Combatting the Causes of Inequality Affecting Young People Across Europe

Mikael Stigendal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351848244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Inequality is one of the most burning issues of our time, affecting young people in particular. What causes inequality? And how can actors at the local level combat the causes, not only the symptoms? By seeking to answer these questions, the book will contribute to this growing and transdisciplinary subject area by using mainly qualitative research and a perspective that integrates theory in every phase of the analysis.

Drawing on cultural political economy, based on critical realism, the author claims that the most important causes of inequality are the ones inherent as potentials in capitalism and the capitalist type of state. Compared with the first post-war decades, these potential causes have been actualised differently since around 1980. They are also actualised differently across Europe. The book explores these differences concerning growth models and welfare regimes. In general, societies have developed into a new condition of social inclusion, which explains why many young people have become excluded. Societal borders have arisen in the cities, separating the winners and losers of inequality.

Positioning itself outside the box of what tends to be the majority of the publications in the field, the book proposes knowledge alliances between young people, policy-makers, civil society and researchers to combat the causes of inequality.

1

Introduction

Inequality has vastly increased since the advent of the financial crisis in 2008. Young people have been highlighted as one of most affected categories. Because of this predicament, the European Council endorsed in 2009 a renewed framework for European cooperation in the youth field (2010–2018), also known as the EU Youth Strategy. The work has been divided into three-year cycles, each one ending with a European Union (EU) Youth Report drawn up by the Commission. The last report from 2015 shows some positive trends in the field of education during the last years, but the general picture continues to look gloomy as “many young Europeans are facing serious threats such as marginalisation in the labour market, deterioration of living conditions, and obstacles to social integration and political participation” (European Commission, 2016a: 158).

According to the report, employment has become more difficult for young people to find and also to retain, and, “when a job is secured, the risk of being overqualified is high for many young graduates. Unemployment, including long-term unemployment, has continued to rise amongst the young …” (European Commission, 2016a: 158). Furthermore, material deprivation rates have gone up and it has become increasingly difficult for many young people to meet their housing costs. As a consequence, overcrowding has risen in many EU Member States. The report contains a lot of interesting indicators on what seem to be the problems but not a trace of any causes; it restricts itself to the symptoms. Therefore, the youth policy presented in the first part of the report cannot deal with much more than symptoms. What else could it tackle due to the missing knowledge on the causes?

In contrast, this book sets out to identify the causes and one of them is inherent in precisely this limited approach to the symptoms. The EU Youth Report represents this latter approach, problem-oriented as I will call it, in contrast to the potential-oriented approach that this book represents, and as the Youth Report makes the reader look upon the symptoms as the main problems, it shows that not only the problems themselves but also how you perceive and define them can be problematic. If policymakers really want to solve the severe problems affecting many young people across Europe, the causes have to be combatted in the first place. To identify these causes and suggest how actors at the local level can combat them is the purpose of the book. Whilst I do not object to those who put the blame on neoliberalism in recent decades, I would claim that the causes are deeper than that. They are inherent in the way contemporary societies work.

I will start in this introduction by explaining the purpose of the book. It has a special relationship to the EU-project Citispyce, where I collaborated during 2013–16 with researchers and practitioners in ten European cities across the EU: Athens, Barcelona, Birmingham, Brno, Hamburg, Krakow, Malmö, Rotterdam, Sofia and Venice. Without Citispyce, it would not have been possible to write it. Furthermore, the book is based on more than thirty years work on a societal perspective, which in recent years I have been inspired to call Cultural Political Economy (CPE). This will be presented in the second section, but only briefly because it runs through the book and will be explained in more detail in many places.

The third section of this introduction dwells on the possibilities of undertaking this kind of research. It could run the risk of further stigmatising disadvantaged young people and neighbourhoods. I will explain, however, how that risk could be dealt with by adopting an approach to knowledge which recognises that even young people can be knowledgeable and, thus, should be treated as subjects in their own right. Such an approach to knowledge is inherent in my interpretation of Cultural Political Economy, founded as it is in critical realism. Finally, in the fourth section, I will present and explain the outline of the book.

