Young people and structural inequality: beyond the middle ground

Abstract

This paper draws on recent debates about the work of Ulrich Beck to explore the conceptual promise of concepts such as individualisation and reflexivity for understanding contemporary youth inequalities. The aim of the paper was to suggest a theory of reflexivity that views reflexive practices as one of the ways that inequalities operate in modernity. The argument is made in three stages. In the first, debates about the meaning of reflexivity for understanding young people's identities are reviewed, foregrounding suggestions for dialogue and synthesis between the individualisation thesis and the work of Bourdieu. Taking this as a starting point, the paper then reviews changing themes in the literature on young people's identities and the structuring of their biographies amidst conditions of social change, arguing that reflexivity is an important feature of young people's identities, and that reflexive practices articulate classed inequalities under conditions of ‘structured fragmentation’. The paper then argues that reflexivity is a means by which the dispositions of the habitus are realised and reworked in practice. The paper concludes by emphasising that reflexive practices are oriented towards local structural conditions, and are one of the ways in which economies of cultural capital operate in late modernity.