Youth Education-Work Nexus and New Configuration of Social Risks. Young People, Inequality and Youth Work

This paper examines the education and work nexus in the lives of young people to demonstrate varied forms of potentialities, vulnerabilities, and types of resilience, and explores experiences of youth in terms of how education and work are integrated and/or disintegrated. The author examines the nature of shifts occurring in global social policy thinking and practice, examines the analytic details of the labour market reforms, that share the same logic of selective exclusion for younger cohorts, and then considers their social, occupational, economic, and demographic consequences to depict the inequality scenarios can be predicted for the local communities. The paper is structured according to a number of key topical foci, namely: (a) to seek to determine what social, economic and institutional factors account for the different degrees of social vulnerability present in a young population, (b) to explore the causes and (un)intended consequences that globalization has had on labour market outcomes in different phases of the life course, (c) to deal with youth in austerity and young people’s responses to inequalities, (d) to understand economic insecurity, youth poverty and social protection, (e) to engage youth discourses in potentialities, vulnerabilities and resilience, and to determine how well these themes aptly or unsuitably capture the nature of education and work structures impacting contemporary youth, (f) to understand the development of social inequality structures in the course of increasing needs for employment flexibilization, and how the process of globalization has influenced life-course patterns and inequality structures in the local communities. The author would like to debate the results of qualitative and quantitative empirical research, but also focus on the theoretical concepts used in the analysis.