Robert Macdonald
Biographic Data
| ID | 3604062 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Macdonald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Macdonald |
| SIGNATURE | MACDONALD R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Teesside University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3496-9886 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 655 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Keynote papers from the 4th Journal of Youth Studies International Conference , University of Ulster 2024
It gives us great pleasure to present this collection of five papers. Each was presented as a keynote lecture at the 4th Journal of Youth Studies International Conference at the University of Ulste...
Missing Youth: Reflecting on Resistance through Rituals and the sociological study of working-class youth and youth culture since then
Resistance Through Rituals ( RTR ) remains one of the most important texts in the history of British youth sociology. The influence of CCCS sub-culture theory was profound and far-reaching. Nevertheless, criticisms soon came and, arguably, one of the most significant of these was about the apparent absence of the mass of working-class young people from subcultures and subcultural analysis and their implicit framing, therefore, as less interesting…
Introduction to special issue: Youth, rural places and marginalisation
Nothing happens here, but that’s ok’: Reflexivity, immobility and staying among young people in marginalised rural locations
Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have ch…
Transitions into adulthood for people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder: A scoping review of promising practices
The Covid-19 pandemic and youth in recent, historical perspective: More pressure, more precarity
Young people have faced some of the hardest social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Taking a critical Youth Studies perspective, we draw on research with nearly 1000 16-to-30-year olds in North East England in order to rectify the ‘structured absence’ of young people’s viewpoints in national media and political commentary about the pandemic. Our findings contradict narratives about young people as lockdown ‘…
Can domestic observers serve as impartial arbiters: Evidence from Zambia’s 2021 elections
With international election observation subject to increasing criticism, this article evaluates how effectively domestic observers can play the role of impartial arbiters relative to their international counterparts. It reviews academic arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of domestic and international observers, with a focus on 1) their methodologies, resources, and reporting practices; and 2) their credibility. It presents a case study …
Youth Beyond the City: Thinking from the Margins
Youth Beyond the City: Thinking from the Margins
The purpose of this book is to situate the place beyond the city as an epistemological vantage point for researching youth. Existing frameworks about young people privilege large urban centres or ‘global cities’ and create forms of marginality that are at once spatial and epistemological. This book interrogates and moves beyond these boundaries, turning the margins into a unique position for understanding youth and examining forms of difference w…
Why have so many African leaders died of Covid-19
This paper provides evidence that the COVID-19-related mortality rate of national government ministers and heads of state has been substantially higher than that of people with a similar sex and age profile in the general population, a trend that is driven by African cases (17 out of 24 reported deaths worldwide, as of 6 February 2021). Ministers’ work frequently puts them in close contact with diverse groups, and therefore at higher risk of cont…
Youth, the ‘underclass’ and social exclusion
Dennis Fentie (1950–2019)
the Yukon lost one of its former premiers, Dennis Fentie.Born in Edmonton, Alberta, on 8 November 1950 and raised by his
Inequality, continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies
This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to bu…
Looking South: What can Youth Studies in the Global North learn from research on youth and policy in the Middle East and North African countries
Connell’s ‘Southern Theory’ calls for intellectuals in the ‘Global North’ ‘to start learning in new ways, and in new relationships’ with and from scholars in the ‘Global South’ in order to better understand the subjects of our research. This, exactly, is the motivation of this paper. In working with, and drawing, on a large, comparative research programme about young people and youth policy in some of the Middle East and North African (MENA) coun…
Sister Mary Agnes Sutherland (1926–2018)
Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: Young people, families and poverty across generations
One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our…
Youth, enterprise and precarity: Or, What Is, and What Is Wrong With, the 'Gig Economy
By taking an historical perspective, and by drawing on our own empirical work from the UK in the 1980s and more recently, we argue three main things. First, we need to understand the particular conditions of 'the gig economy' as a concentrated form of a more general de-standardisation of employment that has brought multiple forms of insecure work. Second, although there is clamour and excitement about 'the gig economy' in fact it shares strong pa…
Re-evaluating international observation of Kenya's 2017 elections
Following the Supreme Court's decision to annul the August 2017 Kenyan elections, many commentators – including journalists, academics, politicians and non-elite Kenyan voters – criticised international election observation missions on the grounds that they had declared the election 'free and fair'. This article argues that specific allegations of incompetence and bias fail to acknowledge how international observers' preliminary statements restra…
The Young Women’s Health CoOp in Cape Town, South Africa: Study protocol for a cluster-randomised trial for adolescent women at risk for HIV
