Writing in a role for structure: low-income young people's dual understanding of agency, choice and the welfare state

ABSTRACT

Young people, it is often argued, are more individualised and more free of older, class constraints than ever before. This has led some thinkers to debate the (positive) possibilities of ‘choice biographies’ and self-making among the young, alongside the (more sinister) possibilities of ‘epistemological fallacies’ blinding them to the limits of these self-making capacities. This article interrogates the idea of ‘epistemological fallacies’ for five groups of young people from low-income backgrounds in England. Comparing focus group discussions they had about their lives, with policies they wrote to address the problems of their lives, this article suggests that these young people were less blind to the limits of their own agency than individualisation theorists may predict, and were in fact acutely aware of the difficulties behind finding personal solutions to social problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Individualisation
• choice biographies
• structure/agency
• epistemological fallacies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Giddens refers to ‘reflectively constructed selves’, rather than ‘choice biographies’.

2 Wyn and White (2000, 166) less pejoratively refer to this relationship between young people's positive perceived choice and agency, despite structural conditions, as the ‘paradox of youth’.

3 The UK's smallest statistical geographical unit, around 5500 residents.

4 According to the UK's child poverty measure, where children are counted as poor if they live in households within incomes below 60% of median equivilised household income (ECP 2011).

5 Which Beck (2007, 682) suggests began with political enfranchisement and then the establishment, expansion and, ultimately, dismantling of the welfare state.