Introduction
The structure and agency dichotomy has been an ever-present and recurring area of concern in youth studies and in the sociology of young people and work. This is demonstrated by the debates about ‘choice biographies’ and persistent class inequalities (Woodman, 2009; Roberts, 2010; Threadgold, 2011; Farrugia, 2013). Kelly (2015) has argued that these debates constrain youth studies ontologically, often representing young people as more or less rational, whilst denuding them of emotions and the elements of life that are hard to put into words. In our work we have proposed that relaying and rehashing the structure/agency dichotomy is limiting theoretical developments in youth studies, as it is too simplistic to capture the relationships between young people’s everyday lives and their immersion in digital communication platforms, education systems, labour markets, consumer cultures, familial and peer associations and other social arrangements. However, new frameworks are emerging. For instance, Threadgold (2018, 2019) has proposed both a Bourdieusian analysis of young people’s everyday life and traced how the figurative production of ‘youth’ has implications for the very object of youth studies. Coffey and Farrugia (2014) have suggested that agency is a conceptual problem for youth studies and draw on Deleuzian and new materialist perspectives such as the concept of ‘the fold’ as a way of understanding youth subjectivities. Recently, we have argued that new theories of labour such as immaterial, affective, and emotional labour make an important contribution to thinking about the place of young people in global and precarious labour markets, where their very agentic activity drives the production of value (Coffey, Farrugia, Adkins and Threadgold, 2018; Farrugia, Threadgold and Coffey, 2018). In this chapter we take these theoretical advancements further by proposing youthful labour, youthful embodiments and youthful culture as concepts to interrogate the myriad interconnected dimensions informing young people’s lives, and problematise the very notions of structure and agency as separate analytical tools. We draw upon our research conducted in 2017 that investigated young people’s labouring practices in ‘hip’ inner-North Melbourne bars. Our key contribution is to understand young people’s active capacities not as inherent in them as subjects but rather as produced within labouring practices and working situations and contingent upon the subjectivities created in the contemporary service economy.
Labour, value and agency
The key argument of this chapter is that shifts in the nature of labour in contemporary capitalism necessitate a new understanding of young people’s agency in relation to work. These shifts have been summed up in discussions of a ‘new economy’ (Adkins, 2005). This new economy is characterised by the emergence of what has been called ‘immaterial’ or ‘affective’ labour (Lazzarato, 1996; Hardt and Negri, 2000). Immaterial or affective labour describes forms of work in which the key products of labour are ‘immaterial’: cultural symbols, social interactions, relationships, affects or embodied sensations. The nature of this work requires new ways of thinking about subjectivities in relation to value, with implications for how the sociology of youth understands agency. Because immaterial labour produces meanings, sensations and relationships, the key product of work is subjectivity itself. In immaterial labour, labour involves enacting subjectivities within broader social arrangements that create value from these practices. These arrangements include systems of relationships and technologies that allow affects to be converted into value and profit, and thereby position subjectivities as sources of value (Adkins and Dever, 2016). As subjectivities become products of labour, the way that labour creates value can no longer be entirely located within the formal employment relation. Immaterial or affective economies therefore produce value from ‘life itself’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Distinctions between the productive and unproductive dimensions of the self become more difficult to discern, with every aspect of a worker’s identity, modes of embodiment and relational styles and distinctions being drawn into their labouring practices.
This relationship between subjectivity, labour and work creates questions about existing approaches to young people and work. These questions can be usefully approached through Adkins’s (2005) critique of the ‘social contract’ view of work. For Adkins, the social contract view of work understands work as a market in which value is produced through the exchange of capitals on the labour market for a wage. Adkins argues that the nature of contemporary labour has made the social contract view of work impossible to sustain. This is due to the relationship between subjectivity and value that characterises immaterial labour, in which Adkins argues that value is produced through the performance of subjectivities that are enacted in the moment of labour itself. Value is therefore produced not only through the exchange of capitals, but through the performance of subjectivities within social arrangements that require the intersubjective recognition of identities and the experience of affects that emerge within the practice of immaterial labour. An example of this is interactive service labour, in which value is produced through the intersubjective experience of affect within a service interaction, rather than only through the exchange of capitals between worker and employer. The social contract view of work therefore has less purchase in immaterial economies, where much of the value created is through the transmission of affects.
