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The article addresses school-to-work transitions among young women in a strongly male dominated professional sphere – the transport industry. Drawing on interviews with two girls over the time span 2015–2022 and visits to their upper secondary school 2016–2019, the study focuses on how power structures related to gender play out in the positioning that takes place in school and workplaces: How the girls were positioned socially and in relation to professional qualification, and how they positioned themselves in these respects. The findings indicate significant changes in discourse and practice when the girls transitioned from students to employees, changes which in the article are discussed in the framework of ‘inequality regimes’ and through the lens of the ‘glass funnel’ metaphor. Linking the funnel metaphor to the framework of inequality regimes broadens the picture to consider how young people are exposed to generally increasing inequalities in labour markets where institutions and organisations are affected by neoliberal economic policies, weakened collective protection of workers and wider wage gaps. With individualisation and insecurity, young people like the two girls in focus in this article, are increasingly left to fend for themselves in a harsh labour market.

In this chapter, we highlight the transition to upper secondary school among young people in nine Nordic rural regions. Like other young people in today’s Western world, they grew up with expectations of rapidly achieving successful careers which will benefit them individually and as a society. However, living in rural areas with relatively fewer educational opportunities or being at the margin of the educational system (as was the case for the study conducted in Denmark), they found themselves in the cross-pressure of different and somewhat contradictory expectations. The aim of this chapter is to explore the challenges and dilemmas associated with transitioning to upper secondary school in particular as we follow this process over time. The research question is, what typical reflections, negotiations, and concerns arose early in the process of deciding which upper secondary programme to choose when the deadline came closer, and what typical struggles emerged after the decision was made?

This chapter investigates what constitutes Nordic young people’s sense of belonging—or not belonging—in their rural communities. Belonging is approached as a concept referring to a sense of connection, membership, and security, here infused with individual and collective histories and shaped by everyday practices. Despite the recent interest in the concept of belonging in youth studies (cf. Harris et al., 2021), longitudinal research on rural youth belonging is rare, and we know little about what shapes belonging over time. Drawing on extensive and comparable qualitative longitudinal data from Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark (n = 196), the chapter investigates what constitutes young people’s sense of belonging in rural regions, along with how belonging changes over time. Drawing on both the ongoing theoretical discussion and Nordic data, the chapter distinguishes between three central dimensions of youth belonging—the social, spatial, and cultural—while identifying three common trajectories of belonging: (1) In strengthening belonging, all three dimensions of belonging are balanced in supporting transition to adulthood in rural areas with ease: strong connectedness to local communities, place attachment, but also appreciation of values, traditions, and lifestyles characteristic of their region. (2) In weakening belonging, different dimensions of unbelonging work together to weaken belonging over time. This may be resolved by moving, but this is not always possible. (3) In conflicting belonging, some dimensions of belonging are in conflict with each other. Young people may express a strong belonging to nature but experience social unbelonging, which results in trajectories where easy solutions are not available. Longitudinal data allow for a reflection on the dynamics between different dimensions of belonging: Earlier bonds of belonging may loosen, while others are reinforced over time in different phases of life. The chapter contributes to the ongoing discussion of youth belonging by showing that the way different dimensions of belonging intertwine and change have consequences for the life trajectories of rural young people. Belonging is often partial, involves negotiation and struggle, and is a result of the continuous recreation and repetition of performative practices.

In research, policy, and the media, urban young people have been a symbol of the future. However, rarely have young people living in rural areas been seen as such; rather, rurality has been portrayed as old-fashioned, backward, and associated with the past (Farrugia & Ravn, 2022), particularly if they stayed and imagined building a life where they grew up (Østergaard et al., 2024; Vehkalahti et al., 2024). In this chapter, we unfold young people’s future imaginations and compare among those who grew up in different rural areas in four Nordic countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. We reveal how they imagine their future and also how this imagination affects them, not only in terms of their future lives but also their everyday lives (Adams, Futures imperfect: A reflection on challenges. Sociology, 57(2): 279–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221113478, 2023; Adam & Groves, Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics. Brill, 2007; Beckert & Suckert, The future as a social fact. The analysis of perceptions of the future in sociology. Poetics, 84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101499, 2021).

