A place for mobility in metaphors of youth transitions

ABSTRACT

Metaphors are central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn [2014. “Reflections on the Use of Spatial and Relational Metaphors in Youth Studies.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (7): 901–915.] have noted that such metaphors as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movement. However, it is still under-debated how we can systemically incorporate mobility into the study of young people to capture the precarity characterising their lives (a), but also heuristically link to metaphors used to describe the changing shape of careers of young people (b). Indeed, scholarship on ‘boundaryless careers’ and ‘peripatetic careers’ appear to have developed separately from the youth-related literature, albeit dealing in part with similar issues. Departing from Furlong’s work on metaphors in youth studies, this article interrogates potential for intertwining research lines within the growing debate on mobility in youth transitions. The article develops at a conceptual level; however it takes on Furlong’s legacy in the sense of contributing to a youth research agenda which is attentive to both the creation of new imaginative categories for the study of current conditions of youth, and the challenges that emerge in discursively positioning youth in society.     

‘Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: young people,families and poverty across generations*

ABSTRACT

One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor ‘cultures of worklessness’ explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural ‘underclass’, in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations.     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

Young precariat and a new work order? A case for historical sociology

This article assesses Guy Standing's (2011) account of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new class' to the many exercises undertaken in youth studies since the 1980s to make sense of the changing patterns of youth employment. While Standing's focus on the experience of fragmented and casualized work in many economies which now implicates young people has value, there are significant problems with his account that highlights the some difficulties in thinking in somewhat abstracted ways about ‘structural’ change processes that do not sufficiently consider the question of time. The case of Australia's of labour market regulation since the 1890s is used to test the validity of Standing's focus on the novelty of neoliberalism after the early 1980 to explain the emergence of precarious employment. Standing's claim that insecurity is central to the ‘new precariat’ because they lack the different kinds of security enjoyed by the ‘working-class’ after 1945, highlights the need for an interpretative framework attentive to the longer term role of state policy and the interplay of historical and local processes. The case is then made for developing a historical sociology that engages with what is now happening in respect to young people and their employment security.     

Translating Bourdieu into youth studies

ABSTRACT

Against a backdrop of lively discussion about the best ways to do youth studies, or sociology of youth, this article asks: Can Pierre Bourdieu’s work be translated into youth studies in ways that benefit the field? We begin by considering Bourdieu’s thoughts on the category of ‘youth’ using a new translation of this text, and then turn to an important discussion by Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn about certain long standing tensions in youth studies. These tensions are between writers engaging in the ‘structure versus agency’ debate that is mapped onto the ‘culture versus transitions’ binary. We consider the case for adopting a ‘middle-ground’ represented by Bourdieu’s writings. We argue that many in youth studies work from an unacknowledged substantialist tradition, which is contra to Bourdieu's relational perspective. The result includes misunderstandings of Bourdieu's thinking and expectations of his work, for example, that it can pass certain empirical tests. We argue that if Bourdieu's relational perspective is to be translated into youth studies, we will need a more determined effort to understand that perspective first.     

Navigating employability from the bottom up

ABSTRACT

Research focusing on young people’s career trajectories has emphasised ‘graduate employability’ with much less attention being afforded to the employability strategies used by disadvantaged youth, including the social, political and labour market contexts in which these emerge. This study explores how young people enrolled in entry-level, vocational training courses in Australia attempt to enhance their employability. Interviews explored perceptions of individual employability, the strategies utilised to improve employability, and the economic, personal and employment consequences of these strategies. Three main employability strategies were identified: gaining qualifications to meet employment expectations; securing work experience in a competitive labour market; and addressing economic and social challenges to secure and sustain employment. The study reveals how the dominant narratives of employability in education and employment policy are misaligned with the economic, social and labour market challenges faced by disadvantaged job-seekers with respect to notions of career and ‘fit’ between the individual and the labour market. Policy responses need to take account of the diverse ‘bottom up’ experiences and circumstances of different cohorts of young people.     

