Overview

Widespread youth unemployment is rapidly becoming a major problem around the world. Young people themselves are being blamed and their non-participation in the workforce criminalised. Ross Fergusson mounts a powerful critique of current approaches to youth unemployment, re-examining its causes and consequences from a wide range of perspectives. This is essential for anyone working with or trying to address the problems of youth today.

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9781447307013

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Ross Fergusson shows that there is not just an economic and social crisis that affects the young in rich-world countries but also a crisis in our understanding of how and why it has come about. His book is a major new critique of several theories. It suggests what can be salvaged from current academic misunderstandings, and how academics can better work with others to begin to turn the tide for young adults who are treated as if they are no longer needed, or are useful only for menial work of little real value. Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford Educational under-achievement and exclusion, diminishing labour-market opportunities and wholesale criminalisation comprise the adverse conditions within which complex youth-adult transitions are increasingly defined and disfigured internationally. Fergusson's timely publication engages with these conditions empirically and theoretically with a level of analytical precision and authority that will make it an indispensable source for sociologists, social policy analysts and criminologists. Barry Goldson, Charles Booth Chair of Social Science, University of Liverpool Young people invariably bear the brunt of social and economic change - especially recessions, and the neo-liberal austerities and criminalising and neglectful injustices that follow them. Fergusson's original interdisciplinary analysis sets a convincing late modern context for grasping the depths of our crisis of youth as it explains why, how and upon whom the burdens of social exclusion fall the hardest. Peter Squires, Professor of Criminology and Public Policy, University of Brighton

Author Information

Ross Fergusson is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Open University. He has published widely on young people in leading journals in social policy, politics, youth justice and education, drawing on primary research findings, critical policy analysis and social and political-economic theory.

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