Arbete, plats och identitet: Om landsbygdsungdomars orientering mot framtiden

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how rural lower secondary school youth orientate themselves towards future occupational life as part of their identity process. The study investigates what ideas about occupations and working life young people express, how an imagined future professional identity relates to their social life worlds, and in what way place and spatial conditions figure. Data was collected through 14 semi-structured interviews with pupils in eighth grade from two schools in an area of southern Sweden with a relatively low population density. Despite that the extended family network was a central inspiration for occupational aspiration, trajectories in life tended to be conceptualized primarily as a result of psychological disposition. Differing opportunities were rarely attributed to the family of origin but revolved around which school the individual attended or which teachers they had. In this way, there was a skewed distribution in the extent to which influencing processes were perceived in young people's reflexive practises on attitudes, interests, and abilities. While gender identity was acknowledged as distorting preferences and perceived competence in relation to career-related tasks, this applied to the generalized other and was rather absent in reflective practises concerning oneself, which instead centered on aptitude, will, fun, and notions of functional matching. Furthermore, the study illustrates how reflexive life planning, far from being a matter mostly relevant for privileged elites, may be even accentuated due to a less advantageous social position. Within the framework of constructing identity, poorer working conditions of the parents gave rise to notions of avoiding the trajectories of previous generations, i.e., a perceived conflict between choosing the spontaneously self-identified profession and ‘advancing’ to a more socially desirable position. Higher class youth could to a greater extent unreflectively follow in the parents' footsteps without grappling with ambivalence between social reproduction and active change, thus making them less confronted with contextual discontinuity. When it comes to spatiality, some narratives contained a mobility imperative, while others downplayed rational considerations of work alternatives in favor of an affective component relating to place attachment. Some youth imagined geographical mobility as an almost mandatory course, after which they could return home and enter a new phase of life: a development imperative, in which norms about leaving suggested a kind of rite de passage that transformed the youth’s identity into one associated with notions of family formation and comfort. Both the social and the spatial position of youth influenced the types of negotiations and reflexive practices that they engaged in.