From Education to Work: Cross National Perspectives

From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Structural transformations in the international economy and the rest...

Author: Walter R. Heinz

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From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Structural transformations in the international economy and the restructuring of work have made the transition from education to employment increasingly problematic. School-to-work pathways have become more socially segmented and the risk of underemployment and joblessness have increased for both vocationally and academically educated youth. Continuous passages have become less common and have given way to multiple entries and exits between schooling and working, underemployment, unemployment, and domestic work. This edited volume of empirical studies is based on a series of comparable longitudinal research projects that draw on survey and biographical data from important players in the international economy (the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Germany). The authors analyze the transition patterns of school-leaving cohorts in the last quarter of the 20th century from cross-national, institutional, and individual life-course perspectives. The studies document that social and gender inequality is a persistent structural feature that restricts the possibilities to take advantage of educational opportunities and career options. Furthermore, different institutional arrangements are shown to play a crucial role in distributing transition opportunities in a more equal way. Walter R. Heinz is Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology and Chair of the Life Course Center at the University of Bremen, Germany. He has written and edited numerous books on life-course research, and he has lectured throughout the world.

From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Edited by Walter R. Heinz

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521594196 © Cambridge University Press 1999 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data From education to work : cross-national perspectives / edited by Walter R. Heinz. p. cm. Revisitions of papers delivered at a conference at the University of Toronto. April 18-20, 1996. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 59419 7 1. Young adults—Longitudinal studies—Congresses. 2. School-to -work transition—Longitudinal studies—Congresses. 3. Young adults—Employment—Longitudinal studies—Congresses. I. Heinz. Walter R. HQ799.5.F73 1999 305.235—dc21 98-31601 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-59419-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-08165-8 paperback

Contents

Contributing Authors

page vii

Preface

ix

Introduction: Transitions to Employment in a Cross-National Perspective Walter R. Heinz

1

Part I Social Origin, Gender, and Transition Patterns 1 Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High-School Paul Anisef, Anton H. Turrittin, and Zeng Lin

25

2 Diverse Directions: Young Adults' Multiple Transitions Victor Thiessen and E. Dianne Looker

46

3 New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion John Bynner

65

4 From Education to Employment: Occupations and Careers in the Social Transformation of East Germany Ansgar Weymann

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Part II Education and Labour Markets: Work Experiences, Skills, and Credentials 5 Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition Pathways in the United States Jeylan T. Mortimer and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson 6 Multiple Life-Sphere Participation by Young Adults Lesley Andres 7 The Subbaccalaureate Labor Market in the United States: Challenges for the School-to-Work Transition W. Norton Grubb

111 149

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Contents

8 Creating New Pathways to Adulthood by Adapting German Apprenticeship in the United States Stephen F. Hamilton and Mary Agnes Hamilton 9 Job-Entry Patterns in a Life-Course Perspective Walter R. Heinz Part III

194 214

Changes in the Social Context of Transitions

10 Institutional Networks and Informal Strategies for Improving Work Entry for Youths James E. Rosenbaum

235

11 School-to-Work Transitions and Postmodern Values: What's Changing in Canada? Harvey Krahn and Graham S. Lowe

260

12 Education and Employment in Great Britain: The Polarizing Impact of the Market Frank Coffield

284

13 From Systems to Networks: The Reconstruction of Youth Transitions in Europe Lynne Chisholm

298

References

319

Index

345

Contributing Authors Lesley Andres is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include the foundations of higher education, sociology of education, and issues of inequality. Paul Anisef is Professor in Sociology; his research fields are education, work, and careers. Anton H. Turrittin is an Associate Professor. His areas of specialization include social stratification, social mobility, the sociology of work and occupations. Zeng Lin is a Ph.D candidate; they all work at the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. John M. Bynner is Professor of Social Statistics and Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit, City University, London, United Kingdom. His research interests are in transition to adulthood, economic and political socialization, and longitudinal study. Lynne Chisholm (Ph.D. London) is a specialist in education, training, and youth transitions at the

Commission of the European Communities in Brussels where she works in the Reflection Group Secretariat. Frank Coffield is Professor of Education in the Department of Education, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom, and Director of the ESRC's research programme into "the Learning Society". His research fields are young adulthood, work, education, life-long learning. W. Norton Grubb is Professor at the School of Education, the University of California, Berkeley. He is also one of the founding members of and a site director for the National Center for Research in Vocational Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research fields are economics of education, public finance, educational issues, and social policy. Stephen E Hamilton is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. His research is about the influences of school, employment, and community on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Mary Agnes vn

viii Contributing Authors Hamilton is Senior Research Associate in Human Development at Cornell University. She is concerned with the educational quality of work experience. Walter R. Heinz is Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology and Chair of the Special Research Center "Status Passages and Risks in the Life Course" at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests are in the sociology of youth, work and labor markets, and life-course studies. Harvey Krahn is Professor of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research interests are in schoolwork transitions, the sociology of work and industry, social stratification, and social policy. Graham S. Lowe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta who specializes in the study of work, school-work transitions, training and human resource development, new technologies, and employment-related public policy. Jeylan T. Mortimer is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Life-Course Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her research interests are in work, family, transition to adulthood, and personality development. Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson is a graduate student in the

Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her fields of interests include gender and employment. James Rosenbaum is Professor of Sociology, Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Evans ton, Illinois. His research interests are in work and careers, education, and comparative transition studies. Victor Thiessen is Associate Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Dalhousie, University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. His main interest is in interpersonal dynamics within families. He is currently conducting longitudinal research on adolescents' images of work in the context of their parents' work experiences. E. Dianne Looker is Head of the Department of Sociology, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada and Managing Editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research is on longitudinal studies on youth, gender issues, rural youth, and sociology of education. Ansgar Weymann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bremen, Germany and is Chair of the Institute for Empirical and Applied Sociology (EMPAS). His research interests are sociological theory, education, work, labor markets, and life-course research.

Preface WALTER R. HEINZ

The transition from education to work is rapidly changing in postindustrial service societies. Structural transformations in the economy and the restructuring of work have rendered this period of the life course increasingly problematic. This book arose out of my involvement in cross-national research on youth and work over the last 10 years. This work included the collaboration with British, Canadian, and United States researchers David Ashton, John Bynner, Ken Roberts, Jane Gaskell, Harvey Krahn, Graham Lowe, and Jeylan Mortimer. An academic year as Visiting Chair for German and European studies at the University of Toronto, Canada gave me the opportunity to organize an international conference about "new passages and uncertain destinations" in April 18-20, 1996. The papers presented at this conference by leading experts on youth and work provide the basis for this edited volume of comparable longitudinal studies that draw on survey data and case studies of young people in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. The goal of this conference was to examine school-to-work transitions in changing societies and the interrelationships between education and training arrangements in the structuring of job-entry processes. Papers were presented by researchers and discussions were held with educators and politicians - all of whom are concerned with the improvement of job-start arrangements for young people and eager to learn from other experiences in North America and Europe. All the papers were reviewed and thoroughly revised for this publication. The review process included discussions and feedback among all the authors and the editor. I want to thank the authors for their willingness to partake in this review process. The subject matter in this book not only includes experiences of many countries but also includes perspectives from many disciplines including education, sociology, economics, and life-course analysis. Special appreciation is due to Mary Lynne Bratti of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto for organizationally supporting this conference. Heartfelt thanks go to the able staff at the Special Research Center (Sfb) "Status Passages and Risks in Life Course" IX

x

Preface

at the University of Bremen, Germany; Ben Veghte who assisted in revising and improving the non-English manuscripts; and to Lisa Bauml who provided secretarial support with never-ending engagement and patience. Lisa provided the vital service of transforming the conference papers into manuscripts for this volume. Cambridge University Press and its staff were reliable and efficient partners in the publishing process. Our editor Julia Hough, the production editor William Grundy, and Hermitage Publishing Services and Kathy O'Moore-Klopf, who were responsible for the painstaking copyeditorial process, not only provided their editorial know-how but also gave us useful suggestions for composing the book. The conference was made possible by generous support from the University of Toronto and its Vice President for Research and International Relations, Heather Monroe-Blum, as well as its Centre of International Studies. Financial assistance also came from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and its North American office in New York.

Introduction: Transitions to Employment in a Cross-National Perspective WALTER R. HEINZ

In the past, research on school-to-work transitions was focused on specific national issues and educational systems. In recent years, however, it has become obvious that comparative studies are the best and perhaps only way to answer urgent questions about the effects of changes in educational participation and labor-market conditions on the transition to adulthood. Are there general trends in company restructuring and nonstandard forms of work that restrict the life chances of the young generation? How do societies respond differently to the decline of entry-level jobs and the upgrading of skill requirements? To what extent do they rely on market forces or attempt to build institutions that structure and support the transition from school to work for different social groups? Are education and training programs sufficient to integrate disadvantaged and marginalized groups, or do we have to restructure the education and labor-market nexus to not only reduce youth unemployment but also offer equal access to careers and options for combining employment, family work, and further education? Finally, how do young people envision and plan their futures and negotiate transitions from education to the labor market in an era with such an unpredictable future? When looking at transitions from a comparative perspective, it is necessary to take into account entire educational systems as well as occupational and skill structures as they change in interaction with the decline of the industrial sector and the ascent of the service sector. Only if we understand how different education-to-work arrangements operate in changing labor markets can international comparison meaningfully illuminate the potential and limits of cross-national learning opportunities. Usually only a few dimensions are selected for comparison, such as the rate of youth unemployment, the quantity and quality of training

2

From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives

and entry jobs offered by employers, or the cost of apprenticeships versus training young people on the job while paying them minimum wage. Such comparisons become more useful if they take into account the respective social, economic and political contexts: the extent to which employers, government, and unions collaborate in the conception and execution of training programs; the cultural norms that define the relative desirability of different pathways (vocationalism vs. academism); the relationships among technological change, skill requirements, and education; and the changing personal returns for investing in secondary and postsecondary education. Furthermore, comparisons are more useful if there is a conceptual framework that allows a systematic understanding of young adults' changing status in their passage from education to work. This framework should be specified in terms of both gender and type of pathway chosen: there are indeed different paths for students, apprentices, trainees, part-time workers, returners to postsecondary education (who combine the student's and part-time worker's roles), unskilled employees with some on-the-job training, and others who attempt to leave unemployment for casual jobs or by participating in training programs. Each of these paths requires separate analytical treatment because it leads to different levels of social integration. Systematic comparative transition research is rare and is usually focused on employment outcomes relative to levels of education and training by applying survey analysis and/or secondary analysis to labormarket data. This offers advantages relative to single-nation studies, which are based on a ranking of certain indicators, such as academic degrees, vocational credentials, and women in the labor force. When contextualized dimensions are included, it becomes possible to make comparative descriptions and statements about the relationships among institutions of learning, pathways, and the social positioning of the young generation. Comparative case studies that look at transition systems in detail by applying quantitative and/or qualitative methods emphasize the interaction of structure and agency and illuminate the interrelationship between socioeconomic conditions and institutional arrangements in which transition processes are embedded. Case studies have the advantage over statistical surveys of providing richer data about the interaction between institutions and individual careers, though their generalizability is limited. This book presents carefully conceived and executed longitudinal case studies on education-to-employment transitions in the United States,

Introduction

3

Canada, Great Britain, and Germany. In these countries there has emerged a growing concern with the consequences of the fact that increasing numbers of young people are temporarily or permanently prevented from entering the job market and that college and university graduates have difficulty finding adequate employment and social and political integration. The chapters of this book, therefore, do not examine primarily the efficacy of specific school-to-work programs or job-creation schemes but rather the issues surrounding the life course and public policy. They direct our attention to the long-term consequences of different transition regimes on the young person's living arrangements and life goals. The book thus contributes to a true cross-national perspective because it illuminates two key contextual dimensions: the social and economic conditions that stabilize or change the specific institutional fabric of life-course transitions, and training arrangements and employment opportunities provided to differing degrees by the public and private sectors. Taking into account the cultural standards and organizational structures of different national transition systems makes it possible to reach reasonable conclusions about their transferability to other societies (Ryan, 1991). This means not only describing their specific modi operandi (intake, processes, and results) but also documenting the linkages among education and training and employment opportunities as well as the unequal effects of social class and gender on transition patterns and outcomes. Comparative research reduces the tendency to generate simple generalizations about the success or failure of a society's transition arrangement: the German apprenticeship system being fail-safe, the British system being class based and market oriented, the North American system being individualized and flexible. Moreover, the fiction of national homogeneity can be questioned by documenting regional variations in the options young women and men encounter on their path into the employment system (Great Britain/Germany: Bynner & Roberts, 1991; Evans & Heinz, 1994; United States/Germany: Blossfeld, 1987; Biichtemann, Schupp, & Soloff, 1994; Canada/United Kingdom: Ashton & Lowe, 1991). Transitions and Institutions in a Life-Course Perspective In North America and Europe, youth and early adulthood represent a main field of problem-centered research because the transition to adulthood has become less predictable and more stressful. The decline of stable employment opportunities and changes in the timing of important

4


life-course events - such as leaving the educational system, starting a career and/or a family - have led to an extension of adolescence into young adulthood. Whereas the frameworks for transitions are provided by cultural standards and societal opportunity structures, individuals fashion their own life courses by using various pathways and sequences to accomplish a meaningful integration of social roles in their lives. A life-course perspective can shed light on how institutional resources and regulations and labor-market opportunities on the one hand and social class, gender, and cultural norms on the other translate into different transitions from education to employment over time. Research that is inspired by the youth question thus focuses on the life plans and educational as well as work experiences of young people in the context of segmented labor markets and differential job opportunities among young women and men (Buchmann, 1989; Heinz, 1994). Youth transitions differ according to qualification, gender, and household situation and are only relatively independent from social class and institutional selection as well as exclusion processes in the employment system. Labor-market theorists (Osterman, 1989; Ashton, Maguire, & Spilsbury, 1990; Betcherman, McMullen, Leckie and Caron, 1994; Soskice, 1994) analyze job entry and career patterns of young people in the context of the segmented opportunities and economic restructuring of work. In the United States, Canada and Great Britain, young people without a college degree tend to be concentrated in the secondary labor-market segments before they move on to adult jobs in the primary labor market - that is, jobs with more pay and security. This contrasts with Germany and Japan, which have arrangements that create close linkages between the school and the employment system. It has been taken for granted in North America that youth without a college degree will shop around for jobs for quite some time until they have collected enough work experience to become employable for stable jobs (see Borman 1991). This erratic schoolto-work transition, together with the practice of learning on the job, reflects the social forces of a market economy that has established a secondary labor market for youth without a college degree and a primary labor market for college graduates. In Europe, a "floundering period" does not exist for most nonuniversity youth because they either are enrolled in vocational high schools or are apprentices. Both routes are linked to the employment system via an occupational certification system. Though these transition structures reproduce social-class and gender inequality to some degree, they support the psychosocial stabilization of youth during the critical period of identity construction.

Introduction

5

Many analyses of school-to-work problems focus on the effects of economic changes and labor-market segmentation on youth transitions (Soskice, 1994) and do not take into account biographical processes (Irwin, 1995). These two interrelated life-course dimensions are conceptually separated in a private and a market sphere, respectively. This separation limits understanding of the personal consequences of economic strains, the labor-market squeeze, and company restructuring. These effects are visible in education choices, career decisions, and the timing of life-course events. Youth studies and labor-market analysis still take as their reference point the standard school-to-work transition and see it as unproblematic. This point of view emphasizes social problems arising from unemployment but does not consider that the ongoing deregulation of education-to-employment paths will affect the life course of all youths. It has become impossible to predict the most likely careers of young adults because social origin, years and level of education, and occupational credentials have lost their predictive validity for life-course trajectories. Thus, jobs and occupations must be seen as proxies for a variety of potential careers that unfold their life-course consequences through the individual timing and sequencing of transitions. We assume, therefore, that a biographical logic is operating consisting of individuals' response strategies to socioeconomic opportunities and constraints. The contributions to this book converge in the attempt to understand the relationships among young people's experiences, orientations, and living conditions as they influence the timing and sequencing of leaving and returning to school, entering and leaving different forms of employment, and household and family formation. The comparative perspective, then, focuses not only on institutional arrangements but also on life-course processes, careers, detours, and prospects that are framed by the occupational structure and specific labor-market opportunities. Comparative transition research, if informed by the life-course concept, looks at the interaction of social circumstances and individual careers in the context of different school-to-work pathways. This approach is very well expressed by Elder and O'Rand (1995, pp. 31-32): "Life-course theory also assumes that people function as agents of their own life course and development. Within the social constraints and options established by a new situation, people make choices and take action in ways that shape the life course." The life-course framework points at the agency of "life-course travelers." Youth and young adults are not mere carriers of family values, school experiences, and diplomas; they have to organize

6


their status passages as well by using educational resources and acquiring additional qualifications as required. Because many youths do not have adequate resources for coping with transition risks, public measures against unemployment and social exclusion have been implemented in North America and Europe (Petersen & Mortimer, 1994; European Commission, 1997). Whereas European welfare-state policy focuses on large-scale training and jobcreation programs (Leibfried & Pierson, 1995), North American societies support short-term work-experience programs and expand vocational education at community colleges (Grubb, 1989b, 1996b). Whereas the policy responses to the youth employment problem differ, employability and individual flexibility are dominant issues in adapting youth to deregulated labour markets and restructured work places. Flexibility has become "the magic word" (Chisholm, chapter 13 in this volume): more individual responsibility and the accumulation of skills and credentials are required to offset declining institutional support of transition processes. Flexibility has different meanings in different cultures and economic contexts. For the United States and Canada, loose links between qualifications and employment and "job hopping" are established social arrangements. This contrasts with Germany, where the linkages between education, vocational education and training, and employment still tend to be highly regulated. As a study comparing Great Britain and Germany (Bynner & Roberts, 1991) has found, there has been more room to maneuver for individuals and institutions alike and careers have been more structured when transitions among education, job entry, and careers were regulated. Whereas formal academic credentials have become necessary but are not sufficient in the United States and Canada in a period of corporate restructuring, in Great Britain further educational diplomas and in Germany, vocational certificates play a more important role. As we have known since the 1970s from the analysis of the "credential society" (Collins, 1979) and the relationship between education and jobs (Berg, 1970: "the great training robbery"), there is an inflation of credentials the more young people acquire and employers require them. Hence, applicants must have credentials and must demonstrate the competence necessary for active and flexible career moves in order to be considered for a job. This "free-market approach" (Grubb, chapter 7 in this volume) to the school-to-work transition goes hand in hand with the institutional mechanism for preparing noncollege youth and young adults to cope with uncertain job entry and career situations. When skill standards are less

Introduction

7

important than educationally based credentials, students and educators have limited access to the hiring criteria that are used by employers. Therefore, in the United States and Canada, with the exception of co-op programs, school leavers and employers have to find out how to match skills with work requirements in a trial-and-error process. Such a process is costly and frustrating: it reflects a tradition that substitutes a transition structure by market-driven flexibility; hiring practices are highly informal and there are few signals for job searchers about what employers expect. In most industrialized service societies, an increasing number of young people remain in secondary and postsecondary educational institutions much longer than ever before. In Europe, transition research has been inspired by the erosion of the youth labor market (Finegold & Soskice, 1990; Furlong, 1992) and the shifting balance between vocational and academic education (BMBWFT, 1996). In the United States and Canada, non-college-bound youth have become the focus of much public and academic concern in the 1980s when the "forgotten half" (William T. Grant Commission, 1988) was discovered. The expansion of postsecondary education in North America occurred simultaneously with the decline of the youth labor market. This made the school-to-work transition for noncollege youth increasingly difficult. Rising youth unemployment led the British government to introduce training schemes in the 1980s. These were modeled on the German system of vocational education and training, but without its nationally recognized certification system. Of all societies in the Western world, Germany has been the most successful in keeping youth unemployment at a low level because of its highly standardized and popular apprenticeship system, which is an institutionalized bridge between school and labor market (Franz & Soskice, 1995; Schmidt, 1997). In industrial service societies, economic turbulence and technological change have restructured the transition from school to employment, with profound effects on the young generation. This also holds for young adults in Germany. Corporate realities (Brown & Scase, 1994) have placed the burden for successful job-entry processes on the shoulders of the young generation. This book not only contributes to the analysis of these changes but also elucidates young people's experiences and aspirations as they navigate their uncertain passages to employment. Transitions and Careers

Analyzing the relationship between life-course dynamics and institutional arrangements requires a cross-national, comparative perspective

8


because societal differences create variations in the linkages among institutions, markets, and biographies, as well as between occupations and careers. Transition research focuses on structures and institutional arrangements as well as individual orientations and decisions that are relevant to explain the movements of people from one life phase to another. The timing, duration, and outcomes of transitions depend not only on social origin, gender, and level of education but also on the opportunities for employment and lifelong learning. Access to prestigous schools and universities as well as to attractive occupational careers is determined not only by individual achievement but also by social origin and gender on the one hand and by the relative social closure of the occupational structure on the other. In expanding stratification and mobility research, transition studies combine the analysis of structurally defined opportunity contexts and sociopsychological dynamics - for example, goals, orientations, and action strategies of young adults and their social networks (Roberts 1993; Kerckhoff, 1996). For comparative transition studies, it is important to understand the different cultural meanings of career, occupation, and vocation. The career concept tends to indicate a person's passage through different jobs and statuses. It is associated with the notion of upward mobility but is also used to refer to horizontal and downward movements in the occupational structure. In contrast to the North American meaning of this concept, in Germany a career is thought of as an institutionalized career progression in a big company or in bureaucratic organizations. Empirically, careers are driven by social origin and gender, mediated by education, shaped by specific occupations and labor-market processes and are activated by individual decisions and institutional gatekeeping (Heinz, 1992). Whereas in Germany an occupation is equated with the idea of vocation (Beruf), in North America it is either a job or a profession. The latter requires college or university education, whereas the former is regarded as low-level employment that requires only minimal schooling and on-the-job training. In Germany, the term Beruf (vocation) carries the image of an occupation for life that applies to all ranks in the hierarchy of occupations, from crafts to professions. Only recently, Kerckhoff (1996, pp. 49-50) has suggested "that schoolto-work careers should be more orderly and career lines more easily identified in societies with essentially controlled education systems, a set of nationally recognized/occupationally relevant educational credentials, regularized school-employer relationships, and professionalization

Introduction

9

of manual work." Hence, the United States and Canada are supposed to have fewer clear career lines than most other industrial service societies. This, however, is not that simple anymore, because Germany and other European societies are experiencing heretofore unknown levels of unemployment and industrial and company restructuring (Greinert, 1994). A period of "jobless growth" contributes to an erosion of continuous education-to-employment pathways. This observation corresponds to several general trends that result from the interplay between the economy and technological change, which have created a fragile balance between occupational opportunities and labor-market constraints. As the longitudinal and historical studies by Buchmann (1989) and Modell (1989) have documented for the United States, there is a remarkable diversity of lifecourse patterns that results from an extension and variation of the timing and sequencing of transitions from youth to adulthood. For Germany (Beck, 1992), there is a more recent increase of alternative pathways and of individual choice between socially differentiated opportunities that makes transition biographies more dependent on labor-market dynamics. With the decline of "lifetime jobs" in one company, individual achievements and credentials are becoming more and more important for job entry and careers. The crucial comparative question concerns the relationship between structure and action, the extent to which the linkage between educational institutions and the employment system expands or restricts the room for maneuver for adolescents and young adults in their transitions. As O'Rand (1996, p. 3) points out, "The movement of individuals within and between institutional contexts brings into focus how lives are shaped at social interfaces and, in turn, how institutions may themselves be transformed in response to the social frictions exerted by demographic processes ..." Not only population dynamics, however, but also the economy exerts pressure on institutions, as we witness in the response of schools, universities, corporations, and governments to the globalization of markets. In times of drastic economic change, societies develop quite different strategies to curb youth unemployment and social exclusion. North American societies stress the importance of postsecondary education, Great Britain expands her colleges of further education, Germany modernizes her dual system of vocational education and training, and France aims to create work for all unemployed youth in public service institutions. Whatever strategy is implemented, we must be careful not to draw premature conclusions about its stabilizing effect on the education-to-

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employment transition as long as we do not have longitudinal data that permit analysis of the long-term career consequences of different transition histories. The outcomes of today's protracted and stressful job-entry processes are still critical for the life course. They affect the chances to participate in society and the achievement of full adult status. This is underscored by Furlong and Cartmel (1997, p. 109) in their recent analysis of youth in late modernity: "Young people can struggle to establish adult identities and maintain coherent biographies, they may develop strategies to overcome various obstacles, but their life chances remain highly structured, with social class and gender being crucial to an understanding of experience in a range of life contexts." Overview of This Book Nine of the thirteen chapters are based on longitudinal research in Canada (Andres; Anisef, Turrittin, & Lin; Krahn & Lowe; Thiessen & Looker), the United States (Hamilton & Hamilton, Mortimer & Johnson), Germany (Heinz, Weymann), and Great Britain (Bynner). The remaining chapters are either based on case-study material (Grubb, Rosenbaum) or discuss empirically grounded long-term trends in the political and social economy of the school-to-work transition (Chisholm, Coffield). In the first section, the relationships among social origin, gender, and transition patterns in a period of shifting job opportunities is discussed. In a unique study that has covered 22 years, Paul Anisef and associates examine the school-to-work transition and social mobility with a sample of Canadians who left school in the mid-1970s. Quite in contrast to the current debate about turbulent transitions to adulthood, this study shows a strong relationship between education and careers as well as predictable sociotemporal sequences. The majority of the sample has experienced substantial career continuity or upward social mobility. Furthermore, 20 years after leaving school, the consequences of social origin had declined and have been substituted by active career moves and improved household income. This demonstrates that individual agency and active reorientation in response to changing employment options do have consequences for careers. Another important result of this longitudinal study is specific to countries such as Canada in which a substantial proportion of the population still reside in the countryside. Differences in access to postsecondary education in rural and urban areas create a connection between social inequality and region of residence. Leaving or remaining in one's home community affects the occu-

Introduction

11

pational status in middle adulthood: "Movers" show higher achievement on the career ladder and come from households with at least middle-class status. Lower social origin is associated with less migration: "Stayers" are more likely to come from lower-status families, are less likely to aspire for a university degree, and tend to regard themselves as being less effective people. These mobility histories show a strong contrast to a contemporary cohort. The impact of a changing economic and labor-market context on youth transitions in Canada is documented in Victor Thiessen and E. Dianne Looker's two-level analysis of work, school, and domestic activities over a 5-year period after high school. Also analyzed were the attitudes and expectations of the youth in the sample concerning the timing and sequence of key transitions to adulthood. The young people's normative attitudes concerning full-time employment and household formation showed a high commitment to work and a preference for an orderly sequence - employment first, then marriage and family formation when they were still at school. With the transition progressing, young adults became more open to variant timings and an overlapping of key life events; their individual practices had also become more flexible. Their actual transition documented a high variability of pathways and a blurring of boundaries between part-time work, education, and household activities. There were, however, strong gender influences: while the goal of both young men and women was a steady full-time job and more than half of the sample had moved in and out of school and in and out of full-time and part-time work, women were still assuming responsibility for domestic activities. This study strongly supports the assumption that "gender matters from school to work" (Gaskell, 1992). The interaction between skills and gender in the process of job entry in Great Britain is analyzed by John Bynner with birth-cohort studies that allow comparison of self-assessments of work-related skills with measured functional literacy and numerical skills. The data show clearly that career paths after leaving school differ on the basis of the levels of these basic skills. The earlier young people have left their educational system, the less training they will get; young women who have children are less likely to get training, regardless of when they left school. There are "gendered" exclusion processes: Men with poor basic skills drift among training schemes, casual jobs, and unemployment, whereas women withdraw - or rather are diverted - away from employment routes and toward motherhood and domestic responsibilities. This, in turn, creates a vicious circle because the chances to return to the labor market drop the

12


longer women are in the caretaker role. The decline of the British youth labor market and the failure of youth training scheme (Coles, 1995) have left in a precarious transition setting those school leavers who do not enter further education colleges or universities. In the Great Britain there is little work-related training like that in Germany and no community college system like those in the United States and Canada. Hence only half of those in the sample recall at age 33 that they received any workbased training for more than 3 days in their employment history. Instead of having to cope with a steady decline in entry-level jobs as British youth do, young people in East Germany had to cope with a profound breakdown of their life-course plans when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. They were confronted with a sudden shift from state-controlled school-to-work routes to a social-market economy that puts a premium on initiative and flexibility. Ansgar Weymann and his team compare two cohorts of young skilled workers and academics 5 years before and shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because of the shrinking economy, the chances for entering employment declined severely from 1990 to 1994. Apprenticed workers were confronted with a notably higher risk of becoming jobless during this period. An increasing gap between the employed and the unemployed has been created by the interaction of cohort membership and gender. The older cohort and women seem to be better protected from dismissal; however, they have poor chances of reentering employment. In comparison with the experiences of the older cohort in the socialist German Democratic Republic, young adults now experience much less life-course stability and short-term upward and downward mobility. For instance, the construction industry offered many jobs during the first 3 years of reunification, as did the banking and insurance industries. Nowadays, however, these sectors are restructuring and downsizing, with the effect that many young adults have to reframe their biography by becoming more flexible in adapting to labor-market trends. The author argues that the transplantation of the West German transition system and labor-market standards to East Germany has been checked by an unexpectedly slow economic improvement. The next section presents five studies that deal with the linkage between education and the labor market in North America and with the return of apprenticeships in Germany. They focus on the extent to which work experiences, skills, and credentials build bridges between school and the labor market. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson studied the life-course implications of adolescent work experiences, an issue that tends not to be investigated in Europe, where working

Introduction

13

teenagers are quite unusual. In the United States, the effects of teenage employment on life course are controversal. On one hand, it is assumed that early work experiences may speed up the adoption of adult roles and will turn young people away from college. On the other hand, being able to combine school and work successfully may promote the competence needed to manage multiple roles in adulthood. Mortimer and Johnson argue that the personal meaning, job quality, and social context of working have to be taken into account in order to understand the effects of teenage employment. They studied a cohort of high-school students from grade 12 to 4 years after graduation and based their analysis on a life-history calendar that recorded various activities and status changes that occur in the passage to adulthood. In the first year after high school, most respondents were combining college and part-time work. Four years beyond high school, only a quarter of the young adults were employed full time. As we have seen in studies in Canada and Great Britain, early family transitions reduce involvement in education: Married women or women with children are less likely to be in postsecondary institutions or doing part-time work. By differentiating between the duration and intensity of employment, the study presents intriguing findings on the effect of high-school work on transitions. For instance, low-intensity work in adolescence is related to the highest level of postsecondary participation; short-duration and high-intensity employment correlates with reduced educational attainment. From a European perspective, the high-duration - high-intensity combination could be regarded as a substitute for an apprenticeship that combines organized on-the-job training and vocational education for school leavers (by grade 10) who do not continue on to a university. The main differences between these two patterns are obviously the limited integration of teenage workers into the training firm, the missing link to adult jobs, and the lack of vocational credentials. According to Lesley Andres's study of a cohort in Canada who left high school between 1988 and 1993, participation patterns in higher education and the employment system create modernized sociotemporal patterns in young adulthood. Andres emphasizes that the changing social context of transition and rising youth unemployment influence young people to enroll in colleges and universities. Canada has the highest postsecondary enrollment of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Postsecondary studies play a core role that defines young adults' participation in other fields, most importantly in the labor market. Contrary to less careful studies,

14


Andres records that part-time work performed in conjuction with education is relatively rare; employment occurs rather mainly during vacations - that is, between university terms. Full-time studies from fall to spring alternate with full-time work in summer. The highly structured North American college and university system requires the "full-time student" who has to restrict his or her participation in the employment system. Women, however, seem to be forced relatively more often to do part-time work while studying in college. This observation is underscored by the result that early marriage and childbearing is a core transition status that is related to less educational participation. Though these data are not yet sufficient for predicting the extent to which men's and women's employment and family career patterns will diverge in the future of this cohort, we can assume that the different participation patterns in postsecondary education, employment, and household activities constitute transition patterns into a gendered life course. The majority of North American young adults enter college or university but do not complete them with a degree. They are a large group of young people with intermediate qualifications - that is, some college education or graduation from a community college. W. Norton Grubb calls this level the subbaccalaureate labor market (SBLM), which consists of different transition paths. He defines this labor market not in terms of age or job conditions but in terms of education credentials. In order to better understand the operation of the SBLM, Grubb conducted interviews and case studies in US communities with educators and employers. Owing to the lack of a transition system, informal hiring is the rule in the SBLM. Though there are a variety of routes for skill acquisition, skill demands are much less transparent than in the baccalaureate market. Inconsistent skill demands reflect the practice of employers: they stress basic skills as well as job-specific skills and demand cognitive and social competence when promoting young employees from entry-level to career jobs. Such a transition setting is somewhat similar to the way the balance between basic and job-specific skills has become problematic in the preparation of young people in Great Britain, as discussed in chapter 3, under the heading of Employability. Grubb argues that free-market mechanisms are operating in the transition from school to employment in North America because institutionalized links between educational providers and employers do not exist, with the rare exception of local cooperative programs or demonstration projects. Employers do not seem to have a valid perception of the quality of local educational providers. Hence incentives for investing in skills and training positions are weak:

Introduction

15

school leavers expect only jobs with low wages and nonstandard employment, and employers do not invest in entry-level occupational training because they do not expect job applicants to have the necessary skills and are also afraid of poaching. The fear of poaching and the reluctance to invest in basic and further occupational training results from market-driven transition patterns in North America and Great Britain that have created a social setting that does not provide valid or trusted signals between the educational and employment systems. This assumption is taken up more systematically by James E. Rosenbaum in the last section of this book. Another much more structured alternative for generating linkages between education and employment is the "German style" apprenticeship system, which is widely regarded by other societies as a model for stabilizing school-to-work transitions. Apprenticeship has never been a major institution in the United States or Canada. Stephen F. Hamilton, whose work has influenced the movement for introducing school-towork programs in United States, and Mary Agnes Hamilton analyze the results of a demonstration project aimed at testing the possibility of adapting apprenticeship to U.S. society. The project consisted of consecutive 2-year periods of study at high schools and community colleges combined with part-time work of up to 20 hours per week. Four cohorts of high-school students were followed and compared with students in college preparatory tracks. The results were not encouraging. Most participants in the cooperative program left the project after high-school graduation. Compared to other students, however, participants reported more often that their work was personally meaningful and demonstrated higher technical and social competence in career planning and adapting to different work situations. A crucial feature of the demonstration project was to find coaches and mentors as adult role models who could convince project participants of the usefulness of combining vocational and academic studies for a successful labor-market entry. In addition to the absence of a training and schooling infrastructure, the reluctance of employers to hire and train young people who came from vocational programs, the lack of a workers' training culture, and the lack of adult trainers combine to explain the limited success of such demonstration projects in the United States. Therefore, the Hamiltons propose a comprehensive school-to-work-opportunity system, not as a program but as a wide range of work-based learning opportunities. The section concludes with a study from Germany documenting the undiminished popularity of the apprenticeship despite declining returns

