The flexibilisation of youth transitions in the post-communist half of Europe is an indication for the pluralisation of modernity. In the 1990s young people in the region were thrown sharply away from the certainty of the previously firmly structured and strictly controlled transition patterns of the state-socialist societies into the sea of the risks and uncertainties of market regulated societies. At present they face the conflicting challenges of globalisation and nationalistic mobilisation, technological advancement and economic underdevelopment, individualisation and traditional military conflicts. The risks of the transition force young people to invent flexible strategies to move through education and training, work and leisure, family and peer relationships to uncertain destinations. The flexibilisation of the passages through the life stages involves a constant shifting of established borders in terms of time and place. Neither the time limits nor the routes of the transitions are any longer fixed in the fluid social, economic, political and cultural orders of post-communism.The first and widely accepted fact about youth condition in East Central Europe is that young people are making their life transitions at a time when the societies they live in are making societal transitions. If we want to analyse youth transitions in the region we have to study the interplay of these problematic transformations. It is very difficult to generalise about the post-communist development because the countries in the region are getting more divergent than they were before, making reforms with different speeds in different directions.Besides, comparative empirical studies in the region are rare while statistical data do not yet systematically cover all the major issues of the social transformation underway. This paper is an attempt to tackle these limitations and cover the changes in youth career routes in postcommunist societies, making use of available official statistics and data from youth research.
The term 'waithood' has become increasingly used to describe the situations of 20-something males and females throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The suggestion is that, following a youth life stage, young adults' lives stall due to males' inability to obtain sufficiently stable and salaried employment to enable them to head new family forming households, which leaves young women, most of whom do not enter the labour market, unable to marry. We use quantitative and qualitative evidence from research in three NorthWest Africa countries (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) to argue that the situation is more nuanced. We conclude that youth life stage transitions in present-day MENA exhibit a region-specific combination of features. The combination is atypical globally, but neither intolerable for young people in MENA nor unsustainable societally.
Whereas in the past, youth cultures were analyzed in terms of their relationship to divisions such as social class, the tendency now is to see youth as submerged in general consumer culture and to analyze this in terms of cultural codes and symbols. In this article, the authors argue that there are important differences in the way in which young people are situated in relation to consumer culture and that this differs according to the different state systems that have existed in different parts of Europe and the new lines of stratification that are emerging. The former Communist regimes along with their recent transformations are particularly interesting in this respect. Through an analysis of the development and significance of youth cultures and subcultures in Eastern and Western Europe, the article argues that such cultures are important in forging generational consciousness and defining generations.
This article focuses on the recruiting practices of public and private agencies dealing with international labour mediation in Bulgaria and Romania. Based on interpretative analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with professionals working in migrant recruiting agencies in the two countries, we aim to understand their views on the advantages and disadvantages of their services in comparison with other mobility channels: such as informal networks, direct contacts with employers, or unofficial Internet sites. The article examines the ways in which international labour mediation practitioners construct their target group—migrants—in terms of motivation, human capital, and/or challenges of their adaptation to the new context. We then look at intermediaries’ perceptions of employers’ needs and expectations. We finish with uncovering recruiters’ underlying assessment of the national and European mobility policies and the outcomes they see for individual migrants, employers and the countries of departure and destination.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.