Youth, Masculinity and the Labour Market: Precarious Transitions in Post-Industrial Britain (Youth, Young Adulthood and Society)

This book examines young men’s precarious education-to-employment transitions as they navigate educational, occupational and emotional challenges in the shadow of deindustrialisation and austerity. Using a mixed-methods approach, Gülgeçer draws on survey and interview data to explore young men’s perceptions and experiences of employment, unemployment, education and training in two post-industrial British cities.The book analyses how structural inequalities - fragmented labour markets, biased education systems and punitive welfare regimes - shape uncertain futures.With education emerging as a risky ‘gamble,’ apprenticeships desired but underfunded and unemployment often experienced as both stigma and moral injury, the study foregrounds the emotional costs of precarity - shame, anxiety and resilience - and reveals a fractured yet enduring agency among young men facing economic abandonment and processes of cultural misrecognition in post-industrial contexts. An interplay of material and a