Young People and Work: Commodification and Perception

This short essay, therefore, aims to be the beginning of a broader and more complex treatment of the subject, which would have to cover at least the following stages: young people’s contestation of the work-consumption pairing around 1968 up to the experiences of 1977; going onto the 1980s and the so-called ‘withdrawal’ phase; and the re-commodification of work from the early 1990s to date. In these pages, however, as hinted before, I will restrict myself to dealing with some cues from the 1950s and early 1960s, while concentrating, in line with the other chapters in this book, on some significant texts.