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This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates claims that millennial youth are being jilted by gilded baby boomers. The interrogation is by comparing the education and early experiences in labour and housing markets, then (when possible) the subsequent lives, of three post-1945 British cohorts: the immediate post-war cohort who completed education between 1945 and 1960, their children who passed through the same youth life stage in the late-1970s and 1980s, and finally the post-war cohort's grandchildren, the millennials who have completed their education since the late-2000s. The analysis searches for gilded and jilted sections within each of these cohorts by comparing their lives with those of their parents. It shows that no cohort has been uniformly gilded or jilted, and that the label (jilted or gilded) which appeared most appropriate when a cohort was making its education to work, and family and housing transitions, has often looked inappropriate by the latter part of their lives. The paper argues that it is too early to apply gilded or jilted labels to any sections of millennial youth, and that current appearances that they are victims of generational inequity are due to a long-term failure to match increased investments in human capital within families and in education with investments in the economy and housing that would enable the millennials to convert their human capital into commensurate jobs and accommodation suitable for new family household formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others' needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment - the politics of austerity - and secondly because of Europeanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The progressive commercialisation of motherhood, babyhood and childhood means that consumption is becoming an increasingly important terrain through which maternal identity, style and parenting practices are displayed and 'caring projects' are enacted. Whilst all mothers may seek to act meaningfully by consuming for their children, this paper argues that aspects of material culture hold particular value for teenage mothers who are positioned outside the boundaries of normative mothering and are often managing on limited financial resources. Consumption emerges as an important site for oppositional strategies through which the young women who took part in this study seek to re-image themselves as respectable carers and deflect negative associations of poverty away from their children. The young mothers' investment in consumer goods, however, is often subject to public scrutiny, criticism and ridicule, and their spending is a site for policy intervention. This paper argues that these young mothers' consumption practices should not be seen as problematic, trivial or pathological, but rather they can be understood as an expression of resilience in the face of a sensation of public visibility, judgement and condemnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009 Woodman has recently challenged youth sociologists concerned with inequality to evolve from what he describes as a middling orthodoxy that misrepresents the work of Ulrich Beck in an effort to emphasise the continuing relevance of class. In 2010 Roberts forcefully responds to Woodman, arguing that Beck's own words and empirical evidence contradict his argument. Woodman responds to Roberts, reasserting his position and asks for the debate to move beyond mere 'quote wars'. This paper engages with this debate, taking Woodman's challenge seriously while maintaining that Beck's jettison of class is problematic, and that the concept of class itself is still vital. The paper concludes with suggestions as to what youth sociologists concerned with socio-economic inequality might want to focus upon in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotê has called for a focus on a political economy analysis, where young people should be thought of as ‘youth-as-class’. Cotê positions youth as having false consciousness, arguing that youth studies is too focussed on subjectivities and a potential apologist for neo-liberalism. While we acknowledge the central importance of economic considerations, this paper critically engages Cotê’s claims while developing an approach to political economy that recognises the importance of inequalities between young people. We engage with a number of Cotê’s claims arguing that his position underestimates the diversity of work in this area and the importance subjectivities to any analysis of political economy. We also identify a number of conceptual problems with ‘youth-as-class’ and the ‘false consciousness’ heuristic. We develop an alternative approach outlining a more integrative understanding of the relationship between the political and the economy highlighting the importance of subjectivity. We draw on ideas of political ecology; reflexivity and consciousness; and concepts from Bourdieu. Our approach recognises that young people's lives can be shaped by economic forces and by classed symbolic and moral forces. Young people are not passive dupes, but are in a constant reflexive struggle to respond to circumstances not always of their own making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how marginalised youth including unemployed young men and teenage mothers come to be represented through labels such as ‘chav’ and ‘pramface’. It explores the deeply affective nature of these representations, how they leak out into everyday life and come adhere to particular bodies and spaces. A contribution of the paper is to move beyond the familiar terrain of textual deconstruction to further consider how lower working-class young men and teenage mothers manage social class stigma and might themselves speak back to these markers of abjection. In doing so they are seen as creative actors who may come to inhabit these seemingly negative articulations, dissimulate from them or resist them altogether. We conclude that while the stubborn markers of class disparagement cannot easily be displaced, paying attention to how they might be understood and re-evaluated within local youth circuits offers nuanced readings that may resonate more closely with working-class experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a reply to Woodman's (2009) recent argument that youth studies often incorrectly attribute the concept