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.

This article analyses how employer federations, trade unions and the Swedish state symbolically construct seasonal migrant workers to work in the green industries, specifically in agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking. Work tasks and skills become ethnicised where certain groups are constructed as ‘fit’ for certain work tasks. Through symbolic constructing, boundaries are drawn in relation to Swedish workers in general but also hierarchically within the group of seasonal migrant workers and in relation to specific groups in Sweden, typically un-employed youth and newly settled refugees. This paper is based on interviews with unions and employer organisations as well as secondary text-sources and legal texts. The analysis shows that while employers construct seasonal migrant workers as vital for agriculture, forestry and wild-berry picking, arguing that their line of business could not be sustained without them, the union side portrays this as an ‘artificial demand’. Within a system that to a large degree is based on employers’ demand for inexpensive and flexible labour, symbolic boundaries of seasonal migrant workers are not only performed by the employers’ side, but are also co-constructed with and sanctioned by the state; while partly contested by the unions.

In this chapter we discuss how demands for social justice and struggles around social reproduction have evolved in the Nordic "periphery", placing the struggles within a context of critical socio-spatial theorizing and earlier geographical research on uneven development within Nordic welfare states. We give examples from Sweden of how resistance in the northern periphery increasingly mobilizes around spatial justice and social reproduction rather than mainly around employment. Demands about the right to spatial justice challenge the rewarding of a specific place – usually the urban – of modernity, meaning-making and hub for democracy and resistance. And thus oppose the naturalization of uneven rual-urban geographies. Nordic critical geographers have researched inequalities within Nordic welfare states, including center-periphery divides and conflicts, and examined how these have increased with welfare state retrenchment. Feminist geographers highlight the centrality of battles around social reproduction – the right to environmental security, work, food, housing, healthcare, education, a meaningful and dignified life in both urban and rural places. We identify a tradition of empirically based geographical research on material conditions and changing socio-spatial forms of production and consumption, which suggests a socio-spatial theory useful in an era of crisis and increased privatization of nature and social reproduction.

The forest berry industry in northern Sweden operates within a competitive global market for nutritious wild berries and is dependent on seasonal migrant workers. This chapter analyses actual wage levels of these workers after a series of new regulations surrounding migration and labour standards. Labour standards improved in Sweden in 2010 with the implementation of collective agreements and work contracts for non-European Economic Area berry pickers, the only country employing such standards within this type of industry. We discuss how, despite these improvements, Thai migrant berry pickers continue to be exploited in a process that we theorise as subordinated inclusion. The chapter is based on unique survey material with berry pickers and in-depth interviews with migrant workers during the berry season in Sweden and off-season in Thailand. We focus on actual wages, while also placing our analysis in the context of the industry’s peripherality and changing geographies of production and consumption. One third of the workers in the survey reported earnings below the income they are entitled to according to the work contracts. Despite deploying varying forms of resistance and the recent regulation of labour standards for migrant labour, we conclude that the fulfilment of their formal rights is still lacking.The forest berry industry in northern Sweden operates within a competitive global market for nutritious wild berries and is dependent on seasonal migrant workers. This chapter analyses actual wage levels of these workers after a series of new regulations surrounding migration and labour standards. It focuses on unique survey material with berry pickers and in-depth interviews with migrant workers during the berry season in Sweden and off-season in Thailand. The changes in the globalising labour markets and the varying forms of conditions and access to rights granted to different groups of migrant workers in relation to national systems provide examples of severe employment inequalities worldwide. Work in rural economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry, or industries of non-timber forest products links increasingly to global value chains and their institutional, ideological, and economic dynamics. The analysis of the survey shows that the earnings for Thai berry pickers many times were considerably lower than the collective agreement had stipulated.