This book explores the formation of youth identities in terms of the cultivation of the self as a subject of value to the labour force. This chapter builds the conceptual framework that underpins this focus, which will be used to situate young people within the dynamics of work and subjectivity in contemporary capitalism. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first establishes the conceptual utility of concepts connected to post-Fordism for understanding the relationship between youth and work, focusing in particular on shifts in the social organization of employment, the nature of labour and the relationship between labour, value and the self. The second section describes Kathi Weeks's concept of the post-Fordist work ethic, which theorizes historical shifts in the meaning of work in different phases of capitalism, beginning with the work of Weber and developing into a discussion of the ethical relationship to work mandated in post-Fordism. The third section explores the way that young people are positioned within the dynamics of post-Fordist work, arguing that youth has become critical to post-Fordist capitalism, operating both as an important source of value and as a point of intervention for governmental efforts aiming to craft and manage a labour force. Finally, the chapter describes what is meant by the cultivation of the self as a subject of value, in the context of the social transformations of post-Fordism and disciplinary requirements imposed by the post-Fordist work ethic.

In the process, the chapter aims to make a number of conceptual shifts in the concepts and theoretical narratives most influential in framing young people's relationship with work. The first and most significant is a shift away from narratives relying on the concept of late modernity and towards an exploration of shifts in the nature of capitalism. While these terms are perhaps not mutually exclusive, notions of late modernity rely on generic narratives about individualized subjectivities to be found across all aspects of social life, while the value of narratives of post-Fordism is to foreground the social and biopolitical conditions that shape the formation of labouring subjectivities within the disciplinary requirements of contemporary work.