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

Abstract

This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions. The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitative longitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, we focus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a small rural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labor market is going through a process of rapid reindustrialization after decades of industrial decline and welfare state retrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural ‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economic growth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of social reproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up with and their speed of establishment on the labor market. At the time of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants in this study had employment in local or regional industries, however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves on the labor market varied between them. Further, their staying on locally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss their transitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization process in North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’ school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the wider social reproduction in the region.