Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2016 15:30 - 17:00
PAPER SESSION 6 / PECHA KUCHA SESSIONS
Effect of Youth Unemployment on Job Search and Quality of Life : Do Location and/or Duration Matter?
Gstrein, M.
(Institute for Advanced Studies)
In recent years, youth unemployment has become a very visible and often considered threatening phenomenon in
many European countries. While various theories explain what long term effects on youth to expect and there exists
an extensive literature on youth unemployment in general, no one has yet fully investigated the effect of duration of
unemployment on the youths' quality of life and future employment prospects..
This is what this paper will do. It will look into the notable increases of long term youth unemployment and investigate
the different impact that short term or long term unemployment may have on personal well-being, health, the feeling of
social inclusion, financial deprivation, societal participation and the quality of society in general. Based on the third
European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS, 2011/12) and grouping countries into five geographical clusters, the aim of
the paper is to empirically test the effect of unemployment for youths under the age of 30.
Work, Employment and Economic Life 2
W823, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
The Farmer Gets a Wife: Hidden Labour in Farming Households
Tonner, A., Wilson, J.
(University of Strathclyde)
Farming is a critical sector within rural economies (Phelan and Sharpley, 2012) but is uncertain and risky for those
reliant upon it (Turner et al, 2003). The majority of UK farms are small family farms (Morell and Brandth, 2007) where
a considerable share of household income is derived from farming, labour is provided by the family and the family
lives on the farm (Calus and Van Huylenbroeck, 2010) compounding the impact of economic uncertainty. Previous
research has focused on the Farmer as the 'person responsible for the administration of the business' (Clark,
2009:219) when seeking to understanding work undertaken in these enterprises and the skills necessary for success.
This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of farm work by investigating the hidden enabling work undertaken by
the wider farming household. Using case-study methodology (Yin, 2009) analysis is based on observations and
interviews with members of 8 households within the Scottish farming community. Extending extant work exploring the
gendered nature of farming (Riley, 2009) it finds that farmers' spouses and children play important roles in the
diversified businesses that characterise contemporary farming. The unmeasured and unpaid nature of the farming
household's work allows farms to retain financial viability which external paid labour would destroy. It finds farmers'
spouses providing labour of high economic value and displaying skills such as entrepreneurial drive, opportunity
identification and business management which are instrumental to successful business outcomes in contemporary
family farm businesses.
Beyond Prosumption
Elder-Vass, D.
(Loughborough University)
The term prosumption links the concepts of production and consumption to describe cases in which consumers do
unpaid productive work on behalf of commercial businesses. The term was originally coined for cases like self-service
in shops and petrol stations, but it is used increasingly to refer to the creation of user-generated content on
commercial web sites: work that is done by site users but produces commercial benefits for the site owners.
The concept of prosumption, however, rests on the conflation of two terms that are themselves problematic. This
paper will argue that the distinction between production activities and consumption activities is not inherent, but an
artefact of economistic discourses of the market. The concept of prosumption, when applied to most user-generated
content creation, mislabels the social relations in which these labour processes are embedded. The paper argues that
we can describe these processes more accurately, and more revealingly, as a distinctive non-market appropriative
practice, than in terms that are deeply imbued with the discourse of the market.
Nor is it any more satisfactory to represent user-generated content creation as an analogue of wage labour. These
cases confirm that profit is sometimes made by other means than the employment of wage labour. We need to see
capitalism as a range of appropriative practices, sometimes articulated with non-capitalist practices. These arguments
have important implications, not only for explanatory analyses of the digital economy, but also for normative
evaluations of the practices that have sprung up within it.
223 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University