Youth, Family and Citizenship.

Compiles qualitative and ethnographic studies conducted in Britain on various groups of young people (aged 16-19), investigating the impact of class, gender, training, education, and family background on the `successful` transition to adulthood. They found that gaps between the privileged and the disadvantaged are growing, at a time when social resolve to rectify the injustice is flagging. Distributed in the US by Taylor & Francis. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

From interviews with factory workers, design engineers, shop assistants, and housewives in eight European countries, distills a widespread pattern of men still being the makers and women the users of modern domestic devices such as washing machines, central vacuum systems, food processors, credit cards, and the totally electronic smart house.

The outcome of a government-funded research project in the UK, this report embraces the three themes announced in the title (`young people` refers to adolescents)--intimately related themes that are rarely considered together. Drawing on quantitative survey data and case studies of 64 homes, the four authors look closely at meanings of adolescence, definitions of health, risk-taking, rules, household negotiations regarding food, sex, smoking, alcohol, and drugs, and relations between parents and young people.

`Leaving Home` is the first major study of leaving home to be published in book form in Britain. It combines a broad history of leaving home with an analysis of the relevant theory and up-to-date research in the area. It examines the processes of household formation in youth, and considers patterns of leaving home in historical context. These patterns are shown to increasingly involve returns to the parental home. Access to state and family support is investigated, and the implications of recent reductions in state support are discussed. `Leaving Home` develops a framework for understanding transitions to adulthood which steers a course between commentators who suggest that young people are responsible for their own homelessness or joblessness, and those who argue that such problems are purely structural. `Leaving Home` argues that this polarisation leads to unhelpful stereotypes, which need to be `unpacked` if we are to understand the social problems affecting young people, and help them to make a successful transition to adulthood. Written in a jargon free style, with clear illustrative diagrams and new survey and interview data, `Leaving Home` is important reading for students of sociology, social policy and social work, housing studies, youth and community work.

A Political Criminology of Youth Homelessness.

This riveting book examines the historical, economic, and political conditions which have shaped homelessness today. Drawing on interviews with 150 young people, the author analyses the causes and consequences of youth homelessness, at the same time as indicating their implications for the politics of youth citizenship. She argues that a significant number of homeless young adults have had their worlds so violently fractured by the effects of housing scarcity, unemployment and cuts in welfare, that attempts to survive and repair their shattered lives necessarily involve a re-ordering of political, moral and economic possibilities. The whole book constitutes a Jigsaw wherein Pat Carlen shows how today`s youth homelessness is a very twentieth century production, strangely caught in the tensions between late-modern systems of welfare-regulation, postmodern creativities of identity risk and reflexivity, and pre-modern fears about the wanderer, the traveller, the mendicant - and all those others who live where they cannot be addressed.

Young People and Social Change.
Individualization and risk in late modernity.