Economists have stated that unemployment has a lasting negative effect, particularly on young people. The present research examined the experiences of young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) in Scotland and the impact being NEET has on their identities. Specifically focussing on how these young people gain recognition and construct a positive sense of self. Three research questions are addressed: (1) how do young people give and receive recognition in their peer group? (2) How do young people engage with the alternative context of an online social networking site in order to give and receive recognition? (3) Are there any disagreements and/or misunderstandings between young people and employers? These questions are examined using three data sets: 16 peer group discussions with a total of 79 young people, 37 Bebo (a social networking site) profiles and questionnaires completed by 33 young people and 29 employers. Analysis of peer group discussions revealed the ways in which young people give and receive recognition and the recognition they feel they are given and denied from others. This highlights the complex transition into work for these young people and their struggle for recognition. For example, trying to balance avoiding ridicule from peers associated with certain jobs with their desire to find a job which will allow them to buy certain things and participate in adult life. Analysis of Bebo profiles revealed that young people make use of the existing structures of recognition within Bebo but also manipulate the site in order to gain further recognition in ways that could not have been predicted. Bebo offers young people the chance to gain recognition for popularity, sexual attractiveness and physical strength in ways which may not be deemed acceptable in everyday offline life. A comparison of the perspectives of young people and employers revealed a number of misunderstandings which hinder their relationship, for example the importance of qualifications. Analysis across these three data sets, and the social contexts they represent, reveals the tensions young people experience as they move between different structures of recognition. The main theoretical contribution of this research is a model of recognition in which the self is caught between different structures of recognition. This model provides an insight into what motivates young people to behave differently in different contexts, based on the perceived and actual recognition available. For example, online social networking provides a space for young people to receive recognition for how much alcohol they can drink, however this is not something they would draw attention to in a work environment. There are two applied contributions: (1) at a practical level, young people would benefit from more work experience placements and positive engagements with employers. (2) Most importantly, alternative structures of recognition are needed which recognise the knowledge and skills that young people do have. Instead of focusing on their weaknesses, we must help them build on their strengths. This would allow all young people to feel valued and more able to create a positive sense of self.

The majority of children, involved in both waged and unwaged work exist beyond the control and comprehension of national and international regulation, within the informal economy. Research has shown that the informal economy, contrary to general perception, is not a sphere of unregulated activity, but rather, operates through alternative structures and techniques of power. Children's work within the informal economy, and therefore outside the regulative reach of the state, is subject to extra-legal modes of regulation that are pursued through elaborate systems of discipline and power exercised by non-state actors, groups, and social institutions and networks. Through a case study on children in Kolkata, India, who are engaged in specific forms of informal work in three distinct urban spaces – domestic servitude in the private realm of the home, small-scale manufacturing and service work in factories and shops, and ragpicking, scavenging and begging on the streets – this thesis aims to explore the way children's lives are constructed through work and space, to uncover the social processes and relations of power that working children navigate in order to build and sustain their livelihoods. I examine the way that children's spaces of work are imbued with social relations of gender, caste, religion, ethnicity and power that are enacted through the construction of hierarchies, divisions of labour, and work regimes. I also explore the politics of these spaces, revealing the primary economic partnerships and obstacles that children contend with in constructing their working lives. Overall, I aim to uncover the ways in which children engage with and negotiate the extra-legal systems of regulation by categorically analysing children's work in the home, shop and factory, and street.

In light of current population dynamics across Europe, employability has been highlighted in policy circles as a way to enhance the employment situation for older people and to extend working lives. This research examines the concept of employability in the context of older workers (aged 50-64) in a number of European countries. The definition of employability is elaborated through prior research to develop a conceptual framework for analysis. This multidimensional framework is then applied using multiple waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The analysis identifies the associations of indicators representing the dimensions of employability on labour market status through a cross-sectional approach, before expanding to explore their relationship with labour market transitions in and out of employment. This is first done using English data before introducing macroeconomic variables in a multilevel model of 13 European countries to incorporate the cultural and contextual factors that may impact trends in labour market outcomes of older workers. Overall, the findings suggest that, while some of the conceptual dimensions of employability are associated with labour market outcomes, many of these relationships relate to broader socio-economic factors as well as the contextual environment in which older workers find themselves. In other words, for policy approaches to improve employment in later life, a focus on the concept of employability may be a less effective approach than concentrating on more specific factors that shape the structure of opportunities for older workers.

