Rights Of Passage by Irwin Sarah Sarah Irwin University of York

Author:Irwin, Sarah, Sarah Irwin University of York. [Irwin, Sarah, Sarah Irwin University of York.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781134222131
Google: XX77AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T04:53:52+00:00

Chapter 5

Lifestyles, orientations and occupational careers

Introduction

Youth research, in hypothesizing and exploring the possibility of an extended period of dependency, has inadvertently set something of a riddle: why should labour force disadvantage prolong youth dependency when traditionally it has been associated with early independence? Research that argued the collapse in employment opportunities, and social polarization between those with and those without secure employment, suggested that young people, displaced by economic change, faced novel social circumstances as a consequence of their labour force disadvantage. The hypothesized social disruption was set up in terms of researchers’ expectations that employment, however limited in its rewards and opportunities, is a prerequisite to “normal” transitions from youth to adulthood. Deferral in the attainment of independence and adult lifestyles has been seen as a potential consequence of resource disadvantage, yet this argument has not been located in relation to the traditional expectation that economic disadvantage is associated with early adult status. In the last chapter, a method of relating the resource circumstances of youth to an index of general consumption standards proved valuable for elucidating patterns of change in the position of youth and young adults relative to the population as a whole. This chapter disaggregates the index of general consumption or living standards, and explores the relation between inequality and the organization of early transitions from dependence to independence.

A positive feature of the life course literature lies in its interpretation of the interaction between transitions to adult status and longitudinal, or lifetime, career and income prospects. Through emphasizing the relationship between patterns of event timing and differing lifetime resource and income profiles, it forces attention to prospective, as well as current and “background” socio-economic circumstances. Class-related differences in the timing of domestic life course events are explained with reference to future, lifetime, economic prospects. Rising earnings over (male) middle-class careers suggest that later ages at parenthood can better accommodate the probable, if temporary, loss of mothers’ earnings and the costs of children, relative to lifestyle aspirations. Job insecurity and a shallow earnings gradient over working-class employment trajectories, where young adults quite rapidly attain earnings levels that they will not progress far beyond, are seen to encourage younger ages at family formation since there is little to be gained by delay. A class-related patterning of early life course transition behaviour, whose explanation invokes future careers and life chances, requires a theory of the orientations through which such futures are rendered meaningful for individual action. However, the structuring of orientations is rarely addressed in detail. Models of class differences in life course event timing rely on rather crude distinctions between class categories, from which orientations are deduced, and equated with a set of attitudes and expectations. In these descriptions, class processes are seen to underlie differences in life course event timing because of differences in lifetime income profiles and life chances, where middle-class careers reward long-term planning and working-class circumstances render it irrelevant (e.g. Roberts 1968; Ashton & Field 1976; Wallace 1987a; Jones 1986; Dunnell 1979; Kiernan & Diamond 1983).

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