Afterword: Dynamic and socially embedded: biographies of participation in youth

Summary

This book has opened up the issue of participation in youth to explore what lies beneath the superficial discourse. It has examined official and unofficial constructions of participation by young people in a range of socio-political domains, explored the motivations and rationales underlying official attempts to increase participation among young people, and offered a critique of their effectiveness. This agenda was not undertaken in a vacuum. Political participation is a form of citizenship, a term which describes the complex relationship between the individual and formal society (the state): a relationship which changes not only over time but also over the life course. In this postscript, I shall briefly examine the effects of individualisation on citizenship in youth, and more broadly on young people's biographies. Then I would like to consider why it is not only policy structures which affect young people's participation, but also the beliefs and practices in their families. This leads me to question how young people can become active citizens in the manner expected of them when their economic and social dependence on their parents has been extended.

From collectivism to individualisation

The shift in post-industrial societies from modernity, with its fixed ideologies, to a more relativist middle-ground world view, demographic change, and the crisis in welfare capitalism are only some of the major social shifts in recent decades. In post-war welfare states, citizenship was thought of in terms of universal rights (to employment, to housing or to welfare) aimed at ensuring a minimum basic standard of living. There has since been a shift towards seeing citizenship in terms of individual responsibility. Welfare dependency is seen by those on the centre-right of politics as one of the main causes of social ills, generating a ‘feckless’ underclass culture. A blame culture has thus developed. The social glue of shared experience which held communities together is said to be under threat. We are no longer ‘all in this together’; each of us stands alone. The reality is not only greater inequality, but the individualisation of poverty. Responsibility for escaping poverty is increasingly laid at the feet of the individual, who is blamed for his or her own circumstances. Structural explanations of social inequality have been disregarded by policy makers, in favour of cultural ones, which have themselves been distorted and exaggerated.