This book has quite a long history in its making as we have been collaborating on research about young people and their individual pathways to adulthood since the mid-1980s. We began at a time when traditional heavy industry and manufacturing were giving way to competition and new industrial processes from the Far East and when youth unemployment was high. The aim was to compare education to employment transitions in the United Kingdom and Germany.

Our approach was to combine quantitative and qualitative methods in understanding differences in young people's experience between the two countries in making the transition from school to work. We concluded that the respective roles of institutions tailored to each country's vocational education and training (VET) arrangements, with deep cultural roots, was central to both establishing and maintaining the different pathways to adulthood. Such pathways also opened the door to understanding young people's aspirations and achievements together with the challenges that faced them in realising their goals. We wanted to learn what motivated the choices made and what demographic and cultural factors helped or hindered them.

Thirty years later, the global financial crisis and the ‘Great Recession’ that followed in 2008 became the stimulus for another collaborative project about the pathways to adulthood involving colleagues in the US as well as Europe. This time the aim was to elucidate the life course effects of the recession set against continuing economic and social trends in the context of accelerating demographic change.

Apart from continuities in the economy and society from then to now, the current book breaks quite new ground. This time our investigation extends to such new socio-economic effects as the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, the gig economy and digitalisation as reflected in the transformations of everyday life and work brought about by the internet.

In a further step, we extended our interest to the potential unravelling of the European Union triggered by Britain's decision to leave – Brexit – and the impact this might have on young people in the UK and Germany and more widely across Europe. Hence, other themes of the book regarding young people's life course include the role of their political participation and family engagement through the internet.

We turn now to probably the biggest challenge of our time, the destructive force of COVID-19, of which the long-term implications for young people may turn out to be the most significant. Of course, we have no means of knowing how long the pandemic will last, including the possibility of its return or another virus of even greater virulence. All we can be sure of is that a shadow has been cast over the generation most directly affected in terms of life chances, for which significant investment will be needed to put in place the necessary safeguards to protect young people's futures.

In the best case scenario the virus effects are a temporary phenomenon for which only a handful of young people have been damaged by the experience. In the worst case the whole generation is significantly affected, of which those in the process of leaving school, facing examinations and seeking work risk losing most. At the same time, to take a more optimistic view, with analogies from the post-World War II period, it is also possible that the shakeup brought about by the pandemic will trigger new thinking and practice in education and other public services. Long-term critics of the status quo have an unexpected opportunity to be heard.

But such development is critically dependent on ensuring that change moves in liberating and progressive rather than regressive directions; that is to say, matching the digitalisation transformation that preceded COVID-19. Surprisingly, and encouragingly, public opinion polls in both the UK and Germany appeared to favour not returning to ‘things as they were’.

In the meantime, society has experienced the world of lockdown and social distancing with the consequence of devastating threats to the economy and risks taken in every attempt by government to ameliorate them. Previous chapters have highlighted key areas, where the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic have brought various forms of disruption, some of which are likely to become permanent. Here we consider what has been learned about the effects of the virus in broad terms and what might be expected to happen next. Each of the following topics reflects issues that needed resolution ahead of arrival of COVID-19 but were then further compounded by the action taken to control its spread. What issues do they raise for youth prospects?

Youth has always been regarded as a period of transition from childhood to adulthood with a wide variation in duration and social support and control by family, neighbourhood, education providers and the state. Its defining institution is the education system, its experiential space is the peer group, fun and games, and more recently social media. We understand transitions as life course events in time and social space. On their path to adulthood young women and young men are confronted with many road signs (norms and regulations) and signals (risks and opportunities) that command attention and individual responses. In view of the multiple institutional demands of education and work and the informal expectations in their family and social networks, adolescents and young adults must deal with the challenge of constructing a coherent self (see Chapter 2).

Life course theory states that transitions imply a duality of social structure and individual agency in the context of social pathways (Heinz, 2009b). Their timing and sequencing, direction and outcome are embedded in structural conditions – the economy, the labour market, and family social background and institutional arrangements, educational and welfare systems. Variations are due to agency, for example individual characteristics – competences, motivation, identity and life goals. Transitions unfold via turning points: entering and leaving school, leaving home, graduating, finding a job, forming a partnership, becoming a parent. The timing and duration of such life course events have become less standardised in recent decades. Today the transition to adulthood implies a period of young adulthood and spans the age between 18 (maturity) and 30 (average age of independent living). Social class, gender, ethnic origin and local/regional opportunity structures modify the course of transitions’ trajectories, suggesting straight paths, detours and revisions of directions.

