Most would agree that the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008, that hit the USA and Europe particularly hard, was the most serious socio-economic crisis since the ‘great depression’ of the 1930s. It also adversely effected the lives of many young people aged between 16–34 years especially. As Alan France argues this, in large part, reflected the ways western governments responded to the 2008 recession. One of the many strengths of Alan France's book is his interest in demonstrating how government policies have persistently interacted with and shaped the economic conditions in which young people now live.

This book covers a lot of terrain with particular attention given to the sociology of youth and contemporary policy-making in areas like education, labour markets and migration. This synoptic approach is used in pursuit of one major question: how can we understand of the lives of young people today in societies that are undergoing a major social transformation-crisis. It's an ambitious book which draws on evidence from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand while the themes France addresses, and his central objective, are all highly relevant for anyone teaching or working with young people.

France offers a thoughtful political analysis of how state interventions have consistently interacted with economic processes, cultural practices and social spaces to shape policy maker's understanding of ‘youth’ as a ‘site’ or, to use Pierre Bourdieu's term, as a ‘field’ of policy activity. France argues that while governments, and particularly those who have fully accepted neoliberalism in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, represent themselves as engaged in technocratic post-ideological form of policy practice, they are in fact involved in deeply political processes.

France is also alert to one political problem that has long characterized youth studies and youth policy. For various cultural and political reasons, most young people have had little, if any, say about the decisions made that affect their lives. Historically young people have been positioned, alongside other subaltern groups, as objects of scientific scrutiny, fantasy and myth-making. These understandings of ‘youth’ or young people, often legitimated by appeals to the ‘scientific’ status of the relevant research projects, have shaped policy-making intended for young people –without the actual involvement of young people.

Given this, it is significant that, as a sociologist, France does not offer a traditional kind of sociology of youth but prefers to outline what he calls a ‘political ecology’ or a political economic approach to young people. To develop this perspective, France draws on the frameworks of Bourdieu and Urie Bronfenbrenner to develop his ‘political ecology’ in parallel with a ‘political economy’, which I return to shortly.

France identifies clearly the relevant traditions and modes of inquiry that constitute the history of youth studies which he wishes to engage with, critique and revise. This explains his interest in the state and policy-making and how they affect young people's life-worlds and the choices available to them.

As France observes, young people have long been represented as trouble and troubled, vulnerable or ‘at risk’. They are stories based on developmental ideas about the human life-cycle that relies on metaphors of a ‘journey’, ‘pathways’ or ‘transitions’ from ‘childhood to youth’ and to ‘adulthood’ understood as perilous and risky because easily derailed. France offers a clear account of how this popular narrative has been revised and reaffirmed within the neoliberal era. He demonstrates how neoliberal youth policy relies on a revamped developmental model that continues describing ‘youth’ as an inherently problematic stage in the life-cycle. He also explains how youth policy agendas in countries like the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada since the 1980s have been informed by the ‘Active Society’. This model was promulgated by the OECD in 1987 that insisted that it was in young people's, and indeed everyone's, interest, to ensure young people assumed responsibility for their own well-being as soon as possible and got on with their transition to ‘responsible’ adulthood (i.e. productive employment).

On the question of how the 2008 recession transformed the conditions young people in which young people live, France argues, correctly, that the 2008 crisis was not a transformative moment in state policy. If anything post-2008 youth policy in the four Anglo-sphere countries he studies has reinforced the pre-crisis neoliberal ‘responsibilisation’ agenda. Moreover, this is what we should expect of a political economy of capitalist crises. As political economists as Randall Collins (Reference Collins1999) and Wolfgang Streeck (Reference Streeck2016) argue, post-crisis responses tend to be the product of practices established and institutionalised before the crisis. This is because crises, even as they disrupt the established order, are typically understood, represented and responded to in ways that are designed to legitimize and strengthen pre-crisis policies and discursive practices.

France demonstrates how pre-2008 policies have largely been reaffirmed after the 2008 recession. He does this by highlighting the ways the governments he studied continued to assiduously emphasize the need for more education, to reiterate the idea of individual responsibility and for the need that everyone invest in more and more in their ‘human capital’. This meant policies that reiterated the ‘imperative’ for young people to accept responsibility for investing in their own human capital, if they were to reap the rewards that doing so would bring. This meant young people being required to invest in their own long-term financial welfare by accruing educational debt. Significantly this implied intergenerational contract was reaffirmed even as the prospect of employment offering a decent and secure income began disappearing. Yet, as France points out, in spite of far-reaching changes to the labour market and economy, the human capital narrative has been repeatedly reaffirmed by policy-makers even as they also began to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, how the generation of young people born since the early 1980s may well be the first generation to do less well than their parents.

France also offers clear and accessible accounts of the emergence of neoliberal policy regimes and the role of financialisation in creating the conditions that led to the global recession of 2008. He also usefully compares his four Anglo-sphere countries (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) with Norway, Japan, Spain and Poland to reveal how neoliberalism does not produce uniform, homogenous policies, but is refracted through an array of national institutions and cultures.

