Abstract
Youth Prospects in the Digital Society: Identities and Inequalities in an Unravelling Europe is an ambitious effort to comprehensively explain the current state of young people in Europe today. Framed by life course theory and a comparative focus on Germany and the United Kingdom, authors John Bynner and Walter Heinz deliver a mix of conceptual explanation, data accumulation, personal theorization, and even policy advocacy. The primary aim is to document the education, labor, political, and social opportunities and challenges of young people. The breadth of substantive topics and rhetorical approaches Bynner and Heinz employ make providing a clear synthesis of the themes and conclusions difficult. Considering the utility of this book (for whom and for what) offers a more effective way to capture its primary contributions.
One particular strength of the book is its ability, in parts, to strike a balance in presenting arguments and information of use to both novice and mid-range scholars. While much of the detailed exposition may not be of tremendous value to experienced youth researchers, the presentation provides a strong and digestible foundation in the application of a structural approach to and analysis of youth issues. For non-sociologists, for whom this book could be of significant use, this perspective would be assuredly enlightening and helpful. For example, Bynner and Heinz explain how the intersection of social class and the unique structure of the education systems in the United Kingdom and Germany lead to varied life chances for youth in each country. For those who might not have considered these broader macro forces, such as how the shrinking industrial sector not only limits job opportunities but also hinders the apprentice-education system that undergirds Germany’s approach to minimizing education inequities, these insights will be quite novel and valuable.
Bynner and Heinz overlay this foundational structural-sociological approach with an underutilized, in the wider field, life course approach. Given recent significant historical moments such as the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, this theoretic lens is extremely appropriate. Drawing on the key life course concepts of historical time and place, timing, agency, transitions, and linked lives, Bynner and Heinz are able to highlight definitive changes to all youths’ trajectories and, as importantly, how these trajectories differ depending on one’s social location (e.g., gender, race, and class). Given their somewhat compartmentalized approach to each issue, Bynner and Heinz provide a strong example of how budding scholars can usefully apply the life course perspective to specific research questions.
A second contribution of this book is its accumulation of a vast amount of data on key behaviors and beliefs of young people in Europe today. The book will serve as a treasure trove of citations for researchers building a case for general patterns among young people and for differences between European countries. Bynner and Heinz draw from the results of numerous surveys to describe young peoples’ beliefs on current political affairs, the environment, employment, and social media use. The information regarding young peoples’ perspectives on and faith in current governmental regimes is particularly enlightening. While at times this reporting can be a bit dry, often presented simply as a list of percentages, a central depository of all this disparate information delivers a useful resource.
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is the important questions it raises for emerging research areas on the impact of digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic. Bynner and Heinz provide a set of key questions and potential causal paths that should provide the foundation for forthcoming research agendas. For example, they outline the ways in which social media use may be changing social relations among young people, but raise the necessary question of whether this impact has truly changed these dynamics or simply become a new form of a similar pattern. The combination of tentative theorization and early empirical results that Bynner and Heinz present will provide future scholars the groundwork to fully pursue these types of crucial questions. The fact that the book was being written as the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding limits how deeply it can pursue this particular, important aspect of young peoples’ lives. But its ability to at least provide initial connections between the state of youth pre-pandemic to potential disruptions creates a fruitful starting point for the future of youth research.
While the breadth of coverage is a definitive strength of this book, it may also be its most significant limitation. In many ways it is a bit difficult to discern exactly what this book is. There is not a clear argument arc that is framed, posited, analyzed, and discussed. While the central and foundational concern (i.e., young peoples’ current life chances) is clear, the lack of a coherent and driving research goal makes the exposition difficult to follow and creates consistent redundancies. (That said, the book need not, and perhaps should not, be read from start to finish to garner useful insights. Rather, readers could pick and choose the chapters of most importance and still obtain the most valuable take-aways.)
Perhaps more problematically, the authors rarely define what “role” they are taking when presenting information or conclusions. That is, the line between empirically backed evidence and personal observation/theorization becomes difficult to discern even within the same section of a chapter. For example, in Chapter Two, Bynner and Heinz tackle the issue of social media use and identity. Yet the section seems to devolve into a typical adult rant. With seemingly only anecdotal evidence, they strenuously lament the potential personal misrepresentation that can occur on social media platforms. The extent to which youth actually engage in such deception (as the authors claim) or, even more importantly, are not attuned to the veil of fraudulence that is built into social media is not supported by any systematic empirical evidence. Yet this section, and others like it, is not clearly identified as being based on the authors’ own conjecture. While some of the arguments seem reasonable, readers may be misled to believe the conclusions are backed by data similar to the results presented in other sections.
That critique notwithstanding, this book is at its best when the authors more clearly step into the advocacy role that is more definitively rooted in their own wealth of research experience. They do so when asserting an “applied advocacy,” such as when they make claims about the issues that higher education must attend to in the shifting digital landscape and structure of the market and employment. They also do so when providing “research advocacy,” such as when they call for more systematic examination of how social media is promoting (or perhaps inhibiting) young people in regard to political mobilization and activism. In these places Bynner and Heinz again create a basis for the future of important research on youth lives and, most importantly, do so in way that draws direct attention to the intersections outlined by a life course perspective. Taken together, they have created a book that should be a key piece for any new youth researcher, both within and outside the field of sociology.