Demographic changes have facilitated longer, healthier lives, and legislative changes have encouraged extended working lives through the increasing of state pension age, equalisation of state pensions, and the removal of the default retirement age. Recent age discrimination legislation has begun to combat age discrimination within the employment context of the UK. Legal precedent has also been established during the course of this research through case law, as a result of high profile age discrimination cases reaching the Supreme Court. Through several interview studies, this thesis explores the experiences, views and attitudes of employees, employers, job seekers and retired individuals. Utilising focus groups, this thesis also presents data from a range of charity representatives, human resources professionals, line managers, employment advisors, health and safety practitioners, and trade union representatives in order to explore the influence of changes in later life working policy and practice. The research of this thesis also includes a consultation exercise to engage the potential users of the research and develops a policy and practice framework providing recommendations which could lead to better outcomes and improved opportunities for older workers. Finally, a series of video case studies presents the research findings in an accessible visual format. This varied use of communication methods was specifically selected in order to increase the impact of the research and potential user audience. Research findings highlighted that managing age diversity was perceived as essential for employee motivation and organisational competitiveness. In particular, interviewees from generationally diverse workforces also reported a more positive attitude to age. Evidence from this thesis presents direct examples of age discrimination limiting the employment opportunities of older workers. Potential victims of age discrimination often struggle to gather evidence to support their perception that they may have been mistreated due to their age. Especially for job seekers, the perception of age discrimination presents a significant barrier to confidence, motivation, and opportunities during the employment search. These concerns are also exacerbated by the most widely reported barrier to securing employment for older jobseekers which was insufficient feedback. While a small minority of employers discussed discriminatory practices, the majority were positive towards age diversity and embraced the benefits of older workers. Responsibility for retirement transitions and performance management as older employees reach the end of their careers were issues employers reported struggling with in light of the removal of the default retirement age. The findings of this thesis highlight the importance of challenging age stereotypes and embracing the opportunities that a multi-generational workforce offers in order to increase equality of opportunity and promote age positive organisational culture. All parts of society have a shared responsibility to change attitudes towards older workers, and offer workers of all ages the equality they deserve.

This thesis examines how the agency of working children relates to the nature of their work and the harm caused by it. Theorists and practitioners specialised in children’s work have argued that its harms should be understood from the perspectives of working children and that efforts to improve their situation should involve them and meet the interests they express. Their approach is premised on children’s capacity for autonomous and rational decision making. The thesis develops an alternative approach, by examining harm in children’s work and children’s responses to it with an understanding of agency as being conditioned by material and social contexts. Its theoretical purpose is to use Bourdieu’s theory to examine children’s work. Its methodological contribution is that it studies children’s work as a practice, rather than children’s individual experiences and perspectives on their work. This involved investigation of patterns characterising forms of children’s work, and exploration of why these patterns exist and how they might be changing which focuses on how children are involved and affected. The thesis is based on empirical study of children’s work in cement block construction in peri-urban localities, as apprentices in Calavi, Benin, and as unskilled workers in northern Bengaluru, in the state of Karnataka, India. Construction is recognised as a worst form of children’s work by the ILO, but the work studied was locally condoned. In Calavi, apprenticeship was considered as professional training, and in Bengaluru, children’s construction work contributed to family livelihoods. These are the kind of work situations that social scientists who stress children’s agency have suggested are likely to be beneficial. Main sources of data were observations of construction work and interviews with workers, mostly children, as well as their direct employers. Interviewed children did not see their work as seriously harmful, although it was found to risk impairing their physical integrity and to confirm their inequality. In Calavi, children were much more oppressed in their work than children in Bengaluru, but in both sites children acted with reasons and interests. They did not however act to change harmful work conditions. Analysis shows how their age, gender and class positions might have shaped their perspectives in ways which explain why they largely accepted them. The children’s shared hope that their own children would not work as they had indicated their involvement in social change which might be undermining their work practices. The findings confirm the importance of examining children’s perspectives in attempt to understand the causes and consequences of their work. Yet they suggest that children may not always be able to identify harm, and thus the relevance of pursued efforts to develop ways of studying harm in children’s work which do not assume their capacity for autonomous and rational decision making or rely primarily on their perspectives.

