The central concern in the thesis is the relationship between the 'concept of ideology' and the philosophies, motivations and lived experience of Youth Training Scheme (YTS) trainees and trainers. This incorporates both the application, effects and impact of official ideologies, expressed in youth policy initiatives and ideologies of the wider society. This in turn is related to the cultural and societal reproduction of young people as gendered and class specific workers in a segmented labour market. The empirical data were collected over a 20 month period at two off-the-job training establishments in the city of Surfton in the South West region of Britain and consisted of questionnaires participant observations and interviews. The first part of the thesis critically reviews the social science literature relating to the new vocationalism, the YTS, labour market segmentation and the concept of ideology. This establishes a series of theoretical concerns which are then tested against empirical data. The thesis demonstrates how formalised official ideologies are mediated through the YTS curriculum and affect the philosophies of both the trainers who implement this curriculum and the trainees who receive this curriculum. The thesis illustrates that YTS participants may support, reinterpret or subvert the official philosophies of the YTS by actually bringing meaning into their lived experiences via ideologies associated with their historical, positional, family class and gendered backgrounds. The thesis will show that the trainees learn not so much technical knowledge, but how to acquire the ideological and practical cultural meanings of a series of workers for a segmented labour market, with greater or lesser collusion from their trainers. The thesis contributes to existing knowledge both at the level of data generation and by illustrating a series of complex, refined and subtle ideological mechanisms which contribute further to our understanding of the microsociology of inequality.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / The study examines female-male differentials in earnings and factors associated with them within the labour market of South Africa. Dating back from the end of apartheid in 1994, a few labour policies have been implemented to reduce poverty especially in the area of gender equity and wage discrimination. However, little evidence has been produced to inform on the magnitude of changes in reducing differences and progress achieved so far. Therefore the study attempts to assess and explain the structural changes in female-male differentials in earnings within the labour market. Sparsely conducted studies during the early years of post-apartheid South Africa showed strong racial divide in terms of wage gaps. This proposed study extends this analysis to socio-demographic attributes and also considers a more encompassing notion of earnings. Thus controlling for individual attributes, the overarching issue in this study stems from the following questions: do male workers earn more than their female counterparts within the Labour market? And if it is the case, what are some of the underlying social and demographic variables contributing to this difference? To assess the structural changes in earnings, data utilized for this study are derived from the Labour Force Survey of 2007 and 2011 carried out respectively under Statistics South Africa. Other public records are used to supplement these two sources. In the first step bivariate analysis are carried out to establish patterns and statistical relationships amongst variables selected. Drawing from that, the study makes use of a predictive model to analyse the combined effect of these variables taken together onto the dependent variable. It is expected to observe varying differences in the magnitude of earnings across the selected variables. Differences could be specific to occupation or industrial sector. Temporal variation provides insights about the dynamics of female-male differentials in earnings. From this the study draws some recommendations to guide policy interventions in the labour market.

In response to shifting borders and radical changes in political and economic regimes, a great number of Hungarian Romanians left their homeland in the last century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Hungarian village in Romania, in this thesis I argue that the growing uncertainty in villagers’ working lives, a result of the high unemployment accompanying post-socialist transformation, and ethnic and class based disadvantage in Romania, impels them to engage in pluriactivity in their livelihood strategies. This includes circular labour migration in Hungary and other European Union states. Economic inequalities within the expanded EU create an ethnically segmented labour market, in which working class Transylvanian Hungarians become associated with certain types of work, in this case, temporary and often undocumented jobs in the least desirable sectors of the economy.

This thesis begins by revisiting and building on themes of labour market segmentation, with particular reference given to Marx's seminal account of segmentation in Capital, Vol.1 (Chapter 25). Marx distinguishes between an active army - the stable full-time employed - and the relative surplus population - the precariously employed reserve army and the residual surplus - and suggests further fragmentation of these main groups into sub-strata. Marx's perspective of segmentation is grounded in fragments of a general theory of employment that, as a long-term tendency, identifies continual advances in constant capital that abolish work and proliferate the reserve army. This thesis builds on these themes by formulating a concept, the 'transference dynamic', which underpins a general theory of employment segmentation. A short history of segmentation under capitalism traces recent phases of development in both developed and lesser-developed nations. Stress is placed on the role of political configurations that regulate capitalism in ways that can either counter the general tendency, such is the case under the Fordist model of capitalism, or strengthen its logic. The theory of employment segmentation and the lessons drawn from the historical account are spliced together with an analysis of the contemporary phase of capitalism, labelled here as the neoliberal model of development. It is demonstrated that the coercive international regulatory dynamic of the neoliberal model reasserts and extends the competitive principle of the capitalist mode of production. Through this extension, nations are transformed into competition-states vying for scarce and globally mobile capital to operate on their shores - the primary source of national prosperity and employment - by implementing capital-friendly neoliberalized policy. This analysis of neoliberal global capitalism reveals an expanding surplus population within a context of deepening international segmentation. This employment crisis is expressed as a hierarchy of nations that is determined in part by their uneven development. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, comprising a majority portion of the world's population, contain a massive reserve army and residual surplus population unincorporated into wage-based capitalism, without any obvious support of means of life and with little hope for the future. Finally, mainstream solutions are criticized for failing to address either long-run or contemporary drivers of the employment crisis. In response, this thesis pitches a project of multi-faceted radical reform that counter-regulates capitalism by adopting a combination of local, national, regional and global forms of democratic socialist governance.

