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Young people are particularly vulnerable to precarious labour. This story has been told by statistical data from the National Statistics Institute and Eurostat and by (official or otherwise) "last in, first out" policies. It happens in a context of increased access to higher education and qualification levels that, together with the changes in the labour market and the effects of the recession, contribute to disappointed expectations of social mobility based on educational attainment. Young people find themselves caught between the goals of survival, work and a career. The new, less visible mass manifestations of "non-extreme" social exclusion delay and seriously constrain the transition to adulthood. This paper provides evidence, based on 52 interviews with young adults and a selection of 3 cases, for the political and statistical invisibility of these new manifestations of precariousness.

This article discusses the unsteady and uncertain conditions in which a potentially individualized life course co-exists with and survives in a so-called institutionalized, standardized, familistic and sub-protective society. For the purpose, non-family living in early adulthood in a southern European country (Portugal) is taken as the example. On one hand, data from the 2006 European Social Survey (23 countries, N=43000) is used to contextualize the Portuguese transition to adulthood and the preconceptions about the so-called familistic societies in general. On the other hand, data on events and values from a small sample of young adults living alone in Portugal (aged 24-30, N=120, approximately 1% of the universe considered), along with official statistics on a housing programme for these young adults (Rental Incentive for Young People), allows us to analytically deconstruct preconceptions about the relation between intergenerational support and welfare policies in familistic societies. This data demonstrates most of all how a mismatch between the still-prevailing institutionalization of life courses in some societies and the reflexivity characterizing contemporary biographies produces critical points in young people's lives. It also demonstrates the adaptability of family cultures to these 'choice biographies' in comparison to the lack of adaptability of some youth policies, in particular those involving housing. These processes of mismatching and misunderstanding reflect and promote the inadequacy and inefficiency of communication between youth research and policy-making.

"Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts. Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life-course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities. The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction and perpetuation of inequalities"--

Introduction. History, biography, endurance and empathy : an introductory (thank you) note to the book / Magda Nico and Ana Caetano -- Challenging the structure/agency binary : youthful culture, labour and embodiments / Steve Threadgold, David Farrugia and Julia Coffey -- Subjective understandings of young people's agency : concepts, methods and lay frames of reference / Sarah Irwin -- The interplay of structure and agency in the school-to-work transition / Ingrid Schoon -- The go-between. young-ish trajectories through a life course agency-structure lens / Magda Nico -- Redefining the link between structure and agency : the place of time / Carmen Leccardi -- Structure and agency : an old couple in a new era of prolonged education-to-work transitions amid rising inequalities and declining life chances / Ken Roberts -- Making a living in a provincial hometown : locality as a structuring landscape for agency / Sanna Altonnen -- Exploring the connection between structure and agency within the context of the young Greek crisis generation / Athanasia Chalari -- Fighting adversity with different weapons : youth, structure and agency in Portugal during the crisis / Nuno De Almeida Alves -- Certainties and control in the lives of young men : stories from three research projects / John Goodwin, Henrietta O'Connor and Laurie Parsons -- Structure and agency in life stories : how to become a gang member / Carles Feixa -- Reflexivity in late modernity : understanding young lives in the context of social change / Daniel Woodman and Amy Vanderharst -- What are the chances? Coping with contingent events in youth / Ana Caetano -- Youth pathways as process : how factor configuration, time dynamics and reflexivity combine together / María Eugenia Longo -- There's always tomorrow strengthening agency and challenging structure through youth work and youth policy / Howard Williamson.

In some of the sociological production of recent decades, the popularity of individualisation theories has resulted in conceptually undifferentiated notions in the analysis of social change. De-standardisation, de-institutionalisation and pluralisation, on the one hand, and reflexivity, agency and action, on the other, are concepts that are frequently used interchangeably, self-evidently and without differentiation. In the social science literature, they often assume the almost incontestable status of a premise, instead of that of an object or empirical hypothesis. Rebutting this approach, in this article, the hypothesis that the process of de-standardising the life course as a growing mass phenomenon has little empirical evidence to support it, is postulated and confirmed. The exercise of reflexivity as an exclusively contemporary practice, mobilised homogeneously by all social groups is also questioned. On the basis of European and Portuguese samples, both statistical and content analyses of biographical sequences and narratives are employed.

In response to the predominance of heteronormativity in the studies on household work, this article explores how this work is organized and shared in same-sex couples. For this purpose, a qualitative study (twenty interviews with homosexual couples) was carried out, examining the imbalances,
negotiation process, level of satisfaction and gendered family legacy in the current organization of household work. It was concluded that the absence of the difference in sex in the couple contributed to a more flexible and egalitarian form of negotiating the organization of the tasks. The
women tend towards greater specialization in the tasks and the men towards greater delegation – a reflection of gender socialization.

Abstract

Secrets are important for understanding interpersonal and family relationships. They give insights into the dynamics, processes, interactions and bonds that are developed, interrupted or revisited throughout life. We address family secrets as observatories of interpersonal relationships in two ways. One relates to how the disclosed secrets reveal social norms and social changes in family relationships. The second relates to telling an individual or family secret during a research interaction and what ethical issues and practices this disclosure implied. We address these issues through the secrets that emerged from 49 interviews carried out within a family histories research project with 15 Portuguese families. We identified a variety of family secrets related in particular to family and reproduction, money and addiction. The emergence of secrets in the interviewees' narratives reveals the fundamental role of secrets in attributing meanings to biographies and family histories.