Youth transitions in an age of uncertainty

Abstract

In this chapter, youth transitions will be discussed in the framework of life course theory and with a focus on the consequences of the restructuring of work for the timing of adulthood in a comparative perspective. For youth research, the concepts ‘transitions’ and ‘pathways’ are of special importance because they refer to the timing and duration of the passage to adulthood and stimulate investigations on how life chances, institutional regulations and individual decisions are related. The social age markers, which used to define the timing of transitions, have lost theirnormative force in the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, though they are still used by young adults, institutions and parents as a means of orientation. Today, individual biographical timetables do not follow socially expected and culturally transmitted age-norms. The borders between all phases of the life course have become fuzzy, the timing and duration of transitions between childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood, and old age are less age-dependent and demand a series of individual decisions. Some youth researchers, representing developmental or cultural positions, see thestructural changes of the life course as a sign of more autonomy, but a more down-toearth explanation would take into account the labour markets and social policies of postindustrial service societies which have restructured youth transitions and created the new life phase of young adulthood. Standard employment has been replaced by flexible work and precarious careers, a development which makes it difficult to individually coordinate the multiple transitions which mark the route to adulthood and require special programmes for preventing the social exclusion of disadvantaged youths. I shall argue that the instabilities of the life course stem from the tension betweenuncertain life chances and the culture of individualism which expects that people actively shape their biographies. At the level of cultural expectations, there is a double-edged message: perform your transitions and pathway choices according to market opportunities and institutional rules and do this according to your individual, self-determined timing. In the following, first, the concepts of transition and pathways will be outlined, thenthe changing social contexts of youth transitions are sketched out, followed by adiscussion of how young people navigate pathways and use their experiences for selfsocialization and shaping their biographies, finally, research issues concerning the relationship between life course policy and transitions are outlined.