Youth and the future of work: introduction

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduces and frames the six papers of this special section. It begins by proposing that youth unemployment needs to be understood in relation to a range of patterns of “getting by” in the global south. We suggest that the many practices of work, including informal ones, discussed in the collection do not attest to a society in “need of development” but rather point towards the future of work, here and elsewhere. While taking transformations in capitalism seriously, we argue that renewed pressures on secure wage work may not lead to a precarity in quite the same way that it has been theorised in the global north. Instead, especially through a focus on youth and generation, we point to multiple experiential circumstances in which work and its futures are enacted. These pertain to time and value and to the importance of space in positioning actors in enabling or foreclosing opportunities for earning income.

KEYWORDS:

• Work
• youth
• futures
• informality
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

This collection emerged out of a workshop on youth and the future of work. We would like to thank all the authors of these papers and the participants of the workshop, as well as the Indexing Transformation project at Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, for generous financial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Braga argues that on global peripheries this surplus of people was always greater in number, and that some kind of precariat has long existed in Brazil. He further suggests that a politics of the precariat emerges from the left, under the Worker’s Party of Lulu da Silva, and that the roll-out of the Bolsa Familia becomes at once an expression of a kind of class politics and at the same time a means to silence this politics, by instrumentalising poverty and facilitating a massive roll-out of grants that could contain the possibilities of more severe social unrest (Braga 2018, 10).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernard Dubbeld

Bernard Dubbeld teaches in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University. He has written on social grants and governance and is working on a book on the experience of post-apartheid governance entitled Unsettled Futures.

Adam Cooper

Adam Cooper is a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council and a research associate with the Chair of Youth Unemployment, Employability and Empowerment at Nelson Mandela University. His research has concerned education and youth in South Africa. He is most recently a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies (2021).