Risky Business?

Youth And The Enterprise Culture

Robert MacDonald, Frank Coffield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135427641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

First published in 1991. MacDonald and Coffield look at the implementation and outcome of enterprise initiatives introduced in Teeside in relation to 100 unemployed young adults in the age-range 16-25, within a political ideology which has sought to change a dependency culture to one of self-reliance. The young people studied are categorized with reference to their attitude to, and experience of, work, and a number of case studies are cited. An important aspect of the study is that it is specifically concerned with ordinary young people. The conclusions are worked out in terms of the changing culture of work, government policies, the internationalization of labour markets and the changing fortunes of young adults in Britain in the 1990s.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Youth and Enterprise

‘Our mission is to develop an enterprise culture in the North to replace a dependency culture’.¹ This statement captures both the essence of government policy for the depressed regions and the paramount objective of the industry which has grown up to deliver enterprise to them. During the 1980s, The Enterprise Years, according to the title of Lord Young’s autobiography (1990), thousands of millions of pounds have been spent on an ideological project to transform the culture of education, training and employment within the United Kingdom and it has been one of the policies dearest to the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s Government. It is time for an independent report on what is done in the name of enterprise, what happens to young people who set up their own businesses and what wider impact such policies have had on the political and economic experiences of school-leavers struggling to find a secure toehold in the labour market.

This book, therefore, represents one of the first detailed empirical tests of the attempts to create an enterprise culture in this country. Its other major theme is the cultural and economic responses of young adults to the virtual collapse of work in localities like Teesside in the 1980s. Structural changes in the economy and in education over the past twenty years have greatly transformed the careers followed by young people as they leave school and search for jobs. The established routes, forged in the post-war political consensus and prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, held as far as the mid—1970s, until the sudden quadrupling of oil prices led to an economic recession in Western countries. In 1975, 60 per cent of 16 year olds went from school directly into employment. By 1987 this number had shrunk to 18 per cent (Department of Education and Science 1988). Moreover, this global economic crisis had very local consequences. It sparked off massive youth unemployment, hitting the more peripheral areas of Britain, like the county of Cleveland, the hardest. Youth unemployment grew more in one year—1980—than in the whole of the previous decade (Raffe, 1987) and the early years of the 1980s saw the instigation of special measures to cope with the soaring numbers of teenage unemployed (and the attendant public fears of youth unrest and disaffection).

The story of the return of mass unemployment and how the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) radically reshaped education and training in Britain is a different one from the tale to be told here (see, for example: Dale, 1985; Finn, 1987; Coles, 1988; Ainley and Corney, 1990; Coles and MacDonald, 1990). All we need point to is how these hasty and much criticized government interventions into the youth labour market have been gradually revised and formalized into an evolving system of vocational training, ranging from the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI) for school pupils, through various versions of the Youth Training Scheme (YOP to YTS to YT) for school-leavers, to Employment Training (ET) for adults.

Whilst the economic recession of the 1970s inspired national programmes of educational and training reforms these have failed to exorcise the demon of unemployment for particular groups of people in particular localities. Even full participation in a succession of courses and schemes cannot guarantee jobs. As a result, the North-East has some of the best trained dole queues in the world and so far-reaching have the social and economic changes been in the past two decades that questions have been raised about the continuing adequacy of theories developed in the 1960s, when it was still possible to write books with titles like Into Work (Carter, 1966) and Adolescent Needs: the Transition from School to Work (Maizels, 1970).

Our book makes a different kind of contribution to the avalanche of reports (for example: Gleeson, 1983; Bates et al., 1984; Varlaam, 1984; and Roberts, 1984) on the transitions from school which have appeared in the 1980s, reporting the rise in unemployment and its consequences for young people. Although we draw upon this now quite vast literature on youth (un)employment, training and education, and share with it a number of common concerns and approaches, we wish to highlight two trends in recent research which we particularly welcome and to which we hope to contribute.

First, we locate our work firmly within the growing tradition of research in the sociology of youth and in education (Corrigan, 1979; Connell et al., 1982) which emphasizes the importance of studying ‘ordinary’ young people rather than exotic, unusual or unrepresentative youth groups (the Punks, Teds, Skins and so on). This broader view has developed from Willis’s early ethnography of the ‘lads’, through Jenkins’ study of ‘lads, citizens and ordinary kids’ in Belfast, from Coffield, Borrill and Marshall’s investigation of ‘growing up at the margins’ to Brown’s examination of the schooling of ‘ordinary kids’ (Willis, 1977; Jenkins, 1983; Coffield et al., 1986; Brown, 1987). Phillip Brown (1987), for example, studied the ‘invisible majority’ of ordinary working class pupils who neither enthusiastically accepted nor vigorously rejected the school; in his own words, those ‘who neither left their names engraved on the school’s honours boards, nor gouged them into the top of classroom desks’ (1987: 1).