Fractured lives: understanding urban youth vulnerability in Perú

ABSTRACT

The paper reports on a mixed methods study that sought to analyse determinants of youth labour market and educational disengagement in Peru. It begins by questioning the widespread focus on NEET – youth not in employment, education or training – as a measure of youth vulnerability in countries with extensive informal labour markets where labour precarity can be as problematic as unemployment for young people’s futures. A broader category of ‘urban vulnerable’ youth, including both NEET and precarious workers, is proposed and used as the basis for analysing the factors that influence young people’s trajectories. Key factors and shocks in youth trajectories are identified through qualitative life histories, and are tested using cross-section and panel survey data. Findings from the study have implications for the analysis of youth labour market vulnerability in the Global South, as well as for the policies that seek to address this problem.     

‘Fuck It,Shit Happens (FISH)’: a social generations approach to understanding young people’s imaginings of life after school in 2016–2017

ABSTRACT

This article uses a social generations approach to explore the lives of young people transitioning to life after schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research in England during the geopolitical uncertainty of 2016–2017, we track the trajectories and narratives of six individuals. The research begins with final year pupils in schools talking about their futures, during and after their A-Level exams. We then follow these individuals on routes to Higher Education and employment, exploring how they are socialised into imaginings of the future and/or struggle to inhabit these futures. A deeply ingrained, modernist, neoliberal reckoning of future time is normalised through experiences of schooling. However, this logic is troubled profoundly in the transition to life after school. Young people’s experiences in an unpredictable present run in stark contrast to the ordered trajectory of future action they have been socialised to expect. Amidst this uncertainty, ambivalence towards shaping the future (‘Fuck It, Shit Happens’) can in some ways feel like the most agentic stance to take. Furlong et al.’s (2011) social generations approach to understanding youth transitions reveals how we must critique the very concept of ‘the future’ if we are to understand the reality of youth transitions in the present.     

Inequality,continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time.     

Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982 ), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.     

Young people and the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of ‘enterprise’: stories from a ‘Rust Belt’ city

ABSTRACT

In the ‘Rust Belt’ city of Geelong in Victoria, Australia, discourses of young people’s enterprise and innovation provide a counter-narrative to the prevailing material and symbolic consequences of industrial decline, job losses, and the growing insecurity of employment and income. GT Magazine is a weekly, large circulation magazine in Geelong with a significant focus on the activities and aspirations of enterprising young people. In this paper, we examine, by utilising techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, the particular ways in which young people’s innovation and enterprise are framed and enacted in GT Magazine. Our analysis reveals that ‘youth’ and ‘enterprise’ are, in GT Magazine, given an embodied form that is powerfully marked by aestheticised, normalised enactments of gender, class and race. In doing this work, we make productive contributions to three key themes in contemporary youth studies: new work orders and the youthful self as enterprise; the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of affective labour in these new work orders; and the emerging spatial turn to examine young people's embodied, place-based experiences of employment and enterprise. We seek to make problematic the sense that solutions to multiple disruptions and crises in capitalism and the environment are to be found in young people’s enterprise. Particularly when that enterprise is given form in ways that are aestheticised, gendered, classed, individualised and responsibilised.     

Is computer gaming a craft? Prehension,* practice,and puzzle-solving in gaming labour

ABSTRACT

This article applies sociological theories of ‘craft’ to computer gaming practices to conceptualise the relationship between play, games, and labour. Using the example of the game Dota 2, as both a competitive esport title and a complex game based around a shared practice, this article examines the conditions under which the play of a computer game can be considered a ‘craft’. In particular, through the concept of ‘prehension’, we dissect the gameplay activity of Dota 2, identifying similarities with how the hand practices craft labour. We identify these practices as ‘contact’, ‘apprehension’, ‘language acquisition’ and ‘reflection’. We argue that players develop these practices of the hand to make sense of the game’s rules and controls. From this perspective, it is the hand that initiates experiences of craft within computer gameplay, and we offer examples of player creativity and experimentation to evidence its labour. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for future research to examine the quality of gaming labour in the context of esports.     