16


in the labor market. Walter R. Heinz has followed a sample of young people from the beginning of their apprenticeship in the mid-1980s until 10 years later. Five years after graduating from vocational and educational training, half of them had left their occupations. Most of them, however, did not experience downward mobility into the casual labor market. Depending on their education level and on the training occupation, they either moved on to postsecondary education, took a full-time job in another trade, or started a family (more young women than men). These young careers document that extended and variable school-towork transitions are becoming normal in Germany, too. An apprenticeship, however, still is the main route for young people who are not university bound for entering the adult labor market and even for buying time to reconsider their original occupational choice and eventually return to higher education. Though the unemployment rate of skilled blue- and white-collar workers between the ages of 20 and 30 has been increasing in the last decade, it still is much lower than the joblessness of young people who did not acquire a vocational training certificate. The study shows that staying in or leaving an occupation cannot be explained by contextual and occupational determinants alone. As a sequence of narrative interviews revealed, career moves are also influenced by biographical action orientations. These orientations consist of experiences in family, school, and training that have socialized young adults to develop different profiles of preferences and goals concerning working and living. The last section concerns more theoretically oriented analyses of the changes in transition organization and options in (post-) industrial service societies. The chapters focus on three major themes of comparative research: improving the linkages between educational providers and employers, the issue of continuity and change in the value orientations of young people, and the relative importance of markets and networks in the "knowledge society." By studying the United States and Japan, James Rosenbaum sought to learn how to create institutional linkages based on a "trusted signals model" between high schools and employers: bridges that support the individual student's precarious transition to the labor market. His communication model emphasizes the importance of signals from both sides as transmission belts for job as well as labor-force information. A successful school-to-work transition system must convey trustworthy signals to employers about youth competence and reliability. For high school students, signals are more important than grades for finding out

Introduction

17

whether school efforts will have a payoff in the labor market. The example of Japan suggests that it is not culture per se but practice that explains the smooth transition from school to work for Japanese youth. Traditionally, hiring decisions tend to reaffirm the mutual commitment between schools and companies for now and in the future. In North America and in Great Britain, employers do not consider grades to be relevant for predicting work behavior. Rosenbaum argues that in societies with no organized transition system, interpersonal relations between teachers and employers are crucial for opening the door to entry jobs. Building on contacts with employers, teachers can act as matchmakers when they guarantee that jobs and skills will match. This is a very informal and at the same time selective process of transition support that is the result of a market system that does not provide a structured period of vocational education and training and organizational socialization. One of the most popular arguments among policy makers and employers for explaining transition problems is that the young generation has lost interest in work and careers in favor of postmaterialistic values and highly individualized lifestyles. Two of the most experienced youth and labor-market researchers in Canada, Harvey Krahn and Graham S. Lowe, look at these supposed changes in the value orientations of youth. With longitudinal data, they question the assumption derived from the concept of "individualization or risk society" (Beck, 1992). Does the young generation represent a postmodern habitus by creating and living a ''patchwork'' biography that is primarily driven by personal preferences? In comparing two recent cohorts of college and university graduates in Canada who were confronted with an economic recession at different stages of their transition to the labor market, Krahn and Lowe found that social class - and gender-related values are still more important than cohort differences. Though the two cohorts encountered different employment opportunities after graduation, they do not show significant value differences. Both cohorts believe strongly that postsecondary education will have a high return in the labor market. In contrast to the individualization thesis, the belief of being entitled to an adequate full-time job has become even stronger in the younger cohort. This expectation, however, contrasts with their actual situation in the labor market. In 1994, almost half of the young adults were employed in nonstandard jobs. They respond to the restructuring of the labor market by staying in the educational system while being in part-time and temporary employment. They create a socially innovative, though complicated role: the "student worker" who is attempting to improve his or her

18


level of education and build a job-search network. This contrasts with the transition culture in Germany, where an apprenticeship still is regarded as a good investment for finding a job with career prospects and, if necessary, as a steppingstone to reenter the educational system. In Canada and the United States, the faith of educators and students alike in the higher-education system is a much more established guideline for the school-to-employment transition, regardless of labor-market conditions or an imputed postmodern trend of individualization. In Europe, we also observe that young people stay in the education system longer than earlier cohorts. This can be explained as a response to the decline of the youth labor market and to the public debate about the cognitive requirements of the "knowledge society" (European Commission, 1997). As Frank Coffield argues in his analysis of the contemporary transition setting in Great Britain, the language of education is more and more dominated by market jargon and concepts that belong to the discourse of technocratic industrialization. The reduction of public investment in education and training is justified with the claim that this will produce efficiency gains and increase individual responsibility for becoming employable or perhaps self-employed. Coffield observes a tension between the vision of the knowledge society and the political economy of education markets, which will bring about an increasing social and economic polarization in the United Kingdom. He bases his argument on data that show that the low-skill and high-skill transition paths are drifting apart in terms of both economic security and personal wellbeing. In order to close this widening gap between unemployed and insecurely employed youth, he argues that basic-skills education, retraining, and work-creation programs will lead to higher returns for society than expanding further-education colleges and postsecondary institutions. Though we observe declining overall unemployment in Great Britain and the United States, compared with rising unemployment in Germany, there is a much greater polarization in the two marketdriven societies between the full-time employed (the working rich) and the working poor, both in terms of household income and quality of life. There is at least some evidence suggesting a convergence of provisions of school-to-work programs but not of transition structures and policies in Europe and North America. The welfare states of Europe struggle with the problems of financing publicly organized and institutionalized school-to-work systems, whereas simultaneously there is a call for more institutionally organized transition arrangements in the United Kingdom (National Vocational Qualifications) and initiatives toward more compa-

Introduction

19

rable standards for school-to-work programs in North America that go beyong local cooperative programs (Rosenbaum et al., 1992). British educational scientist Lynne Chisholm, working with a think tank at the European Commission in Brussels, is drafting a long-term scenario of the possible effects of knowledge production in modern societies on the future of socially differentiated transitions to jobs. She suggests that there is a social reconstruction of the youth phase in the making that will lead to a new balance between formal and nonformal credentials and at the same time to more polarization of life chances in the systems of education and employment. A "feminization" of individual transition biographies will spread in the young generation, Chisholm predicts, because nonlinear transitions with poor exchange values in the labor market will become more frequent for young women and young men. Processes of social polarization and reflexive modernization are at work, producing a multiplication of discontinuous career patterns that reach far into adulthood. In order to give support and orientation to young people, Chisholm proposes establishing community-based and case-centered vocational and career counseling. More decentralized services can help create transinstitutional networks for job searches, further education, and career stabilization. Conclusion The results of these longitudinal studies from four societies document that social and gender inequalities are reproduced in the different transition arrangements. Although youth have more autonomy, often out of necessity, in selecting, combining, leaving, and returning to various school-to-work paths, they are confronted with increasing job risks and career discontinuity. They not only are "working under different rules" (Freeman, 1994) but also are confronted with different "socially provided channels of attainment" (Kerckhoff, 1996). The institutional diversity of transitions operates in different ways in North American and European societies because they either have formalized training arrangements that are connected with an occupationally centered labor market or build their transition system on comprehensive schools and liberal arts colleges that at best have weak linkages to the labor market. This is the main conclusion of the studies presented in this book. Vocationalism cannot compete with the expansion of higher education in North America and of further-education colleges in Great Britain. In Germany, in contrast, the relationships among vocational education and training,

20


university studies, and the labor market are still influenced by the occupational structure's foundation in the apprenticeship system. The prospects for job entry in Germany are therefore different. In North America, apprenticeship may lead to a successful transition into employment only if it is linked with community colleges, whereas it is successful in the German "dual system" because it is connected with the secondary school system and the workplace. Because the image of vocational education has been declining in North America and Great Britain with the expansion of postsecondary education, these societies are responding much too slowly to the vanishing youth labor market. Germany, on the other hand, attempts to adapt to international competition and the deregulation of labor markets by combining more general education with occupational specialization by modernizing the apprenticeship transition. This creates linkages between school and employment because the transition itself delivers signals for young adults as well as employers about skill profiles and potential career destinations. Whatever linkage is put in place, social origin and gender are still implicated in transitions from school to work. Work experience, training, and vocational education, as well as postsecondary education, are organized in institutional and market contexts that reproduce social class and gender divisions. Social practices and personal orientations reflect labor-market segmentation and contradictions between employment and domestic careers. If we want to endow all students with skill profiles that are useful to manage change in the workplace and to self-organize their life course, a transition structure at the school-work interface is a prerequisite. This requires public investment in basic training, job creation, and further education for all young people, instead of short-term work experiences and on-the-job training programs. Education and training cannot solve the problems of life-course turbulence and social exclusion that are caused by market competition and state nonintervention. Nevertheless, vocational and academic transition systems that promote life-course skills and portable and certified qualifications can at least stabilize young people's precarious passages to adulthood. Whether we like it or not, education has been and will continue to be influenced by occupational requirements and career concerns. Comparative transition research, therefore, must also turn its attention to the relationships among general education, occupational and professional training, and the extent to which educational pathways are permeable and connected with different segments of the labor market. A democratic transition

Introduction

21

arrangement that equalizes the access to different routes between education and employment is also a way to stop the marketization of education and to curb the increasing social division between non-college-educated youth and young adults who acquire college degrees. A deregulated labor market requires that the private and public sectors join in providing the resources that the young generation needs to have a chance to respond to jobless growth with competence and initiative. Otherwise, a growing number of young adults will be excluded from full social participation and citizenship.

PARTI

Social Origin, Gender, and Transition Patterns

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School PAUL ANISEF ANTON H. TURRITTIN LIN ZENG

Sociologists argue that all societies are stratified, meaning that social positions or roles are differentially structured in terms of access to power, wealth, and social status. Furthermore, there is a set of rules that governs who gains access to these different social positions (Matras, 1984). Speaking somewhat metaphorically, stratification manifests itself in a series of ladders or shifting positions that provide for social mobility within the existing but also changing social structure. For individuals and groups, social mobility is problematic in at least three ways. First, one must compete for, find, and hold one's place in the stratification system. This aspect of stratification highlights life course and manifests itself most commonly as an occupational career. Second, as social structure changes, the ladders are altered and rearranged some disappearing altogether - thus changing the bases for competition. This aspect invites comparison between the current generation and past ones and what is called intergenerational mobility. Finally, people also desire to help and provide for their own progeny and seek to make the process of social mobility more secure and predictable for them. This suggests that the process contains elements of risk when moving up or down or changing ladders of mobility. These risks can be minimized by drawing on family resources and building institutional forms favorable to mobility (e.g., accessible higher education) through political and community action (Matras, 1984, p. 8; Beck, 1992, p. 94; Heinz, 1991b, p. 11). Generally, in postindustrial societies like Canada, stratification is largely produced through the occupational structure of the economy. As a consequence, career and social mobility mainly reflect the occupations people hold over their life course, but entrance into an occupation is itself contingent on formal schooling. In recent decades, further formal education qualifications and personal career mobility appear to be increasingly intertwined (Erikson & Jonsson, 1996). Thus, an under25

26


standing of career and social mobility requires a careful examination of the school-to-work transition to reveal how education is linked to the occupation structure as young people negotiate their early years of education into employment. Since the end of the World War II, the education system in Canada has grown substantially and has become more multilayered, a tiering that closely matched the expanding occupational structure of the prosperous postwar decades. In this tiering, a high-school education was adequate for many blue-collar, service-sector, and lowerwhite-collar occupations. Community colleges, called colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) in Ontario, provided additional and generally vocationally specific training, whereas universities offered a general liberal arts education or training in a number of professions. The education system was linked to a hierarchy of occupations that could be literally rank-ordered in terms of social prestige and wage and salary earning capacity (Anisef, Ashbury, & Turrittin, 1992). The postwar public demand for postsecondary education reflected both the high value attributed to education and parents' belief, not unfounded at the time, that obtaining diplomas, certificates, and degrees would provide the means for their children to enter better paying, secure, high status, and interesting jobs. For Ontario, and elsewhere in Canada, the education system's ability to retain and promote youths into and through postsecondary education was so successful that by the mid-1970s, it became evident that the highly qualified were beginning to overwhelm the job market (Anisef, Bertrand, Hortian, & James, 1985). The ability of diplomas, certificates, and degrees to guarantee good jobs began to decline in the early 1990s as the rate of technological change and attendant productivity increased. This weakening of job markets has been compounded in the 1990s by the shrinkage of the public sector, downsizing in the private sector, and the export of some jobs outside of Canada's borders (Krahn, 1996). Clearly, these changes in the economy have lessened occupational opportunity, potentially threatening career and social mobility and raising questions about the role of education in postmodern society. This chapter focuses on preliminary findings about the careers and social mobility of a sample of Ontario youth first studied in the spring of 1973. The research began as a study of the education and occupational aspirations of a random sample of 2,555 grade 12 high school students in Ontario who were followed through their postsecondary education and into the labor market by way of two follow-up surveys carried out in the fall of 1973 and the fall of 1974. These same youth were again studied in 1979 as young adults (1,522 were restudied). Most were employed by

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School then, with the exception of a few who continued with professional studies. Contact was again made with 1,129 subjects in 1987-1988. By then, this survey had become the longest longitudinal study of its kind in Canada. In 1995, we went back to our members of the "class of '73," as we called them, and were able to relocate 788 of our original sample. Most of the respondents in 1995 were 40 years of age, married, and had children of their own. This allowed us to obtain some insights with respect to their career and social mobility. First, we have obtained information on their education history and first full-time jobs, in addition to their occupations in 1979, 1987-1988, and 1995, which provided us with data on career or intragenerational occupational mobility.1 Second, in 1995 we asked respondents to report on the occupation of their fathers when their fathers were 55 years of age. The data on fathers' occupations, along with respondents' occupations in 1995, provided the basis for a comparison of occupations that documents "intergenerational occupational mobility," a concept that we shall use interchangeably with "social mobility." Mobility Research in a Life-Course Perspective Changes in occupational structure in Canada's economy have long been tracked by Statistics Canada with particular detail provided by decennial population censuses. Interest in intergenerational occupational mobility preceded career studies, as social mobility studies were launched in the 1970s to assess the impact of such factors as class, gender, ethnicity, and education on occupational opportunities (Boyd et al., 1985) and has been maintained in subsequent studies and analyses (Creese, Guppy, Meissner, 1991; Wanner & Hayes, 1996). Statistics Canada has considered the link between education and the labor market by focusing on a series of studies evaluating the jobs of postsecondary school leavers (Davies, Mosher, & O'Grady, 1994). Several studies examining the school-to-work transition have evolved into longitudinal studies that have permitted researchers to examine longer-term occupational careers (Thiessen & Looker, Krahn & Lowe, Andres, in this volume). Our present research falls in this latter group. Analyzing social and career mobility from the standpoint of lifecourse theory requires factoring in social structural and personal agency dimensions in understanding education choices and occupational pathways (Gambetta, 1987). The social structural dimensions most often cited in the Canadian school-to-work transitions literature are social class and

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gender (Krahn, 1996). Another important dimension is location. Although the major trend has been toward urbanization, the actual number of people living in rural areas has increased significantly, almost doubling since the 1950s (Biggs & Bollman 1994). Location has received limited attention by life-course researchers, however, and its effects are not particularly well documented (Looker, 1995). Several important aspects of personal agency include the decision made by youth to pursue a particular kind of education, to enter the labor force after high school, or to pursue some combination of work and education; and then as young adults, the decision to either remain in their home community and build a life or change location in an effort to enhance career mobility opportunities. Looker (1995) indicated in her study of Hamilton, Halifax, and rural Nova Scotia youth that the decision by rural youths to pursue higher education or to access larger labor markets resulted in their leaving their homes and moving into urban centers. Research on internal migration patterns showed that migrants were distinctive in that they tended to be young adults with above-average education and high socioeconomic status (SES) (Shulman & Drass, 1979). An effective metaphor for conceptualizing education choices and school-to-work transitions would involve a group of adolescents confronting a river into which they must plunge, with different opportunities represented by different points along the far shore. Some are stronger swimmers and easily reach desirable objectives. Other less accomplished swimmers may obtain their objectives, but only after an arduous struggle. The point of this is to recognize the simultaneous dimensions required to make one's way along a life course, with people exercising personal agency within a dynamic and frequently changing social structural context. Our quantitative and qualitative data reveal aspects of both agency and social structure, though the two are not so easily distinguished or untangled. A framework for connecting geographical mobility with a life-course perspective was provided by Jones (1995). She emphasized that the first leaving-home event for young adults is part of a process in the transition to independent living. Furthermore, leaving the parental home needs to be understood with reference to the historical context of the times. Thus, for recent generations of young people, returning to the parental home, does not necessarily signal continued dependence but may be part of an increasingly common process of making transitions to adulthood, albeit over a longer stretch of time than in previous postwar decades. In contrast, members of the class of '73 grew up in a time of greater economic

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School certainty and opportunity than experienced by later generations. For these people, leaving the parental home was a life marker that more closely designated the beginnings of full independence. Some, after carefully considering their options, accepted the challenge of leaving their community in order to enhance their personal opportunities. Others, after due reflection, decided to remain at home and pursue personal aspirations within their community. Research Questions In our study, we focused on the degree to which members of the class of '73 experienced career and social mobility and asked: What occupations have they had, as they moved from first full-time jobs obtained between the years 1973 and 1978 to occupations in 1979, then 1987-1988, and finally 1995? We also explored how education attainment was related to the sorts of occupations entered in each phase of the study and to the process of career mobility. An exploration of this relationship is especially important because it sheds light on the role played by personal agency and social structural factors over the life course. Gender, social class, and urban versus rural origins were included in the analysis of career mobility. In addition, we analyzed intergenerational social mobility for the class of '73 by comparing the SES of male and female respondents with that of their parents. A final series of questions pertained to the relationship of geographical and career mobility. In tracing career mobility patterns, we asked: Are there substantive and long-term effects of having grown up in a rural as compared with an urban environment? What role did leaving home play in enhancing or altering the occupational pathways of youths who grew up in rural versus urban areas? Finally, if leaving home played a significant role in enhancing life chances, can we identify important distinguishing sociological and psychological characteristics of people who are or are not geographically mobile? Analysis and Discussion of Results Career or Intragenerational Occupational Mobility

Our data on career mobility were derived from three of the six phases of our class of '73 longitudinal research. As mentioned earlier, in our most recent survey of 1995, we asked respondents about the occupations of

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30


their parents when they were 55 years of age, which would likely have referred to an occupation in the period between 1975 and 1980 when respondents were 20 to 25 years of age. We have taken the occupation of the father at age 55 as a baseline against which to measure the occupational mobility of respondents. We compared the father's occupation at an advanced stage in his career with his son's or daughter's occupation at age 40, nearly the midpoint of a respondent's occupational life course. Our 1979 survey, undertaken when most respondents had completed their postsecondary education, inquired about members' first full-time jobs and current jobs. These occupations provided us with a baseline to examine career mobility and illustrated their employment patterns at the point of transition from education to the labour market. Career movement was further tracked by our surveys of 1987-1988 and 1995. Stratification research regards first full-time jobs as significant in terms of careers because certain initial or entry-level jobs may be steps on job ladders, some ladders having significant future payoff in terms of status and earning power and others having more limited economic opportunities. In 1979, 79.5% of the class of '73 members were in the labor force, of which 5.5% were unemployed (n = 779). Less than 5% were working part time. In addition, 15.1% were still full- or part-time students. Almost 50% of the women in our sample were married, as were about 33% of men, but only about 20% of the married women did not combine homemaking with being in the labor force or with being a student. The type of employment, however, varied by level of education attainment. It is useful at this point to examine the first full-time jobs held by respondents before turning to the data on occupations in 1979. For most of our respondents, first full-time jobs followed the completion of an educational program. Thus, for those who did not seek further postsecondary education but completed high school and then entered the job market, the modal year of first full-time jobs was 1973. For those completing community college, the modal year was 1976, and for those completing university, first full-time jobs commenced in 1978. Using the occupational categories developed by Creese, Guppy, & Meissner (1991), we determined that 89% of those members of the class of '73 who did not go on to postsecondary education prior to 1979 entered upper and lower white-collar and blue-collar jobs. Only 6.1% entered occupations in any management, professional, or semiprofessional/technical categories. If first jobs are an indicator, the community colleges primarily trained their students to enter semiprofessional/technical and upper-white-collar occupations. By contrast, 44.8% (n = 156) of university graduates started

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School in high or midmanagerial, professional, or semiprofessional/technical categories. There were some significant gender differences in first jobs. Few women entered any blue-collar occupations, and about 53.0% of female university graduates (n = 83) obtained first full-time jobs in the upper- and lower-white-collar categories. Table 1-1 compares the distribution of occupations of members of the class of '73 by gender for first full-time jobs and occupations held in 1979,1987-1988, and 1995. Comparing first jobs with occupations in 1979 revealed the beginnings of career movements as the class of '73 started to shift to higher-status, better-paying jobs. For example, women shifted out of lower-white-collar work and increased their proportions in upperwhite-collar and semiprofessional/technical employment. For men, the proportion of those employed in lower-blue-collar jobs declined, whereas the proportions in upper-blue-collar and in midmanagement positions increased. There were also important differences in occupational distribution by educational achievement. By 1979, few men with only secondary education had moved into any kind of managerial, professional, or semiprofessional/technical occupations. The proportion of men in the upper-blue-collar ranks increased by 50%, however, with a corresponding decline at the lower-blue-collar level. The proportion of women with only secondary education also increased in the upperwhite-collar category and decreased in the lower-white-collar sector. Male community college graduates increased their presence in the semiprofessional/technical, upper-white-collar, and upper-blue-collar categories, whereas the distribution of female community college graduates did not change. At the university level, male graduates started to increase their proportions at the semiprofessional/technical and middle management levels compared to first jobs, and female graduates began leaving lower-white-collar positions and increased their presence in the semiprofessional / technical category. A comparison of occupations held by members of the class of '73 in 1979 and 1987-1988 (Table 1-1) reveals a major increase in the number of professional positions. This increase was not a trend but rather reflected the fact that in 1979 those pursuing professional education were still in school. By 1980 or 1981, they had completed their education and had entered professional occupations. Several trends did emerge when we compared respondents' occupations in 1979 and 1987-1988, however. There was a small increase in men employed at high management levels, an increase in people occupying midmanagement positions, a decrease in the number of respondents in upper-white-collar occupations, and a

31

Table 1-1 Occupational Distributions by Gender of Respondent for Occupations in 1995,1987-1988,1979, Occupation, and for Father's Occupation at 55 Years of Age

First Full-time

Occupational

Occupation in

Occupation in

Occupation in

First Full-Time

Father's Job at

Distribution

1995 (%)

1987-1988 (%)

1979 (%)

Job in 1973-1979 (%)

55 Years of Age (%)

M High-level management Professional Midmanagement Semiprofessional/technical Upper-white-collar Upper-blue-collar Lower-white-collar Lower-blue-collar Agriculture % total Total n F = 1 female; M = 1 male.

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

6.1

4.9

3.0

0.7

1.0

0.4

1.5

0.6

6.2

7.4

15.6 19.3 14.1 9.8 20.7 3.5 8.4 2.6 100 347

16.7 13.4 22.8 17.6 1.2 18.8 4.3 0.3 100 329

14.4 13.5 13.2 8.1 24.0 8.7 10.5 4.5 100 333

18.5 7.5 23.5 22.1 1.8 20.6 4.3 1.1 100 281

8.3 5.7 15.0 12.7 28.7 7.3 17.0 4.3 100 300

6.4 1.9 24.6 38.6 1.1 23.5 3.0 0.4 100 264

8.3 2.8 11.3 10.7 19.0 11.7 28.8 5.8 100 326

4.6 1.4 19.2 28.9 1.4 38.4 5.2 0.3 100 349

9.3 9.6 4.3 7.1 24.2 6.8 22.0 10.2 100 322

12.6 10.6 4.3 8.3 23.2 5.2 17.8 10.6 100 349

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School decrease in the proportion of men in both blue-collar categories. These trends continued to 1995. The proportion of both men and women at both levels of management rose, with decreases in upper- and lowerwhite-collar employment for women and upper- and lower-blue-collar and lower white-collar jobs for men. The long-term impacts of education were also evident in our most recent 1995 survey. University graduates were disproportionately located in the high-level manager occupational category, with twice as many men as women occupying these positions. Equal proportions of men and women were found in the professions. Almost all in the professional category were university graduates, comprising almost 40% of both male and female university graduates. The number of male university-educated midmanagers remained steady (compared to 1987-1988), though the number of female university-educated midmanagers increased. Still, only half as many women as men were in this occupational group. There was some decline in the number of university-educated men and women in the semiprofessional/technical category. Male and female community college graduates increased their presence as midmanagers. The proportion of men increased at the semiprofessional and technical level and held steady in the ranks of upper-blue-collar work, whereas the proportion of women declined somewhat at the semiprofessional and technical level and in the upper-white-collar category but held steady in lower-whitecollar occupations. For those with a high-school education only, about 11% of men and women were midmanagers in 1995. There were increases in the semiprofessional/technical categories for both men and women, decreases at both the upper- and lower-blue-collar ranks for men, and increases in the upper-white-collar but decreases in the lower-white-collar categories for women. We believe that the job experiences respondents gained over time likely provided entrance into high-level management positions for university graduates. Similarly, job experience allowed people of limited educational background into midmanagement positions. Thus, access to management positions appears to be significantly age related, with high-level management positions reserved for people with university and professional backgrounds. Table 1-2 provides a crude index of career mobility by comparing first full-time occupations with 1995 occupations, using quite broad occupational categories.2 Career changes, as shown under "All education levels" of Table 1-2, present a mixed picture for our respondents, given our very broad occupational categories. Members of the class of '73 who started out in high-level management/professional occupations tended

33

Table 1-2. Career Mobility by Education Attainment Education in 19795 High school

CAAT

University

Occupation in 1995 (%) First Full-Time Job in 1973-19796 1. High-level management/professional 2. Midmanagement /semiprof essional/ technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers 1. High-level management/professional 2. Midmanagement / semiprofessional / technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers 1. High-level management/professional 2. Midmanagement /semiprofessional/ technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers

All education 1. Hi-level management/professional levels 2. Midmanagement / semiprofessional / technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers All 1995 occupations CAAT = College of Applied Arts and Technology.

Total % Row %

1

2

3

4

20.0 10.0 3.9 10.8 28.6 10.0 18.4 2.7 81.3 31.4 27.8 29.6

20.0 60.0 28.6 20.8 28.6 66.7 34.7 43.2 14.1 51.0 47.2 40.7

40.0 20.0 46.8 32.5 14.3 11.7 32.7 29.7 3.1 11.8 8.3 18.5

20.0 10.0 20.8 35.8 28.6 11.7 14.3 24.3 1.6 5.9 16.7 11.1

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

2.4 4.7 36.3 56.6 4.6 39.2 32.0 24.2 36.0 28.7 20.2 15.2

5 10 77 120 7 60 49 37 64 51 36 27

72.7 18.6 12.6 13.4

15.6 60.5 35.5 28.2

6.5 12.4 35.0 30.6

5.2 8.5 16.9 27.8

100 100 100 100

12.7 21.3 30.2 35.7

77 129 183 216

21.8

35.7

25.0

17.5

100

n

605

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School to stay at this level of the occupational structure; similarly, those who started off in the midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical category tended to remain with those kinds of jobs. The data show substantial occupational category changes for those who began as skilled and unskilled workers, however. They tended to move into the skilled worker or midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical categories if they originally started out in unskilled jobs, or into the midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical category if they began in the skilled worker category. We have already noted that the variation of occupational careers held by respondents depended on level of education attained, and this pattern is again shown in the bivariate data of Table 12. Some 65% of university graduates began and continued their careers in the top two occupational categories shown in Table 1-2, and of those who had first jobs in the other two job categories (skilled and unskilled occupations), 70% or more moved into the top two occupational categories by 1995. Fully 70% of community college graduates began in midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical or skilled worker jobs and another quarter in unskilled occupations. By 1995, the majority of those who had started in the midmanagement/semiskilled/technical category still remained there. There was, however, a substantial career change into the midmanagement /semiprofessional /technical categories from the skilled worker category or into the skilled worker or midmanagement/ semiprofessional /technical categories from unskilled occupations. Over 90% of respondents with only a high-school education entered skilled or unskilled work. By 1995, the careers of almost 33% of those starting with skilled jobs had gone into midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical work, and over 50% of those who began in unskilled work had moved to skilled or midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical occupations. Only 13.1% of the class of '73 experienced downward career movement between first full-time jobs and 1995 occupations; 42.6% continued in their broad occupational category, and 44.3% shifted upward in terms of occupational category (n = 605). The career data just reviewed suggest a fairly tight linkage between education and the labor market in Ontario for the class of '73, which especially favored university and professional-school graduates. Where career shifts are revealed in Table 1-2, they are primarily out of the unskilled and skilled categories to adjacent occupational categories. The midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical occupational categories provided opportunities for class of '73 members with a limited education to achieve career mobility likely based on experience in the labor force.

35

Table 1-3 Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Son's Occupation in 1995 (%) Father's Occupation at 55 Years of Age 1. High-level management/professional 2. Midmanagement/ semiprofessional / technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers 5. Agriculture Column % Total n 1. High-level management / professional 2. Midmanagement/ semiprofessional / technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers 5. Agriculture Column % Total n

1

2

3

4

5

Total %

33.3

35.4

18.8

10.4

2.1

100

16.1

48

38.6 17.2 17.9 13.3 22.7

36.4 36.6 31.0 13.3 32.4

18.2 35.5 35.7 36.7 30.4

6.8

10.8 15.5 10.0 11.4

0.0 0.0 0.0

100 100 100 100 100

14.7 31.1 28.1 10.0 100.0

44 93 84 30 299 299

68

97

91

34

26.7 3.0 9

Row %

n

Daughter's Occupation 1995 (%)i 35.6

28.8

20.3

15.3

0.0

100

20.7

59

17.5 18.2 11.9 41.9 22.8

47.5 35.2 37.3 29.0 35.4

10.0 19.3 23.9 12.9 18.6

25.0 27.3 26.9 12.9 22.8

0.0 0.0 0.0 3.2 0.4 1

100 100 100 100 100

14.0 30.9 23.5 10.9 100.0

40 88 67 31 285 285

65

101

53

65

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School

37

Intergenerational Mobility, Occupational Structure, and Gender

Another way to evaluate career movement is by considering intergenerational occupational mobility. Table 1-3 compares the occupation of fathers at 55 years of age with the occupations of sons or daughters in 1995. These data reveal an even greater level of upward intergenerational mobility than upward career mobility.3 Comparing fathers and children shows that 17.7% of male respondents were downwardly mobile, 28.8% had occupations similar to that of their fathers, and 53.5% were upwardly mobile. The comparable proportions for women were as follows: 26.7% downwardly mobile, 26.7% with similar occupations, and 46.7% upwardly mobile (n = 285). Whereas 18.3% of respondents' fathers were employed as high-level managers/professionals, 22.8% of respondents had occupations in this category; 14.5% of fathers were employed in midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical occupations, whereas 33.8% of respondents fell into this category; 31.0% of fathers were skilled workers, as were 24.7% of their children; 25.9% of fathers were unskilled workers, but only 17.0% of their sons and daughters did similar work. Finally, whereas 10.4% of fathers were in agriculture, only 1.7% of their children remained in farming (n = 584). Thus, there was a marked shift in occupations between the generations, particularly from blue- and whitecollar unskilled and skilled work to high-level management and professional occupations and midmanagement/semiprofessional and technical occupations. Members of the class of '73 had made progress on two fronts compared with their parents. First, they had experienced career mobility that had also resulted in upward social mobility. In this regard, respondents took advantage of a shift in the occupational structure, which began in the 1960s and saw the proportion of managerial and professional occupations increase substantially (Krahn & Lowe, 1993a, Table 3.3). Second, we have already demonstrated that postsecondary education became the means by which to achieve occupational ends. Here, the contrast could not be more evident. Whereas about 25% of respondents' fathers and mothers had some university or college education or a university degree or higher, the proportion of respondents with those kinds of educational attainment approached 75%. Whereas 14.4% of respondents' fathers and 5.5% of their mothers had a university degree or higher (n = 788), 33% of our sample attained a university degree or higher. Finally, more than 50% the class of '73 members reported in 1973 that their mothers were then employed. By contrast, in 1995, 86.5% (n =

38


788) of the class of '73 women reported being employed, self-employed, or both. The class of '73 women clearly bear the dual responsibilities of managing a household, children, and work. Only 13.5% of women with children were not employed in 1995 (n = 289), though 22.8% of working mothers were working only part time (less than 35 hours per week). By contrast, only 2.0% of men reported part-time work in 1995, if employed (n = 351). Somewhat more than 50% of women not working in 1995 reported that the main reasons for not working were family responsibilities or not being able to arrange child care. Almost 75% of the class of '73 women reported voluntarily choosing not to work one or more times between 1978 and 1994; this applied to only 15% of men. Women (46.5%) also reported having experienced unemployment somewhat more frequently than men (37.4%) between 1978 and 1994. The concentration of men and women in different kinds of jobs in 1995, as shown in Table 1-1, reflects delayed careers for women and shows up as differences in the average Blishen4 scores for men and women. The class of '73 men who were employed in 1995 had an average Blishen score of 52.26, whereas for women the average Blishen score was 49.38. Personal incomes differed markedly for men and women. The median income for men employed full time in 1995 was $50,000 to $59,999, whereas for women the median personal income was between $30,000 and $34,999. Socioeconomic Status and Rural/Urban Origins

In considering factors affecting life-course transitions and careers, social background is a critical element. For the class of '73, the key social background factors were SES, rural/urban origins, and gender. We have already considered some of the main impacts of gender. SES, as measured by the kinds of occupations parents had, parents' educational attainment, and parents' total income proved to be significant factors but made their impact in complex ways early in an individual's life. In 1979, SES had direct impacts on selection of programs (academic vs. nonacademic) and grades achieved in high school, self-concept of academic ability, level of occupational expectation, and level of education attained, and indirectly, on level of expected education which in turn strongly affected level of education attained (Turrittin, Anisef, & MacKinnon, 1983). SES continued to have an impact on current occupation as reported in 1987-1988 (Anisef et al., 1992). But the major long-term effects of SES appeared to work through education, which, as we have shown, profoundly sorted class of

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School '73 members into different career trajectories. Thus, trichotomizing SES showed that by 1979, 50% of the low SES group had no postsecondary education, 25% had received a community college certificate or diploma, and 16% had graduated from university. For the middle SES group, 20% had graduated from university, 20% had obtained a community college certificate or diploma, and 40% had completed high school only. Of the upper SES group, 50% had graduated from university, 17% had obtained a community college certificate or diploma, and 18% had only secondary schooling. By 1995, at 40 years of age, class of '73 members had already attained a new SES for themselves, however, reflecting their own achieved levels of education, occupations, and household incomes. Another significant background variable was geographical origin within Ontario. In the original 1973 survey, high schools were classified by degree of urbanization of their location, using four categories. The first was metropolitan Toronto, the second and third divisions consisted of other large and medium-size cities (including suburban areas), and the fourth division consisted of high schools generally in small towns serving small towns and rural areas. We have shown in previous work that geographical location impacted 1979 educational attainment through such variables as program in high school, self-concept of academic ability, level of occupational expectation, and expected level of education (Turrittin et al., 1983). For example, if we compare metropolitan Toronto, other cities, and small towns and rural areas, 50% of the class of '73 members from Toronto graduated with a university degree, compared to 33% from other cities, and 18% of small town/rural members. Some 14% of Toronto respondents obtained a community college certificate or diploma, whereas 20% from other cities and somewhat more than 25% of small town/rural respondents got certificates and diplomas. Twenty-five percent of the class of '73 members from Toronto had no further postsecondary education by 1979, compared to almost 33% from other cities, and almost 50% of small town/rural members. The effect of geographical location can in part be understood in terms of access to postsecondary institutions. Universities in Ontario are concentrated in only a few urban centers, whereas community colleges are widely dispersed across the province. Attending university in a city where one does not reside or that is beyond commuting distance was likely a financial barrier to class of '73 members who did not live in or near university locations. In terms of occupational mobility after completing their education, the data (not shown here) indicate that urban class of '73 members maintained an advantage over those from rural and small towns with

39

40


respect to first full-time jobs and 1995 occupations. A higher proportion of respondents with urban origins were employed in high management/professional and midmanager/semiprofessional/technical job categories in 1995. Stayers and Movers: Leaving One's Home Community

We have already mentioned that members of the class of '73 occupied a SES distinct from the SES background of their parents. Similarly, their current geographical locations often differed from where they lived when they attended grade 12 in 1973. We developed a two-value variable that classified class of '73 members as either "stayers" or "movers," with stayers remaining in or near the community where they attended high school and movers indicating a 1995 residence not in or near where they attended high school. We should underscore that being a mover is not an indicator of a geographical shift from a rural to an urban destination but could be such a shift in perhaps the reverse direction. Table 1-4 shows how geographical mobility is related to occupational mobility from first full-time job to occupation in 1995. This table demonstrates that being either a stayer or mover did not affect our participant's first jobs, though being a mover did improve their chances of starting out in the midmanagement/semiprofessional/technical category. By 1995, however, being a mover strongly tipped occupational achievement toward the two higher occupational status categories. For example, for those entering the labor market in the skilled category, moving led to entering management or professional positions more frequently than for those who remained in their community. There were no significant gender differences with respect to being a stayer or a mover. We speculate, however, that moving from one's home community demonstrated an intensive search for improved employment opportunity, even for female members of the class of '73 whose economic status largely depended on their spouse's occupation. We found some additional characteristics associated with being a stayer or mover. Whereas stayers and movers were evenly divided within the high SES origin group, among the middle SES group, 56.5% became stayers and 43.5% became movers (n = 260); within the lowest SES origin group, 62.6% remained stayers and only 37.4% were movers (n = 265). Thus, lower SES is associated with less geographical mobility. When we examined geographical mobility in relation to socioeconomic mobility, comparing social-origin SES with achieved SES level in 19955

Table 1-4 Geographical Mobility and Occupational Careers First Full-Time Occupation .A.