Le 1er chapitre examine le rôle de la culture d’origine sur la manière dont les jeunes hommes et femmes diffèrent dans leurs choix de retarder le départ du foyer parental. Je montre que dans les cultures caractérisées par des valeurs traditionnelles portant sur les rôles de genre, les jeunes hommes ont plus d’incitations que les jeunes femmes à rester chez leurs parents. Lorsque les femmes de ces cultures vont vivre dans une société plus libérale par rapport aux rôles de genre, elles quittent plus vite le foyer parental et cherchent à trouver un mari d’une culture différente de la leur. Dans le 2e chapitre, nous montrons, à partir d’un testing sur CV, que les jeunes peu qualifiés sont moins rappelés par les employeurs du secteur privé lorsqu’ils sont Maghrébins plutôt que Français. L’origine des candidats n’a pourtant pas d’effet sur le taux de rappel dans le secteur public, même si les recruteurs des deux secteurs ont des préférences discriminatoires similaires. Notre modèle montre que l'absence de discrimination à l’invitation pour un entretien dans le secteur public est compatible, dans ce contexte, avec une discrimination plus forte à l'embauche. Le 3e chapitre s’appuie aussi sur un testing sur CV pour étudier les effets de l’expérience professionnelle des jeunes décrocheurs du secondaire quatre ans après avoir quitté les études. À défaut de formation certifiante, le taux de rappel n’est pas plus élevé pour ceux ayant eu une expérience professionnelle, subventionnée ou non, dans le secteur marchand ou non-marchand par rapport à ceux restés au chômage. De plus, une formation certifiante améliore les taux de rappel uniquement lorsque le taux de chômage local est faible. / The first chapter examines the role of individuals’ culture of origin in explaining the gender gap in youth’s decision to delay moving out from the parental household. I show that in societies with traditional values about gender roles, young have more incentives than young women to live longer with their parents. When women from these cultures live in a more liberal society regarding gender roles, they move out faster from the parental household and also seek to find a husband from a different culture than their own. In the 2nd chapter, we show, based on a correspondence study that low-skilled youth are less likely to be called back by private sector employers when they are North-African rather than French. By contrast, the origin of the fictitious applicants does not impact their callback rate in the public sector, despite the similar negative discriminatory beliefs of recruiters in both sectors. Our model shows that the absence of discrimination at the invitation for an interview stage in the public sector is compatible, in this context, with stronger discrimination in hiring. The third chapter is also based on a correspondence study and investigates the effects of the labor market experience of high school dropouts four years after leaving school. Compared to those who have stayed unemployed since leaving school, the callback rate is not raised for those with employment experience, whether it is subsidized or non-subsidized, in the market or non-market sector, if there is no training accompanied by skill certification. Moreover, training accompanied by skill certification improves callback rates only when the local unemployment rate is low.

One of the most striking features of contemporary Scottish fiction has been its shift from the predominantly realist novels of the 1960s and 1970s to an engagement with very different modes of writing, from the mixture of realism and visionary future satire in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) to the Rabelaisian absurdity and excess of Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998). This development has received considerable critical attention, energising debates concerning how such writing relates to or challenges familiar tropes of identity and national culture. At the same time, however, there has been a very striking and commercially successful rise in the production of popular genre literature in Scotland, in categories which have included speculative fiction and crime fiction. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in great depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received considerably less critical scrutiny in comparison. Therefore, the aim of my research is to examine popular Scottish writing of the stated period in order to reflect upon whether a significant relationship can be discerned between genre fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction, and to consider the characteristics of such a connection between these different modes of writing. To achieve this objective, the dissertation will investigate whether the features of any such shared literary concerns are inclined to vary between the mainstream of literary fiction in Scotland and two different, distinct forms of popular genre writing. My research will take up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction during the years 1975 to 2006. I intend to discuss the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of the period under discussion informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and to investigate the manner in which, and the extent to which, a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction during this period. This will be done by discussing and comparing eight novels in total; four for each chosen popular genre. From the field of speculative fiction, I will examine texts by the authors Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Margaret Elphinstone and Matthew Fitt. The discussion will then turn to crime fiction, with an analysis of novels by Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. As well as evaluating the work of each author and its relevance to other texts in the field, consideration will be given to the significance of each novel under discussion to wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity which were ongoing both at the time of their publication and in subsequent years. The dissertation’s conclusion will then consider the nature of the relationship between the popular genres which have been examined and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction within the period indicated above.

