This is the first of three empirical chapters exploring the ethics and practices through which young people are formed as workers. In this and the chapters that follow, I will use the concept of the post-Fordist work ethic to examine young people's narratives about the meaning of work, the way they understood their value to the labour market and to employers, and the way they cultivated working selves. My aim here is to foreground the ethical commitments and self-definitions that intertwine in the way that young people articulate the post-Fordist work ethic in relation to themselves, and to analyse how young people position themselves as ethical subjects within the dictates of the work ethic. Through a focus on the relationship between definitions of productivity and subjectivity in general, these chapters are also aimed at applying empirical scrutiny to some of the claims made in theories of post-Fordism and in the narrative about the relationship between class and the work ethic described in Chapter 2. In particular, this chapter and the next explore distinctions between the Fordist promise of social mobility and the post-Fordist offer of self-realization through work. In the process, this chapter – and the book in general – also examine the suggestion that distinctions between the productive and unproductive dimensions of the self are no longer useful for understanding the relationship between subjectivity and work because the entirety of the self has become subsumed into work. These arguments provide the guiding orientation to the analyses that follow, which focus on how young people understand the productive dimensions of their identities and what ethical relationship they adopt towards work. By focusing on young people's narratives, the remainder of this book will argue that the post-Fordist work ethic has become part of the way in which classed subjectivities are formed, and will therefore show how different relationships between productivity, value and the self contribute to classed subjectivities in post-Fordism.

As is reflected in its title, in this chapter I will describe what I am calling ‘passionate subjects’, a term that describes what I will suggest is an intermingling of classed distinction (Bourdieu, 1990) and the post-Fordist work ethic's promise of self-realization through a total investment in work.