2

Transitions, Cultures, and

Identities: What Is Youth Studies?
Andy Furlong

Introduction

What insiders refer to as youth studies is often poorly defined. The focus
is on young people’s lives in a wide variety of contexts, although the
tendency to avoid chronological definitions of youth means that the
stage of life that we study may be interpreted narrowly, as broadly con-
current with adolescence as a bio-psychological stage of development,
or more generously interpreted to cover young adulthood. While soci-
ology remains the predominant discipline, other perspectives are drawn
from social psychology, political science, human geography, and anthro-
pology. With contemporary sociology often seen as being internally
divided, decentered, with the lack of a coherent core (Dunning and
Hughes 2012), it is perhaps unsurprising that sociological approaches
to youth are fragmented with divisions between those who work with
various forms of structuralism and those wedded to poststructuralist
perspectives.
In youth studies there is a fairly widespread assumption that the
relationship between research in what we might call the ‘transitions tra-
dition’ (which often focuses on forms of economic integration, such
as the transition from school to work) and the ‘cultural tradition’
(which tends to focus on youth cultures and forms of consumption)
is somewhat strained. Indeed, in a paper published in the Journal of Soci-
ology (Furlong et al. 2011), reference was made to the so-called false
binary between the two traditions, and it was argued that there was a
widespread confusion about the ways each of the traditions contributes
to a holistic understanding of youth in modern societies.

16
 Andy Furlong 17

In this chapter, I want to reinforce that argument and make an

attempt to move this debate forward. I highlight what each of the tradi-
tions brings to the table and argue that the work of Norbert Elias, who
was always careful to avoid individual/society binaries and was com-
mitted to viewing the social world as a process, is helpful in addressing
some of the issues that have divided youth studies. In the context of
late modernity, it is important that we bridge any gaps and address
what are sometimes little more than misunderstandings of what con-
stitutes good youth research. Indeed, to move forward and develop a
fruitful new agenda, I argue that it is necessary to be a little clearer
about what youth studies is, because sometimes we have a tendency
to ‘talk past each other’ as a result of a lack of clarity about our
subject area.
It is important to begin by exploding some myths. To read some of the
contributions to the debate, an outsider could be forgiven for thinking
that work on transitions was lacking in theory or had a tendency to lean
toward positivism (Cohen and Ainley 2000). In contrast, work on youth
cultures could be portrayed as overly descriptive and with a tendency
to exaggerate the associations of changes in style, fashion, and musical
taste and processes of social change. It is certainly true that there is some
work on both sides that conforms to these pictures. However, there are
clear strengths in both approaches as well as examples of unimaginative
and inadequately theorized work on both sides of the false binary. To
be clear, there is poor research in both the transition and cultural tradi-
tions, but, equally, there is a strong body of work that does not conform
to these caricatures, and this work, especially in contemporary contexts,
tends to span the two traditions.
For many of the most eminent youth researchers, culture and transi-
tion are lenses, starting points, and researchers working outward from
these positions work freely across what is rightly regarded as a false
binary. The most obvious example here is work that came out of the
CCCS tradition in the 1960s and 1970s. People like Paul Willis (1977),
John Clarke and colleagues (1976), and Angela McRobbie (1991) made
clear contributions to the understanding of youth culture while enhanc-
ing knowledge of transitions and processes of social reproduction. From
a similar era, the work of James Coleman (1961) in the United States
provides a good example of work that broadly began from a transi-
tions perspective, focusing clearly on the impact of social background
on patterns of attainment, while at the same time enhancing our
understanding of the ways in which outcomes are mediated through
peer-based youth cultures.
18 What Is Youth Studies?

If one considers the classic pieces of youth research that are quoted
three, four, and even five decades on, little will be found that can be
considered to be narrowly grounded in one tradition. Indeed, landmark
studies tend to tell us something significant about social processes in a
holistic sense: they are concerned to contribute to core, long-standing
sociological concerns and debates and to enhance social theory. Further-
more, if we reflect on contemporary theoretical debates and on the ways
in which they intersect with the youth research agenda, it is clear that
in a context where we recognize the importance of reflexivity, it is vir-
tually impossible to produce robust and meaningful research without
moving freely across this false binary. Indeed, many of us regard our-
selves, first and foremost, as sociologists, with youth being a powerful
vehicle from which we can explore big issues with implications for social
science as a whole: big issues which never sit neatly on one side of this
imagined fence.

