded as linear, involving fairly rapid and relatively smooth progress from the status of pupil or student to that of worker or trainee. In contrast, today relatively few young people work in the manufacturing industry, minimum-aged school leavers are in a small minority, and the transition from education to employment is protracted, messy and reversible.
