Conclusion
Illustrating the experience of un(der)employment through young men's life narratives, therefore, permits the highlighting of the heterogeneous ways in which stereotypes that are naturalized as “truths” in local contexts to produce differentially valued workers are both accepted and also resisted and reworked.
The categories of strivers and skivers, and the associated notions of the deserving and undeserving poor, were both reproduced and resisted by these young men as they attempted to make sense of the difficulties they had in securing decent work. While certain young men experiencing difficulties, including Sam, explained their current situations in terms of their earlier involvement in delinquency and low levels of educational credentials, others, like all those discussed here, also expressed a genuine desire for a stable income and respectable employment and took steps to try and secure it. Yet others, including those who managed to get work, seemed to reflect a neoliberal individualized ideal, interpreting their (relative) success as a consequence of their perseverance, relatively high scholastic achievements, and their distinction from “harder” working-class and racialized masculinities. Yet, the work secured by most of the young men was low paid, often insecure, and largely not the kind of job they aspired to.Whether or not individuals feel responsible for the struggles they face securing work or attaining the kind of work they aspire to, in bringing these individual narratives together, it is clear that there are broader factors at play over which these young men have no control. The economic recession and ongoing process of deindustrialization and the shift toward a service sector economy, exemplified in concrete terms in our research through the retrenchment of work opportunities from Honda, and the ripple effects of the layoffs which took place during the course of our longitudinal study, bring into relief the limited explanatory value individual accounts of motivation and aspiration have in determining young working-class men's success in securing work.
Other factors which played a role related to the location of young men within webs of family and wider social relations which could offer them leads to access to work as well as guidance (for a more detailed account of this, see Hardgrove et al. 2015; Wyn et al. 2012). This support enabled these young men to “strive” for work, a process which is revealed to involve an ability to survive relatively lengthy periods of unstable income, an extraordinary degree of confidence and perseverance in the face of rejection as they continually apply for jobs, and an incredible degree of self-control when they do achieve waged work in tolerating what are often felt as humiliating work conditions.In the context of widespread stigmatization and blame placed on working-class youth who are held individually responsible for not being able to secure employment, Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence is particularly appropriate. It captures the cruelty of the judgment placed on those who fail to succeed in what are extremely difficult conditions:
If there is any terrorism it is in the peremptory verdicts which, in the name of taste, condemn to ridicule, indignity, shame, silence... men and women who simply fall short, in the eyes of their judges, of the right way of being and doing. (Bourdieu 1984 in Skeggs 1997, p. 90)
Berlant (2011b) argues that in the wake of the recent economic crisis, the “good life” has been revealed to be a phantasm of the imagination, as the transformed structural conditions have eroded the conditions necessary to secure it and even to know what steps are necessary to attain it. She refers to this situation as an “imaginary impasse” requiring people to be “living on while not knowing what to do” (p. 183). It remains to be seen whether all the young men whom we interviewed, including the three discussed here, are able to secure stable employment and attain the respectability and independence that is their long-term aim. What is clear is that in the context of austerity and recession, there were few obvious steps for them to take in order to attain a logical progression toward these goals.