With a general concern for the role played by media and communication in individuals’ mobility  in a world where national borders are dissolving and people’s lives are becoming increasingly mediated, this empirical study sought to investigate a group of transnational young professionals’ daily news consumption and their mobile life experiences by conducting face-to-face interviews with target individuals in both Thailand and Sweden, and combining the results with an analysis from a theoretical perspective enlightened by cosmopolitanism and cultural capital. The study identified a set of distinctive news consumption tastes and multiple mobilities possessed by the interviewees. It demonstrates that news consumption can: 1) directly affect the mobile young professionals’ corporeal mobility by providing information about potential movement opportunities; 2) increase their social mobility by enabling them to accumulate cultural capital; and 3) expand their imaginative mobility by increasing their visuality of the multiple communities to which they belong. Conversely, any change in their multiple mobilities is reflected in a corresponding change in their choices of news consumption.

While careers are often conceptualized as individual paths through occupations - propelled by internal drive and (for the lucky ones) passion - this research takes a more social and political perspective, understanding careers as coordinated by forces external to people and their immediate local settings. In particular this study uncovers ways that imperatives and activities associated with contemporary regional economic development have uneven consequences for young workers depending on socioeconomic status. For this dissertation I undertook a three-year longitudinal study of a much publicized initiative by top administrators of a state university to entice more college students to remain in that northeast US state to work upon graduation. Using the theoretical framework and methodology of institutional ethnography, a mode of analysis designed to “explore a regime of social policy from the standpoint of those subject to it,” (DeVault 2008: 2) this research is anchored in the actual experiences of young students and workers transitioning into careers - potential young professionals. Through extensive observations of the activities of those involved with the initiative, interviews of business leaders, students, and recent graduates, analysis of initiative documents, as well as analysis of related practical and academic texts, I mapped the complexes of career-related social relations around students and workers that have material consequences on their everyday lives. According to the leaders of the university initiative “young professionals” – a category applied rather freely - were the creative, energetic, hard workers needed by the state for economic growth. This research investigated the “work” – paid and unpaid - that goes into performing as a “young professional,” and reveals the disjunctures between the idealized images of young professionals and their actual lived experiences. It is much easier for some to perform the work of young professionalism than others, given structural inequities in economic, social, and educational structures. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the consequences of these findings, including implications for university professors who work to prepare college students for their future careers. Despite the prevalence of young professional discourse in the United States, there is very little careers research specifically focused on young professionals and their careers. This research addresses that gap and also adds a needed contextual, longitudinal perspective to that body of management scholarship.

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Работа содержит теоретический анализ отечественной и зарубежной литературы по вопросам реализации потенциала молодых специалистов, а также результаты прикладного исследования реализации потенциала молодых специалистов на одном из предприятий Екатеринбурга (Россия). Автор разработал и представил в диссертации Программу по реализации потенциала молодых специалистов ООО «Газпром трансгаз Екатеринбург». / The paper contains a theoretical analysis of domestic and foreign literature on questions of realization of potential of young specialists, and the results of applied research realizing the potential of young professionals in one of the enterprises of Ekaterinburg (Russia). The author has developed and presented in the thesis Program of realizing the potential of young specialists of OOO "Gazprom transgaz Yekaterinburg".