Journal of Youth Studies

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Youth, work and global capitalism: new directions

David Farrugia

To cite this article: David Farrugia (2020): Youth, work and global capitalism: new directions,
Journal of Youth Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2020.1729965

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Published online: 17 Feb 2020.

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JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2020.1729965

Youth, work and global capitalism: new directions

David Farrugia
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper lays the groundwork for a research agenda on the Received 22 August 2019
formation of young people as workers, and therefore as subjects Accepted 10 February 2020
that are produced, valorised and devalorised within transnational
KEYWORDS
movements of capital and labour. Theoretical development in the Labour; work; global south;
study of youth and work takes place primarily through the study capitalism; theory; youth;
of biographical movements through the labour markets of the work and global capitalism;
global north. This agenda has marginalised the role that young new directions
people play in the dynamics of labour and value in changing
industries, and the transformation of youth labour forces in the
global South. In this context, this paper explores the valorisation
and devalorisation of youth subjectivities as part of processes of
labour force formation within the diverse spaces of contemporary
global capitalism. The paper shows how changes in the nature of
labour forces transform the nature of youth, which is
characterised by new productive capacities through becoming a
part of economic change. In this, the paper suggests a future
agenda focused on how youth subjectivities are formed within
the dynamics of labour, value and production in a global context,
and therefore offers a new agenda beyond the contemporary
focus on transitions in the global north.

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for a research agenda on the formation of
young people as workers, and therefore as subjects that are produced, valorised and deva-
lorised as part of the formation of labour forces within trans-national movements of capital
and labour. Employment is a critical concern for the sociology of youth and for govern-
mental authorities, and young people’s relationship with work is one of the central
drivers of the field. However, the existing agenda tends to focus on young people’s
access to employment and on their biographical movements through the labour
market – or what Christine Griffin in 1993 described as the one “Big Question” for research
into youth and work (Griffin 1993). In the process, what Tannock (2001) refers to as a
‘pathway’ model, (or the study of youth transitions) has become the dominant approach
to youth and work at the level of international social policy, and debates about this model
have become the main way that theories of youth and work develop (MacDonald 2011;
Roberts 2011; Woodman and Wyn 2015; Farrugia 2018a). The dominance of this focus

CONTACT David Farrugia David.m.farrugia@newcastle.edu.au School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University
of Newcastle, Callaghan, 2308, NSW, Australia
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. FARRUGIA

has marginalised analysis of the creation of youth as part of labouring practices and valor-
isation processes taking place at work. Amidst increasing attention to concepts such as the
political economy of youth (Cote 2014), the aim of this paper is to explore what it might
mean to analyse youth as products of the biopolitical relationships and disciplinary
requirements of contemporary labour, and therefore as something that is produced
through global processes of capitalist production and valorisation.
In the process, this paper sketches out one way in which the sociology of youth can
become more attuned to – and impacted by – the experiences of young people in the
global South. The need to address the experiences of young people in the global South
is being increasingly recognised, most recently in the work of Cooper, Swartz, and
Mahali (2019) who critique the dominance of European and North American theory in
studies of young people as well as the tendency to generalise about ‘youth’ on the
basis of empirical examples drawn entirely from the global North. The geographies of
knowledge production critiqued by Cooper, Swartz, and Mahali (2019) are particularly
dominant in studies of young people’s biographical movements through employment –
an area in which theoretical development takes place largely on the basis of explicitly
Eurocentric theories such as those of Beck (1992), and through empirical investigation
of young people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia (Weis
1990, 2004; Wallace and Kovatcheva 1998; MacDonald et al. 2005; MacDonald and
Marsh 2005; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Andres and Wyn 2010; Woodman and Wyn
2015; Furlong et al. 2017). As a way beyond this situation, this paper offers a critique of
the way that concepts such as ‘deindustrialisation’ have been mobilised in the sociology
of youth within geographies of intellectual labour that privilege the experiences of young
people in the global North. The paper then describes the valorisation and devalorisation of
young people as workers within networks of capital and labour that transcend north /
south distinctions. In this way, the paper positions the study of young people and work
as a means by which theoretical development in the sociology of youth can become
less Eurocentric, and better attuned to global labour force transformations impacting on
young people internationally.
This is a theoretical paper that operates by synthesising and critically interrogating how
studies of youth and work have shaped the sociology of youth. The paper draws on and
develops theory and evidence from existing work that is suggestive of the perspective I
develop here or that has implications that are not recognised in dominant research
agendas. In this sense, the paper both critiques existing perspectives and consolidates a
range of literature into an agenda that I am describing as the formation of young
people as workers. This paper is also aligned with recent interest in a ‘political-
economy-of-youth’ (Cote 2014) perspective that aims to situate youth within capitalist
dynamics of profit and exploitation. However, the paper also departs from this perspective
in significant ways, in particular through analysing subjectivities in terms of valorisation
processes rather than in relation to the revolutionary potential of youth as a class. In
general therefore, the aim here is not to summarise the ‘state of the art’ in this or any
other field, but to outline what it might mean to analyse youth as a product of production
and valorisation. The paper is organised into three parts. The first two together make the
case for the necessity of moving beyond the transitions paradigm and the Northern focus
of the field. The third explores the production, valorisation and devalorisation of youth
subjectivities within the creation of new youth labour forces. This takes place through
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 3

