Understanding the changing youth labour market
The first lesson of modern sociology is that the individual cannot understand his own experience or gauge his own fate without locating himself within the trends of his epoch and the life-chances of all the individuals of his social layer.
(C. Wright Mills 1951: xx)
Introduction
In this book, our primary interest is in the lives of young people and the ways in which their working lives have changed between the 1980s recession and the Great Recession of 2008–9 and its immediate aftermath, although we begin by drawing attention to trends already emerging in the preceding two decades. Our core concern relates to the suffering inflicted on our younger citizens through the various ‘civilising offences’ (Elias 1994) committed by governments from the mid-1970s onwards. Looking to the future, the book also offers a glimpse of what the future holds for young workers, especially those who lack resources or who occupy vulnerable positions.
Our aims are achieved through re-analysis of two datasets collected during the 1980s recession (referred to as the historical or legacy datasets), and data collected between 2009 and 2011 as part of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, known as Understanding Society (University of Essex 2014). These datasets and materials are described in more detail in the Appendix; however, in summary, they were examined as part of our research project The Making of the ‘Precariat’: Unemployment, Insecurity and Work-Poor Young Adults in Harsh Economic Conditions, which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under Phase 1 of the Secondary Data Analysis Initiative.
Through this research, we set out to explore unemployment, insecurity and work-poor young adults in harsh economic conditions in the United Kingdom using contemporary and historical/legacy data. Specifically, we wanted to discover in what ways the experiences of unemployed, insecure and vulnerable 18- to 25-year-olds had changed between two key periods of economic instability in the United Kingdom. In relation to this, we also aimed to map the nature and extent of marginality and of precarious or fragmented forms of work in the 1980s and in the contemporary era so as to develop a new understanding of the ways in which positive and negative outcomes occur and are influenced by policy interventions.
In this introductory chapter, we aim to outline the conceptual starting points that have helped us understand the changing nature of the youth labour markets and which inform some of the analysis offered in subsequent chapters.
Analytical starting points and assumptions
Analytical ‘retreat’, sociogenesis and long-term social processes
Precarity, precarious employment and rise of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new dangerous class’ (Standing 2011) have come to dominate recent discourses on and around employment in general and relating to youth employment more specifically. Indeed, the idea of the precariat and the desire to understand trends in precarious working formed the basis for a research project undertaken by the authors. In our research project, The Making of the ‘Precariat’, we purposefully used both contemporary and historic/legacy data to explore this question. These long-term processes of change and transformation are ones that come into sharp focus when we study the changing experiences of young people. Starting from a hunch that precarious working and, in particular, the precarious nature of youth employment was perhaps not so much a ‘contemporary’ phenomenon but, instead, was part of a longer-term process of change and transformation in the way we work, we had some initial reservations about Standing’s thesis.
In adopting a longer-term analytic approach, we draw inspiration from the sociological practice of Norbert Elias and his model of analysing society in long-term perspective. As Goodwin and Hughes (2011) explain, Elias’s sociological approach is underpinned by the three core ‘kinds’ of question:
•an orientation towards sociogenetic questions, for example, how did ‘this’ come to be?
•an orientation towards relational questions, for example, in what ways are ‘these’ interrelated? and
•an orientation towards Homines aperti, for example, what broader chains of interdependence are involved in ‘this’?
(Goodwin and Hughes 2011: 682; see also Baur and Ernst 2011).
For Elias, sociogenesis is the long-term processes of development and transformation in social relations which go hand in hand with what he termed psychogenesis, or the processes of development and transformation in the psychology, personality or habitus that accompany such social changes. To answer a sociogenetic question, such as ‘how did it come to be that precarious working is the new “normality” for youth and other groups?’, requires an analysis of the changing balances of power and shifting human interdependencies in relation to work and employment over a long period of time.
Long-term syntheses, even if only to provide a rough outline, are by no means limited to shedding more light on the problems of past societies only. They also help to create a greater awareness of contemporary problems and especially of potential futures.
