Young People's Time Work: Searching for Certainty in Uncertain Times—Introduction to the Special Section

Abstract

The editors introduce the topic of young people's time work at the intersection of youth research and time studies. A large part of youth studies tends to analyze young people's development and transitions while reproducing the chrononormativites of the institutionalized life course. The concept of time work developed by Flaherty allows to address the multidimensionality of time experienced and lived by young people. An overview over the contributions of this special section is provided.

Since scholars began thinking about temporality, they have shaped their theoretical understandings of time in relation to different phenomena and constructions, for example, juxtapositions of metric and experienced time, external and internal time, or everyday time and lifetime. This special section centres on recent debates about simultaneity, time relations and the practical dimension of time. It depicts how current explorations of young people's perspectives of time in the social sciences focus on career and future expectations, youth culture and leisure, and on the significance of time for the reproduction of social inequalities (Fraji et al., 2015; Morsanyi and Fogarasi, 2014). The sociology of time, in particular, consistently underscores how temporality has been both accelerated and condensed in late modernity, referencing concepts of ‘flexible' and ‘decelerated' time (Leccardi, 2021). Young people therefore must confront time plurality (Paolucci, 1996) as they grow up across and between different social fields involving both chrononormativity (Stauber, 2021) and field-specific synchronization requirements (Bourdieu, 1997; Schmidt-Lauff, 2012).

When they address temporality, youth and transition studies are often concerned with how young people manage their time budgets, the degree to which they consciously plan their daily time, and if and which goals they set for their educational and professional future. Such approaches suggest that time is universal, objective, unidimensional, and linear. By contrast, time studies have referred to diverse, multiple, and at times contradictory temporalities as well as positionality of time. As such time is depicted as being both historical and biographical institutional and subjective, biological, psychological and social, and collective as well as individual. Different understandings reflect how time is perceived, felt, interpreted and dealt with and subject to balancing different time norms. Moreover, time is also linked to previous experience of temporality within different fields. And there is a clear consensus: times and temporal experiences have been changing under conditions of increasing uncertainty in late modern societies.

This special section focuses on how young people contribute to the interactive construction of time; that is how they do time work (Flaherty, 2010; Flaherty et al., 2020). Society —adults and institutional actors in particular—addresses young people in terms of time: they are no longer seen as children but not yet as adults. They are categorized in terms of some discrepancy between where and what they are now compared to and what and where they are expected to be as future adults. However, young people are not passive in relation to temporal expectations and categorizations but are actively involved in the social construction of time by perceiving, interpreting, negotiating, accelerating, decelerating, condensing, and extending time.

Temporalities, both in adolescence and young adulthood, result from family socialization, institutionalized educational paths, youth welfare access regulations, processes of (trans)migration with different durations and timings with regard to future fields of activity, lifestyles, social and political participation, and, ultimately, social positioning. They also evolve differently against the backdrop of diverse biographical constellations and horizons (Schilling, 2018; Zschach, 2022). The experience of time is based, not least emotionally, on a history of social time orders (Wittmann, 2012), or temporal regimes which affect young people's socialization (Bourdieu, 2000; Rosa, 2013; Torres, 2021).

In recent decades, youth and transition studies have repeatedly pointed to increasing temporal uncertainty. For decades the destandardisation of young people's transitions to adulthood has been referenced as ‘fluid times' (Bauman, 2007). Contingent societal and individual futures make it impossible to project individual lives and identities while the process of acceleration (Rosa, 2013) also coincides with periods of slowdown or standstill, especially for young people. This was particular evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, comparative studies completed before the pandemic had already captured how in northern Europe youth transitions slow down when conditions of soial disadvantage narrows labor market access, which young people from privileged backgrounds navigate as they can afford to slow down their trajectories by taking up voluntary gap years. By contrast in southern Europe, young generations seem to be put on hold due to segmented labor markets and lack of youth policies (this is why the special section brings together contributors from Germany and Italy; cf. Benasso et al., 2019; Walther, 2009; Cuzzocrea, 2019; Leccardi, 2020; or for the global south Dalsgård et al., 2014).

