Abstract
The proportion of occupational gains going to local East Londoners, from the beginning of the bid onwards, was considered with scepticism, particularly when it came to high-skilled positions. This chapter details the ethnographic data collection of local East Londoners’ experiences of London 2012 in terms of their employment. Empirical data was gathered for both lower-skilled and higher-skilled jobs, providing highly relevant insights into the reasons why the London Olympic employment programmes, despite their ambitious intentions, achieved only limited success for the career mobilisation of local residents.
It has been evidenced that many local East Londoners, due to the UK recession and long experience of poverty and exclusion in East London, had set their career aspirations on ‘survival mode’. The chapter offers detailed accounts of career motivation, cautiousness, and their limitations towards the mainstream labour market, particularly towards Olympic Jobs.
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Notes
- 1.
London Employment and Skills Taskforce.
- 2.
Convenience sampling is a non-probability sampling technique where subjects are selected because of their convenient accessibility and proximity to the researcher. Systematic sampling is a technique for creating a random probability sample in which each piece of data is chosen at a fixed interval for inclusion in the sample.
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Vadiati, N. (2020). East Londoners as the Workforce for London 2012. In: The Employment Legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games. Mega Event Planning. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0598-0_7
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