This book is about the formation of young people as workers. It explores the position of youth within transformations in the relationship between work and the self that are emblematic of contemporary capitalism in the global north. In particular, the book explores the relationship between youth, work and identity by examining how notions of economic productivity form part of youth subjectivities, and therefore how young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the contemporary labour force. The book will show that the capacity for economic productivity has become intertwined with the ethic of self-realization characteristic of late modern subjectivities. The realization of the self through work has become critical to the way that young people imagine themselves and their prospects of happiness now and in the future. Young people are therefore at the forefront of what Kathi Weeks (2011) has called the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’, or the promise of personal fulfilment and self-actualization through labour that is increasingly experienced as a requirement for a fulfilling life in late capitalism. In this way, the formation of young people as workers provides an insight into the increasingly critical position that youth now occupy within the dynamics of subjectivity and economic productivity characteristic of post-Fordist societies.

With this focus, the book develops intersections between youth studies and labour studies (Tannock, 2001; Besen-Cassino, 2014), and departs from approaches to the relationship between young people and work that are currently dominant in research as well as in social policy interventions into young people's lives. Young people's relationship to the labour market is a long-standing preoccupation of academics and governmental authorities. Youth is a critical point of intervention into the labour force, with a constantly shifting array of educational, disciplinary and technical interventions all focused on turning young people into workers. However, this process – the formation of young people as workers – receives little attention and is poorly understood. Instead, as Stuart Tannock observed two decades ago (Tannock, 2001), the basic focus of existing approaches to youth and work is the role of employment in the biographical movement into adulthood, however ambiguous and complex that adulthood has become.