Full Description
This compelling volume focuses on what it is like to be young in the rapidly changing, enormously diverse world region that is early 21st century Europe. Designed for a North American readership interested in youth and young adulthood, The Modernization of Youth Transitions in Europe provides a rich fund of theoretical insight and empirical evidence about the implications of contemporary modernization processes for young people living, learning, and working across Europe. Chapters have been specially written for this volume by well-known youth sociologists; they cover a wide range of themes against a shared background of the reshaping of the life course and its constituent phases toward greater openness and contigency. New modes of learning accompany complex routes into employment and career under rapidly changing labor market conditions and occupational profiles, while at the same time new family and lifestyle forms are developing alongside greater intergenerational responsibilities in the face of the retreat of the modern welfare state.
The complex patterns of change for today's young Europeans are set into a broader framework that analyzes the emergence and character of European youth research and youth policy in recent years. Reading this collection will provide scholars and practitioners with not only relevant and up-to-the-minute information about youth in Europe, but also a basis for reflecting on the similarities with and differences from today's North American youth. This is the 113th volume of the quarterly journal, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Click here to see the entire listing of issues for New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development.
Contents
1. Young Europeans in a Changing World (Manuela du Bois-Reymond, Lynne Chisholm) The volume's editors set this collection into the framework of a rapidly changing Europe and introduce the individual chapters. 2. European Youth Research: Development, Debates, Demands (Lynne Chisholm) This opening contribution analyzes the emergence and character of youth research within the sociopolitical context of European integration processes. 3. Learning in Times of Modernization (Sven Morch, Manuela du Bois-Reymond) The writers take a close look at changing relationships between education and learners in light of the demands and consequences of modernization. 4. Redefining the Future: Youthful Biographical Constructions in the 21st Century (Carmen Leccardi) Young people's life planning and life rhythms take on a more contingent and open-ended quality as the concepts of time and space change. 5. Social Change, Family Support, and Young Adults in Europe (Andrew Biggart, Siyka Kovacheva) When the welfare state cuts back support for young people in the transition to adulthood, their families must shoulder heavier responsibilities. 6. Biography and Gender in Youth Transitions (Barbara Stauber) Young people's transitions to adulthood remain inescapably gendered so that constructing a life demands active biographical reflection within contradictions. 7. Transitions from School to Work in Europe: Destandardization and Policy Trends (Andreas Walther, Wim Plug) This final chapter depicts risks and breaches among education, training, and the labor market in the context of the policy measures developed to try to deal with these. INDEX.