XJ.

i_7 W

-1»

W4X1

-L JLJLJk

1.V—

1. High-level management / professional 2. Midmanagement/ semiprofessional / technical 3. Skilled workers 4. Unskilled workers 5. Agriculture Column % Total n

Occupation in 1995

Geographical Mobility

1

2

3

4

5

Total %

Row %

n

Stayers Movers

64.0 57.1

16.0 28.6

12.0

8.0 9.5

0.0 0.0

100 100

6.7 7.8

25 21

Stayers Movers Stayers Movers Stayers Movers Stayers Movers Stayers Movers

10.5 21.8 12.7 18.4 10.0 18.9

64.9 50.9 27.1 36.8 28.1 30.6 14.3 20.0 32.1 36.2

10.5 12.7 41.5 27.6 33.8 22.5 28.6 60.0 31.0 21.3

12.3 12.7 17.8 17.1 27.5 27.0

1.8 1.8 0.8 0.0 0.6 0.9

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

15.2 20.5 31.6 28.4 42.8 41.4

57 55 118 76 160 111 14 5 374 268 642

7.1

20.0 14.4 22.4

114

217

4.8

173

7.1 0.0

20.1 19.4

127

42.9 0.0 2.4 0.7 11

3.7 1.9

42


for each class of '73 member, we discovered that being a mover enhanced one's chances of improving one's SES and helped to retard downward movement in socioeconomic terms. Being a mover was also associated with entry into high-level managerial and professional occupations especially for class of '73 members from either low SES or rural backgrounds, or both, in contrast to being a stayer. By 1995, movers were significantly more likely to acquire a university degree (42.7%; n = 342) than were stayers (26.9% n = 446) and stayers were more likely to have completed high school only (33.0%) than were movers (19.0%). This relationship holds true even when SES category is controlled. Finally, in our 1979 survey, members of the class of '73 were asked to describe themselves using a series of adjectives known as a semantic differential. Movers were significantly more likely than stayers to describe themselves as "important," "effective," and "interesting." By way of illustration, 56% of movers and 42% of stayers characterized themselves as effective persons. Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that an understanding of the school-toemployment transitions of younger generations can benefit from a look back at the pathways taken by previous generations. Although we adopted the major premises of life-course theory - that is, that individuals construct their transitions from school to employment within the context of social origin and other social dimensions - we posit the usefulness of adopting the language and employing the techniques that allow us to identify patterns of social, interoccupational, and intraoccupational mobility. In applying these techniques, we have replicated gender and social class findings typically found in North American stratification and mobility studies. Members of the class of '73 had good reason to be hopeful about future prospects as they moved into their high school years. In 1970, Ontario Canada's "industrial heartland" - had the country's lowest unemployment rate, and those with jobs had higher real incomes and better working conditions than had any previous generation (Ray, 1985). Conditions were changing in Ontario, however, and by 1975, the unemployment rate rose to 6% higher than that of three other provinces, though low by today's standards (Ray, 1985). Though our data analysis of social mobility exclusively focussed on full-time employment, we do note that an increased minority of respondents turned to part-time work and selfemployment, especially women. Furthermore, a greater proportion of

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School women than men experienced periods of unemployment between 1978 and 1994. Our findings also showed that respondents in the middle level of SES background were particularly vulnerable to change, with over 60% either moving up or down the ladder of success with respect to intergenerational mobility. Yet, a minority (22%) of respondents from more humble origins took advantage of economic opportunities and moved into upper socioeconomic positions. It is also important to note gender differences that favored greater occupational inheritance among men and the tendency for the gross mobility patterns of women to be quite distinct from those of men. It is also quite clear that the impact of geographical location and the decision to leave home should be taken into account when examining mobility patterns. Living in a city clearly favors upward mobility, and moving location serves to enhance both intergenerational and career mobility. Thus, respondents from lower socioeconomic origins who moved, in contrast with those who remained in their community, measurably increased their SES. A subsequent analysis of those who remained versus those who chose to move revealed structural and psychological correlates. Thus, in comparison with movers, stayers are more likely to be drawn from lower socioeconomic origins, are less likely to positively assess their chances of graduating from university or to acquire a degree, and are less likely to assess themselves as effective, important, or interesting. Our analysis of career mobility for participants who held full-time jobs revealed that the class of '73 did move up the occupational hierarchy, with the proportions in unskilled and agricultural skilled occupations steadily decreasing by 1995. Less than a 33% experienced no occupational mobility from first full-time to current full-time occupation. Movement up or down was incremental. Both men and women experienced a pattern of upward career mobility, though the pattern appeared somewhat stronger for men. It is also important to note that the career impact of socioeconomic origins via education proved more prominent in the long run, favoring those of higher socioeconomic origins. Residence and geographical mobility also proved of some importance in understanding career mobility patterns. Thus, respondents with city backgrounds experienced greater occupational mobility than did rural participants and movers were more likely than stayers to derive benefits from leaving their community by midcareer. In examining the class of '73, we were struck by both the complexity of life-course transition entries and exits made by participants and the degree of uncertainty they expressed at various phases of the project as

43

44


they moved from adolescence into adulthood. Given the even more frequent nonconventional pathways that we expect to emerge among the younger generations of the 1990s, however, life-course researchers wishing to employ conventional social and occupational mobility concepts will likely encounter methodological or practical difficulties. For example, between 1975 and 1994, the part-time employment rate for young women aged 15 to 24 years more than doubled, from 22% to 48% (Krahn, 1996; p. 16), making the use of full-time occupations to measure social mobility problematic. As deskilling, that is the under-utilization of acquired skills, continues and self-employment increases, issues regarding how to rank occupations on a scale that reflects both skill and educational requirements of occupations will arise. These measurement problems need to be thought through carefully if useful and valid comparisons across generations are to be made. Notes 1. Both inter- and intragenerational occupational mobility require a measure of occupational status. This is conventionally done by grouping occupational titles. Respondents' occupations in all our surveys were coded using the four-digit numbers of the Canadian Classification and Dictionary of Occupations (CCDO). In turn, these CCDO codes were used

to place a respondent's occupation into an occupational status classification scheme developed by Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts (Creese, Guppy & Meissner, 1991, p. 34). This classification is a 16-category scale, a rank-ordering of occupations from the highest (selfemployed professionals) to the lowest (farm laborers) in terms of years of schooling and income. The Porter-Pineo-McRoberts Scale was subsequently revised by Creese, Guppy, and Meissner. Taking into account changes in the labor force, the nature of gender segregation in occupations, and patterns of inconsistency, the 16 categories were reduced to 10 (Creese et al., 1991, p. 36). Occupational mobility itself is shown by comparing father's occupation with the occupational attainment of son or daughter. In the 1995 Phase Six survey, we asked subjects to report their current occupation if employed and the occupations of their parents when their parents were 55 years of age if employed. The PorterPineo-McRoberts Scale is more effective for discerning gender differences than the measure derived from factor analysis, so we employ it in this section. 2. For Table 1-2, the high-level manager category is combined with the professional category, midmanagers are combined with semiprofessionals/technical, upper white-collar and upper blue-collar workers are combined into a skilled worker category, and the lower white-collar and lower blue-collar categories are combined into an unskilled worker category. 3. On the basis of respondent's education and occupation (Blishen score), spouse's education, and family income, factor analysis was also used to construct a separate measure that reflects class of destination as a Blishen score. 4. The Blishen score is a two-digit index number attached to each of Statistics Canada's approximately 500 occupational titles and roughly reflects the different compositions of incumbents' education and income within that occupational category (Blishen, Caroll & Moore, 1987).

Social and Geographical Mobility 20 Years after High School

45

5. As in the case of the socioeconomic (SES) status variable that was created through a factor analysis of the 1973 data on parents7 education, parents' occupations, and parents' total household income, a new SES variable was created through factor analysis to indicate the SES of each member of class of '73 as of 1995, based on subject's education, spouse's education, family income, and subject's occupation included as a Blishen score.

Diverse Directions: Young Adults' Multiple Transitions VICTOR THIESSEN E. DIANNE LOOKER

This chapter looks at the attitudes and experiences that youth have of a series of transitions as they move from their teenage years to become young adults. This examination is informed by the life-course perspective, which, as Heinz (1996a, p. 3) notes "focuses on socially recognized sequences of transitions/' Heinz also notes the importance of longitudinal research to "uncover the dynamics of various transitions as they construct or feed into life trajectories" (Heinz, 1996, p. 3). Our analysis presents data from a longitudinal study of Canadian youth to help describe some of these dynamics. Relationship to the Literature The life-course literature (Abeles, 1987; Callahan & McClusky, 1983; Clausen, 1986; Dragastin & Elder, 1975; Elder, 1974; Elder, 1985; Heinz, 1991a; Hogan, 1981; Jones & Wallace, 1992; Kerckhoff, 1990; Oppenheimer, 1981; Rossi, 1985; Troll, 1985) emphasizes the importance of transitions. These include transitions within and between educational and occupational and marital-familial paths (Elder, 1985). This perspective also recognizes the relevance of the historical and structural context in which individuals undertake these transitions. "People make social history even as they are influenced by historical change" (Elder & Caspi, 1990, p. 108). Different transitions make up what life-course theorists see as careers or trajectories, "social strands of a life course in which persons invest themselves or (into which they, (V.T./E.D.L.) are thrust" (Clausen, 1986, p. 30). Focus on a particular cohort facilitates transitional analyses because, as Hogan states, "... [individuals] in a birth cohort age chronologically at the same pace and experience historical events at the same age ... A cohort level of analysis is therefore an appropriate method of discerning the effects of social-structural conditions on the transitions behavior of individuals" (1981, p. 33). We undertook just such a cohort analysis, discussed in this chapter. 46

Diverse Directions: Young Adults' Multiple Transitions

47

One important issue in the analysis of the life course is whether various transitions are "on time'' or "off time" (Abeles, 1987). This issue involves two components that we will examined in this chapter. The first has to do with subjective definitions of what the important, normative transitions are and the appropriate order of these transitions. The second is the order in which individuals actually undertake these transitions and how making one shift has implications for other transitions. Adolescence is a time of multiple changes (Greene & Boxer, 1986). It is a time when youth complete their compulsory schooling and face the prospect of moving into a variety of adult roles. As Wyn (1996a) notes, however, age alone does not define either youth or adulthood. Such a conceptualization "cannot adequately deal with the immense differences between groups of young people in the nature of the transitions to adult life" (Wyn, 1996a: 33). Rather, it is important to document the different patterns (Looker & Dwyer, 1998a) that young people expect and in fact create as they move into adult roles. Several researchers recently have emphasized the importance of examining gender differences in these transitions (Baker, 1985; Coles, 1996; Day, 1990; Looker, 1985; Looker & McNutt, 1989; Mackie, 1987; Mandell & Crysdale, 1993; Moen, 1985; Rossi, 1985; Thiessen, 1996). Not only do young women and young men undertake some different transitions, but the ones they share may happen at different times and/or in different sequence. The meaning of and the costs associated with various transitions are also likely to vary by gender (Looker, 1993). Recent analyses have recognized the fact that many of the transitions to adulthood are becoming extended (Dwyer, 1996; Krahn, 1996; McGrath, 1996; Sharpe, 1996). The transition from school to work is becoming more complex (Coles, 1996, Coles, 1995; Jones & Wallace, 1992, Roberts, 1996; Wyn, 1996b) and multidimensional (Krahn, 1996; p. 7). As Thomas (1993, p. 126) commented for much of the population, transitions between the roles of student and employee have become "multiple in time and increasing in variety." We sought to document some of the complexities of youth transitions and the ways in which work, education, and family transitions are interlinked, in both the normative expectations and the actions of youth. Data Collection This was a longitudinal cohort study of youth living in three areas of Canada: Hamilton, Ontario (to permit a comparison with an earlier study

48


[Looker, 1994]; Halifax, Nova Scotia (to permit a regional urban comparison); and rural Nova Scotia (to permit a rural-urban comparison). The rural sample included information from 11 school districts, chosen to be representative of their economic regions (see Looker, 1993, for details). Names and addresses of all youth born in 1971 in their catchment area were obtained from the school boards. These lists included school leavers as well as those who had already graduated. A random sample of 400 youth was drawn in each of the three sample areas. In-depth face-toface interviews were completed in 1989 when the youths were 17 years of age, turning 18. The response rates were 78% in Hamilton, 71% in Halifax, and 72% in rural Nova Scotia. The interviews explored youths' experiences in family and school and visions of their future life, particularly their educational and occupational aspirations and expectations. Primarily as a means of updating our records concerning their current mailing addresses, we sent a short questionnaire to our respondents in 1992. Then in 1994, we sent a detailed interview to the corrected addresses. We were able to obtain data 1 from 838 respondents in 1994, representing 68% of the original sample. The 1994 questionnaire documented, retrospectively, their education and occupational histories in 4month increments. Additionally, many of the questions asked in 1989 were repeated, giving us the necessary information to tap both uncertainty and change. Historical Context

The time period during which these data were collected coincided with a number of profound changes taking place in the Canadian economy. The 1980s were a time of deep recession followed by a short-lived recovery and then a downturn (Krahn, 1991). This situation contrasted markedly with the economic expansion that characterized the 1960s and 1970s (Anisef, Okihiro, & James, 1982; Rashid, 1993). The 1990s brought in another recession, during which youth unemployment and underemployment rose dramatically (Krahn & Lowe, 1990; Redpath, 1994). Despite the demographic shifts related to the postwar baby boom that lead to a decrease in the population of 15- to 19-year-olds in Canada, the early 1990s saw an increase in high-school completion rates (Krahn, 1996) and an increase in postsecondary participation, such that Canada had the highest university participation rates among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (Oderkirk, 1993). The 1990s also brought a shift to more jobs, being located in the service sector

Diverse Directions: Young Adults' Multiple Transitions (Osberg & Grude, 1995) and an increased reliance on part-time as compared with full-time work (Krahn, 1995). A mix of school and work became more and more common (Krahn, 1996, p. 24). Labor-market instabilities meant that more and more youth experienced bouts of unemployment and/or were pushed out of the labor force (Krahn & Lowe, 1990) Prior to the 1980s, more men than women attended university in Canada. By the time of the 1981 census, this situation had shifted so that equal numbers of women and men attended, at least at the undergraduate level, although men still dominated postgraduate work (Statistics Canada, 1981). By the early 1990s, women were slightly overrepresented in undergraduate enrollments (Statistics Canada, 1994). There were also shifts in the gender composition of the work force during the 1980s and 1990s. Women were employed in a wider diversity of positions in the later years (Armstrong & Armstrong, 1983; Boulet & Lavallee, 1984; Hughes, 1990,1995). The Areas

Hamilton is located in the highly industrialized region of southern Ontario. It is itself very much an industrial city, with a range of industrybased businesses, including two major steel plants. By contrast, major sources of employment in Halifax are the various levels of government (municipal, provincial, and federal). In addition to being the provincial capital, Halifax boasts several postsecondary educational institutions. Hamilton is home to one university and a large community college; being located in southern Ontario, it is within commuting distance of several other postsecondary institutions. Rural Nova Scotia is more heavily dependent on primary industries than are either of the two urban areas, and it has chronically high levels of unemployment, exacerbated in the 1990s by severe cutbacks at the fishing industry. Although there are universities and community colleges close to some of the rural respondents, the majority of respondents have no direct access to either university or community colleges without leaving their home community. The recession that was to influence many areas of Canada in the late 1980s had not yet hit Hamilton or Halifax when the first data collection was being undertaken in 1989. Unemployment in both Hamilton and Halifax was about 9%. In this, Hamilton reflected the employment scene in much of the region of southern Ontario. Halifax, on the other hand, was an oasis in what some would see as a desert of unemployment. 2 Being the provincial capital and relying so heavily on government posi-

49

50


tions, Halifax did not feel the full crunch of the recession until the 1990s, when governments at all levels intensified programs of restraint and retrenchment. Measurements

We divided transitions into two types: (1) activity transitions, or those that eat up daily hours, and (2) lifestyle transitions, such as leaving the parental home. In the former, we included specifically full-time work, part-time work, full-time school, part-time school, unemployment (but looking for work), full-time (unpaid) homemaker, part-time (unpaid) homemaker, full-time child care (own children), part-time child care (own children). In the summer of 1994, our young adults were asked to indicate which of these activities they did within each 4-month time block, starting with January to April 1989 and ending with January to April 1994, for a total of 16 time blocks. We defined an activity transition as a change within an activity domain between two adjacent time blocks, either by initiating such activity or terminating it. For each domain, our measures could range from 0 (no transitions into or out of that activity over the whole time period) to 15 (indicating alternating entering and exiting of that activity between each successive time period). This measure can be thought of as capturing the extent of discontinuities in a given domain. Measures of the youths' attitudes to normative sequencing of transitions and their own expectations about these transitions came from precoded questions in the 1989 interview and the 1994 questionnaires. Details of question wording, where relevant, are included with the corresponding table. Because one purpose of our analysis is to indicate changing expectations and attitudes, we include only those 1989 respondents who also responded in 1994. Given the focus on this subset of the 1989 youth, the results reported in this analysis differ to some extent from other analyses of the 1989 data set. Findings Normative Attitudes

We began our analysis of transitions norms by examining the respondents' attitudes to various key transitions. As we have said, there are dif-


51

Table 2-1. Percentage Who Would Feel Bothered by Not Experiencing Certain Transitions, by Gender, 1989 and 1994 1994

1989 Role Experience* Full-time job Marriage Children University graduation*7

% Male (n)

% Female (n)

% Male (n)

% Female (n)

99(344) 82(342) 82(342) 70(337)

96(465) 85(463) 84(459) 75(459)

98(287) 80(286) 84(286)

93(405) 86(404) 89(405)

fl

For the role experiences of full-time job, marriage, and children, respondents were asked to indicate how bothered they would be if they did not have these experiences. The percentages indicate combined responses of "bothered a great deal" and "bothered a bit." For the question about university graduation, respondents were asked to indicate how much they agree with the statement "I will be disappointed if I don't graduate from university. The percentages are those who either "strongly agreed" or "agreed" with this statement. *This question was not asked in 1994. Percentages in bold type indicate statistically significant gender differences (p < .05).

ferent "markers" that are used in young peoples7 negotiations of adult status. These include obtaining a full-time job, getting married, having children, and obtaining a university education. Any one of these, depending on the context, may be sufficient for considering oneself to be an adult. Looker and Dwyer (1998b) reported that two thirds or more of a sample of Australian youth saw having a secure job, being married, becoming a parent, and completing one's education credentials as important to claiming adult status. A similar number saw moving out of the parental home as an important part of the transition to adulthood. Table 2-1 shows the normative agreement on the importance of each of these markers to the young people in the Canadian sample areas. Virtually all male (99%) and almost all female respondents (96%) in 1989 said they would be bothered if they never had a full-time paid job. This is particularly telling for the young women. By this measure, they are almost as committed to having paid work as are their male counterparts.3 This commitment to work remained high over the following 5 years: by 1994, when the respondents were between 23 and 24 years of age, 98% of the men and 93% of the women gave the same response. This high level of consensus is evidence of a strongly held social norm. Part of the expectation that young adults have is that they will work, and work full-time.

52


The apparent commitment to work was virtually unanimous in our sample, but respondents' commitment to marriage and parenthood was also very high. In other questions, we established that all but a handful (less than 10%) expected to marry and have at least one child. Here we see that they considered these transitions important enough that upward of 80% said they would be bothered if they never married and/or never had a child. In 1989, there was no statistically significant gender difference in the responses to how bothered one would be: only 2% to 3% more women than men indicated they would be bothered if they never got married or if they never had any children. Over time, several things happened with respect to beliefs about both marriage and parenthood. First, a small but statistically significant gender difference emerged for both topics; by 1994, a higher percentage of women than men stated they would be bothered if they did not experience marriage and/or parenthood. For the issue of marriage, this gender difference was created by a slight decrease in the percentage of men and a slight increase in the percentage of women who stated they would be bothered if they never got married. With respect to parenthood, the percentage of both men and women who stated they would be bothered if they never had a child increased, but the increase was greater among women than men. The last row of Table 2-1 gives us information on the youths' commitment to pursuing a particular form of postsecondary education, more specifically a university degree. Unfortunately, this question was asked only in 1989, so there can be no examination of shifts over time. Nevertheless, at 17 years of age, at least 7 of every 10 of the youths saw obtaining a university degree as a sufficiently important goal for themselves that they would be disappointed if it did not happen. Beyond expectations that they would make these important transitions at some point, the youths also had fairly consistent images of the appropriate order of the transitions. We again have measures of how bothered they would be by certain scenarios, particularly focusing on the relative timing of marriage. Table 2-2 gives the relevant results. A complex series of gender and maturation/time differences characterized our respondents' feelings about having out-of-sequence transitions. First, in both time periods, statistically significantly higher percentages of young men than young women felt they would be bothered if they got married before finishing school (85% vs. 80% in 1989; 68% vs. 51% in 1994). More men than women (83% vs. 64% and 77% vs. 48%) would be bothered if they got married before they got a full-time job. Other analyses (e.g., Looker, 1993) have shown that marriage has


53

Table 2-2. Percentage Who Would Feel Bothered by Out-of-Sequence Transitions, by Gender, 1989 and 1994 1994

1989 Sequence

% Male (n)

Marriage before finishing school 85(336) Marriage before full-time job 83(338) Children before marriage 90(339)

% Female (n)

% Male (n)

% Female (n)

80(461) 64(460) 87(462)

68(285) 77(283) 69(286)

51(406) 48(405) 65(407)

Percentages in bold type indicate statistically significant gender differences (p < .05).

quite different meanings for young men and young women. Men still see themselves as responsible for providing for the financial security of the "family" once they marry. Marriage for young women restricts some options, particularly those that would involve geographical mobility, but it does not push them into the labor force (and therefore out of schooling) as much as it would young men. Marriage has implications for the work that young women can pursue, but it does not (as it might have in earlier eras) mean they will be pushed out of the labor force, nor does it mean, as it seems to for young men, that they would be pushed into the labor force by the financial responsibilities of marriage. With respect to having a child before getting married, the same gender tendency exists but does not reach statistical significance in either year. Table 2-2 also shows that for both genders, there are substantial declines in the percentages of our respondents who would feel bothered by having any of the out-of-sequence transitions. For example, in 1994, fewer men (69% vs. 90% in 1989) and fewer women (65% vs. 87% in 1989) would feel bothered by becoming a parent before getting married. This decline in concern with age may reflect a changing attitude to formal marriage as the youth matured. The data in Table 2-1 suggest that it does not reflect a decrease in the importance of marriage. It is interesting to note that women are not more likely than men to be bothered by having a child before marriage. Given that mothers, not fathers, tend to have responsibility for a child in a single-parent household, one might expect that the young women would be more concerned about the relative ordering of these two events. This was not the case. There was no statistically significant gender difference in attitude in either 1989 or 1994. A possible interpretation of this pattern could derive from other infor-

54


mation in the data set. Few, if any, of the youths or their parents anticipated negative outcomes, such as divorcing, being on welfare, or experiencing unemployment. If the pattern of anticipating positive rather than negative outcomes extended to the youths' attitudes to marriage and childbearing, we would expect that they did not anticipate unplanned pregnancies. Rather, their child would be planned and wanted - and whether the two partners are formally married at the time would be less significant than their willingness to make the commitment of having a child together. We cannot, with the current data, test this last suggestion, but it would help explain the absence of an otherwise expected gender difference. By 1994, many of the young people surveyed had in fact already pursued some postsecondary education. For those (particularly rural youth) who had to leave their home community to pursue advanced education, marriage at 24 years of age, when they had already made the move, was less of a threat to their schooling than it would be at age 17 when they were in high school, living at home. Given their progression in terms of postsecondary education, the decline in concern about the effect of marriage on their education is not surprising. As with the relative ordering of education and marriage, the order of full-time work and marriage was an issue for fewer of the respondents in 1994 than it was in 1989. They were closer to having their education credentials at 24 years of age, so the financial implications of marriage were less problematic than they would have been for a teenager. In fact, the number of women concerned about the order of these two transitions sank to just under 50% by 1994. Overall, our data on normative expectations suggest that despite variations by age and gender, there was a high degree of consensus among the youths on the importance of higher education, full-time work, marriage, and parenting. They also had some fairly clear ideas about the appropriate normative sequencing of these events. Anticipation of "outof-sequence" transitions did not sit well with these young people. Individual Expectations

The next stage was to look at what these same youths said about their own expectations with respect to these transitions. Did they see themselves as undertaking these important transitions? Did they see these transitions as being in the near future or as distant goals? Table 2-3 shows us the percentage of youth who expect to be married by 24 years of age.


55

Table 2-3. Marriage Expectations by Gender Expect to Be Married by 24 years of Age" 1989 responses 1994 responses n

% Male 34 16 344

% Female 46 33 465

Includes respondents who have already been married, divorced, or widowed. Gender differences are statistically significant (p < .05) in both 1989 and 1994.

Given the well-established practice of there being an age gap in favor of grooms being older than brides, it is not surprising that more of the young women (46% vs. 34% of the men) say they expect to be married by 24 years of age. We will see later (under "Transition Experiences") how many men and women have in fact made this transition by 1994, but here it is relevant to note the shift in the expectations over time. When they were interviewed in 1989, the youths were at a very different stage of their life course than they were in 1994. As 17-year-olds, most of them were in school and very few of them (and presumably few of their friends) were married or had children. They planned to marry at some point, but questions about the likely age of marriage were likely to be tapping into their beliefs about the normative age at which marriage is most likely to occur. The youths had moved into a different point in their developmental trajectory by the time they were contacted in 1994. At that point, most of them had graduated from high school and undertaken some postsecondary education; many had worked either summers or during the school year. Legally, they were adults and were able to participate in many areas of adult life from which they were earlier barred. Marriage is a more viable option at 24 years of age than at 17. Asking them at this point about likely age of marriage is essentially asking them whether they have immediate plans for making this transition or whether it is still a few - or many - years off. One third of the young women and one sixth of the young men either are married or see marriage in their near future as of 1994. Applying the norms to their own life situation apparently calls for some flexibility. Table 2-4 gives the youths' expectations, for both 1989 and 1994, about number of children by 24 years of age. Only a small minority (12% of the men and 5% of the women in 1994) say they plan to have no children.

56

From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Table 2-4. Number of Children Expected, by Gender, 1989 and 1994 Number of Children Expected None 1 2 3 >4

n

1989 % Male 6 10 57 18 9 334

1994

% Female 8 9 48 21 14 456

% Male

% Female

12 10 55 17 7 278

5 13 57 18 7 389

Most of these are the ones who are in the group in Table 2-1 that said they would not be bothered were they to remain childless. Having examined the youths' plans for marriage and parenting, our next step was to look at one more transition: to postsecondary education (Table 2-5). The majority said they expected to obtain some form of postsecondary education, most commonly from a university. University education is touted by parents, teachers, and particularly high school counselors as the path to take after high school: 72% of the youths said their counselor thought it best that they go to university; 67%, 66%, and 73% said the same of their fathers, mothers and teachers, respectively. In 1989, 68% of the young women expected to take this route; 19% of them expected to go beyond a first degree to postgraduate work. The young men matched this percentage for postgraduate studies, although somewhat fewer young men planned on stopping after an undergraduate degree (39% of men vs. 47% of women). Only about 1 in 10 men and women planned to stop their formal education after high school (12% of men and 10% of women in 1989). Yet, these figures also show the diversity of youths' expectations. Although more than 50% planned to go to a university, about 25% also saw other forms of postsecondary education as viable options. By 1994 there was an upward shift in the expectations of many of the youths. Only 7% of both men and women then said they were willing to stop with no more than high school. More of them than in 1989 planned to pursue a postgraduate education, but again, many saw nonuniversity programs as meeting their needs. Indeed, nonuniversity programs were chosen by more respondents in 1994 than in 1989, although substantially


57

Table 2-5. Educational Expectations, by Gender, in 1989 and 1994 1989 % Male High school or less Some nonuniversity Nonuniversity certificate Some university University undergraduate degree Postgraduate Total n

12 3 24 1 39 21 100 330

1994

% Female % Male 10 1 22 2 47 19 100 444

7 27 9 6 19 32 100 309

% Female 7 17 10 4 18 44 100 405

Gender differences for 1989 are not statistically significant; gender differences for 1994 are statistically significant (p < .05).

fewer men and women then expected to obtain a nonuniversity certificate. Details on the specific programs and their length indicate that even within the postsecondary options, there was a wide range of paths that the youth expected to take. To summarize, as youth moved from being teenagers to being young adults, their expectations for the future changed. Marriage became less definite an immediate option as they moved into their twenties. Parenting was still seen as important, but the time frame tended to be postponed, and the number of youth saying they planned to have more than four children dropped. Meanwhile, these young adults were turning toward more and more postcompulsory education. Few anticipated stopping after high school; more than half planned to get at least one university degree. We saw evidence of a blurring of expectations, however. There were patterns, but nowhere near the 80% to 90% or more consistency in response that we saw in Tables 2-2 and 2-1. Transition Experiences

The data on youths' attitudes presented thus far in this chapter suggest consensus on norms surrounding several of these transitions. The section on expectations shows that the youths had a range of options they were pursuing. Some of the variation reflects the social location of the youths (see Looker, 1993; Thiessen & Looker, 1993); some reflects the choices the youths and their parents made. The next phase of the analy-

58

From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Table 2-6. Work, School, Homemaking, and Child-Care Transitions Experienced by 24 years of Age, by Gender Respondent's Gender Transition Full-time job Part-time job* Unemployment Full-time student Part-time student Finished all education Left parental home* Marriage* Parenthood* Full-time homemaker* Part-time homemaker* Full-time child caretaker* Part-time child caretaker

% Male 82 64 42 78 20 40 52 13 6 0 1 0 1

% Female 77 73 38 83 25 47 65 23 15 9 8 11 6

n = 812. *p < .05.

sis describes the transitions that the youths had in fact made by the time they were 23 or 24 years of age. Table 2-6 documents the different transitions that the youths reported at the time of the 1994 data collection. For all transitions except experiencing unemployment, statistically significant or nearly significant gender differences (p < .10) appear. By 24 years of age, women are substantially more likely than men to have left the parental home (65% vs. 52%), gotten married (23% vs. 13%), become a parent (15% vs. 6%), and consequently engaged in the traditionally female tasks of homemaking and child care, on either a full- or part-time basis. In analyses not reported here, we established that leaving home, marriage, and parenthood had quite dissimilar consequences for men and women. Marriage, and particularly parenthood, introduced young women, but not young men, to domestic roles of homemaking and child care. Less than 10% of the men who were married or had children reported taking responsibility for homemaking or child care. By contrast, about half (47%) of young women experienced homemaking or child-care roles if they were married, and about three quarters of them (78%) did so if they were mothers (data not shown).


59

Table 2-7. Transitions Into and Out of Work and School Between 1989 and 1994

63 7 15 3 2 3 1 2 100

%

Part-time Schooling

24 17

78 9 2 4 0 1 0 1 100

7 2 4 4 31 100

CJl

38 14 13 7 6 3 5 4 10 100

%

Full-time Schooling

CJl

Total

31 13 11 6 6 4 8 3 19 100

%

% Part-time Jobs Unemployment

CJl

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >8

%

Full-time Jobs

CJl

Number of Transitions, 1989-94

n = 812. A transition is defined as reported movement into, or out of, a given status. The

No large differences emerged regarding labor-force participation variables. Women and men were almost equally likely to have held a full-time job, at least for the period between 1989 and 1994. This is a transition about which they indicated considerable concern in Table 2-1. It is not clear, however, that having had such a position for one time period was sufficient. The goal (which is clear from other data, not shown, on their preferred and expected jobs) was to have a steady full-time job. There was little gender difference in the numbers of youths reporting bouts of unemployment during this time period. Unemployment was clearly seen as a negative outcome. Only a handful of the rural youths saw bouts of seasonal employment supplemented by "unemployment insurance" as in any way desirable. Presumably, this was seen as a viable option to these rural youths because it is a recognizable survival strategy in areas with chronically high levels of unemployment. With recent restructuring of the unemployment provisions by the Canadian federal government, however, such an option becomes less viable. Despite its negative status, about 4 in every 10 of the young men and young women had experienced unemployment, even by 24 years of age. For at least some of the youths, these experiences of unemployment pushed them back into school, either as a holding pattern or in an effort to increase their employability by securing additional credentials, hence the large numbers of women and men still in school in 1994.

