Early Job Insecurity and Labour Market Exclusion: Structural Conditions, Institutions, Active Agency and Capability

This paper sets out to develop an original analytical framework for a comparative assessment of the individual and societal consequences of job insecurity early in a career. The framework integrates concepts such as negotiation, agency, capability, social resilience, networks, transition regimes, welfare state regimes and multi-level governance. A key interest is how to conceptualise the interactions between the young adults’ agency and structurally given constraints and opportunities, (e.g. how they perceive and use their scope for action through networks and active agency, even in seemingly adverse circumstances) and in what sense young adults’ find ways of negotiating the challenges of prolonged unemployment and job insecurity. As two notions that are highly attentive to interactions between structure and agency, we suggest that the concepts of 'capability' and 'social resilience' are particularly helpful in this regard. 

We review and summarise relevant theoretical literature on key concepts and assess how they contribute to an understanding of the consequences of early job insecurity for young people. Of particular interest are factors that influence the extent to which young women and men are able to negotiate these conditions and avoid the most adverse consequences of such insecurity. Against this background, we are particularly attentive to mechanisms of gendered labour market outcomes and patterns of marginalisation of young people.

This work is developed as part of the Horizon 2020 funded collaborative European project NEGOTIATE, which seeks to examine how young people’s scope for agency interacts with different layers of structural conditions in a multi-level governance system.