Contemporary understandings of young people’s relationships with work are underpinned by a social contract view of work. This is clearest in the concept of youth transitions, which is focused on the structuring of young people’s biographies according to an interaction between structurally distributed resources and labour market conditions. Existing approaches to young people’s agency at work are fundamentally focused on the capacities that young people can exert in negotiating inequality and labour market uncertainty. Young people are understood as standing at a distance from the labour market and then negotiating this precarious environment in ways that reflect their mobilisation of available capitals. Agency here consists in the capacity to actively mobilise these resources and therefore overcome the hostile labour market conditions that young people currently face. An example of this approach to agency can be seen in debates that took place in the sociology of youth between 2011 and 2015 cited above about the impact of the individualisation thesis (Beck, 1992) on analyses of young people’s biographies. In these debates, analyses that drew on concepts of reflexivity were accused of over-emphasising agency at the expense of neglecting structural constraints on young people’s lives manifested in the distribution of cultural and economic capitals. In this sense, agency was understood in terms of the social distribution of capitals which conferred the capacity to negotiate the labour market. The social contract view of labour perspective can only partially capture what young people do at work. While the exchange of capitals is still very relevant to who and how different individuals or groups take up specific roles in the labour market, it brackets out the importance of actual labouring practices and too overtly separates agency and structure into an oppositional dichotomy.
In 2014, two of us suggested that the sociology of youth is characterised by limited approaches to agency, and made a number of critiques that are relevant to the situation just outlined (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014). We suggested that agency is a conceptual problem for the sociology of youth in two key ways, both of which stem from the opposition of structure to agency. The first was an ambiguity between whether agency is a quality inherent in all young people, or a quantity possessed to different degrees by differently positioned youth. The second included the definition of agency according to the pre-existing political commitments and value judgments of youth researchers, in which agency is invoked in order to valorise actions or subjectivities that are resistant to existing social or political conditions. In both instances, agency is understood as something that is opposed to structure – a critical and progressive force that improves young people’s lives and changes society for the better. When this is not the case, young people’s actions and experiences are typically explained through the category of structure. Structure is what happens when existing inequalities are reproduced, and agency is what happens when they are changed for the good. If they are changed for the worse, even through the active efforts of young people, then that is structure as well, because these actions are seen to be structurally determined and therefore not agentic. This is what we called the ‘black box’ of agency in the sociology of youth.
These arguments have a direct bearing on the social contract view of agency and of work in the context of immaterial labour. In the transitions perspective, agency tends to be positioned as a quantity of capacity related to their possession of capitals. The more capital a young person possesses, the better the return on their exchange in the labour market, the better their employment outcomes, and therefore the more agency they have been able to deploy in their engagement with work. Less capital means less agency and worse outcomes. This perspective makes sense for analysing the class, gender, sexuality and racial contours of inequality that still shape labour market trajectories. But it brackets out new processes of value extraction, where subjectivity itself is formed through working practices. What happens to ‘agency’ when work in the low-wage service economy requires the enthusiastic and passionate deployment of subjectivity as part of the disciplinary requirements of work? This is an instance in which valorisation processes require young people’s agency, but nevertheless result in outcomes that are widely regarded as relatively poor, and which have an uncertain relationship with political resistance defined as challenging and changing the status quo.
Coffey and Farrugia (2014) suggested a view of agency that in this chapter we can deploy as a useful way of understanding the relationship between subjectivity and value within immaterial economies. Agency is located not in any essential properties of ‘the subject’ or in the possession of resources, but in the production of different affective capacities through the assemblages that produce human beings (Rose, 1996: 188). As in Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism, agency is re-theorised as the ‘intra-active’ process of assembling human and non-human bodies through relations and forces, and also informs an array of recent ‘new materialist’ theory and scholarship in sociology and feminism (see Coleman, 2009; Ringrose, 2013). This view of agency is relevant for understanding immaterial labour, because it draws attention to the social arrangements that come together to create value through the performance of subjectivities within working practices. As opposed to the possession of capitals, here we have a view of agency that focuses on the capacities for relationality and affect produced within particular working situations and enacted in working practices that produce both subjectivity and value. In this chapter, we draw on a socio-material view of agency ‘as the subject’s embodied potentiality to form intra-active relationships with material structures, discourses and intersubjective environments’ (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014: 472). This view theorises agency as produced through the social arrangements that shape and valorise working practices. It is through this process of intra-active engagement that ‘agency’ can be located. In this scenario, agency and structure are not a binary either–or; ‘agency’ rather can be approached as part of a person’s continual process of engagement with the world. In relation to work, structure and agency can be reframed as necessarily melded through the everyday performances of labour in young people’s working practices, which may also contribute to...
