Beyond “Employability”: Youth Unemployment, Socialisation and Social Stratification

Abstract

Dominant approaches towards youth unemployment tend to dehistoricize and individualize macro-sociological aspects of social transformation. The reductive and seemingly omnipresent concept employability—now a globalized policy orthodoxy—is emblematic of this tendency. Yet critiques of overly individualized approaches tend to reproduce the dichotomy of the individual and society in neglecting the interplay between social transformations and habitus formation. This chapter takes a process sociology perspective and seeks to re-frame youth unemployment from a present-centred social concern, explained and understood as a lack of employability, to a longer-term sociological problem of shifting power relations, intergenerational change and labour market transformations linked to ongoing urbanization. It is argued that this requires a more holistic perspective of youth socialisation, the family as process, and their interdependent relationship to contemporary polarization. This is articulated with reference to the diversification of contemporary childhood socialization, captured by the stratifying nature of the partial defunctionalisation of the family; the spatialized impacts of deindustrialisation and changes in habitus formation; and the way in which these processes coalesce in informing the debilitating and relentless stigmatisation of disadvantaged youth. It is suggested that these processes underscore the need for a more comprehensive, dynamic conceptualisation of youth in the round, which can account for the dynamics of generational change and the transformation of the family as process. The chapter seeks to contribute to a move beyond static, individualized and economistic notions like employability, which inform social misdiagnoses, perpetuate common sense policy solutions, and often produce negative effects for youth.