Trial registration no: NCT02974998 , November 29, 2016
Age and gender voting trends in the 2015 Tanzanian general election
In Tanzania, younger voters have been more inclined to support opposition parties than their elders, who have proven relatively reluctant to look beyond the incumbent party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). A 'gender gap' also exists within Tanzanian politics. Women are more likely to be pro-CCM than men, who are comparatively open to a change of government. Based on qualitative data collected in Tanzania between 2013 and 2015, this article looks to ex…
The language of empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918
During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century the British Empire increased enormously and by 1900 the Empire covered a fifth of the world's land surface. In Britain itself, the growth of Empire came to the centre of the political debate and was applauded by a largely sympathetic press. Two sides of imperialism had emerged - the acquisition of territory and a campaign of propaganda to make imperialism 'popular'. Both are the subject of th…
Impact”, research and slaying Zombies: The pressures and possibilities of the REF
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically upon current debates and tensions in the governance of research in the UK and more widely, particularly the imperative that social science research should demonstrate impact beyond the academy. Design/methodology/approach Drawing implicitly upon the Bevir’s theory of governance, the paper positions discourses about “research excellence and research impact” as elite narratives that are roo…
Not single spies but in battalions: A critical, sociological engagement with the idea of so-called 'Troubled Families
Recent political and popular discourses in the UK have drawn upon a range of different concepts and powerful and easily recalled sound bites to describe groups who are disadvantaged and who are portrayed as undeserving. The labelling of disadvantaged groups in negative terms and in order to support punitive policies has a long history and not just in the UK. From the racialized ‘underclass' discourses popular in the US to the recent discourse aro…
In search of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies
The idea of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’ has become influential in UK politics and policy, and been used to explain contemporary worklessness and to justify welfare reforms. Workless parents are said to pass on to their children attitudes and behaviours which inculcate ‘welfare dependency’. In its strongest version, politicians and welfare practitioners talk confidently of ‘three generations of families where no-one has ever worke…
Benefits Street' and the Myth of Workless Communities
This paper critically engages with a pervasive myth about welfare in the UK which is commonly spread by politicians, think tanks and the media. This is the myth that there are areas of the country which are so affected by entrenched cultures of 'welfare dependency' that the majority of residents are unemployed. In undertaking research that sought to investigate a different idea - that there are families where no-one has worked over several genera…
Fiddly Jobs, Undeclared Working and the Something for Nothing Society
Whilst it may be easy to dismiss ideological diatribes about `a something for nothing society' as empty rhetoric, there are relatively few recent studies with which to assess claims about `benefit scroungers' and `dole fiddlers'. Qualitative methods were employed to explore the ways in which some working-class people in an economically depressed locality did `fiddly jobs' (i.e. working `undeclared' whilst in receipt of unemployment benefits). The…
Poverty Talk: How People Experiencing Poverty Deny Their Poverty and Why They Blame 'The Poor
Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in 'the low-pay, no-pay cycle', this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty - in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned 'the poor'. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of c…
Growing Up in Poor Neighbourhoods: The Significance of Class and Place in the Extended Transitions of ‘Socially Excluded’Young Adults
Drawing upon qualitative, longitudinal research with 'socially excluded' young adults from some of England's poorest neighbourhoods, the article explores how locally-embedded, social networks become part of the process whereby poverty and class inequalities are reproduced. Networks of family and friends, rooted in severely de-industrialized locales, supported young people as they carved out transitions to adulthood in adverse circumstances. Examp…
In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions
This paper represents a further contribution to recent debates in the Journal of Youth Studies about subculture theory and ‘post-subcultural studies’. Specifically, we argue that the particularised focus of the latter on youth culture in relation to music, dance and style negates a fuller, more accurate exploration of the cultural identities and experiences of the majority of young people. Celebratory and broadly postmodern theories have been uti…
Welfare Dependency, the Enterprise Culture and Self-Employed Survival
New right discourses about a welfare underclass advance the idea that a significant proportion of the long-term unemployed prefer benefit dependency to working for a living. The alternative to this `dependency culture' is the `enterprise culture', the most tangible manifestation of which is the rapid growth in self-employment and the number of new, small firms in the UK over the past fifteen years. Whilst sociologists have engaged with debates ab…
Youth transitions, unemployment and underemployment: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