So although studies of youth during the 1970s (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1978; Hebdige, 1979) made valuable contributions to our understanding of the sub-cultural aspects of various youth groups, research developed in essentially élitist directions, paying little attention to the realities of the everyday lives of the majority of young adults. Conversely, studies of youth unemployment may have generated a wealth of information about national trends and disrupted youth transitions but few of these have seriously attempted to grasp the local or cultural meaning of these experiences. In this book we hope to go some way to combining these relatively distinct traditions of research on youth by exploring the cultural and economic responses of a wide range of ordinary young people to the structure of opportunities facing them. Moreover, we focus on one particular form of response—youth enterprise—which to date has been largely ignored by youth researchers.

A second important trend in studies of youth over the past ten years, and which reappears as a key issue in our argument, is the importance of locality. Local labour markets shape the choices available to young adults and help to structure huge regional differences between the North and South. David Ashton, Malcolm Maguire and colleagues have been particularly associated with this valuable addition to the debate:

Thus although the economic recession has increased the level of youth unemployment nationally, school-leavers’ chances of employment and ‘choice’ of work are still greatly influenced by the structure of their local labour market. (Ashton, et al., 1982:19)

Ashton and Maguire (1986:2) have shown, for instance, that ‘the chances of the sons of middle-class fathers in Sunderland finding employment were less than those of sons of lower working-class families in St. Albans’. Conventional explanations of these differences—personal attributes and social background—were clearly not as satisfactory as the character of the local labour market in affecting employment prospects. Consequently, we pay particular attention to the way youth opportunities, transitions into the labour market and aspects of the experience of enterprise are structured at an immediate, local level by Teesside’s changing economy. In short, we aim to explore the cultural and economic meanings of enterprise for a broad group of young people in the locality of Teesside. Enterprise and youth, then, are the twin pillars of this book. We will now describe briefly how these two focal concerns came together into a research project.

During the mid to late 1980s, it became apparent to us that something unusual was afoot in the county of Cleveland. We became aware of the emergence of a thriving enterprise industry which was offering training and advice on enterprise to school-pupils, school-leavers, young adults and the community at large. At that time, Cleveland had the highest unemployment rate in mainland Britain, its economy was dominated by a few giants like ICI and British Steel, and, as such, it posed a particularly severe test of the Government’s policy of industrial and social regeneration through enterprise. In short, if the enterprise culture could be shown to work in Cleveland, it could probably work anywhere. Local professionals compared the task to ‘rowing up a waterfall’. We decided, so to speak, to kit ourselves out in waterproof clothes in order to study the boats, the rowers, and the obstacles and so chart what progress they made. Our endeavours were made possible by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

In 1987 the ESRC established the 16 to 19 Initiative to address a number of questions:

What happens to [young people] after the age of 16 in education, in work and at home? What do they feel about their opportunities and what influences the choices they make? How do they perceive the economic and political world around them and where do they see themselves fitting into it? (Bynner, 1987b:8)

The ESRC commissioned two consultants, a psychologist, Glynis Breakwell, from the University of Surrey and a sociologist, Ken Roberts, from the University of Liverpool, to review the literature on the economic and political socialization of young adults; and their reports sharpened the key questions which needed to be asked about this age group.

First, how do the careers of young people in education, employment, the family and leisure differ between various groups? Second, how do these different careers interact? For example, the family responsibilities and leisure pursuits of young women are unlikely to be the same as those of young men, whatever their qualifications and job prospects. Third, how do young people themselves ‘create and sustain identities from the consistencies and contradictions that they encounter’ (Roberts, 1987:23). Finally, a new synthesis between the theory and findings of sociological and psychological research was looked for in the work of the Initiative. The ESRC then proceeded to establish at the core of the 16 to 19 Initiative:

a longitudinal research project carried out by local university research teams involving 6,400 young people in four areas of the country—Kirkcaldy, Sheffield, Liverpool and Swindon. In each area two samples of 800 young people—the school-leavers (now aged 15 to 16) and the school-leavers of two years ago (now aged 17 to 18) will be followed up for two years. The first survey was carried out in April 1987 and [was] repeated in 1988 and 1989. (Bynner, 1987b:9)

The core studies, as they came to be called, will publish the first overview of their findings in a book entitled Careers and Identities (Bynner, 1991).

