This edited volume represents a nice attempt to analyse the way the state has recently tried to foster employment among young people in Nordic countries. Since the beginning of the crisis in 2007, the rise of youth unemployment – and its new formulation around the issue of “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment or Training) – has become a salient problem that has led to several policy responses from governments. However, NEET levels have remained rather low in Nordic countries compared to the rest of the EU. The authors thus ask whether this is the case because of the policies that have been implemented there, and if so, why?
To answer this question, the introduction (chapter 1 written by the two editors) provides the theoretical framework conceptualizing social protection in general, “as a system”, by looking at the distinct, but interconnected, sub-systems of “income maintenance”, “social services”, and “social regulation”. The “income maintenance” sub-system concerns cash-transfer policies. The second “social services” sub-system takes into account another kind of policy instrument (services) that can be of relevance when dealing with the school-to-work transition, such as education, training or health. The third “social regulation” sub-system relates to public attempts to change the legal environment in order to alter the functioning of labour markets by changing employers’ behaviours. And these different sub-systems are related to each other, in the sense that the effects of one institutional realm also depends on the other ones. One of the key contributions of the book is to analyse at the same time different kinds of institutional realms and policy instruments, in order to have a holistic view of the way the state can structure the school-to-work transition.
The other contribution of the book is the way the relation between the social protection system and young people should be analysed. While the sociological literature on young people (within “youth studies”) usually adopts a micro, bottom-up, perspective on young people, focusing on their agency, many studies on the comparative literature on the welfare state have a macro, top-down, perspective, focusing more on structures than agencies of welfare recipients. In this book, the authors try to go beyond this distinction, by conceptualizing social protection in three ways. First, following the work of Anthony Giddens, social protection policies are understood as “rules and resources”: in other words, they are not only structures constraining young people’s behaviours, but they are also used and produced by them at the same time. Second, they are also seen as the “provision of capabilities”, according to the work of Amartya Sen. What is interesting here is the focus on the “sources of variation in the conversion of capability inputs into capability sets and functionings” (p.16). In other words, the issue of the “diversity” of the young people’s situations is stressed here, not only focusing in contextual varieties (linked to policies here) but also individual diversity: one of the main contributions of the book is to focus on vulnerable young people from minority ethnic groups or with disabilities. Third, social protection policies are lastly viewed as “social constructions”, following Nancy Fraser, Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s works on the possibility for (young) people’s interests and preferences to be taken into account in the political agenda and the policy-making process.
The first three empirical chapters (2, 3, 4) deal with the situation of young people in general in the labour market. Hyggen, Kolouh-Söderlund, Olsen and Tägstström’s chapter 2 provides a descriptive situation of young people’s situation in the labour market, showing that, although it remains better than in most other European countries, it has worsened since the crisis and remains problematic in many respects. They also present policy responses from governments (youth guarantees, dropout prevention in education, active labour market programmes) underlying the fact that we still don’t know much about the effectiveness of such policies. Seeleib-Kaiser and Spreckelsen’s chapter 3 complements the previous chapter in a very interesting way as it provides a descriptive situation of the labour market situation of young people but in a comparative way (comparison of Nordic countries with Britain and Germany using EU-SILC data) and through the lens of the dualization literature in order to assess the “outsiderness” of young people, which is surprisingly as high as in Britain and Germany in general. In chapter 4, Bäckman, Jakobsen, Lorentzen and Österbacka provide a multivariate analysis of the probability for labour market inclusion considering vocational school dropouts, and underlying differences between boys and girls.
Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 focus on two specific situations of youth vulnerability: minority ethnic groups and young people with disability. Niknami, Schröder and Wadensjö (chapter 5) argue that minority groups (foreign born) are more often NEET than native-born young people, and that policy reforms have not improved this situation. On the contrary, many important reforms (especially concerning cash transfers) seem to have improved the situation of young people with disabilities, say Halvorsen, Hvinden, Kuivalainen and Schoyen in chapter 6, although their situation stays worse in general, which leaves room for policy improvement. Arnardòttir, Hotvedt, Nousiainen and Ventegodt’s chapter 7 also look at young people with disabilities but focusing more on social regulation policies, i.e. employment laws, anti-discrimination laws and wage subvention schemes. From a human rights perspective (based on the UN convention of the Rights of the Person with Disabilities, the Council of Europe conventions and EU law), they underline important diversity among Nordic countries, with only Sweden providing strong policies on the three aspects. Chapter 8, written by Traustadòttir, Rice and Jokumsen, is original in the sense that it provides an analysis of the factors of successful access to employment taking into account the point of view of three different groups (employers, minority ethnic groups and young people with disabilities) with interviews led in only one country – Iceland. They show that formal social regulations do matter a lot, but so do other informal factors, especially social networks.
Chapter 9, written again by Halvorsen and Hvinden as a conclusion, is particularly useful and stimulating. First, they provide a summary of the labour market situation of young people in Nordic countries based on the different chapters. They stress the important result that Nordic countries remain quite different and do not constitute an entirely homogeneous group. Second, they propose an analysis of the different reforms presented in the book, by focusing on the growing relevance of social regulation, but in relation to the other sub-systems of the social protection system. They argue that these reforms seem not to have been so effective so far, and they try to present the reasons why it has been the case by interpreting these results in the light of recent literature. Third, they put into question the Nordic education system by underlying the fact that, although such systems seem usually rather inclusive in a comparative perspective, they are still suffering from a number of problems as far as vulnerable young people are concerned in particular.
In summary, this book is an important contribution to the welfare state literature as well as the school-to-work transition literature, on three regards in particular. First, it provides an in-depth empirical analysis of the situation of young people and of policy reforms in Nordic countries, which are comparatively highly relevant, both from a scientific and a political point of view. Second, authors do not focus only on one policy sector and try to take into account many policies at the same time, which is crucial if one wants to take “regimes” or “institutional complementarities” seriously. Third, they deal with specific groups of vulnerable young people usually overlooked in the literature, i.e. minority ethnic youth and young people with disabilities. Further research should pursue this approach by extending the comparison and taking more countries from other welfare regimes into consideration.