Life course theory argues that focusing on a framework of the political economy of youth cannot illuminate the young person's contribution to the transition process, which is based on their agency, employing several components of their action potential.

The facts and issues regarding youth prospects in the digital society that we presented and discussed in this book are embedded in economic, cultural and social upheavals with enormous consequences for young people's lives. The first two decades of the 21st century were a period characterised by five major societal transformations affecting youth transitions: (1) the spread of neo-liberal economics and politics; (2) deregulation of labour markets and employment; (3) the digital revolution; (4) expansion of higher education; and (5) social media and associated lifestyles. These social, economic and cultural changes have been leading to a dissolution of traditional ways of life, including the decoupling of social classes, social disintegration and uncertainty among large segments of the population, combined with rising populism. They are now joined by more of a natural phenomenon than the conventional human adversary: (6) the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences of which we discussed in Chapter 8 and return to here.

Changes

Fundamental changes in the public sphere are associated with this transformation. News media (newspapers and television) are losing ground to social media with a trend towards the spread of fake news, and of substituting emotions and opinions for knowledge. These changes document the ambivalent effects of digitalisation and globalisation, including worldwide trade, communication and travel versus new nationalism and tensions within societies and generations, brought about by fewer winners and more losers. These transformations have been leading to increasing contradictions. Responsibility and civic participation are expected of citizens, also young people, while bankers, business managers and some politician act irresponsibly – especially those pursuing a philosophy of neo-liberalism.

It is time to see youth not as a problem but as a resource for societies coping with these changes by promoting free education, successful labour market integration, family formation and national and international political participation. Reliable institutions and pathways are necessary contexts for constructing reflexive identities, building social ties and using digital media to find innovative solutions to societal problems.

Much is written about the conflict between generations. Such tensions are at their strongest in the teens when the parental controls of childhood give way to the freedoms of youth while, at the same time, holding onto the sentiments of respect and dependency that children feel for their parents. Parent–child relationships tend to become more relaxed in young adulthood, when the transition from education to work defines this phase of the life course and parents’ emotional and material support is called for.

Stability and change

A continuing theme of family relationships is what the future will offer for young people and this is where we are witnessing unparalleled technologically driven and political change in which population movement, neo-nationalism and widening inequality are major features. Thus, the recession arising from the 2007/08 global banking crisis is just the most recent example of disrupted capitalist economies, bailed out by government funding, of which young people leaving education can bear the brunt. What worked for their parents in the transition to adulthood, including finding job opportunities, building a career and forming a family, is unlikely to work in the same way for them. The choices they must make are laden with risk and uncertainty in a way that was unknown until relatively recently. Most recently COVID-19 has created societies in standstill mode with restrictions in all spheres of everyday life, presenting a completely new challenge for young and old.

The situation is also compounded by the fact that even before the coronavirus pandemic broke out many features of modern society were already changing at high speed, especially in the labour market as the consequence of digitalisation. The younger generation is confronted with a permanently changing world and transforming opportunities for learning and working whatever the outcome of the pandemic. According to a group of leading life course scientists (Settersten et al, 2020, p 38), ‘the pandemic is reshaping transitions and trajectories in every domain of life’. Virologists and the World Health Organization (WHO) are warning that the effects of the second wave will be more serious and put more people at risk when a vaccine against the COVID-19 virus will not be available for everyone.

Political issues are increasingly communicated in the electronic media, while newspapers and television have become less frequently used for building and exchanging opinions, especially among young people. Therefore, this chapter examines the expansion of online use and the extent to which there is interest in European and national political developments. It focuses on young people's perceptions of political issues, their involvement in social networking, and the spread of new youth movements around climate change in Germany and in support of the Labour Party in the UK.

The role of the internet

The UK and Germany are among the countries with the highest rate of IT users in the EU: 95 per cent of the British population and 92 per cent of the Germans. Being online is ubiquitous, almost everyone has been using the internet as the most frequent means of communication in the past decade.

Whereas 73 per cent of people over the age of 10 used the internet in 2009, it was 88 per cent in 2019 in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2020). While all pupils and students, that is teenagers and young adults, were online for many hours a day, only two thirds of pensioners used it at all. Internet activities for private purposes differ by age, too: 89 per cent of the 16 to 24 age group use it for messages on social networks or chat rooms and searching for information on goods and services. The difference between the younger and older generations regarding internet activities is remarkable: whereas among people older than 65 only 19 per cent use the internet for networking, the majority use it for collecting information. This shows the shift in focal interests over the life course.

