Introduction

The effects of the global financial crisis (GFC) on young people in and beyond the world’s richer countries would be a compelling and deserving subject for a comprehensive analytical project in the social sciences. This is especially so for those young people whose prospects for becoming socially and financially independent adults have been severely delayed, significantly impaired or placed beyond reach as a result. An authoritative description of and explanation for mass unemployment, how it has become endemic amongst 16 to 24-yearolds, and why it shows serious signs of becoming a ubiquitous global phenomenon would be equally worthwhile. To differing degrees, these recent developments and the deep underlying concerns to which they give rise are one of the foci of this book. Not only do they set the context for what follows, they also direct the analytical gaze to the origins of the recent crises of young people’s participation and non-participation in education, training and paid work.

In the UK at least, these crises are not without precedents, recognisable precursors, and familiar responses in policy and in public discourse. What is new is the urgent need to understand how these developments – recurrent, endemic and ubiquitous as they are becoming – should be interpreted and theorised, by connecting the multiple elements of the study of young people across a range of disciplines and fields of study of the social sciences. While it is no longer the case that such studies proceed only or predominantly within the analytical and empirical confines of their own specialisms, attempts at genuinely integrative studies that traverse policy fields and disciplinary foci and methodologies remain a small minority. Even rarer are studies that are explicitly theoretical in origin and orientation. Rarest of all are those that endeavour to understand the plights of the most adversely and severely affected groups of young people in ways that cross policy fields, social science disciplines and theories, and the groupings and paradigms within which they are embedded.

The critical need for such an approach is in one sense simply explained. Although there are specific and powerful examples of the ways in which social science research and analysis has exerted direct, transparent and even tangible effects on policies addressed to some groups of young people that are most negatively affected by major social, political and economic changes, they too are rare.