Transitions

Before focusing on ways to move thinking forward, I will say something,

in turn, about the transition and cultural traditions so as to highlight
the strengths of the approaches as well as their shortcomings. As I sug-
gested earlier, transitions are often seen as the serious side of the field.
Without doubt the questions that are being addressed here are extremely
important and government is often willing to put money into research
focused on the changing experiences of young people in a period where
many find it difficult to move smoothly into employment and many
encounter fragmented experiences and protracted periods of unemploy-
ment. Research here is often, but not always, quantitative and focuses
broadly on patterns of inclusion and exclusion, identifying winners and
losers and showing how various bridges and barriers impact on path-
ways. In the UK, the last Labour government set up what it called the
Social Exclusion Unit, and much of the work of that unit focused on
mapping patterns of social exclusion and evaluating policies introduced
to assist the most disadvantaged young people. Similarly, in Australia,
much of the work funded by organizations like the Foundation for
Young Australians focuses on education and employment, and their
annual publication How Young People Are Faring (FFYA 2012) focuses on
transitions with a strong recent emphasis on the implications of a rise
in long-term unemployment and a decrease in job stability.
With government and charities being a major funder of this type
of work, some of the research produced is narrow. It may be about
 Andy Furlong 19

identifying who takes part in activities regarded as risky, who truants

from school, and what sort of people cope best with adversity, but
sometimes it fails to adequately identify the processes that lead to these
outcomes and focuses on the present without due concern for long-term
societal trends. At one extreme, it can be about the evaluation of policies
and simply concerned to learn about how many people who take part
in a particular program achieve outcomes that are judged to be positive.
Clearly there is value in work that enhances our knowledge of pat-
terns of social reproduction, that highlights new complexities and raises
awareness of factors that predict adverse experiences. Research has
shown how early school leaving impacts on future labor market expe-
riences, how youth unemployment leaves lasting scars, and that, in
Europe, the annual cost of young people’s disengagement from the labor
market is around 153 billion (EUROFOUND 2012). The problem is that
a quantitative focus on transitions often reveals patterns while leaving
us relatively unenlightened about the long-term processes that lead to
these patterns. Here, I would argue that, although one of the strengths of
quantitative research is that it helps maintain an awareness of the con-
tinued power of social structures and helps us keep things in perspective,
the best research in the transitions tradition combines quantitative and
qualitative approaches, providing robust evidence of outcomes and a
fuller understanding of experiences.
One of the most cutting criticisms of work on transitions is linked to
the idea that young people’s experiences have become so diverse, frag-
mented, and protracted that there is little sense in searching for an ‘end
point’ that defines the idea of transition. If many young people are not
managing to move into stable employment and if they remain depen-
dent for much of their lives, in what ways are they making a transition?
Now transition might be the wrong word: it does imply a move from one
quite distinct state to another; it is a change that is quite profound in
that ‘time one’ and ‘time two’ look very different. It implies a metamor-
phosis: it is the caterpillar changing into a butterfly. What if the shape of
young people’s lives at ‘time two’ has as many similarities as differences
with ‘time one’? Clearly there are still changes taking place, but perhaps
the term ‘transition’ needs replacing with a term such as ‘transforma-
tions’ (or to borrow a favored term of Norbert Elias, ‘process’), which
highlights multiple, ongoing, change and recognizes the prevalence of
nonlinear pathways set within a broader discourse of the modernization
project.
While we might want to refine our terminology, it would be a mistake
to abandon a focus on change within the life course. As far back as the
20 What Is Youth Studies?

1970s, Glen Elder (1974) managed to move us away from a conceptu-

alization of individuals’ journeys as normative and decontextualized by
highlighting the dynamic and de-linearized nature of the life course in
which human agency is played out in constrained settings. Elder also
argued that human lives are shaped by context, showing how the expe-
rience of the 1930s Great Depression varied significantly between two
generations. Over the last 40-odd years, youth researchers have become
acutely aware of the dynamic nature of transitions – or transformations –
the de-sequencing of events, and the interconnected nature of young
people’s lives. The increased emphasis on navigation does not involve
the wholesale abandonment of structural perspectives, and we are much
more aware of the extent to which reflexive agency occurs within
contexts that restrict the scope for life management (Evans 2002).

