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An introduction to the main patterns and labour market outcomes characterizing the school-to-work transition in European Union countries. It presents the various rhythms of transition and the specific transitory intermediate statuses that may occur in the process. Among a large range of profiles, two extreme ones can be identified, opposing on the one hand countries (Denmark, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands) that share early labour market entry related to high proportions of young people combining training and working and low unemployment and, on the other hand, southern countries that share high levels of youth unemployment and absence of double status positions. A second approach focuses on the necessity to shift from a youth perspective based on biological age to a seniority perspective based on labour market experience, in order to really understand labour market entry in comparative analysis. It leads to picture new entrants as relatively disadvantaged and/or unsettled workers on the labour market in comparison with more experienced workers.

This chapter examines both individual and group characteristics of work experience over the life course. It is shown that there was both huge change and remarkable continuity in the experience of paid work over the life course for men and women in 20th-century Britain. For men, the major change was a substantial reduction in total number of years spent in paid employment, particularly at older ages. For women, the change was in the opposite direction: the 1860s cohort worked on average for only sixteen years between the ages of 15 and 69, whereas the 1970s cohort can expect to work for at least thirty-two years.

Both the coal and the cotton industries in Britain were subject to important technological innovations during the years 1880-1930. The implications such innovations had for work practices reflect much about the attitudes and expectations which prevailed on both sides of industry and provide some insight into the relationship between the work experience and class identities. The decline of Britain’s established export industries in the early 20th century has been traced to technological conservatism and the survival of organisational structures inappropriate to altered competitive conditions. Of late, however, a sturdy defence of British entrepreneurship has been mounted, arguing that technical and organisational choices represented the most rational and profitable course in prevailing market circumstances. This chapter examines such points to elucidate the role accorded labour, particularly skilled workers, in the leading industries of south-central Lancashire.

Besides the conditions presented in the previous chapter, there are “other conditions” that influence people (in this case young scientists and engineers) to pursue entrepreneurship, and this is the main concern of this chapter. It seeks to explain empirically the origins of the technology-based entrepreneur, comparing samples of entrepreneurs with appropriate control groups of scientists and engineers employed at key Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) entrepreneurial source organizations. Extensive analyses on the family background, education, age, and work experience of several technological entrepreneurs are illustrated. The author claims that this type of “controlled” comparison provides higher reliability for drawing conclusions as to the unique “makings” of a technological entrepreneur.

This book examines the forces which helped shape working class identities in Britain during the years 1880-1930. Reflecting the analytical weight given to developments at the point of production, the early chapters concentrate primarily on the world of work. If employers’ readiness to delegate responsibility for workplace operations to selected groups of skilled workers was apparent in both the coal and cotton industries through the 19th century, its implications for labour unity varied markedly. Divisions appeared most pronounced in the cotton trade, more especially in preparatory and spinning departments, where a relatively small number of adult males exercised authority within a predominantly female and juvenile workforce. This book also looks at work experience, trade unions and industrial relations, employment in the coal and cotton industries in Lancashire, industrial welfare in the two industries, the working-class family, and electoral politics in the coal and cotton trades.

Researchers have historically given considerable focus to the impact employment — the simple fact of working outside the home — has on mothers and their children. However, relatively few studies have focused directly on how the quality of a parent's work life correlates with both the capacity to care for children and the health and development of their children. Many parents today are breaking new ground by organizing their life roles in original ways — such as the dual-earner couple, both of whom work outside the home. Of course, the long-term consequences of variations in work arrangements will not be known until this generation of children grows up. However, the impact of career and work experiences can be assessed on the care that children receive and their current health and development.

This chapter tackles issues related to the temporary help agency (THA) experience. Stratified stories also play a role here in shaping the ways that THA experiences influence how African American men are treated during the hiring process. Among the types of employment histories examined thus far, the chapter reveals that the THA employment experience was not meaningfully penalizing for any of the sociodemographic groups in the field experiment when compared to full-time, standard employment experience. In some cases, there was a dip in the callback rate for THA work, but none of these penalties reached statistical significance. The chapter considers why THA employment occupies this unique position. It points to a few key reasons that THA employment may be different from part-time work, skills underutilization, and long-term unemployment.

This chapter discusses the ‘virtual archives’ of community spaces and their potentials for collaborative, community-based knowledge production. It evaluates and problematises concepts of virtual archive engagement using a specific virtual archive project and a specific community as an illustrative case study. Experience Temple Works is a multisensory and participatory virtual archive of a Grade I listed building in South Leeds. It was intended to facilitate an analysis of the relationships between the vivid sensory experience of the building and the creative and cultural activities taking place within it. However, as this chapter attests, the project came to attain much greater social and academic impact through its later reconfiguration as a community-orientated platform for collaborative knowledge production. The overarching intention here is to explicate how new forms of virtual archive might challenge the power relationships historically associated with archives as privileged spaces of knowledge production, while simultaneously avoiding the many pitfalls associated with digitally mediated forms of experience and participation, both of which are well documented within the academic disciplines of new and digital media.

