Youth, Risk, Routine

A New Perspective on Risk-Taking in Young Lives

Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson, Signe Ravn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138217386
• eBook ISBN: 9781315440743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Young people's lives continue to be the topic of public scrutiny and recurring 'moral panics'. Smoking cannabis, speeding, and engaging in street-level fights are depicted as activities based on 'poor choices' or simple hedonism, putting young people's futures at risk. Based on comprehensive, qualitative research with young people in Denmark, this book illustrates how such individualised accounts miss out on the inherently social character of risk-taking activities.

Youth, Risk, Routine introduces a new approach to risk-taking activities as being an integral and routinised part of young people's everyday life. By applying social theories of practice, this insightful volume presents a framework for understanding the routinised dimensions of young people's engagement in risk-taking and how this is embedded in, intertwined with, and held in place by other everyday practices. Indeed, through extensive empirical analyses of the rich material at hand, the authors explore how routinisation, coordination, embodiment, and social context are central aspects for understanding how, why, and when young people engage in risk-taking practices.

Youth, Risk, Routine will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, criminology, and social work as well as wider social science audiences, particularly those interested in exploring the empirical potential of social theories of practice.

1Introduction: why study youth and risk?

Introduction

Despite competing understandings of what are or may be the risks young people face today, the identification of such risks as distinct social issues remains high on the public agenda. In the media, discussions abound about young people’s lives and the many real or imagined risks they may encounter or engage in, such as dropping out of school, engaging in binge-drinking or drug use, unhealthy dieting, ‘sexting’, and other digitally mediated practices. As such, young people’s lives and youth cultures continue to be subject to public scrutiny and ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 2002) that position them as dangerous either to themselves or their surroundings. Sociologists have argued that youth can be seen as a metaphor for the future of society (for a recent example see Coffey et al., 2017). This means that young people engaging in ‘risky’ practices put their own futures at stake, and by extension that of society, too; a perspective that might explain the intensive interest in, and attempts at regulation of, young people’s lives both in Denmark and elsewhere.

This book argues for a new perspective on young people’s risk-taking practices within the sociology of youth. Situating risk-taking in everyday life, we seek to demonstrate that many young people who engage in these practices do so in a routinised way. By shifting focus to how young people synchronise, coordinate, and organise risk-taking practices in their everyday lives we wish to foreground risk-taking as made and re-made through concrete practices, and thereby redefine risk as something that does not exist independently of these social practices. Routines may seem insignificant and mundane but routines are, in their repetition, integral to the practices that make up everyday life. We argue that routines are key to understanding youth risk-taking as they not only capture practical, embodied competencies, but also tacit knowledge about how to navigate everyday life; normative signposts for what to do and not do. Consequently, routines have a logic, and this is what is in focus here.

This book has a dual purpose. First, it provides a sociologically informed contemporary analysis of young people’s engagement with some of the practices that are often termed risky practices – such as drug use, speeding, and getting into fights – illustrating the routinised and socially embedded character of such practices. Second, it poses an intervention in the field by drawing theoretical inspiration from underexplored practice theories to explore empirical data and thereby suggests new ways of analysing how such risk-taking practices are part of young lives. Following from this, another purpose is to reinvigorate the conceptual efforts to understand young people’s engagement in these practices.

Practice theory can be seen as an umbrella term for a cluster of theories that, despite differences, share a focus on practice by focusing on social life as processes and on the routinisation that makes up the everyday (Nicolini, 2013; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996, 2001; Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012). While practice theories are not new, they are still to make their way in a sustained fashion into the sociology of youth as well as related fields such as criminology, social science substance use research, and social work. Drawing on the practice theoretical analytical framework enables us to show how youth risk-taking is a routinised practice embedded in and coordinated with a number of other practices in young people’s everyday life and, therefore, must also be managed within the context of everyday life. Furthermore, this approach enables us to view risk-taking as a set of practices that exist beyond the single participant, meaning that we can step away from individualistic explanations. By turning to practice theory, we insist on the value of a sociological approach to risk-taking, which situates this in the broader context of young people’s everyday lives. Paying close attention to young people’s practices is to challenge the notion that youth risk-taking can be explained and understood in a distant or objective way. Rather than judging young people’s risk-taking as irrational, we must focus on understanding the ‘logic’ of their risk-taking practices, as these are socially embedded, and centrally we must unpack the ways in which these practices interact with other key practices in young people’s everyday lives.

