Young People, Welfare and Crime: Governing Non-Participation - Hardcover

Fergusson, Ross

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1447307011 ISBN 13: 9781447307013

Publisher: Policy Press, 2016

Synopsis

Widespread youth unemployment is rapidly becoming a major—and seemingly endemic—problem around the world. And, increasingly, young people themselves are being blamed, their nonparticipation in the workforce criminalized. Ross Fergusson here mounts a powerful critique of current approaches to youth unemployment, reexamining its causes and consequences from a wide range of perspectives and revealing the structural and cultural problems that underlie it. It will be essential for anyone working with or trying to address the problems of youth today.

About this title

About the Author:

Ross Fergusson is a senior lecturer in social policy at the Open University, UK.

Review:

"Every now and then you get to undertake a book review of a truly excellent book. This has been one of those times. . . . This book excels on all levels." (British Journal of Criminology)

"A wide-ranging, knowledgeable, and sophisticated attempt to offer fresh insights and, indeed, to offer a strong challenge to the ways in which the young are marginalized and manipulated by dominant social forces." (Critical Social Policy)

“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, University of Oxford)

“Educational underachievement and exclusion, diminishing labor-market opportunities and wholesale criminalization 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, University of Liverpool)

“This is an exciting book. Too often scholarly debates and policy thinking about young people take place in separate disciplinary fields, limiting the theoretical potential for understanding. Here Fergusson has produced an important and novel contribution to the way that we should think about the exclusion of young people. The book is to be commended for its ambition in bringing together theory and research from youth studies, criminology, sociology, and social policy, better to understand work, welfare, and crime.” (Rob MacDonald, Teesside University)

“Fergusson has important things to say. His book cuts through much muddled thinking about young people’s non-participation. It challenges dominant policy discourses about contemporary youth and much academic thinking and offers an original and critically informed analysis which disrupts the traditional disciplinary restrictions which limit our understanding of the lives of young people on the margins of education and work.” (Robin Simmons, University of Huddersfield)

“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, University of York)

About this edition

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1447307011
• ISBN 13: 9781447307013
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300