book review

Youth Policy in a Changing World: 

From Theory to Practice

The Book

  • Published in 2012
  • Barbara Budrich Publishers (Germany)
  • Edited Volume


The Editors

  • Marina Hahn-Bleibtreu (Austria)
  • Marc Molgat (Canada)

Marina Hahn-Bleibtreu


  • Former Director of the Austrian Institute for Youth Research (1992-2000)

  • Political advisor to Federal Minister for Social Security and Generations (2000-2002).

  • Until 2011, Former Deputy Head of Unit for Youth Policy, Federal Ministry of Economy, Family, and Youth, Austria

  • Currently: Academic market and opinion researcher at University of Vienna
      

Marc Molgat


  • Director, School of Social Work, University of Ottawa, Canada

  • Research focuses on transitions to adulthood from perspective of life course theory

  • Studied housing trajectories, relations between young people and their parents, socioeconomic integration patterns of high school dropouts and youth migration

  • Interest in youth policies and how they reflect the socioeconomic integration problems facing disadvantaged youth.

Background


  • Volume is an attempt to capture various threads related to youth policy around the world

  • Includes perspectives from Americas, Western and Eastern Europe, and China

  • Book doesn't say this, but fills a gap in the systematic analysis of youth policy not addressed by scholarly journals like Youth & Policy

Challenge

"Youth" as a category is more amorphous than other age categories

It has many vectors:

  • Youth as a chronological age (13-21, 12-25)
  • Period of transitions (child to adolescent, adolescent to adult)
  • Psychological and neuroscientific developmental perspectives (adolescence, adulthood)
  • Life course
  • Political category (citizen / non-citizen)

Therefore...


  • Youth policy is most often treated as part of other policy dimensions like: education, jobs and training, etc.

  • Youth policy goes unnamed as such.

As an edited volume


I will mostly be analyzing the arguments implicit (or missing) in the text as a whole, rather than a single argument carried through the entire book

Main Focus


Three foci for the text:

  • Policy development
  • Effects of policy
  • Perspectives on youth policy

Two Consistent Beliefs


  1. Young people can be active citizens, capable of shaping (in addition to being shaped by) societal institutions.

  2. Public policy can support young people as social actors, both "in their life experiences and their transitions to adulthood" (p. 11)

Policy Development


Papers:

  • Youth policy reviews of the Council of Europe and their impact on national youth policies
  • Transitions to adulthood and Canadian youth policy initiatives: some lessons for transitions research
  • Public debates and sociological research based on the semantic of autonomy: The case of French young people
  • A 'Bottom-up' approach to youth development and policy in the United States
  • The Ibero-American Youth Co-operation and Integration Plan 2009-2015: strategic opportunities and challenges

Policy Effects


Papers:

  • The long-term effects of youth policies in Australia
  • Changes in youth transitions to parenthood in Bulgaria: challenges to youth and family policies
  • Transitions and shifts in work attitudes, values and future orientations of young Finns
  • Migrant and minority youth in the U.S.: rights, belonging, and exclusion
  • Migrant youth in Europe: challenges for integration policies
  • Preparation for work in the trajectories of youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds
  • Young migrant workers in China: plausible integration strategies

Policy Perspectives


Papers:

  • Changing time experience, changing biographies and new youth values
  • Participation among young people in Germany: forms, determinants, trends
  • Participation: a new place for youth in society and policy
  • Gender and transitions from school to work: evidence of youth inequality in Argentina and consequences for youth policy
  • Youth unemployment: causes and consequences and the role of evidence-based youth policies
  • Suicide and ethics: reflections on the reality of young people in Latin America and the Carribean


Conclusion


Two (somewhat) opposing viewpoints about young people:

  1. Adaptation perspective: public policy is meant to help young people adapt to society in order to prevent a wide variety of risky behaviors.

  2. Support perspective: public policy should help and support young people in navigating structural barriers to their success while simultaneously working to dismantle these barriers

Overall Review


On the whole, the book reminds me a bit of how my brain works... trying to pack too many different ideas into the same space, with the inevitable result being: word vomits.

That said...

Strengths

  • Perspectives came from folks deeply embedded in their scholarly and national contexts (some authors had published only in their native language prior to this text)
  • Provides a starting place and comparative perspective for scholars and practitioners in a very young global field
  • Provides a series of models for doing research on youth policy that could be translated and replicated in scholars' own local, national, and international contexts

Critiques

  • Connections between papers are loose at best
    • No common thread of implications, leaves it to readers to start to imagine emerging directions for the field
    • A more helpful strategy for organization could be to organize first by topic (transition, migration, suicide, etc.), and second to focus on development, effects, and perspectives
  • Switch from sections on Development and Effect to the section on Perspectives is abrupt and unexpected
  • Graphics are often poor in quality and overall production looks more like a draft than a final copy 
  • Little reference to the field of political science or public policy, which makes it difficult for new developments to influence those fields or for knowledge from those fields to be integrated into youth policy 

Book Review: Youth Policy in a Changing World

By Alex Fink

Made with Slides.com

Book Review: Youth Policy in a Changing World

This presentation was given during a Ph.D. class on Social Work and Social Welfare Policy. It was eventually turned into a book review published in the journal Youth & Policy.

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