The ethos of vulnerability plays a central role in shaping cross-sectoral youth transition policies and their implementations. Despite good intentions, the ethos of vulnerability emphasizes personal accountability and stigmatization. This is the situation in Finland, where young people tend to be recognized through the prism of inherent vulnerability, with a parallel notion of the self that is damaged and fragile. This “turn inward” to the self does not necessarily help to see problems as societal but as individual, which may perpetuate systematic inequalities.

No abstract

The ethos of vulnerability has come to play an increasingly central role in shaping cross-sectoral transition policies and practices related to young people outside of education and working life. Yet the wider effects of this ethos in policies and practices are still rarely analysed. In this article, we draw our data from five separate studies. The data set includes policy documents, news reports, programme guidelines as well as interview and ethnographic data. This article shows what kinds of effects the ethos of vulnerability in cross-sectoral transition policies and practices can have on young people outside education and working life.

This essay is about the ethos of vulnerability, young people, and policies and practices related to youth support systems in Finland. Our aim is to scrutinize the alliance of the ethos of vulnerability and neoliberal rationality as well as its outcomes in terms of support systems and young people from various backgrounds. In the end, we take our analysis further to see how this alliance is associated with education and how it works by de-politicising, narrowing, and individualizing education toward a new kind of highly tailored precision education governance.

In recent years Finland has witnessed a substantial amount of public debate and concern about vulnerability, wellbeing, mental-health problems and anxiety among young people from various backgrounds. In accordance with the ethos of vulnerability and neoliberalism, people are supposed to become employable, resilient and entrepreneurial, choosing education based on their expected individual needs and what they wish eventually to achieve in life. The focus in this article is on the ethos of vulnerability, and particularly on the cultivation of a vulnerable subjectivity through therapeutically and psychologically oriented knowledge in the neoliberal politics. It is based on individually and jointly produced data from various youth support systems in Finland, and on discussions with young people considered to be vulnerable or 'at risk' who are involved in these systems. We argue that both the therapeutic culture and neoliberal politics legitimise and accelerate cultivation of vulnerability while dismissing social expectations and pressure targeted on young people. Vulnerable subjectivity is strengthened by various types of specialists who claim that the self can achieve a better and more satisfying life through the application of psychologically and therapeutically engineered knowledge and professional skills.