examples drawn from the literature on deindustrialisation, the service economy, and the
formation of youth labour forces in the new manufacturing centres of the global economy.
The paper concludes by suggesting that the agenda developed here has become increas-
ingly pressing given the critical role that youth plays within new dynamics of labour and
value in contemporary capitalism.

Beyond the ‘big question’

The pathway approach to youth and work reflects a historical tendency to understand
youth primarily as a stage of life that is socially organised by institutions such as the
family, education system, and labour market, and which ends when young people partici-
pate in and adjust to whatever constitutes ‘adulthood’ in their own context (Wyn and
White 1997). This approach to youth has led researchers to approach the significance of
work in terms of its role in signifying adulthood. For instance, Norbert Elias’ ‘young
workers’ project undertaken in the 1960s and recently explored in detail by Goodwin
and O’connor (2005) approaches young people’s engagement with work from a theory
of the ‘shock’ that young people experience when they enter the labour market due to
the separation of youth from adulthood through institutions such as the family and the
education system. For Elias, the entry to work was interesting in terms of how young
people handled the new demands of adult status, such as managing impersonal relation-
ships at work and meeting one’s own financial and relational needs. In this way, studying
young workers becomes studying the psycho-social dynamics of adjusting to adult status
created by the entry into the workforce.
The study of young people’s transitions into employment has been fundamental to the
establishment of the sociology of youth as a distinct field of research (Roberts 1968;
Furlong 1992; Wyn and White 1997; Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011). The questions
in this perspective have concerned the interaction between structural inequalities,
employment conditions, and young people’s employment outcomes, with a particular
focus on how unequal levels of employment security, remuneration and overall working
conditions shape young people’s biographical movements through work (Furlong and
Cartmel 2007; MacDonald 2011). One of the key theoretical debates in this area over
the last ten years has been driven by engagements with theories of ‘individualisation’
(Beck 1992; 2000) which became the touchstone for debates about the nature of youth
inequalities and the continued utility of the concept of youth transitions for understanding
social change (Woodman 2009; Roberts 2011; Threadgold 2011). The individualisation
thesis’ focus on reflexivity and risk had a significant impact on the sociology of youth,
both critiqued for its neglect of class analysis (Furlong and Cartmel 2007), as well as under-
pinning arguments that contemporary young people’s lives were more complex than the
concept of a single linear ‘transition’ to employment would allow (Wyn and White 1997;
Woodman and Wyn 2015). Throughout, the key focal point remained the social organis-
ation of young people’s movements into and through employment, and the biographical
practices that shape these movements.
In some ways, the institutionalisation of youth transitions and its development along
these lines represents a narrowing of the field and of what is seen to constitute contem-
porary ‘youth studies’. For instance, young people were part of the tradition of factory eth-
nographies that has historically been so critical to industrial sociology, including Anna
4 D. FARRUGIA

Pollert’s (1981) classic ethnography of young women in the United Kingdom as well as
more recent factory ethnographies of young workers in the global south to be considered
later in this paper. Pollert’s (1981) ethnography of women workers in a tobacco processing
factory showed how the essentialisation of attributes such as manual dexterity as aspects
of young femininity were part of the broader social organisation of labour on the shop
floor. Pollert also explored the role that industrial labour played in shaping young
women’s relationship with other gendered institutions, demonstrating connections
between their marginalisation from union politics by male workers and the gendered
dynamics of the Fordist nuclear family. Beyond this tradition, Paul Willis’ (1977) Learning
to Labour is now seen as foundational to the field, but represented a far more expansive
theoretical programme than the concept of youth transitions. While it did focus on young
people’s engagement with school and eventual movement into employment, Willis also
examined how the value of young working-class men to industrial employers lay in
broader working-class masculinities and ways of life that socialised young men for the dis-
ciplinary requirements of factory labour. In this vein, Phil Cohen’s eclectic mixture of
approaches drawn from cultural studies, urban sociology and psychoanalysis led him to
analyse the ‘new vocationalism’ of the late 1990s in terms of the cultural codes that organ-
ised the relationship between personal identity, classed and gendered divisions, training
schemes and industrial change. In this context, Cohen suggested that
each general form of labour and learning has its own special kind of social routine organising
certain, largely unconscious, frames of mind and body into specific dispositions of skill and
competence, which in turn are associated with particular kinds of identity work. (Cohen
1999, 130)

