She wants to be like her Mum: Girls' transition to work in the 1960's

In the early 1960s researchers at the University of Leicester carried out a unique survey into the school to work transition experiences of nearly nine hundred young adults. The survey documented most aspects of the schoolleavers’ lives, however, the majority of the data from this 'Young Worker Project' has remained unanalysed and unpublished for nearly forty years. Recently 851 of the original interview schedules were uncovered and, as part of a broader ESRC funded project, re-analysis has commenced. Little is known about the transition to work at this time and what research does exist has focused on the experience of boys. Using data from the original survey, which included interviews with 260 girls, this paper examines the female experience of the transition from school to work, concluding that gender played a significant role in influencing the way in which the school to work transition was experienced

Through the Interviewer's Lens: Representations of 1960s Households and Families in a Lost Sociological Study

In this paper we aim to use the interviewer notes from a lost sociological project to answer two broad, interrelated, questions: i) how was family life documented and represented by the researchers in their interviewer notes and ii) what does analysing interviewer notes in this way add to our understanding of families and households? The answers to these questions are considered in the context of a further question – why did the young worker research contain so much data on families and households when the research was concerned with young workers’ early workplace experiences? In answering these questions we offer some insight into family life in the 1960s as documented by the researchers and locate Elias’s young worker research within the context of the other large sociology research projects being undertaken at the time

‘I couldn’t wait for the day’: Young Workers’ Reflections on Education during the Transition to Work in the 1960s

The school and labour market experiences of young workers are a major concern for both academics and policy makers alike. This concern has generated a great deal of research reflecting a wide range of debates around the transition from school to work. One of the first research projects to consider this process was undertaken in the early 1960s by researchers at the University of Leicester, led by Norbert Elias. The data was collected via interviews and whilst 910 interviews were completed, the data was not fully analysed or published. Recently, 866 of the interview schedules have been discovered and an initial analysis suggests that the data provides a significant insight into the transition from education to work in the 1960s. This paper aims to present some of this data for the first time, exploring young workers’ reflections on education and their transitions to work and adulthood

Work and the diaspora: locating Irish workers in the British labour market

Work and the diaspora: locating Irish workers in the British labour marke

Continuity and change in the experiences of transition from school to work

Using previously unanalysed data from Norbert Elias’s lost study of young workers in Leicester —the Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles (1962–1964), and data from a subsequent restudy of the same respondents in 2003–2005, this paper focuses on three main themes. First, we critically examine the concept of transition as it is currently used in education and youth research. We argue that the vast majority of what is written about the transition process focuses upon how the process has changed over time. However such approaches, whilst clearly documenting important aspects of social change, ignore and underestimate continuities and similarities in the young people’s experiences of transition, regardless of their spatial and temporal location. For example, despite significant labour market changes in the UK, young people still have to make the transition from full‐time education to whatever follows next, be it employment, unemployment or further and higher education. Second, we examine the young workers’ experiences and perceptions of the transition process in the 1960s. Building upon analyses offered elsewhere the data suggests that the young person’s experiences of school to work transitions in the 1960s had many similarities to the transitional experience today – namely that, as now, the transition process was characterised by complexity, uncertainty and risk. Finally, the impact of these early transition experiences on subsequent careers are also examined as revealed in the life history interviews of the restudy. Despite a drastically changing local labour market, and the fact that most of the workers were no longer working in the industries of their youth, the analysis reveals the sample retained a strong sense of occupational identity based on their initial transition experiences. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of the findings of this particular data set. The data is unique because it provides a rare insight of the outcomes of decisions made by school leavers some forty years ago on their experiences of the labour market. As such it provides an invaluable glimpse of the lasting impact of the school to work transition on individual working lives

Notions of fantasy and reality in the adjustment to retirement

During the early 1960s, Norbert Elias led a research project on the adjustment of young workers to work situations and adult roles. The data from this project, which consisted of 851 interviews with young people, were recently rediscovered and the participants, now approaching retirement, were re-interviewed as part of a restudy. In this paper we argue, that, in the context of the dramatic changes to the transition to retirement that have taken place in the United Kingdom, it is possible to use Elias's unpublished work on the transition to work as a theoretical framework for understanding of the transition from work and to retirement. In particular, we focus on the themes of fantasy and reality in the perception of retirement; changing interdependencies in the transition to retirement and the extent and impact of retirement preparation on the perception of the change in status from full-time worker to retiree. We conclude by suggesting that the implied advantages of being the 'baby-boomer' generation are far from the reality, with the experiences of this group being similar to those who have gone before and face an adjustment to retirement marked by uncertainty and anxiety

Beyond 'Average' Family Life: Atypicality in the Golden Age of the Family

This article is based on data gathered in the 1960s, which included information on household composition and family formations. We explore different family formations and structures represented in this data and the meaning attached to issues around a number of ‘unusual’ family compositions encountered by the researchers at that time.We also examine the significance attached to atypical family units by both the respondents and the interviewers

Forty Years On: Norbert Elias and the Young Worker Project

Forty years ago, in 1962, fieldwork began on the research project ‘Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles’. Using archived materials relating to the little known Norbert Elias project, this paper has two aims. First, to present some background information on the research and introduce this aspect of Elias’s work to a wider audience beyond the few who were aware of the projects existence. Second, to explore in detail Elias’s contributions to the project by piecing together his ideas and hypotheses from archived materials. During the early stages of the research, Elias suggested that the transition from school to work constituted a ‘shock’ experience and that young people would experience initial difficulties in adjusting to their new role. He suggested that difficulties would emerge in their relationships with older workers, with family and with their new income. For the first time this paper presents Elias’s ‘shock’ hypothesis, and his thoughts on school to work transitions. Although later analysis suggested that, in the main, young people did not experience ‘shock’ on entering work (see Ashton and Field 1976) it is felt that a full exploration of Elias’s model is worthwhile as it adds yet a further dimension to the richness and applicability of his other writing. The paper concludes by reflecting on the limitations of the Elias shock hypothesis

Revisiting Norbert Elias's Sociology of Community: Learning from the Young Worker Project

Since 2001 we have been engaged in a re-study of three linked Leicester projects: The Employment of Married Women in a Leicester Factory (1959–1962), The Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles (1962–1964) and The Established and the Outsiders (1965). The three projects contain a number of striking overlaps, not least Elias's formulation of communities as figurations through which communal behavioural standards are established, learned and maintained. Whether in the different Zones of Winston Parva, or in the large hosiery factories of Leicester, people learned the self-control of drives and affects ‘according to the pattern and extent of socially given drive and affect regulation’ of that time and that community. In this paper we outline the background to the three re-studies and link them to Elias's work on community and the broader canon of community studies. We then consider methodological lessons learnt from our re-studies – in particular, the practical process of re-studies, the definitional problems of what constitutes a re-study, and the value of visual images and walking the field. We conclude by reflecting upon the analytical promise of community re-studies

Utilizing data from a lost sociological project: experiences, insights, promises

In 2000 data from a little known sociological study was ‘re-discovered’, stored in an attic office. The archived data comprised original interview schedules that documented the early work experiences of Leicester’s youth in the 1960s. Forty years on, the original respondents have been traced and re-interviewed as they make the transition from work to retirement. This article examines the complex methodological issues associated with reanalysing, tracing and reinterviewing respondents after such a considerable time lapse. We examine our methodological approach using the concept of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) as a framework for understanding this process. We also reflect on the value of such longitudinal qualitative research. We conclude by drawing out some of the issues surrounding QLR and the implication of our experiences and insights for those who are now building such longitudinal datasets and the promise such data hold