Introduction

Non-participation in education, training, the labour market or other forms of approved productive activity is named and narrated in remarkably diverse ways. In the UK at least, young people who are not participants in recognised activities are variously described as unemployed, truants, disengaged, disconnected, marginalised, socially excluded, or as welfare dependants, dropouts, resistant refusers, victims of failed transitions or members of a new precariat. These terminologies and narrations manifest themselves as social-scientific concepts, administrative categories, historical accounts, policy discourses and scholarly literatures. Charting and analysing the ways in which they are constructed, propagated and afforded status as authoritative descriptors would provide an informative focus for the study and analysis of problematised populations of young people. The more modest aim of this chapter is to examine three principal discourses that purport to explain non-participation – those of transitions, social exclusion and disengagement. The chapter also provides a historical account of some major changes that have radically and apparently irreversibly altered the circumstances in which young people are able – or unable – to achieve social and economic independence as young adults; and of the policy shifts which have initiated, responded to or cemented those changes. It also draws on a range of literatures which variously expound, analyse and critique the changes, discourses and policies with which they are associated.