What is youth studies for? One answer to this question points to the valuable, possibly unique, position youth research has as a window on processes of social change and of social continuity. Based on the author's long-term engagement in youth research, from the early 1980s to now, this article reflects on how youth transitions to the labour market - and the way that they are thought about in youth studies and youth policy - have changed and stay…
In search of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’: Hunting the Yeti and shooting zombies
The idea of ‘intergenerational cultures of worklessness’ has become influential in UK politics and policy, and been used to explain contemporary worklessness and to justify welfare reforms. Workless parents are said to pass on to their children attitudes and behaviours which inculcate ‘welfare dependency’. In its strongest version, politicians and welfare practitioners talk confidently of ‘three generations of families where no-one has ever worke…
Youth, enterprise and precarity: Or, What Is, and What Is Wrong With, the 'Gig Economy
By taking an historical perspective, and by drawing on our own empirical work from the UK in the 1980s and more recently, we argue three main things. First, we need to understand the particular conditions of 'the gig economy' as a concentrated form of a more general de-standardisation of employment that has brought multiple forms of insecure work. Second, although there is clamour and excitement about 'the gig economy' in fact it shares strong pa…
Young people, class and place
This collection focuses on issues of class and place in respect of young people’s lives. \nThe contributions derive, at least in part, from a one-day British Sociological \nAssociation Youth Study Group seminar that was hosted by the Youth Research \nGroup at the University of Teesside in September 2008. What is special or important about the social scientific study of \nyouth? One answer is that the youth phase provides a privileged vantage poin…
Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers, Youth (Sub)culture and Social Exclusion
This paper draws upon qualitative research with ‘socially excluded’ young people in the North East of England. It proposes that the concept and study of ‘leisure careers’ is useful in understanding the transitions, (sub)cultural experiences and identities of social groups like this. The empirical focus is upon the significance of leisure careers in the neighbourhood‐based, social networks of some criminally involved, socially excluded young adult…
The Covid-19 pandemic and youth in recent, historical perspective: More pressure, more precarity
Young people have faced some of the hardest social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Taking a critical Youth Studies perspective, we draw on research with nearly 1000 16-to-30-year olds in North East England in order to rectify the ‘structured absence’ of young people’s viewpoints in national media and political commentary about the pandemic. Our findings contradict narratives about young people as lockdown ‘…
Youth and wellbeing: Experiencing Bereavement and Ill Health in Marginalised Young People's Transitions
Research that explores youth transitions, health, bereavement and wellbeing is rare. Rarer still is research that does this on the basis of long-term, longitudinal, qualitative research with socioeconomically disadvantaged young people. This article draws upon biographical interviews undertaken with 186 young adults in some of England's poorest neighbourhoods (in Teesside, North East England) to examine how experiences of health, wellbeing and be…
Benefits Street' and the Myth of Workless Communities
This paper critically engages with a pervasive myth about welfare in the UK which is commonly spread by politicians, think tanks and the media. This is the myth that there are areas of the country which are so affected by entrenched cultures of 'welfare dependency' that the majority of residents are unemployed. In undertaking research that sought to investigate a different idea - that there are families where no-one has worked over several genera…
Impact”, research and slaying Zombies: The pressures and possibilities of the REF
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect critically upon current debates and tensions in the governance of research in the UK and more widely, particularly the imperative that social science research should demonstrate impact beyond the academy. Design/methodology/approach Drawing implicitly upon the Bevir’s theory of governance, the paper positions discourses about “research excellence and research impact” as elite narratives that are roo…
Youth, Transitions and Social Exclusion: Some Issues for Youth Research in the UK
Studies of the economic restructuring of the UK suggest that the future labour market will be typified by increasing proportions of workers unemployed or subemployed in casual, informal, peripheral, non-standard jobs. Clearly the future working lives of many young people will be substantially different from those of their parents' generation, as full employment in regular, relatively permanent jobs gives way to more insecure and risky working liv…
Snakes & Ladders: In Defence Of Studies Of Youth Transition
Although enjoying a period of renewed government policy interest and favourable research funding, youth studies has recently come under considerable intellectual attack, much of it from within. A common theme is that the major conceptual approach of most British youth research over the past twenty years - the sociological study of youth transitions - is not helpful in approaching 'the youth question'. The paper locates these recent critiques in t…
Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: Young people, families and poverty across generations
One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our…
Biographies of exclusion: Poor work and poor transitions
The usefulness of the concept of transition has been hotly contested in Anglophone youth studies over the past decade. A variety of criticisms have been ranged against it, including that it: presumes the continuing predominance of linear, obvious, mainstream pathways to adulthood; excludes wider youth questions in focusing narrowly on educational and employment encounters; prioritises normative and policy‐focused assumptions and de‐prioritises th…
