Routledge Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood

Andy Furlong

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317619888
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The second and completely revised edition of the Routledge Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood draws on the work of leading academics from four continents in order to introduce up-to-date perspectives on a wide range of issues that affect and shape youth and young adulthood. It provides a multi-disciplinary overview of a dynamic field of study that offers unique insights on social change in advanced societies. It is aimed at researchers, policy-makers and advanced students on a global level.

The Handbook introduces the main theoretical perspectives used within youth studies and sets out future research agendas. Each of the ten sections covers an important area of research – from education and the labour market to youth cultures, health and crime – discussing change and continuity in the lives of young people, introducing readers to some of the most important work in the field, while highlighting the underlying perspectives that have been used to understand the complexity of modern youth and young adulthood.

Part I
Reconceptualising youth transitions

1
The changing landscape of youth and young adulthood

Andy Furlong

Introduction

Youth and young adulthood are phases in the life-course that involve significant changes as new statuses are negotiated and old ones abandoned. Ties of dependency to the family weaken or take new forms and young people gain new freedoms and are expected to accept greater responsibilities. The study of transitions from youth to adulthood has long formed an important theme in youth studies; some would argue to its detriment (e.g. Cohen and Ainley, 2000). Moreover, there is a general acceptance that transitions from education to work, from dependence to independence and from co-residence with parents or carers to co-residence with partners or friends or to solo living has become much more protracted as changes that once occurred in the late teens or early twenties are now frequently delayed until the late twenties or thirties. Indeed, for some this protraction cannot be understood within the parameters of youth but forces us to recognise a new phase in the life-course variously referred to as young adulthood (EGRIS, 2001) or emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2004).

Transitions have also become much more complex and are frequently non-linear (Furlong et al., 2003). Whereas traditional sequences often involved a move from education to work, followed by leaving home and then marriage and family formation, today these events may occur in irregular sequences. Young people may leave education for work, only to return to education on later occasions. While young people may leave the parental home for education, employment or to move in with a partner, moves are frequently reversed, sometimes on several occasions (Jones, 1995). These complex, non-linear, patterns have earned the description of yo-yo transitions (EGRIS, 2001), while some have suggested that for many, in the absence of anything resembling fixed states, the whole idea of transition may be irrelevant (Furlong, 2015).

For social scientists, youth and young adulthood are especially important and interesting phases of the life course because it is here that we can explore and understand the ways in which inequalities are reproduced across generations. Given that we live in societies that are constantly changing, at times undergoing very significant and rapid transformations, the focus on youth and young adulthood often provides an opportunity to understand the ways in which the lives of a generation are being transformed (Woodman and Wyn, 2006) and gives us a vantage point on which we can observe the emergence of new trends and social transformations.

In this handbook, as in the previous edition, the contributing authors are given the opportunity to account for the ways in which modern youth life is played out in a wide range of contexts and to highlight significant changes in their life experiences. Since the last edition, some of the trends previously identified have accelerated, while events with global significance, especially the Great Recession that affected many countries in 1997/98 and the subsequent period of financial austerity, have had (and continue to have) a powerful (even transformative) impact on the lives of young people. As such, there is a real need to draw attention to the ways in which young people are making their lives under these new conditions.

The changing world of work

Finding employment that offers a degree of security and provides the means to sustain independent living still forms the bedrock upon which other transitions are built. Without employment it is difficult to become independent and make a life. Employment, though, is being transformed, drawing in its train a string of changes that impact on virtually all aspects of young people’s lives. In the post-war era, some of the most significant trends reached a watershed in the late 1970s (Furlong et al. 2016). In the UK and in a number of other countries, significant sectors of manufacturing employment were decimated in the early 1980s, resulting in the loss of many of the apprenticeships that had been particularly sought after by male school-leavers. The decline of manufacturing also had an impact on the economic and political socialisation of young people: the shift from employment in large scale, unionised, industrial units to small-scale service units led to a more individualised experience of work and a significant reduction in union membership.

In the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) environment, young people’s opportunities are restricted and employment is often insecure and fragmented. Underemployment is rife and new work forms, such as zero-hours contracts, undermine basic securities and make it difficult for young people to build their lives. At the same time, it is important to recognise that changes have been brought about over a relatively long period of time: the precarious conditions eloquently described by Standing (2011) are not products of the Great Recession but have deep roots. Indeed, in the 1970s, the French sociologist Rene Lenoir (1974) was already writing about labour market precarity, and, by the mid 1980s, French academics were arguing that there had been a significant increase in the numbers of ‘ordinary’ people experiencing adverse labour market conditions.