60


Table 2-7 goes one step beyond Table 2-6 to indicate the number of transitions in and out of a particular activity the youths experienced in the period from April 1989 to May 1994. Nineteen percent of the youth had moved in and out of eight or more full-time jobs. Ten percent had had as many part-time jobs. Thirty-one percent had moved in and out of education programs. Most of this movement reflected students' ceasing their studies in the spring, working (or being unemployed, or both) in the summer, then returning to school, but it also highlighted the overlap between school and work. The youths moved in and out of school, in and out of full and part-time work, and often combined schooling and paid work. There was no one consistent pattern; indeed, we were struck by the variability in the patterns. Many youth experienced no full-time work; others experienced several sessions in which they were employed full time. Some, but not all, ventured into part-time work and/or part-time schooling. Here, we see some of the evidence of both the complexity of the youths' experiences and the blurring of the boundaries between the different transitions. This complexity comes through more clearly in the visual patterns in Figure 2-1. There are three main patterns in Figure 2-1 that are relevant to our discussion. The first is the relatively consistent pattern of part-time work. Although there was some variation, the rate of part-time employment tended to stay at about 30%, regardless of the time of year. Full-time work and schooling varied more over the different time periods. The percentage of youths undertaking full-time studies went down in the summer months, then back up in the fall when they returned to school. There was a peak in the numbers going into full-time work, corresponding to the drop in the number of students during the summer period. The other trend to note is the gradual funneling of the youths' activities, so that during each successive September, fewer returned to full-time studies and more had shifted into full-time work, until the two groups seemed to converge. Although over 90% were in school full time between January and April 1989, less than 50% said the same 5 years later. The flip side of this is that less than 10% were in full-time work at 17 years of age; one third said they had a full-time job between January and April 1994. Sequencing of Transitions

We saw above in Table 2-2 that there was some consistency in the youths' attitudes about the appropriate order of these events. This consistency


61

Full-time work Part-time work Full-time student

Figure 2-1. Transitions between full and part-time work and full-time student activities, January 1989 to April 1994. was more evident in the 1989 responses when the respondents were teenagers. More flexibility was evident in the responses from 1994 in Table 2-2. Table 2-8 shows the order in which these youth have experienced some of these transitions. The first thing to note about Table 2-8 is that most of the transitions that the youths had undertaken were either in the appropriate sequence or within 12 months of each other. The other side to this pattern is that some youths (up to 24%) violate this normative sequence. There is considerable variation in which sequences are followed and which are more likely to be violated. Norms surrounding the order of marriage and other transitions were most likely to be followed. The exception to this statement is the ordering of parenting and marriage; 12% (all women) were parents more than a year before they married. Next in the adherence to the normative sequencing was having children relative to finishing one's education, starting full-time work, and leaving home. For many, especially women, having a child put a stop to their educational plans. For others, especially men, having a child forced them into the labor force, even if it meant taking a less than perfect job. It is interesting that only 64% of the youths were classified as being "in sequence" in terms of becoming a parent and leaving home. Fifteen percent were still at home more than a year after having a child.

62


Table 2-8. Pairwise Order of Transition Experiences % In Sequence

Marriage - children Full-time work - children Leave home - children Finish education - children Full-time work - marriage Leave home - marriage Finish education - marriage Full-time work - leave home Finish education - leave home Finish education - full-time work

78 78 64 85 80 63 81 54 74 70

% Same Time"

% Out of Sequence

Total% (n)

11 11 22

12 11 15 10 7 1 7 24 16 11

100 (85) 100 (74) 100 (74) 100 (82) 100 (70) 100 (73) 100 (75) 100 (406) 100 (437) 100 (481)

CJl

Transition Sequences

13 36 12 21 10 20

The assumed normative sequence is identical to the order in which the sequence transition pairs are listed. "Defined as within 12 months.

In fact, the data in Table 2-8 show that "leaving home" was the one transition that seemed to be most often made "out of sequence" by these young adults. Only about half of them waited until they had left their parents' home to start full-time work. Sixteen percent (19% in urban areas) were still at home while completing their education, but note that virtually none (only 1%) lived with their parents after getting married. This norm is consistently followed. If the youths had not moved out by the time they were married, they did so within the year. Conclusion Our examination of the transitions that the youths had undertaken leads us to a number of conclusions. First of all, it is clear that the different transitions they make on their path to adulthood were linked to one other. These young people did not make decisions about their education and work in isolation from decisions about marriage and parenting. Several of these decisions have implications for the timing of leaving or returning to the parental home. Second, it is clear that these transitions were neither unidimensional nor one-way. These young people moved in and out of schooling and in and out of full-time work, part-time work, and "unemployment," they moved in and out of their parental home. Although few (< 1%) had moved "out of marriage," they moved in and out of the role of full-time

Diverse Directions: Young Adults' Multiple Transitions homemaker and child minder, depending on other pressures present and the resources available to them. Finally, there are some interesting and persistent gender differences in the patterns we have observed. Women and men see the world differently in terms of the normative constraints they perceive. The combination of marriage and parenting carries a different weight depending on one's gender. Men appear to live in a more unidimensional world - work is the issue for them. They pursue education to get a good job; they feel they need a job (preferably a "good" job) before they marry and before they take on the responsibility of parenting. Their see their responsibility in marriage and parenting as being the financial provider. For women, adulthood is more of a balancing act. Women appear to live in a more multidimensional world. More of the women are married and more of them have children at 24 years of age. More of them have taken on the role of being full or part-time homemaker and/or full or part-time child minder, yet as many or more of them aspire to and expect a university education; as many of them see full-time work as an important part of their future. These results document the fact that many stages of the life course are still very gendered. Becoming an adult woman is quite different from becoming an adult man. The types and timing and sequencing of transitions vary by gender. The implications of these transitions also vary. In addition to data on the sequencing of transitions, this chapter has presented empirical evidence on the attitudes of a sample of Canadian youth to the norms about this sequencing. There appear to be some strongly held norms, as evidenced by high levels of consistency in the youths' responses. The longitudinal data show that these norms shift over time and that not all young people are able to follow the prescriptions they acknowledge, however. Rather, the patterns of their life courses reflect the contingencies that they face - as young women and men in the 1990s. Notes 1. For 108 respondents, this information was obtained on a "short version" of the questionnaire, which included only a few key questions. For about half of these, the information was obtained indirectly from another source, usually a parent, rather than directly from the youth respondent. 2. Data from the 1986 census indicates that both Hamilton and Halifax had unemployment rates lower than the 10.3% national rate. The corresponding rate for Nova Scotia that year was 13.5%. Rural Nova Scotia rates are consistently higher than those in the Halifax

63

64


area, unemployment rates for rural youth are particularly high - up to 30% in some areas. 3. Although only 3% fewer women than men stated they would be bothered by never having full-time paid employment, this difference is nevertheless statistically significant because of the low standard deviation occasioned by the extreme skew in the responses.

New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion JOHN BYNNER

No clear or strong relationship can be evidenced between qualifications and employer needs. Deficiencies are noted in relevance, access responsiveness, flexibility and cost effectiveness. Some are apparently attributable to the structure of qualifications, others to the content. The studies do not reveal distinct major and minor occupations, nor distinct vertical hierarchies. Level of qualifications is predominantly relevant in recruitment and selection. It seems to become an issue for employers only when it interferes with utilization and supply (Pearson & Marshall, 1996). This quotation from a recent report on skills utilization by British employers indicates how loosely the system of vocational preparation in Great Britain (Vocational Education and Training, or VET) and the certification it produces is linked to labor-market demands. In line with what social-exclusion theorists tell us about the employment value of qualifications and skills (e.g., Collins, 1979), British employers appear to use qualifications more as a means of sifting young job applicants in terms of the broad abilities associated with educational attainment, as much as by their accredited skills. Thus, academic qualifications, with no direct relevance to employment, are often prized over vocational qualifications and the certification produced by youth training because of the personal qualities they are perceived to signify in the individuals who possess them. In their absence, such qualities need to be demonstrated in other ways: Personal recommendations, appearance at job interviews, and especially evidence of work experience itself may all count as much as if not more than - vocational qualifications in convincing the employer of the young applicant's suitability for the job. Thus, in what Hamilton (1994) described as "permeable" employment systems, employers do not use qualifications to erect barriers to access to particular kinds of jobs so much as use them, when the local economy is contracting, to ration job opportunities overall. Such systems, common to North America, Great Britain, and the countries of southern Europe, contrast strikingly with those of northern European countries, such as 65

66


Germany and Sweden, where gaining the relevant vocational qualification is a prerequisite for entering a particular skilled job. This chapter uses data collected in large-scale longitudinal studies to examine the relationships of three types of skills - basic skills (literacy and numeracy), work-related skills, and work-specific skills - to employability in the modern labor market. The aim is to reveal the part these different types of skills play in the processes of employment integration and exclusion. The New Labor Market Labor-market changes globally have muddied the water even further. As the rate of technological change has accelerated, the skills and qualifications required for entry into different kinds of employment have begun to continually change. This puts a strain on vocational preparation systems everywhere because, except in the most static kinds of crafts or trades, a large number of the skills acquired through VET are likely to be out of date by the time the young person is able to offer them in the workplace (Jallade, 1989; First Dilic, 1991). Even if trainers were able to upgrade their training continually to match employer demands, it is unlikely that employers would be able to specify precisely what their skills needs were, for as Pearson and Marshall (1996) note, "The nature of the relationship between skill change, qualification change and utilization and the processes of employment remains essentially obscure." Moreover, the very idea of training for lifetime occupations, along the lines of the German Beruf, loses salience as increasingly, skilled workers face the prospect of occupational change and continual reskilling to retain employment. In such a scenario, described by German social theorist Ulrich Beck as the "risk society" (Beck, 1992), single occupations give way to "occupational portfolios" (Gershuny and Pahl, 1996) as the means of maintaining lifetime employment. The transitions of the past, dictated by such structural factors as social class, gender, and ethnicity, give way increasingly to individualized routes to employment (Evans & Furlong, 1996; Roberts, Clark, & Wallace, 1994). Young people keep their options open, building up the human capital embodied in qualifications and work experience (Becker, 1975), rather in the nature of vocational insurance to protect themselves against the risk of an uncertain future in the labor market. Despite the uncertain connection between labor-market demand and training for skill, most countries have felt since the early 1980s the need to meet the challenge of labor-market changes by "upskilling" their work-

New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion

67

forces. In Great Britain, there was a burgeoning of training schemes in the 1980s, for early school leavers, culminating in the national Youth Training Scheme (YTS), initially to keep young people off the unemployment registers and subsequently to equip them with the new skills that industry was supposed to need (Coles, 1995). Subsequently, these were followed by the introduction in Great Britain of the country's first curriculum to be taught in schools and a system of accredited national vocational qualifications (NVQs). Those countries with highly institutionalized forms of vocational preparation, such as Germany and Sweden, sought to reform their systems by loosening occupational boundaries and reducing the number of occupations for which training was offered (currently in the order of 360 in Germany); they also experimented with British-style training initiatives. More recently, the general trend has been for young people in all industrialized countries to stay on in education. In the 1970s, two thirds of young people in Britain left the education system at the minimum age, 16, to move directly into jobs. By 1993, two thirds were staying on in education to try to get some qualifications before trying their luck in the labor market (DES, 1988; DfE, 1994). Pointing in North American directions, higher education entrance doubled over the same period from 15% to nearly 30%. More complex patterns of vocational insurance were evident in such countries as Germany, where many gymnasium (grammar school) graduates (Abiturienten) were signing up for an apprenticeship to acquire vocational skills before cashing in their Abitur by going to a university (Heinz, 1990). The net effect of these changes is the extension of the transition to adulthood for ever larger numbers of young people. At the same time, there are increasing tendencies toward "polarization," as those without credentials are marginalized into the limited range of unskilled, often part-time, jobs that are still available. A notable feature of the response to labor-market change in Great Britain was the lag in taking educational opportunities behind the collapse of the youth labor market at the end of the 1970s. Even by the end of the 1980s, about half of British young people were still leaving school at 16 years of age to seek employment, over half of whom ended up in training schemes instead (DfE, 1994). Under poor labor-market conditions, the destination of a large proportion of these trainees subsequently was unemployment (Banks et al., 1992; Bynner, 1992a). Social Exclusion and Employability Such examples of labor-market difficulties for some groups reflect the counterpart to individualized career routes and the accumulation of

68


human capital as vocational insurance. As the transition to adulthood extends and an ever-higher premium is placed on education qualifications, those who drop out from education or, for other reasons, fail to acquire the attributes that employers demand have increasing difficulty getting jobs: They are forced to seek work on the margins of the labor market or exit from it altogether. Such processes of "social exclusion" are not experienced uniformly but tend to be concentrated in particular groups and families, characterized by "economic, social, cultural, spatial or political disadvantage" (CEC, 1995). Social exclusion is mediated by the personal attributes the individual presents to employers. The question arises, therefore, as to what constitutes employability in the modern state and what role vocational preparation systems can and do play in facilitating it. In line with others who have tried to elucidate the concept of employability (e.g., Brown, 1995; CBI, 1989; Krahn, 1996), we can conceptualize employability as comprising three types of skills: basic skills, work-related skills, and work-specific skills. Table 3-1 sets out the three types of skill schematically. Basic skills and some work-related skills are at a premium in gaining entry to modern employment, and work-specific skills are at a premium in changing jobs. Traditionally, employers required possession of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy as the minimum entrance standard for anything other than completely unskilled employment, though even in this type of employment, according to a recent United Kingdom survey of employers (Atkinson & Spilsbury, 1993), such skills are increasingly expected. Under modern employment conditions, the basic skills of literacy and numeracy need to be extended to include keyboard skills and "computer literacy" Other work-related skills, such as working from instructions and plans, computational skills, teaching skills, and finance skills are increasingly at a premium. A wide range of more generic work-related skills are also coming to be demanded, such as flexibility, adaptability, creativity, teamwork, and leadership, described by Jallade (1989) as "horizontal skills" and by Brown (1995) as "charismatic skills". Brown argued that one of the reasons why modern employment practice has increased class-based social exclusion is precisely because such skills are central to a middle-class upbringing. These changing skills demands reflect the demise of the unskilled jobs associated with traditional manufacturing and the move toward information technology-based employment. They have been accompanied by the expansion of part-time or "patchwork" employment (Heinz, 1991).

69

New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion Table 3-1. Components of Employ ability

Component

Constituent Skills

Basic skills

Old

Literacy Numeracy Oracy

Type of Capital Formation = Experience Exposure x Time

Source Family

Human capital

Education

Social capital Human capital

Family

New

Work-related skills

Keyboarding Computing Old Teaching Counseling Finance Supervising Organizing Punctuality Recordkeeping New

Work-specific skills

Adaptability Flexibility Leadership Teamwork Creativity Using tools Using plans Joinery Hairdressing Fitting Electronics Plumbing Etc.

VET

Human capital, Employment capital

Employment

VET = Vocational Education and Training.

They have also affected men and women differently. Men without the core requirements for employability face a limited range of casual unskilled work or unemployment. Women with poor skills leave the labor market early, typically to have children (Ekinsmyth & Bynner, 1994). Such changes raise a number of questions about employability, which the rest of this chapter will address: What are the skill components of employability? How does their absence or presence, singly and in combination, affect the process of inclusion into or exclusion from employment at different stages of the life course, and what form does

70


this exclusion take? Are there differences between men and women both in the kinds of skills that constitute employability and in the forms social exclusion takes? Data Sources To answer the questions posed above, I draw on findings from a program of research on skills, involving two large-scale longitudinal research resources, the 1958 and 1970 British birth-cohort studies, known respectively as the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) (Ekinsmyth, Bynner, Montgomery, & Shepherd, 1994; Bynner & Steedman, 1995; Ekinsmyth & Bynner, 1994; Bynner, 1996; Bynner, Morphy, & Parsons, 1996; Bynner & Steedman, 1995). The NCDS comprises a cohort of all people born in a single week in 1958, and the BCS70, a cohort of all people born in a single week in 1970. The subjects were followed from birth to adulthood at 5, 7, 11, 16, 23, and 33 years of age (NCDS) and at 5,10,16, and 21 years of age (10% sample, BCS70). In the 23-year-old and 33-year-old NCDS surveys and in the 10% BCS70 21-year-old sample survey, a large number of questions were asked about the cohort members' perceptions of their basic skills problems. Up to 12% acknowledged some kind of difficulty (Ekinsmyth & Bynner, 1994), of which the most common were writing and spelling. Cohort members also completed an inventory requiring them to assess how good they thought they were at 15 work-related skills, (drawn up with the help of Department of Employment officials) on a scale: "good," "fair," "poor," or "don't have the skill" (full details are given in Bynner & Fogelmann, 1993, and descriptive results in Bynner, 1994). Much information was also collected on occupational and family histories back to 16 years of age (the statutory minimum school-leaving age) and a range of other personal characteristics. In the BCS70 21-year-old sample survey, the cohort members' "functional" literacy and numeracy skills were also assessed. All sample members completed tests comprising 16 literacy tasks and 14 numeracy tasks encompassing the use of literacy in such everyday situations as reading instructions, extracting information from a timetable, working out the area of a room, and working out the cost of discounted items in a shop (full details are given in Ekinsmyth & Bynner, 1994). From the responses obtained, it was possible to compute functional literacy and numeracy scores that were standardized to a scale of 0 to 10. To allow those respondents who were most lacking in basic skills to be separated out from

New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion those most proficient in them, respondents were the classified into three groups with boundaries representing natural breaks in the distribution of scores and where maximum discrimination between the group's other characteristics was evident. The low-literacy group was defined by scores in the range of 0 to 5.2 (6% of the total sample), the medium group by scores in the range of 5.3 to 9.0 (77%), and the top group by scores in the range 9.1 to 10 (17%). The comparable grouping for numeracy was low, 0 to 3.6 (18%); medium, 3.7 to 7.9 (66%); and high, 8 to 10 (16%). The differences in the percentages falling into the low-literacy and lownumeracy groups reflects the much greater prevalence of poor numeracy in the British population. For the purposes of the analysis reported here, I focus on the comparison between the low-scoring group and the total sample. Basic Skills and the Transition to Work Functional weaknesses in literacy and numeracy impede all education attainment in school and restrict access to the further and higher education that follows it. They originate typically in disadvantaged home circumstances, where parents have low education achievements themselves and have difficulties in providing reinforcement for their children's school learning (Bynner & Steedman, 1995). In the BCS70 21-year-old survey, 60% of those with the lowest literacy scores had parents who had gained no education qualifications and 66% had gained no education qualifications themselves: 90% had not gotten beyond the basic 16-year school-leaving standard - the ordinary level ("O Level") of the General Certificate of Education (GCE). At 16 years of age in the mid-1980s, BCS70 cohort members had the opportunity to stay on in education or leave. If they stayed on at school in the sixth form or moved on to a further-education college, they might embark on A-level courses leading to higher education or take vocational courses as a preliminary to seeking work. If they left, they might get a job directly or after doing some youth training, ideally with a potential employer first. The less successful could experience a mixture of training and unskilled casual jobs interspersed with unemployment; others might leave the labor market altogether. Entry into these different routes varied from one part of the country to another. Although much the same proportions stayed on in education, the prospects of obtaining employment after leaving was also strongly dependent on the state of the local economy. In the 16-19 Initiative Survey, over 35% of 18-year-olds in economically

71

72


Table 3-2. Career Routes and Low Literacy and Numeracy Scores After 16 Years of Age Literacy Scores Low Numeracy Scores Low Trajectories Staying on Academic Vocational Leaving Job

YTS Job Mixed n (100%)

%Male '% Female

% Male % Female

All Respondents % Male % Female

0 15

0 21

0 14

3 21

15 18

16 29

32 15 12 41

23 19 26 53

28 15 14 96

20 19 19 188

30 12 9 759

12 11 12 864

YTS = Youth Training Scheme.

depressed Liverpool, Sheffield, and Kirkcaldy were in the halfway house of training schemes, casual work, and unemployment, compared with 10% in economically buoyant Swindon (Bynner, 1992a). Table 3-2 shows, for the BCS70 sample, the percentages of male and female cohort members in the low-literacy and the low-numeracy groups whose early careers, over the 2 years since the end of compulsory schooling (16 to 18 years of age), followed these different career patterns. Table 3-3 shows the percentages, at the time of interview, of those in three nonemployed statuses: unemployment, homemaking, training. As we might expect, Table 3-2 shows that compared with the sample as a whole, much higher proportions in the low-literacy and low-numeracy groups left school at 16 years of age (85% of men and 79% of women, compared with 67% of men and 55% of women in the sample as a whole). Of those who left, under half had gotten jobs; the rest of the young men had resided mainly in YTSs, and the young women, in the "mixed" category of unemployment, homemaking, and casual work. In the total sample, of those who had left education, over three fifths had obtained employment. The consequences of these early transition experiences are show in Table 3-3, which also highlights the different response of men and women to labor-market difficulties. At 21 years of age, 35% of men in the low-literacy group reported that they were unemployed, compared with 8% of women; 34% of women reported that they were "at home" caring for their families, but none of the men described themselves as in this category. This compares with 13% of men unemployed in the sample as a


73

Table 3-3. Labor-Market Status at 21 Years of Age and Low Literacy and Numeracy Scores Literacy Scores Low Numeracy Scores Low All Respondents Market Status Unemployment Homemaking Training n (100%)

% Male % Female 35 0 2 41

8 34 4 53

% Male 25 2 4 96

% Female %Male % Female 7 22 2 188

13 0 1 759

6 12 1 864

whole and 12% of women engaged in homemaking. Although there was no tendency for those in the low-literacy group to marry early, having children was associated with low literacy: One in 5 women in the low-literacy group had 2 or more children, compared with 1 in 20 in the sample as a whole. Among the men, there was no relationship between low literacy and having children. In these figures, we see signs both of the exclusion effects of poor basic skills and the characteristic forms of exclusion for men and women. Men, whose poor basic skills put them in the most vulnerable labor-market positions, drift between training schemes, casual jobs, and unemployment; women more often move on to the alternative career path of motherhood and home care. The consequences for these women may be not long-term unemployment so much as continuing disadvantage in the labor market. Women tend to return to the labor market, after having children, at a lower level than when they left it, often into such service jobs as cleaning (Joshi & Hinde, 1993); those who start at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy tend to stay there. Work-Related Skills We have seen that poor basic skills appear to impede entry into employment and to limit access to a restricted range of low-level jobs. Women with poor basic skills are especially disadvantaged in this respect; many withdraw from the labor market, often to have children. Poor basic skills not only limit opportunities directly, but also serve to inhibit the development of human capital in other respects. To what extent is this manifested in failure to develop the wider range of work-related skills, and how do they affect relations to the labor market? Such skills represent the more concrete elements of human and social capital, some of which

74


potential employees bring with them to a job and some of which they acquire through work itself. As noted earlier, in the BCS70 21-year-old survey and the 33-year-old survey in NCDS, cohort members indicated how good they thought they were at 15 work-related skills (Table 3-4). Possession of the skills differentiated men and women, with more men claiming to be good at using tools, working with plans, constructing, and calculating, and more women claiming to be good at writing, keyboarding, computing, teaching, advising, speaking, and caring. In the BCS70 survey, there were no differences with respect to selling, organizing, supervising, and finance. Notably, these latter skills were all claimed to a greater degree by men than by women in the NCDS survey at 33 years of age, suggesting that men were acquiring them as they progressed through employment to a greater extent than women were. Lack of some of these skills (i.e., any response other than "good" to the question about the possession of the skill) was associated with poor basic skills (reading and numeracy): for men, writing, using plans, keyboarding, computing, and calculating; for women, these skills plus speaking, teaching, supervising, advising/counseling, organizing, finance. For three of the skills, the relationship was in the opposite direction. Among the young men, poor basic skills were associated with being good at "using tools" and "constructing things," and among the young women, being good at "caring." Possession of these latter kinds of skills characterizes people whose employment opportunities are most limited: among men, because in Great Britain's unregulated labor market, at least, practical skills associated with the building trade are the only kinds they are able to offer as a basis for casual (often self-) employment (Bynner, 1994), and among women, because of the child care in which many who exit the labor market are engaged. Table 3-4 and 3-5 extend the picture to the relationships between workrelated skills and labor-market status for men and between work-related skills family status for women. Statuses are classified as signifying exclusion or inclusion in labor-market terms. That is, for both men and women, inclusion is represented first by full-time employment and second by full-time education, because of the good employment prospects full-time (usually higher) education at 21 years of age brings. For men, the excluded categories are unemployment and self-employment. For women, "at home" replaces unemployment; having children is also included with and without a partner because of the exit from the labor market this typically represents for 21-year-olds. Part-time work and


75

Table 3-4. Percent of Men Without Work-Related Skill by Employment Status at 21 Years of Age Exclusion

Skills Writing Using plans Keyboarding Computing Calculating Finance Supervising Teaching Advising Organizing Sales Speaking Caring Constructing Using tools n (100%)

Inclusion

Unemployed

Self-Employed

7

Full-Time Employed

67 62 89 81 75 90 85 85 79 85 81 53 79 54 52 52

72 60 91 96 70 80 69 76 64 75 69 59 87 55 27 54

63 47 56 75 66 82 68 75 67 83 75 54 88 56 43 71

7

Full-Time Education 48 44 77 56 35 74 81 78 58 81 90 41 85 69 63 408

of

Total 63 50 77 77 65 82 72 76 67 83 78 54 86 56 45 721

Figures in bold face display percentage differences between exclusion and inclusion cateories > 14% (P < .05).

self-employment are treated as halfway, intermediate categories because they involve choices for some women as well as exclusion pressures for others, brought about by lack of employment opportunities. Of course, being at home at 21 years of age, with or without children, may also be a matter of choice, as may self-employment and unemployment for men. In this respect, the exclusion comes from the lack of independent access to personal income or job security, or both. Being at home and having children are not mutually exclusive categories, so some of the same women appear in both of them. Mothers without partners are also a subset of all women with children. The striking feature of the relationships shown in Table 3-4 is their similarity to those just reported between the basic skills and the workrelated skills. Thus, compared with men in full-time employment and full-time education, those who were unemployed or self-employed reported lack of such skills as using plans, keyboard work, and computation. They also reported lack of finance skills, supervising skills, teaching

Table 3-5. Women Without Work-Related Skill by Status as a Parent and Employment Status Exclusion Skills Writing Using plans Keyboarding Computing Calculating Finance Supervising Teaching Advising Organizing Sales Speaking Caring Constructing Using tools n (100%)

Exclusion / Inclusion

Home

Children*

%

% Employed Part Time

Self-Employed

50 82 81 90 89 92 81 57 63 94 92 43 26 81 68 88

46 (52) 78 (77) 77 (83) 87 (96) 85 (88) 89 (92) 77 (76)

25 75 75 82 71 93 68 57 54 74 57 21 50 86 59 32

39 69 75 79 86 75 61 61 57 68 54 39 54 82 46 28

%At

58 (55)

65 (64) 94 (94) 89 (86) 43 (40) 32 (36) 83 (72) 73 (69) 132 (52)

%

Inclusion %

Employed 35 68 50 57 74 73 64 68 49 86 70 35 64 86 66 448

% Full-Time Education

Total

23 56 68 78 69 86 63 50 37 78 78 18 58 84 70 80

35 69 59 67 75 79 66 63 51 85 73 35 55 83 65 832

%of

Figures in bold-face display percentage differences between exclusion and inclusion categories > 14% (p < .05). ^Figures in parentheses relate to women with children and without partners; the figures to the left refer to all women with children.


77

skills, and advising skills. Compared with those who were in full-time education, they also said they lacked writing skills and speaking skills. They appeared to be superior only with respect to constructing and toolusing skills, the skills identified with poor literacy and numeracy. For women, the picture changed again. Table 3-5 shows that compared with those in full-time education and employment, those at home and engaged in parenting reported absence of the same skills that differentiated the employed from the unemployed men and of two of the additional skills that were more prevalent among women - teaching and advising. The only skill for which women at home appeared to be superior to the women in full-time employment or education was "caring/' again the skill most closely identified with poor literacy and numeracy. In almost every case, those in the halfway category of part-time work and self-employment held an intermediate position with respect to skills absence. The only exceptions were writing and speaking, where those in part-time work were superior both to women at home and to women in full-time employment and full-time education, and sales, where superiority rested with both the part-timers and the self-employed. Work-Related Training

People bring skills with them into jobs, but the kind of work-specific skills they need to perform in the job itself will typically be acquired through the process of employment itself. One of the main means of doing this is through the training employers provide. Such training represents a significant - and to a certain extent risky - investment for employers. It not only helps employees acquire the skills that will enable them to do the job better but also improves their opportunities for promotion and for moving on to other employment. Fear of "poaching" is said to be one of the main disincentives for British employers to train. To examine work-based training, one needs to access to more extensive experience of employment than 21-year-olds had had in BCS70. Accordingly, for this purpose, I use the much longer period of the life course - from 16 to 33 years of age - offered by the NCDS 33-year-old survey. Only half of the NCDS sample had in fact received any workbased training lasting 3 days or more. Figures 3-1 and 3-2 show the percentages of NCDS men and women, with and without children, who had attended work-related training courses (lasting 3 days or more) for different ages of leaving education. Two features of the figures are notable. The first is the paradox that the

78


Higher Education -

—

mmmmammmmm

i

Age 18 • Children Age 17 -

No Children

•

••MM|

Age 16 or Earlier -

20

40

60

80

100

Figure 3-1. Women and work-related training: percent attendance for training courses by age at which they left education and status as a parent.

earlier people leave education, the more time they have spent in the labor market, yet the more time they have spent in the labor market, the less training they get. This applies for both men and women, but in the case of women, another effect to that of having children - is also apparent. Although for men, parenthood appeared to be, if anything, positively associated with getting training, women who were parents were consistently less likely to get training at all school leaving ages. This applied regardless of how long the women had spent in the labor market, but only at certain levels of the occupational structure. Figure 3-3 shows that when the sample was restricted to those who had at least 11 years in employment, in the higher occupations that women tended to enter (professional, associated professional, and managerial), more women without children actually received training than did men. In the lower "women's" occupations (clerical, sales, and personal services), substantially fewer women than men reported receiving training, and women with children received the least training of all. It is notable that over 70% of the women who had left school at 16 years of age entered clerical, sales, and personal services jobs - that is, the jobs for which training was least likely to be had.


79

I Higher Education -

i

Age 18 -

•

Children

•

No Children

Age 17 -

i

Age 16 or Earlier -

20

40

60

80

100

Figure 3-2. Men and work-related training: percent attendance for training courses by age at which they left education and status as a parent.