(Elias 2006: 407)
However, a review of existing analyses of precarity or the ‘the precariat’ reveals something of a tendency to focus on the ‘contemporary’ experiences of work and employment, often with a specific focus on the period following the Great Recession. While in and of themselves there is nothing inherently wrong with such approaches or analyses, as Wright Mills (1951) suggests, limiting the analytical horizon to the present can be problematic: there is a danger of implying that ‘the present’ or ‘the contemporary’ are somehow separate from ‘the past’ and that the two are not linked or do not overlap. The idea that the past is somehow ‘hermetically sealed’ from the present and that our current experiences of work and employment are not informed by change and transformation over the long term is both epistemologically fallacious and ontologically problematic (see Furlong and Cartmel 1997: 144). This is something particularly relevant in the context of youth studies, which, as a subject matter, almost lends itself to a prioritisation of ‘contemporary’ issues at the expense of all else.
Such an approach implies that the ‘here and now’, or the issues of contemporary youth, are wholly different from what went before or simply emerged out of nowhere. For example, one of the most influential and agenda-setting examinations of the precariat is offered by Guy Standing (2011), and, while Standing acknowledges the importance of the emergence of globalisation in the 1970s and earlier labour market transformations, he primarily focuses his analysis on the period immediately before and during the economic crisis of 2008 onwards. He suggests that the numbers entering the precariat accelerate after 2008 and that a new dangerous class can be seen to emerge. Yet, narrowing an analysis to a largely contemporary timeframe ignores what has gone before and prompts us to ask additional questions. For example, what is the evidence for the ‘precariat’ having existed well before the economic crash of the mid 2000s? Are the economic conditions post 2008 so unique that current cohorts of young people share no common experiences with those young people entering work in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or 1980s? Is work and employment more precarious now than it was is the dark ages, the middle ages or the Victorian and colonial era? Are there no continuities between the past and the present?
For Elias (1987), over-focusing on the ‘present’ and the restricting of analyses to the ‘contemporary’ is a problem that he describes as the ‘retreat of the sociologists into the present’. Elias strongly critiqued this ‘narrowing’ of the researcher’s attention to immediate problems with a view to solving short-term issues at the expense of understanding their genesis over time. He writes,
the immediate present into which sociologists are retreating … constitutes just one momentary phase within the vast stream of humanity’s development, which, coming from the past, debouches into the present and thrusts ahead possible futures.
(Elias 1987: 223–4)
If we are to truly understand precarity, then a longer-term perspective is needed.
There are a number of implications of such an approach for analysing and understanding precarious working. First, that for the analysis to be complete, and for our understanding to be as full as possible, a longer-term perspective is essential. In short, precarious working and the marginalised labour market positions that young people occupy do not simply emerge in isolation from what has gone before or within a historical vacuum. Rather, forms of employment are the consequences of long-term processes of change and transformation.
Second, precarity itself is not fixed, nor are the dominate modes of work and employment at any one time. Indeed, patterns of employment will continue to change, transform and reconfigure as we move into the future. How people experience work and employment in the future is linked to the experiences of work and employment both now and in the past – a long-term chain of interrelationships that continually evolve and change. Focusing on the contemporary is the equivalent of taking a photograph, a snapshot in time, rather than watching a ‘movie’ of connected images (see Dunning and Hughes 2013). We cannot ‘ignore the fact that every present society has grown out of earlier societies and points beyond itself to a diversity of possible futures’ (Elias 1985: 226).
Third, as Elias also suggests, the retreat to the present, especially for disciplines such as sociology, is often driven by a desire for immediate policy decisions. Research is positioned to provide the contemporary evidential base for intervention by the state or state actors. Yet, without understanding the genesis of an issue, such policy interventions are inevitably short term, limited in their impact and (more often than not) doomed to replicate the mistakes of previous policy interventions. In relation to youth employment, one only has to consider the multitude of government-sponsored training programmes implemented from the late 1970s onwards, all of which massage employment rates but do little to address the underlying trends and labour market changes.
There are further problematic assumptions which underpin some of the existing work on precarity − in particular, that ‘precariousness’ is implicitly measured against an assumed ‘gold standard’ of full-time, permanent employment. The assumption is that permanent, full-time work is the mode of working that all should aspire to and which should be on offer to all. It is an assumption that harks back to the 1950s and 1960s as representing something of a ‘golden age’ of high-quality education, training and employment for young people but which does little to acknowledge that a different employment ‘normality’ or ‘reality’ may now exist for young people. Having no direct experience of a society built on full employment that is both permanent and full-time, having no first-hand understanding of this beyond what young people are told by teachers, careers advisors, schools and universities, how young people experience or perceive work and employment may not relate directly to the officially sanctioned discourse of full-time, permanent, paid employment.
