This book examines young men’s precarious education-to-employment transitions as they navigate educational, occupational and emotional challenges in the shadow of deindustrialisation and austerity.

Using a mixed-methods approach, Gülgeçer draws on survey and interview data to explore young men’s perceptions and experiences of employment, unemployment, education and training in two post-industrial British cities. The book analyses how structural inequalities – fragmented labour markets, biased education systems and punitive welfare regimes – shape uncertain futures. With education emerging as a risky “gamble”, apprenticeships desired but underfunded and unemployment often experienced as both stigma and moral injury, the study foregrounds the emotional costs of precarity – shame, anxiety and resilience – and reveals a fractured yet enduring agency among young men facing economic abandonment and processes of cultural misrecognition in post-industrial contexts.

An interplay of material and affective precarity in youth education-to-employment transitions, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social policy, youth studies, labour market studies and masculinities. It will also be of value to professionals engaged with UK welfare, skills and labour market policy.