Thanks to a comparison of the entry trajectories into adult life in different European countries, Cécile Van de Velde deeply renews the field of sociology of youth.
Youth redefined
We thought we knew everything about youth in France. Numerous and good quality works have indeed accompanied since the early 1980s the difficulties encountered by young people of all the environment to find their place in society. The 1970s oil shocks upset the previous calendars from the transition to adulthood. Yesterday access to a stable job often had little installation in an independent accommodation, life as a couple and the birth of the first child. It is no longer going today: the time for studies is getting longer for everyone, but also the in-between which extends between the exit of the school system and stabilization in a job. Porty to France, school treatment of unemployment, the low activity rate of young people and the high level of unemployment striking these age classes slow down and complicate access to adult life.
Cécile Van de Velde’s work deeply renews this classic approach. It first calls into question the conception of the youth that underlies it: conceived as a transient state prior to the crossing of the three thresholds defining the entry into adulthood-stable use, independent residence, couple-, youth would be part of a statutory design of ages of life separated from each other by fixed and immutable borders. However, now progressive, discontinuous and reversible, these stages have lost their collective power of the routes. The traditional thresholds tend to work and the alleged adult is no longer conceived himself as a finished being: he keeps being in front of a horizon line which retreats as he advances and reappears before him at the very moment when he believes he has crossed him. The concept of adults no longer refers to a status, it is only perspective.
Four ways to become an adult
This small methodological coup, Cécile Van de Velde then implements the main tool for renewing the question: the longitudinal exploitation of the European household panel carried out in four countries, Denmark, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. The first six waves of this panel make it possible to reconstruct the routes of family emancipation and social integration of young people living in these four countries and aged from 18 to 30 years from 1994 to 1999. This comparative dimension transforms the classic approach to the classical approach because it puts into perspective the French situation with those of three other countries, precisely chosen because of their differences. In these four countries, the author analyzes social executives, which preside over experiences associated with these youth routes. It focuses in particular to measure the way in which state intervention, the education system and family cultures structure the modes of entry into adulthood. But it also strives, from interviews, to understand the meaning that individuals give to their youth routes. The empirical observation protocol put in place is remarkable and the processing of impeccable data.
Hence the interest of the results exposed in the form of a clear and clear typology, which must surely have a lot to the way in which Serge Paugam, who had led the thesis from which this book is drawn, likes to analyze social logics. Four countries, four ways to become an adult. To be in Denmark, to assume yourself in the United Kingdom, to place yourself in France and to settle in Spain. It is indeed a typology of experiences, not a categorization of individuals. These four ways of becoming an adult are social constructions which have been linked to the methods according to which articulate in these four countries the intervention of the State, the School and the Family.
Be found corresponds to a way of living their youth as a long time of exploration and experimentation in a logic of personal development. Early independence, sinuous and discontinuous routes experienced without emergency, progressive self -construction and definition of a social identity. So much for the Danes.
Assume is the British way of becoming an adult. This second form of youth experience is part of a logic of individual emancipation, with short trajectories oriented almost exclusively towards job search. In this journey, the young man and the young woman must prove the individual capacities of independence and self-financing and to break themselves the links which connect them to the family and to the State.
Place is the French variant of the model. Investment in human capital under the species of schooling and the diploma race is the main factor. It is accompanied by prolonged dependence on the family. The feeling of emergency is very significant: you have to integrate at all costs and as quickly as possible, once and for all life.
Settle On the contrary is part of a logic of family membership. Stop from his parents is the last step in a three -act process: stable employment, marriage, purchase of accommodation. This model characterizes young Spanish.
We understand very well thanks to the mutual lighting that allows this clear and well -argued typology to be carried on the four countries, in the name of which values are articulated these experiences of youth with social frameworks specific to each company: personal development among the Danes, individual emancipation, among the English, social integration in France and matrimonial installation in Spain. We also understand why French sociologists were so attached to a conception of youth as an age of life with fixed thresholds. They inherit this representation of the social frameworks which shape us and the way in which the actors themselves consider their youth, as a transitional stage with definitive integration.
Bright stereotypes contestation
We will also understand that this book constitutes a significant advance in the knowledge of the processes of access to adulthood which it renews thanks to its comparative and international dimension as well as to the combination of statistical data and interviews restoring the meaning that young people give to their experiences. The French case thus appears in a new light thanks to the light carried by the situations of the other three countries.
This book is a masterpiece of clarity: written in a crystal clear language, it declines in a rigorous and convincing way a subtle argumentation armed with a precise knowledge of all that has been written about this question in France and abroad. I will nevertheless make three reserves. The initial methodological coup d’etat calling for a Copernican revolution – youth is no longer a state but a becoming – is partly unfinished. Many passages or formulas continue to reify this age of life in the book: “ youth routes “,” youth “Just,” Access to adulthood “, etc. Stereotypes have a hard life and everything is not wrong either in this archaic representation, especially in France !
We can also regret that the differences between girls and boys are not studied in a greater detail. The impression that we remove is that the models described are more male than female.
The clarity prohibits this clear and clear typology on the differences between these four countries is bright. But everyone knows that if the model is pure, social reality is always dirty and contradictory. One always wonders, faced with an ideal type of this kind, what is the fraction of the population which it really accounts for and what is the share of those who live in the margins of the model. Classic question which should not be discouraged by young sociologists to start the operation in other contexts, because Cécile Van de Velde showed it in a brilliant way. An international survey of good quality exploited with creative and daring concepts is always an inexhaustible source of knowledge: here is a book that encourages us to think.