Youth and Generation

Rethinking change and inequality in the lives of young people

Dan Woodman, Johanna Wyn, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446259054, 9781446259047
• eBook ISBN: 9781473911116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Woodman and Wyn have produced a text that offers conceptual clarity and real depth on debates in youth studies.  The authors skilfully guide us through the main sociological theories on young people and furnish us with sophisticated critiques from which to rethink youth and generation in the contemporary moment."
- Professor Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University

The promise of youth studies is not in simply showing that class, gender and race continue to influence life chances, but to show how they shape young lives today. Dan Woodman and Johanna Wyn argue that understanding new forms of inequality in a context of increasing social change is a central challenge for youth researchers.

Youth and Generation sets an agenda for youth studies building on the concepts of 'social generation' and 'individualisation' to suggest a framework for thinking about change and inequality in young lives in the emerging Asian Century.

1

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

Young people experience a world that is significantly different from the world their parents knew as young people. These young lives are being changed alongside large-scale transformations in education, work and relationship formation in many parts of the globe. Although these changes are clearly documented in North America, Western Europe and Australia (Vosko, 2003; Bynner, 2005; Leccardi and Ruspini, 2006; Andres and Wyn, 2010), they are not limited to the Global North. The expansion of higher education, rapid integration into a global economy and contested and changing possibilities for relationship and household formation are also creating profound changes in many former communist-bloc countries (Roberts, 2007; Roberts and Pollock, 2009) and across Asia, Africa and South America (Nilan and Feixa, 2006; Tranberg-Hansen et al., 2008).

These changes have been driven by the implementation, sometimes under duress, of ‘market’ reforms, opening domestic markets to international trade, liberalising labour laws and pushing to increase individual investment in post-secondary education (Marquardt, 1996; Ball et al., 2000; Thrupp, 2001; Nilan and Feixa, 2006). While the impacts of these changes are far from limited to the young, it is the experience of youth that has been most reshaped by this wave of reform. They as a group are most affected by education and labour market changes and are also among the group most likely to be experimenting with new ways of living in response to new conditions, such as those facilitated by new digital technologies, and to be pushing for social change.

While young people in some parts of the world are seen as politically apathetic, under some conditions (including high youth unemployment and undemocratic government) they are driving significant political change. Young people have been at the centre of the social movements attempting to reshape North Africa and Western Asia (or the ‘Middle East’). Structural changes in the experience of youth have been one of the major catalysts of these uprisings. Driven in part by experiments with democracy, demands for human rights and supported by the rise of a ‘digital generation’, the revolutionary movements in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt for example have also been fostered by highly educated but unemployed young people who have embraced the call to further their education but have not been rewarded with the job opportunities promised (Castells, 2012: 66; Herrera, 2012).

Youth unemployment and the poor employment conditions facing young people are not only a problem in the Global South. Even if it is yet to lead to uprisings elsewhere, this does not mean that young people in the Global North are not suffering or protesting. In a reversal of the direction in which influence among youth cultures is often assumed to flow, the Occupy Movements that sprang up in many parts of the Global North in recent years, with its catch cry of ‘we are the 99 per cent’, were a response to precarious conditions of employment once squarely associated with the Global South, but now also spreading across the North (Beck, 2000; Standing, 2011). The Occupiers in New York City and elsewhere also drew their inspiration in part from the example of the revolutionaries of North Africa and West Asia (Castells, 2012).

At a time of unprecedented investment by governments and young people in further education, unemployment and temporary and precarious employment are also on the rise for young people across the world, making it appear unlikely that the ‘neoliberal bargain’ that promises individuals a return for their investment in human capital can be maintained (Brown et al., 2011; ILO, 2013). This could shape a generation. Considerable evidence has been amassed to show that unemployment and even precarious employment in the late teens and twenties have a scarring effect on young people, correlating with relatively poorer employment prospects and conditions into middle age and beyond. This has been found in countries of the Global North, like France (Chauvel, 2006), and also countries like Brazil in the Global South (Cruces et al., 2012).