Sociologists and anthropologists alike have pointed out that risk is a cultural construct as well as a normative concept (see the seminal work of Douglas, 1986, 1992). When we stick to the term risk here, we do so for strategic reasons (White, Wyn, & Robards, 2017) – not because we want to represent young people’s engagement in these practices as inherently problematic, but because we believe that conceptualising risk-taking from a practice theoretical perspective enables us to construct risk-taking as essentially a social phenomenon existing beyond the individual. This means that our focus is not on young people’s individual behaviour or on risk objects, such as drugs, but on the practice – for example, of drug use – as an embodied and situated practice that can be constructed by some people (we as researchers, some users, social workers, politicians, and others) as a practice that may involve risk.

In this book we draw on empirical data from qualitative interviews and focus groups with young Danes about their involvement in risk-taking practices. Our turn to practice theory as the analytical framework is a consequence of our initial reflections on the data, notably the insight that the participants told us little about deliberately seeking out excitement, thrills, or situations where they were ‘on the edge’ between control and loss of control, as the literature on voluntary risk-taking suggests they do (Lupton & Tulloch, 2002; Lyng, 1990; Zinn, 2017). Rather, their engagement in various risk-taking practices was an integrated part of their everyday lives and in that sense often routinised activities. To uncover these more mundane aspects we use four main dimensions of practice theory to guide our focus in the analytical chapters; that is, the routinised engagement with practices that are culturally meaningful, the interaction and coordination between risk-taking practices and other practices in young people’s lives, the embodied character of practices, and the embeddedness of practices in larger social structures. With this approach, we can, we believe, formulate a strong response to media, policy, and developmental approaches that too often focus on the individual young person’s risk-taking and target single behaviours as the point of concern.

Youth and ‘problem behaviours’

A large body of research across various disciplines seeks to document the causes and nature of young people’s ‘problematic’ actions. Behavioural economics approach this as a matter of (ir)rational decision-making and incentives (such as Booth & Nolen, 2012; Gruber, 2001). Developmental psychology focuses on low levels of self-control and lack of resilience (such as Reyna & Farley, 2006; Yates & Grey, 2012). And in the neurosciences, gaining much momentum today, research focuses on brain development, impulse control, and ‘dispositions’ towards risky behaviour (such as Casey, Jones, & Hare, 2008; Galvan, Hare, Voss, Glover, & Casey, 2007; Steinberg, 2008). With few exceptions (such as Steinberg, 2007) this research can be seen as looking for single variables and causes to explain the dimensions and consequences of young people’s risk-taking practices by focusing on the individual and ‘pre-social’ young person (France, 2000).

One result of such approaches is the concept of ‘at risk youth’. This concept has gained huge traction amongst policy-makers and (some) practitioners across a range of geographical contexts, especially in health-focused research, educational research, and crime prevention research. This approach comes to underpin strategies for intervention by focusing efforts and resources on those most ‘at risk’. Other policy responses include campaigns and a focus on information, seemingly based on the assumption that ‘problem behaviours’ are simply poor choices based on a lack of information and/or misinformation. Examples of such campaigns in Denmark are the National Board of Health’s ‘Max 5’ campaign against binge-drinking (2007), ‘Only with a condom’ campaign for ‘safe sex’ (2017) and ‘Under the influence of music’ campaign against drug use at music festivals (2017). What these efforts have in common is a lack of acknowledgment of the social and (youth) cultural dynamics that shape and inform young people’s engagement with any of these practices, nor the complex interaction with other practices. Therefore, such prevention efforts are at best inefficient, because they do not resonate with young people’s own ‘lay’ experiences (Demant & Ravn, 2010; France, 2000), and at worst counter-productive and problematic, such as when Australian drug education promotes a view of young women’s substance use as more problematic than that of young men (Farrugia, 2017).

