Young women's provisioning: A study of the social organization of youth employment

This study uses institutional ethnography (IE) to address the question of how young women, considered to be "at risk" youth, make decisions about their working lives. Based on interviews with young women and program workers in housing, employment, young mothers' and girls' programs, field observations, and document analysis at Gen-Y (pseudonym for a women's community-based social services agency), young women's provisioning experiences are used to critique current program and policy models that feature notions of choice and risk. Provisioning is a concept that captures a wide range of work and work-related activities that young women perform for themselves and people they feel responsible for. IE is applied to understand how institutional processes and practices give rise to the conditions under which young women participants at Gen-Y make career and life decisions.;The findings are twofold. First, Gen-Y young women provision by making the kinds of career, educational and caregiving choices expected of them, but having few resources at hand to deal with the exigencies of everyday life, they often settled for short-term over long-term gains. The young women used these provisioning strategies even though they may be putting their future economic security at risk. Once deemed "at risk," these young women participate in community programs. This precipitates the second finding: that the youth employment program complex is organized to influence young women's career options through locally based funding arrangements and program evaluation practices. These institutional processes are embedded in social relations of gender and race that coordinate young women's decision-making with program workers' and administrators' efforts to meet their professional obligations and organizational mandates. While Gen-Y programs were developed to help young women, it is argued that the funding pressures shape the organizational context in such a way that program workers' and administrators' applications of anti-discrimination and diversity, access and equity initiatives inadvertently reproduce the social inequalities they are meant to eliminate. The thesis ends with theoretical and practice implications for social work and social policy.