Inequality, continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time.

KEYWORDS:

• Andy Furlong
• social change
• inequality
• individualisation
• generation

Introduction

Youth Studies, focused on the intersection of a changing social structure and the life course, is an avenue for asking questions and creating new approaches of value to the social sciences as a whole. In many national contexts, including the U.K. and Australia, Youth Studies has moved from the periphery toward the centre of social sciences over the past two decades. Professor Andy Furlong played an enormous role in making this happen. Andy was the founder of the Journal of Youth Studies and its Editor in Chief for two decades between 1998 and 2017. Andy died in January 2017, too young, but already having left a legacy that will shape Youth Studies for decades to come. In putting together this Special Issue we were especially keen to honour Andy's contribution but also to try to think about Youth Studies moving into the future; we hope that the papers selected here will help stimulate new debate and lines of enquiry in the field.

Foreshadowing themes that would shape his work and the field of Youth Studies, Andy did not have a simple, linear transition from school to Ph.D. He completed his doctorate at the University of Leicester in his mid-30s, after a period of working in the (youth) culture industries and as a teacher in youth and adult prisons. After returning to study via a non-traditional route, his doctoral studies were supervised by Professor David Ashton, a leading scholar in the area of youth employment, as part of a larger project on young adults in the labour market funded by the U.K. Department of Employment. His Ph.D., completed in 1987, focused on the effects of government intervention in the labour market through Youth Training Schemes for the unemployed.

Andy's early academic life took him to the University of Edinburgh and then to the University of Strathclyde. After this, he joined the University of Glasgow, where he would spend the rest of his career, first in the Sociology Department, where he established the Youth, Education and Employment Research Unit and became Head of Department, then as Professor of Sociology within the Department of Management, and finally as Dean of Research and Professor of Social Inclusion and Education within the School of Education. He was a keen supporter of early career scholars and included them in the workings of the Journal from the outset. He worked closely with international colleagues, helping to build a global Youth Studies community.

He worked particularly closely with colleagues in Japan and Australia, holding research grants and appointments in both countries. At various times over his career, Andy held visiting appointments with at least four Australian universities. This is particularly notable given there are only forty Australian universities, meaning Andy had a formal connection to ten per cent of these. He also advised the British and Luxemburg governments on youth employment issues, and the United Nations on youth policy. His awards, achievements and accolades were numerous but in this introduction, we will focus on his academic contribution.

Continuity and change

Andy Furlong's Ph.D. thesis was the basis for his first books, Schooling for Jobs (1993) and Growing Up in a Classless Society? School to Work Transitions (1992). In the context of youth unemployment becoming a major social and policy issue, and the rise of ‘training’ schemes in the place of a transition straight into a job for many school leavers, Andy asked whether profound changes in education systems and youth labour markets were weakening the effects of class. His answer was that significant progress towards equality of opportunity was hard to identify, despite these changes.

These are themes he would build on in his field-defining work with the late Fred Cartmel, Young People and Social Change (1997/2007). This book asked whether the field of Youth Studies needed new conceptual frameworks to understand changes in young lives. In it the authors outline key themes for understanding youth, stressing the importance of keeping analytic attention on continuities as well as changes in the experiences of young people across time:

In this book we describe some of the ways in which social changes occurring over the last three decades or so have led to a heightened sense of risk and a greater individualization of experiences among young people …. Despite the far-reaching and ongoing implications of social change, we still hold to the view that there are powerful sources of continuity: young people's experiences continue to be shaped by class and gender … .Young people today are growing up in different circumstances to those experienced by previous generations; changes which are significant enough to merit a reconceptualization of youth transitions and processes of social reproduction …. But the greater range of opportunities available helps to obscure the extent to which existing patterns of inequality are simply being reproduced in different ways. (2007, 8-9)

This balanced perspective seems as valid now as when it was set out over twenty years ago (in the first edition Young People and Social Change). The text remains central, core reading on Youth Studies modules and programmes globally. In a following book, Higher Education and Social Justice (2009), Furlong and Cartmel show how this production of inequality through shifting means happens in the context of higher education. It outlined the way that diminished returns on higher education and heightened attention to the prestige of particular institutions and degrees has accompanied the rapid expansion of higher education, its feminisation and the relative opening of access to working-class young people, as demand from middle-class young people (and their families) reached a saturation point. They argue that meaningful change in the capacity of higher education to serve a social justice function requires more than expansion and marketisation. It requires active policies working against elitism and efforts ‘to direct policy towards finding effective ways of restricting middle-class advantage’ (Furlong and Cartmel 2009, 115).

