The new youth sector assemblage: reforming youth provision through a finance capital imaginary

Abstract

The language of austerity has been widely used to characterize policy-making in post-industrial nations since the financial crisis. Youth services in England are a noted example of the effects of austerity, having suffered rapid and severe cuts following a period of record investment prior to 2008. In this article, I argue that ‘austerity’ is an inadequate conceptual basis for critical analysis of policy-making since 2008, and that youth services are better understood as an exemplar case of the reforming effects of a ‘late neoliberal regime’. The late neoliberal regime describes a regulation of production through a finance capital imaginary, as distinct from the productive capital imaginary of the quasi-marketising neoliberal regime. I argue that late neoliberalism has effected the disassembly of quasi-marketised youth services and simultaneously the emergence of a new youth sector founded on norms of investment and return. I trace the reforming force of this regime through the productive relations of capital distributions, policy discourse, and organizational forms.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• youth services
• assemblage
• social investment
• austerity

Notes

1. I refer specifically to England as, while austerity policy can reasonably be understood to apply to the UK as a whole, policy and regulation regarding youth services is, to a significant degree, devolved to the parliaments of individual nations.

2. These numbers are deliberately left unspecified as the methodology used, while providing a useful sense of the scale and rapidity of change, cannot provide specific numbers. First, the survey is based on survey responses by local authorities. A large number of authorities responded, but not all. As I explained late, given large and growing geographic variations in spending on youth services, it is not entirely safe to generalise from this sample to a wider population. Further, it is not clear if what is being referred to as youth service spending is consistent with definitions used in prior years.

3. This preference for targeted over even a consumer-oriented open-access ‘local offer’ is a pattern replicated in the cuts to children’s services (NCB 2015), suggesting a wider pattern of reform in late-neoliberal regulation.