There are certain issues that—at least in the European public space—attracted high consensus: volunteering, youth entrepreneurship and initial vocational education and training (VET). They all share such an overwhelming positive social load that it is hard to find alternative discourses. It is hard to imagine reasons for which VET would not be inherently something societally good, economically needed if not close to a panacea. It is loaded with the expectation of poverty alleviation, youth employment, skilled workforce (Wieland 2015; Powell 2015; Eichhorst et al. 2015), economic growth and attraction of investments. VET bridges issues from education theory, sociology of work, youth studies, economy and policy making. It is part of strategies on social inclusion and unemployment reduction, but also on innovation. A recent Cedefop research bluntly states that ‘where VET is strong unemployment is low’ (Cedefop 2016, p. 1). Economic agents speak about a shortage of skilled workers, policy makers plan an increase in the number of young people in VET, whilst media promotes successful stories of young women and men who chose VET and a trade (most often as an alternative to a university degree and an option for materiality at the expense of liberal education). All this indicates that, indeed, we expect a lot from VET (Grubb 2001).
Yet, VET is not without its dilemmas. Back in 2002, Alison Wolf, a leading expert on education and skills, questioned the assumption that low-level vocational courses should be the default ‘offer’ for ‘less academic’ pupils. She made a well-argued case in favour of increased investment in education at the elementary school level, as the crucial skills in the labour market are, according to her, mathematical and linguistic. In a radical way, she argued against the policy hypocrisy of promoting initial VET, whilst titling a chapter ‘A great idea for other people’s children’ (Wolf 2002). Later, she argued: There of course remains a risk that some schools will, as has happened in the past, effectively write off some of their least academically successful students, and park them in vocational courses irrespective of whether these ‘count’ (Wolf Report 2011, p. 113). Nonetheless, in 2011, Cedefop issued a report named ‘Vocational education and training is good for you – The social benefits of VET for individuals’ which shows that ‘initial VET is associated with positive changes in social outcomes for individuals’ (2011, p. 116).
In many countries, VET is close to a ‘restless’ educational area because of hard-to-reconcile interests and competing legitimacies of employers, policy makers, teachers, parents, young people and ‘society’ by large. Yet, important as they are, young people’s perspectives on VET are at best assumed and often not sought after. To a large extent, young people in VET have been a rather invisible social group, close to Roberts’ (2011) ‘invisible middle’: young people who fall in between categories that attract high public attention. In many ways, they are ‘ordinary people’, at distance from the overqualified graduates or from the exceptional achievements attributed to the emerging young entrepreneurs, and, also, in a different situation than those not in education, employment or training (NEET).
Previous research on VET has been mainly structuralist in nature, as it prioritized labour market needs (Powell 2012). The weak representation of young people’s ‘voices’ from research is in line with their silent, ambivalent status in VET policy making and in the more general thinking about VET. In order to counteract some of the above limitations, this book uses a bottom-up, constructivist understanding of work and education, grounded in young people’s views. This research came out of the need to add young people’s own views—incomplete and contradictory as they may be—to the emerging debate on VET. First, it addresses an ethical imperative of bringing young people’s voices closer to the centre of VET policy making. Second, it complements the existent discourses through a different type of knowledge, grounded in young people’s ‘personal epistemologies’ (Billett 2011, p. 222) over what VET and work is or should be.
The book sets itself the goal of exploring the process by which young people in initial VET (aged 16–18) try to make sense of their future lives. They are enrolled in a shorter educational track that comes as an alternative to high school education (be it liberal or technical), although some progression routes are later possible. Many have long-term experiences of educational failure, but still, do not make the most disadvantaged group, as they did not drop out, for instance. Their overwhelming majority commute daily from rural areas or small towns. The research tries to understand how young people’s views on the type of lives they value are articulated with the (arguably objective) prospects of precarious work and precarious lives. In doing so, the book asks what young people in Romania’s VET find important, what they envisage as useful and for what. Starting from a general view on what matters to young people, the research privileges the imagined role of work in young people’s projections and examines it through sociological lenses within the interdisciplinary area of youth studies.
Why Romania and Why Now?
Romania tries to reinstate VET attractiveness in an economic climate shaped by global transformations in the meaning of work. Generally, the long-held notion of employment as secure, with a sense of purpose and progression, based on commitment and achievement (craftsmanship cf. Sennett) is shaken. Concerns about the deteriorating quality of jobs start to be experienced in many industries in Romania. Stable work (in production) is increasingly shifting towards precarious work, often in the service sector. By and large, there seems to be a general sense of unease within the labour market where young people now in VET are likely to enter.
Against this backdrop, Standing discussed about people’s ‘habituation of expecting a life of unstable labour and unstable living’ (2014). Chances are that soon many young people now in Romania’s VET will have precarious jobs. Informed by the notions of craftsmanship and precarity, this book examines the views on future occupational trajectories held by young people in VET. Do young people see themselves as locked in a process that leads them into precarious work? Do they negotiate options and ways out? Is there something else going on?
By having Romania as a VET case study, the book has to bring on board several core-periphery issues. It argues that the young people in VET meet the criteria of a ‘missing middle’ group (Steve Roberts 2015) in a country that is itself, part of the ‘missing middle’: ‘not completely Western’, yet, not ‘exotic’ enough to attract by default interest (Cărtărescu 2017). The book frames VET in the broader socio-economic context shaped by a recent history of de-industrialization, massive dismissals and political turmoil. It argues that the process of de-industrialization was a questionable window of opportunity for profit-making and strategic alliances for some, while for many others this was a perpetual experience of losing ground. Terms such as the ‘losers of economic transition’ were often used to refer to people with low skills, from the countryside or, in more general terms, to social groups without enabling circumstances to adapt to the new economy. In the absence of a policy able to find coherent responses, a neoliberal message of self-governance gained potency. People had to secure individual routes to survival or success. Migration became a solution at both individual and family levels and, due to remittances, for the national economy, as well. The social costs for children, families and communities were high and silent.
The increased access to higher education in Romania brought certain distaste for physical work and situated white-collar work as the normative occupational route. From a period with strong occupational identities, the country is undergoing a stage when many workers see their occupational identities eroded. For the older generation, a sense of nostalgia for a time when skills were valued seems recurrent. Now, it is frequent for workers to first tell the name of the company and not their occupation. The country moved from a robust sense of working class, to a situation where individuals are expected to find individual solutions (often precarized) for navigating an unfriendly economic climate. Against this context, in 2007, Romania had the lowest general job satisfaction in Europe (Eurofound 2007). Now, the rate of young people in NEET situations is one of the highest in Europe (20.9% cf. Eurostat 2015).
This book unpacks different layers of geographical marginality and ultimately touches upon the condition of the young people in Romania’s rural areas, a subpopulation largely absent from youth research. By and large, young people from the rural areas are marginally reflected in the current youth studies. At best...