2 - Globalization and Its Impact on the Political, Economic, and Labor Market Aspects of the Transition

Summary

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that the Great Recession has accelerated preexisting trends regarding transformations of employment opportunities and labor markets in industrial societies. These trends, in turn, are shaped through the dynamic and changing interplay of political and economic relationships in response to increasing globalization. However, national political and institutional structures are not powerless in the face of these changes. While they cannot insulate societies and young people from their effects, they can buffer, and to some extent shape, the ways in which these transformations impact on young people's experience of major economic and financial upheavals such as the Great Recession. More specifically I argue that one of the effects of the recession was to speed up preexisting trends regarding deskilling and casualization on young people's transition to work because of their vulnerability at the point of entry to the labor market. However, the differences in national political structures and institutional arrangements meant that young people in the UK, the USA, and Germany experienced the impact of the Great Recession in different ways. While national governments have not been able to reverse these trends they do have powerful instruments through which their impact on young people can be moderated.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to assess the impact of globalization on youth transitions in times of social and economic change. The first section traces the interplay between economic and political relations at the global level that were responsible for the changes in the transition from school to work associated with the Great Recession. Specifically it documents the shift from nation-centric forms of production to global-centric forms of production. In doing this it highlights the common pressures and trends these global changes imposed on national economies. The second section illustrates how the national economies responded to these longer-term changes. It traces the link between these preexisting global trends and changes in the power balance between different national class and status groups and how globalization changed the occupational structures of the older industrial societies. The third section focuses on how these global processes of change were mediated at the national level by the political and institutional structures of the three societies, the USA, the UK, and Germany, and what their consequences were for young people.