ノンエリート青年の「学校と仕事の間」のリアリティ

ある高校中退者の事例から考える

抄録

Today, Japanese young people are said to have a lot of problems and uncertainty with their school-to-work transition. There are many discourses on youth unemployment, “friitaa”, NEET, and so on. But there are few researches on the internal process of individual young non-elite people's everyday life, especially on working life as non-skilled part-time worker. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the social experiences and consciousness of a young high-school dropout, applying the life-history approach based on the long-term (more than two years) periodic interview. The main results of the empirical research are as follows: 1. He tries to get the temporary position in complex social relationships, not by trying to belong to some kind of social group or internalizing the social norms completely but by trying to take a kind of “against-something” attitude. Difference is very important for him. 2. He rewrites his life story from repressive experiences as it really is to the story of independent and active choices. By doing so, he gets a certain degree of sense of freedom. But ironically, this process encages him into the small sphere of daily life and makes him deflect attention from broader social process or social structure. 3. His narratives go on by using “vocabulary of motives” that gives the legitimacy to his social behavior. By doing so, he can present his choice as reasonable in itself and continue his story without serious contradictions. The research also suggests the necessity to put a new question about the relationship between the micro-process of individual non-elite young people's everyday life and the reproduction of the social class structure.