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The aim of this article is to develop a dynamic understanding of the significance of the extended family in young people’s transitions to adulthood. Previous research has tended either to overlook ...

This chapter explores gendered narratives about young people. We argue that – in recent decades – two clearly gendered problem representations have come to dominate the academic and public debate about youth: “pathologisation of girls” and “negative representations of boys”. For boys the narratives revolve around society’s problems with them. Regarding girls the focus is more on various ways in which societal pressures concerning self-expression and individual performance affect them negatively. In other words, the popular story about pressure and stress among girls today contains an undertone of “poor them”, whereas corresponding representations regarding boys often include a “poor us” assumption. Based on recent research, we discuss the basis for these narratives, how they are expressed, and the role research plays in their emergence and in nuancing the predominant problem representations. Moreover, we demonstrate how such gendered stories about blame and victimization appear in extreme versions when it comes to young Norwegians with minority backgrounds. We discuss how these gendered problem narratives may affect youth policy, views of youth, and not least the young people themselves. What happens when problems that concern a relatively small number of young Norwegians come to dominate narratives about all boys and girls?

Claims that low-skilled young people, and especially the men among them, are being excluded from the labour market have been influential over recent decades, contributing to an increasing concern over the issue of early school leaving. In this study, we use high-quality administrative data and sequence analysis to investigate the school-to-work trajectories of three birth cohorts of early school leavers in Norway between the ages of 16 and 26. Our observation period (from 1994 to 2015) covers several structural transformations of the Norwegian economy, such as increased migration, labour market polarisation and automatisation, widely held to have worsened the prospects of low-skilled young people. In accordance with expectations, we find some signs of increased labour market exclusion among early school leavers, relating to changes in welfare policy. However, the majority still follow trajectories characterised by employment and/or further education. Contrary to discourses on low-skilled men as losers, but in accordance with previous research, we find that male early school leavers consistently predominate in trajectories leading to middle and high incomes. Even in the comparatively gender equal country of Norway, the gender-segregated labour market consistently appears to be providing low-skilled men with more economically rewarding life course trajectories. publishedVersion

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This article describes the ways in which children and young people’s everyday places have changed in the course of the Post-war period in Norway and suggests some opportunities and constraints arising from these changes. The analysis is based on biographical interviews with three generations in 23 Norwegian families, in addition to a wide selection of relevant research and statistics. Children and young people’s everyday places have become more institutionalized, organized and digitalized, and neighbourhoods have become less important as sites of everyday interaction. This development has varying implications for different groups of young people. Those who experience failure in school are in the greatest need of experiences of mastery in other areas. Recruitment to organized leisure activities is closely related to parental resources, and whereas experiences of household work previously could point the way into prac-tical occupations, many practically inclined young people now lack direction, opportunities and motiva-tion, except for different varieties of consumption. The mastery experienced in today’s everyday places can be relevant and valuable in the labour market, albeit in different ways than the building, tinkering and care work of previous periods.

This article sheds new light on a key topic in youth research over recent decades; how young people often rely on individualistic frames of interpretation in understanding their own lives. Based on...

Based on biographical interviews from a three-generation study in Norway, this article examines the place of the contemporary ‘gap year’ within life course transition trajectories and intergenerati...

This article examines the issue of early school leaving from upper secondary education in light of life course theory on age norms. Based on existing literature, it examines how definitions of earl...

This article discusses Lockwood’s concept of the work situation and its fate within class analysis. For a brief period, this concept served to make the experiences that people have by virtue of their positions in the division of labour a central concern in class analysis. Over time, however, attention to such issues has given way to an increasing interest in workers’ individual characteristics, and the measurement of social mobility according to class schemes. Over recent decades, the wider contexts of ‘class culture’ and ‘social space’ have become common frames of interpretation. While these developments have all broadened understandings of social class, their net effect has been to break up the once close relation between class analysis and the study of work. Key findings from recent labour market research suggest that, in the current context of increasing inequality and precariousness, the contribution of class analysis might be strengthened by a reincorporation of attention to work situations.

Title: The Myth of Welfare Dependency. Summary: The myth of welfare dependency has long historical roots and is influential in both policy and research. The central idea is that receiving welfare benefits decreases people’s motivation for work and fosters a culture of dependency. The myth originates in an Anglo-American context but is also evident in a Nordic context. Nordic welfare states, with their comparatively high levels of benefits, are presumably especially at risk of encouraging welfare dependency. This article questions the myth of welfare dependency, by presenting a life-course perspective that directs our attention to relations between historical developments and individual life-course processes. Viewed from a life-course perspective, it becomes clear that the myth of welfare dependency is based upon a number of problematic premises: an individualistic and static conception of lives and relationships, a narrowly defined concept of welfare, and on several misconceptions of how welfare state policies, especially of the Nordic variety, function in practice. The dichotomy of dependence and independence upon which the myth rests is untenable when confronted with empirical life-course research, and has highly-skewed implications in terms of both gender and social class.

This chapter addresses research on the transition to adulthood in relation to wider family relationships and examines how this transition is shaped historically both by the family support available and the wider economic and political contexts of the period when young people make their transition. First, it sets the transition to adulthood in a contextualist life course perspective. Second, it gives an overview of topics discussed in studies of the transition to adulthood in youth research. Third, it approaches the transition to adulthood from an intergenerational perspective, that is, the ways in which this life course phase of young people is embedded in intergenerational family relations whose meaning and importance change over historical time, vary by gender and social class and may be transformed by experiences such as migration. The chapter covers a wide spectrum of studies (written in English) and outlines the variety of research questions that have been examined in research with different types of methodological, theoretical and empirical orientations, and the types of knowledge gained from these respectively.

Theories of post-industrial society have since their earliest formulations had a questionable relation to actual processes of social change. This article explores why they nonetheless continue to hold influence. Drawing on Mannheim, it argues that theories of post-industrial society were originally formulated as utopia – hopeful speculations about the future. When their core concepts are used to describe present conditions, however, they take on the role of ideology, in Mannheim’s sense of this term. The ideology of post-industrial society represents a specific world view in relation to work, knowledge and education. It elevates and celebrates ‘knowledge work’ and renders invisible existing forms of industry and workers’ knowledge necessary for practical work. When the present is viewed through the lens of these theories, practical work is cast as the work of yesterday and the people who do it as yesterday’s people.