ABSTRACT

In his historical account of the emergence of the teenager Jon Savage maps the emergence of ‘youth’ as a specific stage in the lifecourse, associated with the emergence of modernity, consumerism and global capitalism spanning (Savage 2007). What began in the 1890s as a European and upper class avant-garde movement was by the 1950s a mass global culture with its own manifestos, music and theories. Central to the idea of the ‘teenager’ was the notion of autonomy – from parents but also from the past and the demand that they replicate previous models of masculinity, femininity, work and leisure. ‘Youth’ then gains a paradoxical status as both an abstract period of transition between dependent childhood and independent adulthood that all are subject to and which is consolidated in legal definitions of ages of consent, majority, rights and responsibility – as well as a more contingent and messy negotiations of situated generational change involving families, localities, popular culture, biography and history. Within youth studies the metaphor of transition has proved to be a useful way of describing the different strands that constitute adulthood, with researchers documenting the contours of housing transitions, school to work transitions and transitions from families of origin to destination-mapping on to the policy categories of the post-war welfare state. This kind of approach also enabled an awareness of how the conditions enabling these strands of transition changed over time and the consequences of this for other dimensions of transition – so for example noting how the disappearance of a youth labour market from the 1970s onwards gave rise to ‘extended dependency’ where young people relied on parental support for longer. It is important to remember that the idea of transitions was a conceptual framework imposed on the messy realities of social life, and reflecting a particular historical moment of post-war welfare consensus underpinned by a belief that social policy could and should produce ‘social security’ across the life-course – balancing out the costs of economic activity and dependency through a model of shared tax and welfare. This is a model that continues to operate in much of northern Europe, yet which is being dismantled in the UK and US since the 1980s by the adoption of neo-liberal policies and economies. Tracing data from the 1970s into the 1990s, British sociologists Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel characterised a shift in youth transitions over this period likened to the difference between a train journey (fixed tracks and all getting on and off at the same stations) and myriad car journeys, individualised in times of timings, reversible and less predictable (Furlong and Cartmel 2007).