Together, these texts explore how the social organisation of industrial labour itself created
and organised classed and gendered subjectivities amongst young people. This work
draws attention to the way that industrial transformations contribute to the creation of
new identities and productive capacities in the youth labour force. Yhey show how
youth subjectivities are formed through what might now be called the biopolitics of
work (Foucault 1984), or the disciplinary requirements of labour as they relate to
broader modes of industrial production and valorisation. With this in mind, the shift I
am suggesting here is from the young people’s biographical movements through the
labour market, to a focus on youth as a form of subjectivity that is created and attributed
with value through the social organisation of labour forces. This includes a shift away from
a focus on employment outcomes, to a concern with how youth subjectivities are created
through changes in the productive capacities required of workers, and how these subjec-
tivities contribute to contemporary valorisation processes. That is the agenda pursued in
this paper.
The need to develop on these precedents is increasingly pressing in the light of recent
shifts in young people’s position as workers, an issue explored in this paper but also taken
up in the ‘political-economy-of-youth’ perspective (Cote 2014). In in this political economy
perspective, youth is theorised as a class defined by the relations between labour, value
and profit that position young people relative to adults. These conditions include the
increasing significance of young labour in the most precarious sectors of the economy,
and declining youth wages relative to adults, justified politically through essentialised
notions of youth development. This connection between essentialist notions of youth
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 5

and the value attributed to young labour recalls Pollert’s discussion above of the way that
subjectivities are formed and mobilised within workforces to attribute value to labour and
justify wage levels. For Cote (2014) the contemporary political economy of youth consists
in a kind of super exploitation of young labour which facilitates rising levels of inequality
and the emergence of a super-rich elite. This approach to young people in terms of labour
and exploitation is important for moving beyond the dominance of a pathways approach,
and introduces a focus on young people as critical sources of value to contemporary capit-
alism. Indeed, the value of young labour was also recognised by supra-national political
and economic institutions such as the World Bank, whose widely cited 2007 report ‘Devel-
opment and the Next Generation’ described young people as significant resources for the
economic development of the global South. Whilst this report relied on a neoliberal faith in
the power of deregulated global markets (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008, 2014), it neverthe-
less also situated young people as subjects of value within global capitalism, and reflects a
recent explosion of interest and governmental intervention into youth as a way of govern-
ing markets (Sukarieh and Tannock 2014). The political economy of youth perspective is
therefore timely and positioned to address the new position that young people occupy
within contemporary capitalism.
However, as raised by its critics (France and Threadgold 2016) the political economy of
youth perspective as articulated by Cote (2014) is suspicious of studies of identity as repre-
sentative of a somewhat broadly defined ‘liberal youth studies’, and reduces the actually
existing subjectivities of young people formed both inside and outside of work to distinc-
tions between false and revolutionary consciousness. This is of limited utility in a context
where – as argued by contemporary economic sociologists – subjectivity itself is inter-
twined with the value of labour and enacted in labouring practices (eg Adkins 2005).
Rather than the revolutionary potential of young people’s attitudes to capitalism, the ques-
tions I want to address here concern how youth subjectivities participate in value creation
processes and thereby reflect processes of labour force formation. This includes the cre-
ation of youth subjectivities through the disciplinary requirements of labour, and the attri-
bution of value to differently positioned young people through broader industrial
transformations. Arguing for this perspective also offers the possibility of moving
beyond the largely Eurocentric focus of contemporary youth studies, an issue which I
turn to in the next section of this paper through a focus on deindustrialisation.