The intention of the 16 to 19 Initiative was always to fund a number of much smaller, self-contained projects in specialized areas to prevent all their eggs being entrusted to four large baskets. A series of associated studies was therefore established into topics and samples of young people which were not adequately covered by the core studies. Projects were set up to investigate: young adults in a rural labour market; young people with special needs; family socialization; ethnic minority youth; adolescent identity; teenage ‘housing careers’; and the use of video methods in the study of socialization. In addition, the Anglo-German Foundation awarded a grant for a comparative study of young people in declining labour markets (Bremen and Liverpool) and expanding labour markets (Paderborn and Swindon) in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Britain.²

Our Project: The Teesside 16 to 25 Initiative

We successfully applied to the ESRC for an associated study into the impact of enterprise on the education, training and employment of young adults in a depressed area of Britain (Cleveland). In more detail, the central aim of our proposed research was to study new career patterns for young people for whom traditional routes into employment had either disappeared or become severely restricted. School-leavers began to experience a much wider variety of early careers; until the mid-1970s many moved straight from school into apprenticeships and jobs which often lasted into adulthood. Increasingly, some started to undergo protracted transitions into adulthood by way of government training schemes (Hollands, 1990) and spells in and out of employment before landing a ‘real’ job. Others became trapped in a succession of schemes and/or ‘shit’ jobs (their expression) which led nowhere; some of these slowly became part of the long-term unemployed. It was under such grim economic conditions that some young adults turned to explore alternatives through enterprise in self-employment, co-operatives and community projects. Others began working wherever they could, ‘on the side’, in ‘fiddle’ jobs or even travelled to find employment in southern England or abroad.

The aim of our study has been to concentrate on self-employment, enterprise schemes, co-operatives and community projects. The constraints of a modest budget have meant, however, that the project lasted only fifteen months from October 1988 to December 1989; the total sum available and the time-scale placed constrictions on the scope of the research but, within these limits, we still managed to interview over 100 young people. We were interested in studying not just new forms of transition from school to self-employment, but also the experience of enterprise, for instance, as it related to the economic and political attitudes of our informants. The central question which we sought to answer was: what does enterprise mean for young people in Cleveland? Moreover, we were keen to assess the impact of enterprise courses and schemes on the local culture of work, which was itself undergoing marked changes (Beynon et al., 1985). In the early stages of planning the research we developed a large number of more specific but interrelated questions, and we list the principal ones here:

1 What is the present state of, and future prospects for, the Cleveland economy? We wished to trace the historical development of local industries to deepen our understanding of current problems on Teesside and their impact on the transitions from school to (un) employment by young people.

2 What is enterprise? What definitions of it are used and what do enterprise courses consist of? How extensive is the enterprise movement and what ideology or ideologies underpin it? What is the significance of the new policies to decentralize and privatize training and enterprise to the new Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs)? What are the theoretical or practical justifications for the activities carried out in the name of enterprise? Have these activities been evaluated and have the evaluations been acted upon to improve practice?

3 What enterprise initiatives are taking place locally? How many organizations are involved, what models or enterprise do they promote and how? By whom are they funded and with what aims and objectives?

4 What kinds of young people become involved in enterprise and why do they move into self-employment in small businesses or cooperatives? How do they start up in business and what problems do they face? What kind of work do they do and under what conditions?

5 What are the implications of our findings for policy in the general areas of the education, training and (un)employment of young adults and in the more specific field of starting small businesses? To what extent has the enterprise culture taken root on Teesside?

6 Last, but by no means least, how do young adults themselves assess enterprise? How do they rate the quality of the experiences they undergo and what processes does it involve them in? How is success and failure defined in official terms and by young people themselves? What are the political and economic outlooks of ‘young entrepreneurs’?³ Are they more conservative than their peers and what do they understand by the term ‘the enterprise culture’?

As is obvious from such an extensive list, we were journeying into unknown territory; there was no danger of us running out of questions but we could not be sure at the outset how many of these would be adequately answered by our study. We hope, by the end of Chapter 10, to have answered at least some of them.

We were also concerned that, despite the flow of considerable sums of public money into enterprise projects in Cleveland, few, if any, independent evaluations had been carried out. The area bristled with unexamined claims, some of which were mutually inconsistent. For instance, we were told by staff delivering the Enterprise Allowance Scheme ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Youth and Enterprise
• Chapter 2 The Hunt for the Heffalump Resumed: the Rise of the Enterprise Movement
• Chapter 3 The ‘Infant Hercules’ Comes of Age
• Chapter 4 Cleveland’s Enterprise Industry
• Chapter 5 ‘Becoming Your Own Boss’
• Chapter 6 Risky Business?
• Chapter 7 Runners, Fallers and Plodders: Some Case Studies of Youth Enterprise
• Chapter 8 Beyond Small Business: Alternative Forms of Enterprise
• Chapter 9 Maggie’s Army?
• Chapter 10 A Culture of Enterprise or a Culture of Survival?
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index