Individualisation

One of the major accomplishments of Andy Furlong's work, and Youth Studies as a field, has been to highlight the continued impact of class, gender, race and other longstanding social divisions during a period of social and economic change. In reiterating this point across the 1990s and 2000s, Andy critically engaged with arguably the major theory of social change in sociology of the past 30 years, individualisation theory, particularly the version of it developed by the German sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualisation is a complex idea, with varying interpretations (Woodman, Threadgold, and Possamai-Inesedy 2015) but at its core is the claim that structural change now means that individuals are increasingly compelled to hold together structural incompatibilities and forced to imagine themselves as ‘the control centre’ of their own biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002).

Furlong and Cartmel (1997) explained this shift using the metaphor of ‘a car journey’ – as opposed to ‘a train journey’. The latter metaphor had already been used by Ken Roberts to describe ‘the opportunity structure’ of youth employment transitions as a trajectory towards largely fixed destinations; the ‘train journey’ has different classes and different stations at which passengers depart but the train heads only in a single direction with predetermined stops. The structures of such a ‘train journey’ are clear, even to the passengers, who see that they share an experience of transition with those of the same class. Individualisation, for Furlong and Cartmel, can be thought of as a shift towards a car journey. Unlike a train, cars allow diversions along the way and different routes to the same destination and a sense of the driver being in control. Certain young people can only head to particular destinations and the quality of car they have to get them there varies, but they none-the-less have a feeling of greater control and choice in their journey.

Furlong and Cartmel (1997) called this the epistemological fallacy. Life chances are highly structured; class continues to give shape to these chances. Yet people increasingly seek solutions on an individual, rather than a collective basis, as these structures become obscure. A recurring theme in Andy Furlong's work in the period since has been to connect social changes, which can seem new, to a longer running process of growing complexity, interdependency but paradoxically also greater individualisation. He draws on the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias to do so.

One of the reasons individualisation has been widely debated and (arguably) misunderstood is that it references contradictory processes. Engaging with Andy Furlong's work, Woodman and Leccardi (2015) have proposed thinking of two waves of individualisation. Some dimensions of individualisation have a long history. In recent work, Andy Furlong and colleagues (Furlong et al. 2017) have shown that youth transitions were less linear, more precarious and relatively more individualised in the past, even in the post-war ‘golden age’, than Youth Studies scholars often assume. For Elias (2000 [1939]) modernity was characterised by the unfolding of a new type of standardisation, and concurrently, its seemingly opposite. Through the centuries an increasingly complex set of interdependencies emerged that demanded increasing self-control and personal attention to managing the self and relationships; a growing sense of individual autonomy and self-control was necessary to this new type of society and became an important site for classed processes of distinction-making, in the way Bourdieu (1984) develops this term.

Using Elias, Andy Furlong attempts to guard against a tendency for those living in an individualising society, including social researchers, to think of individuals as, on the one hand, unique and, on the other, as at the whim of external social forces, pushing each person around in haphazard ways on the individualising waves of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). Andy argued that individual and society cannot be separated but were moments or outcomes of an unfolding process (Furlong and Cartmel 2007, 144). In Elias's words, as quoted in Furlong (2015, 25): ‘we say “the wind is blowing”, as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if the wind were separate from its blowing, as if a wind could exist which did not blow’ (Elias 2012, 106–107). Self and society only exist with each other, through a continual process.

This long wave of individualisation provided the context for the development of an understanding of youth as a transition to adulthood. Within the often-sharp boundaries of class, race and gender, the transition to adulthood in this modern period evolved into a set of constrained questions such as ‘what career I should pursue?’ or ‘who should I marry?’. In other words, following the ‘train’ metaphor, which of a finite set of trains and carriages for people like me should I take? The current phase of individualisation is shaped by an uneven acceleration of social change (Rosa 2013) which means that the institutions and interdependencies that shape young lives fit together less neatly than in the past, creating new demands to manage the partial and contradictory aspects of social structure. This is the situation facing the young people in their ‘cars’; seemingly more choices. These are better conceptualised, however, as a continuing set of cascading decisions that need to be made along the way and within conditions where the possibilities for concrete planning – for instance, of choosing a clear route forward – are diminishing. Moreover, the opportunities for choice and for planning remain classed and unequal (Woodman and Leccardi 2015).

Throughout his writing, Andy aimed to highlight the ‘existence of powerful continuities which link the experiences of this generation to those of earlier ones’ (Furlong and Cartmel 2007, 142). It would be wrong to take this to be a denial of significant change. Andy Furlong stressed that changes that are currently significant have a longer history than is often recognised and, as Elias proposed, that change (and continuities) cannot be separated from long chains of temporal and interpersonal action through which the world is continually made and remade.