The 2019 German Youth Study (Albert, Hurrelmann and Quenzel, 2019) summarised the research with this statement: ‘Society is perceived (by youth) online’. Digital channels are preferred over analogue media, while newspapers and TV are rarely used. Almost all Germans aged 10 to 44 use the internet and 14– 29-year-olds are connecting with social media for six hours a day.

Inequality, as discussed in the preceding chapter, is a distributional characteristic of human society supplying key markers of life chances from an early age as defined by such demographic and attributional factors as social class, gender, ethnicity, education, income, wealth and geographical location. The first signs of inequality's considerable ramifications become evident in childhood: kindergarten and elementary school set the scene for adolescence, where the different routes via vocational or academic education signal likely destinations in the adult labour market. This chapter turns to the individual life course attributes and life course processes from which adult identity is formed, paying particular attention to the consequences of the transition to a digital society. To what extent does the transition bring about shifts in what we want and believe ourselves to be in the exercise of our human agency and in achieving our aspirations for the future? These changes are addressed in the context of the three transformational factors of digitalisation interacting with different economic and social conditions, including growing nationalism, in mainly a European context. Our starting point is the construction of identity, focusing first on the idea of developmental stages as formulated originally by psychoanalytic theorist Erik Erikson. Next, we turn to identity as a life course resource. We then consider the transformation of the workplace and the labour market in the digital economy and the effect of these structural changes on the relationships of lifestyle, social class and identity. The chapter ends with the wider implications of the changes for young people's communication, and solidarity in the digital age.

Self and identity

The sense of self has long been of central interest in the study of human behaviour and development, embracing disciplinary perspectives ranging from history through anthropology to psychology and sociology. The concept comes in a number of forms with various extensions – self-concept, self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-awareness and self-presentation – quite distinct from each other but all bound up in the idea of identity.

Taking for granted that the last three of these identifiers are selfexplanatory, self-concept sums up the central features. The two identifiers following self-esteem express the possibility of unlimited aspiration as embodied in the notion of the ‘Ideal Self ‘.

The form families take, and their internal organisation, have been changing in the process of modernisation. Formal marriage has increasingly given way to cohabitation as the basis of partnership and having children, while more recently the marriage contract has been extended to same-sex couples of either gender to enable them to formalise their relationships.

In contrast, the trend in the other direction has been the rise of singlehood. Increasing numbers of adults in a partnership with or without children or living alone are resisting the idea of formal or informal partnership in favour of staying single. These self-determined ‘singletons’ are joined by the growing proportion of others, who – as a consequence of marital or partnership breakdown, in which children are involved – become single parents.

Nevertheless, despite the importance of these latter family formations, in policy terms there is still, albeit implicitly, a broad consensus, reinforced judicially and through the tax and benefits system of the desirability of formal marriage and children as the basis of family life. The commitment to it of a substantial section of the adult population remains strong.

Family types define the various contexts in which children of the current era grew up and stayed in, or left, the family home. As we have seen, since the 1980s there has been a postponement of leaving home, forming continuing partnerships, getting married and having children. At its simplest level this points to increasing stress laid on family functioning largely borne by parents.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine whether there is an identifiable digitalising effect on family functioning. How are young people and their family members using and affected by digital devices? What are the intergenerational connections over use, what concerns do parents have about their children's online activity and what are the rules, if any, governing the communications? Who are the gatekeepers, mentors and significant others for young people in the digital world?

Digitalisation and its counterparts

On the face of it, digitalisation seems unlikely to have an effect on family structures and dynamics, but that would perhaps be an oversimplification.

Our discussion starts with the US as a disturbing example of the impact of neo-liberal thinking on unequal prospects of youth by considering the consequences of social origin on transition processes and outcomes in the changing economic and political contexts of education and work. The first stop is perhaps surprisingly not Europe but the US, which economically sets the agenda for what happens in the countries to which it is closest, such as Germany and the UK in Europe.

Social inequality is a basic feature of societies that is built on the unequal distribution of property and income from work. For social scientists there are generally four dimensions to be distinguished: education, occupation, income, and wealth; these stratify the population into segments of people with different life chances and social mobility prospects. Since the beginning of the 21st century, as comparative research shows, there has been a widening disparity in the life chances associated with these strata between the social classes in the western democracies (see Blossfeld et al, 2005, 2008; Picketty, 2014).

Educational inequalities have characterised the differentiation of pathways to adulthood since the 1970s (Jencks, 1972) in the US and in the post-social democratic period increasingly in Europe, where the global trend towards higher education as a means of achieving social mobility became popular. The effect of family and schooling on young people's transition to employment and independent living arrangements has been widely documented. During the subsequent decades, the gap between lower and higher education became larger, due to the concentration of wealth and academic credentials in the upper classes. Moreover, as research shows, the middle class is divided into two segments: traditional middle class and new middle class, both fearing downward social mobility due to globalisation and the digitalisation of work (Gilbert, 2002).

