Broken Transitions: From School to the Scrap Heap

Abstract

Some recent British studies of youth unemployment have argued that many young people, and especially working-class youth, are now facing a ‘broken transition’ to adult status (for example, Willis, 1984). This work is part of the considerable research literature on youth which has developed since the discovery of ‘teen-agers’ after the Second World War. Its antecedents lie in G. Stanley Hall’s comprehensive study of adolescence, in which nineteenth-century social Darwinism provides the foundation for the ideological construction of adolescence (Hall, 1904; cf. Cohen, 1986). Research in this area has spanned sociological studies of ‘youth’ and psychological investigations of ‘adolescence’, including work on juvenile delinquency, youth cultures and sub-cultures, the transition from school to work, and adolescent moral and sexual development. The recent sharp rise in youth unemployment has led to a marked increase in research on or around youth. Some researchers have reproduced dominant themes in the study of unemployment, whilst others have reassessed existing assumptions about youth and adulthood, work and leisure, as well as prevailing analyses of young people’s experiences and the transition to adult status (Griffin, 1985a). On another level, recent research on youth unemployment has retained some key features of earlier studies, notably the focus on young men’s experiences as the norm, and the perception of young people (especially white and Afro-Caribbean males) as potential problems, or alternatively as sources of important cultural and political resistances.