School to work in transitions : the life course context of a cohort of 'at-risk' youths in Malta

Abstract

Recent research on school to work transitions has moved away from the analysis of direct transitions from the school bench to the work place. Such linear transitions had characterised traditional classic studies such as Willis' (1977) Learning to Labour. Rather, it is readily acknowledged throughout the sociological literature that transitions have become increasingly fragmented. As a result, they are thereby likely to be more protracted than they were traditionally (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, Heinz, 1991, Jones and Wallace, 1992, Hannan, Raffe and Smyth, 1996, Walther, Hejl, Jensen, and Hayes, 2002). This implies that people opt to take up different jobs, rather than choosing a 'job for life' in the manner that had once been the established practise. They envisage changing jobs time and time again, sometimes re-engaging themselves in schooling in some interspersed period between different jobs, or somehow combining schooling with work. Lemme (1995) suggests that the notion of being employed in a particular job for the whole of one's life is something obsolete. This study will be informed mainly by a social constructionist perspective. This is focused upon exploring how 'reality' is constructed from the communicative processes that are ordinarily adopted within and between people (Shorter, 1995). Potter and Wetherell (1987) explain that this takes place when pointing out that the kinds of ways that a people have available to talk about themselves gives way to their experience as human beings. Phrasing this otherwise, basic to social constructionism is that ''to be a self is not to be a certain kind of being, but to be in possession of a certain type of theory" (Harre, 1985, p. 262, in Burr, 1995, p. 125). Certain texts use the term 'social constructivism' rather than 'social constructionism' to imply the same thing. However, as Burr (1995) points out, the term 'constructivism' is sometimes used to refer to Piagetian theory. This is a perceptual theory that is based on an idea that knowledge is not simply acquired from outside the individual but also from within, and how it may be altered, reconstructed, or done away with, depending on how applicable individual learners deem it to be in the real world (Chapman, 1988). [...]