According to Susanna Ågren, when discussing the worker-citizenship of young vocational upper secondary graduates, the realities that determine their worker-citizenship in a changed adulthood are not sufficiently identified.
In her doctoral dissertation, M.Soc.Sc. Susanna Ågren studied 17–25-year-old vocational students’ and graduates’ views and experiences of their transition to working life in the current labour market. She concentrated on the ways in which the young adults reflected on their societal belonging against the ideals and expectations that are societally connected to worker-citizenship.
For the dissertation, Ågren examined worker-citizenship as an ideal that values and defines the lives of young adults. Especially vocational students’ and graduates’ participation and value in society is often mainly discussed from a working life perspective. Young vocational graduates should be a motivated and skilled worker-citizens, but also prepared to adapt their competencies, personality, and aspirations to the needs of the labour market.
“I wanted to examine how the young adults understand the significance of work and their societal belonging and how they position themselves as worker-citizens. I wanted to look at what kind of issues and contradictions related to well-being and belonging are connected to this kind of worker-citizenship ideals. A special point of interest was whether the ideals give young adults the message that their main goal should be worker-citizenship while it may turn out to be difficult for them to fulfil that ideal in practice,” Ågren explains her study.
Young adults’ labour market experiences challenge the worker-citizenship ideals
However, youth researchers have long discussed that while young adults are increasingly being held responsible for their participation in working life, meeting these requirements may not be easy in today’s world.
“The young vocational students in my data hoped that if they found employment in their field, they would become independent and move forward in their lives as societally expected. Even though they realistically recognised the uncertainties in the labour market, and some were also concerned about their coping, many also trusted their occupational field and their personal opportunities in the labour market in the long run,” Ågren says.
However, graduates told much more complex stories about their transition to working life.
“I interpret that the stories showed, for example, the frustration of some young adults with how the requirements associated with worker-citizenship in, e.g., employment services, do not recognise the realities they are facing in the labour market. These young adults felt that employers demand the impossible from young employees, their occupational skills are not valued, or their own wishes and life situations are not heard in employment services, or that they must stretch their coping at work. Some had also experienced very unfair treatment by employers,” Ågren continues.
Young adults have to take a stand on worker-citizenship’s dissonances – and are forced to bear the related responsibilities
The study shows that despite this, many young adults wanted to emphasise their own properness as worker-citizens and their right to be valued as seriously taken professionals and members of society. Still, also those who had attained worker-citizenship in accordance with the ideals described conflicts in their hopes, well-being, and life situations.
The central finding of Ågren’s dissertation is that, in practice, worker-citizenship is a very complex and somewhat contradictory position for young vocational graduates to negotiate who they feel they are and who they want to be, should be or can be as worker-citizens. To illustrate the contradictions between worker-citizenship ideals and young adults’ own experiences, opportunities, expectations and wishes in present-day adulthood, Ågren introduced the new concept of ‘epistemological dissonance of worker-citizenship’ in the dissertation.
“I think that in the lives of contemporary young adults is a fundamental and epistemological contradiction in worker-citizenship on which every young adult must take a stand at least at some level. This is not necessarily recognised in the political and societal debates that guide vocational education and young adults’ lives.”
“Instead, we estimate very narrowly and in a rather obligating tone that worker-citizenship would guarantee these young adults the experience of societal belonging and an opportunity for a sufficiently good adult life,” Ågren concludes.
Ågren’s dissertation is part of the multidisciplinary ALL-YOUTH - All Youth Want to Rule Their World research project funded by the Strategic Research Council (STN) at the Research Council of Finland.
Public defence on Friday 26 January
The doctoral dissertation of M.Soc.Sc. Susanna Ågren in the field of youth research titled Epistemological Dissonance of Worker-Citizenship: Young vocational students’ and graduates’ negotiations of societal belonging within the changing labour market will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Tampere University at 12 o’clock on Friday 26 January 2024 on the city centre campus. The venue is auditorium B1096 in the Pinni B building (address: Kanslerinrinne 1). The Opponent will be Professor Emerita Carmen Leccardi (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca). The Custos will be Professor Päivi Honkatukia (Tampere University).
The doctoral dissertation is available online.
The public defence can be followed via a remote conntection.
Photograph: Jani Tuovinen