Book review - Norbert Elias’s Lost Research Revisiting the Young Worker Project

Few matters spark the interest of social scientists more than the re-discovery of lost research from a bygone age. In this book, Professors John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor provide a comprehensive examination of the late Norbert Elias’s first and only foray into the world of wide-scale qualitative social research in 1960s Leicester. In doing so, the authors present authoritative evidence detailing how the social and economic experiences of young workers in the original study were inconsistent with the post-war ‘golden age’ portrayal of youth transitions provided by contemporary Youth Studies scholars. They note how transitions into the labour market for both genders were commonly interspersed with periods of unemployment, feelings of insecurity and frequent changes in job roles. Furthermore, the book provides a fascinating insight into the departmental politics and methodological challenges experienced by the project team by judiciously examining detailed field and meeting notes.