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

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Imported on 2024-05-21 13:10

⭐ Important

• & 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. (p. 1)
• & 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. (p. 3)
• & 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). (p. 3)
• & 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. (p. 3)
• & 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. (p. 3)
• & 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 (p. 4)
• & 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. (p. 4)