Despite the apparent significance of these changes, recent youth research shows the enduring nature of patterns of structural inequality over time. In response to this, there has been a chorus of voices within youth studies highlighting the risk of exaggerating change. Researchers caution against relying on a simplified account of the past to create the appearance of a contrast with the present (Goodwin and O’Connor, 2005), or failing to recognise that the same groups of people are the ‘winners and losers’ (Roberts, 2003). Gender, class, ethnicity, disability and other social divisions continue to profoundly shape outcomes. If new possibilities for young lives have been created, it appears to be only a smaller group of privileged young people who really get to make choices about their future (MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Roberts, 2007). In other words, it can often seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same (MacDonald, 2011). Understanding the dynamic between continuity and change is one of the central challenges for youth sociology today.

This book addresses the complex issue of the interrelated transformations of societies and individual biographies and how these impact on the social dynamics of inequality in young people’s lives. We agree with youth researchers who suggest that interrogating the relationship between continuity and change is the substance of the promise and challenge of youth studies. Robert MacDonald (2011: 440, emphasis in original) for example believes that it is the ‘asking of these sorts of questions – questions about social change, social continuity, about inequality and the position of young people’s transitions in these processes – that … gives youth studies its particular appeal and purpose’. This view is also the foundation for arguably the most influential youth studies text of the past two decades, Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel’s (2007 [1997]) Young People and Social Change. These authors concisely state how concerns about the balance between continuity and change set the central questions for contemporary research:

Young people today are growing up in different circumstances to those experienced by previous generations; changes which are significant enough to merit a reconceptualization of youth transitions and processes of social reproduction. In other words, in the modern world young people face new risks and opportunities … But the greater range of opportunities available helps to obscure the extent to which existing patterns of inequality are simply being reproduced in different ways. (Furlong and Cartmel, 2007: 8–9)

In many ways our book takes up the spirit and challenge expressed in these words. The changes occurring around the world in the experience of youth point towards the need for a reconceptualisation in youth studies. Our concern however is that the view embedded in the second half of this quotation has been far more influential than the first in youth studies, and represents a common, but we will argue limited, way of thinking about inequality as evidence against social change. While it is rare to find a youth researcher who would contest absolutely that significant change in the experience of youth has occurred, it is common for youth researchers to assert that fundamental social stratification is simply reproduced despite change (Roberts, 1995; Lehmann, 2004; Evans, 2007). To some extent this is also expressed by Furlong and Cartmel (2007: 8), who emphasise ‘that there are powerful sources of continuity; young people’s experience continues to be shaped by class and gender’.

In this book we aim to rethink how the relationship between change and inequality is understood in youth studies, based on the starting point that this ‘reproduction’ of inequality is not simple, and that the creation of inequality is not opposed to but integral to change. We argue that if youth researchers are to understand the emergence of new patterns of inequality, it will be necessary to develop conceptual approaches that can analyse entrenched (and new) forms of inequality as part of the process of change. Too often these elements are seen in opposition, creating a conflation of ‘continuity’ and inequality. This is sometimes represented by the claim that because older forms of stratification have changed the outcome is a reduction in inequality. More commonly, continuity and inequality are conflated through arguments that evidence of inequality is evidence against change.

While youth researchers should contest accounts of youth that downplay inequality, the more significant challenge facing youth studies is that too often simply showing that class or gender still matters is seen as an important contribution in itself, and, as such, limits the analysis in some youth research from more fully understanding the contemporary dynamics and changing nature of inequality (Woodman, 2009: 253). As such, we also argue that new risks and inequalities do not simply mask old forms of inequality, but are central to the way inequalities, including those of class and gender, are being made afresh in contemporary conditions. To put this rather simplistically, creating a balance sheet that places change in young lives in one column and inequality in the other will not realise the promise of youth studies. This promise is not achieved through simply tracing social change, or highlighting patterns of continuity, but through showing how the two are intertwined.

