Introduction

It is a normal facet of intergenerational relationships that adults complain that young people have changed compared to when they were young. Karl Mannheim (1970) described this as social conflict that arises from the different horizons and experiences separating generational layers, something that plays a key contributing role in social innovation. In this chapter, we argue that, in late modern societies, these changes are profound, perhaps more so than the older generation and the societal institutions they administrate have realised thus far. Hence, public policies persistently fail to address young people. We start from the hypothesis that young people's transitions to adulthood are undergoing a process of destandardisation, while institutions and policies addressing such transitions continue to assume a linear life-course model in which social integration is equivalent to labour market integration.

The chapter is based on the work of the European Group for Integrated Social Research (EGRIS) and particularly on the EU-funded project ‘Misleading trajectories’. It consists of three main sections. First, it outlines some general aspects and elements of the changes that have affected youth transitions during the past few decades. The second section concentrates on the relationship between young people's transitions and education and training, welfare and labour market policies. By simply reducing their perspective to school-to-work transitions and still assuming that ‘normal’ transitions are structured in a linear manner, such policies increasingly cause ‘misleading trajectories’; that is, policies that intend to lead young people towards social integration but instead (re)produce social exclusion. Third, and finally, it suggests a new policy approach that takes these changes and risks into consideration: Integrated Transition Policies (ITPs), which attempt to overcome compartmentalisation and fragmentation in order better to deal with the complexity of contemporary young adults’ lives.

Destandardisation of transitions: from linearity towards uncertainty

Over a number of years, a branch of social research has developed that is concerned with investigating young people in a comparative European perspective. In these studies, one can perceive some changes in what has come to be called the ‘sociology of youth’. In the industrial era, the ‘model of youth’ has been conceptualised as a moratorium that follows childhood as a preparation for adult status. The transition from childhood to adulthood was perceived as a linear process resulting in gender-specific normal biographies structured by paid work for men and by the role of housewife and mother for women.