Young People, Welfare and Crime: Governing Non-Participation

Product Description ​Mass youth unemployment is now endemic and almost ubiquitous in the global north and south alike. This book offers an original and challenging interpretation of the ways in which young people’s unemployment and general non-participation is becoming marginalised and criminalised. It re-examines the causes and consequences of non-participation from an unusually wide range of disciplines, using an innovative theorisation of the fast-changing relationships between extended studentship, welfare provision, labour market restructuring and crime. This approach offers an important contribution for understanding what it means for young people to be socially re-positioned and economically excluded in increasingly unequal societies, in and beyond the UK. Review A wide-ranging, knowledgeable and sophisticated attempt to offer fresh insights and a strong challenge to the ways in which the young are marginalised and manipulated by dominant social forces." Professor Roger Smith, Critical Social Policy"Young People, Welfare and Crime is scholarly. It is readable. It provides an original analysis. This book excels on all levels …It offers a stunningly clear theoretical framework… Its interdisciplinary analysis is utterly compelling and masterful. The implications are profoundly unsettling…" Professor Jo Phoenix, British Journal of Criminology“Ross Fergusson shows that there is not just an economic and social crisis that affects the young in rich-world countries but also a crisis in our understanding of how and why it has come about. His book is a major new critique of several theories. It suggests what can be salvaged from current academic misunderstandings, and how academics can better work with others to begin to turn the tide for young adults who are treated as if they are no longer needed, or are useful only for menial work of little real value.” Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford“Educational under-achievement and exclusion, diminishing labour-market opportunities and wholesale criminalisation comprise the adverse conditions within which complex youth-adult transitions are increasingly defined and disfigured internationally. Fergusson’s timely publication engages with these conditions empirically and theoretically with a level of analytical precision and authority that will make it an indispensable source for sociologists, social policy analysts and criminologists.” Barry Goldson, Charles Booth Chair of Social Science, University of Liverpool“Young people invariably bear the brunt of social and economic change – especially recessions, and the neo-liberal austerities and criminalising and neglectful injustices that follow them. Fergusson's original interdisciplinary analysis sets a convincing late modern context for grasping the depths of our crisis of youth as it explains why, how and upon whom the burdens of social exclusion fall the hardest.” Peter Squires, Professor of Criminology and Public Policy, University of Brighton Review “Working in sophisticated fashion across disciplines and theoretical approaches, this unique – and very welcome – book provides much-needed contemporary insights into the complex relationships among youth unemployment, welfare and crime.” Nick Ellison, Professor of Social Policy, University of York About the Author Ross Fergusson is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Open University. He has published widely on young people in leading journals in social policy, politics, youth justice and education, drawing on primary research findings, critical policy analysis and social and political-economic theory.