Beyond the Northern metropole

One of the most significant drivers of theoretical developments in the study of youth and
work is the deindustrialisation of the manufacturing centres of the global North as part of
mobilities of capital and labour accelerating particularly in the 1980s and continuing in the
present moment. Deindustrialisation describes a shift in the nature of labour, in which
work in consumer and professional services replaced manufacturing as the key source
of employment for young people in the economically powerful nations of the global
North. This shift is as a result of the search for cheaper sources of labour within the increas-
ingly ‘light’ and mobile nature of contemporary capital (Harvey 2006). The impact of this
shift in the sociology of youth has been enormous due to the significance of manufactur-
ing labour to classic texts in the field such as Willis (1977) and Pollert (1981) and due to the
elevated levels of youth unemployment and underemployment that have been installed
6 D. FARRUGIA

as structural features of youth labour markets. With deindustrialisation, many influential

and high-quality studies of youth and work emerged to document the impact of elevated
levels of youth unemployment in former manufacturing centres in the United States (Weis
1990; 2004) and the United Kingdom (McDowell 2003; Nayak 2003; 2006; MacDonald and
Marsh 2005). The studies just cited are nuanced and empirically sensitive ethnographies of
the interaction between historically and locally embedded class cultures and changing
employment conditions. Some are concerned with documenting the significance of col-
lective solidarities in young people’s response to the lack of work (MacDonald and
Marsh 2005), while others focus on transformations in ‘raced’ and classed identities due
to deindustrialisation (Nayak 2003; 2006), including how this connects with the contem-
porary service economy (McDowell 2003).
Deindustrialisation is part of broader social and economic shifts across the globe,
including the emergence of precarious service economies globally and the explosive
growth of industrial centres in Asia that now underpin the global manufacturing
economy. However, in the sociology of youth a focus on the deindustrialisation of the
global north has narrowed understandings of how this global restructuring has trans-
formed youth, creating narratives in which young people in the global north respond to
manufacturing work moving ‘elsewhere’. One of the strengths of this body of work has
been its detailed focus on the local, and the way that local economic histories are
impacted upon differently by globalisation, producing concentrations of unemployment
in particular places alongside relatively enduring modes of youth identity that were
described as ‘redundant’ to the youth labour market (McDowell 2003). However, the
experiences of young people located in the ‘elsewhere’ to which manufacturing work
has moved have made little impact on theoretical development in this field. This
reflects what has been described as the limited spatiality of intellectual labour in the soci-
ology of youth more broadly (Farrugia 2018a): young people in the metropolitan centres of
the global north dominate this field, and handbooks documenting the ‘state of the art’ of
youth studies tend to reproduce this focus (Furlong and Woodman 2014). There is
however a large and high quality literature about youth in anthropology, geography,
area studies and development studies that remains largely absent from what has come
to be institutionalised as ‘youth studies’ (this literature is too large and disparate to cite
exhaustively here but see Maira and Soep (2005), Hansen (2008), Christiansen, Utas, and
Vigh (2006) and Abbink and Van Kessel (2005) for edited collections on youth in the
global south). Cooper, Swartz, and Mahali (2019) also raise this problem in their outline
for a less Eurocentric sociology of youth, in which they show how the experiences of
Northern young people are positioned as emblematic of youth in general. Their critique
is particularly relevant to studies of young people, work and deindustrialisation, in
which white, working-class young people in the United States, United Kingdom and
Europe dominate research about industrial transformation. These young people constitute
an epistemological investment that has had a profound impact on the field, to the exclu-
sion of spaces located beyond the metropolitan centres of the global north.
The problem of Eurocentrism and the neglect of spatial thinking is common to soci-
ology in general (Connell 2007; Gieryn 2000), in which narratives about globalisation
have ignored the experiences of nations in the global south who have long been
forced to understand themselves as connected to geographically distant others due to
the legacy of European colonialism (Massey 2005). A useful perspective here is that of
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 7

Lefebvre (1991) on the ‘production of space’, or the creation of new spatialities in which
cities, regions and labour forces are produced through the global movement of capital
and labour. New spaces produced as part of global economic flows include the trans-
national networks of ‘global cities’ that shape contemporary financial flows (Sassen
2012), deindustrialised zones in the former manufacturing centres of the global north
(MacDonald and Marsh 2005), and the creation of ‘free trade’ or ‘special economic’
zones in what were once described as ‘developing countries’, in which local and national
development projects take place through the allocation of particular areas for use by
global corporations attracted by special labour and environmental permissions (Ong
2002). These spaces also include what Sassen (2014) has described as zones of ‘expulsion’,
in which particular areas and populations are positioned as structurally irrelevant to the
global economy, which may include marginal spaces such as urban slums or the bulk of
a youth labour force in some regions or nation states. These are just a few of the
spaces of global capitalism, and their production entails the creation of new labour
forces which emerge from local employment structures differentiated by classed, gen-
dered, racialized and intergenerational power relationships.
So far I have offered two critiques of the way that youth and work are commonly
approached in the sociology of youth, and in what remains of this paper I hope to
show that they can be productively addressed together to create new directions in
research on young people and work. The first critique has been the marginalisation of
research agendas focused on the formation of young people as workers due to a dominant
focus on employment outcomes. This is as a result of the dominance of notions of youth
transitions, and can be addressed by considering of young people as economic subjects
whose labour is valorised and devalorised through the dynamics of value creation and
labour force formation in contemporary capitalism. My second critique is that the focus
on the experiences of young people in the former manufacturing centres of the global
north has created narratives about the movement of work ‘elsewhere’, creating questions
about what is taking place outside the spaces that dominate contemporary youth studies.
This can be addressed by situating young workers within the creation of labour forces as
part of the production of space. In what remains of this paper I draw together the impli-
cations of both of these critiques and offer an analysis of the way that young people are
formed as workers through economic transformations impacting on geographically
distant but economically connected young people, drawing on and extending the impli-
cations of literature in sociology, youth studies and anthropology, and focusing in particu-
lar on processes of deindustrialisation and rural industrialisation in different parts of the
world.

