School-to-work transition services: marginalising ‘disposable’ youth in a state of exception?

Abstract

Disadvantaged young people often inhabit a dangerous space: excluded from education, training and employment markets; constructed as disposable; and cast out as ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2004). There are many macro-level analyses of this catastrophic trend, but this article provides insights into some of the everyday educational micro-practices which contribute to such marginalisation. It presents findings from a study of a national school-to-work transition service in England, in a context not only of neo-liberal policies but also of severe austerity measures. The data reveal processes of triage, surveillance and control – driven by governmental and institutional targets – which denied many young people access to the service, including some of the most vulnerable. Beneath a rhetoric of social inclusion, the service in fact acted as a conduit into a dangerous space of exclusion. Drawing on the work of Butler and of Agamben, the article argues innovatively that such practices may represent an encroaching state of exception, in which more or less subtle forms of governmentality are gradually being supplanted by the more overt exercise of sovereign power.

Keywords:

• school-to-work transitions
• youth
• social exclusion
• homosacer
• state of exception

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, grant no. RES-000-22-2588. We are grateful for the collaboration of Cathy Lewin, Lisa Mazzei and Sandra Gladwin in the conduct of the project, as well as to Connexions' staff and stakeholders who gave of their hard-pressed time to participate. Our thanks are also due to two anonymous referees of this journal for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. The category of ‘economic inactivity’ applies to far more people than ‘unemployment’, since unemployment is defined narrowly in terms of claimant eligibility rather than joblessness:

Economically inactive people are not in work and do not meet the internationally agreed definition of unemployment. They are people without a job who have not actively sought work in the last four weeks and/or are not available to start work in the next two weeks. (UK National Statistics Publication Hub, n.d.).