Work Aspirations and Attitudes in an Era of Labour Market Restructuring: A Comparison of two Canadian Youth Cohorts

Graham S. Lowe and Harvey Krahn
Additional contact information
Graham S. Lowe: Department of Sociology University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2H4 CANADA
Harvey Krahn: Department of Sociology University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2H4 CANADA

Work, Employment & Society, 2000, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: This article tests the assumption that youth's work attitudes are changing to reflect the restructured labour markets that often are taken as a characteristic of late-modernity. Comparing 1985 and 1996 cohorts of high school leavers in a Canadian city, we find that occupational aspirations increased significantly since 1985, especially among females, in ways consistent with employment trends in a service-based economy. However, the 1985 and 1996 youth cohorts wanted very similar conditions in a job, and in each cohort we observed significant gender differences. General attitudes towards work and education also remained fairly constant. We discuss the implications of these findings for school-work transition research and for larger debates about youth responses to conditions of late-modernity.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170022118248 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:14:y:2000:i:1:p:1-22

DOI: 10.1177/09500170022118248

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().