Understanding the consequences of early job insecurity and labour market exclusion: the interaction of structural conditions, institutions, active agency and capability

This document is the first deliverable from Work Package 2 of the NEGOTIATE project, “Early job insecurity and youth unemployment as a theoretical and societal challenge”. The Work Package’s first objective is to develop “an original analytical framework for a comparative assessment of the individual and societal consequences of job insecurity early in a career. The analytical framework integrates concepts such as negotiation, agency, capability, empowerment, social resilience, embedded employability, networks, transition regimes, welfare state regimes and multi-level governance. A key interest is how to conceptualise the interactions between the young adults’ agency and structurally given constraints and opportunities, (e.g. how they perceive and use their scope for action through networks and active agency, even in seemingly adverse circumstances) and in what sense young adults’ find ways of negotiating the challenges of prolonged unemployment and job insecurity.” (DoA, Annex 1, Part A, p. 16). NEGOTIATE’s core question is how young people’s scope for agency interacts with different layers of structural conditions in a multi-level governance system. As means to answering this question, the deliverable will review and summarise relevant theoretical literature on key concepts and assess how they contribute to an understanding of the consequences of early job insecurity for young people. A particular interest is the extent to which young women and men are able to negotiate these conditions and avoid the most adverse consequences of such insecurity. We will be particularly attentive to mechanisms of gendered labour market outcomes and patterns of market marginalisation of young people. The practical goal of presenting the analytical framework and undertaking a conceptual clarification is to provide a common basis for the empirical work of NEGOTIATE (cf. Work Packages 3-8), as well as a conceptual base for the final synthesis of results.