Understanding this foundation of Andy Furlong's thought helps to explain how, in the last decade of his life, he engaged with seemingly incompatible theoretical frameworks. Alongside colleagues, he undertook research to track these chains of continuity and change from the 1970s onward. He showed how contemporary discussions of precarious employment have a prehistory, with government policy from the 1970s onward shaping the lives of the generations transitioning to work from that time, albeit in new ways (Furlong et al. 2017). Instead of the recent emergence of a ‘precariat’ generation’, ‘zones of insecurity’ have been created for some young people, intensifying and morphing over several decades. He also traced how intergenerational relationships shape experiences of poverty today (MacDonald, Shildrick, and Furlong 2014). Rather than a ‘culture of worklessness’ passed on across the generations, instead MacDonald, Shildrick and Furlong found that precarious work and periods of worklessness could unite generations as they responded to ever fewer opportunities to find secure employment with meaningful career prospects.

Yet at the same time he wrote with others about the sociology of generations (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011), using this framework to argue for the need to treat young lives holistically, investigating how transitions, youth culture and politics intersect in the context of social change. The long chains of interdependency, and how these provide resources and barriers for different young people, have particularities at this moment. His work helped push youth scholars to rethink and work across the conceptual divisions that have shaped the field. This included youth cultures and transitions in the context of social and economic changes, including individualisation and shifting temporal structures of employment and youth cultures, which mean the boundaries between work and leisure are more porous than before. Echoing earlier calls for a more unified approach that would bridge ‘the two traditions’ of Youth Studies (e.g. MacDonald, Banks, and Hollands 1993), Andy Furlong (2015) argued, the case for treating young people at work like they had no lives beyond work was no longer sustainable, neither was it possible to study youth cultural forms, and the relationships between young people, in isolation from the need for paid employment in a shifting youth labour market.

While arguably he did not always succeed (see Bessant and colleagues in this collection), Furlong aimed to follow Elias in avoiding reductionist tendencies, arguing that we can only understand humans as pluralities (Furlong 2015). Interdependencies are growing more complex and entangled and this is one of the drivers of the contemporary wave of individualisation in which young people are attempting to build their lives. In the work that Andy undertook over the past decade, he developed a nuanced understanding of continuity and change in youth and the way that young people were part of making and remaking lives – and inequalities – in this context.

This collection

Youth Studies is a broad field, drawing on scholars from many disciplines and using a variety of methods and frameworks. The field, and this Journal, grew alongside Andy Furlong's writings on youth. Following a conference he organised in 1997, Andy founded and launched the Journal in 1998, as Editor in Chief. Whether the frameworks, concepts and theories of Youth Studies need to be revised in the face of ongoing, global change that impacts hard on young people and how relationships, experiences and drivers of inequality are being reshaped in this changing world have been guiding questions for Youth Studies since the inception of the Journal. They are themes which have helped keep the diversity of approaches to and within Youth Studies together and have helped the field grow over these two decades. Andy Furlong provided his own powerful answers to these questions but questions as substantial as these do not allow final answers. Youth Studies scholars must continue to study the long-run and short-run social, political, cultural and economic processes that shape young lives and the way that possibilities are available to some groups of young people and not to others. Andy Furlong's work was not just about understanding these dynamics for their own sake but carried with it a strong sense of social justice and attention to how we might widen opportunity for young people and create interventions that confront inequalities.

Articles in the first issue of the Journal of Youth Studies in 1998, curated by Andy to set an agenda for the field and for forthcoming issues, included discussions of young people's educational transitions in non-urban settings, about citizenship, about youth culture and consumer identities, and about the key challenges for Youth Studies (MacDonald 1998). The articles in this collection in 2020 cover some similar territory, drawing on Andy Furlong's legacy to do so. As noted, social science research infrequently lends itself to final answers, but new empirical evidence and more sophisticated conceptualisations mean that progress is possible. The articles that we have selected for this collection reflect on and help to push Andy Furlong's agenda forward. Over the past twenty years, questions that were central to Andy Furlong's work – about continuity and change in youth and about the reproduction of inequality – have been significant for the wider field of Youth Studies and to very many of the articles that we have published in this Journal. Undoubtedly, they will continue to be so – but we also hope that this set of papers, forthcoming issues and our editorial statement and revisited aims and scope for the Journal, which we published a year ago (MacDonald, Shildrick, and Woodman 2019) help to provoke debate and discussion about new agendas and directions in Youth Studies.

