Adolescent experiences and adult work outcomes: Connections and causes

This volume of Research in the Sociology of Work starts with the deceptively simple question, “Do events and experiences during adolescence influence the work outcomes of individuals when they reach adulthood?” While at first glance simple, the question has a wide range of theoretical and practical implications, which are covered in a compelling set of contributions. One goal of pulling together this volume was to encourage new and exploratory research related to this fundamental question and highlight the opportunities for further research on the topic by integrating sociological and management theories.

Understanding adolescent effects on adult work outcomes is appealing for two reasons. First, the potential for strong and long-lasting effects on each individual inherently makes it an important question. Much more research will be needed to assess how strong and long-lasting the effects actually are, but there are good reasons to expect highly consequential effects. Early matching of individuals to firms and jobs has strong effects on work outcomes, in part because the conventional way of defining careers means that the individual worker and potential employers will think of future job moves as a career progression that follows certain rules (Barley, 1989; Moen & Roehling, 2005). We need to test how much this matching is influenced by events and experiences in adolescence. Since experiences and events in adolescence set in motion identity formation, social labeling, and a build-up of experiences that direct individuals into paths that they prefer to maintain, or are prevented from exiting, they can set off a lifelong path-dependent process (Arthur, 1994; Sydow, Schreyogg, & Koch, 2009), which can be defined as a stochastic process where the distribution of outcomes evolves as a function of its own past history (David, 2001). Because the effects of events and experiences during adolescence on adult work experiences operate subtly, they are unlikely to be well understood by the individuals themselves. This is in contrast to the treatments that see work and career decisions as planned actions with significant individual foresight and agency (e.g., Becker, 1975), and it is a counterpoint to an implicit implication that adult work outcomes mainly reflect systematic ability or opportunity differences. Consistent with the view that early experiences influence individual goals and assessments disproportionately, there is evidence that career aspirations are highly unstable in adolescence (Jacobs, Karen, & McClelland, 1991). Early work experiences may result in attraction to or repulsion from specific kinds of work even though an adolescent worker will have different work roles and experience different treatment than an adult one. Events and experiences previously thought to be unrelated to later work outcomes also matter if they push toward – or away from – specific occupational choices. This means that early experiences can result in career path dependence. Path dependence can help us understand how a sequence of early events and experiences, sometimes not obviously related to subsequent outcomes, start a chain of social process events that leads to specific outcomes in a self-reinforcing manner. This suggests an opportunity for research to explain how some of the decisions made by adolescents and their parents have long-term career consequences that are not currently understood. Such insights are especially useful for members of social groups that are at risk of experiencing careers with low rewards and high uncertainty. A better understanding of such early influences could be useful in determining societal remedies to mitigate discriminatory outcomes.