Skills as Human and Social Capital Possession of particular work-related skills at 33 years of age did not show any clear pattern of relationships to the types of jobs the NCDS cohort members had. Although certain skills, such as using tools, were associated with craft occupations and caring was linked with the associated professions (which include nursing), the main differentiation was by gender. In other words, the cohort members saw themselves as bringing different types of skills to the work they did, rather than identifying their skills closely with the job they had. On the other hand, the more skills they claimed to possess, the higher the occupational level they were on. Thus, management and professional occupations were associated with high levels of virtually all skills except tool using and caring; plant and machine operation work, followed by personal service and "other occupations," was associated with the lowest overall levels of skills (Bynner, 1994). The skills in aggregate also related to labor-market status. The more skills the cohort members claimed to possess, the less unemployment they

80


Personal/Services

Sales

-

Clerical/Secretarial

Assoc. Professional

Professional

Managers & Admin. -

Women with Children Women without Children Men

Figure 3-3. Effects of having children on percent receiving work-related training for men and women with a minimum of 11 years in full-time employment. were likely to have experienced; the fewer skills they possessed, the more likely they were to be out of employment (unemployed or at home). It seemed that over and above the protection particular skills appeared to provide against labor-market difficulties, in combination they also differentiated cohort members in terms of their abilities to get work. In this sense, they could be seen as representing the human and social capital carrying a premium with employers - that the cohort members had acquired. This effect is strikingly evident from charting overall workrelated skills against employment status from 16 to 33 years of age. Each cohort member was given a score representing the number of workrelated skills they claimed to possess, and the overall scores were then divided into four quartile ranges (Bynner, 1996). The percentages of cohort members in each of the cohort ranges who were unemployed was than plotted for each of the years from 16 to 33 (Bynner, 1996). Quite different patterns were apparent for the men and the women. For men, from 16 years of age, a gap developed across the skills' quartile ranges in unemployment level, with those in the lowest quartile range

New Routes to Employment: Integration and Exclusion showing the highest unemployment, reaching a peak in the early twenties. This was in the early 1980s when unemployment was very high in Great Britain. From then on, the unemployment rates in all four groups declined, reflecting the improving economy, but the gap between the high-skills group and the low-skills group remained. In other words, overriding the effect of economic recession, those cohort members reporting the fewest skills remained more vulnerable to unemployment than did the others. For women out of the labor market and at home, the picture was in some respects similar and in other respects quite different. As for the men, from 16 years of age, a gap developed in unemployment rates across the skills' quartile ranges, with those in the lowest skills quartiles leaving the labor market in the largest numbers. This time, however, the overall levels did not peak in the early twenties but continued to rise until the late twenties, the most common age period in Great Britain for having children. At this point, the gap between those with the least and those with the most skills reached a maximum, which then persisted, whereas the overall level declined. Here, we see confirmation of the earlier point that at every age, women with the least skills leave the labor market most. By the late twenties, this effect was paralleled by a more general life-cycle pattern in which increasing numbers of women were leaving the labor market to have children. Although there was a clear tendency for them to return to employment, presumably as the demands associated with child care declined, those with the fewest skills were least likely to return. These results also confirm what others have observed (e.g., Ashton & Maguire, 1986): that the recession of the early 1980s affected men much more than women. The kinds of jobs women held, from secretarial work to cleaning, were more resilient to the pressure of the economic recession than were the unskilled manual jobs men held, which disappeared in large numbers over this period. New Routes to Integration and Exclusion? The birth-cohort studies data enable reappraisal of the role of skills in labor-market inclusion and exclusion processes and give pointers to the appropriate forms of vocational preparation for school leavers. Basic skills provide the foundation stones of employability. Without them, the likelihood of being out of the labor force is greatly increased and acquisition of the wider range of work-related skills - the building blocks of

81

82


employability - is also impeded. This is supported by the results of multiple regression, which showed the literacy and numeracy scores to be the best predictors of all the skills measures examined here in predicting (negatively) the amount of unemployment experienced since leaving school (Bynner, 1996). The lower the basic skills scores, the higher the experience of unemployment. The position of women with poor basic skills is particularly difficult in this respect, especially if they have ever had children. Except at the highest occupational levels, women get less work-based training than do men, and women with children get the least training of all. This reinforces past evidence for the gender gap in employment prospects for men and women (e.g., Melamed, 1995.) It also points to a polarization process taking place among women themselves that has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged in the past. Women without children and with the most human and social capital, as represented by the jobs they are in, lag only a little behind men with respect to the work-based training received, and in certain occupations, these women may surpass them. Those women with very little human and social capital, and especially those with children, lag substantially behind men at every occupational level, but especially at the lowest occupation levels, which 70% of women with poor basic skills enter. Work-related skills themselves divide along gender lines. The kinds of practical and computational skills men claim to possess are less common among those with basic skills deficiencies than among others. Similarly, the kinds of interpersonal skills women generally profess to be good at are less prevalent among those with poor basic skills. These differences carry through to relations with the family and the labor market. Much the same skills that are impoverished by basic skills difficulties are also less prevalent among men who are unemployed or self-employed and among women who are at home and who have children. Particularly notable are keyboarding skills, computing skills, working with plans, and finance skills, which are central to modern employment and in a sense define integration into it. The only exceptions are the traditional skills involving "using tools" and "construction" for men and "caring" for women, which are more common among both those with basic skills deficiencies and those not currently employed. Table 3-6 illustrates schematically the relation of the different types of skill to the kinds of status identified with social exclusion. Social exclusion for men was typified by unemployment. For women, it was characterized by exit from the labor market and the "patchwork" employment


83

Table 3-6. Employability and Social Exclusion Social Exclusion After 1975 Employability

Before 1975

Men

Basic skills absent Work-related skills absent Work-specific skills absent

Women

Women with Children im.ninMm.iinlmfn.nnnmHm.iiinmiiWmii

Socially excluded Part-time or patchwork employment Socially included

that many take up to survive. Since the mid-1970s, the lack of skills has affected these statuses differently. The increasing significance attached to the wider range of work-related skills, including "charismatic skills" (Brown, 1995), is a product of the information technology revolution that took off at that time. The question arises, though, as to whether being out of employment, unemployed at home, or looking after children, are correctly described as forms of social exclusion. Insofar as those in these categories seem to be propelled into them rather than enter them by choice, they are "excluded" from the economic and other benefits that employment brings. The skills data also show that excluded women perceive themselves to have far fewer of the work-related skills than do those who are actively engaged in the labor market. They are also substantially lower than the others in self-esteem (Bynner, 1994). As for with men, the origins of their basic skills deficiencies lie typically in a combination of difficulties experienced in early childhood at home and at school (Bynner & Steedman, 1995). As young women, their typical biographies involve an early exit from the labor market, frequently to have children, and a subsequently return to it at the lowest levels to undertake such work as child minding and cleaning, which enable them to combine earning money with child care. It is acknowledged that to describe child care and being at home for women as "exclusion" might appear to deny the clear choice that many women make to opt for parenthood as an occupation, in place of paid employment, at a certain stage in life. Although such choices are avail-

84


able to most women, however, by 21 years of age it is those who have the most limited human and social capital who tend to withdraw from the labor market first. In this sense, the early move into home and family does appear to manifest a form of social exclusion. It is notable that in societies with highly institutionalized forms of labor-market entry, such as the Scandinavian countries, marriage and family is postponed much later than in such countries as Great Britain without such a developed VET system. The average age of marriage in Denmark in 1990, for example, was 29.4 years for men and 27.7 years for women. In Great Britain, the comparable ages were 26.4 and 24.2 years, respectively. Conclusion The data point clearly to work-related skills as embodying not so much specific competencies of interest to employers as indicators of human and social capital, which are their primary consideration when recruiting people to jobs. So where does this leave the different VET models and what should their goal be? The first point to acknowledge is that the specific occupational competencies, which typically provide the main focus for VET programs, are far less important in employability terms than, on the one hand, the basic skills (enhanced to include computer literacy) and, on the other, the wider range of personal attributes and broader competencies of the kind considered here. These arise from a combination of sources, including the education system, the family, and work itself. This points to work experience as pivotal in effective vocational training and to the (largely unacknowledged) value of the work experience young people gain privately through the weekend and holiday jobs that many do (see chapter 5 in this volume). Also, the effective European systems of vocational preparation, such as the German one, need to be viewed in a new light. Ostensibly, the goal of German apprenticeship is to equip the young person with the skills necessary to enter a particular occupation. The system is full of paradoxes, however - not least that most young people who undertake an apprenticeship do not end up with the employer who trained them, and a large proportion move to a different area of employment from the one in which they were trained. Moreover, in a comparative study of transition to work in Great Britain and Gemany, young British people reported far more independent work-based experiences than did their German counterparts, suggesting that the young Germans - even as apprentices - saw themselves more in a quasistudent role than in a worker role (Bynner, 1992b).


85

What the German system is better seen as doing is building up the young person's employability within the highly motivating framework of gaining a Beruf. It includes much exposure to work practices through work experience and work-based training (Hamilton, 1994) and socializes the young person within a protective environment into employment itself (Blossfeld, 1992). Even if a majority of young Germans do not stay very long with the employer who trains them - or even if they continue practicing the occupation for which they have been trained - most are able to establish positive careers in the labour market (Bynner & Roberts, 1991; Evans & Heinz, 1994). This is because all interested parties in Germany, especially employers, trade unions, and politicians (the "social partners"), are committed to making the system work. Without such an apprenticeship or equivalent vocational experience behind them, young people in Germany have a problem getting employers to take them seriously. This is why, in the 1980s, the whole system has both broadened and extended to provide the maximum opportunity for every young person to participate in and complete the training it offers. Those who remain outside it consequently suffer a form of exclusion that is perhaps more difficult to sustain than in a less institutionalized system. Such developments in the German "dual system" (apprenticeship) provide pointers to those needed in the "vocational schooling" systems (vocational educational track) of Scandinavia, the "schooling" systems (general education track) of North America, and the "mixed" systems of such countries as Great Britain (vocational education and youth training/apprenticeship). Insofar as these systems develop curricula for all young people comprising basic and work-related education coupled with work experience in increasing amounts, they would appear to be enhancing employability. Insofar as they pursue the route favored in the early version of youth training in Great Britain, which dispensed with any curriculum element other than the specific competencies believed to be necessary for particular jobs, they are unlikely to succeed. There is an irony in the fact that in the economies of the United States and Canada, prosperity has been achieved while paying the least attention of all nations discussed here to the VET issue. Their great strength, as Hamilton (1994) points out, is the "permeability" of employment opportunities, where absence of particular vocational qualifications is no barrier to the offer of a job. Either work-based competencies are assumed by employers or it is seen as employers' responsibility to equip the new recruit with these competencies. The signals they look for are those bound up with human and social capital of the kind that American col-

86


lege education produces, which accounts perhaps for the fact that 90% of Canadian youth aspire to go to college (Ashton & Lowe, 1991). As critics point out, however, in the modern world, the problem lies at the level below college, where little attention is paid in the school curriculum to employment outcomes and little guidance is given to young people as to how to equip themselves for jobs. Reform of the high-school curriculum for all students - along Swedish lines to include large amounts of scheduled exposure to work and to give more attention to work-related skills of the kind examined here - would appear to offer one solution. What matters most is that young people are given the opportunity to keep their options open and build up the human and social capital that will lead to successful entry into and retention of employment. They may not stay in the first job - nor even the same occupation - for long. What they are able to do, though, is take advantage of labor-market opportunities when they arrive and the training that employers provide.

From Education to Employment: Occupations and Careers in the Social Transformation of East Germany1 ANSGAR WEYMANN

...for a sociologist nothing else is as fascinating as the collapse of a society (Ganpmann, 1993; p 172). Hardly ever in history has a process of rapid and radical social change been as much the object of continual observation and analysis by the social sciences as the modernization and transformation process of the former Soviet bloc. Numerous large- and small-scale projects have been launched to investigate this secular historical event in various countries. With respect to the destiny of Europe, historians like to compare the breakdown of the Soviet bloc with the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917, both of which split the continent; the revolution of 1989 tore down the dividing lines of confrontation, however. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a parallel is drawn between 1989 and the German bourgois revolution of 1848 (Kocka, 1995). After 1989, Germany reassumed her uncomfortable position in the center of the continent. In terms of sociological theory, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the subsequent dramatic social change in a number of countries is seen by scholars from different schools as an instructive example of postponed modernization, a rectifying revolution of an erroneous pathway (Collins & Waller, 1993; Habermas, 1990a, 1990b; Joas & Kohli, 1993; Zapf, 19962). Since the end of Soviet hegemony over central and eastern Europe, civil societies of the Western type have been restored or established for the first time. The 1989 revolution also paved the way for the reestablishment of the nation-state (Offe, 1994). The ongoing modernization is characterized by the development of representative democracy, elaborated capitalism, welfare states, and mass consumption (Hettlage & Lenz, 1995; Zapf, 1994). Modernization promotes economic, social, and cultural differentiation of the social structure (Bertram, Hradil, & Kleinhenz, 1995; GeifJler, 87

88


1993, 1996; Glatzer & Noll, 1995; Schafers, 1995; Weidenfeld & Korte, 1996). On the institutional level, the East German legal (Hettlage, 1995) and economic (Freese, 1995; Ftirstenberg, 1995; Wiesenthal, 1995) infrastructure has been transformed or fully replaced by West German models. A continual change in the cultural realm (Engler, 1992,1995), religious beliefs (Pollack, 1993), and in norms and values (Meulemann, 1996) can also be observed, as can the individualization of life courses and biographies (Diewald & Mayer, 1996; Huinink et al, 1995; Trommsdorff, 1995a). Within this historical and macrosociological context of new interrelations among social structure, institutions, and life course (Sydow, Schlegel, & Helmke, 1995; Weymann & Heinz, 1996), what can we learn if we look in detail at passages from education to work and at outcomes of vocational careers, focusing on East Germany? The case of East Germany is in a sense unique (Hirschman, 1993; Waldrauch, 1996; Weidenfeld & Korte, 1996) because the incorporation into the Federal Republic set goals and rules for the transformation process, which was not the case in other post-Soviet societies. As a result, the GDR transformation led to a tremendous increase in income and standards of living within just a few years. At the same time, however, the labor market lost millions of jobs because of the monetary union, which led to a revaluation of the East German mark due to the lack of competitiveness of many products and services on the world market, increasing wages yet persistently low productivity, and the transformation of the economic base from agriculture and industry to services and consumer-goods production (Konig & Steiner, 1994; Lutz & Schroder, 1995; Schmidt & Lutz, 1995; Siebert, 1993). The transformation in other post-Soviet societies has followed the formula "bad things first; good things postponed/' but in the GDR, this sequence has been reversed: "good things first; bad things later" (Wiesenthal, 1995: 25). The result is a decline in personal happiness and political consent as well as a dramatic drop in the birth rate (Bertram, 1995; Youniss, 1995; Zapf, 1994). The rapid replacement of institutions after 1989 has been successfully managed and the East German social structure is adapting quickly to the West German standards, but culture and people "lag behind" the speed of this revolution (Pollack, 1996; Reipig, 1993; Schmitz, 1995; Trommsdorff, 1995b). Along with the protracted cultivation of a competitive economy, the profound reorganization of the labor market and the occupational structure, a considerable devaluation of qualifications and skills occurred (Dewes, 1995; Hartmann, 1995; Kornbichler & Hartwig, 1994; Olbertz, 1995). A new problem in the transition from education to work

Occupations and Careers in the Social Transformation of East Germany

89

emerged, to which people were not accustomed. The former state-regulated interlinking of education and employment disappeared, along with the state-guided - even guarded - low-mobility career pattern. The West German education, labor-market, and employment systems offers much weaker institutional guidance than do those of the centralized, socialist GDR. The Study: Vocational Careers in East Germany Our research group is conducting a longitudinal study of the transition of individuals from education to employment and their subsequent occupational careers from 1985 to 1999 in two panel waves. The analytical focus is to what extent occupational mobility and success or failure, depend on (1) the level of education, (2) cohort, (3) gender, (4) labor-market segment, (5) occupation, (6) personnel management by private and public employers in expanding and shrinking new and old industries, and on (7) biographical coping strategies. In this chapter, we focus on the occupational development of skilled workers and academics who graduated from vocational education and training or from a university either in 1985 or 1990. The older cohort had its first job entry under socialist conditions; the younger, under labormarket conditions after German reunification. Both cohorts represent the new East German generation that, via generational change, provides "the opportunity for social change to occur" (Ryder, 1965: 844; see also Mannheim, 1928-1929). Two sets of data have been collected: a macropanel and a micropanel. The data of the macropanel are drawn from a quantitative, retrospective, standardized written survey, designed as a life event-history analysis. The random sample size is 2,130 subjects. The macropanel analyzes the life course by means of transition rates, transitions from event to event, and from status to status. The data were collected on a monthly basis in a first wave during 1994. Data from a second wave were scheduled to be available in 1997. The micropanel consists of qualitative interviews, designed as biographical case studies, drawn from a random sample of 80 subjects. The micropanel analyzes the subjective perception of the subject's biography, the awareness and meaning of opportunities and constraints, and the logic of biographical coping strategies. The micropanel data were collected on a monthly basis in two waves, in 1992 and 1995. The present state of the project allows for a 10-year window of observation. The observation will be extended to 13 years; the next wave was in 1997.

20

15 -

Io 10

5 -

r i

1990

i I I i i i i i | i i i i i i I i i i i I i i i i

1991

1992

\

\

I

i

i

r

i

i

I

i

I

n

i

l

1993

time Figure 4-1. Unemployment rates of apprenticeship and university graduates.

i I r i i r i I I

1994

i T

\ \ i I

1995


91

We report here only some of the results from the study: regarding transitions from employment to unemployment or vice versa, upward and downward occupational mobility within certain labor-market segments and professions, and coping with biographical discontinuities. Transitions from Employment to Unemployment and Vice Versa

First, we look at the unemployment rates of some subgroups of our sample over a period of time. Tremendous differences can be found between the unemployment rates of apprenticeship versus university graduates, beginning in 1990 with 6% for both groups, and ending in 1995, with 15% for skilled workers and 4% for academics (Figure 4-1). Compared with this, gender differences in unemployment rates are minor (Figure 42), and the difference between the pre- and the postunification cohorts (Figure 4-3) approaches zero and is hence insignificant. At first glance, careers predominantly depend on the level of education achieved. Gender and cohort effects are of minor or negligible importance. The traditional impact of education on careers - and thereby on stratification - is salient and stable even through the turmoil of the present social transformation processes in Germany. The life event-history design permits an analysis of the impact of education, gender, and cohort on careers in a useful way: we can distinguish between entrance into and departure from a status. It is possible to differentiate between the risk of a transition from employment to unemployment on the one hand and the chance of a transition into employment on the other. Both events may vary independently: People can be well or poorly protected from dismissal, and they might have good or poor chances for (re)employment. Various combinations of transition rates are possible, which will result in very different life courses: for example, long-term stable employment combined with long-term or transitory unemployment, or unstable employment combined with good or poor chances for reemployment. The following tables show the transition rates from employment to unemployment and vice versa in more detail. Table 4-1 shows the transition rates from employment to unemployment between the years 1990 and 1995 for the whole sample and for the three subgroups. The risk of losing a job was highest in 1991 (.0114) and lowest in 1994 (.0064). Because the figures indicate risk on a monthly basis, the annual unemployment rate can be calculated by multiplying the figures by 12 (months), which results in an unemployment rate of 13.7% in 1991

20

15 -

o

10-

5-

r

1990

T

iI i Iii 1 ii|i ii i II rI i ii|ii1 irn

1991

1992

ii ii| ii ii iiiri

1993 time

Figure 4-2. Unemployment rates for men and women.

F

i |ii i i

1994

1995


93

Table 4-1. Transition to Unemployment* (Piecewise Constant Exponential Model) Model 1 Transition rate 6/1990-12/1990 1/1991-12/1991 1/1992-12/1992 1/1993-12/1993 1/1994-12/1994 Variables Men

Cohort 1985 Graduation from apprenticeship

0.0077* 0.0114* 0.0085* 0.0065* 0.0064* -29%* -18%* 135%*

Log likelihood, -8,176,84; number of episodes, 3,547; number of censored episodes, 2,632; number of subjects, 2,112. ^Reference group: 1990 female university graduates without children. *Significant at the 1% level.

and 7.7% in 1994. Putting these figures into the denominator provides the figure for the average period of employment before the transition to unemployment takes place: for example, 87.71 months (7 years 3 months) in 1991 and 156 months (13 years) in 1994. It is apparent from these figures that the risk of losing one's job has generally decreased since 1991. In a closer look at the risks of the subgroups, this general result has to be modified as expected. The most important observation is that graduates from the apprenticeship system run a 135% higher risk of losing their job than do university graduates. Further, women run a 71% higher risk than do men, and the cohort of 1990 has a significantly higher risk of dismissal than does the 1985 cohort. We conclude that the risk of unemployment decreased over the years of observation; apprenticeship graduates face by far the highest risk of losing their jobs. The portrayal in Table 4-2 of the transition rates into employment shows the opposite tendency. The chances of a transition into employment deteriorated from 1990 to 1994, the longest average duration of unemployment being in 1993. During the same period - see Table 4-1 the risk of dismissal decreased; thus, the combination of these two tendencies widened the gap between jobholders and the unemployed, ere-

20

15 -

1 10 4 cohort 1985

5 -

i i I i I I

1990

i i i i i i I i i I I i i i i i i i r

1991

I T

i l l

i i i I i ( I

1992

Figure 4-3. Unemployment rates of cohorts.

1993 time

i i i I i I i i i i i i r i r i r n

1994

i i

1995


95

Table 4-2. Transition from Unemployment to Employment* (Piecewise Constant Exponential Model) Model 1 Transition rate 6/1990-12/1990 1/1991-12/1991 1/1992-12/1992 1/1993-12/1993 1/1994-12/1994 Explanatory variables Men

Cohort 1985 Graduation from apprenticeship

0.1033* 0.1039* 0.0848* 0.0800* 0.0843* 67%* -35%* -22%*

Log likelihood, -9299.07; number of episodes, 1,433; number of censored episodes, 540; number of persons, 833. ^Reference group: 1990 female university graduates without children. *Significant at the 1% level.

ating new and severe inequalities. An improvement in the labor-market situation has not been forseeable until now. What are the chances of transition into employment for each of the subgroups? Although apprenticeship graduates run a tremendous risk of being dismissed, their chances of reemployment come much closer to those of university graduates. We conclude from this observation that the main difference in the unemployment rate of the two groups is mainly due to the risk of dismissal rather than to the chance of reemployment. As we have seen, women are relatively well protected from being dismissed, but Table 4-2 shows that their chances of getting a job are poor. Whereas older cohorts are better protected from dismissal, younger cohorts have better chances of employment. In this case the situation is reversed when one looks at transitions into unemployment (see Table 4-1). Our conclusion from the data presented in Tables 4-1 and 4-2 is that the risk of dismissal does not covary with the chances of getting a job: groups with the smallest risk of being fired are not identical to the groups with the best chance of being hired. From the data, we found that career paths depend mainly on the level of education attained, but also - to a smaller degree - on cohort and gen-

96


Table 4-3. Transition to Unemployment" (Three Piecewise Constant Exponential Models) Basic Model Transition rates 6/1990-12/1990 1/1991-12/1991 1/1992-12/1992 1/1993-12/1993 1/1994-12/1994 Explanatory variables Men With children (< 6 years) With children (< 3 years) With children (< 6 years) With children (< 3 years) Married Cohort 1985 Graduation from apprenticeship

0.0077** 0.0114** 0.0085** 0.0065** 0.0064** -29%**

Model 2

Model 3

0.0083*5 0.0122*' 0.0092*' 0.0069*'f 0.0068*'

0.0082** 0.0124** 0.0096** 0.0073** 0.0072**

-21%** 60%**

-23%** 69%**

-25%** -18%** 135%**

-10%** -15%* 116%**

-26%** -38%** NS 107%**

NS = significant. Log likelihood for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: -8,176.84, -8,143.64, -8,137.83; number of episodes for basic m odel, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 3,547, 3,805, 3,822; number of censored episodes for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 2,632, 2,874, 2,883; number of persons for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 2,112, 2,112, 2,112. ^Reference group: 1990 female university graduates without children. *Significant on 5% level; **Significant on 1% level.

der. With respect to the impact of gender, it would be interesting to know if gender is a salient factor per se or if parenthood and child rearing are the life events that actually matter in differentiating career chances between women and men. Table 4-3 and 4-4 again give the transition rates into employment and unemployment, but they distinguish between three models of data analysis: the basic model, model 2, and model 3. The basic model is the one we have already discussed. Model 2 presents the results for women with children up to 6 years of age. At 6, children enter elementary school and are no longer at home for at least half the day. Model 3 gives figures for women with children up to years of age 3. At 3, children can enter kindergarden, and most do. Table 4-3 shows the unemployment risk of women with dependent children. What can we learn from these data? Married people generally have a 38% to 40% lower risk of unemployment. For men, the unemployment risk is reduced by another 21% to 29%. Although for women, hav-


97

Table 4-4. Transition from Unemployment to Employment" (Three Piecewise Constant Exponential Models) Basic Model Transition rate 6/1990-12/1990 1/1991-12/1991 1/1992-12/1992 1/1993-12/1993 1/1994-12/1994 Explanatory variables Women With children (< 6 years) With children (< 3 years) With children (< 6 years) With children (< 3 years) Married Cohort 1985 Graduation from apprenticeship

0.1726* 0.1736* 0.1417* 0.1336* 0.1409* -40%*

Model 2

Model 3

0.1779* 0.1751* 0.1463* 0.1415* 0.1514*

0.1798* 0.1781* 0.1498* 0.1432* 0.1512*

-23%* NS -36%*

-35%* -22%*

NS -26%* -33%*

-28%* 52%* -47%* -24%* -28%* -32%*

NS = not significant. Log likelihood for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: -9,299.07, -9,282.35, -9,283.16; number of episodes for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 1,443,1,472,1,490; number of censored episodes for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 540, 569, 587; number of persons for basic model, model 2, and model 3, respectively: 833, 833, 833. ^Reference group: 1990 male university graduates without children. *Significant at the 1% level.

ing children increases the unemployment risk, especially when the children are young, having children decreases the risk for men. Again, the cohort effect is of minor importance, and the level of education exceeds all other factors by far. This effect is influenced only to a very small extent by having children. We conclude from the data that marriage is an advantage for both genders, but having children disadvantages women and advantages men. The impact of education still exceeds all other factors, however. Although marriage reduces the risk of dismissal, it does not increase the chances of employment (Table 4-4). By contrast, having children positively affects the chances of employment for men, albeit not for women. In a look at the subgroups, it is apparent that this positive effect of having children depends on gender: women with children had a lower chance of employment (36% to 47%, depending on the age of the child),

98


whereas men with very young children (under 3 years of age) had significantly higher chances of employment (52%). We conclude that marriage does not affect the chances of employment positively, whereas having children does positively affect employment chances, but only for men. Occupational Mobility

In this section, we examine the careers of the two cohorts in terms of upward and downward occupational mobility. First, we analyze the mobility of the two cohorts for the first 4 years after graduation, then the mobility of vocational and professional groups within certain segments of the labor market over the same period.3 Figure 4-4 reveals the structure of upward and downward mobility of both cohorts for the first 4 years after graduation. For both cohorts, graduating in 1985 or 1990, the rate of downward mobility was higher than the rate of upward mobility. In both groups, the second move counteracted the results of the first: Only a small proportion of the individuals descending in the first move descended a second time, whereas a larger proportion ascended; only a few of the individuals who were upwardly mobile in the first step moved further upward in the second step, whereas a larger group descended. Within both cohorts, social differentiation increased progressively over the first 4 years of their careers. In looking for cohort-specific ratios of distribution, significant differences between the cohorts become evident. The first is the change in nonmobility rates of both cohorts - that is, the share of people who experience neither downward nor upward mobility in the first and second steps. This nonmobility rate decreased in the first move from 60.8% (1985 cohort) to 50.9% (1990 cohort). With the second move, this percentage decreased again, independently of whether people had been upwardly or downwardly mobile in the first step. For example, the nonmobility rate of former downwardly mobile individuals dropped from 77.7% to 57.5% and the nonmobility rate of former upwardly mobile individuals dropped from 71.7% to 63.0%. Thus, the main difference between the two cohorts was the increasing likelihood of upward and downward mobility versus the first cohort's horizontal vocational life path that remained in the same social stratum. The stability of social rank throughout the life course is apparently disappearing. This can be explained mainly by structural changes in the labor market, due to German reunification, that result in cohort effects

Occupations and Careers in the Social Transformation of East Germany starting point

cohort 1985

1. move

2. move

starting point

1. move

99

2. move

cohort 1990

[22.1%]

12 [1089=100%] 2

[63.0%l 13

[24.5%]|

31

[33.0%]]

[50,9%]|

[57.5%]

[27.0%]

33

[9.5%]

sample =2009

Figure 4-4. Percent upward and downward mobility. Individual career resources or earnings potentials are operationalized by occupational status of all job episodes and measured by the Wegener magnitude-prestige scale. Reference group: 1990 male university graduates without children. 1 = upward mobility; 2 = no mobility; 3 = downward mobility.

on occupational opportunities. The 1985 cohort entered its first job under socialist conditions, which meant not only conditions of social and vocational stability and security but also few occupational opportunities. By contrast, the 1990 cohort entered its first job under market conditions, which meant not only conditions of continuous social and technological change and competition but enlarged occupational opportunities as well. The comparison of cohort mobility shows salient cohort effects of the transformation process on careers. Career mobility depends further on the occupation and labor-market sector the graduates chose on the basis of their education. In the transformation process, all economic sectors have changed greatly in size and importance, and occupational groups have correspondingly gained or lost shares of the labor market. Upward and downward career mobility of individuals depends on the changing occupational structure in the transformation process. The following fig-

100 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives S\\

0.2

'medical science'

1 i i i i I i i i i i I i i i i i I i i i i i | i i i i i | i i i i i | i i i

time (months after job entry)

Figure 4-5. Upward mobility of vocational groups: product - limit estimation of the survivor function and its derivates (Blossfeld & Rohwer, 1995; 66-79).

ures show the mobility of some large vocational groups within 48 months of their first job entry. The upward mobility processes show a great deal of variety, depending on the occupational groups to which individuals belong (Figure 4-5). Over 50% of individuals in administration and nearly 30% of those in the social sciences and humanities experienced upward mobility within the first 6 months. Thereafter, little mobility can be observed. Individuals belonging to other professional groups experienced less upward mobility initially but a longer-lasting and continuous ascent over the ensuing 48 months (e.g., consumer-goods production, mechanics). Others had very little upward mobility at all (teachers). The high upward mobility rate of individuals in administration and of people in the social sciences and humanities has been facilitated by the transformation of the tertiary sector of the economy, especially the civil service, which led to a sudden increase in opportunities for some of the graduates. The professional opportunities for other groups depend more on economic development, which takes time.


101

0.2 time (months after job entry)

Figure 4-6. Downward mobility of vocational groups: product - limit estimation of the survivor function and its derivotes (Blossfeld & Rohwer, 1995; 66-79).

Figure 4-6 shows the downward mobility of individuals grouped by profession over the same period of time. Once again, there is a highly differentiated structure of professional performance. Over 60% of people from the social sciences and humanities, and approximately. 50% of scientists in agriculture, and about 30% of administrative personnel in agriculture descended within the first 4 years after job entry. People in the medical sector did not experience a severe risk of downward mobility. Skilled workers in consumer-goods production and machine building ("mechanics"), as well as those in other services and teachers, were also relatively well protected from downward mobility. In comparing Figures 4-5 and 4-6, it becomes evident that members of some professional groups profited and members of others suffered from the economic and social transformation. In some groups, much upward and downward mobility can be observed at the same time. In other cases, neither a great deal of upward nor a great deal of downward mobility takes place.

102 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Coping with Biographical Discontinuities

The representative macrosurvey, a life event - history analysis, has shown that rapid institutional and social structural change after 1989 forced mobility on life courses and inflicted stress and distress on most people, which was reflected in their biographies. In this third section, we present some information from the microsample, from biographical studies of 80 interviewees. Which coping strategies were applied to deal with biographical discontinuities on such a scale? The micropanel covers the same period as the macropanel, from 1985 to 1994. Data were collected in two waves in 1992 and 1995. In the first panel wave, we inquired about prospective occupational aspirations, desires, and fears, as well as about individual biographical frames and human-capital resources available to manage existing or potential vocational problems. In the second wave, we asked the interviewees to reflect retrospectively about the period of time between the two interviews as well as about future plans. By contrasting statements from the first and second interview, we obtained information about the reassessment of given structural conditions and of future perspectives. Firm closures, loss of jobs, massive devaluation of previously acquired qualifications, and increasing sexual discrimination indicate some of the main risks that affect individuals' occupational chances during the process of transformation from a socialist to a Western social system. The interviewees tried to maintain control over these risks by redefining the framing of a desired, normal biography and by activating human-capital resources. Figure 4-7 illustrates dimensions and congruities of biographical coping strategies by the interviewees. A strong vocational orientation was the dominant biographical frame that governed the coping behavior. All interviewees focused their coping strategy primarily on achieving job security and stability. This frame remained stable over the period of time between the two interviews, regardless of whether people were professionally successful. A dominant redundant vocational orientation was seen as guaranteeing a secure future. This explains, for example, why women replaced the habitual GDR model of simultaneously having children and working full time with the West German model of separately and sequentially ordering work cycles and family in the life course. They gave work priority when they had to make a choice. The prime human-capital resource of biographical coping is the vocational or professional qualification.


103

Risk Situations

\

Frames: - Aspiration level - Professional identity - Alternative roles to paid employment

Control Competences: - Locus of Control - Self-efficiency - Temporal awareness

—

Resources: - Job security - Professional qualification - Networks - Family

i

t — •

Decision

Timing Action

Figure 4-7. Model of coping strategies within the occupational biography.

The vocational/professional organization of education and the labor market is a traditional characteristic for both East and West Germany; it was unchanged by the country's division. Nearly all of the interviewees who gained access to stable employment after reunification did so via a formally certified existing qualification or formally certified retraining. Only a certified qualification can lead to promising and stable employment. Because a good education is seen as the foundation for self-sufficiency, most interviewees believed that their fate was in their own hands. The locus of control was definitely internal. Only during the turbulence immediately following the collapse of the GDR did some emphasize fate or the external forces of social structure and change as the main factors determining their biography. A dynamic interrelationship of biographical frames and human-capital resources can be observed from 1989 to 1995. Directly after the collapse of the GDR in the autumn of 1989, the level of career aspirations in biographical framing increased strongly. Shortly thereafter, as social and economic union occurred along with the subsequent political reunifica-

104 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Security

Euphoria

Hope

Hope dashed and Disappointment

Stabilization and Differentiation

Demand on control competence

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

Figure 4-8. Frames, resources, and control competences over time.

tion in 1990, human capital resources became devalued. The divergence of frames and resources reduced the remaining control competence over biographical action. Control competence was seen as rapidly vanishing. Frames and resources had to be reorganized in reaction to this challenge. The framing of aspirations had to be restricted realistically and resources had to be activated or renewed to maintain or regain an internal locus of control. Figure 4-8 shows the dynamic of biographical coping during the transformation process from 1989 to 1995. It should be added that biographical control competence also depends to a large extent on the appropriate timing of decision making. It was important not to miss windows of opportunity (Figure 4-9). One of these windows was located early in the transformation process. Timing is a crucial dimension of successful biographical coping, particularly in times of rapid social change. We discovered coping strategies that indicate that vocational training and the institutionalized transition from the educational system into the employment system via a continuing professionalization of the labor market are significant integrative factors. Both dimensions describe special features of the German educational and employment system.

Occupations and Careers in the Social Transformation of East Germany Security Euphoria Hope Hope dashed and Disappointment

105

Stabilization and Differentiation

Frames Resources

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

Figure 4-9. Window of opportunity.

Conclusion We described the development of unemployment in East Germany from 1990 to 1995, observing a decrease in the risk of being dismissed but also a deterioration of the chances for employment. These two opposing trends widened the gap between the employed and the unemployed. Analysis of subgroups of the sample revealed salient differences between unemployment rates and employment chances over the years of observation according to gender and education. We then examined the transitions either from employment to unemployment or from unemployment (or nonemployment) to employment as a dynamic process. An important observation was that the risks of dismissal and the chances of reemployment did not covary in the same direction - neither over time nor from group to group. For example, the older cohort and women are better protected from dismissal, but they have poorer chances of employment. Next, we analyzed occupational mobility. The data showed a decline of life-course stability and an increase of upward and downward mobility. Within the growing number of mobile people,

106 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives

downward mobility is experienced more often than upward mobility. Some occupational groups face high mobility rates and others face lower mobility rates; some show little internal variance of mobility and others show high internal variance. Finally, from the biographical interviews, we found that overall career performance depends first on the general trend in occupational structure and labor-market sectors in the process of economic and social transformation but second on the successful management of biographical frames and human-capital resources. What can we learn from the data in terms of a cross-national perspective on the transition from education to work? During the first 5 years after Germany's reunification, a rapid transformation of the socialist GDR society took place, often characterized as a rectifying modernization. Within this modernization process, the former GDR state-regulated link between education and employment was replaced by the West German system. The West German system of transition from education to employment gave much weaker institutional guidance but still is - compared to other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries - relatively institutionalized. The labor market is shaped to a large extent by occupations and professions. Access to stable employment largely depends on the fulfillment of educational prerequisites, at both the apprenticeship and the academic levels. This tradition of a meritocratic regimen of fitting education and employment survived the division of the country. A prominent example is the vocational training scheme known as the "dual system." This means that on-the-job training with a firm and schooling at vocational high school are pursued parallel to one another, generally for a period of 3 years. Because almost all school graduates who do not enter the university system pass through the dual system, there is little unskilled labor. Another example is the Staatsexamen (state exams), which are mandatory for graduates of medical schools, law schools, or teacher training. As a consequence of this meritocratic tradition of connecting education and employment, access to occupations and professions is often closed for applicants without the necessary educational certificates. The rules of admission or closure are institutionalized by regulations controlled by associations and chambers or via legislation. The linkage of job requirements and educational credentials is the outcome of a tradition of collective bargaining on the part of corporate actors, such as trade unions, and employers' associations, and vocational and professional lobbies, as well as a result of the constitutionally prescribed


107

bargaining process between the Lander (states, provinces) and the federal government. To a greater or lesser extent, the linkage between educational credentials and employment contracts continues to be a subject of collective bargaining between trade unions and employers' associations, inscribed in the Tarifvertrage (agreements) in which national rates of pay, working hours, job conditions, length of paid vacation, social benefits, and so forth are also agreed on. The German tradition of a relatively high degree of institutionalized linkage between education and employment is reflected in our data. The educational system still sets strong demarcation points for careers and occupational mobility. This is typical for a meritocratic system and a system of collective bargaining. Thus, a system of linking education and employment and of strict labor rules has its advantages and disadvantages. It is beneficial for those well and properly educated but unfavorable to the rest; it protects people relatively well from dismissal, downward mobility, or pay cuts as long as they are employed but puts strict constraints on the opportunities for those looking for a job, particularly when appropriate educational credentials are lacking (Schenk, 1995). It should be mentioned that under the increasing pressure of the globalization of capital and labor competition, and because of the precedence of rules and regulations of the European Union (EU), the German tradition of an institutionalized linkage between education and employment and of ritualized collective bargaining between employers and trade unions is coming increasingly under criticism and may be systematically changed or even discarded. Whether this tradition vanishes will greatly depend on the economic competitiveness of this kind of social policy and labor-market regime compared to other OECD countries within and outside the EU. The further development or nondevelopment of EU social policy might be an important factor as well. As Leibfried and Pierson (1995, p.44) put it: Although the extensive barriers to EU action have prevented any true federalization of European social policy, the dynamics of creating a single market have made it increasingly difficult to exclude social issues from the EU agenda. The emergence of a multitiered structure is less the result of attempts by Eurocrats to build a welfare state than it is a consequence of spillovers from the initiative to build a single market.

