Sociology, Youth and Youth Work Practice

Simon Bradford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230237988
• eBook ISBN: 9781350312982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

How can sociology inform our understanding of young people's experiences? Introducing core theories by drawing on a range of cultural resources - from pioneering research to genre-defining films - this book demonstrates how a sociological imagination can enhance informal educational and social welfare approaches to work with young people.

1

Sociology Matters

Sociological Perspectives and Young People

Introduction

This book begins from the conviction that sociology has great potential in helping youth practitioners understand young people, the world they live in and the professional practices that aim to support them. Sociology involves a special and unique way of thinking about the world that the book will introduce.

Insofar as thinking leads to doing, the aim is to influence how readers approach their practice with young people and communities. Sociological thinking aims to provide resources for analysis and change and is therefore inevitably implicated in questions of politics and power. Sociological analysis points to difficult questions that are sometimes problematic for government and decision makers: questions of freedom and security, wealth and poverty, consensus and conflict, stability and change. These are matters that those in power may prefer to ignore but for practitioners with young people, they are fundamental to day-to-day practice. The intention of this book is to open such questions to the sociological imagination so that youth practitioners – as practitioner-sociologists – can better understand their implications.

Most introductions to sociology refer to the ways in which societies shape the beliefs, conduct and identities of their members. Society is constituted in the groups to which people belong (families, communities or classes, for example), the institutions through which the social world is organized (education, welfare systems, politics and the law, for example), and the shared cultures and practices which differentiate one society from another. Essentially, sociologists claim that there is something important and unique about the social that helps us to understand a range of important questions. Sociologists are interested in questions like, ‘Why do people (as shoppers, football fans or young men, for example) behave as they do? Are people born or made? Are people social or individual beings or both?’ Such questions underpin sociological and broader philosophical debates that have, sometimes, run on for centuries. This book will engage with some of these questions and offer an understanding of them in the context of professional work with young people.

Chapter 1 outlines sociology and the unique perspectives that it offers. As a discipline, sociology seeks knowledge and understanding of the social world through rigorous research, reflection and theorization. Many of the areas that sociologists are interested in are ordinary and everyday and will be familiar to many youth practitioners. Examples might be: how can shoplifting be understood in societies obsessed with shopping; does celebrity culture shape young people’s aspirations and ambitions; are young men’s views of what it means to be a young man in contemporary Britain shaped by biological or social factors; how and why has football become so established in some national cultures and not others; how does popular music help young people to express their sense of identity; and how are young people’s emotions shaped by social processes and institutions?

A Brief History

Sociology as a Modern ‘Science’

Before looking at the broad issues that sociological thinking can illuminate, this chapter briefly explores sociology’s beginnings. The historical context can help us to define and understand some of the questions that sociologists are interested in looking at and the broad positions that they occupy. Sociological approaches draw on rational analytical thought. This involves identifying a problem, seeking, evaluating and interpreting evidence, and drawing conclusions. This approach underlies all scientific endeavours and derives from the philosophies of the classical world, but sociology, as the science of society, is a product of the ‘modern’ industrial and scientific age. It is these ‘modern’ origins of sociological thought that are considered here.

As science and rational thought began to offer an alternative to the dominant religious world view in late eighteenth-century Europe and America, social philosophers and scientists began to apply the tools of reason (logic and scientific method in particular) to social life itself. The optimistic aim of these ‘logical positivist’ social philosophers was simple. By painstakingly gathering facts, creating theories and testing them, they believed that everything was ultimately knowable and the mysteries of the universe would eventually become accessible to the scientists’ investigations.

The first use of the term sociology is usually credited to a French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who argued that his new science of sociology had the capacity to define what should count as human progress and flourishing (Comte, 2010: 802). This is quite a claim, particularly as friends, adversaries or neighbours might disagree about what progress would look like and how human flourishing should be defined.

However, for the early sociologists, the so-called scientific method offered the guarantee that its reflections would lead to truth. Comte held the firm conviction that society could be studied scientifically through the methods of observation, experimentation and comparison that had developed within the natural sciences such as chemistry and biology. He also identified the sociological problems of social change and social stability and was determined to discover what appeared to him to be specific laws governing social order, what he called ‘social statics’, and those governing social change, ‘social dynamics’. For Comte, the purpose of his ‘new science’ of society – sociology – was to uncover underlying universal laws that determined the ebb and flow of social life. As such, he was interested in similar problems to many contemporary sociologists.

Over to you…

Critical reflection

The idea of progress is quite complex and looking at the world around us it is difficult to believe that any of the early sociologists’ convictions have counted for much at all. What would count as progress and whose progress would it be? What ideas of progress do you think underlie current political party positions in your own country?

What about the question of ‘human flourishing’? In your view, what would a ‘flourishing human being’ be like and what kinds of social conditions and arrangements would be in place to encourage that? Should practitioners with young people be concerned with human flourishing and, if so, how does your work contribute?

One of the important, continuous defining features of the sociological perspective has been its combination of scientific method and moral concern. Despite claims for the ‘value free’ and scientific status of sociology, its origins and development have always been implicitly or explicitly connected with notions of improving the human condition.

Sociology is not only a body of abstract ideas and thought. It has to be understood in its material setting as well. The development of sociology was intimately bound up with the tumultuous happenings in the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The earliest sociologists, including Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Saint-Simon (1760–1825) were part of the surge of Enlightenment ideas that were developing a powerful critique of Europe’s ancien regime based on feudal tradition and structured by the articulated powers of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church. This culminated in the French Revolution and the War of American Independence; both defined as progressive causes informed by and furthering Enlightenment ideas. Sociology, in embryo form, thus contributed to the intellectual underpinnings of revolution and this can be understood as an early version of a critical and sometimes utopian tendency in sociology. It is not too much of an exaggeration to argue that this is sociology, as Comte and others saw it, in the service of human emancipation.