A good illustration of this is the use of the metaphor ‘lost generation’. This idea, the notion of a generation lost (discussed further in Chapter 3), has been liberally sprinkled through the discussions of precarious working and youth marginalisation (see, for example, Nilsen and Brannen 2014) and political discourse. For example, Nilsen and Brannen (2014) outline how the term is used by youth researchers to describe young people ‘out of work’, or MacDonald and Marsh (2001) have used ‘lost generation’ to describe those young people who are identified as ‘inactive’ or welfare dependent. More recently, MacDonald (2011) extends the ‘lost generation’ metaphor to graduates entering the labour market but who fail to secure employment. However, few actually question the assumption underpinning this metaphor or consider ‘lost from what?’ What such analyses point to is youth ‘lost’ from participation in full-time paid employment or a ‘job for life’, without acknowledging the attendant labour market transformations and new employment realities. The metaphor ‘lost generation’ as used in some discussions also appears to have a static permanency attached to it, as though the labour market positions of young people can never and will never change. The idea that groups are ‘lost forever’ is problematic. Elias also, perhaps, helps us understand why precarious youth employment is set against an assumed ‘gold standard’ of full-time, permanent employment in some analyses. Elias suggests that
Adult investigators are apt to investigate either their own problems with regard to young people or, more generally, the problems which adults experience so far as the younger generation is concerned, not problems which confront, and which are experienced by the young generation itself.
(Elias 1962: 1)
In short, not having full-time paid employment could be perceived by ‘adult investigators’ to be a problem, whereas it may not necessarily be perceived or experienced negatively by young people themselves. Moreover, the analysis should have more reality congruence and not focus on ‘what should be’ but instead explore and document in more detail ‘what is’. What is the experience of precarious work, and what are the longer-term changes and continuities which underpin those experiences?
Civilising offensives
As we have outlined already, Elias was concerned with long-term processes in the development of human societies, which he called ‘civilising processes’ (Mennell 2015: 1). Focusing on both sociogenetic and psychogenetic changes via the analysis of historical documents, past texts and, most famously, manners books, Elias was able to explore, sociologically, the transformations of societies, changes in behavioural standards, the formation of states and the control of the means of violence, among other things. For example, in On the Process of Civilisation (1939), Elias documents how court societies and ‘courtiers’ in Europe
were the product of centuries-long conflicts between many rival warlords, out of which there gradually emerged a smaller number of central rulers, kings who gradually undertook the ‘taming of warriors’ as the key element in the internal pacification of their lands, a central component of state formation processes.
(Mennell 2006: 429)
These long-term ‘civilising processes’ are central to understanding how societies and behavioural standards ‘came to be’ and how societies change and transform. Power is crucial here. Control of the means of violence, whether real or symbolic, gives the holder of the control a significant power advantage to intervene to maintain or even change accepted behavioural standards of that time. Since the industrial revolution, in many countries there has been an accepted habitus of work, an accepted hegemony that individuals who themselves have limited access to resources and power will engage in paid employment for those who have or control power and resources. It is easy to find examples through history where behaviours around paid employment are controlled, such as the loud ringing of a bell at the factory to ensure that those in surrounding villages arrived at work on time for their shifts, through to entire state-based social welfare systems and practices being predicated on an individual’s ‘fitness to work’.
However, following Mennell (2015: 1), and others, it becomes important to distinguish between ‘civilising processes’ ‘as long-term, intergenerational, unplanned and unintended processes, involving changes in the balance of the typical social habitus’, on the one hand, and ‘civilising offensives’, which are ‘in contrast planned, organised and intended’ (Mennell 2015: 1), on the other. For example, in relation to civilising processes, Elias (2010: 52) suggests that ‘our standard of behaviour and our psychological make-up, was certainly not intended by individual people. And it is this way that human society moves forward as a whole; in this way, the whole of human history has run its course’.
