Individualization of disadvantaged young people’s agency

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how professionals working in youth support services articulate the agency of disadvantaged young people living in a suburban area. Using focus group discussions between professionals in the field of youth services, this article shows that professional articulations of disadvantaged young peoples’ agency are shaped in line with institutional and ideological individualization, which is embedded in the predominant societal practices and welfare policies of the Western societies. These articulations privatize (im)possibilities of agency and exclusionary social dynamics in the individual lives of disadvantaged young people themselves and ignore wider socio-structural contexts limiting their agency and causing social problems. We argue that the dominant understandings that professionals hold of young people’s agency have a threefold individualizing character. First, those understandings identify agency as and through the personal characteristics of individual young people; second, they address individual factors as the ultimate causes of social exclusion; and third, they seek solutions to social problems at the level of the individual. These findings contribute to the on-going debate in youth studies on individualization and the roles of agency and structure in young people’s lives by bringing the professional emphasis on individualized agency to the fore.