Individualisation

One of the contributing factors to the conflating of inequality with continuity is a widely held belief that influential contemporary sociological theory both overemphasises change and downplays inequality. A shared point of departure for much contemporary sociological theory is that a series of shifts that began in the latter parts of the twentieth century are reshaping both the self and society (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 2001; Sassen, 2008; Archer, 2012). Although the details vary, these theorists argue that a qualitatively new form of social organisation is emerging that impacts on how people imagine and build their biographies. In youth studies in particular, the concept of individualisation as proposed by Ulrich Beck and colleagues (Beck, 1992, 2007; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), has been extensively discussed and critiqued. The ‘individualistion thesis’ is consistently interpreted as making two key claims. The first is that social structures, such as gendered role expectations about work and motherhood and the class structuring of education and employment opportunities, are weakening. The second is that in the space left in the wake of these weakening structures the work of shaping the future increasingly becomes the active responsibility of each person who can and must now make choices about their future.

Sociological youth research is an obvious area of study to put claims about the biography to the test and there is a substantial body of research that gives unequivocal evidence of patterns of inequality and their continuity over time. Based on consistent findings of the persistence of inequality, many youth researchers have heavily criticicised theories of individualisation for either de-emphasising, or worse, actively denying the (unchanging) nature of inequality (see Andres et al., 1999; Evans, 2002, 2007; Lehmann, 2004; Brannen and Nilsen, 2005, 2007; McLeod and Yates, 2006; Roberts, 2010, among others). We acknowledge the important contribution that these researchers have made to cataloging patterns of inequality, and some aspects of their theorising of it. However, the conclusion that theories of individualisation do not enable an account of inequality is too simplistic. The theory of individualisation is complex, presenting apparent contradictions that require interpretation. We argue, however, that the way individualisation has been predominantly understood in youth studies has missed one of this theory’s central claims. This oversight is not primarily because of the theory’s own ambiguities, although they do exist, but because the individualisation thesis has become a trope employed as a foil to emphasise empiricist analyses of inequality.

We offer an analysis of the individualisation thesis that opens up a more nuanced understanding of how key elements of the theory work (Woodman, 2010). The concept of individualisation offers a sense of the active work that people must do to shape their lives. Yet far from proposing a weakening of social structure that frees individuals to shape their own lives, individualisation indexes an unequal but spreading challenge of keeping the biography from breaking into pieces in the face of new structural constraints, which are contradictory or ambivalent in their demands (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 22).

While we use the individualisation thesis, this book is not a straightforward application of the concept of individualisation to thinking about youth. Despite arguing that people must now actively shape the biography in new ways, most of the individualisation theorists say relatively little about the detail of how people actually respond to the changes that individualisation brings. We use the idea of individualisation as a description of the conditions of contemporary youth, taking it as a starting point but using a variety of other theories, including Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and concepts from post-colonial theories often considered to be incompatible with individualisation. Our analysis does not interpret individualisation to be a privilege of the most resourced to make choices about the biography, but sees it as a structural challenge faced most acutely by the least resourced. This becomes a point of departure for theorising the way that inequality is made in contemporary conditions among young people, including by class, gender and race.

We draw on a range of theories because the challenge of analysing young lives in context is complex. We explore the processes through which social relations create unequal outcomes to understand how these processes interrelate. Attending to the interrelation of different institutions and actors that shape contemporary conditions can highlight changes in the meaning and function of aspects of social life that would otherwise appear unchanging over time. For example, Saskia Sassen (2008) in defending her claims about the profound impacts of globalisation highlights how social arrangements and shared beliefs, such as the idea of sovereignty, can endure over time while coming to play a much more significant and sometimes radically different part in a social formation over time. As we have already mentioned, the changing nature of youth labour markets and conditions of employment is a significant dynamic impacting on young people across the world. Understanding this dynamic requires an understanding of new global processes.

Sassen (2008) argues that economic globalisation, including the rise of non-state economic actors such as multinational firms, could not have happened without the highly developed financial and legal mechanisms within nation states. These mechanisms, which once strengthened the nation state, have become disembedded from the context in which they originated, to be repositioned to serve cross-national actors’ purposes (such as forcing opening national economies to global trade) (Sassen 2008: 13–14). For our purposes we use and develop the concept of generations to provide a conceptual anchor for investigating the complex intertwining of change and continuity in the production of inequality in the lives of contemporary young people.