In contrast, civilising offensives are deliberate and premeditated acts or interventions especially designed to purposely ‘improve’ or change the behaviours of the ‘lower orders, the colonised peoples, and so on – the “outsiders” to the respectable “establishments”’ (Mennell 2015: 2). As we have already suggested, in many societies since the industrial revolution an officially sanctioned discourse around the normality of full-time paid employment has been sustained (see Wight 1993). It is an expectation that those who are able to work should work in paid employment for a set number of hours per week. Those who do not engage in paid employment, save for those who are deemed to be legitimately engaged in other roles such as parenthood or who are defined as not needed to work (children, the elderly and so forth), are categorised as ‘the outsiders’, ‘the underclass’, the ‘chavs’, the ‘feckless and workless’, as ‘spongers’ ‘lazy’ or ‘welfare dependent’. Indeed, there is an entire discourse which reinforces the primacy of full-time paid employment and which defines those who do not work negatively. It is in relation to this that the idea of civilising offensives becomes particularly powerful.
Throughout the last century or so, there are many examples of deliberate and premeditated acts by the state to ensure that individuals work in ways deemed to be acceptable. For example, in their analysis of employability civilising offensives since the late 1970s, Crisp and Powell (2016) demonstrate how government policies in the United Kingdom were underpinned by three trends:
a near exclusive focus on addressing youth unemployment through supply-side interventions to improve employability; growing levels of conditionality to enforce attachment to the labour market; and differential treatment of young people relative to other age cohorts. Nearly every single major initiative is premised upon the ‘supply-side orthodoxy’ that interventions to tackle ‘worklessness’ should largely focus on improving employability through individual behavioural change by raising the skills, aspirations and work-readiness of young people out of work.
(Crisp and Powell 2016: 7−12)
As Crisp and Powell (2016) also highlight, the key idea here is initiatives by the state, through policy interventions, to transform individual behaviours to ensure compliance with the socially accepted hegemony around paid employment.
Liminality
There is a long history of labelling those who do not engage in socially approved versions of paid employment as outsiders; as somehow deviant or at odds with dominant norms. However, as we have also argued, labour market transformations and associated industrial decline have meant that the opportunities for young people, or working-age people in general, to work in full-time paid employment throughout their lives have been reduced. The ‘gold standard’ of full-time paid employment has been replaced with a variety of ‘alternative’ forms of employment that are precarious, temporary and so forth. Given that industrial societies seem to retain the idea of full-time paid employment as something that all should aspire to, this suggests that the role of those working in such ‘alternative’ forms of employment is somewhat ambiguous and ill-defined. For example, the very notion of temporary employment is underpinned by ambiguity. The temporary worker is not permanent, does not ‘belong’ and has no definite occupational identity or career, and his or her future is doubtful, uncertain and risky. It is here that, perhaps, other concepts may help us understand more fully how it came to be that insecure work forms are the new ‘normality’ for young people – in particular, Elias’s assertion that the social role of young people is ambiguous and the idea of ‘liminality’.
First, the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of alternative and precarious forms of work dovetails somewhat with the ill-defined and ambiguous social role of young people themselves. In our previous work (Goodwin and O’Connor 2015), we highlighted Elias’s assertion that the social role of young people is ambiguous, especially during transitional periods in the life course when their roles lack clarity. At school, at college or within the family, a power ratio has emerged which frames the young persons’ position as subordinate to the adults around them. Yet, when they begin to enter work,
[it] places young workers into a different position not only in relation to parents or to friends, but in relation to adults who are strangers – adult workers, supervisors, managers etc. on whom they depend … The norms, the behaviour and attitudes of the adults with which they now come into contact often differ considerably from those with which they are familiar in their own family circle or from their contact with masters at school.
(Elias 1961: 1)
The more complex a society, the more complex this process of transition to adulthood or the learning of adult norms becomes. This complexity, for Elias, meant that the transition from childhood to adulthood, from school to work is an ‘anxiety arousing transition’, as the young person’s social existence and social order are threatened. The ill-defined social role of youth and the anxieties caused by the transition to work are compounded by the fact that entering work and becoming an adult, in many respects, has become a ‘passage without rites’.