The balance of power between market forces and the welfare states' social policies defines the framework for the further development of Germany's - and other countries' - life-course policy at the intersection of education and employment (Giddens, 1991, pp. 209-231; Weymann, 1996).


Notes 1. Research was conducted by Matthias Rasztar, Reinhold Sackmann, Olaf Struck-Mobbeck, Ansgar Weymann, and Matthias Wingens and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the Special Research Centre (Sfb 186) under the title "Status Passages and Risks in the Life Course'' at the University of Bremen. For further information on mobility, see Rasztar (1997); on generational exchange, see Sackmann (1997). 2. Weymann (1998) scrutinized the applicability of theories of social change and modernization to the transformation process. 3. Mobility is measured by occupational prestige (Wegener magnitude - prestige scale).

PART II

Education and Labor Markets: Work Experiences, Skills and Credentials

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition Pathways in the United States1 JEYLAN T. MORTIMER MONICA KIRKPATRICK JOHNSON

In the contemporary United States, part-time employment during the high school years has become an integral part of the "new passage" between education and work. Unlike the situation in Germany, Japan, and other countries, adolescent part-time work occurs in the context of a relatively unstructured school-to-work transition (Hamilton, 1990; Rosenbaum, Kariya, Settersten, & Maier, 1990). That is, in the United States, there is relatively little institutional support for young people as they embark on their job searches on completing their formal educations. This is especially true for those who do not complete a 4-year college degree (William T. Grant Foundation, 1988). In view of the high youth unemployment rates that result from this situation (Petersen & Mortimer, 1994), new initiatives to heighten the linkage between school and work, with support from the federal government, are now being developed (Borman, Cookson, Sadovnik, & Spade, 1996). Most youth, however, lack such support and must find out about the world of work - and forge their entry to the labor market - on their own. Without the benefit of apprenticeship programs or strong connections between schools and employers, almost all high-school students in the United States obtain employment in the "youth labor market," consisting largely of service-sector jobs, even before leaving high school (Manning, 1990). There is strong demand for their labor. Bachman and Schulenberg's study (1993) of 71,863 high-school seniors in the annual "Monitoring the Future" surveys showed that 75% of the employed boys and 38% of the employed girls worked more than 20 hours per week. The vast majority of employed students are in "free-market" jobs, not in internships or other school-supervised employment programs. Most research on this subject has been concerned with the immediate consequences of employment for high-school students - for example, with whether working youth are poorer students or engage in more problem 111


behaviors, such as delinquency, smoking, and drug use (Bachman, Bare, & Frankie, 1986; Bachman & Schulenberg, 1993; Greenberger, 1984; Greenberger & Steinberg, 1986; Steinberg & Dornbusch, 1991; Steinberg, Greenberger, Garduque, Ruggiero, & Vaux, 1982). On the basis of these assessments, some investigators conclude that employment is detrimental, and should be limited in scope (Greenberger, 1988; Steinberg, Fegley, & Dornbusch, 1993). Social scientists have given rather little attention to the longer-term consequences of teenage employment. Because much of the extant research is based on cross-sectional data, it is impossible to discern longer-term consequences or the direction of effect (Bachman & Schulenberg, 1993; Greenberger & Steinberg, 1986; Steinberg & Dornbusch, 1991); the few longitudinal studies of this topic are plagued by sample-selection problems (e.g., Greenberger & Steinberg's small longitudinal component, 1986) or very low retention rates (Steinberg et al., 1993). In this chapter, we examine whether teenage work experience has consequences beyond high school and whether it appears to enhance the development of human and social capital or detract from early adult wellbeing by curtailing postsecondary schooling, lessening attainment prospects, and hastening the transition to adult roles. On the basis of our own and other studies, we find it plausible to assume that adolescent work experience can have positive as well as negative implications. Acquisition and successful maintenance of the work role are central markers of transition to adulthood, enabling financial independence and determining a major aspect of adult identity (Erikson, 1963). The work role is a key component of the adolescent's future "possible self" (Markus, Cross, & Wurf, 1990). Exposure to the work environment may encourage thinking about future occupational goals, work values, and preferences. Moreover, the adolescent may acquire skills on the job that, although seemingly mundane from the standpoint of the adult worker, are highly salient for a young person: for example, the knowledge that one is able to find a job, meet supervisors' expectations; accept responsibility, relate to co-workers and customers, manage money, and be on time. The ability to function in the work world could signal to the adolescent a capacity to control immediate outcomes as well as to "make it" in the future. Greenberger and Steinberg's 1986 study of students in four California high schools found that teenage employment was associated with self-reported punctuality, dependability, and personal responsibility (Greenberger, 1984; Steinberg, Greenberger, Garduque, Ruggiero, & McAuliffe, 1982) and with girls' self-reliance (Greenberger, 1984). Several

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition longitudinal studies conclude that adolescent planfulness, responsibility, and future orientation have positive consequences for adult adaptation (Clausen, 1991, 1993; Elder, 1969; Jordaan & Super, 1974; Mainquist & Eichorn, 1989). Despite the increasing "destandardization" and "disorder" in the early life course, adolescents' aspirations and plans clearly matter for postsecondary educational attainment and residential independence from parents (Pimentel, 1996). Moreover, a greater sense of efficacy distinguishes adolescents who have been able to successfully actualize their plans. The fact that efficacy is responsive to the quality of adolescent work experiences (Finch, Shanahan, Mortimer, & Ryu, 1991) indicates that early work experience may be quite consequential for the transition to adulthood. Other orientations that are found to be reactive to adolescent work experiences - occupational values (Mortimer Pimentel, Ryu, Nash & Lee, 1996) and depressive affect (Shanahan, Finch, Mortimer, & Ryu, 1991) - probably also influence early attainment processes (Mortimer, 1994). Employed adolescents may learn to better manage their time so as to effectively juggle the many activities associated with being a worker, student, friend, and family member. The benefits of multiple roles in adulthood, because they provide access to social contacts and support, diverse activities, and opportunities to cope with challenging problems, are well known (Thoits, 1983, 1986). Interestingly, though employment is often thought to draw youth away from school, both employment and hours of work are found to be positively related to involvement in school activities (Mihalic & Elliott, 1995). The experience of successfully combining schooling and work is likely to promote a self-image of one who is able to meet the challenges of multiple adult roles (Elder & Caspi, 1990). Moreover, although some research has found negative associations between work hours and grades (Finch & Mortimer, 1985; Marsh, 1991; Mortimer & Finch, 1986; Steinberg & Dornbusch, 1991; Steinberg et al., 1993), working may have positive academic consequences under certain conditions. Mortimer Johnson & Kirkpatrich (1996) found that highschool seniors who work at low intensity (20 hours or less per week) have significantly higher grades than students who work more hours and than students who do not work at all. Similarly, D'Amico's 1984 analysis of the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) youth data showed that employment at low intensity lessened high-school drop-out rates. Finally, adolescent part-time work has repeatedly been shown to have positive consequences for employment and income following high

113


school (Carr, Wright, & Brody, Mihalic & Elliott, 1995; 1996; Marsh, 1991; Mortimer & Finch, 1986; Steel, 1991; Stern & Nakata, 1989). Prior anticipatory socialization, providing opportunity to learn and to practice future roles, is generally a good predictor of successful role adaptation (Mortimer & Simmons, 1978). We have no knowledge, however, about whether the transition to part-time work in adolescence constitutes a valuable or necessary anticipatory socialization experience with respect to the future adult work role. The answer to this question may depend on work's quality, as suggested by Stern and Nakata's (1989) findings that skill use in adolescent work predicts success in the job market during the first 3 years after high-school graduation. Moreover, Bachman and Schulberg (1993) found that students suffer when they work in poor-quality jobs for long periods of time - in jobs that do not make use of their talents, are unconnected to anticipated future jobs, and are only being done "for the money." They also reported many direct benefits of "high-quality" jobs with respect to reduced substance abuse and other salutary outcomes. In considering the consequences of adolescent work, the broad meaning and social context of working must be taken into account. Marsh (1991) reported positive effects of adolescent employment on grades, but only when the worker is using earnings to save for college. This connection of employment to a valued future "possible self," as college student, apparently transforms its meaning. It is noteworthy in this regard that the majority of seniors who plan to complete college save at least some of their earnings for this purpose (Bachman, 1983). Depression-era adolescents who contributed to their families' income through paid work gained a sense of confidence and efficacy from helping at a time of crisis (Elder & Rockwell, 1979). Similarly, in economically hard-pressed farm settings of rural Iowa, relationships with parents improve with the son's higher earnings (Shanahan, Elder, Burchinal & Conger 1996). Whereas a vast body of social-science literature examines the effects of experiences in childhood and youth for adult outcomes - including the accumulation of human capital through education, work, and job training and the acquisition of social capital through the formation of social ties the implications of adolescents' work experiences for these outcomes have been almost entirely overlooked. Some commentary suggests that adolescent involvement in the paid labor force signals a breakdown of human-capital investment in education, but there is reason to believe that the increasing prevalence of adolescent paid work is accompanied by new forms of acquisition of personal and social resources. Moreover,

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition working in adolescence may set the stage for continued simultaneity of work and educational investment, such that adolescents who work during high school continue to combine the two roles effectively as they go through college and other postsecondary educational institutions. Taking a more negative stance, Bachman and Schulenberg (1993) suggest that youth employment is one component of a syndrome of "precocious development" that precipitates a hastened transition to adulthood. This syndrome includes early involvement in dating (Mihalic & Elliott, 1995); "adultlike" leisure behaviors, such as drinking and smoking, and withdrawal from the more dependent, preadultlike student role. It is reasonable to suppose that adolescent employment would enhance economic and/or emotional independence from parents over the longer term. Alternatively, adolescent work could be associated with "accelerated" transition behavior, given its linkages to social class and gender as well as distinct schooling and training arrangements following high school (Bynner, personal communication, February 11, 1997). Little is known, however, about whether contemporary youth who have had greater investment in early work "grow up faster," leaving school and moving into adultlike family/residential arrangements (leaving the parental home, cohabitation, marriage, and parenthood) and work roles (acquiring full-time work) more rapidly than other youth. Carr et al. (1996) found that in an earlier cohort - NLS youth who were 16 to 19 years of age in 1979 - more hours of work during high school did in fact predict a small decrement in educational attainment by 28 to 31 years of age in 1991. With education attainment controlled, however, employment in high school had positive effects on later employment and wages. Effects of Adolescent Work on Development of Human and Social Capital We examine three outcomes of adolescent work investment, each of which is expected to have strong influence on early adult achievements. Education Attainment

Education attainment is the most significant form of human capital development during the transition to adulthood, with critical implications for the trajectory of early occupational attainment (Sewell & Hauser, 1975).

115

116 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives Postsecondary Work Experience

Previous analyses have shown that adolescents, in the aggregate, obtain jobs of higher quality as they go through high school (Mortimer, Finch, Denneby, Lee, & Beebe, 1994). Jobs obtained later in high school are more complex and involve more training, greater likelihood of supervisory responsibility, and a wider range of job types than those held in earlier years. We examine the extent to which high school employment predicts the acquisition of human capital during the transition to adulthood, as indicated by labor-force participation and the quality of subsequent work experience. Family Outcomes

We assess whether greater investment in employment during high school leads to earlier movement through critical family-related markers of transition to adulthood. For example, do adolescents who work for a longer period of time during high school - or at greater intensity - grow up "faster," as evidenced by less time spent living at home in subsequent years and by more rapid movement into independent living arrangements, cohabitation, marriage, or parenthood? Early marriage and parenthood may have negative implications for the accumulation of human capital through schooling and work experience. On the basis of earlier studies, we expect the consequences of early marriage and childbearing to be more deleterious for young women than for young men, curtailing their humancapital investment in education as well as work experience and diminishing their earnings (Marini, 1984a, 1987; Marini, Shin, & Raymond, 1989). Data Source To address these questions, we use data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective longitudinal study of a community sample (St. Paul, Minnesota) of adolescents and their parents (see Appendix A). The YDS was initially designed to assess the consequences of early work experience. A panel of 1,000 adolescents was surveyed annually from the ninth (1988) to the 12th (1991) grades in high school, with excellent panel retention (93%) over the 4-year period. Yearly questionnaires included a large battery of items concerning experiences in work, family, school and peer group, as well as indicators of mental health, achievement, and adjustment (see Appendix B). So that we could understand parental per-

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition spectives on teenage work, mothers and fathers were also surveyed in the first and fourth years of the study. In the 3 years following high school (1992,1993, and 1994), the respondents were mailed a "life-history calendar" (Freedman, Thornton, Camburn, Alwin, Young, DeMarco, 1988), on which they indicated various activities and family-status changes during the previous year (school, work, military service, living arrangements, parenthood, and so on) in monthly units. In spring 1995, approximately 4 years after most adolescents' graduation from high school (when most were 21 to 22 years of age), a more extensive survey was conducted, including the life-history calendar as well as measures of education and occupational attainment. Almost 78% of participants were retained through the 1995 survey. The study design and retention rates are shown in Table 5-1. This chapter reports information drawn from the "life-history calendar" data collected in Waves 5 through 8, enabling assessment of the implications of working during adolescence for activities related to education, work, and family in the 4 years following high school. Adolescent Employment and Transition Markers of Adulthood There are multiple plausible operationalizations of adolescent investment in work. It is useful to distinguish between the duration of adolescent work operationalized here as the length of employment in months, and its intensity, measured as the average number of hours of work per week during the period of employment. Work-history data were collected each year during high school; current employment as well as that occurring in the previous year were registered. For each job, the students indicated the month and year it started, and, if applicable, when it ended. They also told us the number of hours that they typically worked at each job per week. On the basis of these data, we computed each student's total months of paid work (the duration of work) as well as each student's work intensity, or average hours working per week - the cumulative hours of work divided by the total weeks of work. To examine the pattern of work activity, we constructed a typology based on experiences during 24 months of high school, including the full lOth-grade and llth-grade academic years of 9 months each, and the first 6 months of the 12th grade, up to the senior year survey, which was conducted in March 1995. We omitted ninth grade employment, which was

117

Table 5-1. Youth Development Studya Administration Grade Level Age Year

;Mail Survey Life History Calendar, Tracking Full Survey

Administration in School Full Survey 9 14-15 1988

1,000* Number of adolescent respondents — Retention rate (%) 924 Number of mothers responding 649 Number of fathers responding % Respondents with at 95.9% least 1 parent responding

10 15-16 1989

11 16-17 1990

12 17-18 1991

18-19 1992

19-20 1993

20-21 1994

21-22 1995

964

957

933

816

782

799

780

96.2% —

95.4% —

92.8% 690

81.3% —

77.7% —

79.6% —

77.6%

—

—

440

—

—

—

—

—

79.1%

—

—

—

"This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, under the tittle "Work Experience and Mental Helath: A Panel Study of Youth" (MH42843).] fc In fall 1987,1,010 consented to participate.

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition

119

Table 5-2. Patterns of Labor Force Participation, Grades 10-12 Percentage IDistribution Work Pattern Not working Low duration, low intensity Low duration, high intensity High duration, low intensity High duration, high intensity Total n

Boys

Girls

Mean Hours of Work

Mean Months of Work Boys

Girls

Boys

Girls

9.9

4.6

0.0

0.0

0

0

23.2

24.1

9.8

11.7

578

650

23.2

14.3

10.4

11.8

1,216

1,376

18.2

30.6

22.0

22.0

1,263

1,328

25.6 100.0

26.4 100.0

21.9

22.2

2,678

2,587

406

481

largely informal (Mortimer et al., 1994); such as baby-sitting for girls and yardwork for boys, and summer employment. A five-category typology was formed by cross-classifying the two dimensions of work duration and intensity and by including a fifth nonworking group (those who did not work at all while school was in session).2 Inspection of the data reveals five quite different work patterns (Table 5-2). The first group of students worked at low intensity most months while school was in session for an average of 20 or fewer hours per week; a second group worked at the same level of low intensity for about half the available months when school was in session. It is especially noteworthy that although the cutoff point in forming the duration dichotomy was set at 18 months (the median number of months of employment for the panel as a whole), the actual mean months of work for those who worked at high duration and low intensity, 22 for both boys and girls, approaches the total number of available months of observation - 24. A very small group of students did not work at all during this period of high school. Finally, there were those who worked for a relatively long duration (on the average, most of the time) at high intensity and those who worked for a relatively brief period at high intensity. Whereas youth in the "lowduration-high-intensity" and the "high-duration-low intensity" categories register about the same number of total hours of work per week, the patterning of this employment is exceedingly different. It is pertinent to note that employment status at a single time, or at several occasions measured serially, may provide little indication of the


overall pattern manifested when continuous employment data are observed. For example, 87 students were employed at high intensity (> 20 hours) at the time of each survey, in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. Of these 69 were, as might be expected, in the high-duration-high-intensity category; however, 18 students, or 21% of the total, were in the low-duration-high-intensity category, suggesting that their total months of employment, notwithstanding the constancy of their (high-intensity) status at each observation, were below the median. Similarly, 19% of those students who manifested low-intensity employment at each of the three waves were in the low-duration-low-intensity category (the rest are in the high-duration-low-intensity group). These early employment patterns are significantly related to student background characteristics measured in wave 1. Students employed at low intensity during high school tend to be of higher socioeconomic status (SES) background than other workers; the high-intensity workers clearly have a lower SES background. For example, among young people whose parents had at least some college, 20% were in the high-duration-high-intensity category; 36% of those whose parents were less educated conformed to this pattern (not shown). The two low-intensity patterns had greater popularity among youths from college-educated families (27.5% and 29% were in the low-duration-low-intensity and the high-duration-low-intensity categories, respectively; only 18% and 20% of youths whose parents achieved less education were in these groups). Young people who did not work at all were more likely to be foreign-born. Because of these differences, it is important to control background characteristics in any assessment of the long-term impacts of the duration and intensity of employment. Furthermore, a series of cross-tabular analyses showed that several indicators of academic orientation and achievement, measured in the ninth grade, were significantly related to the subsequent high school employment pattern. These relationships illustrate the manner in which personal characteristics of the adolescent predict the character of the early school-to-work transition, in the absence of formal supports and institutional structuring. For example, those ninth graders who had higher academic self-esteem (e.g., perceived themselves as better readers and more intelligent), a stronger intrinsic interest in and motivation toward schoolwork, and higher grade point averages were more likely to work at low intensity during the succeeding years. Ninth grades with higher educational plans and aspirations were more likely to work at low intensity for a long duration. By contrast, the high-duration-high-

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition intensity pattern was associated with more drinking and smoking, key indicators of "pseudomaturity," as well as with peer orientation (time spent with friends) and problem behavior at school. The monthly life-history calendars (Waves 5 through 8) cover a 4-year time span after high school and include human-capital investments in education, full-time work, and part-time work, as well as indicators of residential independence and living arrangements (living with parents, living with roommates, living alone, and cohabiting). We computed the time spent in each transition-related status each year: for example, months spent living with parents in Wave 5, the first year after high school. Finally, we examine whether the youths had married and/or become parents by each wave of data collection. Data obtained in Wave 8 enabled assessment of the extent to which the duration and intensity of employment during high school were associated with the quality of work 4 years subsequently. Hypotheses

We hypothesize that students who engage in low-intensity work will have the more positive transitional outcomes. The critics of teenage employment have mainly been concerned with the deleterious effects of high-intensity work, not employment limited to 20 or fewer hours per week, which may have positive consequences for academic achievement (Mortimer & Johnson, 1998) and school retention (D'Amico, 1984). Those who limit their hours of work have likely achieved a better balance between school and employment, because low-intensity employment would make for less interference with homework as well as extracurricular activities in school. It is high-intensity work that is strongly implicated in adolescent alcohol use and smoking; low-intensity employment was found to be protective with respect to these problem behaviors in the YDS high-school data (Mortimer & Johnson, 1998). Furthermore, high-intensity work is more adult like in character; it also yields greater monetary returns, increasing youths' purchasing power and, perhaps, feelings of economic independence. It is therefore expected that youths who work at high intensity during high school will engage in less post secondary schooling and more rapidly acquire full-time employment after leaving high school. If they are "precocious" in their social development, as Bachman and Schulenberg (1993) suggested, high-intensity workers might move away from the parental home earlier, thus gaining residential independence at younger ages; they might also spend more time living alone, living with roommates,

121


and cohabiting during the years immediately after high school. Finally, the "precocious maturity" argument would lead to the prediction that adolescents who work at higher intensity would be more likely to marry and to have children after leaving high school. It is reasonable to assume that whatever benefits may be derived from employment would be less evident for those with relatively little work experience during high school. Moreover, work of long duration, which in our panel signified working practically all (22 of 24) months while school was in session, implies an ability to maintain employment and effectively coordinate work and other activities, which may bode well for early adult outcomes. By contrast, employment of short cumulative duration could imply difficulties in the successful acquisition of employment or an early failure to maintain the work role over substantial periods of time. Admittedly, given our lack of information about reasons for leaving jobs, much of this discussion is speculative. With the widespread approval of adolescent employment and the prevalence of teenage work, however, the approximate 50% of boys and 38% of girls who engage in relatively little work, as well as those who report no employment at all (10% of boys and 5% of girls), may be "deviant" not only statistically but also in terms of widely held social definitions of what is appropriate for U.S. teenagers. The particular combinations of duration and intensity delineated by our typology may be suggestive of student lifestyles and orientations to the future. The student who works at low intensity for a long duration of time may be deliberately limiting work hours to appropriately balance employment and studying, in an effort to maintain high enough grades to go to college as well as to have sufficient earnings to finance (or help finance) postsecondary studies. By contrast, low-duration, high-intensity employment may be indicative of fluctuating life patterns and goals; students whose employment is characterized by this pattern move into the labor force at high intensity and then out again after relatively brief periods of time. Analytical Strategy

We first examined mean differences in outcomes for each category of the employment typology, using multiple classification analysis (SPSS, 1993). In a second phase of analysis, differences in adjusted means, controlling for parental education, family income, race (coded 1 if white), nativity (coded 1 if born in the United States), family composition (coded 1 if

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition two-parent family), and a selection to the sample hazard rate that takes into account differential attrition (Heckman, 1976, 1979), were assessed. Predictors in the selections equation were nativity, race, family income, family composition, parents' education, and academic self-esteem. Finally, in a third phase, controls were added for relevant lagged behavioral and attitudinal variables. For the achievement-related outcomes of education and work, we control a series of ninth grade indicators of involvement in school: intrinsic motivation toward school, academic self-esteem, educational goals (an index of aspirations and plans), and grade point average. For the indicators of residential independence, marriage, and parenthood, we controlled for early (ninth grade) indicators of "pseudomaturity": frequency of smoking, drinking, and peer orientation (time spent with friends), as well as ninth-grade school-related problem behavior. Unless noted otherwise, all differences described in this chapter are statistically significant at the .05 level. Because the effects of adolescent work experiences on the transition markers and early occupational attainments may be different for boys and girls, we performed all analyses separately by gender. We then examined the effects of the adolescent work-experience patterns on the quality of work obtained 4 years after high school. That is, we estimated the influence of the high-school employment pattern on several work attributes for those who were employed in Wave 8 (net of social background). Finally, we explored the manner in which early work in high school may contribute to or detract from subsequent employment. We examined the likelihood of working, each year after graduation, for the same employer as in high school. Distribution of Transition Markers

Before we examine the relationships between the high-school employment dimensions and activities during the period after high school, it is instructive to observe the aggregate distribution of these activities, shown in Table 5-3. The percentage of students attending school, including 4-year colleges, community colleges, and technical-vocational schools, declined precipitously during the 4-year period. Still, approximately half the male and female respondents in Wave 8 reported some school attendance during the preceding year,3 and those who did attend spent, on average, more than 8 months of the year in this activity. Over time, the percentage of students who had part-time work declined, paralleling the decline in schooling. Again, however, involvement in part-time work

123

Table 5-3. Aggregate Distributions of Students in States - Life-History Calendar Boys% W5

% Any time in school 73.8 Mean months in school total sample 5.60 Mean months in school, if attendeded school 7.58 68.4 % Any time in part-time work Mean months in part-time work total 5.17 sample Mean months in part-time work if worked part time 7.56 % Any time in full-time work 48.5 Mean months in full-time work total sample 3.35 Mean months in full-time work if worked part time 6.90 % Any time unemployed 27.2 Mean months unemployed total sample 1.41 Mean months unemployed, if unemployed 5.16 % Cohabiting 5.7 Mean months cohabiting, total sample 0.39 Mean months cohabiting, if cohabiting 6.86 % Married by a given wave 1.6 % With children by a given wave 4.1 W = wave.

Girls%

W6

W7

W8

W5

W6

W7

W8

53.7 4.39 8.18 55.5

52.6 4.39 8.35 52.9

48.2 4.27 8.86 52.1

78.2 5.87 7.51 74.6

63.9 5.26 8.23 66.7

58.3 4.85 8.33 62.2

53.8 4.53 8.41 55.9

4.43 7.97 62.1 4.83 7.77 17.5 0.96 5.47 12.4 0.79 6.34

4.23 8.00 66.4 5.78 8.71 12.7 0.53 4.15 16.5 1.19 7.20

4.35 8.35 65.7 5.68 8.65 15.4 0.60 3.88 17.5 1.40 8.00

6.20 8.31 39.4 2.44 6.20 25.8 1.37 5.30 14.0 0.90 6.41

5.61 8.40 50.8 3.59 7.07 19.9 0.92 4.61 18.7 1.41 7.54

5.35 8.61 55.0 4.39 7.98 13.1 0.57 4.33 28.7 2.37 8.28

13.5

12.5

17.8

23.4

5.08 9.09 60.1 4.94 8.22 10.1 0.51 5.04 28.8 2.39 8.31 15.2 31.8

3.4 6.8

8.3 8.3

9.9

2.0

3.3

8.0

Adolescent Part-Time Work and Postsecondary Transition

125

Table 5-4. Co-occurence of Education and Work Statuses

Boys (%) School only Part-time job only Full-time job only School and part-time job only School and Full time job only Part-time and Full-time only All three Girls (%) School only Part-time job only Full-time job only School and Part-time job only School and Full-time job only Part-time and full-time job only All three

W5

W6

W7

6.9 4.3 9.5

2.1 8.0

2.9 5.9

2.3 6.8

36.3 11.2

22.0 22.3 11.0

24.7 19.5

21.9

21.4

24.4 20.3 11.8 10.0 20.3

6.2 4.8 55

4.8 8.5

4.2 6.3

5.1 6.0

13.8 29.5

17.6 27.2

22.3 21.1

20.2

10.2 20.2

8.1

44.0 7.8 6.2

20.9

7.6

8.5 7.0

22.8

8.5 9.6

W8

9.4

11.0 20.8

9.0

W = wave.

was substantial for those who engage in this activity - also approximately 8 or 9 months. As the number of years out of high school increased, full-time work became more prevalent, as did the time spent doing it. In Wave 8, almost two thirds of the boys and 60% of the girls reported having had full-time jobs. It is noteworthy that girls were more likely to be doing part-time work, which is more compatible with postsecondary schooling, and less likely to have full-time jobs each year after high school. About one fourth of the panel spent some time unemployed in Wave 5, the first year after high school; this decreased to 15% of the boys and 10% of the girls 3 years later. For those who reported any unemployment, by Wave 8 the amount of time spent in this state was about 4 months for boys and 5 months for girls. Although these figures may be somewhat exaggerated, given that students were instructed to check the life-history calendar each month that they experienced any unemployment (not necessarily lasting the whole month), the data suggest that Minnesota youth, despite persistently low unemployment rates in the state compared to national averages, experience considerable difficulties in finding and maintaining work. It is of special interest to observe the co-occurrence of the education, part-time work, and full-time employment statuses, shown in Table 5-4. The most common pattern in the first year after high school, for both genders, was to combine schooling and part-time work.


A substantial minority of students, however - fully one fifth of the boys and girls - combined all three statuses during the course of the calendar year, experiencing some schooling, part-time work, and full-time work. The general form of the distribution persists throughout the 4-year period after high school, with decreases in schooling and work combinations and increases in the proportion of students having only a full-time job during the year. Even in Wave 8, however, 4 years beyond high school, less than one fourth of the panel is giving exclusive attention to a full-time job. It is remarkable how similar, overall, are the girls' and boys' distributions. Girls were somewhat less likely than boys to be employed full-time and more likely to be attending school (only) or combining school and parttime work, however. Clearly, the contemporary transition from school to work, as indicated by these co-occurring roles, is highly variable and individualized as young people acquire human capital through education and work, moving between and combining these experiences. Returning to Table 5-3, we now consider early family formation processes. With respect to the establishment of intimate and familial relationships, the rate of cohabation increases from 6% to 18% of the male respondents from Waves 5 to 8; for female respondents, the rates are greater each year, increasing from 14% in the first year after high school to 29% 4 years later. As judged by the mean months of cohabitation registered, the cohabiting state lasted approximately 8 months in Wave 8. (Cohabiting partners are not necessarily the same during these periods.) Similar proportions of men (10%) and women (15%) were married 4 years after high school. Many more women reported that they were parents than reported having been married, however. In fact, by Wave 8, 32% of the women had had one or more children; this was true of only 13.5% of the men. These particular activity states during the transition to adulthood are of course interrelated (Table 5-5). For both male and female respondents, months of schooling in Wave 8 was positively related to months of parttime work and negatively related to full-time employment. Part-time work may provide financial support for the continuation of schooling, as well as continued human-capital development through what is learned on the job. The demands of full-time work, by contrast, may be incompatible with extended postsecondary schooling (Thornton, Axinn, & Teachman, 1995). Those in Wave 8 who spent more time cohabiting spent less time in school, and this inverse relationship is especially pronounced among girls (r = -.32 for girls; r = -.16 for boys; for both, p < .01). Those who

Table 5-5. Correlation Matrix of Life Activities for Wave 8

Boys School Full-time work Part-time work Cohabiting Living alone Living with parents Living with roommates Girls School Full-time work Part-time work Cohabiting Living alone Living with parents Living with roommates *p

skill levels

->

change

Expansion ofHE/FE*

287

->

Shift to learning society

HE = Higher Education /FE = Further Education Figure 12-1. Relationship between education and employment: the technocratic model.

(HMSO, 1996, p. 8); as such, it represents a real economic threat to the unity of the European Union (EU). Since 1988, extensive reforms have addressed fundamental weaknesses in education and training provision, including a massive expansion of higher and further education to supply the increased number of professionally trained and technically qualified workers that the modern economy claims to need. This technocratic argument takes one final step the United Kingdom should become a learning society, and should develop "a culture of continuing improvement [because] competitiveness is dynamic. We cannot ever afford to stand still. For as we change and innovate, the outside world also changes. And so the pressures continue" (HMSO, 1994, p. 159). The key to sustainable economic prosperity is considered to be highly skilled workers who are also lifelong, flexible learners. This argument could be used to justify a further expansion of higher and further education, but it is too one-sided: The interactions of physical and human capital have always been more complex, and are especially so in the new high-tech manufacturing industries, where the organization of work and robotic technology are both constantly employed to diminish dependence on skilled workers. For instance, Fujitsu, which produces microchips near Darlington, invested approximately £1 million in plant and equipment for each of the 500 jobs it originally created and a further expansion (involving another 600 jobs) will again cost £1 million per job (Aviss, 1995). Many thousands of the 140,000 unemployed in northern Great Britain (Labour-Market Trends, March 1996) could, in fact, be trained to perform these jobs, but the region would still need 127 such plants to eradicate unemployment. The paradox of modern industry is that a strong manufacturing base is an essential precondition for long-term economic growth, but it does not create many jobs, so high structural unemployment is likely to continue to coexist even with a high-tech, high-investment economy as in


Germany. Investment in education and training is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of sustained economic prosperity: The point is neatly captured in the phrase "Let them eat skills." This exhortation is the title of an article by Douglas Noble, who argues that in the United States as in the United Kingdom, "there is a dire shortage of decent jobs, not a shortage of skilled labour ... The wages and job security of those still employed are steadily eroding, as organized labour has been all but destroyed, and most new jobs are in the low-wage, temporary, part-time, service sector, requiring minimal skills" (Noble, 1994, p. 22). The result may be, for the United States and for the United Kingdom, a highly skilled elite and a growing army of the (at best) semiskilled and expendable. Noble's account, however, does not, despite his claims, accurately describe the situation in Germany, where industry continues to create high-tech jobs and where the trade unions remain a force to be reckoned with. Such views are a necessary corrective to the current conventional wisdom, eloquently and influentially advocated on both sides of the Atlantic, which restricts attention to improving both the quality and quantity of the skills of the workforce. In the United States, Reich (1993) has maintained that the only true competitive advantage lies in enhancing skills and capacities, particularly of the new category of workers he calls "symbolic analysts." Rifkin (1995, p. xvii) pushed this argument further by claiming that the new technologies and globalization: ... are fast polarizing the world's population into two irreconcilable and potentially warring forces - a new cosmopolitan elite of "symbolic analysts " who control the technologies and the forces of production, and the growing number of permanently displaced workers who have little hope and even fewer prospects for meaningful employment in the new hightech global economy. In Canada, the province of British Columbia produced a report with the apposite title Training for What? that argued persuasively for "an industry-led workforce development strategy, linked to an economic development strategy." Unfortunately, the development of the economic policy that is to create all the new jobs for "the world-class, highly skilled and adaptable" Canadian workforce was considered beyond the scope of the report (1995, p. 34). Swift quoted this irresponsible remark of the premier of New Brunswick in Canada (1995, p. 131): "If you have the training, the jobs will take care of themselves." Swift's book is a sustained attack on "the seductive myth of salvation through ever more training." A jet aircraft needs engines as well as trained pilots.