The formation of young people as workers

In what follows I explore what I have thus far described as the valorisation and devalorisa-
tion of young people as workers amidst shifts in the nature of labour and the spatial dis-
tribution of production. In order to connect my arguments here to processes that are
recognised as significant in the field, my discussion will begin by considering the kinds
of economic shifts that have hitherto been understood in terms of deindustrialisation.
This will include both repositioning young people as economic subjects within the
dynamics of capitalist valorisation, and exploring how young people are repositioned as
8 D. FARRUGIA

economic subjects within global mobilities of capital and labour. The key examples here
will be the shift to a service economy in the economically powerful nations of the
global north, alongside changes in the global distribution of manufacturing and industrial
production. Youth have been critical to both of these processes, offering unique sources of
value and being repositioned as economic subjects.

Young workers in the service economy

As is widely recognised, young people’s relationship with work has been transformed in
recent years with the shift to an economy dominated by professional and consumer ser-
vices, as part of the shift to post-Fordism (Amin 2003). As well as an increase in precarious
and ‘gig’ employment, this has changed the labouring practices required of workers and
the subjectivities that are seen to facilitate these practices. One of the most obvious con-
sequences of this shift is the devalorisation of particular modes of white working-class
masculinity that Willis (1977) positioned as central to the reproduction of the industrial
labour force of the United Kingdom. While physical toughness and the capacity for
‘piss-taking’ resonated with the demands of industrial labour, these dispositions are deva-
lorised in an economy in which retail and consumer services has replaced manufacturing
as the key destination for working class youth (Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2001). The
service economy requires young workers who are deferential, well-presented and capable
of performing relational and emotional labour (Hochschild 1983). These changes created
concerns about ‘redundant’ masculinities (McDowell 2003, 2019; Weis 2004) as well as new
forms of working-class masculinities that include the capacity for relationally oriented
service labour and that define this as real and respectable work (Roberts 2018).
However, whilst elevated levels of youth unemployment have been structural features
of the contemporary labour market, the shift to a service economy has also produced and
valorised other forms of youthful subjectivity, creating a substantial youth labour force
that has become critical to economic sectors such as hospitality, retail, and other consumer
services. The way that young people have been positioned as cheap and flexible sources of
labour is well recognised (Mizen 2004). Young people are part of a broader and diverse
range of vulnerable workers in the poorly paid, precarious and unglamorous parts of
the service economy such as the app-driven gig economy and the global logistics and
warehousing industry (Geissler 2018). However, what is also becoming increasingly clear
is that certain young people are positioned in such a way as to offer a particular and
unique source of value to some parts of the service labour force. This is the case in
sectors requiring interactive service labour, in which interactions with consumers confer
value onto commodities. The ideal service worker, argues Linda McDowell is ‘white,
slim, young [and] unwrinkled’ (McDowell 2009, 63), precisely because these youthful
embodied attributes confer value onto products and interactions. Young workers are
not merely cheap and flexible, but some youth subjectivities are positioned as particularly
valuable to the operation of this new economy, and the ‘quality of youthfulness’ has
recently been theorised as an aspect of valorisation processes in the service economy (Far-
rugia 2018b).
The way that these subjectivities are valorised offers a useful example of how young
people are formed as workers through the disciplinary requirements of work. ‘Youthful’
attributes contribute to the value of some service labour, especially in parts of the
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 9