Labours of Love: Voluntary Working in a Depressed Local Economy
Whilst studies of employment have fuelled arguments about post-Fordism and questions of flexibility, recent debates about welfare have considered social polarization and the growth of an anti-social, anti-work 'underclass'. In both cases, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which people in depressed local economies now survive through precarious, marginal and informal work.This article explores how people deprived of jobs se…
Looking South: What can Youth Studies in the Global North learn from research on youth and policy in the Middle East and North African countries
Connell’s ‘Southern Theory’ calls for intellectuals in the ‘Global North’ ‘to start learning in new ways, and in new relationships’ with and from scholars in the ‘Global South’ in order to better understand the subjects of our research. This, exactly, is the motivation of this paper. In working with, and drawing, on a large, comparative research programme about young people and youth policy in some of the Middle East and North African (MENA) coun…
Inequality, continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies
This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to bu…
Missing School: Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion
Qualitative research with socially excluded young people in a prime underclass locale is the basis for this examination of experiences of schooling in the shaping of youth transitions. Young people's accounts of school disaffection were depressingly familiar. Explanations for persistent truancy-for missing school-related, in part, to powerful, (sub)cultural critiques of orthodox claims about the instrumental relevance of education. Paradoxically,…
Risky business? Youth in the enterprise culture
A plethora of competing ideological versions of enterprise are currently being promoted in pre‐ and post‐16 education and training. Dominant among these models is enterprise as self‐employment in small business. While moves to transform the educational system (and, indeed, whole regions of the country) in the name of economic enterprise proceed apace, there has been little in the way of independent, critical analysis of the consequences of the ri…
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online: The Marginalised Mainstream: Making Sense of the 'Missing Middle' of Youth Studies
Research in the field of youth studies has produced many important insights and has been influential in critiquing, shaping, and changing our understandings of, and social policies in respect of, young people's lives. The social scientific focus has, rightly so, oftentimes been on those young people more obviously situated on the margins of society and possibly at risk of becoming excluded or disconnected from it. There has been some occasional a…
Nothing happens here, but that’s ok’: Reflexivity, immobility and staying among young people in marginalised rural locations
Research and policy analysis often presumes a ‘mobility imperative’ in respect of rural youth; to ‘get on’ they have to ‘get out’. Those who stay, therefore, tend to be depicted as socially and economically deficient, backward, lacking agency and ‘left behind’. The aim of our paper is to provide a corrective to this sort of thinking. We present new, extensive, qualitative, longitudinal research conducted with fifty young men and women who have ch…
Family Development in Three Generations
Family Development in Three Generations is an unusual kind of multigenerational gathering-the result of a massive, in-depth research effort. It is based upon Hill's personal interviews conducted with over 300 families during the course of a year. The discussion results from these interviews, from the statistical information that they produced, and from Hill's consultation with fi ve other fellow researchers. This scholarly contribution to the fam…
Local Policy Management Needs: The Federal Response
Epic and Chronicle: The "Poema de mio Cid" and the "Crónica de veinte reyes" . Brian Powell
Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission, by Thomas R. Berger
Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Canadian Arctic Explorer, by William R. Hunt
Integrating Theory and Practice
Integrating Theory and Practice Get access Jerome H. Zimmerman Jerome H. Zimmerman University of Southern MississippiHattiesburg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 32, Issue 1, January-February 1987, Page 95, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/32.1.95 Published: 01 January 1987
The House of Bernarda Alba
Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North, by Hugh Brody
Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901)
In the shallow Queen Maud Gulf a series of small islands, named by Amundsen during his Northwest Passage voyage, commemorate the arctic exploits of a remarkable Finnish-Swede, Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiold. Though best known for his epic voyage in the Vega, which went through the Northeast Passage and circumnavigated Asia and Europe in 1878-80, Nordenskiold had other bases for fame, including eight other trips to the Arctic. ... [These were primar…
Spirit of the Barrens: Diary of an Arctic Journey, a video by Peter Harmathy
with their cousins of the western Alaskan mainland, those records are presented by James VanStone in an organized synthesis that brings the careful description of everyday Alaskan Eskimo material culture into the twentieth century.It is most fitting that this job so well begun by Lantis should be equally well completed by VanStone, who is signally qualified by his own extensive experience with both historic and recent material culture of western …
Risky business? Youth in the enterprise culture
A plethora of competing ideological versions of enterprise are currently being promoted in pre‐ and post‐16 education and training. Dominant among these models is enterprise as self‐employment in small business. While moves to transform the educational system (and, indeed, whole regions of the country) in the name of economic enterprise proceed apace, there has been little in the way of independent, critical analysis of the consequences of the ri…