Education and Employment in Great Britain

289

In the United Kingdom, Sir Christopher Ball (1995) continues to proclaim that "the quality of the education and training of the workforce is the single most important characteristic in determining economic competitiveness." What is overlooked in these arguments is acknowledgement of the comparatively low demand for high-level skill in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The work of Ewart Keep and Ken Mayhew is particularly associated with the view that significant sectors of the British economy "are concentrating on low-specification, lowcost, standardized goods and services that create a weak demand for additional skills" (Keep & Mayhew, 1995, p. 9). Additional public investment in higher and further education, therefore, may result in only disappointment and frustration for future cohorts of graduates unless a means is found of increasing the demand for skills across the British economy. Brown and Scase (1994) advanced different reasons for rejecting the "technocratic model," principally because it does not stand up to examination, either theoretically or empirically. On theoretical grounds, the technocratic model is thought to be seriously deficient because it ignores "the power play of competing vested interest groups [which] is vital to a full understanding of both educational change and the labour market" (Brown & Scase, p. 17). In a similar vein, Stephen Ball (1993) concluded that the market reforms that have been implemented in British education are producing winners and losers. The winners tend to be middle-class families, who, through their knowledge of the system, are reasserting their advantages in education; the losers tend to be working-class families who so value their local community that they send their children to the nearest school rather than compete for places at "successful" schools, which may be some miles away. The comparative lack of both economic and "cultural" capital also ties working-class families to their immediate locality. The questions that need to be asked of the society that has been created in the United Kingdom are: How many losers can the system stand? What practical concerns are expressed by the privileged for the most needy? What happens to social solidarity when the wealthy increasingly withdraw from state services, such as education and health, into private provision? Taylor-Gooby (1991, p. 16) caught the moral tone of contemporary Great Britain in the following passage: In a polarized society, the idea that many poor people constitute an undeserving underclass, corrupted by state aid, is likely to find a ready audience among the advantaged, since it confirms their own merit, and gives a moral gloss to the material gulf between the established and the marginal.

290 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives 1 Academic:

-^Upskilling -> Expansion -> Intensification —>1 Core workers: of Hierarchy ofHE/FE* middle class among monopolization Institutions: of superior jobs -> Multiskilling "Oxbridge" "Redbrick"

2 Vocational:

-> New hybrid skills

A Levels

GNVQs* 3 Employment:

-> Increasing Diversification:

-» Reskilling

"Plateglass" Ex-Polytechnics

NVQs*

Colleges ofHE/FE 4 No qualifications -> Deskilling -> YT* 50% get

qualifications 24% become unemployed

-> 2 Peripheral workers: part-time, casual, shortterm contracts

Firm-based YT -> 3 Unemployed "under-class"

* GNVQs = General National Vocational Qualifications NVQs = National Vocational Qualifications YT = Youth Training HE/FE = Higher Education/Further Education

Figure 12-2. Relationship between education and employment: the Polarization model, with, increasing competition between occupational social group. The Polarization Model

A model of social polarization, again based on Brown and Scase's original argument about social exclusion, is therefore preferred to the "technocratic model." This alternative approach is presented in Figure 12-2. Support for this competing explanation comes from the empirical examination of the claim that there has been a general upskilling of the workforce. Gallic studied patterns of skill change in the United Kingdom and assessed the evidence for three competing claims: Is the workforce being upskilled, deskilled, or polarized? He concluded that "the argument that is best supported is that of a polarization of skill experiences between classes ... those that already had relatively high levels of skill witnessed an increase in their skill levels, while those with low levels of skill saw their skills stagnate" (Gallie, 1994, p. 75). Gallie's research suggests that two factors appear to be at work simultaneously. First, the skill requirements of some forms of work are rising


291

sharply and are being extended to many more members of the workforce. At the same time, however, a deep class and gender divide in skill formation is taking place: "There are also great differences in virtually every aspect of training and development between those in higher-level jobs and those in jobs at lower skill levels. There was a marked lack of provision for the one-third of employees with very low levels of qualification" (Gallie & White, 1993, p. x). It is far too sweeping, then, to claim that the workforce is being extensively upskilled when certain groups, such as unskilled manual workers, are struggling to find casual, ill-paid jobs without any training. Bynner (chapter 3 in this volume) has also emphasized the polarization that is taking place among women themselves; Those women without children and with the most human and social capital receive as much work-based training as men, whereas those women with children and with very little human and social capital lag way behind men at every occupational level in the amount of training received. The long controversy between upskilling or deskilling interpretations of the changing conditions of work has recently been reviewed, and the conclusion was reached that "the nature and direction of skill change is unclear because there is no uniform effect" (Parsons & Marshall, 1995, p. 7). Braverman's well-known thesis (1974) about the increasing degradation of work in the 20th century founds only limited support, but Parsons and Marshall added that "many of the lower-skilled jobs ... have been effectively de-skilled out of existence through process automation" (Parsons & Marshall, 1995, p. 15). New hybrid combinations of skill across occupational boundaries were also found to coexist with upskilling, deskilling, reskilling and multiskilling: In short, the picture is becoming increasingly muddled, with traditional skill boundaries breaking down and with much still to be learned about the direction and detail of skill change.2 Figure 12-2 is an attempt to capture some of the main features of the growing polarization in contemporary Great Britain, so not only are the three pathways (A level, general national vocational qualifications [GNVQs] and national vocational qualifications [NVQs]) in the national framework of qualifications listed, but a fourth pathway has been added, consisting of those who leave school with no or minimal qualifications. Sir Ron Dearing's review of qualifications for 16- 19-year-olds shows that as many as 21% of 17-year-olds were neither in education nor training (Dearing, 1996, p. 5). This sizable minority has, in effect, precious little hope of ever becoming successful members of a global economy that celebrates and rewards a trained capacity to continue learning.


Moreover, the value of education credentials begins to fall as a higher percentage of each generation achieves graduate status (up from 6% in the early 1960s to almost 30% in the early 1990s), when there is no corresponding expansion of elite jobs. Hirsch accurately described one of the main consequences of this inflationary spiral that has taken off, with graduates reading for higher degrees to increase their chances of employment in a job market where the entry requirements are constantly rising: "Where educational expansion overcrowds superior positions as a whole ... the effect will be to push competition by hitherto qualified applicants down the hierarchy of jobs: screening will be intensified at each level" (Hirsch, 1977, p. 50). This process of "downgrading" is already excluding many of those with middle ranking qualifications from the jobs they used to do. A Canadian study (Tanner, Krahn & Hartnagel, 1995, p. 152) took up the argument here: In turn, competition for the remaining jobs at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy is more intense. High school dropouts are at the end of the job-seekers' queue. In the past, some dropouts could hope, in time, to move into reasonably well-paying and secure jobs. But such opportunities are rare today. In 1976, Dore accurately described the paradox of the diploma disease, whereby "the worse the educated unemployment situation gets and the more useless educational certificates become, the stronger grows the pressure for an expansion of educational facilities" (Dore, 1976, p. 4). What is happening to those at the bottom of the British system? Only 50% of those who complete 2 years of youth training obtain a qualification, and 24% complete their training only to become unemployed (MacLagan, 1996, p. 9). These percentages are the global national figures, so they disguise both considerable regional variations (with far poorer outcomes in such areas as Merseyside and the northeast, which reflect the state of local labor markets) and high rates of early leaving: The national completion rate is 46% (Dearing, 1996, p. 13), with 25% completing in Merseyside and 63% in Hertfordshire. Raffe and Surridge's review (1995, p. 3) of the evidence about the participation in Great Britain of 16to 18-year-olds in education fully endorses the alternative model that is advocated in this chapter: Britain may stabilize as a medium participation system in which participation and attainment are highly polarized. In this scenario a large proportion of the age group will graduate from higher education but few will leave with intermediate qualifications. A large minority will continue to leave early, or will stay on but achieve little of value; this minority will be at greatest risk of unemployment and other disadvantage.


293

The expansion of the higher education/further education (HE/FE) sectors and the market in education have also brought in their wake an increasing diversification and an intensification of the hierarchy among institutions, because, just as with the school system, markets require variety and choice. In the words of Halsey (1995, p. 31), "In Britain the paradoxical outcome has been a more elaborate pyramid of prestige, with Oxford and Cambridge never more securely placed at the apex on the basis of academic merit while retaining more sumptuous amenities and superior social connections/' Britain's blue chip companies are not, of course, evenhanded in the universities from which they are prepared to recruit graduates, with the result that more than 20% of graduates from some of the "new" universities are still unemployed 6 months after graduation. The unemployment rate for new graduates in the system as a whole was 11% in 1993. The final column of Figure 12-2 summarizes the alternative thesis: British society is polarizing and three main groups can be discerned. Hutton (1995, p. 105) labels the United Kingdom "the thirty, thirty, forty society," where the bottom 30% are the disadvantaged (unemployed or economically inactive), the next 30% are the marginalized and the insecure, and the final 40% are the privileged in full-time, secure jobs. The most anxious of all are those who have cause to fear that they may slip into a lower category. If this model of educational and economic polarization is a reasonably accurate description of some of the main trends in the United Kingdom, then future plans for all sectors of education will have to take account of it. A useful start would be for the sectors of higher and further education to acknowledge openly that, for reasons of financial exigency, their employment policies have been contributing to the divisions in society by creating armies of part-time, casual teaching staff, predominantly women, on short-time contracts, who receive little or no staff development or training. 3 Such measures help large institutions cope with sudden fluctuations in funding, but a temporary expedient has become standard procedure, raising moral as well as financial questions about its continued use. Evidence to support a thesis of polarization in the United Kingdom has been accumulating for years, but this is not the place for a comprehensive review; instead, two powerful, detailed, and representative studies will be briefly discussed. First, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published in February 1995 a two-volume report entitled Inquiry into Income and Wealth. Some of the key finding from the report can be summarized as follows:


Income inequality in the United Kingdom grew very rapidly between 1977 and 1990 and reached the highest level recorded since World War II. It might be argued, however, that this finding is simply reflecting an international trend, whereby all nations are affected by global markets, which domestic policy can do little to mitigate. The report refutes this interpretation by showing that, apart from New Zealand, the United Kingdom was exceptional in the pace and extent of the increase in inequality in the 1980s. There has been no general trend toward greater inequality. Between 1975 and 1993, a growing polarization took place in the United Kingdom between "work rich" and "work poor" households. The proportion of two-adult households where both adults were earners rose from 51% to 60% whereas the proportion with no earner rose from 3% to 11%. Polarization between deprived and affluent neighborhoods gradually increased during the 1980s. Poverty is becoming concentrated on "peripheral" council housing estates, which have been called "landscapes of despair" (Donnison, 1994, p. 20). Wealth has not "trickled down" from the richest section of society. Between 1979 and 1992, the poorest 20% to 30% of the population did not benefit from economic growth, and children were disproportionately represented in this group. More specifically, the wages of the bottom 10% hardly changed in real terms, but those of the top 10% rose by 50%. The second study also supports the basic findings of the Rowntree report. Gordon Forrest (1995, p. 5) produced an atlas of some of the key social and economic divisions in Great Britain, using data from the 1991 census, and after measuring and mapping deprivation in three different ways, they concluded that, "poverty had become so widespread in England by 1991, and its manifestations were so varied, that the same broad patterns can be discerned almost irrespective of the methods used to measure it. To put it bluntly, when there is a lot of poverty it becomes relatively easy to measure." Two examples out of a total of 36 maps and charts are given here: the percentage of children in households with no earners and the geographical concentration of the new, highly educated middle class. First, the percentage of children in nonearner households shows a striking contrast between:


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... poorer inner city areas, the older industrial districts and affluent rural and semi-rural areas. In Tower Hamlets (in East London) nearly 46 percent of children are in households with no earners and, in 30 districts, over a quarter of children are in that category. Among the major cities, Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham are in the top ten ... At the other extreme are the affluent rural and semi-rural districts in the south east and in the north west. In those areas, only around 5 percent of children are in non-earning households (Gordon & Forrest, 1995, p. 51).

The spatial concentration of the highly educated tells the same story, with the district of the City of London having the highest proportion of adult residents with degrees (29.9%), whereas the district of Barking and Dagenham in East London was at the other end of the scale with only 1.5% with degrees (Gordon & Forrest, 1995, p. 69). The message of all their 36 maps and charts is the same: This atlas provides ample evidence for the existence of social polarization with strong spatial characteristics. Problems of unemployment, poverty and ill health are concentrated in the major cities, the depressed industrial north and in the forgotten corners of England. By contrast, areas of affluence and privilege are found in the extended suburban south east. These patterns suggest a country divided, rather than at ease with itself (Gordon & Forrest, 1995, p. 9).

Conclusion This is the social context within which new models of education and training need urgently to be developed: Existing divisions appear to be deepening and new divisions are also being created. If evidence continues to mount of sharpening polarization, then the case for increasing the proportion of young people entering higher education will have to be considered alongside other options for investment. Keep and Mayhew, for instance, argued that public money spent on basic skills training and on retraining the adult unemployed and the peripheral workforce "... would probably produce a significantly higher social rate of return than any additional expansion of undergraduate provision" (Keep & Mayhew, 1995, p. 94). The three options to which they accord priority would benefit "those who are currently among the most disadvantaged in the labour market, and whose educational and training problems, not least in terms of consequent unemployment, impose very significant social and economic costs on society as a whole" (Keep & Mayhew, 1995, p. 93). It is now widely argued that a prosperous economy and a just and cohesive society are not conflicting but complimentary objectives: Here is an opportunity to turn that slogan into reality.


This chapter has argued that the common-sense technocratic explanation of the need for Western societies to become learning societies does not, on close examination, make much sense. Instead, evidence has been advanced of a sharpening polarization between and within social groups, a polarization in part structured and intensified by new education and training pathways. The rapid rise in inequality in the United Kingdom since the 1970s, which has made the United Kingdom more like the United States or Canada than its partners in the EU, has, however, been caused by many factors, including the changing nature of work, the differential strategies of employers toward "core" and "peripheral" workers, and the intensification of competition in the global market with the resultant steep increases in unemployment. The policy of the British government of allowing the market free rein has contributed to the deepening of divisions, however. Notable evidence includes the abolition of the wages councils that sought to protect the income of the poorest paid, the refusal to increase social security benefits in line with inflation, and changes to the tax system that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. The reforms in education and training, detailed earlier, are also part of this overall policy. In sum, the government's strategy appears to be advocating two economies, each of which is profitable, for two different sections of the community: a high-salary, high-skills economy that produces highquality goods and services and, simultaneously, a low-wage, low-skills economy trading in low-quality goods and services. It remains to be seen at what point these two economies begin to come apart and at what cost to the cohesion of British society. Hungarian financier George Soros (1997) has begun to fear: ... that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.

In the United Kingdom at least, the spread of market values has not been the result of laissez-faire capitalism but the deliberate and planned action of the conservative government, which at least has the advantage that it could be reversed.4 Notes 1. I am grateful for the stimulus provided by the arguments presented by Phillip Brown and Richard Scase (1994) and I freely acknowledge them as the source of the ideas pre-


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sented here. A comparison, however, of the two accounts will show that the original argument has been considerably elaborated on and developed. 2. Professor Francis Green (Leeds University), Professor David Ashton, and Dr. Alan Felstead (Leicester University) are conducting the first detailed survey in the United Kingdom of skill levels and reward as one of the 14 projects within the Economic and Social Research Councils (ESRC's) Learning Society Programme. Further details about the these projects are available from the director, Frank Coffield, Department of Education, University of Newcastle, St. Thomas Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom. 3. One estimate puts the number of university-based researchers on short-term contracts at some 18,000 in 1995 (see SET Forum, 1995, p. 25). 4. I am grateful to Lesley Andres and to Walter R. Heinz for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

From Systems to Networks: The Reconstruction of Youth Transitions in Europe1 LYNNE CHISHOLM

This chapter addresses two linked questions about the directions of contemporary European social change processes. First, what kinds of changes appear to be taking place in the social construction of the life course that impinge on the modalities of youth transitions? Second, what kinds of flexibilities are demanded of individuals and forms of social organization in "knowledge societies/' a term gaining increasing currency in both theoretical and policy discourses on the nature and implications of economic and social change for education, training, and employment? To date, public sphere debate has focused on how to promote change at the level of individuals themselves (how to become more innovative, adventurous, autonomous, enterprising, qualified, and so on). There is considerable room, however, for institutional and organizational change toward forms of openness and flexibility that can both facilitate active citizenry and assist people to meet the increasingly complex circumstances in which they must plan and carry through their education/ training and their paid working lives. It would be implausible to argue that the risks and difficulties people experience in initial (and increasingly, recurring) education-to-employment transitions are either caused or might be resolved by the withering away of institutionalized arrangements for managing these processes. Such arrangements clearly vary between European countries: Some national-cultural traditions display quite highly structured transition management systems, whereas others have developed looser frameworks in this respect. There is no prima facie superiority of one type of arrangement over another, beyond the evident fact that existing arrangements in any one country have developed in conformity with the historically specific characteristics and evolution of a given society and are therefore, in a general sense, adapted to the working character of that social formation as a whole. 298

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There is reason to suppose, however, that different transitions systems do harbor characteristic chances and risks for those passing through them, and that the learning processes these experiences engender may favor particular profiles of perspectives and behavioral dispositions. Recent Anglo-German comparative research and related analyses offer an example of this point; see Bendit, Gaiser, and Nissen (1993); Bynner and Roberts (1991); Chisholm (1993); Evans and Heinz (1994); and Kriiger (1990). Yet, however these arrangements presently operate, it is plausible to argue that the relations between individuals and institutions have entered a process of social reconstruction and recontextualization. This is so simply because established relations between the two are less appropriate and less workable under emerging conditions, whether the perspective taken is purely economic (present arrangements are no longer financeable), more technological (present arrangements are replaceable by other instruments), macro social (present arrangements are functionally inefficient and ineffective), or indeed full-blooded culturalist (present arrangements are redundant in the face of individualization 2). Most education-to-employment transitions research is necessarily empirically retrospective (using data referring to the past, albeit often recent), even when it is explicitly future oriented (i.e., interested in forecasting future trends). The perils of social trend forecasting are legion and its frequent inaccuracies are well known; it remains, however, an indispensable element of social theory and policy. The task of judging the extent to which the future can and will replicate the past or can be extrapolated from existing data is the crux of futures analysis. This can be hazardous, especially in periods of very rapid change (such as the present) and in particular when the pace and nature of change suggest that our societies and economies are undergoing a genuinely qualitative change (for example, the transition to postindustrial economies or knowledge societies). Envisaging the prospective - as distinct from simply calculating it - then becomes particularly salient, and this is why prospective analysis is essentially heuristic, relying on theoretical plausibility rather than direct empirical evidence. The argument in this essay rests on some elements that are empirically undisputed (economic globalization, a new technological era, unemployment, and labor-market restructuring), whereas others can draw on little existing research or are perhaps less readily accessible to empirical analysis in the first place (the idea of patchworkers; ontological and epistemological questions about types of knowledge and modes of thinking). It is acknowledged that empirically oriented researchers may find this problematic, but there is


the point that theory has a way of running ahead of the data - and this is very much part of its role. This chapter falls into two main parts. It begins by looking at some basic points about institutionalized practices and change processes in the context of youth transitions, followed by a summary of theoretical developments that link the study of youth transitions more closely into a recontextualized field of the life course and social change. The second part then considers the nature and implications of knowledge societies for the reconstruction of transitions between education, training, and employment for young people, but within the framework of the challenges of life long learning and recurrent transition cycles; some indicative material from recent policy studies in this field is included. Adaptation, Flexibility, and Change The frequently made observation that interactions between individuals and institutions are increasingly out of sync has, by and large, prompted proposals for readjustment that demand innovation from individuals but nothing from institutions, which have been left to continue to behave as they "always" have (Chisholm, 1995). It is individuals and their significant others who are enjoined to cope with the contradictions and discontinuities of contemporary modernization processes; it is they, and not institutional collectivities, who are currently expected to achieve social and economic integration (Berger & Hradil, 1990, p. 4). This is a question of the relation between individuality and community, not of the subordination of the latter to the former or vice versa. If we translate this statement into a substantive example, then it is not a question of whether the pluralistic deregulated structuring of youth transitions in the United Kingdom is preferable to the firmly regulated modalities of educationto-employment transitions in Germany. They are both expressions of established transitions arrangements, but both remain oriented toward the notion of systems: Germany wants fewer of their constraints (such as inflexibility of occupational trajectories), and the United Kingdom wants more of their advantages (such as clarity of accredited occupational positions). Social systems and their institutions are patently capable of adaptation and must adopt continuously to avoid social inertia and counteract dysfunctional tendencies. For example, then, Roberts (1996) recently argued that youth transitions have adapted to new labor-market conditions in the advanced economies, so that the new patterns of youth transitions


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(in particular, extended and fragmented education-to-employment trajectories) are now being normalized. This means that European countries have been able to develop flexible transition systems and the vast majority of young people have proved themselves able to cope, given sufficient family support and an adequate supply of good-quality employment for young adults at the end of the transition process. Persistently high unemployment rates in most parts of Europe, however, render this analysis empirically optimistic, at least in the short term. Furthermore, the idea that "flexible transitions systems" now exist across Europe may require significant qualification and differentiation. Flexibility can mean several different things, and these differences are meaningful both for describing the way particular arrangements work and for the ways in which people experience and respond to their terms. Flexibility may mean that the links between certification/qualification and employment/occupation are relatively loose and unpredictable. This is traditionally so in the United Kingdom and in North America: Flexibility of this kind is not a new adaptation to changing conditions but rather part and parcel of established arrangements in these societies. It may also mean that previously inflexible systems, such as those operated in the planned economies and societies of pre-1990 central and eastern Europe, have lost their rationale and logic. Under former arrangements, education-to-employment trajectories were very much prestructured and largely nonalterable once embarked upon (see Weymann, chapter 4 in this volume). Flexibility in this case came suddenly and unexpectedly, in the sense that the collapse of existing transitions systems left little more than a vacuum - no reliable signposts at all. For those caught up in the (continuing) transformation period, such flexibility looks more like disorganization, even blockage: Former transition routes no longer exist or function, but reliable new options or strategies have not taken their place (Dubsky, 1993). But flexibility can also refer to societies in which the public secular sphere has never generated socially institutionalized arrangements for education-to-employment transitions, but in which, for example, a privatized clientelism has traditionally served similar purposes, such as is the case in southern Italy's Mezzogiorno (Leccardi, 1995). This alternative system, neither a vacuum nor disorganized, was able to underpin youth transitions satisfactorily as long as the region's traditional society and economy remained in closed-system equilibrium. The examples noted above could be multiplied. Essentially, the term flexibility refers to the amount and kind of room for institutional and individual maneuvering in an established social configuration that regu-


lates, in this particular case, trajectories between education origins and initial labor-market destinations, but it is difficult to produce a generalized empirical description of what flexibility comprises that is appropriate across a range of social and economic contexts. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is the kind (rather than the amount) of room for maneuvering that concerns us. Are the kinds of flexibilities required by contemporary processes of economic and social change well exemplified in our present and various transitions systems? What kinds of flexibilities are likely to be required in the future? The proposal made here is that in the negotiation of transitions between education and the labor market, formal credentials are paradoxically losing relative significance, whereas the capacity to analyze and respond proactively across a range of contingencies and alternatives is becoming relatively more significant. Nevertheless, at the same time, qualifications or competencies per se continue to rise in their overall absolute significance. Thus, Brown (1995) argued that corporate restructuring under conditions of heightened global competition and changing forms of symbolic control in work organizations favor changes in personnel and staffing practices that presage the construction of flexible careers that take fluid shape over a long period. On the other hand, research findings to date have continued to show the significance of initial transition for the quality of subsequent employment and career development (Mayer & Blossfeld, 1990). The argument made here thus breaks with established empirical patterns in that it suggests the quality of initial transition may become a less secure indication of the directions subsequently taken than has hitherto been the case (see Heinz, chapter 9 in this volume). This calls for explication. First, high-technology and service-oriented economies operating in global markets are generating upward pressure on labor-force qualification levels. This pressure is of a continuous nature, so that the acquisition and renewal of competence becomes a salient element of people's active lives as a whole, and not simply at the point of initial entry. Similarly, under these conditions, occupations as clusters of related competences in given organizational and task contexts also change, dissolve, and are reconstituted into new clusters much more rapidly than was hitherto the case. It is likely that more people will more often move between employers, organizational contexts, and occupational categories than has been the case for at least several decades - but bear in mind that this has been a familiar experience for some sectors, and especially for those in unqualified and casualized employment.


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Corresponding changes in personnel and staffing practices are bound to follow, if not to lead. Second, imbalances in labor-market supply and demand continue to generate credential inflation in many sectors, including among the highly qualified. This means that for many young adults, routes into appropriate and good-quality employment that corresponds to their interests and qualifications are now lengthier and more complex, building in a range of additional elements. Faced with a surfeit of qualified applicants, some of these elements are used by potential employers as extra filters - that is, as indicators of applicants' added value in terms of competencies that are not necessarily accounted for by formal credentials. These indicators will include useful kinds of work experience and skills gained along the way, but they will also include a whole range of personal, social, and communication skills that combine not only old-style class-based cultural capital (persona, accent, dress, family contacts ...) but also new-style individualized cultural capital (mobility/languages, patchworker trajectories, evidence of distinctive creativity and initiative). This implies a rebalancing between formal and nonformal credentials, in which the latter gain in importance for wider groups of young people in transition. Taken together, the two factors described above illustrate the emergence of a certain democratization of risk in education-to-employment transitions: Gaining marketable qualifications is a highly significant factor in securing reasonable initial integration chances - necessary, but of themselves not sufficient. More is needed, and this more is neither formally accreditable nor necessarily meritocratic in nature. There is abundant evidence to show that the reproduction of elite groups has always worked in this way; the difference is that our societies' increasing inability to deliver a social justice legitimated through education meritocracy and corresponding labor-market rewards may now be generating precisely what we have generally sought to minimize since 1945. If those young people who underachieve and fail at school and in initial vocational training are now added into this picture, a decisive modification arises for the proposition that the quality of initial transitions may become a less significant predictor for subsequent life chance. Research evidence unequivocally underlines that school failure and lack of vocational training together with insertion into second-sector employment and the experience of youth unemployment are highly likely to place individuals onto trajectories of labor-market marginalization and social exclusion in general. The reasons for this are complex, in that


school failure itself continues to be strongly correlated with social background and origin; the best predictor for young people's own trajectories into marginalization and exclusion is having come from a highly disadvantaged family"1 (Paugam, 1996; Room, 1995). A democratization of risk for the majority is therefore accompanied by an intensification of social polarization that places a minority on the wrong side of a widening gap in life chances, a gap that is characterized by cumulative disadvantage and that is increasingly difficult to bridge. The quality of initial transitions between education and employment remains one of the critical markers of that divide, and insofar as benchmarks of achievement are generally pressured upwards without corresponding changes in school organization and pedagogy, the generation of social exclusion through education underachievement and failure will continue. In sum, although poor-quality initial transitions are likely to remain negative predictors of employment and career chances across the whole period of active life, satisfactory initial transitions are likely to provide less of an "insurance policy" in this respect. In a curious way, we might propose that a "feminization" of transitions biogaphies is on the horizon (Chisholm, 1996; Kriiger, 1994). This term summarizes a cluster of features that until now have characterized women's education-employment relations and worklives: level for level, poorer transition outcomes in terms of the exchange values of qualifications on the labor market, higher risk of underemployment and unemployment in most contexts and countries, nonlinear employment and career progression patterns, greater openness to lifelong learning practices and to the idea of changes in direction during active life, and the development of personal and social competencies that are typically more amenable to improvization and rapid response to unpredictabilities and contingencies. In this context, existing transitions systems look increasingly anachronistic. Where such systems can no longer effectively guide, control, or predict outcomes (as in the formula "formal education and training, appropriately selected and provided, results in corresponding employment on a secure basis and, for the good achievers, career advancement"), their logic becomes redundant - above all, for those expected, cajoled, or forced to pass through their machinery. Young people may and perhaps must, - continue to absolve the ritual performances involved, but they no longer need to believe in their efficacy (and indeed, it could well be risky to do so).4 On the contrary, they must gain access to and acquire competence for a "second system" - effectively a communication


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network - in which they learn to play a gameboard whose configurations change with every move. What kinds of knowledge and skills underly and are required by such a transitions game? Cohen and Gomm's (1987) role-playing board game (1987) for young people, "Livelihoods/' was developed by youth workers and education practitioners in inner London as a realistic simulation of decision making about transition routes from school to work; its currency was "street creds." Today, the street is turning into a data highway - a virtual labyrinth - and the creds have a rapidly declining half-life. Where does that leave youth transitions, from a life-course perspective? Changing Youth Transitions and Life-Course Perspectives The 1980s were a period of renewal in youth studies, one enriched by the emergence, perhaps for the first time, of genuinely transnational problematics in the European context. This dynamic has continued into the 1990s.5 The "first wave" of the renewal process was a crisis response to the collapse of youth labor markets at the close of the 1970s. Its problematic was quite specifically that of youth unemployment. Empirical research in northwestern Europe studied "blocked" and "broken" transitions to adulthood, but with linear and sequential life-course patterns as the normative conceptual baseline. Where young people could not find stable employment (whether preceded by formal training or not, given the diversity of conventional transition systems in European countries), their access to full economic and social independence was constrained, with knock-on effects in other areas of their lives (household and family formation, patterns of social participation, freedom of movement, and lifestyle). Under this kind of model of the life course, the youth phase is conceptualized as a series of milestones and tasks that are completed more or less one after another, one in which securing paid work occupies a key position in the process.6 There had always been problems with this kind of conceptual framework: There were obviously individuals and groups whose lives did not match the normative expectations that had been carried over, unquestioned, into sociological discourse on the life course. Until the 1980s, these "atypical" patterns were effectively treated as deviant or deficient. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, much of the Anglo-American literature on education and occupational transitions from the 1950s onward was quite explicit in this respect: Minority-group and lower-class men, together with almost all women, were simply "not up to standard."


The poverty of theories that could adequately integrate the life patterns of the majority of the population had not gone unnoticed, most particularly by feminist researchers. It was not until young men generally began to have serious problems in meeting the tasks and milestones of youth transitions between education and employment that the mainstream youth studies community (as well as government policy making) started to raise more fundamental questions about the social construction of youth transitions altogether, however. Clearly, not all young men began to experience transition difficulties to the same extent, in the same ways, and at the same time. Precisely which groups triggered research and policy concern is an interesting question. Certainly, young workingclass men have historically prompted political and public anxiety over civic and moral disorder when their time is seen not to be sufficiently productively occupied, whether gainfully or in their free time. (See Pearson, 1983, for a British account; for a comparable Canadian account that, in contrast, considers the moral panic that accompanied young women's entry into employment and urban life at the turn of the century, see Strange, 1995). Furthermore, British youth research that began to address the problem of youth unemployment and its effects from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s paid much more attention to young white working-class men than to any other group, feminist revanches notwithstanding. (For a summary, see Chisholm, 1990; for an extended account of Anglo-American youth research altogether, see Griffin, 1993). It is arguable, however, that major policy measures with significant funding to respond to transition difficulties gained momentum only once it became clear that many "ordinary kids" who were neither unqualified nor necessarily from lower-working-class backgrounds were affected. Be that as it may, from the mid-1980s, a resurgence of interest in life-course theory and research took hold (Heinz, 1991a, 1991b, 1992). Together with the analysis of gender-specificity and the life course, it was the attempt to understand the social deconstruction of the youth phase (or alternatively, reconstruction; see Krahn & Lowe, chapter 11 this volume) that fueled the "second wave" of renewal in contemporary youth studies. It is worth mentioning here that the framing of the new problematics has not notably been European in any inclusive or mutually interrogative sense of the term, They have been primarily framed within northwestern European social and economic realities and discourse traditions; it is only quite recently that southern European realities and analyses have begun to make their own transnational impact. There are no good reasons for this relative neglect, but the potential parallels with "gender blindness"


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are instructive. With persistent and very high rates of youth unemployment, with labor markets that can be structured in ways wholly alien to northern European eyes, how do young people growing up in much of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece envisage, construct, and manage their lives? Some of the most imaginative contributions to life-course theory and research currently come from these parts of Europe, where the material exigencies and the cultural framings of youth transitions have never corresponded well to dominant sociological conceptualizations. Similar observations potentially apply to postsocialist youth studies in central and eastern Europe, where institutional and political framings of youth transitions have collapsed like a house of cards. It is here, more than anywhere else in Europe, where studies of the Restructuring and ^standardization of educationemployment transitions are at the top of the agenda.7 The renewal process in the study of youth transitions has moved into a "third wave," in which the social construction of the life course itself is implicated in the attempt to describe what are everywhere judged to be fundamental changes in the advanced economies - to describe, in effect, the transition to reflexive modernity (Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994). Characteristically, life-course structuring appears to be positioned in a tension field between simultaneous differentiation and homogenization processes across biographical and social time and space. Differentiation processes would include the thesis that a new life-course phase (called postadolescence or young adulthood) between youth and adulthood is crystallizing into personal and social visibility. Homogenization processes would include the idea that transition patterns between education, training, and the labor market are converging, for example, between young women and young men, or between different parts of Europe. For these two examples - and this is, once more, characteristic - both the extending horizon and the increasingly contingent quality of the status passages between youth and adulthood find their origins in the nature of changing equations between education and employment. Long-term cultural changes toward the individualization of subjectivity and biography are seen at least to accompany these processes, although, as ever, the extent of the relative autonomy between cultural and economic change remains in dispute. Finally, contemporary demographic change is refiguring both biographical horizons and intergenerational divisions of labour. As various commentators have pointed out, longer life expectancy means that people do not have to rush to get everything done by the time they are 40-something (except, perhaps, having children, in the case of women, but biotechnology is pushing back this barrier too). Higher numbers and proportions


of older people might also mean, for example, that grandparenting could (in some sense: once again) replace or complement parenting as far as childcare/preschool socialization and education is concerned. And, of course, formal education and training is mainly predicated upon young people as learners. This is no longer appropriate, in view of a more general reorientation towards lifelong learning, as noted earlier. In effect, the simultaneity of differentiation and homogenization processes coincides with a rising permeability of what have become, in modern societies to date, traditional boundaries between life phases and their corresponding activities and normative subjectiveies. This is at the heart of the social reconstruction of youth transitions as understood in this chapter: The core problematic has become the contextualization of youth transitions themselves within the broader study of transitions and social change across the life course. The intention is not to deny the legitimacy or rationality of specialist youth studies but rather to suggest that the emergent features of youth transitions can be better appreciated, theoretically and empirically, if they are related more systematically and explicitly to the changing features of the social life course as a whole. Heinz (1991c, p. 13), in drawing all these kinds of features of change together, described modern life planning in risk societies as the construction of a "patchwork in time." Liebau (1993, p. 94) concluded that for ever longer periods of time, transitory and status inconsistent states are normal experiences. The conclusion would be that an improved understanding of youth transitions demands a reconceptualization of the social life course that dispenses with linearity and unidimensionality - as encapsulated, for example, in Machado Pais' use (1996) of the term yo-yo generation. In the interim, the term patchworkers has entered the vocabulary of both policy makers and - arguably more so, though some treat this fact with reserved suspicion - progressive-minded employers. Patchworking evokes the curricula vitae of what would once have been described in transitions studies as normative outliers people whose lives do not fit the expected patterns of biographical structuring, who do not follow the recipes. Of course, the patchworkers everyone is thinking of are the creative supercooks who never use recipes but still serve up winning dinners every time. The failing candidates sink without trace; for most of us, learning how to use recipes imaginatively helps considerably. On that basis, the proposal here is that successful patchworkers in time need access to "networks in space" and the knowledge to navigate them autonomously. These are the core skills and competencies referred to at the close of the previous section,


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and I do not think their heightening significance is solely a function of intensifying competition for the scarce resource of secure, good-quality employment and incremental career advancement, as Brown's account (1995) might be held to suggest. They correspond to the idea that macrolevel changes in advanced societies and economies have implications for modalities of thought and knowledge production, and thus for social organization and social action. From Systems to Networks Gibbons et al. (1994) argued that the ways in which legitimate knowledge is produced are undergoing a modal transformation. What they call "Mode 1" knowledge - what we generally call science - is in fact derived from Newtonian physics, is fundamentally cognitive, is discipline-based, and is produced in an institutionalized context. "Mode 2" knowledge - the emergent modality - is created in a broader, transdisciplinary framework that takes cognizance of the social and economic context in which it is produced and used. This kind of knowledge constitutes a response to identified problems, and it is essentially transient in nature in that it is produced across a variety of sites. Of particular interest here is the following; Even though problem contexts are transient and problem solvers highly mobile, communications networks tend to persist and the knowledge contained in them is available to enter into new configurations ... [It is a] capacity on the move ... [in which] communications in ever new configurations are crucial ... [These are] maintained partly through formal and partly through informal channels (Gibbons et al., 1994, pp. 5ff).

