ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we considered different ways that young unemployed adults perceived themselves and their choices in a changing labor market. We used the notion of 'working-identity' to convey the idea of young people engaging in plural, complex, fluid, hybrid, and contingent processes. Giddens speaks of identities as 'continually revised biographical narratives' (1991). To perceive young adults' identities in this way confronts us with the question of how processes of identity (re)formation might be constructively influenced by different forms of relationship and social practices:
In this chapter, we explore further how various activation projects responded to young adults 'identities in (com)motion'. Implicitly, and explicitly, we are increasingly bringing to the fore questions such as whether and how funded projects aimed at reducing social exclusion and unemployment seem to be effective in influencing young adults':
• capacity to reflexively process their life and work experiences;
• development of a greater sense of possibility and choice;
• competence for different forms of social and economic participation;
• capacity to engage in social learning, around the contradictions and disjunctions they experience;
• capacity to exert individual and collective agency in response to changing social and economic conditions.