Homeless Careers: A Framework for Intervention

Abstract

The present paper identifies three ‘homeless careers’ abstracted from the diversity and complexity of individual cases and pathways. These are the ‘youth career’, the ‘housing crisis career’ and the ‘family breakdown career’. The paper discusses the usefulness of the career typology for framing interventions. A core argument is that early intervention involves different forms of practice in each pathway. For young people, early intervention has to occur when they are at the ‘in-and-out’ stage, before they have made a permanent break from family. For adults experiencing housing crisis, early intervention is about providing assistance to people before they lose their accommodation. The family breakdown career commonly involves domestic violence, so although early intervention may involve family reconciliation, in many cases it involves supporting victims of domestic violence to move to alternative, secure accommodation.     

Entering the Labour Market in Britain: the survival of traditional opportunity structures*

This article analyses the career development from age 16 to 20 of representative samples from Kirkcaldy, Liverpool, Sheffield and Swindon who were surveyed by mailed questionnaire in three successive years - 1987, 1988 and 1989. Although most respondents attributed significant power of career determination to themselves, the evidence shows that the young people's career choices had typically been inconsequential for their later achievements. These had depended on their places of residence, secondary school qualifications, and social class backgrounds. The samples’ self-concepts and social beliefs were not systematically affected by, but had played a part in determining, their career paths. However, social class origins, on account of their cumulative effects at successive career stages, were the best predictors of the samples’ longer-term career trajectories. The evidence from this research shows that the benefits of the new opportunities in post-compulsory education and youth training that were introduced in Britain in the 1980s were filtered by the traditional predictors of career success. Furthermore, the main routes into the workforce of the 1970s and before - an academic track for high achievers in education, and employment-led inductions from age 16 or 17 for the rest - remained the main routes at the end of the 1980s.     

All roads leading to Rome? The medium term outcomes of Australian youth’s transition pathways from education

Young people’s transition from education into the labour market are diverse: sometimes direct from school to work or inactivity, sometimes characterised by stop-starts and combinations of different activities. This paper explores the association between transition pathways of Australian youth and their outcomes, in terms of earnings, perceptions of employment opportunities and debt. It builds on analysis by Fry and Boulton [2013. Prevalence of Transition Pathways in Australia. Canberra: Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper] who identified five pathways most typically taken by 15–24 year old Australians over a 10 year period, including quasi linear transitions from education to work with and without study, combinations of work and study, multiple churning between labour market statuses, and transitions into prolonged periods of inactivity. The present study adds four more years of panel data that have since become available, and compares the labour market outcomes of the different pathways at age 29–38. Earnings and employment perception converged over time, but debt did not. Socio-demographics were most strongly associated with outcomes, but earnings were also greater for churners and for young people in extended education increasingly combined with work. Transitions that combined learning and work seemingly strategically or ‘flexibly’ appeared most rewarding in the medium term, although neither compensated for socio-economic difference.     

Multiple Perspectives of Teams’ Experiences of a New Zealand Wraparound Process

Since it was first introduced in the 1980s, Wraparound has been defined as ‘a philosophy,’ ‘an approach,’ and ‘a service’ which is designed to work with youth and families with high and complex needs. Wraparound is most commonly understood as an intensive, individualised care planning process. It aims to achieve positive outcomes through a structured, creative, and individualised team planning process, which results in effective and more relevant plans for the youth and family. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of Wraparound facilitators, caregivers, youths, and team members to gain a multi‐perspective insight into the process. Sixteen families and Wraparound teams participated in the study which resulted in 56 semi‐structured interviews being conducted involving 16 Wraparound facilitators (some facilitators were interviewed more than once because they served multiple families who participated in the study), 16 caregivers, eight youth, and 16 team members (one person from the team, i.e., teacher, social worker, or mentor). Thematic analysis gave seven themes organised into three broad domains: (1) key elements of the Wraparound process including the Wraparound facilitator, Wraparound's philosophies and principles, and the supportive nature of the process; (2) the outcomes achieved throughout the process including family empowerment and hope, improved family dynamics and relationships as well as individual parent and youth change; and (3) the challenges and feedback respondents identified through the process, which included personal and systemic challenges, improved transition, and continuity of care, role clarity, and accessibility of the service. Overall, the findings from this study support Wraparound as an effective process for youth and their families, identify the importance of key aspects of the process, and suggest some improvements to increase the efficacy of and accessibility to the process.     