Risky Business
Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918
MacDonald documents his study with a wide range of contemporary sources, from newspapers to military memoirs. Exploring the genesis of an imperial institution through its own texts, he brings new insight into the Edwardian age
Fiddly Jobs, Undeclared Working and the Something for Nothing Society
Whilst it may be easy to dismiss ideological diatribes about `a something for nothing society' as empty rhetoric, there are relatively few recent studies with which to assess claims about `benefit scroungers' and `dole fiddlers'. Qualitative methods were employed to explore the ways in which some working-class people in an economically depressed locality did `fiddly jobs' (i.e. working `undeclared' whilst in receipt of unemployment benefits). The…
Welfare Dependency, the Enterprise Culture and Self-Employed Survival
New right discourses about a welfare underclass advance the idea that a significant proportion of the long-term unemployed prefer benefit dependency to working for a living. The alternative to this `dependency culture' is the `enterprise culture', the most tangible manifestation of which is the rapid growth in self-employment and the number of new, small firms in the UK over the past fifteen years. Whilst sociologists have engaged with debates ab…
Labours of Love: Voluntary Working in a Depressed Local Economy
Whilst studies of employment have fuelled arguments about post-Fordism and questions of flexibility, recent debates about welfare have considered social polarization and the growth of an anti-social, anti-work 'underclass'. In both cases, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which people in depressed local economies now survive through precarious, marginal and informal work.This article explores how people deprived of jobs se…
Youth, Transitions and Social Exclusion: Some Issues for Youth Research in the UK
Studies of the economic restructuring of the UK suggest that the future labour market will be typified by increasing proportions of workers unemployed or subemployed in casual, informal, peripheral, non-standard jobs. Clearly the future working lives of many young people will be substantially different from those of their parents' generation, as full employment in regular, relatively permanent jobs gives way to more insecure and risky working liv…
Employment, Unemployment and Social Polarization: Young People and Cyclical Transitions
L'A. examine la situation critique des plus defavorises dans une localite tres specifiquement britannique -Teeside- mettant en avant la combinaison de facteurs structurels ayant cree le monde du chomage ainsi que la banalisation du sous-emploi integree par tant de jeunes aujourd'hui. Les AA. soulignent le fait qu'un important aspect de l'echec des politiques destinees a combattre le chomage des jeunes a ete leurs tentatives de transformer les jeu…
Upwards and Onwards for the Unemployed
Heather Trickey, Karen Kellard, Robert Walker, Karl Ashworth and Alison Smith, Unemployment and Jobseeking: Two Years On, London: HMSO/Department of Social Security Research Report no. 87, 1998, £38.00, viii+203 pp.Mike Campbell, with Ian Sanderson and Fiona Walton, Local Response to Long-term Unemployment, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation/York Publishing Services, 1998, £12.95 paperback, v+58 pp.These two reports are both concerned with the unem…
Snakes & Ladders: In Defence Of Studies Of Youth Transition
Although enjoying a period of renewed government policy interest and favourable research funding, youth studies has recently come under considerable intellectual attack, much of it from within. A common theme is that the major conceptual approach of most British youth research over the past twenty years - the sociological study of youth transitions - is not helpful in approaching 'the youth question'. The paper locates these recent critiques in t…
Crossing the Rubicon: Youth transitions, poverty, drugs and social exclusion
Missing School: Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion
Qualitative research with socially excluded young people in a prime underclass locale is the basis for this examination of experiences of schooling in the shaping of youth transitions. Young people's accounts of school disaffection were depressingly familiar. Explanations for persistent truancy-for missing school-related, in part, to powerful, (sub)cultural critiques of orthodox claims about the instrumental relevance of education. Paradoxically,…
Disconnected Youth: Growing up in Britain's poor neighbourhoods
How do young people get by in hard times and hard places? Have they become a 'lost generation' disconnected from society's mainstream? Do popular ideas about social exclusion or a welfare dependent un
Growing Up in Poor Neighbourhoods: The Significance of Class and Place in the Extended Transitions of ‘Socially Excluded’Young Adults
Drawing upon qualitative, longitudinal research with 'socially excluded' young adults from some of England's poorest neighbourhoods, the article explores how locally-embedded, social networks become part of the process whereby poverty and class inequalities are reproduced. Networks of family and friends, rooted in severely de-industrialized locales, supported young people as they carved out transitions to adulthood in adverse circumstances. Examp…
Youth, The 'Underclass' and Social Exclusion
The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of 'decent' working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new 'dangerous class' and 'dangerous youth' are taken as the prime subjects of undercla…
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (38 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (31 works) · Law (24 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (15 works) · Geography (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Economic growth (13 works)