YOUNG

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the diversity of youth civic action by pre-senting several examples of what young citizenship concretely is and can be in the European Union (EU). This will be done by placing Theodore Marshall's (1950) classical, modern formulation of citizenship in different contemporary contexts, and thus also going beyond the modern conception of citizenship. Contexts such as the globalizing world, new conditions for transitions into adulthoods, new forms of political participation of youth, and the transformation of politics (media politics) as well as consumption will be elaborated upon. In addition to Marshall's triad — civic, political and social — media citizenship, consumer citizenship, cosmopolitan and global citizenship will be discussed as new types of civic virtue (late modern civic virtue). The genre of the article falls into the special category of reflectively open research texts with a touch of a criticism and politicization. The text is not based on any specific empirical corpus as research texts conventionally are.

Theories relating to youth participation are, in the main, ill-defined and contested. It is often assumed that citizenship and a sense of well-being are the outcomes of active forms of youth participation. This paper presents a critical comparative review of each before offering a new model which seeks to explain the top-down and bottom-up influences on the positive engagement of young people.

The fact that girls on the average seem to do better than boys at all levels of schooling has triggered off a debate on ‘feminization of schools’ as a problem in many Western countries. In this article, a competing hypothesis is proposed, namely the ‘new girl hypothesis’, relating the academic success to the change of cultural as well as psychological positions among young girls of today. The story of schooling gender is told on the basis of data from a three-generational study of girls and their mothers and grandmothers in Norway, interviewed in 1991–92, and with a follow up for the girls ten years later. This story proves to be a rather ‘messy’ one, showing both ruptures and continuities between the generations. To understand this ‘messy story’ the article explores some paradoxes in schooling gender: Firstly, the paradoxes of pedagogy wavering between gender neutrality and gender reproduction, secondly the paradox of the welfare state wavering between individualizing policy and reproductive family orientation, and finally the paradoxes of knowledge-seeking itself, which can be seen as both gendered as well as transgressing gender boundaries.

This paper is based on evidence gathered in 20 firms, matched by size and business sector, in each of three Central Asia cities — Almaty in Kazakhstan, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. In each firm the owner(s) and/or senior managers supplied information about the business, focusing on methods of recruitment, training, and employee career development. Parallel questionnaire surveys gathered information about the family and educational backgrounds, and labour market and employment biographies, of all the young (up to age 30) employees in each of the 20 companies. A total of 1,402 young employees completed questionnaires, and from these, eight per city, with equal numbers of males and females, with and without higher education, were subsequently interviewed in depth. The evidence is used to identify how families that were advantaged under the old (communist) system were continuing to reproduce their advantages inter-generationally. It is shown that this was mainly, though not entirely, via their children's superior chances of progressing through higher education. The evidence is also used to argue that cultural capital was playing a stronger role than social capital in the inter-generational transmission of advantages, that the critical events in the potentially life-long status attainment process were concentrated within a relatively short time frame, and that the multiple strategies to which families with economic and cultural assets could resort were liable to neutralise all efforts to diminish their ability to pass their advantages down the generations.

The purpose of the present article is to outline and illustrate an analytical approach that accentuates the biographically complex processes inhering within early school leaving transitions. The organizing device of ‘structural option’ (Stones, 2001) is introduced, which brings into focus the role and interplay of types of ‘structures’ (in a structurationist sense) in the decision-making processes underlying school exit. ‘Structural option’ combines two important dimensions in influencing young people's choices: cognitive/emotional and relational/interactional structures. This study shows that disengagement from school is more than a straightforward reading that might suggest lack of positive disposition towards education, but rather is born out of powerful interactions across these two main structural dimensions. As an analytical construct, structural options alert us to the importance of analyzing young people's disengagements from mainstream school in terms of social relationships, power, and emotions. While the article is based on empirical findings from an Irish context, the intention is that its scope extends more broadly to qualitative data analysis of school exit transitions within other contextual settings. The empirical focus derives from the interview narratives with fourteen participants attending a second chance educational initiative in Ireland, known as the Youthreach programme. While most of the young people occupy the status of ‘early school leaver’, closer inspection of their structural options shows that their pathways to early school exit and school disengagement (for those who completed) comprise quite differing structural combinations. As researchers, appreciation of such combinations can help us understand the justifications young people use in their decision-making.