On the question of theoretical framework: France says he wants to bypass the longstanding debates in sociology framed as a choice between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. This, I argue, is a good idea. He does this by relying on Bourdieu. This, I suggest, is where he has some problems. Bourdieu is very helpful and relevant for policy studies and for research relating to young people – especially his argument that it is a good idea to bypass the reductionism and determinism which both structuralist and social constructionist traditions have promoted; rather Bourdieu's preference is for a relationalist or ecological account of reality.

For many sociologists the ‘structure versus agency’ binary underpins an major debate: on the one hand the ‘structuralists’ claim that ‘society’ can only be understood in terms of our relationship to an overarching system of structures. For those working from this perspective, the job of researchers is to reveal ‘underlying’ structures that inform or determine ‘behaviour’. Those with phenomenological interpretivist preferences on the other hand say we can only know what is happening in the social world by inquiring into human experience and consciousness, by focusing on the meanings we attribute to experience and ‘the world’.

France acknowledges this issue: how the social sciences are marked by such long-standing methodological disagreements between positivists and interpretivists. This is why France is interested in Bourdieu's approach. Bourdieu argues that positions are problematic because they rely on a language of things. For Bourdieu both positivists and interpretivists in their different ways look for causal connections and rely on the idea we can reduce complex phenomena like ‘the social’ and explain it by references to its component parts – that is, reductionism. In this way we see explanations fall towards their author's preferred side of the binary: ‘society’ or ‘the individual’. In both cases it's an approach that relies on a form of ‘substantialism’. Bourdieu is critical of this because ‘relationality’ is central to his sociology (1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant, Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992).

Bourdieu's concern is that in sociology ‘substantialist’ thinking produces a language that is ‘better suited to express things than relations, states than processes’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992: 15). Substantialist thinking is problematic, he says, because it values substance over relationships and sees the properties that are attached to people – like occupation, age, sex, credentials etc. – as ‘forces independent of the relationship within which they act’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1984, 22). For this reason, I expect Bourdieu might say that the life and social positions (of young people, policy-makers, educators. . .) should not be understood as having a ‘thing-like’ quality or status; that it is better understood in terms of configurations of relations within particular ‘fields of practice’ that give them their significance (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992).

This raises one major theoretical problem I have with France's book, as he seems to want to continue talking about structures in e.g. his reference to the ‘under-theorising of structure’, but at the same time to rely on Bourdieu who rejected it. This raises a question about how we can talk about theorising ‘structure’ while at the same time drawing on a Bourdieu's relationalist or ecological account of social reality. What would Bourdieu say about the idea of structure in the context of research about young people and the state? Might he e.g. be concerned that references to social structure might encourage us to miss the ways this metaphor invites us to see and think in particular ways – and in so doing encourage us to overlook the flows and contests over the various (cultural, social, intellectual, economic. . .) capitals that characterize our relations? Might Bourdieu say that using the language of structure encourages us to bypass the intellectual, emotional and illustrative functions of such a metaphor, and give aid and comfort to policy makers who tend to be overly keen to solidify, concretize and reify social relations and practices as if they are an external nearly immovable object? (Boden, Reference Boden1994; Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1984).

Finally, and to continue with one other point of critique, while France offers a sharp account of the 2008 crisis and the policy responses to it by various states, the book would have been strengthened by giving some attention to the major transformative processes now taking place, what some call the ’fourth industrial revolution’ or the ‘digital disruption’. I say this because this is a major issue critical to the lives of young people and central to contemporary youth policy, government and politics generally.

It is a process addressed by sociologists employing political economy; like Collins, who highlights the far-reaching transformation taking place that makes the 2008 recession recede into insignificance (Collins, Reference Collins2010). Labour-saving machinery is seeing the ‘technological displacement’ of human manufacturing, administrative and clerical workers and more recently it is encroaching on highly skilled educated professionals. It is doing so in ways that will see unemployment grow and consumer demand fall, hastening the end of the capitalist mode of production. Added to this are other technological innovations that are changing every aspect of our lives from our health, to our social relations to education.

Sociologists like Collins argue that, unlike in the past, this time capitalism cannot generate ‘escape routes’ from the consequences of labour displacement by creating new high skill or professional jobs. This prospect raises questions about the capacity of traditional markets (like the labour market), that capitalism has relied on for constant accumulation, to survive – to say nothing of how consumption of the goods produced by automated means can be purchased – which, together, pose new questions about distributional justice. In particular when unemployment, from 2030 onwards, reaches 50 to 70 percent of the work age population, this together with the resulting political disaffection is likely to see major changes that will affect the lives of those who are young today.

In summary, I strongly recommend Alan France's book. It is a good book – and especially helpful for teachers, students and indeed anyone interested in understanding policy and how it has influenced the lives of so many young people. It is clearly written and presented in an easily accessible style that reflects France's thoughtfulness and care. It is also great to see Policy Press publish this great little book at a relatively affordable price.