1.1 The purpose of the book

During the course of the Citispyce project, every team produced reports on their cities and the situation of young people from national and local government perspectives together with those of NGOs and ‘experts’ working at the neighbourhood level as well as from disadvantaged young people themselves. All of these reports from across Europe display effects of the political project known as neoliberalism (see chapter 5.2), most obvious in the reports on Birmingham and the cities in Eastern as well as Southern Europe. Furthermore, neoliberalism appears in the far-reaching labour market reforms in Germany, driven by the principles of activation and workfare. It has put a decisive imprint on the transition of the Dutch welfare state. Neoliberalism shows itself clearly in the austerity measures pursued with the intention to “solve” the crisis, for example the excessive use of fixed-term contracts for young people. In the sense of being increasingly imprinted by neoliberalism, European societies have converged.

Neoliberalism has had an uneven impact but yet been very successful across Europe. A major reason for this success is that finance capital has become its main beneficiary. The political project of neoliberalism has made the European economies in general more financialised. The Euro has been crucial in the neoliberal project, urging the member states to strengthen competitiveness by increasing flexibility as well as promoting temporary and part-time work. All Eurozone countries have joined this race to the bottom and the race has been won by Germany. Because of that race, countries across Europe have diverged over the last years.

These patterns were clearly expressed in reports from Citispyce and identified as effects of different growth models in Europe. On that basis, we have seen how the growth model of dependent financialisation in the south of Europe has made young people with a job particularly vulnerable due to their employment in the most dependent sectors. We have seen some aspects of what is meant by the fact that labour markets with a low share of the type of organisation called discretionary learning do not tend to foster creative producers and demanding consumers. We have seen how labour markets with weak regulations make people unsecure. But we have also seen how highly regulated labour markets protect the ones included in them while making it difficult for young people without a formal education to get a job.

All the work in Citispyce – back and forth, up and down the levels of abstraction, and the turns between simplicity and complexity – has indeed reaffirmed the validity of the method known as retroduction, associated with critical realism, i.e. the philosophy of science which guides the book (see for example Sayer, 2000; Danermark, 2002; Jessop, 2015a: 240). What is required in research, as Moulaert et al. (2016: 179) put it, is a “reflexive spiral movement, which is typical of critical realist analysis, between meta-theoretical, theoretical, and empirical analysis, refining conceptual entry points in the light of substantive findings and deepening, widening, and modifying the empirical analysis in the light of the developing heuristic model in its articulation to specific middle-range theories.” The purpose of this book is to take this very fruitful and rewarding spiral movement further.

Citispyce resulted in a rich material. In all the cities, two urban areas and the services provided for young people in them were studied in more detail. Many young people were interviewed on their life situation in more general terms. The Citispyce researchers in Venice (Della Puppa & Campomori, 2014: 7) give a beautiful glimpse into how such interviews could be carried out:

As long as we interviewed him, trying to transform it in an informal chat, sitting in the cement and with a hexis corporelle as similar as possible to that of the respondents – they perceived us like figures close to the street educators which gave us their contacts and with whom they have a relationship of trust – some other guys approached us with curiosity, listening and sometimes speaking, sometimes standing in silence. Giovanni and Luca, they talked freewheeling solicited by our questions and, meanwhile, they were rolling joints and sharing with the others. However they appeared lucid and centred on the topic of the interview, but I started to ask myself how to preserve their confidence and their trust even in the case they would offer us to smoke. This did not happen: they felt the need to respect the border of our positioning. The interview continued while, around us, the darkness was falling and the humidity of the evening rising.

Pilot projects and case studies were carried out in order to identify socially innovative practices. Parts of this rich empirical material have been used and analysed in a number of reports and articles. In this book, I intend to build further on all these efforts but its main purpose is to explain what actors at the local level can do not just to alleviate the symptoms of inequality, but to combat its causes.

