Locality, mobility and labour market citizenship: reflections of Finnish vocational students in social services and health care

Abstract

In the current economic order, the basic duty of citizens is to find placements in the internationalising labour market. Internationalism has been a common educational objective throughout Europe. Previously associated as a feature of middle-class subjectivities and academic education, it is implemented in the agenda of vocational education as well. In this article, I analyse how vocational students in the Finnish educational context of social services and health care see their future in the presumed internationalising labour market. The analysis is based on three years’ ethnographic fieldwork in one vocational institute of social services and health care. The dataset consists of field notes, the interviews of students and teachers, and documents produced by the institution and organisations involved, and in this article five case studies are presented in order to make visible the multiple ways in which young people make sense of their placements in the global labour market. This analysis suggests that the imagined futures of the vocational students are mainly tied with the local context. However, the global labour market is involved and in some cases actively mobilised with their subject formations, and makes the negotiating between individual desires, resources, dependences and interdependences in everyday life even more complex than it used to be.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• labour market
• vocational education
• youth transitions

Acknowledgements

This paper has been written while visiting as an honorary fellow in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 2013. I would like to thank Professor Thomas S. Popkewitz and all the inspiring people attending his Wednesday seminar, especially Maria Terning from Stockholm University.

Notes

1. Lappalainen 2010–2012 and Lahelma 2010–2013, supported by the Academy of Finland.

2. Translation provided by the Finnish National Board of Education.

3. This was the number of the students at the beginning of school year. However, dropping out and delays are common in the context of vocational education and in the second year around half of them continued their studies.

4. Due to the intermits and dropouts the sizes of the groups were dynamic and tended to decrease during the school years.

5. The data has been anonymised.

7. The term foreigner was a definition which Adelina brought into the discussion previously in her interview, presenting it as a reason to consider paperwork as one of the biggest (albeit not insurmountable) challenges in her studies.

8. In Finland, most established celebrations are based on the Lutheran ecclesial year, which, for example in the educational context, is a given framework of the Finnish culture (Lappalainen 2006).