Many sociologists, either implicitly or openly, take the view that sociology makes a contribution to progressive social arrangements, sometimes construed as some kind of emancipation or liberation (Becker, 1967; Foucault, 1988). In one sense, sociology’s historic position has been to subject the world to relentless critique, as a science of society; critical questioning of the social world is intrinsic to the discipline.

Traditional and Modern Societies

The segmentation of society into age groups in which young people came to be allocated a particular position in relation to work, family, education and leisure is as much a characteristic of the industrializing world of the modern age as is the focus on science. The emergence of youth as a social category is bound up in shifts from traditional to modern societies.

It is useful here to consider how sociology has made distinctions between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies and the significance of this for the position of young people. Pre-industrial societies have been categorized as ‘pre-modern’, while industrial and post-industrial societies have been understood as ‘modern’ in terms of their economic, institutional and social characteristics.

Pre-industrial societies are often understood as ‘traditional’ societies based on at least the following characteristics:

• common values and beliefs centred on religious world views

• primary face-to-face relations (people know each other), ascribed (predetermined) roles

• extended families as forces of socialization and as the basis of economic production

• strong gender order and little social or geographical mobility

• systems of agricultural production and the extraction of natural resources from the earth

• gradual social change.

In pre-industrial societies young people are relatively tightly integrated into the community and the transition from childhood to adulthood is characteristically short (Ben-Amos, 1994: 236–42). Social reproduction means that in such societies young people remain in the same social category as their parents and undertake similar work to that of their parents.

The characteristics of modernity, which can be seen as beginning roughly in the mid-eighteenth century at the beginning of industrial society (Bell, 1976; Hall and Gieben, 1992: 6), are listed below:

• the nation state as the key territorial unit in which secular forms of power and authority operate, developing new imagined communities of place and belonging

• modern societies are monetarized exchange economies, large-scale systems of marketized commodity production and consumption, long-term and sustained property ownership and capital accumulation

• declining traditional social order of fixed and articulated social hierarchies and their dynastic authority (aristocracy and Church, for example), a specialized and complex division of labour, industrial capitalism and social class formation

• declining religious world view and ascendancy of secular and materialist culture with an associated knowledge economy characterized by individualism, rationalism and instrumentalism.

Modernity is characterized by the growth of industrialization and mechanized technologies for making things and managing people. It involves urbanization in which people move from the countryside into expanding towns. Modernity is associated with the establishment of newly defined nation states; for example, Italy and Germany became unified nations during the nineteenth-century modernization of Europe. Governance in modern states involves a range of centralized practices and institutions including the increasing audit and surveillance of the population. Most modern societies are, above all, capitalist societies based on systems of marketized commodity production and consumption.

With the emergence of capitalism in late eighteenth-century Europe, traditional inherited social relations of feudal power and dependence declined. Emerging social relations were profoundly shaped by the inequality between those who owned the means of production – factories and mines, for example – and those who had to sell their labour in order to survive. The growth of modern industry is associated with the shift from a family-based economy and a greater mobility of labour in terms of shifting work roles and the geography of work. In the process of industrialization, old ties and social roles are no longer necessarily appropriate, and young men in particular become freed from the necessity of occupying the same roles as their fathers. Technical education becomes more important and the school becomes an important site of training, replacing some of the previous functions of the family, again, especially for boys.

Further changes occurred with the emergence of what has been termed ‘post-industrial society’ in the latter part of the twentieth century, which can be also understood as a knowledge society in which information and knowledge are the main commodities. According to Bell (1976), post-industrial society remains a modern society, sustaining similar social relations even as industrialism declines. The growth of knowledge economies has profound implications for young people, especially in relation to the significance of education. These economies depend much less on physical capacity (for example as in heavy industrial work) than on the sometimes high-level skills that underpin service and knowledge-based work. Those without such skills are likely to be very vulnerable in these labour markets, making transitions to independent adulthood potentially problematic. These economies are characterized by increasing inequality of wealth.

The shift from the pre-modern into modernity is essentially characterized by a fundamental shift in the nature of social relations.

Over to you…

Critical reflection

Sociologically speaking, it is very important to distinguish between the terms social relations and social relationships. Both terms are used in sociology but with important differences. When we refer to social relationships, we mean the particular associations that we have with others (my relationship with my partner, my second year students or my next-door neighbour). If we refer to social relations we mean the general patterns of association that develop over time and become almost ‘external things’ that seem to have a life of their own. So we might talk about the social relations that occur in the context of age, gender or ethnicity (the general ways in which men and women or different cultural groups characteristically relate to each other in a particular society: we could refer to these as gender relations or ethnic relations). In these examples, you would probably want to argue that these social relations are characterized by persistent inequalities, at least in the specific context of the UK. Can yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Sociology Matters: Sociological Perspectives and Young People
• Chapter 2 Growing Up in the Present: From 1945 to the 2000s
• Chapter 3 Growing up in Public and Private: Youth, Transition and Identity-Making
• Chapter 4 Being Similar and Different: Youth and Social Difference
• Chapter 5 Being Social: Complying and Transgressing
• Chapter 6 Being Somewhere: Youth, Space and Place
• Chapter 7 Living in a World of Change and Constancy: Globalization, Citizenship and Youth
• Chapter 8 Does sociology matter?
• References
• Index