1.2 A broad and founded societal perspective

This purpose has to be put in perspective and mine is a broad one. Once upon a time, broad societal perspectives belonged to the mainstream. Scholars like Adam Smith and David Ricardo called their science political economy. These classical political economists did not lock themselves into academic disciplines. In contrast, political economy was regarded by these and other polymaths “as the integrated study of economic organization and wealth creation, good government and good governance, and moral economy (including language, culture and ethical issues)” (Sum & Jessop, 2013: 16). Classical political economy took for granted the dependence of society and science on values. These political economists were driven by what C. Wright Mills called the sociological vision (1959). They did not treat method or theory as independent areas but as interrelated.

In contrast to such aspirations, a fragmentation of social science emerged in the latter part of the 19th century, much driven by the establishment of neoclassical economics, which I will address further in chapter 5.2. In recent decades, such a further fragmentation has made it increasingly difficult to understand social phenomena in their societal contexts.

An alternative to this fragmentation is the broad societal perspective called Cultural Political Economy (CPE), represented in particular by Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013). It could be seen as a response to the so-called cultural turn in social science of the last few decades that was instigated in the 1980s, above all by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). This cultural turn was in itself a response to the structuralism of the 1960s and 70s.

Another response to the crisis of structuralism was the philosophy of science developed around the same time, called critical realism, proposed in particular by Roy Bhaskar (Bhaskar, 1975, 1989; Sayer, 1992, 2000), and which underpins CPE philosophically. With the support of critical realism, we can distinguish between potential and actual causes of inequality as well as its forms of appearance. What appears to be happening constitutes only a part of reality, referred to as the empirical. Using an expression from Liedman (2006, 2015), who in his turn draws on Hegel, we could also refer to this as the surface forms of reality. The empirical – the surface forms – expresses a content which critical realism calls the actual, meaning that which actually happens. But what critical realism calls the real also includes the potentials.¹ To give but one example: young refugees may possess knowledge which thereby exists in its potential, but which cannot be actualised if society does not recognise it due to, for example, the grading system.

Similar philosophical ideas informed regulation theory, initiated by Michel Aglietta and others in the 1970s and 80s (Aglietta, 1987). Aglietta emphasised regulation theory as an alternative to the neoclassical theory of general equilibrium, a theory which was recently effectively shredded by Thomas Piketty (2014). Aglietta argued that the concepts of subject and condition should be replaced by relation and process as part of the bedrock of economics. Through critical realism, the foundation was laid for CPE. With regulation theory, the E was put in its place. On the same ground, the P has been developed, particularly by Bob Jessop’s work on state theory, inspired, in turn, particularly by Gramsci and Poulanzas (Jessop, 2002; 2015b).

In recent years, the C in CPE has been put in place by the work of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013). Culture should not be seen as a separate part of a whole but as interacting and interwoven with social structures. CPE places culture and structures on an equal ontological footing. Reality is always more or less complex, and in order to be able to ‘go on’ – e.g. to be able to know what to do, what to decide, take the next step, how to act or to form an opinion – this complexity needs to be reduced. Two modes of reducing complexity exist: making sense and meaning of, as well as structuring, social relations. Basically, social science is about exploring how and in what forms actors simplify this natural and social complexity (Moulaert et al., 2016: 176).

The understanding of the first mode of complexity reduction is based on the theory of semiosis, because, in essence, it is a matter of signs (which according to Umberto Eco is “everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else” (quoted in Sum & Jessop, 2013: 24)). CPE highlights semiosis as an umbrella concept for many and diverse forms of sense- and meaning-making, one of them being culture. Yet, despite this subordination, the term culture has been used to label the CPE perspective. That is because the perspective has been developed in response to the cultural turn and the term culture seems easier to grasp and use than semiosis.

Both cultures and structures have to be made by actors. Otherwise they would not exist. I will return to what that means in chapter 3.1 but here only highlight actors and agency, as an essential concept, alongside structures and cultures (Brante, 2015: 249). Actors may make a difference due to their capacity for strategic calculation and action. There is always a discretion, by which I mean the scope that “exists for actions to overwhelm, circumvent, or subvert structural constraints” (Jessop, 2016: 55). The concept of discretion deals with the changing ‘art of the possible’. I will explain this further in chapter 3.2.