While sociological scrutiny of the emergence and uses of the ‘at risk youth’ approach to policy have been significant (see France, 2008; Kelly, 2001a, 2001b; te Riele, 2006, and a more in-depth discussion of this in Chapter 3), the popularity of (conceptual) risk research, both in sociology as a discipline and in youth sociology as a subfield, has seemingly declined over the last decade and left the stage to new theoretical developments and other analytical preoccupations. The early 2000s saw a number of conceptual developments in the sociology of youth (such as Crawshaw & Bunton, 2009; France, 2000; Green, Mitchell, & Bunton, 2000; Lawy, 2002; Lyng, 2005; Miller, 2005; Mitchell, Crawshaw, Bunton, & Green, 2001), but since then sociological debates on risk have moved to the margins of youth sociology. A wealth of empirical studies have continued to produce rich insights into young people’s engagement in specific practices such as alcohol consumption (e.g., Demant & Järvinen, 2006; Griffin, Szmigin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, & Mistral, 2013; MacLean, Pennay, & Room, 2018; Zajdow & MacLean, 2014; Østergaard, 2009), drug use (Dahl & Sandberg, 2015; Hunt, Evans, & Kares, 2007; Measham, Parker, & Aldridge, 2001; Ravn, 2012), speeding and car culture (Balkmar & Joelsson, 2014; Best, 2006; Fynbo, 2014; Lumsden, 2008), and street-level violence (Bengtsson, 2012; Ravn, 2018), but they rarely situate this in a broader discussion of risk-taking in young people’s lives. This means that the academic discussion now seems to be primarily dominated by other disciplines such as psychology and behavioural economics, as discussed above. When risk is seen as a matter of rational calculations and trade-offs between short-term benefits and long-term costs, biological predispositions or individual psychological inclinations, the consequence is that the contexts surrounding young people’s risk-taking as well as their own experiences are ignored and dismissed. This is problematic because we as sociologists leave the processes of defining, understanding, and not least acting on young people’s ‘risky behaviours’ to these other disciplines, at the cost of not being able to take the complexity of everyday lives into account. With this book we want to ‘take back’ ‘risk-taking’ as an object of study and approach worth studying from a sociological perspective that situates risk-taking as practices in the broader context of young people’s everyday lives.

Youth and risk-taking

The research underlying this book explores young people’s engagements with a range of practices commonly seen as constituting risk-taking practices, such as alcohol and drug use, speeding, violence, steroid use, and petty crime. While not directly labelling this as ‘risk-taking’ in our contact with participants, we did pose questions about perceptions of risk and risk management strategies. It quickly became apparent that while the participants were keen to recount their experiences with, for example, criminal activity or cannabis use, they did not speak about this in terms of ‘risk-taking’. For many of them, notions of risk – at least in the simple sense of potential negative consequences of their engagement in the practices in focus – were more complex than this and not always seen as particularly relevant to their own everyday lives. Risk, or the idea of taking a chance and risking something, was for the young people in our studies rarely about the potential physical risks involved in practices, such as speeding in a car or taking drugs. For some, the illegality of a given practice could be of some concern, but for many the risks they envisioned had more to do with the social and structural context of such practices. The discussion of cannabis use in a focus group illustrates this:

ADAM:You have to be careful, it [cannabis] can easily become a taboo if you do it [smoke cannabis] too much. I mean, someone who is just smoking all the time and gets totally … weed addicted or whatever, and just needs weed all the time, that’s a bit of a taboo I think.

HJALTE:Yes, then it’s just too much, that type of –

ADAM:Exactly, too much, way too much! But lots of people, if you just do it, like, a Friday evening or Saturday evening or something like that, like, just hanging out and having one night dedicated to smoking, then –

HJALTE:Yes.

ADAM:– then it’s all good, that’s chill.

(S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: why study youth and risk?
• 2 Setting the scene: growing up in Denmark
• 3 Looking back: ‘risk’ in the sociology of youth
• 4 Looking ahead: towards a new framework for analysing youth risk-taking as practice
• 5 Being young: risk-taking practices and youth culture
• 6 Coordinating practices: risk-taking and everyday life
• 7 Embodying risk-taking: risk, embodiment, and gender
• 8 Contextualising risk: risk-taking, youth transitions, and processes of social marginalisation
• 9 Conclusion: routines of risk in young lives
• Appendix: the two empirical studies
• Index