Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers and Social Exclusion

Abstract

We now turn our attention away from young people’s differential engagement with school to consider their leisure lives and social networks and how these relate to wider process of inclusion and exclusion. As we described in chapter 2, more holistic youth research has striven to understand young people’s housing and family careers as well as their school-to-work experiences (Coles, 2000a). Relatively few studies simultaneously consider criminal and drug-using careers (see chapter 9), and fewer still incorporate an investigation of youth leisure as part of the task of charting and understanding transitions. Although young people’s leisure lives were not imagined by us to be significant in this respect, they certainly became so in the course of fieldwork and analysis. In this chapter, we discuss young people’s accounts of their changing free-time associations, peer networks and leisure activities and their significance in explaining their current life situations. We use the concept of ‘leisure career’, which has had some airing in the leisure studies literature (Rapoport and Rapoport, 1975) but which has been discussed rarely in youth research (Roberts et al., 1990; Roberts, 1999).

Corner Boys are groups of men who centre their social activities upon particular street corners…they constitute the bottom level of society within their age group, and at the same time they make up the great majority of young men in Cornerville…most of them were unemployed or had only irregular employment. Few had completed high school…

Whyte (1943: xvii)

They don’t want to do a qualification…There are high levels of absenteeism, truancy. It [studying] has no relevance to them. They simply don’t care ... the most important things to them are not their relationships with schools or teachers, but their relationships at night-time. Friendships and street corners are the main thing. Total apathy. They never do their homework. Drugs and sex — that’s what their life is.

Karen (who works with school-leavers deemed not ‘work-ready’: our emphasis)