Aujourd’hui, plus de deux cent millions d’enfants sont contraints de travailler dans le monde pour des raisons multiples. Leurs conditions de travail sont généralement déplorables. L’abolition effective du travail des enfants est donc l’un des plus urgents défis de notre époque. Divers instruments internationaux et européens protègent les enfants contre l’exploitation au travail. Ces instruments visent à assurer l’épanouissement physique et psychologique des enfants ainsi que le respect de leur droit à l’éducation. La présente étude a pour but d’analyser ces principaux instruments. / Today, more than two hundred million children are forced to work throughout the world for various reasons. The working conditions are in general deplorable. The effective abolition of children work is therefore one of the most urgent challenges nowadays. Many international and European instruments protect children against exploitation at work. These instruments aim at insuring physical and physiological development of children as well as respecting their right to education. This study aims at analyzing these principal instruments.

This study from the onset sought to explore, through a postcolonial critique, the meaning ascribed to child labour by fishers in a fishing community in Ghana. The purpose was to inform practice in social work so that social justice might be achieved for working children and their parents. However the study expanded, methodologically and theoretically, to preliminarily include a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial and discursive approach, extending the postcolonial critique to develop a nuanced understandings of the fishers' lived experience of, and responses to, children's work. Distinct from the dominant reductionist and positivistic etiologic understandings of child labour, this approach neither derides child labour as morally reprehensible and unequivocally dangerous, nor romanticises its beneficial aspects and links to cultural and traditional beliefs and practices (see Klocker, 2012). Instead, enables understanding of the fishers as ‘defended subjects' who invest in certain discourses as a way of defending against their vulnerable selves. It also affords a critically reflexive understanding of myself as a ‘defended researcher', owing to my semi-insider position as a former child labourer, and of the impact of this on my research relationships and findings. The study is intended to inform social worker practices in order to deal with complex situations concerning the relationship among fishers and their children paying equal attention both to the inner and the social circumstances of the fishers (Wilson, Ruch, Lymbery, & Cooper, 2011). In this regard it is inspired by Mel Gray's (2005) contention that social work practice should be shaped by the extent to which local social, political, economic, historical and cultural factors, as well as local voices, mould and shape social work responses. The study is conducted using critical ethnographic design that draws on the lived experiences of 24 fishers. Attempts were made to explore the fishers' experiences using psychoanalytically informed method (FANI) in addition to other conventional methods. The study highlights the fishers' use of narratives of slavery to explicate child labour. It focuses on the relationships that the fishers' have developed with their children and with the laws surrounding the use of children in work. It gives an indication of how the fishers' violently and aggressively relate with their working children. It also highlights the fishers' rejection of the laws surrounding child labour as being foreign and an imposition which excludes customary laws. The study further examines the identities the fishers developed in relation to laws that regulate them and children's work. It suggests that others see the fishers as powerless subjects who don't matter. It also underscores my shame and worries as a researcher considered by the fishers as an ‘educated elite' who works for ‘white people'. It further highlights how I provided self-justifying explications to defend myself as a researcher. The findings imply that solutions to child labour need to be localised paying equal attention to both the psyche and the social life of the fishers. They speak to the imperative for critical review of social workers/NGOs practices taking into account the unconscious processes that go on between fishers as parents and social workers as service providers. This thesis introduces a psychosocial dimension and insight into debates on child labour in Ghana.

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