School-to-Work Transitions and Digitalization. the Added-Value of "Extended" Ethnography

Since the economic crisis of 2008, school-to-work transitions have become even more unstable and precarious than in the 1990s, particularly for the least qualified and most precarious classes of young people. A collective ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2019 among a variety of young people from working-class neighbourhoods in Brussels has generated a NEET/non-NEET typology that highlights the various societal processes at work in young people's school-to-work transitions, whether these processes are linked to the dynamics of inequality or to the functioning of public institutions (André & Crosby 2022). These processes explain why the most marginalised fractions of young people in working-class neighbourhoods become involved in informal organisations, which are to some extent parallel to the official institutions in Brussels. Since then, many changes have taken place, including the pandemic and the growing use of digital technologies, particularly in the labour market and public services (Georges 2019). What are the effects of these changes on the school-to-work transitions of urban lower-class young people? We will answer this question on the basis of the results of an "extended" ethnography (Burawoy 1998) conducted in the same neighbourhoods. In particular, we will be looking at how young people, especially those from working-class and immigrant backgrounds, appropriate digital technologies in their daily lives in general, and in particular in their adult lives, i.e. in their search for employment or training, in their search for housing? The new observations and discussions with young people will be compared with the data previously collected. "Extended" ethnography provides a temporal resonance in which the analysis of school-to-work transitions is linked to wider changes in the organisation of labour and publics institutions. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to the field of study on school-to-work transitions and their determinants.