Cultural approaches

With cultural approaches to youth studies often focusing on expres-

sion and sometimes on spectacular dimensions of youth life, this work
is sometimes portrayed as more peripheral to policy and even as a
sideshow. Indeed, reading work grounded in a cultural perspective, we
often need to remind ourselves that highly visible changes in expression
can occur without any meaningful change in underlying relationships
and without what Willis (1977) calls ‘penetrations’, or understandings,
of the unjust and exploitative nature of life in advanced capitalist soci-
ety. The best work in the cultural tradition is measured; it does not
exaggerate change and maintains a clear awareness of the boundedness
of agency. Work of this sort is not unusual, and researchers working
within a cultural approach are just as able as those working in the transi-
tions tradition to highlight suffering and social injustice and to provide
a rich picture of young people as drivers of social change.
We could select many examples of modern work that comes under
the broad banner of a cultural perspective that successfully avoids being
blinded by superficial expression in order to engage in meaningful social
critique. For example, Robert Hollands’ (2002) work on the nighttime
economy in the North East of England focuses on young people’s night-
time consumption and on the places they congregate and consume
in the evenings, especially pubs and clubs. Whereas others who have
focused on what Hollands refers to as ‘nightscapes’, such as Redhead
(1990), fail to take us much beyond a description of club cultures some-
times wrapped up in impenetrable postmodern jargon, Hollands focuses
on the reshaping of the nighttime economy by the leisure industries to
 Andy Furlong 21

appeal to a range of style communities but not to all. Through this, he

looks at the ways in which some groups of young people, especially the
poor, increasingly find themselves excluded. In this way, Hollands pro-
vides a rich picture of young people’s changing leisure lifestyles while
at the same time drawing attention to the interplay between youth cul-
tures and corporate concerns and to the emergence of new forms of
exclusion that are embedded in longer-term transformational processes.
Another good example of excellent work in the cultural tradition is
Nayak’s monograph, Race, Place and Globalization (2003). In an investiga-
tion of the ways in which young people’s identities have been reshaped
in the postindustrial city, with a strong focus on processes of racializa-
tion, Nayak draws attention to sources of continuity as well as change,
and examines the interplay between place and identity. While richly
unpicking the complexity of diverse youth cultures, he recognizes the
impact of material cultures on young people’s identities. Thus, while
providing significant cultural insights, Nayak clearly shows ‘how labor
market restructuring, migration and the cultures of globalization have
impacted upon contemporary youth formations’ while highlighting the
importance of ‘time, place and circumstance’ (2003: 167).
Reflecting on the relationship between the cultural and transitions
perspectives, Bennett (2011) argues that we need to consider structural
experience as reflexively managed though the creative appropriation of
cultural resources. For Bennett, cultural practices can be regarded a pro-
cess within which people are active in shaping their cultural milieu and
understanding and addressing structured inequalities.

Changing contexts

Reflecting on the division between cultural and transitions perspec-

tives, the relationship starts to look problematic in the mid- to late
1980s. One explanation can be found by focusing on shifting theoretical
paradigms in social science more generally, in particular the grow-
ing popularity of postmodern perspectives and the so-called cultural
turn, which has been criticized by Rojek and Turner for its privileging
of aesthetics over ‘engaged detachment’ (2000: 638). But theoretical
shifts tend not to develop in some sort of abstract intellectual sphere;
they arise from our reflections on changes in the world more gener-
ally. In the UK, we entered the 1980s as a society clearly marked by
class-based divisions and identities, and, following a prolonged neolib-
eral attack on collectivist structures and traditions, by the time we
reached the late 1980s, people were starting to question the relevance
22 What Is Youth Studies?

