Aspiring workers or striving consumers? Rethinking social exclusion in the era of consumer capitalism

ABSTRACT

This study is part of a special issue aimed at investigating young people’s trajectories in troubled and challenging times. The paper tackles the topic by providing the results of an in-depth qualitative and exploratory study conducted on young unemployed people in the Italian city of Turin – the industrial ‘capital’ of the Sixties, now undergoing a massive wave of deindustrialization. Interviews were gathered in 2010, when the Great Recession was severely affecting young people living in Southern European countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The article proceeds along two levels of analysis. The first focuses on the subjective experience of unemployment and job precariousness seen through the eyes of young people, aware of living in exceptionally hard and uncertain times. The second focuses on the broad mechanisms leading to social exclusion paying particular attention to deprived experiences of consumption. Findings reveal that while work has not lost its material and symbolic meaning, a great importance is attributed to experiences of consumption, as a way for young people to socialize with peers.

KEYWORDS:

• Social exclusion
• consumption
• unemployment
• precariousness
• youth

Acknowledgements

The data analysed in this paper are the result of the research project YOUNEX – ‘Youth, Unemployment, and Exclusion in Europe: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding the Conditions and Prospects for Social and Political Integration of Young Unemployed’. The authors are grateful to Matteo Bassoli who helped collecting the interviews during the fieldwork in 2010 and to all the members of the international research consortium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lara Monticelli is post-doctoral research fellow at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). Her research is centred on the study of political participation in its various forms, social movements, prefigurative politics and alternative, sustainable lifestyles.

Simone Baglioni is Professor of Politics in the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health at Glasgow Caledonian University (UK). He is the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 project SIRIUS and the principal investigator in the ‘TransSol’ and ‘Fab-Move’ projects dealing with social innovation and collective actions issues.

ORCID

Lara Monticelli http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2108-6352

Notes

1. See Sealey (2015) for a review.

2. The definition of NEET provided by Eurostat is: the indicator young people neither in employment nor in education and training, abbreviated as NEET, corresponds to the percentage of the population of a given age group and sex who is not employed and not involved in further education or training. The numerator of the indicator refers to persons meeting these two conditions: they are not employed (i.e. unemployed or inactive according to the International Labour Organisation definition); they have not received any education or training in the four weeks preceding the survey. The denominator is the total population of the same age group and sex, excluding the respondents who have not answered the question ‘participation to regular education and training’. In the case of the data presented, the age range considered is 20–34.

3. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.

4. Interview schedule available on request.

5. Longitudinal series available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics.

6. Interviewers’ questions, comments and notes have been italicized and out in parentheses throughout the quotes.

7. ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ is a 2006 American movie in which a young woman, after graduating, starts to work for a famous fashion magazine in New York.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Seventh Framework Programme [Grant Agreement no. 216122].