In the work society, the cultivation of the self as a worker is necessary for the experience of a socially intelligible self. It is compulsory both to work and to become a worker – forming the self in line with the disciplinary requirements of labour and experiencing the capacity for productivity as a critical part of personal identity. Becoming economically productive is one of the key tasks of youth, and young people are surrounded by a vast institutional architecture that encourages them to become workers. As shown throughout the previous chapters, young people recognize this as legitimate and necessary, and many understand the successful formation of a working self to be the basic condition for meaning and happiness in life. In responding to the imperative to become a worker, young people demonstrate the profound significance of the post-Fordist work ethic for the formation of youth subjectivities. The post-Fordist work ethic shapes young people's relationship to themselves, their family and friends, educational institutions and jobs. It gives meaning to employment and unemployment, and situates these experiences as part of an autobiographical narrative. The relationship between work and life is mediated by the ethics that drive the cultivation of the self as a worker.

However, young people's practices, subjectivities and definitions of value also complicate contemporary understandings of post-Fordism. The subjectivities that emerge from these practices create questions about epochal distinctions between different eras of capitalism and about the suggestion that work has come to encompass the whole of life. In particular, the relationship between work, value and the self articulates both continuities and disjunctures with earlier manifestations of the work ethic in ways that are classed, and reflect changing distinctions between work and the rest of life. The formation of young people as workers also creates new perspectives on broader issues in the sociology of youth, including in how the nature of youth inequalities are understood and the theoretical and normative frameworks that currently underpin understandings of youth and work. In this concluding chapter, I summarize the project that I have pursued throughout this book and explore the implications of this perspective for understanding young people and contemporary capitalism.