In the UK, Goodwin and O’Connor (2005) convincingly argued that young people’s experiences of employment in the 1950s and 1960s often involved frequent changes of employer and occupation and conditions were often poor. In some sectors of the economy, such as the textile industry, employees’ wages were frequently determined by personal productivity. In West and Newton’s (1983) study carried out in the late 1970s, more than three in ten females were paid on a piecework formula. A long hours culture was also common, with many young people working regular overtime in order to secure reasonable wages levels.

While from the 1970s young people were being squeezed out of a declining manufacturing sector and pushed towards a service sector that offered quite different conditions, a number of other contemporary trends have roots in the same era. Participation in post-compulsory education, including higher education, was increasing and fuelling aspirations. New programmes were being developed for unemployed young people which, during the 1980s recession, had become a normal part of youth transitions. With much training provision outsourced to the private sector, a whole new industry providing training for workless youth was established, much of it poor quality and resented by those conscripted to participate (e.g. Stafford, 1981; Raffe and Smith, 1987; Roberts and Parsell, 1989). The 1980s also marked a punitive turn in welfare provision involving a shift from thinking of unemployment as a social issue to one that began to think of it as linked to personal shortcomings (Furlong et al. 2016).

Significant trends that characterised young people’s transitions and work experiences included the continued growth of post-compulsory and higher education so that by the 1990s the vast majority of young people in the UK remained in education until the age of 18 and almost one in two experienced some form of higher education. Linked to this expansion, advanced qualifications came to be a requirement for a range of occupations that were once secured on the basis of an average performance at school and degree entry started to be required for a range of semi-professional jobs, such as nursing. The increase in well-qualified workers, however, outstripped the demand for highly educated and skilled employees, resulting in a growth in underemployment. Consequently, graduates increasingly had to settle for non-graduate jobs; they frequently spent time unemployed after university or opted for further study to try and increase their chances of ‘suitable’ work.

During this period the labour market started to ‘hollow out’ and commentators drew attention to the establishment of a dichotomy between ‘lovely’ and ‘lousy’ jobs (Goos and Manning, 2007). The ‘lousy’ jobs included a growing variety of atypical forms of employment: agency working, fixed-term contracts, zero-hours contracts and short-hours employment. Once largely the preserve of women with family responsibilities, part-time working has become increasingly common among young people, some of whom try to juggle a number of part-time jobs in order to secure the equivalent of a full-time wage and many of whom express a desire to work more hours than currently available to them (Bell and Blanchflower, 2013).

Where young people have their working lives fragmented between a number of jobs or have unpredictable hours, it has been shown that social lives come under pressure. In this context Woodman (2012) has argued that, pressure to work unsocial hours and with the lack of control over hours worked, young people find it difficult to synchronise their lives with those of their friends and relatives, leading to greater social isolation and distancing them from support networks. Although Woodman does not make the link explicitly, other evidence suggests that the increased complexity and unpredictability of lives, together with reduced support, have fuelled the deterioration in mental health that is currently manifest in a wide range of countries. Eckersley (2011), for example, argues that mental disorders are now ‘the biggest contributor to the burden of disease and suffering in young people’ (p. 4), a statistic he attributes to ‘over-engagement’ as young people struggle to manage the competing demands of education and employment.

Standing (2011) is perhaps the best known commentator on the growth of insecure work forms and their implications. Although he doesn’t focus specifically in young people, he acknowledges that they are suffering disproportionally from the changes. Moreover, Standing also makes the link between the changes taking place in the labour market and negative subjective consequences such as an increase in anxiety, alienation and anomie. Standing refers to those affected by these changes as the ‘Precariat’ and he argues that they constitute ‘the new dangerous class’.

For Standing it is the unemployed, the groups such as the unemployed, the insecurely employed and the working poor who constitute the precariat. While he is clear that they are a diverse group, he argues that they are unified by the common experience of insecurity of work and living conditions. One of the attractions of Standing’s work is that he attempts to capture new work trends that are affecting large numbers of young people within a class framework. On an objective level he recognises that we inhabit a class society with class membership being one of the most powerful determinants of life chances. On a subjective level he also recognises that, as a result of a growth in precarious conditions, people often lack work-based identities and find it difficult to sustain a coherent narrative to connect their disjointed lives. Overall, this analysis comes very close to what Furlong and Cartmel termed the ‘epistemological fallacy’ (1997: 2) under which social structures become increasingly obscure despite great continuities in the extent to which social class shapes life chances.

