The Dual Society

‘The unintended consequence of the neoliberal free market utopia is a Brazilianisation of the West. For trends already visible in World Society – high unemployment in the countries of Europe, the so called ‘jobs miracle’ in the United States, the transition from a work society to a knowledge society – do not involve a change only in the content of work. Equally remarkable is the new similarity in how paid work itself is shaping up in the so-called first world and the so-called third world; the spread of temporary and insecure employment, discontinuity and loose informality into Western societies that have hitherto been bastions of full employment. The social structure in the heartlands of the West is thus coming to resemble the

patchwork quilt of the South, characterised by diversity, unclarity and insecurity in people’s work and life’

76 The field of youth studies since the late 1970s has primarily concerned itself with young people’s education and their transitions from school to work. This period is fraught with difficulty, stress, and insecurity – as has been evidenced in Section 2.4 detailing the debates concerning social mobility. Understanding this dynamic is key to the development of an effective theoretical framework within which to situate this research, and in particular the understanding of risk and how that alters the transitions of young people in the UK and beyond.

A key consequence of a society based on risk in the transitional stage is the expansion and elongation of education, which has sought to mitigate the effects of having too many jobseekers who lack the necessary qualifications to find the kinds of employment that now predominate in a post-industrial society (Bell, 1999). This is conceptualised both as a concern for the dependency children experience to their guardians and the state, and as a concern for autonomy and extending responsibility. Youth studies therefore

negotiates this dichotomy by assessing the risk factors which might hinder a smooth transition from one to the other (Cieslik & Simpson, 2013). Yet when we apply the same consideration to work, the very notion of unemployment is stigmatised and problematised to a much greater extent, especially in the period of life defined as youth that is fraught with individualisation (Kelly, 2001).

Sociological debates concerning this key point in a young person’s life are underpinned by a normative understanding which views youth as inherently transitional; we become someone (Wexler 1992). It is less common however to consider to what extent this becoming is actually a cessation of something

fundamental, and in relation to unemployment it is socially accepted that a person experiencing it has become no one (Breakwell, 1985). A job is what defines us, it is our reason to be in a neoliberal capitalist economy according to some writers (Gini, 2009; Selenko et al, 2017). Work when considered in a purely economic sense takes on an inherently dutiful role. Over time, as the nature of work has changed, it is apparent that young people’s perceptions of work have begun to broadly reflected this duty also. Given the political climate of austerity, this duty has come to be seen as something owed to the state as recompense for minimal benefits (Davies, 2014), a dynamic which fosters resentment in working class communities who do not believe that they played a role in the financial crash. It is perhaps time we asked as a result whether our work and employment can extend to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment, whilst it is being forced on us as a duty. Why should that duty after all not reflect the broader concerns of the individual, the family, and the community?

In this research transitions from education to work can be considered to be situated within Gorz’s concept of the dual society, that of heteronomous and autonomous forces that impact an individual which primarily concern the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time (Gorz, 1994). To state this in relation to the research directly, there are external forces which dictate the nature of work and sort of

77 transitions young people experience (their education or the economic environment of austerity in this case), and equally there are individuals who are socially integrated into expected transitions by a common understanding of what work is (cultural and environmental factors that go towards developing individual character and expectations). In essence, this conception does not eliminate the heteronomous forces which construct our understanding of work, but acts to delimit and subordinate it in order to let the autonomous become predominant. Understanding the dual forces of society was a fundamental concern of Marx in his conception of class conflict as the key determinant of revolutionary change and for many writers still has primacy in our struggles with rebalancing power over work (Gorz, 1997; Gollain, 2016). Whitbread (1985) and Howard (2016) see the dual society as a struggle between spaces of control i.e. our aspirations and desires, and spaces of alienation i.e. power that is enacted upon us.

The study in part seeks to investigate whether this dual society, which encapsulates assumptions about human nature, is present not only in the traditional shopfloor Marxist analyses of old (Burawoy, 1985), but whether it can be a guide for the transitional conflicts that young people face when leaving education and entering work. In short, can we alter education and work to better reflect the personal wishes of this ignored group, without completely doing away with efficient labour systems? Narratives of this kind see autonomy through the lens of mobility, the freedom to achieve a better condition for oneself. Young (1986) saw this question in terms of the autonomy of the individual and their autonomy in relation to the state and argues that personal autonomy implies individual self-determination in accordance with a chosen plan of life. In turn this feeds into debates regarding social mobility that are not only viewed through an economic lens but through a varying definition of success.

Gorz has often been misrepresented as subscribing to a purely existential analysis, but with increased interest in ideas like a Universal Basic Income (UBI) (Section 2.5) (Jordan, 2011; Taylor-Gooby, 2013) there is now space to incorporate his analysis more widely. Our inability to gauge the value of activities and

relationships which have neither economic worth nor societal utility, as exemplified by the general resistance to the UBI as a policy reform, is in itself symptomatic of ‘the production of a world without sensory values and a hardened sensibility, which hardens thought in its turn’ (Gorz cited in Bowring, 1996:4). In this sense Gorz theorises that all work when coerced directly or indirectly has a dehumanising quality, though this in itself is not necessarily wrong, what is false is the perception that the processes can be humanised without humanising the outcomes.

If we apply the concept of duality to the question at hand the perception of work presented by young people in this study (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) is often one that sees mostly remunerative value, or career progress, yet often little else of value within the action of work. Standing’s (2014) analysis of the

78 work done by this class as work-for-labour. In essence this refers to unremunerated activities that become indirectly coercive as failure to take part will prevent individuals from a decent standard of living. At the extreme end this concerns Workfare, but on a much more general level young people are expected to engage in such activities daily (Walther et al, 2015). Calls for extended years spent in school are common in the UK, as well as time spent on often potentially superfluous training courses for jobs that do not exist.

There is a sense among some commentators that risk (in this case unemployment) is being mitigated solely for the benefit of the state (Jentsch, 2004; MacDonald, 2006). The risk society described by Beck (1992) sees the labour market as the motor of individualised risk, but if young people are delayed from entering that market or indirectly prevented from entering it altogether the risk for those already occupying positions of power are mitigated but not those of the young person themselves. Individualisation ‘manifests itself in the acquisition, proffering, and application of a variety of work skills’ (Beck 1992:93) which in turn creates a sense that failure to succeed is a failure on your part alone. Further,

individualisation inculcates a dependence on wages and consumption, thereby promoting geographical mobility in order to find even subsistence level employment . In distancing individuals from their families and childhood support networks risk becomes further individualised, and notions of autonomy are only realised in terms of spatial movement promoting greater competition for diminished opportunities, and further mitigates away risk from employers, schools, and governments. In the consideration of these two core theoretical concepts: risk and the dual society, a space opens up for a new debate in regards to youth transitions.