of class, as traditionally framed, and were beginning to imagine their

lives and the processes through which they were socially embedded in
new ways.
In the context of youth studies, prior to the 1980s, youth culture was
clearly conceptualized as a subculture, a subset of broader class relations.
Researchers were interested in the interplay between the cultural dimen-
sions of young people’s lives and the dynamics of class in a context
where class-based processes of social reproduction were seen as being
played out, reinforced, and transformed, through the activities of young
people. Processes of deindustrialization, educational expansion, and an
emerging individualization involving a loosening of social bonds and
an increased emphasis on reflexivity led to a weakening of traditional
images of class and a renegotiation of identities that were once firmly
rooted in class cultures. The link between youth cultures and social class
also became weaker and more diverse.
In contexts where lifestyles and forms of consciousness appeared
to lose their association with class, the temptation was to focus on
the cultural sphere, to place an increased emphasis on agency, and to
downgrade both the importance of structure and the link between struc-
ture and agency. In youth studies, for some researchers, it triggered a
polarization between those drawn to focus on culture and those pri-
marily interested in the reproduction of structured inequalities through
transition.
In contemporary contexts, the focus on ‘choice biographies’, which
involve a process of reflexive life management, has the potential to
accelerate a process of polarization. An emphasis on reflexivity and the
tendency to think of the life course as a project can lead to the down-
playing of structural analysis as researchers focus their attention on
diverse, individualized, social biographies. At the same time, biographi-
cal approaches should aim to represent ‘consciousness and subjectivity,
as well as the objective constraints that shape individual lives’ (Rustin
and Chamberlayne 2002: 3). As du Bois Reymond (2009) makes clear, a
‘choice biography’ does not necessarily involve free choice.
Indeed, a focus on transition is entirely compatible with the idea
that individuals are constantly revising and reinterpreting their bio-
graphical projects, although it does introduce greater fluidity into the
process. Youth and young adulthood are statuses that must be nego-
tiated, but negotiation takes place in contexts that are never wholly
of our making. Moreover, the work put into developing life projects
requires us to draw on a range of resources that are economic as well as
cultural.
 Andy Furlong 23

In the recent past, few sociologists would take issue with the idea
that the resources that underpinned and shaped the life course were
essentially components of social class. But of course social class has
become one of the victims of postmodern thought. Theorists who are
popular among youth researchers, such as Beck (1992), Giddens (1991),
and Sennett (1998), have all, in different ways, argued that class has
weakened or become irrelevant as orientations become more fragmented
and individualized. There is little doubt that forms of consciousness,
attitudes, and lifestyles have become much more loosely connected to
structural locations, but the fact that some people find it difficult to link
their social suffering to a social position they share with others does
not signal the death of class and therefore does not remove the need
to make linkages between youth cultures and social class (Furlong and
Cartmel 1997).
Aside from those who subscribe to a ‘pure’ postmodern perspective,
relatively few social scientists would argue that structured inequalities
have ceased to exist, and there is clear evidence that life chances are still
patterned in accordance with people’s position in the socioeconomic
order. Many social scientists would argue that social classes exist in situ-
ations where locations in a socioeconomic structure shape life chances,
irrespective of whether we can identify a set of cultural perspectives that
neatly map onto such divisions. Moreover, research (especially among
young adults) continues to show that many individuals do have a basic
awareness of the ways in which their lives are shaped by unequal oppor-
tunity structures and can often link their experiences to a class position
(e.g., MacDonald and Marsh 2005, Furlong and Cartmel 2009). While
the everyday language of class may have declined, UK surveys continue
to show that people are willing to acknowledge the existence of class
and to assign themselves to a specific social class (albeit in ambiguous
ways) and are able to ‘articulate a sense of class’ (Savage 2000: 36).
One of the issues we face is that, for young people who move through
a series of part-time and temporary jobs, experiencing periods of unem-
ployment, underemployment, and precarious work forms, it is difficult
to use occupations as a proxy for class. As a consequence, increas-
ingly culture becomes the key to understanding class, and here youth
researchers have been coming to terms with the ways in which cultural
expressions of class can be confusing and contradictory (Thornton 1995)
and are beginning to explore ‘how class processes are manifest in more
implicit and individualized forms in daily lives’ (Hebson 2009: 29). This
process is entirely compatible with a modern youth studies agenda that
has moved beyond the false binary.
24 What Is Youth Studies?

