‘Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: young people, families and poverty across generations^*

* Paper for Special Issue of Journal of Youth Studies dedicated to the memory and work of Professor Andy Furlong.

ABSTRACT

One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor ‘cultures of worklessness’ explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural ‘underclass’, in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty
• class
• youth
• ‘cycles of disadvantage’
• generations

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Robert Crow and Johann Roden for their work on the project, and the anonymous reviewers whose criticisms and suggestions have helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* Paper for Special Issue of Journal of Youth Studies dedicated to the memory and work of Professor Andy Furlong.

1 This paper comes from a project that the three authors worked on. The paper was in progress when Andy Furlong died in 2017. It felt right to name him posthumously as a co-author albeit that this creates a stylistic irregularity in that, at times, we (Robert MacDonald and Tracy Shildrick) make direct and explicit reference to Andy’s wider work and intellectual legacy.

2 There is not the need nor the space here to describe the UK government’s multi-million pound Troubled Families Programme (TFP), except to say that it was based on the idea that a relatively small number of impoverished, often ‘workless’, ‘chaotic’ families (originally tallied as 120,000) were responsible for a large proportion of crime, anti-social behaviour, school truancy, social security expenditure and other social problems, and that ‘hands on’, ‘intensive’, no-nonsense social work could ‘turn around’ these families. Outlandish government claims for the success of the programme have been punctured by devastating evaluation reports and sociological critique (see Crossley 2015; Shildrick et al. 2016; DCLG, 2016; Portes 2016).

3 That is not to say that prior New Labour approaches to ‘social exclusion’ were free of underclass thinking (see Levitas, 1998).

4 Research ethics were approved by Teesside University following British Sociological Association guidelines. A key imperative was to preserve participants’ anonymity by using pseudonyms. Because interviewees sometimes reported things which might threaten their anonymity we occasionally also had to alter minor biographical details.

5 Except in one instance when pragmatic convenience meant interviewing the Martin family together.

6 Co-incidentally, one of the examples that Rutter and Madge give of external conditions that can create a ‘cycle of disadvantage’ bears closely on the labour market conditions of our research sites: ‘Undoubtedly there are continuities over time … only some of these involve family continuity. Regional continuities are, for example, very striking. Thus, for many years Scotland and northern parts of England have had particularly high rates of unemployment and of poorly paid workers …’ (1976, 303).

7 To be clear, the Middlesbrough interviewees were aware of the negative impact of drug markets on their neighbourhoods, but these had not impacted on the biographies of these families in the same way as they had in Glasgow, as we explain later.

8 Parker et al (1988) refer to ‘young men’ but, as we show, marginalised young women in Glasgow were not immune to the impact of heroin. There is not the space here, however, to describe how gender shaped different forms of engagement in the drug-crime economy.

9 Meaning that we theorise ‘common social environments’ as potentially having significant socio-graphic variation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Joseph Rowntree Foundation.