economy that offer modes of ‘hip’, ‘cool’ or youthful consumption (Farrugia 2018a), such as
those available in the ‘bohemian’ night time economies described by Lloyd (2010), or in
the fashion retail industry (Williams and Connell 2010). In fashion retail, employers
search for young employees whose modes of aesthetic presentation and relational
styles resonate with the image cultivated by a brand, and prefer young workers
because of the image of savvy, cutting-edge consumption that young bodies can
confer onto a brand (Williams and Connell 2010). Recently published ethnographic work
on young hospitality workers (Coffey et al. 2018; Farrugia, Threadgold, and Coffey 2018)
shows that young people who are members of particular music scenes or other taste cul-
tures are particularly valuable workers for bars and other venues hoping to cultivate these
cultures as part of their clientele. Cameron’s (2018) research on young hospitality workers
in an urban ‘café culture’ characterised by an image of ‘alternative’ consumption describes
young workers as ‘aesthetic signal points’ (p 48) which signify the kinds of behaviour and
consumption that are offered and expected in particular venues. By interacting with
workers who embody a cool and alternative style, customers experience the enjoyment
of hanging out in cool cafes representing a cosmopolitan and culturally sophisticated
youthful lifestyle. In the process, the formation of youth identities, including modes of
embodiment, relational styles, and membership of youth (sub)cultures become inputs
into the creation of value, and youth subjectivities themselves are produced through
the production of value and profit in the service economy (Farrugia 2018a).
Class, gender and youth are intertwined in new and unpredictable ways in these forms
of work. Young retail workers for example are precariously employed and poorly remun-
erated, and their exploitation by fast food and other similar industries is well documented
(Tannock 2001). Gendered divisions of labour are clear in these industries, with young
women expected to mobilise a pleasing and polite demeanour while taking orders
whilst young men work as cooks invisible to customers. However, beyond these industries
more expansive demands are placed on young workers’ subjectivities. Young people who
sell shoes, clothing and other boutique or fashionable commodities are required to
mobilise sophisticated modes of taste and cultural knowledge in order to interact with
customers and sell the value of a brand. The work of Lynne Pettinger (2004, 2005)
shows that young women working in fashion retail are expected to embody the image
of their employee’s brand while at work, and class differences in the clientele cultivated
by outlets are reflected in the forms of self-presentation required of workers. Middle-
class young women – often students – are best equipped with the kinds of classed and
gendered dispositions required to successfully perform this labour. In the process,
middle-class young people become the ideal workers for what are essentially working-
class jobs. The precarity and poor remuneration of this work is the backdrop to the cultiva-
tion of identities and modes of embodiment shaped by the disciplinary requirements of
service work and the image cultivated by brands.
This kind of symbolically saturated low-wage service work may not be universal or even
dominant in the service economy, but it nevertheless offers the possibility for thinking
about youth and work in new ways. The economic changes that have reshaped the econ-
omies of the global north have impacted upon youth not merely in terms of elevated
levels of unemployment and precarity, but in the formation of new economic subjectivities
that are produced through the disciplinary requirements of contemporary employment,
and that form embodied attributes and capacities in line with the valorisation processes
10 D. FARRUGIA

of particular sectors. As well as the devalorisation of industrial working-class masculinity,

the service economy has also positioned young people as important sources of value
for forms of labour that rely on the embodiment, aesthetics and relational styles of
workers. Youth subjectivities – especially those that can mobilise a mixture of subcultural
cool and middle-class aesthetic discernment – are now drawn upon to confer value onto
commodities, retail outlets and hospitality venues. This example suggests the possibility of
a broader analysis, in which the devalorisation of some young people is accompanied by
the valorisation of others and the creation youth subjectivities as synonymous with pro-
duction and exploitation. This approach can also be expanded to explore new young
economic subjects that are being produced in the new global manufacturing centres fol-
lowing the deindustrialisation of the global north. Youth has been critical to these global
economic shifts, and it is to the formation of these new economic subjects that this paper
now turns.

