Generación (pre-)parada – Unemployment, Precarity and Uncertain Futures of Highly Educated Young Adults in Spain
Work plays a key role in individual and social life in many ways. The social organization of work is directly and inextricably linked to the social structures of societies. As a social practice work constitutes and transforms social relations, it shapes the everyday routine and the biographies of individuals and it creates social identities. In Western societies, formal wage labor has become the hegemonic way of securing livelihood and social security. Over the past decades, however, the loss of stable employments and the high rates of unemployment and employment precarity (massively exacerbated by the financial crisis) have increasingly undermined the legitimacy of the established social model of the fordist society.
Against this background, my research project explores livelihood strategies and life projects of highly educated young adults without a stable employment and without (or with very limited) access to state-provided social security in Barcelona.
The young adults in Spain are a social group that has been largely affected by the financial crisis and by the austerity policies implemented by Spanish government. My research partners grew up in a time of educational expansion, a time dominated by a strong belief in a social upward mobility for the younger generations due to education. It has been a widespread strategy of individuals and families to invest in academic studies, as a high education level seemed to promise stable and secure future perspectives. However, the high level of unemployment and precarity among them makes evident that for a large part of the current generation of young adults, a stable employment is unreachable in the foreseeable future. Formal wage work thus cannot fulfill its socially established function of securing livelihood and social security and of serving as a basis for social integration and a framework for planning the future.
Due to their unstable and unpredictable employment situations, my research partners live in a state of constant uncertainty and vulnerability. In this context, I am interested in the resources, relationships and institutions they are able to mobilize in coping with the big variety of insecurities they are confronted with, in both their daily lives and in terms of their future perspectives. As economic behavior is always embedded in a specific social and cultural environment, social actors navigate in their daily lives within a complex web of social norms, structural constraints, and personal beliefs and motivations. The (economic) decisions of social actors cannot be reduced to economic reasoning and logics, but are deeply interwoven with regimes of meaning, moral values, and emotions, and they can be highly ambiguous and contradictory (Narotzky 2012). Therefore, I investigate in what ways the livelihood strategies are shaped by normative frameworks and by the family background of individuals and how social norms and social relationships (e.g. intergenerational or gender relations) are constituted and transformed by the current socio-economic situation. Furthermore, I am interested in the life plans and biographical narratives my research partners develop, and in the ways the notion of “crisis” is interpreted and used as structuring element to explain or legitimate transformation processes, both in public and private discourses. A special emphasis is given to possible gender differences on all levels of data collection and analysis.
