Abstract
This chapter argues that young people in VET feel strongly about enduring views of work. Their normative aspirations are grouped in three large areas that make the chapter’s three subheadings: (i) the quest for craftsmanship; (ii) the belief in hard work and need for predictability; (iii) the quest for validation and progression. The chapter argues that young people in VET (as well) value and expect from work to deliver social validation, progression, a sense of certainty and self-worth.
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Notes
- 1.
Approximately €200.
- 2.
Lei: the Romanian coin. Ten million lei was the equivalent of €250.
- 3.
Young people saw Roma in collective terms: as families/communities . As they were situated at social distance, interviewees were hardly able to add shade and nuance to the stereotypical image of welfare recipients as opportunistic and, ultimately, disincentivized to work. References to individuals, on the other hand, rarely mentioned reliance on welfare: it was more a matter of parasitical dependence on indulgent parents and of lifestyle (being easy-going, playing computer games and hanging around).
- 4.
A part of the young people in NEET situations seem to be heavily involved in subsistence agriculture: taking care of the cattle or land cultivation. Interviewees did not perceive the young people in these situations as ‘unemployed’. On the contrary, they seemed to attract a strong sense of appreciation in relation to the hard work.
- 5.
However, the high value young people place on VET does not exclude strategic ‘ways out’ via short-term courses (of the same type as the ones they discredit). This is particularly the case for those less confident in the quality of learning or in their own capacity to exert the VET occupation.
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Pantea, MC. (2019). The ‘Grand Narrative’: Or the Power of Conventional Aspirations. In: Precarity and Vocational Education and Training. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02689-9_5
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