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ABSTRACT
The social changes tied to late modernity and an increasingly precarious labor market have facilitated the emergence of fortune as a potentially significant element for understanding contemporary society. This article approaches this contingent, individualized, secularized, and uncertain panorama from the perspective of the young adults tasked with navigating these societal transformations and the effects of a prolonged economic crisis. Based on a discourse analysis of 20 in-depth interviews and three focus groups with young adults in Spain, it examines how chance/luck is employed by these individuals. A typology is presented and discussed, consisting of four different relationships with fortune. In the participants’ narratives this paper finds a meritocratic approach, which involves an understanding that good luck is attained through individual initiative, but also relationships less concerned with human agentic power where it can be conceived as an explanatory or meaning making device, as a threat or as an element tied to hope. Consequently, the article seeks to address a gap in sociological research, which has tended to overlook the analytical relevance of fortune, arguing that it constitutes a central element to the symbolic frameworks of these vulnerable young adults as they make their way through a changing world.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Antonio Álvarez-Benavides for his thoughtful recommendations and to Jose Antonio Santiago for his helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to all the young adults who participated in this study. Finally, I thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable feedback.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Spain began 2021 with the highest rate of youth unemployment in the European Union (39.9%) and was the country with the largest unemployed population in the EU (16%) (Eurostat Citation2021).
2. While there are theorists who would seek to establish a differentiation between fortune and luck (Coffman Citation2007; Pritchard Citation2005; Rescher Citation1995), others reject such distinctions (Broncano-Berrocal Citation2015; González García Citation2006; Stoutenburg Citation2015) noting that these two terms are employed synonymously in ordinary usage, both in English and Spanish.
3. For a reflection on the possible semantic differences between chance and luck, see Michael Sauder’s text “A Sociology of Luck” (Sandel Citation2020).
4. González García (Citation2006) argues that the process of rationalization involves an attempt to dominate chance through rational means. The individual attempt at controlling chance/luck, a feature of second or reflexive modernity, can be understood as an extension of this idea.
5. In this case, we move from this notion of an individualized control over chance toward a symbolic conception that would highlight the limits of rationalization (Tejerina Citation2020).
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Matthew L. Turnbough
Matthew L. Turnbough is a member of the Applied Sociology Department at the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as a researcher at the Complutense Institute of Sociology for the Study of Contemporary Social Transformations (TRANSOC) and the Contemporary Sociocultural Studies Group (GRESCO). His research focuses on contemporary social changes, individualization, globalization, chance/luck/fortune, the sociology of the individual and sociological theory.