New economic subjects beyond the global north

As the global north deindustrialised, the emergence of new manufacturing centres has
included the production of a youth labour force, emerging at the nexus of global flows
of capital and state sponsored development projects. For example, there is a large and
high quality literature that describes processes of rural industrialisation that have taken
place over the last three decades in East and South-East Asia and that have relied on
the labour of rural young women. Factory ethnographies of by Ong (1985) in Malaysia,
Wolf (1992) in Indonesia and Pun (2005) in China all describe the production of new econ-
omic subjects through the position young women now occupy within the global manufac-
turing industry as it takes place in the special economic, industrial or free trade zones
established by these countries in recent years. In each case, the price and quality of
young labour is marketed to global firms in order to attract investment, and production
takes place in ways that both build on and transform local gendered and generational
relationships. Factory labour has now become a normative experience for some South-
East Asian rural women (Elmhirst 2002, 2007), making these young people into central
(and highly exploited) figures within the dynamics of the global manufacturing industry.
Young factory workers in rural Malaysia described in the work of Ong (1985) were mar-
keted as ideal manufacturing workers on the basis of racialised and gendered discourses
which essentialise discipline, docility, and manual dexterity as intrinsic attributes of rural
young women. These attributes were positioned as valuable characteristics for a labour
force formed through the establishment of a free trade zone which was designed to
attract investment from the global textiles industry. Indeed, rural young women have
become the most important source of labour for the contemporary manufacturing indus-
try across a range of countries. In her ethnography of workers in a special economic zone
in southern China, Pun writes that young women are seen as ideal workers because com-
petence, obedience, and tolerance for routine work is seen as aspects of young rural fem-
ininity. In the special economic zone studied by Ong (1985), rural schools organised for
young women to tour the factories of the area in an attempt to encourage them to
leave school at an appropriate age to work in the factory, with a mid-level high school qua-
lification that was seen to designate them as skilled but nevertheless compliant workers.
The organisation of labour within the factory was built upon local village structures,
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 11

especially hierarchies of gendered authority in which factory managers explicitly describe

themselves as father figures who police both the labour and broader social and sexual
relations of their young female workers. Recruitment took place through social connec-
tions between factories, schools, and local village elites who facilitated the movement
of unmarried young women into factory labour. In this way, the social structures of a
locality – especially gendered and generational structures – are critical to the formation
of this youth labour force and to the value that these young workers offer.
The formation of this labour force means that young women take on a new and
complex status, exploited and denigrated within broader gendered divisions of labour.
Pun (2005) emphasises that rural industrialisation and the creation of special economic
zones has not merely recruited young women into factory labour, but has created a
new kind of worker subject in China. This is the dagongmei, a term that denotes both a
low worker status in relation to the kind of industrial workers celebrated by Maoism,
and a young or unmarried woman who therefore has a low status within gendered and
sexual relations in rural China. Both Pun and authors writing in Malaysia and Indonesia
(Ong 1985; Wolf 1992) describe young women’s position within the patriarchal relations
of a shop floor organised around strict Fordist lines, in which every moment of the day
and every movement of their body must be justified within the techniques of scientific
management that organise their labour. Outside of work, young women live in dorms
in which their private lives are also surveilled by factory managers who punish infractions
with docked wages and the threat of employment termination. Therefore, whilst these
young women are performing the kind of manufacturing labour that was once emble-
matic of the economies of the global north, the subjectivities formed through the social
organisation of this labour in rural Asia are radically different from those that are familiar
in the contemporary sociology of youth, intersecting with rural / urban distinctions, gen-
dered inequalities, and the economic and development ambitions of these rapidly
growing economies.
However, this process of rural industrialisation has also transformed gender relation-
ships and created new forms of gendered and consumer subjectivity. This has taken
place differently in the different areas covered by the ethnographies I am discussing
here, but nevertheless reveals a deeply ambivalent situation in which new power relation-
ships, subjectivities and desires are formed through the formation of young women as
workers. Elmhirst (2002, 2007) in rural Java describes the gendered and familial shifts
taking place as a result of young women’s participation in factory work, which brought
in a critical source of income and constituted them as economic units in their own
right. In Elmhirst’s longitudinal work, factory labour loosened restrictions on young
women’s movement that had been designed to policy virginity and gender relations. A
factory wage also increased the value of young women in marriage, which allowed
more individual autonomy in choice of marriage partners and delayed childbirth. In
Ong’s analysis, the constitution of young women as economic subjects had far reaching
consequences on their familial and intimate lives, and impacted on power relationships
within families themselves:
“The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-brother relationships is displayed in refusal
of money to parents who remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital
sex … and decisions to hand earnings over to the mother … male honour is in a fundamental
12 D. FARRUGIA

sense undermined as the … household budget derives increasingly from female wages … In
effect, the employment status of working daughters has loosened many from father-brother
control, connecting them instead to male power institutionalised in bureaucratic systems
external to [the village].” (Ong 1985, 108)

