David Farrugia

Biographic Data

ID229573
NAMEDavid Farrugia
GIVEN NAMESDavid
FAMILY NAMEFarrugia
SIGNATUREFARRUGIA D
AFFILIATIONSDeakin University
ORCID0000-0003-0288-2775
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS61
TOTAL CITATIONS652
AUTHOR COUNT59
EDITOR COUNT2
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2009
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX16

  • Everyday multiculturalism at work: Young migrants and service labour

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaARTICLECitizenship Studies2026

    This paper draws on theories of lived citizenship and everyday multiculturalism to explore everyday racialised and interethnic relations of belonging, identification and exclusion amongst migrant young people in service workplaces. Drawing on interviews with ethnic minority migrant workers conducted in Australia, the paper explores service workplaces as sites of routine inter-ethnic encounter and identification, enacted through precarious employm…

  • Youth side-hustles: Enterprise culture and the post-Fordist work ethic

    Open AccessDavid Farrugia, Stephanie Patouras et al.ARTICLEThe Sociological Review2026

    This article explores youth ‘side-hustles’ – or small-scale business activities pursued alongside paid employment – as a way of examining how enterprise culture and the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ is reshaping relationships between identity, productivity and working time amongst young workers. The article goes beyond existing concerns with the ‘entrepreneurial self’ as a generic form of neoliberal youth subjectivity to focus on the everyday lives a…

  • Young people’s Buy Now, Pay Later use: Financial stress, usage patterns and intersections with other forms of credit

    Joshua Healy, Julia Cook et al.ARTICLEJournal of Youth Studies2025References: 7

  • Sexual Harassment and Service Labor: Strategies and Relational Practices

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaARTICLEGender Work and Organization2025Cited by: 1References: 10

    Sexual harassment and gender‐based violence are longstanding concerns in studies of service work, but are typically analyzed in terms of interactions between workers and consumers within gendered definitions of “good service,” neglecting the role of relationships amongst workers as a critical context that facilitates or constrains how workers can respond. However, literature on young women and harassment in leisure settings shows that women's saf…

  • Lay Moralities of Young Workers and the Moral Economy of Service Labour

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaARTICLEWork Employment and Society2025References: 32

    This article develops concepts of moral economy to show how workers’ notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment. The article draws on a project which interviewed 75 young workers employed in the retail, hospitality and call-centre industry, exploring the normative ideas and social relationships that shape how young workers’ negotiate their con…

  • Youth and hospitality work: Skills, subjectivity and affective labour

    Open AccessDavid Farrugia, Julia Coffey et al.ARTICLEJournal of Sociology2025Cited by: 1References: 32

    Hospitality is popularly regarded as unskilled work and the industry relies on a young labour force. This paper examines the role of youth in the way that the 'unskilled' status of hospitality labour is defined and contested by workers. Drawing on qualitative data collected with hospitality workers, the paper creates new connections between theories of affective labour, the politics of skills, and conceptions of youth in relation to work. The pap…

  • Buy Now, Pay Later technologies and the gamification of debt in the financial lives of young people

    Open AccessSteven Threadgold, Barrie Shannon et al.ARTICLEJournal of Cultural Economy2025Cited by: 5References: 36

    In many countries Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) services have rapidly become a pervasive option to pay for consumer products both online and instore. Under-regulated and specifically marketed at young people, BNPL services use gamified and social media-like features to create frictionless user interfaces that supposedly resonate with the way young people engage online and in digital spaces, producing specific financialised subjectivities. In this arti…

  • Indebtpending: An ugly feeling of youthful financialised futurity

    Open AccessSteven Threadgold, Julia Coffey et al.ARTICLEJournal of Youth Studies2024Cited by: 1References: 12

    Indebtpending: an ugly feeling of youthful financialised futurity

  • Post-industrial worker-citizenship

    David FarrugiaARTICLEJournal of Youth Studies2024References: 11

    Post-industrial worker-citizenship

  • Precarious Youthspaces of Work and Diverse Economies in the EU South: A Conceptualization Attempt

    Open AccessAthina Avagianou, Stelios Giali et al.ARTICLEYoung2024Cited by: 2References: 17

    Youth disengagement is widespread in the less developed regions of advanced capitalism, and precarity is constantly (re)produced in the youth labour markets there. In this context, ‘diverse economies’ such as the social economy (SE) and the digital platform-induced sharing economy (DPSE) have emerged as policy solutions to pressing social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly in the south of the EU. However, most relevant studies e…

  • Winging it”: How youth workers navigate debt with young people

    Open AccessKate Davies, Julia Cook et al.ARTICLEChildren and Youth Services Review2024References: 21

    Debt is a growing, but poorly understood issue for young people in Australia and internationally. To understand how young people seek help with debt, we conducted interviews and focus-groups with 16 youth workers and two financial counselors. We found that youth workers are often the first point of connection for young people experiencing debt. Young people were unlikely to seek help specifically for financial issues but disclosed these issues to…

