Abstract
Ross Fergusson’s Young People, Welfare and Crime is an important book. It challenges established approaches to understanding the lives of young people; works across disciplines and perspectives to examine the patterns, causes and consequences of non-participation in education and work; and examines the complex relationship between youth unemployment, welfare and crime. Much of its content focuses on the United Kingdom, although the book draws on a broad range of literature and also examines the position of young people in a range of international settings. Fergusson’s book provides a wide-ranging analysis and locates debates about participation, welfare and crime in a critical constellation of perspectives, although theories of governance and criminalization are at the heart of its analysis.
The text is split into four parts. Part One first sets out the aims of the book and provides an overview of its scope and coverage. It then focuses on patterns of non-participation in the United Kingdom, where the proportion of young people classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training) continues to be greater than in most OECD nations, before explaining how youth increasingly bears the brunt of unemployment across the globe. It finishes by ‘positioning’ the book within the field and explaining how it challenges much of the existing literature which, tends to focus on particular policy fields or is based in one of the established traditions. This, Fergusson argues, fails to offer an adequate understanding of the inter-relationship between young people’s non-participation, welfare and crime. There is, he suggests, not only a crisis of young people’s non-participation but also its analysis, and so he aims to work across traditional divisions and circumnavigate the limitations of working within a single tradition, perspective or paradigm.
Part Two reviews the three traditions which have, over time, dominated youth studies: the youth transitions approach, cultural studies and various conceptions of social exclusion which have become popular across much policy discourse, at least since the 1990s. The latter, Fergusson argues, has over recent years folded over into more hard-edged notions of ‘disengagement’ which tend to emphasize endogenous, psychosocial and moral referents—a movement which he has critiqued elsewhere (see Fergusson, 2013). Fergusson then moves onto analyze the effect of economic recession on the relationship between unemployment and crime, and argues that we need to move beyond a focus on instrumental incentives, rational choice and cognition to understand how such factors may interact with more expressive motivations, such as anger and resentment, and to critique the disciplinary actions of the state. The interlude which finishes this part of the book then argues for a dedicated theorization of the relationship between crime, welfare and non-participation which takes into account the ‘textured complexity’ of such relations.
Part Three, ‘Theorising Non-participation’, is detailed and challenging and Fergusson argues convincingly that there is a need to move beyond the restrictive binaries highlighted in the previous section. Here he considers various ways of theorizing non-participation and its relationship with crime, especially aspects of Jurgen Habermas’ (1976) and Imogen Tyler’s (2013) works, to demonstrate how different approaches can be synergized. Fergusson draws cleverly on Tyler’s ‘anatomies of abjection’ to help us understand the insidious inductive pathways to criminalization which increasingly characterize neoliberal regimes, such as the United Kingdom. Such an analysis can, it is argued, be combined with and make good some of the shortfalls of Habermasian attempts to take into account endogenous and exogenous causes of crime and non-participation. Part Three goes on to engage with a range of other thinkers, including Simon’s (2000) work on governance and his analysis of the state’s need both to find more and more sophisticated ways of trying to resolve what are essentially structural problems by requiring specified forms of participation and through using increasingly punitive measures against those who refuse to take part in such prescribed activities.
Part Four, ‘Criminalising Non-participation’, examines the ways in which the neoliberal state increasingly combines processes of governmentalization with more overt powers of juridification to govern young people’s non-participation. The use of workfare schemes, benefit sanctions and various other attempts to force youth into the labour market are, it is argued, essentially policy experiments in which young people are used as a test-bed to drive down wages more generally—although, as Fergusson points out, such forms of coercion run contrary to the free market principles and notions of individual liberty championed so vociferously by neoliberal regimes. Either way, the encroachment of the state into an increasing broad range of everyday matters is, as Fergusson explains, now a significant characteristic of government in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The implications of this are, as Fergusson points out, serious—not only for those young people who continue to defy the strictures of the state, but also for the principles of social justice and democracy more broadly.
The book concludes by arguing that research needs to resist and challenge dominant policy discourses and populist assertions which increasingly promote nationalism, xenophobia and inter-generational conflict whilst diverting attention from questions of class, capital and structural inequality. It is, as Fergusson argues, difficult, however, to counter such narratives or for academics to gain access to the sites necessary to expose the roots and complexities of young people’s participation and non-participation in the labour market, its relationship with welfare and the interface between such dimensions and involvement in crime. There is then a call to address this through increased collaboration between academe, think tanks, investigative journalism, campaign organizations and other parties. This desire for publicly engaged critical research is laudable and academics do, I agree, need to think of new and creative ways of challenging dominant assertions about the relationship between the individual and society, but I would also stress caution. Think tanks, after all, played a key role in engineering the rise of neoliberalism and campaign groups usually have a specific agenda to pursue. Working with such bodies may well offer significant possibilities but academics need to find ways of maintaining integrity and rigour if they are to do so.