New biographies in the ‘risk society’? About future and planning

Abstract

If the ‘first modernity’ construed the meaning of future as a time of experimentation and possibilities, contemporary modernity defines it rather as an uncertain dimension, as such more a limit than as a resource. This new semantic framework also deeply shapes the ways and forms in which young people's biographies come to be defined. While new ways of relating to the future and time are delineated, the ‘life plan’ constitutes increasingly less the principle capable of structuring biographies. Particularly visible in the biographical constructions of young people, these forms of temporalisation do not imply, however, the pure and simple loss of the future. Rather, as recent research would indicate, a number of the young people appear to be actively involved in the construction of forms of mediation between the need for subjective control over future time and the risky and uncertain social environment of today.