Salvaging adulthood at youth work: Dignity, social disrespect, and the micro-politics of recognition in a polarized world

Grounded in an ethnographic study of a US fast food chain, this paper explores how the rising employment polarization under neoliberalism may pose a threat to dignity via the predicament of adults doing youth work. We draw on Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition to develop a tripartite framework of the micro-politics of recognition, aimed as a middle-range construct for guiding empirical studies of work through the lens of dignity. We argue that a study of dignity at work, with the everyday human struggle for recognition as the focal point, may help to illuminate the realities of contemporary work and enable a humanistic critique of contemporary capitalism. We also highlight adulthood as the underarticulated yet morally laden identity signifier in organizational inquiry, which may gain added importance as more adults enter occupations where few institutional supports of adulthood exist.