Discussion of globalization embraces a wide array of analytical debates about the world economic and political order. This chapter focuses on the links between work organizations and the global context, with two main themes. First, globalization is not an inevitable force but an organized project, and this chapter examines how particular organized interests have promoted their own conceptions of the process. The second theme embraces the implications of globalization for concrete work experience. This book is about working life, but it is also about the influences on concrete work experience. This chapter is concerned only with economic issues, that is, the degree to which the world economy is becoming increasingly interlinked and the ease with which capital and labour are globally mobile. Three models are considered: hyperglobalism, scepticism, and transformation.

This chapter explores the work histories and work experience of parents, their ambitions and the role of training in helping mothers in particular back into work. It summarises the evidence from the 200 families about their work experience, the evolution of jobs in their families and the links between parents’s work ambitions and training opportunities. It then explores the parents’ direct accounts of work, studying and training, using parents’ own words to convey their experiences, including work history and the prospects of ‘work-poor’ families. It notes that the work background of the families clearly influences why some parents do not work, including inter-generational worklessness. It further notes the impact of working tax credits, childcare worries, the knock-on effects on benefits and associated problems in relation to jobs, and suggests what might help.

This chapter studies how the real work experiences of second-generation Caribbean young adults influence their views on the role of education in their lives. The first section discusses the segmented assimilation theory and racial formation theory. It also introduces the race–gender experience theory, which can be used to understand the racial(ized) and gender(ed) experiences of the second generation in modern U.S. society. The second section of the chapter looks at the work experiences of second-generation Caribbean men and women, and describes this against the backdrop of a changing New York economy. The chapter references the life histories of the second generation, which reveal that men and women had rather different experiences in the labor market, which led to significant changes in their views about education.

This chapter aims to determine if there are major differences in work experience, attitude, and opportunity between mothers who work and mothers who stay at home. It compares the experiences of lone mothers with mothers who are living as part of a couple. It then explores whether mothers wanted to be in paid work or not, and why it was important for many of the mothers to be at home full-time to take care of their children.

The gendered nature of employment and women's experiences of work between the wars remains a relatively neglected field of study, especially in Scotland. Contemporary depictions of working women in the inter-war period often present them as cheap labour and ‘usurpers of men's jobs’, while historical representations of women tend to portray them as embracing a reconstructed domesticity. However, Scottish women's employment patterns, work experiences, trade union membership, industrial activism, and political consciousness in the workplace, although failing to fit within labour historiography's male-centric framework, do nevertheless subvert the stereotypes that inter-war working-class women were politically apathetic or that they had the potential to undermine male employees. What the nature of women's work and trade union organisation does highlight are the considerable obstacles that working women had to overcome to achieve progress and avoid exploitation in the world of work.

This chapter examines some instances of dissident, working-class, and regional writing, considering some texts that register the early stages of a ‘collective working-class experience’. These texts include a television show and several poems.

This chapter contemplates the current nature of employment for people with learning difficulties and aims to envisage an enabling future. It critically considers some of the contemporary employment policies and programmes in Britain, making reference to a recent study of the work experiences of people with learning difficulties and unpacking the discourses and philosophies that underpin some of the interventions of professionals and policy makers. The chapter outlines the definition of ‘learning difficulties’. It explores how employment was considered in the 2001 White Paper, Valuing People. The chapter critically examines the impact of supported employment and its relationship with normalisation. It analyses the concept of ‘real jobs’ and the service culture to which many people with learning difficulties are confined. The chapter assesses the involvement of disabled professionals and organisations of disabled people in the employment of people with learning difficulties.

This chapter addresses work experience from the perspective of the young people themselves so as to capture varied lived experiences of youth employment and unemployment. Research to date has provided an incomplete picture of youth unemployment, failing to focus on part-time work. For youth, part-time jobs are becoming scarce and more difficult to locate. With the economic recession, not only are employers in the retail and service sector less likely to hire but young people find themselves in competition with unemployed older workers and immigrant workers, rendering these jobs more competitive than ever before. Moreover, with the rise in youth unemployment and with recently intensifying aesthetic labor requirements, young people do not have the same extent of opportunities for interacting with diverse groups of workers from a range of backgrounds, including those who have been socially and economically disadvantaged.

This chapter turns to the response of the criminal justice system to neighborhood violence, in particular examining to what extent persistently high levels of incarceration can depress economic well-being and human capital in disadvantaged and racially segregated communities. A panel analysis of New York City neighborhoods between 1985 and 1996, a period in which the city's violent-crime rates both rose and fell sharply, provides evidence that high incarceration rates reduce income growth, educational attainment, and work experience in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods. To rectify this, targeted micro investment and housing development in such areas can break the connection between incarceration and economic and educational disadvantage.

This chapter explains that although not much of Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical concerns Alexander Hamilton's life before he came to the colonies to make his fame as a Revolutionary War hero and leader of the new United States government, the opening song, “Alexander Hamilton,” implies that Hamilton worked as a child and did not appear to have attended primary or secondary school. Not only did he work hard as a child, but one is led to believe that his success later in life stemmed both from his early work experiences and from his lack of formal schooling as a child. If Hamilton had been born today, would he have been the same “self-starter?” Might his tendency “to work a lot harder” have been squelched by the “paternalism” associated with modern-day child labor laws and compulsory schooling laws? The chapter then discusses the U.S. child labor prohibitions, which are well within the mainstream of international child labor standards.