Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession

Long-running trends towards increasing inequality between the rich and poor across Europe have been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. As employment opportunities for young people diminish and as the welfare state is pulled back, pathways to adulthood change and become more difficult to navigate. Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession consists of a collection of papers by researchers from Britain, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Italy and Greece, locating young people's transitions to adulthood in their national social, economic and political contexts. It explores young adulthood with reference to generational continuity and change and intergenerational support. With a cross-national comparative framework, this volume highlights the importance of variations in structural contexts for young people's transitions. Bringing together authors across sub-disciplines such as the sociology of youth, family and kinship, class and inequality and life-course studies, Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession will appeal to academic social scientists as well as final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as political science, sociology, youth studies, social policy, anthropology and psychology; and a wider public readership. Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Sarah Irwin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. Ann Nilsen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Acknowledgements Contributors Chapter 1 Understanding Youth Transitions in Difficult Times Sarah Irwin, Ann Nilsen Chapter 2 Youth research meets life course terminology: the transition paradigm revisited Ken Roberts Chapter 3 Transitions from school to work in Norway and Britain among three family generations of working class men Julia Brannen, Kristoffer Chelsom Vogt, Ann Nilsen, Abigail Knight Chapter 4 How parents see their children's future: education, work and social change in England Sarah Irwin Chapter 5 Biography, History and Place: Understanding Youth Transitions in Teesside Robert MacDonald, Tracy Shildrick Chapter 6 Social inequality and the transition to education and training: the significance of family background in Germany Birgit Jentsch, Herwig Reiter Chapter 7 Youth transitions and generations in Portugal: examining change between baby-boomers and millennials Nuno Almeida Alves Chapter 8 Young people and housing transitions: the role of intergenerational support in an Italian working class context Elena Mattioli, Nicola De Luigi Chapter 9 Young people, transition to adulthood and recession in Greece: In search of a better future Alexandros Sakellariou, Alexandra Koronaiou Chapter 10 Kinship, community and the transition to adulthood - geographical differences and recent changes in European society Patrick Heady