1.3 Researching inequality

Researchers can be quite insensitive to how the choice of words, expressions, styles and modes of explanations may exclude those who are not initiated. That is certainly the risk with a highly theoretical perspective like CPE. It can easily give the impression of being a concern for just a small group of the highly educated. The use of such a mode of communication may become particularly detrimental in research on inequality. It may run the risk of actually aggravating inequality by further stigmatising the ones affected by it. That is also the case when the research focuses solely on this so-called losing-side of inequality. In contrast, this book pursues a relational definition of inequality, which treats it as a difference between two sides: winners and losers. The book deals with both sides.

Inequality might also be aggravated if the research treats the ones affected by inequality only as objects, as if they have nothing to contribute. In contrast, I have in many research projects worked together with the ones concerned by inequality, both those affected by it and those who try to manage the consequences of it, employed by the local council or volunteers in civil society. This book is imprinted by such an approach: potential-oriented as I call it.

It is my firm belief that young people have a lot of potential. The main problem of inequality is the inability of societies to take advantage of this potential. Young people have a lot of experience but also knowledge. Some of this knowledge has not been learnt in school but through interaction with peers, often by using social media and the internet. Sometimes this kind of knowledge is called informal, as it has not been graded and thus recognised formally. People who work with young people also have a lot of knowledge.

But can this really be called knowledge many would probably ask. The answer depends on how we view knowledge; what we mean by it. This is a profoundly important topic which a CPE perspective based on critical realism can have a lot to say about. Exploring this paves the way for an understanding of CPE as something more than a perspective and to call it an approach or a paradigm seems therefore more appropriate. The space in this book, however, is not sufficient for me to go into depth in these matters, so I shall make some crucial remarks in brief (see also Sayer, 1992: 13ff).

Firstly, knowledge should be seen as a context of meaning in which the terms take on meaning through their relationship to each other (Sayer, 1992: 56). It makes sense and meaning of something and that something can be called its referent object. By making sense and meaning of that referent object, knowledge constitutes a reference object. These two objects should not be confused, due to the insurmountable gap between them (Sayer, 1992: 47; Liedman, 2015: 41, 401). As a reference object, knowledge is always something other than what it concerns and refers to: its referent object.

Using inequality as an example, it intrudes on us empirically and provides us with referent objects in the shape, for example, of what we ourselves experience; stories we hear; reports we read; or pictures we see on the TV. We need to make sense of this complexity in order to express an opinion or perhaps do something about it. The sense we make of it, for example my attempt here in this book, is a reference object; i.e. something which refers to the referent objects (see also, for example Moulaert et al., 2016: 175).

Secondly, this sense-making is particularly demanding regarding knowledge which, therefore, should be seen as an act of production. Thus, knowledge does not exist by itself but has to be produced. Just as any other human activity, this production takes place in socio-spatial contexts, characterised by social relations and various forms of meaning. This concerns all knowledge on inequality, which, thus, has been produced, regardless of whether it appears in books, lectures, debates, politics or in the behaviour of council employees supporting young people facing inequality. Hence, it is imprinted by human incompleteness and is neither unquestionable nor final. Neither experience nor information is the same as knowledge although either one of them may become an important starting point for the production of knowledge. In order to become knowledge, experience and information have to be worked upon.

Thirdly, to make sense of this knowledge, we need to make it our own personal knowledge and that requires work as well. Therefore, learning cannot be achieved passively (see also Sayer, 1992: 52). It matters also in what context it takes place. If we succeed, knowledge becomes a reference object for us. We then understand what it is about, i.e. its referent object.

Fourthly, knowledge does not just take shape in the mind but also in the body. Such an approach appears in the Swedish national Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and the Recreation Centre 2011, which states that knowledge …

… can be expressed in a variety of forms – as facts, understanding, skills, familiarity and accumulated experience – all of which presuppose and interact with each other. The work of the school must therefore focus on providing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What is inequality?
• 3. Why does inequality exist?
• 4. Systemic causes of inequality
• 5. From decreasing to increasing inequality
• 6. Financialised economies
• 7. Austerity and individualisation
• 8. Inequalities in the cities
• 9. Combatting inequality
• 10. Concluding summary
• Bibliography
• Index