‘Corsages on their parents' jackets’: employment and aspiration among Arabic-speaking youth in Western Sydney

Abstract

Many commentators have observed that late modernity has profoundly reshaped the nature of employment such that workers have become more reflexive, mobile, individualistic and entrepreneurial, free to re-invent themselves as they choose in a world of endless possibilities. Theorists of reflexive modernity suggest that the family unit and class have been usurped by an inherent individual mobility. This article challenges this discourse of the new economy arguing instead that young people (Gen Y as market researchers would call them) are not as free as these proponents of the new individualism would have us believe. This article is based on interviews with young people from Western Sydney of Arabic-speaking backgrounds. It considers the way they form ambitions to work in ‘creative industries’ and their struggles to account for, and explain these ambitions to members of their families/communities. It illustrates the ways biographical narratives exemplify struggles to pursue aspirations in the face of class/ethnic positioning and intergenerational misunderstanding.