A psychosocial approach to unemployed young men in a South Wales town

A project on worker identity transformation in a South Wales town, which has lost its major employer, a steel works, undertaken by the applicants, revealed that while some young men were able to shift their aspirations towards available work, others were unemployed because they refused to take 'embarrassing' shop work, which they considered as feminine. The research revealed that these young men had unemployed fathers. This led the research team to propose further research on this issue, focussing on the role of family dynamics, particularly those between father and son, in the production of this work refusal. This one year project uses a psychosocial approach which allows us to understand the role of unconscious dynamics in the issue and to work with youth and community workers to develop modes of understanding which will help them to work with 'hard to reach' young men and their families, as well as to understand the role of the transmission of unconscious aspects of masculinity across generations. This will help in understanding the importance of psychosocial issues in regeneration to the extent that it will allow us to understand what kinds of support needs to be offered to get these young men into available work.