Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in a European Context

John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm, Andy Furlong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138359314
• eBook ISBN: 9780429779510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1997, this text is built around themes agreed upon for a conference which aimed to set the agenda for youth research over the next decade. These themes are: the shaping of trajectories and biographies - individualization, agency, structure; vulnerable groups excluded and included youth, polarization, marginalization; social construction of identity - identity, culture, gender, ethnicity; political and social participation and citizenship. The book brings together the work of British and Continental researchers.

Part 1

INTRODUCTION

1 A new agenda for youth research

John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm and Andy Furlong

Changing contexts, altered perspectives

Social scientists have had an interest in young people’s experiences, in the processes of social reproduction and transformation in youth and in the development of identities among young people for much of this century. At the beginning of the century, progressive education (Reformpädagogik) was an important contributor to the development of concepts and practices of applied youth research and youth work (Stafseng, 1997), although prior to the second world war the field tended to be dominated by psychologists who focused on adolescence as a stage of psycho-social development. Sociological interest in youth as a stage in the life cycle became established much later and became particularly influential during the 1960s. Indeed, youth research in Britain has its roots in developments which took place in the 1960s and was closely linked to the emergence of youth as an important consumer group with distinctive tastes and spending patterns (Abrams, 1961).

During the 1960s, researchers tended to place a strong emphasis on the implications of young people’s actions: they were seen as developing distinctive youth cultures and questioning the values of their parents’ generation (Musgrove, 1964). While young people’s identities were seen as being shaped by class relations, much of the research taking place in this period was blind to gender and ‘race’. The early work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, for example, which became particularly influential in the 1970s, largely ignored the differences in the life experiences of young men and young women (e.g., Willis, 1977; Corrigan, 1979): ‘youth culture’ was presented as the culture of (mainly) working class young men. In the same broadly Marxist tradition of CCCS, the work of Angela McRobbie (1978) on teenage girls’ ‘bedroom culture’ was a notable exception.

The CCSS position, as set out in the papers in Hall and Jefferson’s (1976) Resistance through Rituals, viewed youth transitions in terms of processes of social and cultural reproduction. This work helped to set the agenda for youth research during the 1970s and much of the 1980s, and was influential across the whole of Western Europe. The key texts in this tradition highlighted the ways in which working class males adopted distinct subcultures as a form of class solidarity and resistance. It was through these means that patterns of inequality were reproduced and their class and gender-based identities were formed.

Many of the better known texts which were written in the 1970s were ethnographic studies relying mainly on qualitative methodology, although in this period we were also learning through the use of survey data about the distinctive, class-based, routes which young people were following from the family, through education and into the labour market (Carter, 1962; Ashton and Field, 1976; West and Newton, 1983). These studies highlighted the ways in which young people’s experiences were closely related to class positions and laid the foundations for the development of more structuralist perspectives in the 1980s.

With the virtual collapse of the youth labour market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, social scientists began to argue that young people’s influence over their transitions from school to work were extremely limited and we entered a new research phase heavily influenced by structuralism (Roberts et al., 1987). The term ‘career trajectory’ started to come into common usage, implying that young people followed fairly clear-cut routes from their class of origin to their class of destination: their scope to influence outcomes was seen as limited. In terms of methodologies, ethnographic studies in the CCCS tradition were still much in evidence (e.g. Jenkins, 1983; Griffin, 1985; Coffield et al., 1986; Brown, 1987; Wallace, 1987). The era was also characterised by the establishment of a number of continuous youth surveys, including the England and Wales Youth Cohort Surveys and the Scottish Young People’s Surveys. With routes into the labour market becoming increasingly protracted and complex, the surveys used from the mid-1980s included a longitudinal element, (i.e., the follow-up in successive surveys of the same group of young people over time). While many of the earlier surveys had relied on cross-sectional ‘snapshots’ of young people’s labour market destinations six months or a year after they had left full-time education, these new surveys tended to trace young people’s movements into and within the labour market over a period of around three years (Furlong, 1992).

