Table Of ContentDisconnected Youth?
Other books by Robert MacDonald
RISKY BUSINESS? Youth and Enterprise Culture (with F. Coffield)
YOUTH, THE ‘UNDERCLASS’ AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION (editor)
SNAKES AND LADDERS (with L. Johnston, P. Mason, L. Ridley and C. Webster)
POOR TRANSITIONS (with C. Webster, D. Simpson, A. Abbas, M. Cieslik, T. Shildrick
and M. Simpson)
Disconnected Youth?
Growing up in Britain’s Poor
Neighbourhoods
Robert MacDonald
University of Teesside
and
Jane Marsh
© Robert MacDonald and Jane Marsh 2005
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First published 2005 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-4039-0487-4 ISBN 978-0-230-51175-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230511750
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
MacDonald, Robert, 1962–
Disconnected youth?:growing up in Britain’s poor neighbourhoods/
Robert MacDonald and Jane Marsh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Youth with social disabilities—Great Britain. 2. Poor youth—
Great Britain. 3. Marginality, Social—Great Britain. 4. Poverty—
Great Britain. 5. School-to-work transition—Great Britain.
I. Marsh, Jane, 1974– II. Title.
HV1441.G7M35 2005
305.235′086′9420941—dc22 2005047301
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Social Exclusion and the Underclass: Debates and Issues 6
2 Young People, Transitions and Social Change: Researching
Disconnected Youth 25
3 Missing School: Educational Engagement and Youth
Transitions in Poor Neighbourhoods 48
4 Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers and Social Exclusion 68
5 Paths to Work? Youth Training, New Deal and
Further Education 85
6 Getting Jobs: The Status of Work in Poor Neighbourhoods 107
7 Becoming and Being a Young Parent: Family Careers in
Poor Neighbourhoods 128
8 Housing Careers and the Significance of Place 152
9 Journeys to the Margins: Drug and Criminal Careers 170
10 Disconnected Youth? Conclusions 193
Notes 218
References 228
Index 247
v
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Acknowledgements
The largest debt of gratitude we owe is to the young people who took
time to talk to us for the purposes of our research. We can offer them
nothing more than our thanks and our hope that this book goes some
way towards doing justice to what they told us.
We also very grateful to those agencies in Teesside who helped us
with the research and the staff who took the trouble to describe their
experiences of working with the problems of social exclusion, in its
various guises. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the
project and the University of Teesside helped fill the gaps, by allowing
some time for analysis and writing, in what proved to be a far lengthier
enterprise than originally envisaged. We are grateful to Wendy Bland
who provided administrative assistance to the project.
We have been lucky to work in a university where our research inter-
ests, as represented in this book, the subjects of the courses that we run
and the life experiences of (some of) our students meet so closely. Much
is claimed about the important interrelationship of research and teaching.
We suspect, though, that it would be difficult to find elsewhere what
has proved to be such a productive interplay of ideas between those
‘expert’ by the fact of academic learning and those ‘expert’ by the fact of
biographical, day-to-day experience. One example: in a seminar, a couple
of years ago, two young women students – both residents of one of
Teesside’s many poor neighbourhoods, recipients of welfare benefits
and single mothers – concluded their ‘critical assessment’ of conser-
vative underclass theory with an overhead transparency projection:
‘WE LOVE (signified by a large heart) CHARLES MURRAY!’ A case of
‘false consciousness’? Possibly, but as we show later, such a viewpoint
proved to be far from uncommon among those one might expect least
to hold it. Whatever the rights and wrongs from our perspective of
students’ heated arguments, they deserve credit for the way they have
encouraged us to consider close-up the complexities, contradictions and
controversies of popular ideas about social exclusion and the underclass.
Colleagues and friends at Teesside have helped enormously in the
development of this book – debating its findings and arguments with
us, feeding in ideas from their own research projects, reading drafts of
the chapters, and so on. Colin Webster has been a constant source of
intellectual stimulation and encouragement. Tracy Shildrick deserves
vii
viii Disconnected Youth?
special thanks for the same reasons, for reading and commenting on the
whole manuscript and for pointing us to good research and new books
that we had missed. The number of times Colin’s and Tracy’s own argu-
ments and ideas crop up in this book (as well as their corrections of
ours) far exceeds the number of times they are acknowledged. Donald
Simpson, Mark Cieslik, Mark Simpson, Siobhan McAlister, Heather
Easton, Robin Haggart and Andrea Abbas have served as readers and
valuable critics of particular chapters, or as timely sounding-boards for
the development of our ideas. Whilst we never got round to asking
Steve Taylor to do much in respect of the book, we appreciate his offer
of help and the work he does to make Sociology at Teesside what it is.
Further afield, Robert Hollands and Shane Blackman continue to be valued
friends and colleagues in the efforts we share to understand ‘youth’.
We thank our editors at Palgrave: Heather Gibson for taking this on
initially and more recently Jennifer Nelson, Briar Towers and Jill Lake,
particularly for their tolerance of our missed deadlines. We are indebted
to Bob Coles for being – over many years – an invaluable mentor (to
Robert MacDonald) and, in this instance, for taking time to review the
manuscript in the ever-diminishing, academic summer vacation. Whilst
a friend, he is not shy of criticism. His comments, like those of the others
listed above, have improved the book immeasurably. As ever, all faults,
errors and inaccuracies remain our own.
Finally, and closer to home, Jane Marsh would like to express her
thanks to her family and to her partner, Shaun, for their ongoing sup-
port and encouragement. Robert MacDonald would like to record his
indebtedness to Jacqui Merchant. If she had not been so supportive and
gracious about his badly tilted ‘work-life balance’ the book would never
have seen the light of day. Credit, too, to Jessie, Will and Paddy for only
rarely pursuing the ‘delinquent solution’ when their father was in absentia.
He dedicates his efforts on Disconnected Youth? to his family.
Introduction
Although the facts of poverty frame all that is discussed in this book, it
is not one that is concerned with academic debates about measures,
rates and definitions of poverty (see Hills etal., 2002; Piachaud and
Sutherland, 2002). Nor is it an evaluation of the laudable political efforts
of the British Labour government to reduce child poverty, regenerate
run-down neighbourhoods or otherwise tackle social exclusion (see Social
Exclusion Unit, 2004). Rather, this is a book about the experiences of
people as they grow up in some of the poorest parts of Britain; how they
live through conditions of poverty and carve out transitions to adult-
hood in some of the most adverse circumstances. In other words, our
ambition has been an ethnographic one: to understand, from the point
of view of those at the sharp end, how processes of social exclusion
intermesh with processes of youth transition.
The book has at least in part been inspired by the unanswered questions
left hanging in a previous title – Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion
(MacDonald, 1997). Although the contributors to that edited collection
are best known for their work in the field of ‘youth studies’, it aimed – as
this book does – to address wider-ranging social scientific debates. As
Furlong and Cartmel argue (1997: 2), the study of youth provides:
an ideal opportunity to examine the relevance of new social theories;
if the social order has changed and if social structures have weakened,
we would expect to find evidence of these changes among young
people who are at the crossroads of the process of social reproduction.
In this vein, others that have reflected on our core questions conclude
that young people have become disconnected from the normal, moral,
mainstream life of society. They are ‘a lost generation’, part of a new
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