ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how youth work at times in history refracts or illuminates social issues in relationship to its work with young people. It reviews the sociological analyses that have propped notions of transitions as critical in youth work history. In the broadest sense, youth work has been characterized as falling into one of two sociological approaches: either as a strategy that aims to support young people to become productive members of existing society or as a strategy aimed towards changing the societal structures and oppressive mechanisms that recapitulate inequalities in the lives of younger generations. Butters and Newell argue that a critical break is needed to move towards a radical paradigm of youth work because regulation functions to replicate the dominant social order and thus expel any movement towards radical change. Global Youth Work (GYW) was first coined in 1995 by Bourn and McCollum of the Development Education Association and has been most widely accepted in the U.K.