Moreover, both Wolf (1992) and Pun (2005) emphasise the significance of consumption for
rural young workers. Pun (2005) argues that the dagongmei is as much a consumer subject
as a worker, formed through the increased capacities for consumption offered by the
factory wage and the opportunities for consumption and sociality available to young
women away from their home villages and families. This includes clothes, cosmetics,
accessories and food that would otherwise be normatively prohibited and which are
part of a period of time that is experienced as relatively autonomous. For participants in
Wolf (1992) in rural Indonesia, this consumption transgressed local norms defining
moral or upstanding feminine behaviour, but was nevertheless enjoyed publicly by the
young women, whose families were unable to restrict this behaviour due to their reliance
on their daughters’ wage. Of course, I am not suggesting that rural young women’s par-
ticipation in factory labour should be seen as merely emancipatory. These young
women are deeply exploited and poorly paid due to the essentialisation of their capacities
for labour as an aspect of rural femininity, whilst contributing to critical projects of national
economic development and to the dynamics of labour and value in global manufacturing.
Instead, what I want to emphasise here is the new and ambivalent gendered and genera-
tional subjectivities and relationships produced through the formation of young women
as industrial workers, and hence through their incorporation into the global manufacturing
labour force.
This example demonstrates both important connections and critical disjunctures in the
formation of young people as workers through global mobilities of capital and labour. As
young working-class masculinity in the global north is transformed through deindustriali-
sation, young rural femininity has been positioned as a critical source of value within pro-
cesses of rural industrialisation taking place in China and South-East Asia. What unites
these socially and geographically distant young people is their importance to changes
in the spatial organisation and political economy of industrial production, and the role
that they have played in global labour force transformations. In both instances, it is the
value that young people’s subjectivities offer to the requirements of industrial labour
that shapes their position as workers and their experiences of work. However, the differ-
ences between them are also critical for the way that their labour has been valorised
and devalorised. In particular, the new youth labour force just described is formed at
the intersection of economic development projects, local gendered relationships and
urban / rural distinctions. Youth subjectivities are articulated in unique ways within the dis-
ciplinary requirements of work in these special economic zones. Both the social organis-
ation of production and the labouring subjectivities produced are radically different
both to those to be found in the global north today, and to those that existed prior to dein-
dustrialisation. In this sense, attention to young people beyond the metropolitan centres
of the global north reveals connections between metropolitan young people and those
elsewhere, as well as unique articulations of youthful subjectivities with global transform-
ations in labour and economic production.
 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 13

Conclusion
In this paper I have tried to make two contributions to existing approaches to young
people and work, and sketched out what the consequences of these might be for a
discipline working towards better recognising the significance of young people in
the global south for theoretical development and political impact. This first is the
examination of young people as subjects of value to the labour force, including the
value that youth offer to contemporary economies and the way that youth subjectiv-
ities are formed and transformed through changes in the nature of labour. This leads
to my second contribution, which is that understanding the experiences of young
people in the global south can begin with a consideration of new youth labour
forces that have been formed through connections and disjunctures with processes
that are already familiar in youth studies, such as the impact of deindustrialisation
on youth in the global north. My arguments here resonate with some of the priorities
raised by advocates of a political economy of youth perspective, as well as the increas-
ing significance of calls for a sociology of youth that is less dominated by the northern
metropole. However, beyond bringing these priorities together I suggest that the need
to understand young people as workers in the terms I have described here is increas-
ingly pressing given the critical role that youth plays within new dynamics of labour
and value in the contemporary global economy. Youth labour forces are not merely
convenient and cheap, but made up through the valorisation of dispositions that
are distinctly youthful – although what that means in different local and national con-
texts is transformed by the very processes that have thrust young people to the fore
as subjects of value to the labour force. In this sense, analysing the formation of young
workers in the global south means more than merely opening the field to currently
excluded youth, but also uncovers young people’s role in globally significant economic
transformations that are made invisible through a focus on the deindustrialisation of
the global north.
This is an agenda that belongs in the field of youth studies, where the concept of
youth is at stake in the key theoretical debates that drive the field. Here, changes in
the nature of labour forces transform the nature of youth, which is characterised by
new productive capacities through becoming a part of economic change. This
agenda situates youth studies as critical to understanding how subjectivities are
formed through the dynamics of labour and value in contemporary capitalism, and
shows how youth is situated within the political economy of specific economic
sectors. While this is also recognised in the political economy of youth perspective
(Cote 2014), a focus on subjectivities as products of work (Adkins 2005) goes
beyond distinctions between the false or revolutionary consciousness of young
people. This distinction is unable to capture how locally specific classed and gendered
subjectivities respond to the specific requirements made of young people by service or
industrial labour processes, or how value is attributed to some youth subjectivities and
not to others. Understanding the formation of young people as workers therefore
means foregrounding the ambivalent consequences of industrial transformations for
young people themselves, and situating youth itself as an aspect of value creation
in contemporary capitalism.
14 D. FARRUGIA

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number DE160100191].

ORCID
David Farrugia http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0288-2775

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