ABSTRACT
To debate the relationship between ‘youth work’ and ‘citizenship’ is rather like Barbara Wootton’s depiction of an offender attempting to predict their sentence: ‘like a drunkard trying to hit a moving punch-ball with a wobbling hand’. There has been renewed attention to the general concept of citizenship. Beyond its use as a rhetorical device in the promotion of citizen’s charters and citizen’s service, the formerly taken-for-granted assumptions around citizenship have been increasingly problematised, especially as concern has increased about, on the one hand, access to a range of services and, on the other, social integration and social solidarity. Unless the idea of citizenship is reduced to some individualised notion of consumerism, it must refer to the bonds which bind fellow-citizens together and to the community, or society, to which they belong. Civic virtue - being a good citizen - relates to attitudes and behaviour and expresses itself as a sense of responsibility.
