School-to-work transitions in rural North Sweden : staying on in a reviving local labor market

• Published in: Journal of Youth Studies
• Main Authors: Rönnlund, Maria, Tollefsen, Aina
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för tillämpad utbildningsvetenskap 2023
• Subjects: Transitions; Rural; Spatial capital; Re-industrialization; Social reproduction; Pedagogical Work; Pedagogiskt arbete; North Sweden
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-214565; https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2023.2259323

This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions.The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitativelongitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, wefocus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a smallrural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labormarket is going through a process of rapid reindustrializationafter decades of industrial decline and welfare stateretrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economicgrowth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of socialreproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up withand their speed of establishment on the labor market. At thetime of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants inthis study had employment in local or regional industries,however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves onthe labor market varied between them. Further, their staying onlocally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss theirtransitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization processin North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the widersocial reproduction in the region.