Robert MacDonald

Growing up in poor neighbourhoods: the significance of class and place in the extended transitions of 'socially excluded' young adults

Drawing upon qualitative, longitudinal research with ‘socially excluded’ young adults from some of England’s poorest neighbourhoods, the article explores how locally-embedded, social networks become part of the process whereby poverty and class inequalities are reproduced. Networks of family and friends, rooted in severely de-industrialized locales, supported young people as they carved out transitions to adulthood in adverse circumstances. Examples are given in respect of informants’ highly localized housing careers and their longer-term experience of ‘poor work’. Paradoxically, though, while local networks helped in coping with the problems of growing up in poor neighbourhoods and generated a sense of inclusion, the sort of social capital embedded in them served simultaneously to close down opportunities and to limit the possibilities of escaping the conditions of social exclusion. Overall, and contrary to some recent youth sociology, the article stresses the continuing importance of class and place in shaping youth transitions.

In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions

This paper represents a further contribution to recent debates in the Journal of Youth Studies about subculture theory and ‘post-subcultural studies’. Specifically, we argue that the particularised focus of the latter on youth culture in relation to music, dance and style negates a fuller, more accurate exploration of the cultural identities and experiences of the majority of young people. Celebratory and broadly postmodern theories have been utilised as a means for understanding the ‘scenes’, ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘lifestyles’ that ‘post-subcultural studies’ describe. Such studies tend to pay little attention to the importance, or otherwise, of social divisions and inequalities in contemporary youth culture. Almost unanimously, post-subcultural studies reject the previously pivotal significance of class-based subcultures, as theorised by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, in their attempts to explain new forms of youth cultural identity. We argue that this critique of subculture is premised on a partial interpretation of the theoretical objectives of CCCS and that, in fact, some of the theoretical and methodological propositions of the latter remain relevant. This argument is supported by a brief review of some other, very recent youth research that demonstrates the continuing role of social divisions in the making and shaping of young peoples leisure lives and youth cultural identities and practises. In conclusion, we suggest that the ambition of the CCCS to understand not only the relationship between culture and social structure, but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of this relationship, remains a valuable one for the sociology of youth.

Youth transitions, unemployment and underemployment Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

What is youth studies for? One answer to this question points to the valuable, possibly unique, position youth research has as a window on processes of social change and of social continuity. Based on the author’s long-term engagement in youth research, from the early 1980s to now, this article reflects on how youth transitions to the labour market – and the way that they are thought about in youth studies and youth policy – have changed and stayed the same over the past 30 years. While the main empirical focus is on the UK, the article notes the wider relevance of many of the trends that are discussed. As well as looking backward, the article considers possibilities and challenges for the future; for youth, for youth research and for youth policy. In terms of young adults’ lives, the spreading shadow of unemployment, economic marginality and precariousness is described. In terms of research, it argues that, in order to achieve greater theoretical significance and impact for youth studies – and to better understand processes of social change and continuity – further strides need to be taken to overcome the enduring divide between youth cultural and youth transitions studies. Finally, on the basis of these reflections from youth studies, the article raises important questions for current and coming social and economic policy. Here the local – and global – significance of underemployment and the ‘myth of the skills economy’ are discussed.

Street corner society: leisure careers, youth (sub)culture and social exclusion

Abstract This paper draws upon qualitative research with ‘socially excluded’ young people in the North East of England. It proposes that the concept and study of ‘leisure careers’ is useful in understanding the transitions, (sub)cultural experiences and identities of social groups like this. The empirical focus is upon the significance of leisure careers in the neighbourhood‐based, social networks of some criminally involved, socially excluded young adults. Theoretically, we argue that a focus on leisure careers, as part of a broad, holistic approach to youth transitions, can help overcome some of the problems that currently affect youth studies. In particular, fuller examination of shifting, leisure‐based activities and identities within studies of youth transition may help bridge the analytical divide between that tradition of youth research and that which focuses primarily on youth culture and identity.

Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long-running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working-class life are in decline.

Predicting Criminality? Risk Factors, Neighbourhood Influence and Desistance

Using qualitative biographical data from a longitudinal study of youth transitions, criminal careers and desistance, this paper casts doubt on the veracity and predictive power of risk assessment devices such as Asset and OASys. These devices, and the research on which they are based, suggest that earlier and current childhood and teenage influences trigger and sustain later re-offending. In contrast, we argue that focus must be shifted to contingent risk factors that accrue in late teenage and young adulthood. Secondly, risk assessment and criminal career research has ignored the influence that unforeseen and unforeseeable processes of neighbourhood destabilization and life events have in criminal careers and their cessation.

Snakes & Ladders: In Defence of Studies of Youth Transition

Although enjoying a period of renewed government policy interest and favourable research funding, youth studies has recently come under considerable intellectual attack, much of it from within. A common theme is that the major conceptual approach of most British youth research over the past twenty years - the sociological study of youth transitions - is not helpful in approaching ‘the youth question’. The paper locates these recent critiques in terms of the development of ‘two traditions’ of youth research in the UK; a development which has served to separate structural and cultural analyses and so to limit the theoretical potential of the field. A recent qualitative study of young people growing up in Teesside, Northeast England is then discussed. Close analysis of the biographies of two of its participants are used as the basis for a reconsideration of the nature of transitions amongst ‘socially excluded’ youth and a discussion of some of the limitations of recent critiques of youth studies. The paper argues that the sort of research, methods and analysis employed here provide one example of how interests in the cultural and structural aspects of youth might be integrated. It concludes by reasserting the theoretical value of a broad conceptualisation of transition in understanding the social, economic and cultural processes that define the youth phase.

In search of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies:

The idea of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’ has become influential in UK politics and policy, and been used to explain contemporary worklessness and to justify welfare reforms. Workless parents are said to pass on to their children attitudes and behaviours which inculcate ‘welfare dependency’. In its strongest version, politicians and welfare practitioners talk confidently of ‘three generations of families where no-one has ever worked’; even though no study, bar this one, has investigated whether such families actually exist. Solid evidence for intergenerational cultures of worklessness is elusive so this study tested the idea via interviews with twenty families in Glasgow and Middlesbrough that had been long-term workless. Theories of intergenerational cultures of worklessness feel like ‘zombie arguments’ – resistant to evidence and social scientific efforts to kill them off. Regardless, the findings of this critical case study are offered as a fresh batch of ammunition with which to try to do so.

Missing School Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion

Qualitative research with socially excluded young people in a prime underclass locale is the basis for this examination of experiences of schooling in the shaping of youth transitions. Young people’s accounts of school disaffection were depressingly familiar. Explanations for persistent truancy—for missing school—related, in part, to powerful, (sub)cultural critiques of orthodox claims about the instrumental relevance of education. Paradoxically, in retrospect the majority missed school, in the sense that they wished they were still there, and many came to hold more instrumental views about education. This research suggests, however, that qualifications appeared to play a minor role in the shaping of overall transitions. The authors conclude that we cannot understand these contradictory, shifting orientations to the value of schooling without understanding the changing structures of opportunity that prevail for young people in different places and their fit with localized, class-cultural tastes and aspirations.

Labours of Love: Voluntary Working in a Depressed Local Economy

Whilst studies of employment have fuelled arguments about post-Fordism and questions of flexibility, recent debates about welfare have considered social polarization and the growth of an anti-social, anti-work ‘underclass’. In both cases, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which people in depressed local economies now survive through precarious, marginal and informal work. This article explores how people deprived of jobs seek to re-create positive working lives for themselves through voluntary work. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with working-class men and women in Teesside, it explores the motivations and meanings of volunteering and the significance that voluntary action has for work and welfare in such communities. State intervention in the voluntary work sphere is assessed and a number of recommendations are made for policy and practice.