Under this emerging modality, teams change according to context and demands, but these changes are not centrally coordinated by any particular organization or authority. Instead, they are prompted by problems that emerge in specific times and places. New organizational forms are needed to fit these characteristics: In particular, they call for a lesser degree of institutionalization. The key competence is that of transferable experience, which is operationalized through an organization and communication matrix that allows further groups to be formed as new problems emerge. Communications at institutional levels, Gibbons et al. (1994, pp. 48, 75) add, tend to be bypassed because of the need for rapid, flexible responses to problems. In sum: The notions of competence become redefined and boundaries of organisations tend to become blurred. Problem solvers, problem identifiers and strategic brokers move back and forth. Knowledge resources are held in

310 From Education to Work: Cross-National Perspectives different organisations and can be shifted between environments which are at one moment competitive and at another collaborative ... Education and training in advanced industrial societies have the paradoxical task of preparing people to perform difficult jobs competently, while bringing them to accept that they will have to change their jobs and skills quickly and often ... To travel fast one must travel light, in skills as well as attitudes. The only skill that does not become obsolete is the skill of learning new skills. They take the position that Mode 2 knowledge production (the evidence for whose existence remains admittedly fragmented at present) is the emergent modality and will become increasingly widespread. They identify both the "oversupply" of well-qualified individuals (for whom the availability of Mode 1-oriented jobs has declined since the late 1970s) and the communication opportunities provided by new technologies (which enable virtual mobility) as the key factors behind the shift. Stehr (1994) took a similar view but attributed more weight to directly economic and technological factors. Access to and use of knowledge is becoming the constitutive principle of the social formation (hence the term knowledge society, in distinction to industrial or feudal society, for example); and the dominance of specifically scientific knowledge paradoxically generates an increasing contingency of social action. Following the reasoning of Touraine (1986,1988), Stehr (1994, p. 231) opened up an explicitly optimistic prospect: "Knowledge societies offer the unprecedented means to empower social actors/' Individual citizens "know'7 more (as ever, through education and training, but broadened and enhanced through access to new information and communications technologies), whereas the complexity and unpredictability of social life makes control more difficult and thus tends to disempower macroinstitutional agencies. The optimism may not be generally shared, but the problem of creeping institutional paralysis in the face of economies' and societies' moving too rapidly to catch hold of is plausible, so that "one of the better images symbolizing and summing up the nature of the change from industrial to knowledge society would be to refer to the former as a community organised and controlled in a pyramid-like fashion, while the latter type of society more closely resembles delicate mosaics without definite centres" (Stehr, 1994, p. 228). For the purposes of this chapter, the important point in these kinds of analyses is the assertion that institutionally organized knowledge and resources stand in increasing contradiction with the demands and realities of emergent economic and social formations. In effect, Mode 1


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knowledge corresponds to systems-oriented modalities of production, whereas Mode 2 knowledge corresponds to network-oriented modalities of production. Systems are closed, networks are open; systems are prestructured, networks are flexibly structured; systems position their subjects, individuals can position themselves within networks; systems operate on technical rationality principles, networks work through communicative rationality; and so forth.8 Essentially, systems are predicated on a supply-side logic, in which it is the providers/managers who possess useful knowledge and the users who must be guided, selected, and placed. Networks, on the other hand, are oriented toward a demand-side logic that seeks to explicate, develop, and use the competencies that individuals and their situated histories bring with them. By way of empirical illustration of these points, this chapter concludes by signaling some of the problems of present transitions systems through two recent policy studies in the field of vocational guidance and counseling. From Supply to Demand: Vocational Guidance and Counseling Services According to the Young Europeans 1990 Eurobarometer survey (CEC, 1991, Table 6.6),9 at least three fifths of 15 to 24-year-old employed (full-time, part-time, or through a job placement scheme) respondents from Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain found their present job through their parents or friends of the family. This proportion fell to one fifth or less for only Danish, Dutch, and West German respondents. The scarcity of employment opportunities for young people is, on the whole, much more severe in southern Europe than in northern Europe, and in southern Europe, the provision of public advice, information, and placement services for those making the transition between education, training, and the labor market remains patchy. Together with longstanding traditions of clientelism and familism in the economic and social organization of these parts of Europe, such figures are predictable (Leccardi, 1997). These traditional arrangements and means of securing paid work are not modern networks in the sense described above; they are more like community-based and particularistic transitions systems, although, it should be noted, they are highly communicative systems that rely on webs of personal relations. In those parts of Europe where such public services do exist on a systematic basis, however, they are not necessarily used to the extent we


might expect, and they are used much more frequently by some groups rather than others. In Belgium, for example, the Eurobarometer survey found that whereas only 28% of the employed respondents had found their jobs through family or friends, no more than 15% mentioned job centers, employment agencies, schools, or training centers either. The largest proportion, one third, had found their jobs by directly contacting employers. The Belgian contribution to a recent CEDEFOP (European Center for the Promotion of Vocational Education and Training) study of vocational guidance and counselling services in all European Community countries (Chisholm, 1994) presented survey findings that confirmed these low usage rates. It also showed that young people of nonindigenous origin and nonnationals were more dependent than average on official guidance and placement services but were less likely to have found them useful (both in their own views and in consideration of their poorer employment positions).10 The German contribution to the CEDEFOP study looked specifically at studies of young women's use patterns and their levels of satisfaction with the services provided. The information available indicates that although young women use official vocational guidance and counseling services to a greater extent than do young men, they are less satisfied with the services they receive. A number of factors appear to be involved. First, women of all ages and situations are more likely to seek information and advice in general than are men. Women are more open to the idea of self-reflection, and they are more likely to judge themselves as needing assistance in planning and decision making. Second, women may expect more from the services they use; their standards and criteria are perhaps more demanding, in particular as far as professional human relations skills are concerned. Third, women's labor-market prospects offer less room for maneuvering to fit aspirations with expectations and outcomes; it is more likely that they will not be able to secure what they would prefer. This may be intensified when they sense that guidance counselors are not optimistic or are perhaps actively discouraging at the mention of nontraditional jobs and occupations they might be considering. In addition, young women with above-average education credentials and those with very poor school achievement levels are underrepresented among service users. Formal transitions systems seem to work best for the middle levels of education achievement and employment prospects; they seem to be modeled toward average profiles, one might say. This may never have been ideal; but where individualized modali-


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ties of life planning and transition biographies gain ground, this model becomes less and less effective for more and more people. The 1990 Eurobarometer survey data, for their part, show broadly similar patterns of job finding for West Germany as for Belgium: comparatively low levels of use of family and friends combined with high levels of contacting employers directly or through advertisements. One fifth of employed German respondents, however, had found their jobs through public employment agencies, a proportion matched only by Dutch and British respondents (whose direct contacts with employers had been far less significant). These kinds of differences reflect, in some measure, the differential state of member states' youth labor markets, but they also point to differently organized transitions systems. Ultimately, the picture is not so different from southern Europe: Universalism and personal action (contacting employers directly, responding to ads) may replace particularism and family action (kinship and community connections), yet jobs do not come via the formal employment services in either case, and information and advice services do not play a prominent role in the education-to-employment transition process as a whole.11 Perhaps the most striking figure of all from the Eurobarometer survey is that 34% of the East German respondents (compared with only 21% of the West Germans) had found their jobs with the help of their parents and family friends. By contrast, very few had done so via advertisements or the official employment services (compared with much higher figures for the West Germans). A "second system" in the form of a communication network based on personal relations - the only resource in abundant supply - clearly existed here as for other goods and services, enabling young people, in some measure at least, to circumvent inflexible and ineffective formal systems. It might be countered that institutionalized arrangements for managing and supporting education-to-employment transitions are bound to prove inflexible and ineffective for some kinds of individuals and groups, and that it is positively desirable that people may choose to take advantage of these or not, as they prefer. This presumes, however, that access to such services is genuinely equally distributed, that the quality of services provided responds to a broad spectrum of potential users, and that the results are effective in terms of training and employment outcomes. Both the CEDEFOP study of young Europeans' needs and demands for vocational guidance and counseling and a second similarly focused study of adult women returning to the employment after inter-


ruption for family-related reasons (Chisholm, 1997b) conclude that this is not, by and large, the case. The evidence from the 12 national studies included in the CEDEFOP study indicated that providing better-quality and more effective services requires reconsidering their purposes, scope, methods, and contextualization altogether. Four dimensions for change were identified. First, active response to client demand, including outreach strategies, should take priority over the supply of predesigned services. Second, proactive and experiential methods of guidance and counseling offer greater scope for providing individualized services. Third, services will be more acceptable and effective where the relations between professionals and clients are as balanced as possible (recognizing, for example, that young people may well possess useful knowledge about training and employment opportunities, acquired from a variety of sources). Finally, vocational guidance and counseling services will become more attractive and productive where they integrate their activities into the personal and social life contexts of their user populations. In particular, this implies the development of networking, liaison, and cooperation across the full range of formal and informal contexts in which young people negotiate the transition process (e.g., mentoring, see Hamilton & Hamilton, Chapter 8 in this volume). Women returners, for their part, are an increasingly heterogeneous as well as a rapidly expanding group. They are also making transitions into the labor market, increasingly frequently in various combinations with education and training participation (and sometimes these are initial transitions, which can occur independently of age and generation). Women are much more eager to train, retrain, and renew or upgrade their qualifications and experience. Their demand for information and advice quite clearly outstrips the supply, and once more, that which is provided is not always appropriate to their needs. In some cases, they are ineligible to use formal services at all, on the grounds of, for example, age, family circumstance, employment status and history, citizenship, and residency status. Good-quality and women-friendly services are heavily oversubscribed, however. Women's requests for advice and information are generally multifaceted, which reflects the complexities of their personal circumstances and biographies: Women's lives do not, by and large, fit the standard normative patterns that inform the logic of transitions systems. In overall terms, the solution is the development of more open and holistic approaches to guidance and counseling contexts and their practices. The institutionalized nature of mainstream agencies


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poses problems of access and flexibility of response. This explains the rapid growth of grassroot and noninstitutionalized services, including women-only projects. These provide targeted flexibility of service at a local level and with an open-door, low-threshold access policy. They also place great emphasis on the development of communication networks across the full range of human services, enabling teams to converge together on demand to address a specific problem for specific individuals and groups. Here, the similarities with Mode 2 knowledge production are evident. Nevertheless, women's seemingly better grasp of an arguably emergent modality has not so far paid off in terms of notably improved labor-market chances and distribution. This may simply mean that some closely textured empirical research to explore this whole area is called for. In any event, Mode 2 is still a minority modality in terms of social power relations; I am prompted to add that even though knowledge may be power, the two have never been synonymous. Different kinds of knowledge are invested with quite different kinds and amounts of power, whereas relations between knowledge and power are differently constructed according to the identity of the subject representing that relation in any one instance. Both gender and generation are significant identity markers in this respect. Analogously, although we might admire the personal initiative and survival skills of many of the young marginalized and excluded (whether in the Mezziogiorno or in Liverpool12), it is of little comfort to know that they seem to derive small benefit from the kinds of services that are intended to help in the management of education-to-employment transitions. One hypothesis might run that their relative success (without applying absolute definitions of what that means) can be attributed, in part, to the ability to apply Mode 2-type strategies to making their way through the transition to active life (whether through employment as such or other means of economic survival). Once more, this calls for some systematic research, in which the operationalization of what could be meant by Mode 2-type strategies would constitute a central task. Theoretically, it reminds us that modalities of knowledge production do not simply emerge from nowhere but are all capable of being socially generated at any time. The salient question is much rather one of determining the conditions under which particular modalities become dominant rather than complementary, subordinate, or submerged - and who has access to learning how to use powerful modalities effectively.


Conclusion This chapter has argued that the social construction of the life course is increasingly marked by internal permeability, fluidity, and recursivity; this might be described as the sociological feminization of biography. Changing relations between education/training and employment/career, alongside cultural individualization and demographic shifts, are expressed in longer-term life-planning horizons and higher levels of biographical contingency. The rapidity of economic and technological change will probably demand, for more and more people, commitment to education and training on a continuous, lifelong basis. This contrasts with the "oneway, one-chance, and front-loaded" logic of present education-toemployment transition channels. Coupled with what appears to be the inevitability of more flexible employment patterns, it is now possible that initial transitions between school and paid work will gradually lose some of their longer-term significance for the direction and quality of biographical trajectories. Life-course uncertainties and risks are likely to rise for all people, but their distribution over biographical time may become more evenly balanced and ultimately fall across a longer span of active life. The key competencies for individuals will therefore become the ability and the motivation to learn and relearn continuously, together with the flexibility to respond proactively and on demand to less predictable tasks and problems in a range of different contexts with changing groups of colleagues. The patchworkers, "ideal-type" active citizens in this scenario, will need access to communication networks and the knowledge of how to turn the resources they offer to good use in life worlds where education-to-employment transitions effectively become stable, longterm features. Institutionally organized knowledge and resources are not well suited to these developments. The established arrangements for managing and supporting youth transitions that exist in much of Europe are becoming anachronistic: They take the form of closed systems that design and provide services from supply-side perspectives. Open systems operating on a demand-side logic would be more appropriate - that is, communication networks that enable more autonomous participation and mobility between problems, sites, and personnel. Vocational guidance and counseling services offer one example of this lack of fit between individual needs and demands and conventional institutional forms of provision.


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Many young people do not use or value these services, and many find their way through education-to-employment transitions without (and even despite) their assistance. Perhaps it would now be sensible - and possibly even more cost-effective - to look at what young people actually do; discover thereby what kinds of information, advice, and support they would find most useful; and then design and provide targeted services on that basis. This is, after all, one way of ensuring that institutions keep up with individuals. Notes 1. This chapter represents the personal professional views of the author, does not necessarily reflect European Union policy positions and does not engage the European Commission in any field of its activities. 2. Take, for example, the following: "until now, the developmental dynamic of the code of individuality has been integrated in the institutionalized structuring of the life course. In the future, it is one's own individuality that takes the place of institutionalized structures - or, to put it more accurately, the permanent search for one's own individuality." (Kohli, 1989, p. 268; translated by L.C.). 3. This should not lead to a static view of the consequences of poor initial transitions: Failure at one point in time can still be followed by success at later date, failure and success are not absolute constructions to be imposed solely by observers of other people's lives. Interim outcomes are snapshots of processes that continue to unfold in different ways over the biographical span, even if statistically speaking, the probabilities point much more sharply in some directions rather than in others. 4. A certain "empty instrumentalism" coupled with an intense search for meaning and self-actualization, as described in recent hermeneutic youth research, could be taken as an indicator (e.g., Helsper, 1991; Zoll, et al., 1989). 5. CYRCE (1995) provides a digest of the field's main networks and literature. 6. The British-dominated youth cultural studies school had, of course, cogently argued for the independent sociological significance of youth as cultural expression, within which strategies of resistance to social hegemonies could be observed and analyzed (see Chisholm, 1997a). The concept of transitions, whether between school and work or whatever, did not play a central role in perspectives that focused on the internal features of youth cultures, whether seen as generational or as universal phenomena. But the pioneering theory and research had taken place in the 1970s, before youth labour markets collapsed: employment or the lack of it was simply not the core problematic at that time, but rather the production and reproduction of class and gender relations (ethnicity/race was added much later on). 7. See the range of contributions included in Cavalli and Galland, 1993; Chisholm, Biichner, Kriiger and du Bois-Reymond, 1995; Chisholm and Liebau, 1993; Machado Pais and Chisholm, 1997; Youth and Policy, 1994. Preel and Le Bras (1995) conducted a secondary analysis of survey and research studies in which they proposed two contrasting models of youth transitions in Europe: southern prolongation versus northern autonomy. 8. Organizational theorists will immediately contend that systems can take open as well as closed forms and that they are not necessarily always or wholly reactive or inert in their response to the changing contexts and demands. This is evidently so (as noted early on in this paper), just as it can be argued that dichotomies such as those used here


9.

10.

11.

12.

to distinguish between systems and networks polarize and oversimplify complex realities. Real systems and networks operate between the poles of such dichotomies, which simply fulfill the basic task of analytical description. An empirical distribution of real and random examples is nevertheless likely to produce a clustering toward the expected polarities of the continuum. It thus seems reasonable to distinguish between the two clusters terminologically. Eurobarometer public opinion surveys are conducted regularly under the auspices of the European Commission. Respondents make up a statistically representative sample (and not a panel) of community citizens 18 years of age and older and drawn from all member states. Standard items are joined by blocks of questions on particular themes of topical interest or of relevance to particular areas of policy action in which the European Commission engages. The Young Europeans surveys belong to this latter category, and in this case, a supplementary sample drew in respondents 15 to 17 years of age who were not included in the main survey sample. To date, three youth surveys have been conducted: in 1983,1987 and 1990. The questions asked in the latter two surveys were very similar, so that comparisons across a 3-year period are possible (although few genuinely significant changes emerge, and none of these are relevant to the data included in this chapter). The fourth youth survey was scheduled to take place during 1997, but few questions were to be be repeated: in the years that have elapsed since the third survey, not only have young people's circumstances and concerns changed their complexion, but policy concerns have also evolved, especially in relation to the implications of European integration processes for young people. Young people on trajectories of marginalization and exclusion are very poorly served by transitions services, as a study of 16 to 18-year-olds in South Glamorgan United Kingdom described with brutal clarity (Istance, Rees, & Williamson, 1994). Although most of those studied had had at least occasional contact with education, training, career advice, and youth service agencies, they had gained the impression that no one cared about them. The accounts of both young people and professionals across the spectrum of official agencies concerned with youth and social services also confirm a piecemeal and unstructured interagency practice at the level of the individual clientuser. The need for improved networking and liaison was undisputed. Harvey Krahn and Graham Lowe (1991) have noted, in response to these findings, that the reliance on informal networks and personal contacts by young European job seekers resembles the typical job-seeking behavior of North American youth. They raise the question of whether this empirical similarity is producing a convergence of policy perspectives on respective sides of the Atlantic: Although North American policy makers are calling for a greater measure of institutionalization of their school-to-work transitions systems, European policy makers are seeking to promote individual responsibility and initiative on the part of young people themselves rather than looking to "more schemes and systems" as solutions to easing transitions. These are only two contrasting examples among the many possible, but they are not coincidental. The Italian contribution to the CEDEFOP study referred to earlier described the technical and social skills young people in southern Italy had acquired and were using to survive despite the lack of regular employment opportunities and despite their formal status as unqualified school leavers. The Anglo-German studies cited earlier (in footnote 2) included Liverpool as an economically depressed large British city offering poor transitions chances to its young people, but the findings illustrated their confidence, optimism, and initiative in negotiating the obstacles they faced in search of personally satisfactory solutions.

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Index

Academic skills, hiring practices and, 242-243 Adolescent part-time work, 111-148 academic performance and, 113-114 academic self-esteem and, 120-121 adult adaptation and, 112-113 distribution of transition markers, 123-128 early family formation and, 126-128,136-137 education and work status cooccurence, 125-126 low-intensity vs. high-intensity work, 121-122 parenthood and, 128 patterns of working and, 119-120, 134-138 precocious development syndrome and, 115 role adaptation and, 113-115 social background measures, 146-148 Youth Development Study data, 138-145 Age, defining adulthood and, 47 Agricultural skilled occupations, 43 Apprenticeships, 194-213. See also Subbacculaureate labor market bringing young and old together, 198-199 certification and, 199-200 costs of, 209-210 demonstration project in U.S., 200-213 career paths and, 206-207 cross-national policy research implications, 212-213

employer commitment and, 209-210 implications of, 208-209 infrastructure and, 210-211 social and personal competence and, 205, 207 technical competence and, 205 work-based learning types, 211-212 employers role and, 199 European, 197-200 in Germany. See Germany, apprenticeship system in identifying promising workers and, 249 motivation and, 198 reemployment and, 95 unemployment and, 91-93 Aptitude, 177 Biographical action orientations, 226-230 definitions of, 227-228 education level and, 229 gender differences and, 228-229 occupation and, 229-230 region differences and, 228 theory of, 226-227 Biographical control competence, 102-104 Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, 226 British Cohort Study 70-84 Canada labor-market restructuring in, 266-269 multiple life sphere study, 149-170 345

346 Index Canada (continued) postmodern values and labor-market problems, 260-283 social and geographical mobility, 25-44 unemployment in, 267-268, 280 vocational training in, 85-86 young adults' multiple transitions, 46-63 Career, cultural meaning of, 8 Career fixation, 228 Career mobility. See also Inter generational occupational mobility factors in, 29-35 patterns in, 43 Career routes, literacy and numeracy and, 72 Carl Perkins Act, 190 Charismatic skills, 68 Cohabitating relationships. See also Marriage adolescent work activities and, 133-134 Common sense, 177 Community colleges. See Subbacculaureate labor market Company identification, 228 Computer literacy, 68 Contacts, 235-236 Coping strategies, 102-104 Corporate restructuring, 302 Counseling services, 311-315 "Credential society/' 6 Democratic imperative, 285 Democratization of risk, 303-304 Denmark, apprenticeship system in, 197, 200-201 Deskilling, 44 Diploma disease, 292 Early family formation, 136-137 Earnings, education level and, 195-196 Economic changes, occupational opportunity and, 26

Economic imperative, 285 Educational expectations, 56-57 Educational level. See also Postsecondary education; Subbacculaureate labor market attitude belief and, 276-279 biographical action orientations and, 229 career mobility by, 33-35 career opportunities and, 218-219 earning and in U.S., 195-196 first time jobs and, 31-33 linkage to employment in Germany, 107 long-term impacts of, 33 multiple life sphere activity and, 154-165 reemployment and, 95 trends regarding, 67 unemployment and, 91-93 Education attitudes class, gender, and education attainment and, 276-279 postmodern values and, 274-276 Employability skills, 68-70 Employee needs, qualifications and, 65 Employer commitment, apprenticeships and, 209-210 Employers, hiring practices of. See Hiring practices Employment. See also Unemployment adolescent work activities and, 130-133 basic skills and, 71-73 flexibility, 262-263 labor-market changes and, 66-67 social exclusion and, 67-70 tests, 245 work-related skills and, 73-77 work-related training and, 77-78 Europe, youth transition systems in, 298-317 European apprenticeships, 197-200 European Center for the Promotion of Vocational Education and Training study, 312-315

Index Experience, in subbacculaureate labor hiring, 181-185 Family action, in job seeking, 313 Federal Institute for Vocational Education, 210 "Feminization" of transitions biographies, 304 First time jobs, 30-33 Flexible transition systems, 6, 301-302 "Floundering period/' 4 Forgotten Half, The, 195, 212

Foundation skills, 177 Free-market approach, to school-towork, 6-7 Full-time jobs, young adult attitudes towards, 51-52 Gender activity patterns nongraduates, 161-163 nonuniversity graduates, 159-161 postsecondary education nonparticipants and, 163-165 university graduates, 157-159 actual transitions by, 58 adolescent part-time work activities and, 128-134,136 attitude belief and, 276-279 attitudes and postmodernist prospective, 274-275 basic skills and, 71-73 biographical action orientations and, 228-229 educational expectations by, 57 intergenerational occupational mobility and, 36-38 labor-force participation and, 59 in life-course theory, 28 marriage expectations by, 55 occupational distributions by, 32 out-of-sequence transitions and, 52-54 parenting expectations by, 56 part-time work and, 168 role experience attitudes, 50-52

347 skill demands and, 69-70 skill polarization and, 291 social exclusion and, 82-84 unemployment and, 59, 80-81, 96-97 vocational guidance and counseling services use, 312-315 work-related skills and, 73-77 work-related training and, 77-78, 82 General equivalency diploma (GED), 249 Generation X values, 260, 265, 269-270, 279. See also Values, postmodern Geographical mobility, life-course transitions and, 28-29, 40-42, 43 Germany apprenticeship system in biographical action orientations and, 226-230 economic shifts and, 215-216 education level and career opportunities, 218-219 entry into labor market and, 215 job stability and, 221 occupational comparison, 221-226 overview of, 197-200 social exclusion and, 84-85 social inequality and, 216-217 transition to employment and, 219-226 unemployment and, 221 youth unemployment and, 215 job-entry patterns in, 214-231 social transformation of, 87-107 biographical discontinuties and, 102-105 dual training system in, 106-107 modernization process and, 106 occupational mobility and, 98-101 transitions from employment to unemployment, 91-98 unemployment rates, 90

348 Index Great Britain education and employment in, 284-296 employment studies, 65-86 labor market changes in, 264 High school diploma, 178 High-tech industries, 287-288, 302-303 Hiring practices academic skills and, 242-243 apprenticeships and, 249 interviewing and, 244-245 mistrust of academic information, 243 newspaper advertising, 246-247 school help in, 246-248 Hiring standards, in subbacculaureate labor, 181-185 Homemaking roles, 58 Horizontal skills, 68 Income attainment, adolescent work activities and, 133 Income distribution changes, in Canada, 268 Income inequality, 293-295 Individualization attitudes towards, 274-276 structural change and, 262-264 of subjectivity and biography, 307 Individualized routes to employment, 66 Industry-led workforce development strategy, 288, See also Technocratic model Informality, in subbacculaureate labor hiring, 180-181 Infrastructure, apprenticeship, 210-211 Inquiry into Income and Wealth,

293-294 Institutional networks and work entry. See also Hiring practices employers practices and, 241-249 future possibilities, 256-258 Japanese system, 239-241

low-income youths and, 235-236 signaling models and, 236-239 teacher attitudes towards, 252-256 work-bound students attitudes toward, 249-252 Intergenerational occupational mobility, 36-38 Interpersonal skills, 177 Interviews, 244-245 work-bound student performance in, 249-250 Japan, institutional networking system, 239-241 Job-creation programs, 6 Job entitlement attitudes, 274-275 Jobless recovery, 266 Knowledge society, 310 Labor-force participation, 59 Labor-market changes in, 66-67 education linkage with, 35 literacy and numeracy and, 72-73 supply and demand, 303 Language of education, industrialization of, 284-285 Leaving home, normative sequencing and, 62 Life-course perspective changing, 305-309 mobility research in, 27-29 transitions and institutions in, 3-7 Life expectancy, 307-308 Life-sphere participation, multiple. See Multiple life spheres Lifetime job concept, 9 Literacy, 68, 71-73 Livelihoods, 305

Location, in life-course theory, 28 Low-income youths, job entry and. See Hiring practices; Institutional networks Marriage adolescent work activities and, 126-128

Index education level and, 166, 277 employment chances and, 97-98 gender attitudes and, 277 individual expectations and, 54-55 normative sequencing and, 61 ordering of, 52-54 postmodern attitudes and, 275 social status and, 277 young adults attitudes towards, 51, 52 Migration patterns, 28 Minority groups employment tests and, 245 hiring practices towards. See Hiring practices Mobility research, in life-course perspective, 27-29 Models of education and training contrasting views, 285-286 language of education and, 284-285 polarization model, 290-295 technocratic model, 286-290 Motivation, employment and, 177 Movers, 40-42 Multiple life spheres, 149-170 activity patterns, 154-157 for nongraduates, 161-163 for nonparticipants, 163-165 for nonuniversity graduates, 159-161 for university graduates, 157-159 expectations and, 168-169 family patterns, 166,167 sociotemporal patterns and, 151-152 sociotemporal rigidification, 165-170 transition context, 152-153 transition space conceptualization, 149-150 National Child Development Study (NCDS), 70-84 National Targets for Education and Training (U.K.), 286 National vocational qualifications (NVQs), 67 Nation at Risk, A, 195,196

349 Networking, 236-237 Network-oriented modalities of production, 311 Nonparticipants, postsecondary education, 163-165,166 Nonuniversity graduate, multiple life sphere activity, 159-161 No penalty attitude, 251 Normative attitudes out-of-sequence transitions and, 52-54 role experiences and, 50-52 Numeracy, 68, 71-73 Occupation cultural meaning of, 8 preferred biographical action orientation and, 229-230 Occupational mobility, in East Germany, 98-102 Occupational structure career and social mobility and, 25-26 intergenerational occupational mobility and, 37-38 "Off time" transitions, 47 "On time" transitions, 47 Optimizing chances, 227-228 Out-of-sequence transitions, young adults attitudes towards, 52-54 Parenthood adolescent work activities and, 128 early family formation, 136-137 individual expectations and, 55-56 normative sequencing and, 61 ordering of, 52-54 young adults attitudes towards, 51, 52 Part-time employment adolescent cohabitating relationships and, 133-134 future employment and, 130-133 future income attainment and, 133 postsecondary education and, 129-130

350 Index Part-time employment (continued) in Canada, 266-267 nongraduates, 161-163 nonuniversity graduates and, 159-161 postsecondary education nonparticipants and, 163-165 university graduates and, 157 Patchworkers, 308 Permeable employment systems, 65 Personal action, in job seeking, 313 Personal competence, apprenticeship systems and, 205 Polarization model, employment and education, 290-295 Political attitudes class, gender, and education attainment and, 276-279 postmodern values and, 274-276 Postadolescence life-course phase, 307 Postsecondary education adolescent work activities and, 129-130 demand for, 26 expansion of, 7 individual expectations and, 56-57 multiple life sphere activity and, 157-159,165-166 young adults attitudes towards, 51, 52 Postsecondary part-time work, 130, 157 Precocious development, 115 Promotion, in subbacculaureate labor market, 185 Public employment agencies, 313 Risk, democratization of, 303-304 Risk Society, 262

Role experience, normative attitudes towards, 50-54 Rural /urban origins, life-course transitions and, 39^40 School referrals, 246-248 School relevance, student perceptions on, 250-252

School-to-Work Opportunities Act, 190, 211 Self-employment, 44, 228 Service industries, 268-269 Service-oriented economies, 7,302-303 Signaling model, of school-to-work transition, 236-239 employers attitudes and, 241-249 teachers attitudes and, 252-256 work-bound students attitudes and, 249-252 Skills employment, 68-70 basic skills, 71-73 as foundation of employability, 81-82 as human and social capital, 79-81 interpersonal skills, 177 social exclusion and, 82-84 subbacculaureate labor market and, 175-178 work-related skills, 73-77 polarization and, 290-295 class divisions, 291 education value and, 292-293 gender divisions, 291 income inequality, 293-295 upskilling or deskilling, 291 Social attitudes. See also Socioeconomic status class, gender, and education attainment and, 276-279 postmodern values and, 274-276 Social competence, apprenticeship systems and, 205, 207 Social mobility, problematic nature of, 25 Socioeconomic status adolescent part-time work and, 120 attitude belief and, 276-279 effects on education and occupation, 216-217 geographical mobility and, 40-42 in life-course theory, 27 life-course transitions and, 38-40, 42^3

Index measures of and work experience, 146-148 skill polarization and, 291-295 social exclusion, 67-70, 82-84 social inequality, 216-217 social polarization and. See Polarization model; Skills, polarization and Sociotemporal patterns, 151-152 Sociotemporal rigidification, 165-170 Stayers, 40-42 Stratification, 25-26 Structural change, individualization and, 262-264 Student perceptions on education, 250-252 Subbacculaureate labor market, 171-192 cooperative education and, 192 cyclical nature of, 180-181 education as factor in, 181-185 employment skills and aptitude and common sense, 177-178 basic skills, 178 job-specific skills, 175-176 motivation and interpersonal skills, 177 hiring standards, 181-185 implications for education and training, 190-192 incentives for skill investment in, 189 informality of hiring in, 180-181 local nature of, 178-180 as part of labor force, 171 policy interventions and, 189-190 problems for employers in, 187-189 promotion, 185 student uncertainty in, 186-187 supply of individuals to, 172-173 wages and, 171-172 Systems-oriented modalities of production, 311 Teachers, job placement and, 252-256 matching students with jobs, 255

351 offering general information and exposure, 254 providing specific information, 254-255 providing warranties to employers, 255 referrals, 246-248 value of teachers7 responses, 256 Technical competence, apprenticeship systems and, 205 Technocratic model, employment and education, 286-290 Temporal regularity, environmental, 168-169. See also Multiple life spheres Temporary/contract labor market, 269 Transitional experiences actual, 57-60 individual expectations and, 54-57 normative attitudes and, 50-54 into and out of work and school, 59,60 sequencing of, 60-62 Transition space, conceptualization, 149-150 Transition systems, youth, 298-317 adaptation, flexibility, and change, 300-305 changing, 305-309 from systems to networks, 309-311 vocational guidance and counseling services, 311-315 Unemployment apprenticeship systems and, 215, 221 in Canada, 267-268, 280 nongraduates and, 161-163 nonuniversity graduates and, 159-161 postsecondary education nonparticipants and, 163-165 skill levels and, 79-81 strategies regarding, 9-10 transition in East Germany, 91-98 university graduates and, 157-158

352 Index United States adapting German apprenticeship in,194-213 adolescent part-time work in, 111-148 earning and education level, 195-196 high school graduation levels, 194 institutional networks and work entry, 235-259 secondary education completion rates, 194-195 subbaccalaureate labor market, 171-192 vocational training in, 85 Unskilled occupations, 43 Upskilling workforces, 66-67 Values, postmodern, 260-283 conclusions regarding, 281-282 education, social, and political attitudes and, 274-276 empirical questions, 264-266 impact of class, gender, and education attainment, 276-279 school-to-work transitions and, 271-274 structural change and individualization, 262-264 Vocation, cultural meaning of, 8 Vocational Education and Training (VET), 65, 66, 215, 217. See also Germany, apprenticeship system in

Vocational guidance, 311-315 Vocational insurance, 66 Vocational preparation systems, new labor markets and, 66-67 Wage benefits, of school placement help, 247 Wage-worker habitus, 228 Welfare-state policy, 6 Women issues. See Gender Worked-based learning, 211-212. See also Apprenticeships Work entry, institutional networks and. See Hiring practices; Institutional networks Work-related skills, 73-77. See also Skills Work-related training, 77-78 Work-study programs, 176 Young adulthood life-course phase, 307 Young Europeans 1990, 311

Youth Development Study (YDS). See also Adolescent part-time work employment and schooling findings, 116-117,138-145 Youth rebellion, 251 Youth Training Schemes (YTS), 67, 215 Yo-yo generation, 308

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