Generation

In the context of the rise of theories proposing a new modernity and their impact in youth studies, Ken Roberts (2003: 27–8) has argued ‘[w]e need progress, not more restarts … Constantly seeking new approaches, perspectives and paradigms is a recipe for stagnation … We have foundations, an impressive track record of youth research, on which to build. Why kick past achievements away?’ There is an intuitive truth in this claim. In part this book returns to and affirms the importance of the longstanding focus on transitions, cultures, class, gender and race in youth sociology. However, our way forward is neither to start from scratch nor to refuse to jettison what we have.

While unequal outcomes for different groups of young people remain predicable to a significant degree, they do not emerge from an abstract or inevitable social logic. Instead they are the outcomes of institutional arrangements adjusting to social change, and through people actively maintaining distinctions and advantages over others in new conditions. For example, at the same time as education has become more important, the outcome of this investment in education has become more tenuous, with secure professional employment elusive for many and casual employment at the lower ends of the service industry growing rapidly (Furlong and Kelly, 2005; Andres and Wyn, 2010). It is only through rethinking our frameworks for contemporary conditions that youth research can remain relevant and reaffirm its core concepts such as class, gender, race and identity (Woodman and Threadgold, 2011).

In this spirit, one of our conceptual strategies is to follow a long tradition in sociology of reinventing older conceptual frameworks to better fit new times and new places (Abbott, 2001). As well as drawing on a relatively recent conceptual contribution, the theory of individualisation, we return to some of the oldest sociological thinking about young lives in the form of Karl Mannheim’s (1952 [1923]) essay on generations. The sociology of generations is part of a broader tradition that asks not only how youth transitions and cultures have or have not changed, but also how the very meaning of youth as a relational concept is shaped by contemporary conditions (Allen, 1968; Lesko, 1996; Mizen, 2002; Blatterer, 2007). Along with other authors who use frameworks that emphasise a relational understanding of youth (but who may not embrace the term ‘generations’), we argue that the changing patterns of work, study and living arrangements mentioned in the opening of this chapter point to a new socio-historical economic and policy formation that does not simply change the timing of transitions or young people’s leisure practices, but more foundationally transforms the types of adulthood available and the possibilities open to young people (Wyn and Woodman, 2006).

While this broader tradition of attending to the relational shaping of youth continues to be influential in youth studies, the sociology of generations can provide tools for focusing thinking about continuity and change. Mannheim (1952) highlights that at particular points in time a generation of young people will face conditions different enough from those facing their parents (in their youth) that the rules for how to achieve a basic sense of ontological security, let alone sense of success, will have to be rewritten. It is the young generation that rewrites these rules. Mannheim’s theory, however, does not present a generation as an homogeneous group of young people. He argues that a generation is made up of sometimes radically different and potentially politically opposed ‘generational units’ (Mannheim, 1952: 8). According to Mannheim, class was one of the significant elements that contributed to the heterogeneity of a social generation. These units are groupings that, while sharing the same generation, react in different ways to the conditions of their times due to their different social positions.

We argue that this central element of Mannheim’s framework was overlooked by youth researchers in large part because of a similar conflation of continuity and inequality to that which influences youth research today. Mannheim’s theory of generations was, to the detriment of youth studies, largely abandoned as the notion of generations was linked to an implicit and homogenising type of generationalism in the work of mid-twentieth-century functionalist sociology that was heavily critiqued by subcultural scholars in the 1970s.

While we hold that Mannheim’s (1952) theory of generations continues to be valuable for thinking about youth, for our purposes his framework needs updating. One limitation is his focus on politics. His theorising tends to rest on the potential for a shared consciousness to emerge among some sections of a generation as a catalyst for political movements, neglecting other more mundane and affective forms of generational subjectivity. To attend equally to everyday and embodied forms of subjectivity created in the context of generational...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Continuity and Change
• 2 Global Change and Inequality
• 3 Individualisation
• 4 Generations
• 5 Transitions
• 6 Cultures
• 7 Time
• 8 Place
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index