Abstract:
The constitution of work life has shifted substantially across the late modern period. The security and predictability of earlier work life has been replaced by non-standard and precarious work arrangements, including the reduction of paid employment as a core activity of work life. Preparation for work life is a dominant imperative of contemporary school education policies and informs much of educators’ work. It is timely, then, to consider how parents are imagining their children’s work futures, and how children imagine this for themselves in light of their schooling experiences. Similarly, attention should also be given to how workers in education imagine the shape of their work in a contemporary context.
In this paper I report on interviews conducted with 14 parents, students and tutors about their imagined work futures. I use Beck’s (2000) theories around the shift from a ‘work society’ to a ‘civil society’ to understand the participants’ orientations to their work futures. Preliminary findings suggest that parents and students are ambivalent about the shape of their work futures and private tutoring is used as a resource to manage the risk of an uncertain and unpredictable employment future. I also examine private tutors’ relations to their work arrangements and argue that these relations are illustrative of a new work order. This paper contributes to a growing conversation on importance of worker agency, and of harnessing the power of ‘risk communities’.
In this paper I report on interviews conducted with 14 parents, students and tutors about their imagined work futures. I use Beck’s (2000) theories around the shift from a ‘work society’ to a ‘civil society’ to understand the participants’ orientations to their work futures. Preliminary findings suggest that parents and students are ambivalent about the shape of their work futures and private tutoring is used as a resource to manage the risk of an uncertain and unpredictable employment future. I also examine private tutors’ relations to their work arrangements and argue that these relations are illustrative of a new work order. This paper contributes to a growing conversation on importance of worker agency, and of harnessing the power of ‘risk communities’.