In recent years there have been significant changes in the contexts of young people’s lives within advanced industrial societies. Young people are remaining in full-time education and training for much longer pericxls and it has become increasingly difficult for them to make early transitions into the labour market (Bynner, 1987; Banks et al., 1992; Roberts, 1995; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997). The variation in the pace of these changes between different countries and the ways in which they cope with the phenomenon of youth unemployment has also given added interest to comparative research (e.g., Ashton and Lowe, 1991; Bynner and Roberts, 1991; Evans and Heinz, 1994). These changes have led to a prolonged dependency on the family as well as to an extension of youth as a stage in the life cycle (Coles, 1995; Jones, 1995). Moreover, there is evidence that the common experience of delayed transitions has led to a weakening of the impact of social class on young people’s lifestyles (Roberts and Parsell, 1994; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997).

As a consequence, many of the concepts introduced by continental youth researchers in the attempt to reconceptualise youth under the new conditions are still relatively new to British youth researchers: terms like post-adolescence, life course, individualisation, polarisation and social biography (Chisholm et al., 1990; Heinz, 1991; Beck, 1992). This new vocabulary signals a shift towards placing greater emphasis on the significance of individual action in the shaping of biographies, but in contemporary British contexts, structuralist and marxist approaches still tend to dominate. Moreover, calls for a more holistic approach to youth study (e.g. Jones and Wallace, 1992), emphasising the interconnectedness of action in the different life domains (for example, the relationship between school to work and domestic transitions) have so far produced only a limited response.

European dimensions as catalysts

The contrasts between British and continental European youth research traditions and theoretical perspectives highlight the need for a more intensive and systematic mutual interrogation of perspectives. But why is this needed?

Firstly, it is self-evident that Anglo-Saxon and continental European youth research researchers have much to gain from closer communication. However, communication channels have indisputably been relatively weak. Language barriers have led to a comparative isolation of British youth researchers from the flow of debate across the continent: in contrast the majority of continental youth researchers are able to access Anglo-American literature. Institutional and funding arrangements for research and professional networking activities are also rather differently structured, which has frequently posed problems for those trying to establish closer links and develop joint projects (Tennom, 1995; Hübner-Funk and du Bois-Reymond, 1995). But regardless of these intrinsic’ considerations, a quarter of national research budgets are now transferred to the European Community research budget. This is indicative of a gradual shift towards transnationality in the structuring of research funding arrangements across Europe. If national research communities are to participate effectively in any new research agenda then their members must possess the linguistic and intercultural competencies that will enable them to do so.

Secondly, comparisons and contrasts are an important source of theoretical creativity and innovation. Some might argue that they are at the core of social science, which is essentially comparative. Depending on the kind of problem being tackled, researchers may seek to examine strong or weak contrasts, and to site these contrasts at different levels of analysis. Equally, depending on the cultural context and intellectual tradition in which researchers are working on a problem, fundamentally different kinds of analytic frameworks can be applied to what appear to be quite similar empirical phenomena and trends. Contemporary modernisation processes and their implications for the changing social construction of the youth phase can be interpreted within the conceptual framework of continuity and discontinuity, for example. The analyst’s choice of emphasis is likely to reflect a broader, historically and culturally specific heritage which lends a recognisable tone to nationally-based discourses: in Germany, for example, the emphasis is characteristically placed on rupture and risk, whereas in Britain, there is a much stronger accent on the reproduction and predictability of social life. Amplified, this can produce strong theoretical contrasts in the analysis of young people’s lives. Yet it is equally possible to argue, on the basis of a collection of key empirical indicators for education, employment and family life, that two major types of youth transitions exist in Europe - the ‘southern’ and the ‘northern’ model (Le Bras, 1996). That said, it is still worth asking why British social researchers have so often found North America, Australia and New Zealand - and now South-East Asia and Japan - more appropriate and accessible contexts for inspiration and comparison, yet have so infrequently turned to their European neighbours in similar spirit. Whatever the answer, it is difficult to think of good theoretical or methodological reasons to preserve the imbalance.

