ABSTRACT
Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives brings together different takes on the possible combinations of agency and structure in the life course, thus rejecting the notion that young individuals are the single masters of their lives, but also the view that their social destinies are completely out of their hands.
‘How did I get here?’ This is a question young people have always asked themselves and is often asked by youth researchers. There is no easy and single answer. The lives that are told, on one hand, and their interpretation, on the other, may have the underlying idea of 'own doing' or the idea of 'social determinism' or, more accurately and frequently, a combination of the two.
This collection constitutes a comprehensive map on how to make sense of youth’s biographies and trajectories, it questions and reshapes the discussion on the role and responsibility of youth studies in the understanding of how people juggle opportunities and constraints, and contributes to escaping what Furlong and Cartmel identified as the "epistemological fallacy of late modernity", in which young people find themselves responsible for collective failures or inevitabilities. It can thus interest students, researchers and professors, youth workers and all of those who work for and with young people.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |11 pages
Introduction
part I|86 pages
Beyond the agency–structure divide
chapter 1|17 pages
Challenging the structure/agency binary
chapter 2|15 pages
Subjective understandings of young people’s agency
part II|100 pages
Agency and structure in historical and generational context
chapter 6|17 pages
Structure and agency
chapter 7|14 pages
Making a living in a provincial hometown
chapter 9|16 pages
Fighting adversity with different weapons
chapter 10|20 pages
Certainties and control in the lives of young men
part III|66 pages
Structured agency, reflexivity and action