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"Within the diversity of contemporary youth research there are two dominant streams that can be categorized under the broad headings of 'transitions' and 'cultures' perspectives. This collection sets forth a challenge to youth studies, with the contributors arguing that social change means it is no longer possible to understand the experience of young people through this transitions/cultures prism. The future of youth studies, it is argued, will require new conceptual foundations, capable of bridging the gap between transitions and cultures approaches to researching youth. The chapters, including contributions from some of the most established names in contemporary youth studies, draw on a wide variety of alternative concepts, including generation, assemblage, field and belonging to rethink how the study of young lives should be pursued in the coming decades. "--

Several researchers have pointed to an overemphasis on 'spectacular' elements of youth culture and on 'at-risk' young people, arguing for greater attention to the 'ordinary' in sociological youth research. This article draws upon the Life Patterns Project, a 20-year longitudinal study of transitions in Australia, to argue that both understanding the 'ordinary' experience of youth and contemporary patterns of inequality between young people can be facilitated by a return to ideas from the undervalued legacy of the sociology of generations. Much youth research draws, often implicitly, on a model of youth where the adulthood that is the end point of transitions tends to be taken for granted. Yet, in the context of a rapidly changing labour market, the Life-Patterns participants have had to reshape the meaning of youth and adulthood as the field of possibilities open to them has changed. Understanding this remaking is the basis from which youth research can understand how some young people come to win or lose in contemporary conditions.

Young people increasingly mix study with variable hours of employment in a precarious youth labour market. Drawing on interview material from 50 participants (supported by questionnaire data from 1294 participants) from a longitudinal study of the post-secondary school transitions in Australia, this article explores how these patterns of work and study impact on young people's friendships. As the participants left school they moved into new courses of study, in which timetables shifted each semester, and employment in which the hours they worked also varied, sometimes each week. This increasingly common temporal structure shaped the participants' lives in inconsistent and singular ways that made it more challenging for many, but not all, to find regular periods of shared time to maintain close friendships and to build new acquaintances into deeper friendships. Some participants had the resources to manage this emerging variable temporal structure without it having a major impact on their relationships.

Young people's temporal orientation is now a major focus of youth studies. A central research question in this area is whether or not young people treat their futures as 'choice biographies' to be planned as a personal project. In this article I suggest that this focus has emerged in part from a misreading of contemporary sociological theory and I attempt to widen the focus of inquiry. Drawing on a qualitative interview with 50 young people in Australia aged 18 to 20, I highlight two significant elements of temporal orientation obscured by a focus on planning versus not planning. First, that young people mix multiple temporal orientations and strategies, of varying degrees of discursive explicitness, concurrently and as such can be present and future oriented at the same time. Second, that thinking about and shaping the future and enjoying, and coping in, the present are not individual pursuits but shaped collectively with significant others.

AbstractResearch considering young adults' experiences of place is characterised by two focal points: the relationship between place, education and employment; and immaterial aspects of place such as experiences of belonging and relationality. Previous research has worked across these focal points considering, for instance, how symbolic and immaterial factors and social ties can inform mobility choices and experiences. We extend this work by drawing on longitudinal qualitative data to show three ways that place attachment can be a part of the formation of contemporary occupation‐based identities. Using the concept of the self as enterprise (Kelly 2013), we mark out this development as part of a broader generational shift in occupational identities. We ultimately find that some young adults can remain in or return to meaningful rural and regional places by developing an occupational identity or 'personal brand' informed by changing occupational demands and enabled by social ties linked to specific places.

In this article, Johanna Wyn discusses her pivotal contributions to youth studies, in conversation with Dan Woodman. Professor Wyn's key ideas are introduced: the critique of futurity in youth studies, the rise of a new adulthood, social generation, the limitations of a transitions framework, and belonging for young people. These conceptual contributions are discussed in relation to understanding patterns of inequality among young people and the main challenges and opportunities for the future of a global youth studies.

AbstractThis paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by theRoyalCommission into the 2009 'BlackSaturday' bushfires during which 173 people died in theAustralianState ofVictoria. Often inspired byBrunoLatour's material‐semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. InLatour's approach no object is reducible to something else – such as nature, the social, or atoms – it is instead a stabilized set of relations. ALatourian approach allows us to highlight how theRoyalCommission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the 'natural' from the 'social'. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations.GrahamHarman, in his object‐oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a 'relationist' metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of 'objects' to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of theVictorianBushfiresRoyalCommission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements ofHarman's ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material‐semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.

There is an emerging consensus that new approaches are needed to take account of the impact of social conditions on young people's lives. We argue that an approach informed by the sociology of generations can highlight the interrelationships between changing social context and life patterns. This approach enables policies that aim to enhance the social inclusion of youth at risk to recognise the intersections between individual and social transitions that shape the changing experience of youth. We argue that social change needs to be recognised in order to ensure that policies are based on a sound understanding of new patterns in young lives.

Parents are increasingly providing financial support to their adult children. At the same time, it is often taking young people into their 30s to convert educational credentials into career outcomes, establish independent households, and marry or form partnerships. While the role of the so-called 'bank of mum and dad' in assisting with entry into home ownership is well established, its effects are potentially far wider, for example affecting young adults' employment pathways. This article contributes to emerging research on extended intergenerational support using longitudinal data from Australia to explore which young people are receiving this support during their 20s and into their early 30s. Drawing on our findings, we contend that financial transfers as people enter their mid-20s and beyond appear to be used both to manage hardship and precarity, and to enable speculation on positive employment futures.

Young people's drinking represents a nexus between time, temporalities and social practices. While drinking and intoxication have previously been considered a way to achieve a youthful sense of 'time out', young people's drinking is declining in Australia and other high-income countries, suggesting alcohol's centrality in young people's leisure time has diminished. Drawing on interviews with light and non-drinker teenagers from Melbourne, Australia, we develop Adorno's concept of 'free time' to show how young people's time use practices – including how they incorporate alcohol into their lives – are more than ever shaped by social and economic pressures. We framed participants' discussion of time and its relationship to drinking as a) using free time 'productively', b) being opportunistic around busy schedules, and c) the importance of using time for restoration. These framings suggest fragmented and pressure-filled patterns of free time may challenge drinking as a 'time out' practice for young people.