Furlong and colleagues (2016) attempted to operationalise Standing’s precariat through the use of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (also known as Understanding Society), focusing on respondents between the ages of 18 and 25. Through detailed analysis it became clear that the group Standing referred to as the precariat were too diverse to treat as a homogeneous group in any empirically or theoretically meaningful way or to think of as constituting a class. Given important sources of internal differentiation sustained by the ownership of various forms of capital, it was argued that any idea that post-recession realities involved a ‘democratisation of insecurity’ (Brown et al., 2003) was seriously flawed.

Within the precariat there are clear differences between workless young people with neither skills nor qualifications and graduates working in part-time or temporary forms of employment. Such differences, as Weber recognised, relate to the ways in which education and skills are commodities of value that can be traded in the labour market. Furlong and colleagues (2016) argue that if one wanted to suggest that the precariat constituted a class, the implication is that a qualified pilot working through an agency (who may command relatively high wages and have a strong work-based identity) occupies the same class position as an unqualified burger flipper on a zero-hours contract.

Subjective accommodations

There is an abundance of literature on the mental health of young people, a substantial proportion of which claims causal links between the changing social and economic conditions of young people and a range of psycho-social maladies (e.g. Rutter and Smith, 1995; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Eckersley, 2011). Research showing causal links between unemployment and poor mental health outcomes has a long history (e.g. Pilgrim Trust, 1938; Banks and Ullah, 1988; Viner et al., 2012). More recently, studies are beginning to show that students can suffer a decline in mental health due to money worries and concerns about performance (Rowbotham and Julian, 2006) while young people in precarious and temporary forms of employment may experience depression (Vives et al., 2013) and face social isolation (Woodman, 2012).

Clearly young people have to negotiate a set of uncertainties that were less prominent in the lives of previous generations, may worry about future security and may suffer in terms of psychological well-being. Using a nationally representative sample of 18–25 years olds in the UK, Furlong and colleagues (2016) discovered that while around one in two survey respondents reported feeling optimistic about the future, almost one in five said that they rarely or never felt optimistic. Similarly, while around one in two reported that they never felt downhearted and depressed, fewer than one in ten said that they felt this way all or most of the time. These feelings varied according to their position in the labour market: optimism was lowest and depression highest among those without work while the opposite was true of those in relatively secure forms of employment.

However, while it is clear that a section of the young population is suffering, especially those who are without work or hold insecure forms of employment, it is also evident that many are able to maintain a positive outlook in the face of adverse conditions and show no evidence of suffering psychologically. Indeed, there are Australian studies that suggest significant proportions of the youth population are unconcerned about employment insecurity and that ‘many young people embrace flexibility as a way of life’ (Stokes, 2012: 78). In a similar vein, Wierenga (2009) argued that young people stress the importance of a work–life balance and do not place an emphasis on work as a central source of meaning.

In this context it is important that older youth researchers do not try to impose their own work-related norms on to a generation making their lives under very different circumstances. Indeed, the work-related trends that we highlighted have deep roots and young people are likely to have gradually built the changing realities into their expectations. In other words, young people have not suddenly found themselves having to cope with a radically altered set of realities: today, as in the 1960s, the realities encountered by young people more or less confirm their expectations. Moreover, with parents of contemporary youth likely to have experienced high levels of unemployment themselves as school-leavers in the late 1970s and 1980s, it is also likely that families help reinforce the view that transitions can be difficult to accomplish.

Adjusting to new realities

Prolonged educational careers, labour market insecurities and, in many areas, difficulties in accessing affordable housing mean that young people are finding new ways of living which impact on relationships, patterns of sociability and on approaches to work. While family and friends can provide a crucial source of stability in a context where lives are in flux, the ability of parents to provi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Reconceptualising youth transitions
• PART II Divisions
• PART III Education
• PART IV Employment
• PART V Dependency
• PART VI Youth culture
• PART VII Civic engagement and disengagement
• PART VIII Physical and mental health
• PART IX Identities, values and beliefs
• PART X Crime and deviance
• Index