Towards a revaluation of work in post-Fordist societies? Critical reconversions of highly skilled youth and negotiations of fluid relationships with work

ABSTRACT

This article investigates young university graduates who actively engage with critical reconversion processes in their relationship to work, by abandoning a relevant field of study and embarking on self-made projects in other areas. They are motivated by meaningfulness, freedom and creativity, albeit having to remain in underemployment or even unemployment. The flexibility of young workers and the individual capacity to reconvert have been at the core of policy discourse for the knowledge economy. There is, however, little evidence of youth experience of mismatch and reconversion trajectories, especially for highly skilled youth. Based on biographical narratives of graduates in Cyprus, this article investigates transformations in young people’s relation to work in a context of economic crisis and precarity. The findings suggest that new fluid relationships with work are being negotiated by young people, moving across the boundaries of matched and mismatched employment, work and non-work. These are founded on the development of new subjectivities that put into question the social construction of work and its relation to value for youth in post-Fordist societies. For these young people from upper-middle classes, a compromise seems to be forged between an agentive stance of search for emancipation and embodied neoliberal imperatives of the knowledge society.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth transitions
• reconversions
• higher education graduates
• youth employment
• precarious work

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the informants who took part in this research and shared their life stories. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Cyprus, Start-Up Scheme Grant 2019-2021.