[their position] is, of course, not determined or chosen by the younger generation itself. They are determined by the conditions of industrial societies such as ours in the mid twentieth century, i.e. at a specific state of social development. To illustrate this point in the most general way one need only remember the fact that today the ‘passage towards adult roles’ is a ‘passage without rites’. But even in European societies that has not always been the case; the passage to adulthood has not always been regarded as an entirely private and personal problem of the individual.
(Elias 1962: 1)
In extending this analysis, Elias (1962) goes on to argue that in the past there were ceremonies and rituals, such as those associated with craft guilds when apprentices produced their ‘masterpiece’, and these rituals marked the transition from one social role to another. For Elias, the role of such rituals was to help those making the transition to work and adulthood to confront fears and anxieties associated with transitioning into the ‘unknown’.
Second, Elias’s writings on adjustments to adulthood, and the ‘passage without rites’, link directly to some of the writings around ‘liminality’. As others have highlighted, liminality has its origins within the work on rituals by Van Gennep (1909/1977) and latterly developed by Turner (1969), as well as being linked to the work of Douglas (1966) (see, for example, Boland and Griffin 2015; Lopez-Aguado 2012; Jones 2014). For Turner (1969), liminality, or ‘liminal individuals’, are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony’ (1969: 95), while for Douglas (1966), ‘liminal individuals’ have ‘no status, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows’ (1966: 36). The use of liminality in their work relates directly to social sanctioned rituals and rites of passage that individuals pass through as a transformatory process of ‘becoming’, suggesting that these ‘liminal individuals’ remain socially ambiguous and ill-defined (neither one thing or another).
The ritual was an important ‘marker’ of becoming, and for Van Gennep (1909/1977) there were three phases of rites through which individuals passed – separation (séparation), transition (marge) and incorporation (agrégation). This entails a separation from what was before, a previous role, position or status, through a transition (often marked by a ritual performance, examination, trial or test) on to incorporation into a new role or status. Turner (1974) refines his approach and, alongside liminal individuals and outsiders (or outsiderhood), he considers ‘marginals’ to be those ‘who are simultaneously members of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another’ (La Shure 2005: 233). Turner (1974) suggests that ‘marginals like liminars are also bewixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity’.
In many respects, Lave and Wenger’s concepts of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ and ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) also have echoes of Van Gennep’s (1909/1977) approach – ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ as a transformatory process of ‘becoming’ via moving from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘established’ though active social participation as learning (see Goodwin 2007 in Hughes et al. 2007). As Goodwin (2007) suggests, in Lave and Wenger’s approach legitimate peripheral participants do not perceive their peripherality before they enter the workplace but only begin to understand their ‘separateness’ from the ‘established’ workers around them when they start to make the adjustment to work and adulthood. It is the ambiguous status that is key here. Likewise, Boland and Griffin’s (2015) use of liminality is particularly instructive here. They use liminality to explore job-seeking in welfare policy, arguing that ‘unemployment/job-seeking is not simply an economic experience … more speculatively we suggest that unemployment/job-seeking is liminal, though less a meaningful rite of passage or a joyful carnival, but a tedious limbo punctuated by frantic job-seeking’ (Boland and Griffin 2015: 30).
Liminality helps us understand that it is hard for young people to now complete the transition for work to adulthood – to pass through Van Gennep’s séparation, marge, aggregation successfully. This is because the employment they enter is characteristically liminal − precarious work is neither unemployment nor full-time career oriented work as had been traditionally understood but hovers somewhere between. It is a form of work that is neither one thing nor another. By entering such work, it becomes harder for the young to be incorporated into established notions of paid employment, to become workers and fully adult. So, young people in the adjustment to adulthood are also in a kind of limbo. They are no longer children, nor are they yet fully adults. Young people are perhaps the most obvious ‘liminal individuals’ in the most liminal work roles.
Towards a ‘sociogenesis’ of precarious working
Following Elias (2006), we can only provide a rough outline of a long-term syntheses of youth employment, but in so doing we are able to highlight those key events that link the broader social processes with the life-chances and experiences of individuals. Indeed, over the last half decade there have been momentous changes in the world of work. Employment in the once dominant manufacturing industries declined sharply from the late 1960s and, in the United Kingdom today, employs less than one in ten of the workforce (Comfort 2012). Back in the 1970s, fewer women were employed, and many of those that were held part-time jobs. A programme of privatisation has significantly reduced the number of workers employed in the public sector, and final salary pension schemes, which were once relatively common among salaried workers in the public sector, have largely been abandoned in favour of less generous pension schemes where returns are subject to the unpredictability of the market. Trade union membership has fallen sharply, partly due to the decrease in employment in the manufacturing industries, but also due to privatisation and to increased employment in small-scale service units.
