Youth Prospects in the Digital Society: Identities and Inequalities in an Unravelling Europe

179 Pages·2021·1.804 MB·English

by  John Bynner, Walter R. Heinz

YOUTH PROSPECTS IN THE

DIGITAL SOCIETY
Identities and Inequalities in an
Unravelling Europe
John Bynner and Walter R. Heinz
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by
Policy Press, an imprint of
Bristol University Press
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ISBN 978-1-4473-5148-1 paperback
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Contents

List of abbreviations iv
About the authors v
Acknowledgements vi
Preface vii
Introduction: Pathways to adulthood 1
1 Social structure and inequality 11
2 Identity and social media 29
3 Youth and Europe 45
4 Navigating the transition to adulthood 61
5 Education, capability and skills 79
6 Smart families and community 95
7 Political participation, mobilisation and the internet 111
8 Impact of COVID- 19 on youth 127
Conclusions: Youth policy challenges 139
References 153
Index 165
iii
List of abbreviations

AfD Alternative for Germany

AI artificial intelligence

CDU Christian Democratic Union (Germany)

CEDEFOP European Centre for the Development of

Vocational Training
CMC computer- mediated communications

CSU Christian Social Union (Germany, Bavaria)

CTE career and technical education

DAAD German Academic Exchange Service

DESI Digital Economy and Society Index

ECTS European Credit Transfer System

EU European Union

FES Friedrich- Ebert- Stiftung

FfF Fridays for Future

GDR (Former) East Germany

GR Great Recession (2007/ 08)

HE higher education

IoT Internet of Things

IT information technology

JUSO Youth wing of the German Social Democratic Party

MOOC Massive Open Online Course

NEET not in education, employment or training

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-o peration

and Development
PISA Programme for International Student Assessment

SPD Social Democratic Party (Germany)

VET vocational education and training

WHO World Health Organization

iv
About the authors

John Bynner is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences in Education
at the University College London Institute of Education, where
he was Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, the Wider
Benefits of Learning Research Centre and founding Director of the
National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and
Numeracy. In retirement he has been responsible for establishing the
think tank Longview and the Journal of the Society for Longitudinal and
Life Course Studies.
Walter R. Heinz is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Psychology at
the University of Bremen, Germany and senior faculty member at the
Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS). He
was visiting chair of German and European Studies at the University
of Toronto and after retirement was research director of the German
Centre of Higher Education and Science Research (DZHW). His
research has been on life course transitions in the context of education
and work.
v
Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the many friends, family and collaborators
who supplied the inspiration for the book. Valerie Bynner and Eva
Heinz are owed our particular thanks for patiently accompanying
our writing.
We also want to thank Janet Leigh Foster for her excellent work in
preparing our manuscript for publication.
We dedicate this book to our grandchildren.
vi
Preface

This book has quite a long history in its making as we have been
collaborating on research about young people and their individual
pathways to adulthood since the mid- 1980s. We began at a time when
traditional heavy industry and manufacturing were giving way to
competition and new industrial processes from the Far East and when
youth unemployment was high. The aim was to compare education
to employment transitions in the United Kingdom and Germany.
Our approach was to combine quantitative and qualitative methods
in understanding differences in young people’s experience between
the two countries in making the transition from school to work. We
concluded that the respective roles of institutions tailored to each
country’s vocational education and training (VET) arrangements, with
deep cultural roots, was central to both establishing and maintaining the
different pathways to adulthood. Such pathways also opened the door
to understanding young people’s aspirations and achievements together
with the challenges that faced them in realising their goals. We wanted
to learn what motivated the choices made and what demographic and
cultural factors helped or hindered them.
Thirty years later, the global financial crisis and the ‘Great Recession’
that followed in 2008 became the stimulus for another collaborative
project about the pathways to adulthood involving colleagues in the
US as well as Europe. This time the aim was to elucidate the life course
effects of the recession set against continuing economic and social
trends in the context of accelerating demographic change.
Apart from continuities in the economy and society from then
to now, the current book breaks quite new ground. This time our
investigation extends to such new socio- economic effects as the rise of
robotics and artificial intelligence, the gig economy and digitalisation
as reflected in the transformations of everyday life and work brought
about by the internet.
In a further step, we extended our interest to the potential unravelling
of the European Union triggered by Britain’s decision to leave –
Brexit – and the impact this might have on young people in the UK
and Germany and more widely across Europe. Hence, other themes of
the book regarding young people’s life course include the role of their
political participation and family engagement through the internet.
Today, transitions occur in a setting of further transformation and the
digital society. Our idea is to use these new societal developments to
reframe such life course challenges as structural inequality, the forming
vii
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Youth Prospects in the Digital Society
of identity and social and economic exclusion. Our story thus moves
from the preparation of young people for a new economy to the
world of digitalisation and the uncharted territory of the ‘Internet
of Everything’.
We finished the book in the shadow of the COVID- 19 (novel
coronavirus) pandemic, whose long- term consequences for all
generations cannot be predicted. By circumstance rather than as
originally planned we also now extend consideration to the as yet
largely unobservable long- term consequences of COVID- 19 on
youth prospects.
We must rely on the younger generation to contribute to a masterplan
for recovering from this fatal crisis. We must also demand political
commitment to curbing the pandemic and supporting its victims and
an international strategy of prevention so that it does not happen again.
Postscript
The research reported here was completed in November 2020 in
advance of the successful development of a vaccine to defeat the virus
and the subsequent variants that have followed.
Though the supply of vaccines takes longer than expected, success is
evident – but the future remains uncertain, pointing to the continuing
need for vigilance in which young people will be playing a major part.
viii
Introduction:

Pathways to adulthood
Much is written about the conflict between generations. Such tensions
are at their strongest in the teens when the parental controls of
childhood give way to the freedoms of youth while, at the same time,
holding onto the sentiments of respect and dependency that children
feel for their parents. Parent– child relationships tend to become more
relaxed in young adulthood, when the transition from education to
work defines this phase of the life course and parents’ emotional and
material support is called for.
Stability and change

A continuing theme of family relationships is what the future will offer
for young people and this is where we are witnessing unparalleled
technologically driven and political change in which population
movement, neo-n ationalism and widening inequality are major features.
Thus, the recession arising from the 2007/0 8 global banking crisis is
just the most recent example of disrupted capitalist economies, bailed
out by government funding, of which young people leaving education
can bear the brunt. What worked for their parents in the transition to
adulthood, including finding job opportunities, building a career and
forming a family, is unlikely to work in the same way for them. The
choices they must make are laden with risk and uncertainty in a way
that was unknown until relatively recently. Most recently COVID-1 9
has created societies in standstill mode with restrictions in all spheres of
everyday life, presenting a completely new challenge for young and old.
The situation is also compounded by the fact that even before the
coronavirus pandemic broke out many features of modern society were
already changing at high speed, especially in the labour market as the
consequence of digitalisation. The younger generation is confronted
with a permanently changing world and transforming opportunities
for learning and working whatever the outcome of the pandemic.
According to a group of leading life course scientists (Settersten et al,
2020, p 38), ‘the pandemic is reshaping transitions and trajectories in
every domain of life’. Virologists and the World Health Organization
1