Disconnected Youth?: Growing up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods PDF
Preview Disconnected Youth?: Growing up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods
Disconnected Youth? Other books by Robert MacDonald RISKY BUSINESS? Youth and Enterprise Culture (with F. Coffield) YOUTH, THE ‘UNDERCLASS’ AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION (editor) SNAKES AND LADDERS (with L. Johnston, P. Mason, L. Ridley and C. Webster) POOR TRANSITIONS (with C. Webster, D. Simpson, A. Abbas, M. Cieslik, T. Shildrick and M. Simpson) Disconnected Youth? Growing up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods Robert MacDonald University of Teesside and Jane Marsh © Robert MacDonald and Jane Marsh 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-0487-4 ISBN 978-0-230-51175-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230511750 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacDonald, Robert, 1962– Disconnected youth?:growing up in Britain’s poor neighbourhoods/ Robert MacDonald and Jane Marsh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Youth with social disabilities—Great Britain. 2. Poor youth— Great Britain. 3. Marginality, Social—Great Britain. 4. Poverty— Great Britain. 5. School-to-work transition—Great Britain. I. Marsh, Jane, 1974– II. Title. HV1441.G7M35 2005 305.235′086′9420941—dc22 2005047301 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Social Exclusion and the Underclass: Debates and Issues 6 2 Young People, Transitions and Social Change: Researching Disconnected Youth 25 3 Missing School: Educational Engagement and Youth Transitions in Poor Neighbourhoods 48 4 Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers and Social Exclusion 68 5 Paths to Work? Youth Training, New Deal and Further Education 85 6 Getting Jobs: The Status of Work in Poor Neighbourhoods 107 7 Becoming and Being a Young Parent: Family Careers in Poor Neighbourhoods 128 8 Housing Careers and the Significance of Place 152 9 Journeys to the Margins: Drug and Criminal Careers 170 10 Disconnected Youth? Conclusions 193 Notes 218 References 228 Index 247 v This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements The largest debt of gratitude we owe is to the young people who took time to talk to us for the purposes of our research. We can offer them nothing more than our thanks and our hope that this book goes some way towards doing justice to what they told us. We also very grateful to those agencies in Teesside who helped us with the research and the staff who took the trouble to describe their experiences of working with the problems of social exclusion, in its various guises. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the project and the University of Teesside helped fill the gaps, by allowing some time for analysis and writing, in what proved to be a far lengthier enterprise than originally envisaged. We are grateful to Wendy Bland who provided administrative assistance to the project. We have been lucky to work in a university where our research inter- ests, as represented in this book, the subjects of the courses that we run and the life experiences of (some of) our students meet so closely. Much is claimed about the important interrelationship of research and teaching. We suspect, though, that it would be difficult to find elsewhere what has proved to be such a productive interplay of ideas between those ‘expert’ by the fact of academic learning and those ‘expert’ by the fact of biographical, day-to-day experience. One example: in a seminar, a couple of years ago, two young women students – both residents of one of Teesside’s many poor neighbourhoods, recipients of welfare benefits and single mothers – concluded their ‘critical assessment’ of conser- vative underclass theory with an overhead transparency projection: ‘WE LOVE (signified by a large heart) CHARLES MURRAY!’ A case of ‘false consciousness’? Possibly, but as we show later, such a viewpoint proved to be far from uncommon among those one might expect least to hold it. Whatever the rights and wrongs from our perspective of students’ heated arguments, they deserve credit for the way they have encouraged us to consider close-up the complexities, contradictions and controversies of popular ideas about social exclusion and the underclass. Colleagues and friends at Teesside have helped enormously in the development of this book – debating its findings and arguments with us, feeding in ideas from their own research projects, reading drafts of the chapters, and so on. Colin Webster has been a constant source of intellectual stimulation and encouragement. Tracy Shildrick deserves vii viii Disconnected Youth? special thanks for the same reasons, for reading and commenting on the whole manuscript and for pointing us to good research and new books that we had missed. The number of times Colin’s and Tracy’s own argu- ments and ideas crop up in this book (as well as their corrections of ours) far exceeds the number of times they are acknowledged. Donald Simpson, Mark Cieslik, Mark Simpson, Siobhan McAlister, Heather Easton, Robin Haggart and Andrea Abbas have served as readers and valuable critics of particular chapters, or as timely sounding-boards for the development of our ideas. Whilst we never got round to asking Steve Taylor to do much in respect of the book, we appreciate his offer of help and the work he does to make Sociology at Teesside what it is. Further afield, Robert Hollands and Shane Blackman continue to be valued friends and colleagues in the efforts we share to understand ‘youth’. We thank our editors at Palgrave: Heather Gibson for taking this on initially and more recently Jennifer Nelson, Briar Towers and Jill Lake, particularly for their tolerance of our missed deadlines. We are indebted to Bob Coles for being – over many years – an invaluable mentor (to Robert MacDonald) and, in this instance, for taking time to review the manuscript in the ever-diminishing, academic summer vacation. Whilst a friend, he is not shy of criticism. His comments, like those of the others listed above, have improved the book immeasurably. As ever, all faults, errors and inaccuracies remain our own. Finally, and closer to home, Jane Marsh would like to express her thanks to her family and to her partner, Shaun, for their ongoing sup- port and encouragement. Robert MacDonald would like to record his indebtedness to Jacqui Merchant. If she had not been so supportive and gracious about his badly tilted ‘work-life balance’ the book would never have seen the light of day. Credit, too, to Jessie, Will and Paddy for only rarely pursuing the ‘delinquent solution’ when their father was in absentia. He dedicates his efforts on Disconnected Youth? to his family. Introduction Although the facts of poverty frame all that is discussed in this book, it is not one that is concerned with academic debates about measures, rates and definitions of poverty (see Hills etal., 2002; Piachaud and Sutherland, 2002). Nor is it an evaluation of the laudable political efforts of the British Labour government to reduce child poverty, regenerate run-down neighbourhoods or otherwise tackle social exclusion (see Social Exclusion Unit, 2004). Rather, this is a book about the experiences of people as they grow up in some of the poorest parts of Britain; how they live through conditions of poverty and carve out transitions to adult- hood in some of the most adverse circumstances. In other words, our ambition has been an ethnographic one: to understand, from the point of view of those at the sharp end, how processes of social exclusion intermesh with processes of youth transition. The book has at least in part been inspired by the unanswered questions left hanging in a previous title – Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion (MacDonald, 1997). Although the contributors to that edited collection are best known for their work in the field of ‘youth studies’, it aimed – as this book does – to address wider-ranging social scientific debates. As Furlong and Cartmel argue (1997: 2), the study of youth provides: an ideal opportunity to examine the relevance of new social theories; if the social order has changed and if social structures have weakened, we would expect to find evidence of these changes among young people who are at the crossroads of the process of social reproduction. In this vein, others that have reflected on our core questions conclude that young people have become disconnected from the normal, moral, mainstream life of society. They are ‘a lost generation’, part of a new 1
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