At present, it is contested whether being young now still (or increasingly again) is structured by assumptions of youth-as-transition (Wood, 2017). This has raised questions about whether ‘youth' has acquired a meaning in its own right, in terms of the personal experiences it can offer in the here and now, and the social and existential explorations it enables (Wyn et al., 2020). Leccardi (2021) contends that in such situations, everyday life has become the primary arena for young people's time work, a most appropriate ground for innovation as well as for the expression of agency and subjectivity. The benefit of making everyday life temporality central relates to the reassuring protective order resulting from the use of micro-routines and short-term cyclicity. In everyday, young people appear to frequently search for new relations between personal creations and the specific conditions of uncertainty they have to deal with. At the same time, everyday life time work coincides with persisting institutional time structures and their inbuilt chrono-normativity of ages, moments, timings, durations, and speeds which are preconceived for specific states and transitions. At the same time, debates about the need for more flexible, needs-oriented schedules that seek to allow for compensatory opportunities for socially disadvantaged young people continue to reflect institutional time regimes shaped by both Fordist and post-Fordist temporal normalities and expectations.

If social inequality is understood as systematic unequal access to action and living conditions that permanently improve or worsen a person's position based on their membership in social categories, then these conditions are reflected in different everyday life temporalities (Elias, 1988; Nowotny, 1993). They constitute a rhythm of life and shape perspectives on what is possible in the future or what will no longer be possible at some point. Educational time regimes shaped by various forms of school and training forms not only act as the pacemakers of time as resource, but also inform different temporal self-concepts (Zimbardo and Boyd, 2011).

Most of the contributions to this special section focus on young people's time work (Flaherty, 2003; Leccardi, 2021) in the course of searching for certainty in times structured by subsequent periods of crisis and a life phase involving overlapping transitions. Growing up under conditions of an uncertain future, social acceleration, and periods of (apparent) standstill, young people are constantly concerned with reassessing and shaping their everyday lives, as well as their life courses and identities. Young people “do time” both individually and collectively, in both formal institutions and informal everyday life settings of growing up. Biographical approaches reveal how they constantly re-arrange their life time in relation to powerful discourses and institutions while doing time coincides with “doing transitions” (Settersten et al., 2022). Demands that they must plan their transitions from school to work are contradicted by a lack of satisfying training and work opportunities and uncertain future of labor markets. At the same time, the chrono-normativies of the ‘right time to …' (Freeman, 2010) persist in life course institutions. Young people are increasingly responsible for coping with these contradictions in the activating welfare state. Youth cultural studies reveal how young people engage in collective practices, to make meaning of shared experiences of temporal uncertainty. As such, this special section addresses individual, collective, formal and informal practices of young people's time work. This helps to fill the gap in the limited research explicitly reflects on the chrono-normativies of growing up, which is even more the case for collective practices in informal contexts.

The first article by Andreas Walther and Barbara Stauber unfolds a framing perspective on the relation of temporality and the constitution of youth resulting from the linear temporal regime of the institutionalized life course in modern Western societies. Thus, it relates historical, institutional, and biographical dimensions of time analyzing the relation between the representations and expectations that youth and young people's cultural practice are expecteded to uphold as they struggle to find subjective meaning, agency and a means to control the present and the future. Three exemplary empirical case vignettes illustrate the complexity and paradox of these temporalities: coping with suspension of transitions during the pandemic; Fridays for Future as an intergenerational struggle for the future; and youth cultural practices characterized by speeding up and/or slowing down. The paper's core discusses three modes and tensions of temporality: the tension between moratorium and acceleration, between orientation toward the presence and orientation toward the future, between simultaneity and linear sequentiality. For young people, these tensions implied the demands of coping in terms of both identity and agency. The article concludes by suggesting the need to integrate relational concepts of temporality in youth research.

The introductory article is followed by empirical contributions that focus either on young people's temporal perspectives, drawing on the analysis of narrative interviews and group discussions, or reconstructing practices of time work through ethnographic analysis.