of 'choice biographies' to the work of Ulrich Beck. Drawing heavily on Beck's own words, this paper contends that youth researchers might not be making this association unduly. Consideration is paid to some conceptual issues outlined by Will Atkinson, which Woodman has not appeared to consider, that challenge Beck's rejection of the relevance of structural analysis. Further, a review of some empirical evidence countering Beck's theory of 'individualization' suggests that 'middle-ground' positions in youth sociology can arguably be justified. Finally, it is proposed that Woodman's defence of Beck is partly a reflection of an alignment of focus between Beck's theoretical repertoire and Woodman's preferred method for understanding the youth period - the concept of generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most young people in the UK now stay on in education or training when they finish school. Numbers will continue to increase following the implementation of raising the participation age. Despite an upward trend in further education participation, young people's pathways continue to be shaped by class and gender. This paper explores the choices and decisions made by young people in their final year of compulsory schooling and describes how these class and gender inequalities are reproduced. We also spoke to parents about their own trajectories and their involvement in guiding their children's next steps. Our concern is with young people in ‘the middle’: not most at risk of social exclusion, but certainly not the most privileged. The decisions at this key transitional point are socially embedded. Processes of class reproduction and class mobility are dependent upon both structural context and access to advantageous resources. The opportunity structures for our participants were very different for the two generations. We note the wider role that social resources play at this moment, and the classed differences between the children of parents who had experienced some upward mobility and those who had remained in working-class positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of Andy Furlong's abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural 'underclass' can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor 'cultures of worklessness' explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural 'underclass', in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roots of the political-economy-of-youth perspective can be traced to the neo-Marxist attempts to account for the youth movements and countercultures of the 1960s and to argue that youth constitute a potentially revolutionary ‘class’. Although this perspective influenced subcultural views of youth, since the 1980s sociological and cultural studies approaches to youth studies have tended to focus on the disadvantaged and working class rather than the entire youth segment of the population, while becoming increasingly preoccupied with subjectivities rather than the material conditions. Although these approaches to class divisions within the youth segment are useful, there is recent evidence of a systemic proletarianisation of the entire youth population in many countries, raising again materialist concerns and the issue of youth-as-class. Evidence for class-relations between youth and adults with respect to reduced earning power and education-to-work prospects is presented, followed by a critique of current youth-studies approaches that do not provide explanations of the root causes of youth proletarianisation. The paper ends with a call for a revival of the political-economy-of-youth perspective that is capable of generating ideas about solutions to this proletarianisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As young people attempt to adapt to a rapidly changing society, how they experience school and work has undergone significant changes in recent decades. Youth researchers attempting to understand these changes have drawn heavily on the concepts of agency and structure. In the process, researchers often end up taking a ‘middle-ground’ approach and in turn have critiqued the theorizing of Ulrich Beck for being too focused on agency. This article engages with this debate by examining young people's understandings of the social structures shaping their lives within the constantly changing environment of a boomtown. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with high school students, post-secondary students, and young workers, it was found that most young people were able to recognize how class had shaped their lives, only Aboriginal young people discussed how race/ethnicity had shaped their lives, and only young women understood how gender had shaped their lives. The findings suggest that the specific local context that young people experience their school and work lives within is important in their reflexive understandings of their biographies. In this case, the boomtown environment helped to highlight difference and make only certain social structures visible to particular young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of precarity has gained momentum and challenges social scientists to consider the effects of labour-market insecurity across classes and welfare arrangements. This article discusses the varieties of experiences of precarious work by young people in university and identifies in which cases they are also experiences precarity. It is one of the first studies of its kind to investigate the material triggers of inequality by comparing young people's experiences across countries (England, Italy and Sweden) and by looking at the welfare mixes available to young people who are working at university. Through a comparative qualitative research involving young people from different socio-economic backgrounds and 'welfare mixes', the article shows that experiences of precarity concern a minority of young people who have an absolute necessity to rely on labour-market sources, due to the lack or insufficiency of state support and family sources. It also identifies: a group of young people who feel pressure to get precarious jobs to fill a decline in family resources; and a convenient use of precarious jobs suiting the circumstances of young people with abundant family resources. Overall, the research found that precarity is deeply connected to young people's welfare mixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the theoretical