The first paper in this Special Issue for Andy Furlong revisits some of his interest in young people, poverty and intergenerational research. In ‘Cycles of Disadvantage’ Revisited: Young People, Families and Poverty Across Generations’, Robert MacDonald and Tracy Shildrick present research and theory they worked on with Andy before his death. It is perhaps fitting that this first paper in the Special Issue includes Andy as an author. The paper ‘debates with’ a well-established point of view in Youth Studies, and a firm conclusion from much of Andy's own work; i.e. that the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. The paper shows that on some occasions 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 policymakers. The paper revisits a classic study of intergenerational ‘cycles of disadvantage’ from the 1970s and reports on qualitative research from the late 2000s with twenty families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods. It argues that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor ‘cultures of worklessness’ explained why hardship persisted in these families over generations. The paper theorises that critical, instead, is a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Of course, a shared context of declining job opportunities is part of this, but it also extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor quality education, and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. The authors 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.

The second paper in this collection also takes a backward look, examining the experiences of participants in the U.K.'s Youth Training Schemes (YTS). In ‘Returning to YTS: The Long-Term Impact of Youth Training Scheme Participation’, John Goodwin, Henrietta O’Connor, Laurence Droy and Steven Holmes revisit an aspect of Andy's work that informed all his future work, and which served as the basis for many of his later projects – his Ph.D. This thesis was submitted in 1987 and was entitled ‘The Effects of Youth Unemployment on the Transition from School’ (Furlong 1987). The influence of his PhD on his later work is evident throughout his catalogue of publications. The thesis began with a chapter titled Youth Transitions and Social Structure, Social Class, Gender and Schooling – encompassing in one single chapter the key themes that he continued to research throughout his career. The following chapters covered: attitudes towards education and the decision to leave school, occupational aspirations and the development of work attitudes, entry to employment, transitions to work and the negotiation of structural change in local labour markets, experience of unemployment, youth training schemes and transition. The last chapter of his thesis takes the authors to the crux of their paper – the experience of YTS amongst unemployed young people making the transition from school to work at the height of the 1980s recession. This research is important as it offers insights into the early experience of YTS and the attitudes of young people towards government schemes at the time and contemporaneous with the young people's struggles in a complex and changing labour market. Andy found that those who joined the schemes sometimes regarded them favourably and that they could be a route to the jobs they wanted, albeit dependent upon local labour market conditions, in this case in Leicester. Based on the authors’ collaborations with Andy exploring YTS, the paper revisits British Cohort Study (BCS) data in order to update the story. It attempts to unravel the later labour market fortunes of young people who participated in YTS over thirty years ago. The paper concludes by reflecting upon this aspect of Andy's legacy and considers how it can be used to shape the future research agenda around youth training and labour market preparation.

Within Youth Studies there is a long-standing and growing body of research that pays attention to the importance of place in shaping young people's identities, life opportunities and intergenerational relationships. Of critical importance to these discussions is the need to explore notions of ‘belonging’ and social citizenship, interrogating the extent to which differing perceptions and experiences contribute towards variations in the outcomes and life chances of disadvantaged young people. Indeed, the very first issue of the Journal contained an article looking at similar themes and issues, vis-à-vis youth, place and mobility in rural areas. Our third paper in the Special Issue is by Aniela Wenham. It addresses Andy's questions about continuity and change with a focus on marginal places and youth identities and mobilities. In ‘“Wish You Were Here”? Geographies of Exclusion: Young People, Coastal Towns and Marginality’, Wenham draws upon ethnography, participatory arts-based research, and semi-structured interviews with young people who live in a deprived coastal town in the North of England. The research investigates processes of marginalisation and disconnection, from the perspectives of young people who were deemed as disengaged, or ‘at risk’ of disengagement, from education, employment or training. The research took place during a time of rapid change and uncertainty as Britain voted to leave the EU. The findings of this study throw light on how contemporary, classed subjectivities are formed, how experiences of inequality and austerity are made sense of, and how, within a turbulent political context, young people negotiate complex transitions to adulthood.

