The "NEET" category from the perspective of inequalities: toward a typology of school-to-work transitions among youth from lower class neighborhoods in the Brussels region (Belgium).

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the NEET category. We argue that it is both too focused on individual responsibility and too homogenizing to enable the development of public policies and measures capable of responding to the needs of the most excluded youth. We respond to these needs using a qualitative approach that has allowed us to account for the diversity of young people, especially the most marginalized, living in lower-class neighborhoods of the Brussels region. Our approach generates a NEET/non-NEET typology that helps deconstruct NEET as a statistical category by identifying social situations that are both diverse and temporary. This typology challenges the tendency to reify young people and to hold them responsible for their own circumstances. Furthermore, our typology shows how NEET situations result from trajectories shaped by structural dynamics as well as relations and processes of inequality. These may stem from social class, experiences of migration, or the intersection of the two, and inevitably exercise an effect on both school and job market environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]