  • Hospitality workers and gentrification processes: Elective belonging and reflexive complicity

    Open AccessSteven Threadgold, Lena Molnar et al.ARTICLEBritish Journal of Sociology2024Cited by: 2References: 43

    This paper contributes new understandings of the dynamics and processes of gentrification that contribute to wider transformations of class relations. We argue that the hospitality sector, specifically the tastes, dispositions and practices of young hospitality workers, are central in how gentrification processes currently function. We extend concepts of elective and selective belonging, and reflexive complicity, to analyse how young hospitality …

  • Ambient citizenship and noise in the service economy: Young People and the Everyday Politics of Work

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaARTICLECitizenship Studies2024Cited by: 2References: 32

    This paper explores the informal citizenship practices of young service workers, and develops concepts of lived citizenship, ambient citizenship and political ‘noise’ into an analysis of the everyday politics of service labour. Drawing on interviews with young people working in retail, hospitality and call centres the paper examines the embodied interactions and relations of mutual reciprocity through which they experience and contest the power r…

  • Youth and the consumption of credit

    Open AccessDavid Farrugia, Julia Cook et al.ARTICLECurrent Sociology2024Cited by: 5References: 29

    This article explores young people's consumption of credit and the role of credit and debt in the distinction between youth and adulthood. The article engages with recent shifts in the nature of credit that have turned credit into an object of consumption in itself, as well as broader arguments about the financialisation of daily life, in order to understand the temporalities and moral distinctions enacted in different forms of credit and debt am…

  • Embodying debt: Youth, consumer credit and its impacts for wellbeing

    Julia Coffey, K Senior et al.ARTICLEJournal of Youth Studies2023Cited by: 3References: 11

    Young people form the primary target demographic of new ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to …

  • Femininity work: The gendered politics of women managing violence in bar work

    Open AccessJulia Coffey, David Farrugia et al.ARTICLEGender Work and Organization2023Cited by: 4References: 17

    This paper explores how women bar workers manage violence at work. Women bar workers in our study described that the capacity to recognize, intervene, and defuse potentially violent situations was a pragmatic response to the problem of men's violence in the night‐time economy. We analyze the gendered norms and expectations at play in how violence in bar work is managed by staff and locate this as a form of “femininity work” extending from the mod…

  • Hospitality work and the sociality of affective labour

    Open AccessDavid Farrugia, Julia Coffey et al.ARTICLEThe Sociological Review2023Cited by: 5References: 37

    This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers' intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised…

  • Youth Beyond the City: Thinking from the Margins

    Open AccessAina Tarabini, Alejandro Montes et al.BOOKYouth Beyond the City2022

  • Youth Beyond the City: Thinking from the Margins

    Open AccessAina Tarabini, Alejandro Montes et al.BOOKYouth Beyond the City2022

    The purpose of this book is to situate the place beyond the city as an epistemological vantage point for researching youth. Existing frameworks about young people privilege large urban centres or ‘global cities’ and create forms of marginality that are at once spatial and epistemological. This book interrogates and moves beyond these boundaries, turning the margins into a unique position for understanding youth and examining forms of difference w…

  • Introduction to April’s Theme: Youth

    Open AccessSteven Threadgold, David Farrugia et al.ARTICLEThe Sociological Review Magazine2022

  • The impact of pandemic-related loss of work on young adults’ plans

    Julia Cook, David Farrugia et al.ARTICLEJournal of Youth Studies2022Cited by: 3References: 17

    This article presents the findings of an interview and digital methods-based study of young Australian hospitality workers who lost work in the wake of the pandemic. In so doing it focuses on the relationship between one’s present-day material conditions and their capacity to form plans for the future, and the role of planning in young people’s future thinking. The article argues that the impact of the pandemic on the participants’ plans can be b…

  • Queer subjectivities in hospitality labor

    Open AccessMegan Sharp, David Farrugia et al.ARTICLEGender Work and Organization2022Cited by: 9References: 9

    This paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notio…

  • Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaBOOKYouth, Work and the Post-Fordist…2021

    Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self represents a paradigm shift in contemporary understandings of youth and work: from the study of youth transitions to the formation of young people as workers. With this focus, the book addresses transformations in the status of young people as economic actors. Despite high levels of youth unemployment, young people are increasingly encouraged to view work as a realm of meaning and self-actualisation, and are …

  • Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self

    Open AccessDavid FarrugiaBOOKYouth, Work and the Post-Fordist…2021

  • Youth, Precarious Work and the Pandemic

    Open AccessJulia Cook, Steven Threadgold et al.ARTICLEYoung2021Cited by: 24References: 11

    While Australia has experienced low COVID-19 case numbers relative to other countries, it has witnessed severe economic consequences in the wake of the pandemic. The hospitality industry, in which young adults are overrepresented, has been among the most affected industries. In this article, we present findings from an interview and a digital methods-based study of young hospitality workers in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Newcastle who …