DEL INGRESO Y SALIDA DE PERSONAS, MERCANCÍAS Y MEDIOS DE TRANSPORTE

The metaphors of youth transitions

The various metaphors of youth transitions are worth exploring here as they provide insights into the changing perceptions of how young people make their choices.

The metaphor of ‘pathways’ is very apparent in education and training discourse (Finn, 1991). It conveys an image of different ‘roads’ to be chosen when leaving one position and ‘arriving’ in another (Finn, 1991). It is an idea of linear transition, within which adulthood is usually defined by markers such as leaving schools, leaving home, getting a job and living independently. However, in late modernity, many of these markers have become impermanent, reversible and fragmented, so that there is no simple and clear “arrival” at adulthood. A group of European researchers characterise this trend using a metaphor of a yo-yo to symbolise ‘the ups and downs of fragile and reversible transition’ (Walther, 2009, p. 123). This analogy fits well because ever more young people are finding it difficult to associate themselves exclusively with youth or adulthood. Nevertheless, youth and education policies continue to be structured in linear, discrete, hierarchical packages.

Official pathways as designed by policy may be largely symbolic and bear little relation to the actual roads travelled by many young people (Dwyer and Wyn, 2001). These policies imply that young people should read the map better and choose a useful pathway, for those who get lost on the way to adulthood only have themselves to blame (Wyn and White, 1997). This understanding contributes to a sense of personal responsibility for one’s life experiences, including post-compulsory education and training. As a result, young people are ‘likely to blame themselves for any lack of success’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Ball et al., 2000; Dwyer and Wyn, 2001). Thus, the ways in which education and the labour market marginalise some young people become obscured.

Moreover, within the structure-agency perspectives, the metaphor of ‘trajectory’ is used to imply that labour market destinations are largely determined by social forces and that transitions are largely outside the control of individual social actors (Evans and Furlong, 1997). Analysing from a Bourdieusian standpoint, transitional outcomes are explained more in terms of structural factors, such as social class, race, gender, educational attainment and labour market conditions, rather than by reference to individual characteristics or aspirations. However, in the ‘risk society’ portrayed by Beck (1992), individuals are required to be self- navigators, ‘negotiating their way through a sea of manufactured uncertainty’ (Evans and Furlong, 1997). Thus, the metaphor of ‘navigation’ emerges (Evans and Furlong, 1997). Young people need to learn to live with ‘a calculative attitude’ to the open possibilities of action (Giddens, 1991).

Young people, social change and the ‘epistemological fallacy’

As mentioned above, young people are increasingly required to be self-navigators and assume personal responsibility. Andy Furlong and his colleagues investigated how the ‘individualised’ risks impact young lives (1997).

In Young People and Social Change, drawing on empirical data relating to different aspects of young people’s experiences, Furlong and Cartmel (1997) suggest that life in late modernity revolves around an ‘epistemological fallacy’:

Although social structures, such as class, continue to shape life chances, these structures tend to become increasingly obscure as collectivist traditions weaken and individualist values intensify. (p. 2)

Thus, risks have become ‘individualised’ and people increasingly regard failure as individual shortcomings, rather than as the outcome of processes which are beyond personal control (1997). For example, challenges faced by students who are less advantaged in their education

experiences could be considered a reflection of their lack of potential, rather than a consequence of an ill-structured education system. Unemployment among young people may be seen as a result of a lack of skills or qualifications, rather than as a consequence of a world economic recession. In an individualised society, people may ‘not be as aware of the existence of constraints as they are of their attempts at personal intervention’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, p. 7). This false perception, or ‘subjective epistemological fallacy’ (Farthing, 2016), where, for young people, agency becomes the central narrative of their lives, despite acute external limitations, masks the impact of structure on their lives. Young people are ‘blind to the existence of powerful chains of interdependency’ that link them to social forces (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, p. 114).

Furlong and Cartmel use the metaphor of railway journeys to describe the old model of young people’s trajectories. They board trains, follow different tracks determined by factors like social class, gender and education, and there are few chances to change direction. However, the experiences of youth today are described in terms of car driving. The drivers are constantly facing a series of decisions relating to routes to different destinations (1997, p. 6). The experience of driving one’s own car, rather than travelling as a passenger on public transport, leads to the impression that individual skills and decisions are crucial to the determination of outcomes. Many drivers focus on holding the steering wheel of the car, but fail to realise that the type of car they have been assigned is the indicator of the outcome. Young people today embark upon a journey with a wide variety of routes and uncertainties, while old social divisions remain intact. The constant source of frustration and stress for today’s youth is ‘the maintenance of traditional opportunity structures combined with subjective “disembedding”’ (1997, p. 7).

In Young People in the Labour Market, Furlong and his colleagues further investigated the working lives of young people and the ways they have changed between the 1980s and the great recession of 2008-9 (Furlong et al., 2018). The authors use two longitudinal datasets to explore unemployment, insecurity and work-poor young adults in harsh economic conditions in the UK (Furlong et al., 2018, p. 9). Their analysis demonstrates that young people have been facing increasingly deteriorating labour conditions over the years, involving less secure jobs and more temporary contracts, part-time working, and work in occupations that provide little in the way of intrinsic fulfilment (Furlong et al., 2018, p. 98). Their research is greatly informed by the work of Elias, especially the concept of ‘civilising offences’ (Elias, 1994). Civilising offences are ‘deliberate and premediated acts or interventions especially designed to purposely improve or change the behaviours of the

lower orders, the colonised peoples, and so on’ (Mennell, 2015, p. 2). When analysing the UK Government’s attitudes toward youth unemployment, Furlong et al. observe a ‘punitive turn’ in policy—since the early 1980s, unemployed young people have been sanctioned for their failure to secure employment with the threat of benefits being withdrawn and training schemes becoming compulsory (Furlong et al., 2018, p. 103). The treatment of young people in policy is directly linked to the neoliberal agenda, which requires the establishment of civilising offences by the state against young people.

Furlong and Cartmel’s idea of ‘epistemological fallacy’ (1997) shares some similarities with the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’ (1893), which will be explored in detail in Section 2.3.3. Both ideas focus on the false perception of intensified individualist values and the obscuring of the ‘chains of human interdependence’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, p. 2). The concept of ‘civilising offence’ used in Young People in the Labour Market bears some resemblances to Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and Gramsci’s idea of hegemonic power, which will be discussed in Sections 2.4.2 and 2.4.3.

The above section has reviewed the metaphors of youth transitions and some of the important research in the field. The following section discusses the debates around the role of agency and individualisation in youth transitions.