ABSTRACT
Navigation is a nautical term. Nautical charts must lead the ship and its crew safely through the endlessness of unknown oceans and bring them safely back to their home harbour. Why is it that this metaphor is used so frequently by youth sociologists to characterize the lives of young people who live in contemporary societies? Obviously their status and life circumstances are not clear but need active and informed navigators to do the intricate navigation work. The antagonistically intertwined concepts of structure and agency can teach us how to investigate that work and their workers. What makes the navigation work difficult and the outcome uncertain is the growing
tension between intended actions and unintended risks and outcomes. That tension is caught in the much discussed concept of ‘risk society’, originally introduced by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (Beck 1992). Living in contemporary risk societies intensifies feelings of contingency, feelings of never being sure if personal decisions will take me where I want to arrive. The motor which transforms traditional societies into risk societies is the speed with
which new technologies are developed, applied, spread and further developed. That development disquieted and fascinated philosophers and social scientists like Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century and many scholars again after the Second World War and up to the present. Interestingly (and disquietingly?) the fear of abusively used technology and knowledge has ceased these days. The ‘knowledge society’ seems to have sunny rather than dark connotations for most people (or not?). The term signifies that the acquisition of knowledge is worthwhile and even necessary to cope with modern life. Rapid structural changes are not restricted to certain societies and continents but are
spread over the globe, although at an uneven pace and with different outcomes. One of the many results of these developments is increased mobility of people within their own society and between countries and continents, resulting, among many other effects, in growing heterogeneity of national populations. Western-type societies willingly or unwillingly become host societies for people emigrating to find employment in the
richer continents of Europe and North America. Youth in a given society is no longer identical to autochthonous young people and can therefore not only be analysed within the traditional categories of social class and gender, but must now be conceived as an ethnically and culturally mixed group. Incalculable risks, growing knowledge and diverse ethnic-cultural composition of the
population are three influential conditions which steer the navigation work of young people today – or fail to do so. Youth sociologists have developed over the past three or so decades useful concepts to describe and analyse that navigation work – and its failures. Those concepts we now discuss in the remainder of this chapter.