New challenges

Today, young people across the world are facing far-reaching economic,
political, and social changes, and the agenda for youth studies has
become ever more challenging. Opportunities for young people are
being fundamentally reshaped, leading several commentators to argue
that we are entering a new social, economic, and political era that young
people find difficult to negotiate. Standing (2011), for example, has
focused on the deterioration of economic conditions, the fragmenta-
tion of employment, and the growth of insecurity: processes that have
hit young people hard. For Standing, late modernity is marked by the
growth of the precariat: an emerging ‘dangerous class’ comprised of
those suffering from the withdrawal of basic securities in the modern
labor market.
Youth researchers are acutely aware of the severity of conditions in
the contemporary labor market. In parts of southern Europe, such as
Greece and Spain, at least one in two young people are unemployed,
and many more occupy insecure positions and work too few hours to
make a living. Young people are being locked out of the labor market,
forced to pick up steep bills for their education, and face difficulties in
accessing suitable housing. The older generation who caused the finan-
cial crisis and generated huge amounts of debt are passing the costs onto
the younger generation while protecting their own benefits and assets
(Howker and Malik 2010). These changes have political repercussions,
and, from London to Athens, from Tel Aviv to Washington, young peo-
ple have been active in protests about the conditions they face, such as
the lack of jobs, student finances, and housing costs.
To begin to face these challenges and to move forward both the study
of youth and the disciplines in which it is embedded, we need to address
some fundamental issues that have constrained and divided social sci-
ence. One of our primary tasks involves a better definition of the core
focus. Agenda-setting youth studies should be theoretically driven and
focused both on forms of expression, or culture, and on patterns, or
structure. It should be grounded historically in the sense that there is
an awareness of change and continuity and of the factors that shape
the era that we are studying: it should heed Elias’ (1987) warning of the
limits on explanatory power that arise from the tendency of sociologists
to retreat into the present. More than that, it is political in the broadest
sense of the word: it is on the side of young people as a group, who are
often relatively powerless and subject to ongoing and legitimized dis-
crimination by older citizens who expect to be able to control their lives
and set political, economic, and social frameworks.
 Andy Furlong 25

To bring these strands together, to build a firmer theoretical founda-

tion that provides greater clarity concerning the relationship between
the culture and transitions perspective thereby breaking down the false
binary, contemporary youth researchers have much to learn from the
work of Norbert Elias and the figurational sociology that he developed.
While an emphasis on processes of individualization in contempo-
rary youth studies encourages us to think of individuals as unique
and as subject to social forces that are external to them, Elias was
extremely critical of reductionist tendencies and argued that we can
only understand humans as pluralities in context (Dunning and Hughes
2012).
Frequently, work on transitions encourages us to think about indi-
vidual movements and of their stratified aggregates, and of the ways
that young people negotiate the complexities of social and economic
life and construct biographies that help them manage transition pro-
cesses. In contrast, cultural perspectives draw our attention to collective
manifestations: to meanings and practices of groups. In doing so, the
two traditions, and the forms of language they employ, sometimes help
promote the misguided belief that there can be a meaningful separa-
tion of the individual and society: that what Elias referred to as homo
clausus, closed-off individuals, underpins many of our assumptions.
For Elias, the idea of an individual as an ‘isolated abstraction’, some-
how separable from other social formations, was nonsense (Dunning
and Hughes 2012: 52–53). As Quintaneiro puts it, ‘our discourses and
thinking habits lead us to treat the concepts of “individual” and
“society” as “isolated and reposing objects” or, at best, as objects of
processes’ (2006: 2). Elias was scathing about such a separation that
reduces ‘process to static conditions’, as he put it; ‘we say “the wind
is blowing”, as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a
given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if the
wind were separate from its blowing, as if a wind could exist which
did not blow’ (Elias 2012: 106–107, quoted in Dunning and Hughes
2012).
For Elias, attempts to separate stratified social processes from culture
would be equally ridiculous as it would suggest that the individual and
society are separable entities. Seen in this light, the categories of tran-
sition and culture reflect no more than ‘differences in the viewpoint of
the observer, which at times may focus on the persons that form the
group and others on the group formed by them’ (Elias 1995: 63, quoted
in Quintaneiro 2006). For youth studies to thrive and to lead theoretical
debates, we have to ensure that we overcome false separations between
culture and transitions.
26 What Is Youth Studies?

By its very nature, youth research has a specialized focus: in itself

this is not problematic, but the lesson we should learn from Elias
is that we should remember that, as social scientists, we also have
a core interest (Elias would regard it as a duty) to develop a better
understanding of ‘long term social processes and associated broader
overarching questions about human societies’ (Dunning and Hughes
2012: 202). By embedding youth research in these broader, high-level
discourses, our focus moves beyond youth in the here and now as,
through the vehicle of youth studies, we turn our attention to the
increasingly complex interdependencies of a dynamic late modernity:
interdependencies that cannot be understood through dualistic forms
of thinking.

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