Learning and Improvisation at the Policy-practice Interface

Throughout this book, we have explored specific education, training, employment, and guidance practices as manifestations of increasingly dominant European policies and discourses relating to 'activation'. These have as their espoused purpose that of better integrating unemployed and socially excluded young adults into the social and economic fabric of society. However, the complex ways in which these largely instrumental and economically derived policy discourses operate at the micro level of everyday practice and impact on young adults' processes of identity formation and participation, remain largely invisible to the system as a whole.