From ‘Employab-ility’ to ‘Entrepreneurial-ity’ in Spain: youth in the spotlight in times of crisis

This paper discusses the processes of individualisation of work and redefinition of the referential category of worker fostered by youth employability schemes in Spain. Employability measures proposed by the recent Spanish Youth Guarantee Implementation Plan and its antithetical youth representations (as a group ‘without qualities’ – the ‘NEETS’– while at the same time as a referential value and cultural model – ‘the young entrepreneur’-) will be analysed. These paradoxes strengthened by employability policies, and further aggravated in the wake of the current economic crisis, do not give rise to political contradictions due to the depolitisation promoted by employability policies: social problems are converted into individual deficits. These processes of psychologisation of work are further discussed on the basis of a recent study on employment counselling and career guidance to help to enhance the employability of jobless people in three Spanish cities, Seville, Madrid and Valencia. These tools are aimed at fostering employability of unemployed people with a high risk of social exclusion and are emblematic concerning the principle of employability (new governance tools, different intervention logics/principles). Some paradoxes concerning employability policies (entrepreneuriality) in the current labour market crisis will be outlined.     

Black mafia, loggies and going for the stars: the military elite revisited

The connection between a Public School education and the British Army officer corps has often been presented as an example of a self‐perpetuating elite, with little by way of theoretical explanation. This paper aims to explicate these matters by reference to Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field and to extend the empirical work of earlier studies by looking at the nature of army organization structure, the place of particular regiments within it, and the relative success of officers from different regiments in gaining promotion to general. Inter‐regimental competition plays a key role in allowing the reproduction of privilege within the military, and testifies therefore to the importance of organizational structures. The shorthand conclusions of earlier studies that ‘the elite is maintained’ can be replaced by analysis and explanation, which suggest that the alignment of public school habitus and military field will ensure that (other things being equal) this state of affairs will be slow to change. The property assets of the upper middle class allow their offspring to acquire at public school the cultural assets that will enable them to succeed in a military career. This in turn give access to organizational assets and economic rewards that will enable them to provide the next generation with their cultural assets.     

Parents’ income and children’s school drop-out at 16 in England and Wales: evidence from the 1970 British Cohort Study

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ income on children’s drop-out from school at age 16 using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). Unlike previous papers using the same data set, we use a continuous measure of income derived from the grouped income variable available in the BCS70, we employ instrumental variable techniques to address the issue of endogeneity of family income and take account of the potential endogeneity of income response with respect to a child’s education by jointly modelling the school drop-out decision and response to the family income question. Our estimates show the exogeneity of response to the income question with a child’s education and are in line with the previous literature finding a statistically significant small negative effect of family income on school drop-out at 16. On the contrary, other non-pecuniary parental effects, such as parental education and social class, turn out to be both significant and of a sizeable magnitude. Early versions of this paper benefited from presentations at the University of Warwick, the ZEW Summer Workshop 2002 on Human Capital, the European Society for Population Economics 2002 Conference and the European Economic Association 2002 Conference and comments by Martin Andrews, Lorenzo Cappellari, Charlotte Lauer, Derek Leslie, Jeremy Smith, Mark Stewart, and two anonymous referees. The BCS70 data were kindly provided by, and used with permission of, the UK Data Archive (UKDA, University of Essex). Funding from the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

‘Scarred’ young entrepreneurs. Exploring young adults’ transition from former unemployment to self-employment

The recent increase in youth unemployment has major implications for the current and future development of European labour markets. Previous studies reveal the long lasting ‘scarring effects’ of early unemployment experience on later career prospects, including a higher probability of future unemployment or social exclusion. Self-employment is often advocated as a potential remedy for unemployment in general and youth unemployment in particular. In this study, we investigate the individual-level factors that lead young people with the ‘scar’ of previous unemployment to engage in self-employment. Based on a recent survey among young adults in eleven European countries, we show that previous unemployment has a significant moderating effect on other individual-level characteristics usually associated with a higher likelihood of being self-employed. While the overall propensity of self-employment is not affected by unemployment experience, the reasons for becoming one’s own boss differ considerably between those young adults who have and those who have not experienced unemployment in the past.