Thirdly, in the face of economic and cultural globalisation, Europe as a whole is undergoing a fundamental process of redefinition of self, to which Britain is not immune. John Gillis, the American writer of the classic monograph Youth in History (1974), in a recent reflection (1996) of the future of the discipline of European history in the United States, has noted that whilst Europe has lost its spatial and temporal centrality, it has gained the luxury of self-assessment. Europeans are more conscious of their own peculiarities, introducing unfamiliar terms such as diasporas, borderlands and peripheries into their vocabulary. This resonates with a clearly identifiable trend in European social research towards the breakdown of conventional analogies between centre and periphery and between tradition and modernity, and an increasing focus on complex dynamics in cultural and economic life. It makes little sense, in this kind of intellectual scenario, to cling to nationally-defined symbolic boundaries as if their interpretative and explanatory potential were ex officio more (or, of course, less) promising than others.

Finally, a European youth research community does already exist (see, for example, CYRCE, 1995) and has long begun to debate these and many more issues, whether through joint projects, on the conference circuits, through multiple networks - or, increasingly frequently, informally on the Web. British youth researchers have been remarkable, by and large, by their low profile in these fora. It is not simply a matter of joining the fray in order to gain, but equally to give: as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, British youth research continues to radiate a theoretical innovativeness and an empirical vibrancy. This can and should lend a significant impulse to a new agenda that is not simply British, but consciously transnational in the context of a new Europe.

Background to the new agenda

Although British youth research has a relatively long history, many of our key assumptions about youth were developed from knowledge about young people’s experiences in the three decades following the second world war, which are no longer necessarily appropriate to an understanding of todays’ youth who negotiate their lives within a set of institutional arrangements which have changed significantly. As institutional arrangements and economic circumstances are central to the experiences of young people and their ability to make transitions to adulthood, the social and economic changes occurring over the last two decades have led to major programmes directed at monitoring and elucidating young people’s new situation. These have been spurred by key policy concerns, such as homelessness, drug taking and crime. The need to reconceptualise young people’s socialisation into adult roles and responsibilities has also been an important motivating factor.

The first major research initiative focusing on the impact of the changing situation of young people, Young People in Society, was launched in the early 1980s by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (Schaffer and Hargreaves, 1978; Beloff, 1986). Through surveys and ethnographic studies, this programme addressed a series of issues including employment, delinquency, drinking, politics and new technology. Following this programme, the last major programme of research in young people in Britain supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) was the 16 - 19 Initiative, (Bynner, 1987). This was targeted at improving understanding of the economic and political socialisation of young people and took place over the period 1985 - 1991. It comprised a ‘core’ study in four labour market areas (Swindon, Liverpool, Sheffield and Kirkcaldy), and a number of associated studies on topics ranging from rural youth in the South West of England to black young people in Liverpool. The research strategy embraced theoretical perspectives from sociology and psychology and multiple methods ranging from surveys to individual life histories and ethnographic studies of groups of young people. The 16-19 Initiative generated numerous journal articles and working papers and a number of books, including Careers and Identities, which brought together some of the main findings from the core study, (Banks et al., 1992).

Since the Initiative ended, the development of new theoretical perspectives been slow. Meanwhile in continental Europe, stimulated by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992), a new set of theoretical perspectives around the theme of individualisation and the life course have become influential. These new theoretical perspectives have been adopted very gradually by British youth researchers and in this respect there is a significant gap between continental and British youth research interests. Indeed, towards the end of the 16-19 Initiative, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the fairly narrow age range involved, sixteen to nineteen, though serving one of the main policy concerns of the 1980’s - vocational preparation -failed to do justice to the wide ranging effects of changing economic, social and political conditions across all the domains of young people’s lives. At the final Initiative workshop in May 1991, ‘New Findings’, it was agreed to take forward the research in this new context by seeking support from the ESRC for a series of seminars leading to the formulation of a proposal for a new programme of youth research in Britain. The ESRC supported the setting up of a ‘Youth Network’ to organise the seminars and a new working paper series was established to extend the high...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The shaping of trajectories and biographies
• Part 3: Vulnerable groups: excluded and included youth, polarisation and marginalisation
• Part 4: The social construction of identity
• Part 5: Perspectives on citizenship and participation
• Part 6: Theory and the new agenda