Our fourth paper continues this interest in mobility and young people – but explores these themes theoretically, reflecting as Andy had done previously on some of the dominant metaphors and concepts in Youth Studies. In ‘A Place for Mobility in Metaphors of Youth Transitions’ Valentina Cuzzocrea argues that the production of metaphors is central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn (2014) have noted that metaphors used in relation to youth, such as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movement. Cuzzocrea argues, however, that it is still under-debated in Youth Studies how we can, in wider terms, systemically incorporate mobility into the study of young people to capture the precarity characterising their lives. Indeed, Cuzzocrea suggests, even though they deal with similar issues scholarship on ‘boundaryless careers’ and ‘peripatetic careers’ appear to have developed separately from the youth-related literature. Contending with Andy Furlong's work on metaphors in Youth Studies, the article interrogates the potential for intertwining research lines within the growing debate on mobility in youth transitions. It follows in Andy's legacy by arguing critically about the best ways to theorise and conceptualise youth, about the youth research agenda and about the need, potentially, for revision and development of some of our orthodox categories, concepts and metaphors. She finishes by proposing the metaphor of a pinball game for reconceptualising youth mobility.

The fifth paper in this issue is also a critical engagement with the conceptual frameworks that shape contemporary Youth Studies, in part because of the influential work of Andy Furlong, particularly his use of the sociology of generations. Against a backdrop of lively discussion about the best ways ‘to do’ Youth Studies, or the sociology of youth, this article by Judith Bessant, Sarah Pickard and Rob Watts asks whether Pierre Bourdieu's work can be brought into Youth Studies in a new way that benefits the field. The article, ‘Translating Bourdieu into Youth Studies’, begins by considering Bourdieu’s (1978) thoughts on the category of ‘youth’ using a new translation of this text and then turns to an important discussion by Furlong, Woodman and Wyn (2011) about certain long-standing tensions in Youth Studies. These tensions are between writers engaging in the ‘structure/ agency’ debate that is sometimes mapped onto the ‘youth culture versus youth transitions’ binary. Bessant and colleagues consider the case for adopting a ‘middle-ground’ and whether Bourdieu's writings represent such a position. In doing so, they argue that many in Youth Studies work from an unacknowledged ‘substantialist tradition’, which is contra to Bourdieu's ‘relational perspective’. The results, they argue, include misunderstandings of Bourdieu's thinking and unrealistic expectations of his work, for example, that it can pass certain empirical tests. The article goes on to argue that if Bourdieu's relational perspective is to be better translated into Youth Studies, we will need a more determined effort to understand that perspective first and a critical engagement with the substantialist frameworks used in the field.

In the sixth contribution, Susan Batchelor, Alistair Fraser, Lisa Whittaker, and Leona Li discuss exactly this intersection of youth transitions and youth cultures in the context of temporal individualisation and precarious work. In their piece, entitled ‘Precarious Leisure: Youth, Transitions and Temporality’, they observe that the precarity of young people's transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in Youth Studies. As Andy Furlong and many others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people's experiences and understandings of leisure such that many young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that participants in the research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented. Echoing core themes in Andy Furlong's work over the years, the authors argue that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions, oriented in complex ways to the past, present and future, reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing the study of youth leisure into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.

In our seventh and final paper, Patrick Alexander, John Loewenthal and Graham Butt use a social generational framework (Woodman and Wyn 2015; Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011) to investigate how young people imagine post-school transitions. This article, titled ‘“Fuck It, Shit Happens (FISH)”: A Social Generations Approach to Understanding Young People's Imaginings of Life After School in 2016-2017’, draws on ethnographic research in England during the geopolitical uncertainty of 2016–2017. The authors track the trajectories and narratives of six individuals. The research begins with final year pupils in schools talking about their futures, during and after their A-Level exams (aged roughly 18 years). The research then tracks these young people on routes to higher education and employment, exploring how they are socialised into imaginings of the future and/or struggle to inhabit these futures. The authors suggest that a deeply-ingrained, modernist, neoliberal reckoning of ‘future time’ is normalised through experiences of schooling. This logic, however, is troubled profoundly in the transition to life after school. The researchers found that young people's experiences in an unpredictable present ran in stark contrast to the ordered trajectory of future action they had been socialised to expect. Amidst this uncertainty, ambivalence towards shaping the future (‘Fuck It, Shit Happens’) can in some ways feel like the most agentic stance to take. The authors argue that a social generations approach to youth transitions reveals how we must critique the very concept of ‘the future’ if we are to understand the reality of youth transitions in the present.

No collection of papers could fully do justice to the legacy that Andy Furlong has left for the field of Youth Studies. Nevertheless, we hope that these articles – with their balance of attention to new empirical research and to theoretical debate, with their consideration and critique of concepts and terms that might help us better capture the experiences of young people, with their focus on ‘the now’ of youth but also youth in the context of generations, history and change across time, with their interest in change and continuity in young people's labour market transitions and wider lives, with their concern for disadvantage and inequality – go some way to reflecting Andy's own research interests and his intellectual contribution to Youth Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dan Woodman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2893-5222