development of subcultural theory. It first provides a brief history of subcultural theory. It then attempts to outline the central requirements which should be fulfilled by a neo-Birminghamian conception of subculture that takes valid critiques of the CCCS into account, while maintaining the theoretical richness and analytical qualities of the concept. This includes putting social structures, including class in intersection with gender and ethnicity, back into subcultural theory, in a way that allows for grasping complexity. The article moves on to argue that the development of such a conception of subculture could potentially be realized by entering a theoretical dialogue with Bourdieu’s sociology and feminist accounts of intersectionality. Furthermore, it suggests that such a theoretical conception may be highly relevant to current research areas such as gangs/street culture and Jihadism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates intersecting institutional and policy relations that influence divergent developmental trajectories among young people. Beginning with young people’s experiential knowledge of key institutional contexts shaping their lives, the article illuminates socially organized disjunctures whereby young people come to see themselves as developmentally out of sync with institutional expectations for youth development, which organize everyday life in public schools. This institutional ethnography explicates the intersecting social relations that shape how young people grow up, the choices that are available to them, their participation in public sector institutions and ultimately, the race and class-based patterns of inequality perpetuated by public schools and other public sector institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the subjective understandings of advantage and disadvantage of Oslo youth. It combines survey and interview material where participants have been invited to judge the relevance of various assets for and obstacles to achieving one's goals in life. As advantages and disadvantages can be grouped into factors within and outside the control of individuals, this object of study is of direct relevance to the long-standing debate about individualization, class, and youth subjectivity. The study finds a widespread adherence among participants to the central tenets of individualism, but this endorsement is not accompanied by a rejection of the impact of family resources. The study further identifies social differences in that youth from higher class backgrounds are more inclined to acknowledge assets and obstacles of a structural quality. Finally, participants from dissimilar class backgrounds mobilize structural factors in reflexive, but dissimilar ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon Bourdieu's concept of ‘cultural capital’ to examine how working-class young people negotiate and navigate everyday life in their neighbourhoods. Young people's relationship with cultural capital has traditionally been conceptualised by its value in the formal institutional setting (i.e. schools); being ‘owned’ and ‘used’ by parents or professional workers such as teachers to advantage (or disadvantage) certain groups; or by being passed down to young people through intergenerational linkages. Limited recognition has been given to the embodied and objectified nature of cultural capital in the lives of the young themselves or how it may operate in different informal settings and social interactions to structure and situate their individual agency. This article centralises the voices of a group of young people living in British working-class neighbourhoods to show how certain cultural illiteracies and cultural assets help them manage everyday life. Life in such areas is both ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’ and requires them to draw upon forms of cultural capital recognised amongst their peers to help them construct ‘safe’ and ‘successful’ routes through working-class transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article replies to Steven Roberts' recent critique of my article on the concept of choice biography and how youth studies have engaged with the work of Ulrich Beck. I use this rejoinder to extend my argument about why Beck's ideas matter for youth studies. I suggest that both those who find the concept of choice biography useful and those who critique Beck need to rethink their position. I argue that the model of individualisation built by Beck describes not a reduction of structural constraint but an increase in rules and guidelines shaping young people's lives. However, as these guidelines are partial and contradictory young people must actively manage their biography in a new way. It is not those with the most resources who face the greatest demand to actively shape their biographies but those with the least as they most face the consequences of a proliferation of contradictory and changing rules and guidelines. Beck provides new ways to think about contemporary inequality, but has been under-utilised because he is misread as a continuation of long-running debates in youth sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The themes of mobility and transformation occupy centre stage in many sociological accounts, where 'movement' references people and places in 'new' times, often without situating how movements may actually be embedding or reconstituting inequalities, spatially, culturally and materially. Attention to how gender and class may be reconfigured queries straightforward notions of change, even 'crisis', pointing towards the reshaping of exclusions and their intersecting dimensions. Based on interviews in the North-East of England, this article aims to explore younger women's spatial negotiations in the context of change and continuation, where regional efforts on regeneration can be conceptualized against the backdrop of de-industrialization and (urban) rebranding; the 'past', 'present' and 'future' sit uneasily in these (re)imaginings. These reconstitutions force consideration of the different forms and consequences of social transformation, negotiated in the dis-identifications made by women where, for some, their presence was marked as distinctly out of place, as opposed to others who could more easily claim a movement and placement compatible with the sense of regional change and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]