Sina Köhler and Maren Zschach's contribution reconstructs the time and future orientations of young adolescents who find themselves in rather difficult life situations due to disability-related barriers (Waldschmidt, 2017). The respondents experienced time-outs primarily as institutional barriers at school. Analyzing contrasting cases, the study uses a longitudinal typology to examine time and future orientations with experiences of school exclusion and inclusion from a biographical perspective (McMahon et al., 2019). The empirical results provide insights into the time and future orientation of young people who are exposed to an increased risk of exclusion, which has so far largely been ignored in empirical educational research in the sense of time diversity (Köhler and Lindmeier, 2022) and which the author discuss as ‘temporal discrimination'.

Yağmur Mengilli's article analyzes the youth cultural practice of ‘chilling' among peer groups as a form of boundary work between coping with the demands of education, work, and welfare under conditions of a lack of free spaces. German youth use the term ‘chilling' to refer to hanging out, a term inherited from techno raves where ‘chilling-out' symbolized the need for phases of slowing down to keep pace with the music's quick beat (in turn reflecting the acceleration of social life). It can therefore be seen as a specific, youth cultural form of ‘time work'. In practices of ‘chilling' with their peers, young people negotiate and maintain certain boundaries between different spheres—including between the public and the private, the collective and the individual as a means to distance themselves from institutional time regimes. On the one hand, the peer groups' collective practices serve to create certainty in terms of belonging. On the other hand, they allow the group a means to distinguish itself from others. At the same time, group references to shared experiences in the past constantly shift these practices of demarcation while they are together in the present and preparing for future role expectations and requirements. These references differ depending on resources, practices, and expectations and are expressed in varying forms of chilling. Thus, chilling offers a means for young people to regain control and certainty in terms of defending or reconquering time spaces (Nunn et al., 2021; Woodrow and Moore, 2021) in which young people balance external demands and their own collective desires.

In her article, Valentina Cuzzocrea is concerned with the forms of time suspension young people experienced and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from an Italian case study, she suggests that young people's time work reveals alternative life styles beyond the classical patterns of moratorium or waithood. Some young people actually make use of time suspension, at least in mid-term perspectives. She elaborates that time suspension appears in a different light if the meaning young people ascribe to it is considered. Analyzing documentary sources and qualitative material provides a means to zoom in on how young people reworked certain rituals due to lockdown restrictions, such as the final school exam. The article concludesthat shifting attention from ‘timing transitions’ to ‘times in transition', would allow scholars to look more attentively at the meanings young people ascribe to various forms of time suspension that make up youth through specific youth temporalities.

The special section concludes with Louka Goetzke's ethnographic study. The article brings together findings on gender transitions as a temporal issue. Gender transitions are not only normatively located in youth as a life phase as part of figuring out one's relation to gender and sexuality, but—regardless of an individual's chronological age—are often framed as a second puberty. Against this backdrop, this article shows how gender transitions involve time work (Flaherty, 2003), and by extension, how time works to place gender within the modern linearity. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Germany on gender transitions from 2020 to 2022, the first part of the articles highlights the different ways in which temporality contributes to the emergence of gender transitions as transitions. For example, hormone blockers delay physical changes, and while gender transitioning processes suppose movement, mobility, and self-discovery, they also imply lots of waiting, not only but especially in relation to medicolegal institutions. At the same time, building a trans identity involves anticipating a future self, creating biographical coherence, navigating insecurity, and establishing temporal thresholds, for example, demarking the past and present when documenting changes.

Together, these contributions demonstrate how young people actively find ways to cope with the various time demands of growing up while simultaneously developing their own ideas and time practices. They perform time work as compliance and accommodation, but also as time deviance (Flaherty, 2012). Regardless of all contingencies and uncertainties in volatile societies, the passage of time itself represents an irrefutable certainty that can be reckoned with. This special section impressively demonstrates that not only can planning be seen as an antidote for uncertainty (Leccardi, 2013: 255), but that young people can also practice time work in several forms when dealing with contingencies.