In Germany, the traditional middle class consists of VET graduates, skilled workers, qualified service employees, and small and middle-sized enterprises (SME), whose values are centred on status maintenance, material well-being and an orderly life. The new middle class consists of HE graduates (BA/MA), whose value orientations are focussed on self-realisation, quality of life and cosmopolitism.

Many political and economic decisions of the European Union are affecting young people's living and learning circumstances in all member countries, though not in the UK after Brexit. Therefore, this chapter outlines the basic components of the European Union and the strategies of the European Commission for improving the living conditions and prospects of young people. Since their attitudes towards the EU and its institutions determine how the younger generation will become active in supporting and criticising its policies, we also look at young people's perception of the EU and the effects of its youth policy, with a focus on the UK and Germany.

The EU provides a single market with a free exchange of goods, services, capital and people. The EU has been a work in progress, without a master plan: From its inauguration as the ‘Economic Community’ in a ‘common market’ 60 years ago with the Treaty of Rome, its members grew from six (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) to 28 states in 2018; the UK (and Ireland and Denmark) joined in 1973. The current European governance system with a multilevel structure was established by the Maastricht (NL) Treaty in 1992. A common currency, the euro, replaced 12 (of 28) national currencies in 2002. The euro is supervised by the European Central Bank, which regulates the monetary policy.

The institutional setting of the EU consists of two legislative bodies: the European Parliament (in Strasbourg, France), representing the member states’ citizens, and the European Council (in Brussels, Belgium) of the heads of state, representing the member states’ governments. The executive agent of the Union is the European Commission, with the EU's most visible politician, its new President Ursula von der Leyen from Germany, which implements policies and ensures compliance with European laws, for example in environmental protection or agricultural issues. Finally, the European Court (in The Hague, the Netherlands) has supremacy over the national laws and decides legal disputes in and between member states.

The integration of 28 countries under the umbrella of an economic, political and cultural union is a delicate project, with ups and downs in the perception and support of the member states’ leaders and citizens.

‘How do we ensure that the digital economy doesn't leave people behind?’ To answer this question posed by Mathew Taylor and Payal Dalal (2019) of Britain's Royal Society of Arts requires much deeper consideration than has been the case for societal transformations of this kind in the past. As we shall see, ‘The Internet of Everything’ produces change at an accelerating rate in every domain of human activity, of which the most problematic, in terms of meeting youth transition needs, is education. At the most basic level, as the previous chapter showed, prior to the influx of digitalisation, schooling supplied, at least in principle, the knowledge and skills needed to lay the foundations for later participation in vocational training, the labour market and citizenship.

With the dramatic changes in the organisation of the labour market from the 1970s onwards – now confronted by the challenges of digitalisation and ever-accelerating technological change – transformation reaches another level of complexity. The far-reaching educational consequences have been evident for some time, but until the 2007/08 banking crisis, and the recession that followed, most of these effects on young people's prospects were barely recognised (Schoon and Bynner, 2019). The crisis economy, marked by 12 years of post-2008 banking collapse and austerity, was characterised by lack of stability and insecurity. Short-term and zero-hour contracts, ‘casual’ jobs and unemployment replaced secure positions across whole swathes of the labour market. The consequence in Britain was a massive rise in social and economic inequality and the beginnings of the case not only for lifelong income support but universal lifelong learning (Bynner, 2017). In Germany there was a faster recovery and a race to higherlevel education, adding to educational inequality.

Against this background, this chapter addresses the role of education in supplying added value in the digital society of which Germany and the UK are now a part. What should be the content of the curriculum for young people pursuing the various routes to adult life in the changed circumstances of a rapidly transforming society and uncertain international relations arising from Brexit? What are the capabilities and transformational mechanisms essential for full participation that the education system has to transmit to the younger generation in the digital society?

In this chapter we review the evidence from a three-country study assessing the impact of the 2008 Great Recession on young people making the step into independent adulthood, comparing experiences in the UK, in Germany, and the USA. Drawing on evidence from large scale, longitudinal studies the experiences of young people coming of age in different cultural contexts are described. The findings suggest that the Great Recession was a significant, but not principal influence on young people’s changing life course post-2008. Better to characterize it as a major economic shock that intensified the impact of pre-existing economic and social processes on young people’s lives.

Nonetheless, the recession effects presented new obstacles to entering and sustaining employment within the adult labor market. In particular the increasing precaritization of employment and marginalization of growing sections of the youth population, including graduates, is a major concern.