Youth and Society
Rob White and Johanna Wyn
Wild Years
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,Chapter 1
Introduction
This chapter focuses on one of the central issues in the sociology of youth and youth studies: the changing
experience and meaning of youth. While we draw on a range of approaches, in this chapter, in order to
understand social change, we draw on theories of individualisation and risk, and on theories of social
generation. The individualisation thesis enables us to understand the ways in which institutions play an
increasingly significant role in people’s live. We also draw on the idea of social generation, with the aim of
understanding the ways in which social conditions create generational dispositions and approaches.
Youth as a social process
From a sociological point of view, youth is social process. Youth is ‘imagined, endowed with meaning and
problematised’. It is ‘a social construction with social meanings and it is the task of sociology of youth to
understand how and why these have developed’. Bourdieu said that ‘youth is just a word’, and argued that age
divisions were arbitrary reflections of power relations. The way in which the category ‘youth’ is used and the
meaning of being a young person are a product of the time and place in which they occur. Thus at the outset
we aim in this book to explore the ways in which youth is framed and constrained (by institutions), shaped and
acted on (by young people) and experienced in enactments of identity, taking account of different contexts and
circumstances. We use the term ‘youth’ to talk about a social category and we use the term ‘young people’ to
talk about specific people and groups.
Theoretical orthodoxies create ‘truths’ and naturalise particular ways of thinking about young people. Talbut
and Lesko explain how these theoretical orthodoxies com e to be ‘affective’; that is, they are internalised by
professionals and parent’s who invest emotionally in their ways of understanding youth. Ball draw on the
insight of Foucalut and Bourdieu to argue that social scientists need to guard against closure and to be aware
of the ways in which presuppositions are inevitable in thinking about the social world. Complexity is
increasingly on the agenda for youth researchers. Digital communications play a significant role in breaking
down distinctions between local and global cultures and political movements and create new sites for the
expression of Indigenous cultures.
Yet the approach taken in this book resonates with Connell’s idea of ‘dirty theory’ or ‘theorizing that is mixed
up with specific situations’ so as to ‘multiply’ rather than ‘slim’ the sources or our thinking. The shifts in youth
studies and the sociology of youth, towards reflexivity in the use of theory and a willingness to draw on
diverse disciplines to understand young people’s lives, are consistent with the orthodox-breaking agenda that
Connell has set. These developments in thinking focus on connections between people and place, and between
social and physical environments, that enable young people to belong and to be sustained.
All around the word, society is undergoing radical change; radical in the sense that it poses a challenge to
Enlightenment-based modernity and opens up a space in which people choose new and unexpected forms of
the social and the political. They use the term ‘first modernity’ to refer to nation-state societies that exist in a
clear territorial sense and exercise control over their dominions. A shift to ‘second modernity’ has involved the
fragmentation of collective ways of life based on the nation state and, through globalising processes, on the
undermining of the possibilities for nation states to control social conditions.
An influential writer in the individualisation traditions, Beck’s most significant contribution to youth studies is
the idea that individuals must respond regularly and frequently to changing circumstances. Although Beck’s
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, work has been (mis)used to explain how individual people respond to change, his work did not focus on
individuals. The value of Beck’s writing is that it offers insights, often partial and imperfect, about changes in
institutions. These processes have a number of implications for young people. First, because the world they
experience is different, the pathways and approaches used by older people, especially those in the previous
generation do not necessarily provide a reliable guide for action. The decline in control over social processes
by nation states has meant that individuals feel more responsible for managing risks. The capacity to be
proactive in uncertain times relies in part on the ability to be reflexive. The process of individualisation
captures the process through which young people come to feel that they are responsible for bearing the risks
that are created through social structures. As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue, social inequalities in late
modernity have become redefined in terms of ‘an individualisation of social risks’. They explain that, as a
consequence, social problems become perceived through a psychological, and therefore individualising, lens.
The framework of individualisation and risk has been subject to debate and criticism within youth studies.
From time to time, researchers have claimed to have ‘disproven’ the individualisations thesis because young
people’s ‘choices’ are still constrained by class and gender divisions even if influenced by ‘an ideology of
individualism’ or because they have traditional expectations of life and relationships.
The popular stereotypes, like generation X, Y, baby boomers etc. assert that generations can be distinguished
from each other and imply that hey will continue to be distinctive, and to be identified as a social generation,
throughout their lives. Within sociological writing, the concept of social generation has a long history. It is
based on the understanding that age is a sociologically significant variable and the meaning of age is given
through social and economic relations. Edmunds and Tuner, for example, argue that social generations develop
a ‘cultural identity’ that they form as a result of ‘their particular location in the development of a society or
culture’. Nonetheless, a concept of social generations has value because is overcomes the reliance on age as
the defining feature of ‘youth’ and embeds youth within historical and local conditions. Perhaps most
importantly, this concept also has value because it focuses on the meaning of change to young people. The
shift to monetarist policies coincides with the emergence of ‘generation X’. Under monetarist policies, state
support for young people was reduced as welfare systems were restructured. Most importantly, the concept of
social generation gives significance to the meanings that young people themselves attribute to their lives. A
social generations is constituted through common subjective understandings and orientations as well as
material conditions. In the early sections of this chapter we argued that social processes influence the
possibilities of who young people can become. In the following section we discuss this in more detail through
the concept of subjectivities because young people’s subjectivities provide important insights into the effects
of social change, and they can also influence change.
While the terms ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’ are sometimes used interchangeably, there is an important
distinction between them. The term ‘subjectivity’ refers to the social, economic and political frameworks,
constraints and limits within which identities are formed. Social identities are shaped within specific social
contexts in which only limited possible subject positions (subjectivities) are given. In other words, identities
are experienced and actively produced by young people but these productions and experiences are contingent
on social and institutional relationships. A lot of recent youth research has focused on subjectivities, which
enables researchers to provide evidence about the new possibilities that are emerging for different groups of
young people. The focus on subjectivities as enables researchers to understand how new meanings of career,
employment and family are emerging. There is a clear link between these idea bout young people’s
subjectivities and processes such as individualisation.
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