From the Polanyian perspective on the double movement of labour commodification and self-protection of Society, the aim of this study was to examine how unionists perceive and problematise precarious employment and what are their practices for unionising and thereby securing precarious workers. A double case study was conducted in the hotel-restaurant and construction sectors in Sweden with the participation of blue-collar unionists with diverse backgrounds and experiences. The results show that precarious work is associated with labour market segmentation, subcontracting and fragmentation of economic organisations, deskilling of work, loss of autonomy and sometimes over-qualification of workers. Perceived difficulties for unionisation are fear, lack of knowledge of precarious workers about their rights, membership cost, status frustration and lack of interactions with other workers. Reported practices for unionising precarious workers consist of dealing with these barriers in order to build trustful relations and empowering workers through education and inclusion in leadership positions. Actions taken to protect and secure precarious workers are strongly interlinked with their unionisation and seem to rest mainly on negotiations. The main conclusions of the study are that precarious work means a loss of control by workers over their work life stemming from labour commodification and flexibilisation due to increased management control and lack of rights and protections surrounding work. The formation of solidarities needed for unionisation is hindered by the detachment of precarious workers from the work community and by inequality regimes. The domination of fear manifests the prevalence of emotions. Therefore, the care and emotional work of unionists is essential for making workers feel confidence. Unions practices tend to lean also, to some extent, towards organising and community building models. Thereby, union agency appears to be able to engage in an interplay with structures to exert some influence on employment and industrial relations.

La croissance du secteur informel en Algérie fait de celui-ci une composante structurelle de l’économie. Les controverses, déjà anciennes, sur son rôle (dynamique, marginal, parasitaire) se poursuivent et témoignent de la complexité du phénomène. L’objet de notre thèse consiste à analyser le secteur informel en Algérie, selon la définition du BIT, afin de comprendre s’il s’agit d’un secteur dynamique ou d’un secteur de subsistance. Pour cela, nous avons réalisé une enquête représentative auprès d’un échantillon de 522 ménages dans la wilaya de Bejaia, soit près de 1000 actifs occupés. L’analyse en coupe instantanée des données de l’enquête, grâce à l’analyse factorielle des correspondances multiples et la régression logistique, a permis de cerner les caractéristiques saillantes des actifs (salariés et non salariés) du secteur informel et d’établir ainsi différentes typologies (informels purs vs. informels hybrides ; travailleuses à domicile couturières, sous-traitantes de pro duits alimentaires et prestataires de services) qui témoignent de son hétérogénéité (diversité des activités et des acteurs, degrés d’informalité variables, différenciation des revenus). L’analyse de la mobilité socioprofessionnelle des actifs informels met en évidence l’existence au sein du secteur informel d’une forte mobilité intra-sectorielle ascendante et une segmentation entre les micro-entrepreneurs non mobiles et les micro-entrepreneurs mobiles. Globalement, la faiblesse du capital humain, le faible niveau des revenus ainsi que la faiblesse des liens avec le reste de l’économie, tout en confortant la thèse de la segmentation entre les deux secteurs (formel et informel) et au sein du secteur informel lui-même, accréditent l’existence d’un secteur informel de subsistance. / The growing informal sector in Algeria has become a structural component of the economy. The old controversies on its role (dynamic, marginal or parasitic) are still going on and account for the complexity of the phenomenon. The subject matter of our thesis is to analyze the informal sector in Algeria, according to the ILO’s definition, in order to understand whether it is a dynamic or a subsistence sector. In this connection, we conducted a representative survey on a sample of 522 households in the wilaya of Bejaia, i.e. nearly 1000 employed workers. The cross-section analysis of the data, thanks to multivariate analysis (multiple correspondences) and the logistic regression, has identified the salient features of employees and self-employed of the informal sector. Thus, we distinguished various types (pure informal vs. hybrid informal; seamstresses, food sub-contractors and service providers homeworkers), which reflect its heterogeneity as regards the diversity of activitie s and actors, varying degrees of informality and income differentiation. The analysis of the informal workers’ mobility highlights strong intra-sectoral upward mobility within the informal sector and the segmentation between non-mobile and mobile self-employed. Low human capital and low income as well as weak linkages with the overall economy support the assumption of segmentation between the two sectors (formal and informal) as well as within the informal sector itself, but emphasize the existence of a large informal subsistence sector.

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