There have also been important changes in employment practice, including a fall in the numbers employed on full-time ongoing contacts, underpinned by moves to weaken the legislation that once helped secure tenure and protect workers from unfair or arbitrary dismissal. New contractual arrangements have been introduced, such as zero hours contracts where an employer makes no guarantee about the number of working hours (or the pay) offered, while agency work and temporary work contracts have become more common. Welfare entitlements for those without work have been reduced, and conditions under which support may be claimed have become harsher. Poor wages also mean that many working households in the United Kingdom depend on benefits in order to achieve a minimum standard of living. Indeed, the majority of those classed as being in poverty (having an income of less than 60 per cent of the national median) live in families where at least one of the members is in employment (MacInnes et al. 2013).
Of course, levels of employment are always in flux: there was a recession in the mid-1970s linked to the 1973 oil crisis, followed by recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s. The most recent recession, occurring in 2008–9, was triggered by the fallout from the bursting of the housing bubble in the United States and the ensuing failure of several large banks. This recession, frequently referred to as the 'Great Recession', or the Global Financial Crisis, was the most severe since the 1930s ‘Great Depression’ (Reuters 2012).
In recessions, a slowdown in economic activity triggers a fall in investment and an increase in unemployment; and unemployment may continue to rise for some time after the recession is officially over. Furthermore, recessions encourage employers to look for cost savings, with the most common responses being pay freezes, a reduction in paid overtime and the implementation of more flexible employment practices such as an increased use of agency workers and fixed term contracts (CBI 2009). Revised employment practices which cut costs and increase profitability may become standard practice after a recession. As such, recessions can be linked to longer-term changes in employment conditions. Recessions may also mark a watershed in a country’s industrial profile: old staple industries may not fully recover, they may be reshaped with core processes relocated to cheaper countries and employers may begin to hire workers with different skill sets.
The 1980s recession is significant in that it marked a major shift in the industrial shape of the United Kingdom: many manufacturing jobs were permanently lost, and some of the new opportunities created in the service sector resulted in a demand for a new type of employee capable of performing 'emotional work' (Hochschild 1983), in which they were required to become skilled in the use of expressions, such as smiling and eye contact, in their everyday dealings with clients or customers. In this new world, traditional masculinities are sometimes seen as redundant, and even as representing an impediment to employment in the growing sectors of the economy (McDowell 2003). In the new economy, there is a much reduced demand for unskilled industrial workers whose jobs have been either replaced by machines or exported to countries with lower wage costs.
We are currently experiencing the aftermath of another recession, the Great Recession, and we can begin to see the contours of the emerging post-recession economy. In the new order, the flexible employment practices that became more widespread during the recession are retained: workers experience ongoing insecurities, are forced to juggle multiple part-time jobs and are constantly faced with uncertainty about their ability to manage financial commitments. Despite an increasingly qualified workforce, predictions about the growth of jobs point towards the less skilled sectors of the economy, meaning that people are running up large debts for education only to enter a labour market where educated workers are increasingly employed in unskilled jobs. The new labour market is a stratified labour market in which the few enjoy a privileged security while the majority exist under conditions of insecurity. In the new economy, ‘precarity is a fundamental condition’ (Ball 2013: 134), and the majority become outsiders as part of a political strategy to provide differential benefits to the favoured and less favoured (Emmenegger et al. 2012: our emphasis).
These changes, which affect people of all ages, have their most profound influence on the lives of young people. Young people tend to bear the brunt of a recession; they are far more likely than older workers to become unemployed and, as new entrants to the labour market, are first to experience the new conditions of the post-recession economy.
In the chapters that follow, we explore the changing experiences of young people from the 1970s to the present day, involving in-depth discussion and analysis of the 1980s recession and the more recent Great Recession. Our discussion is informed by the work of Elias and others outlined here, set within the evolving policy landscapes that frame the lives of young people.