Levels of intersecting temporalities in young men’s orientation to the future. A cross-national case comparison

Introduction

The following takes inspiration from the writings of G.H. Mead in an exploration of young people’s thoughts about the future. Temporal aspects of social life formed an important basis of Mead’s theoretical ideas. Based on the pragmatist tradition, he saw the present as the site of social interaction and of interpretations of the past and perceptions of the future (Mead, 1932, 1936). Thoughts about the future are elements of biographical time that are important because they are associated with a sense of direction and opportunity related to past experiences interpreted in a present situation; ‘what we are going to do is determined by what we are doing’ (Mead, 1936: 301). And ‘what we are doing’ is situated in a present where layers of context beyond the immediate personal circumstances are of importance. Time horizon and time perspectives change over the life course as past experiences are carried over into ever-changing presents.

The last decades have been characterised by social, political and economic changes that have exacerbated inequalities in European societies (Stiglitz, 2012) and studies have shown how this affects young people’s approach to both their personal futures and their long-term perspectives of society (Irwin and Nilsen, 2018; Adam and Groves, 2007; Cook, 2016; Heinz, 2014). In this paper, the focus is on the general orientation to the future (Hadjar and Niedermoser, 2019) in education and work and the topic are examined by doing cross-national comparisons between two pairs of cases of young Norwegian and British men ¹ set in the multilayered contexts of historical period, cohort and their three-generation families.

The theoretical framing of the article is Mead’s concepts of time. Three levels of temporality are involved: the biographical time at the individual level, family time at the intermediate level and historical time at the level of society (Hareven, 2000). Thus, the overarching questions address how intergenerational relations act as an intermediate level between individual young people’s future thinking and the specific circumstances in the Norwegian and English ² societies in this particular historical period. Conditions in the family such as available resources of various kinds and parents’ experiences from their trajectories are important for the timing of life course events, and the way young men think about them in relation to their biographical time. The main question addressed is thus whether perceptions of the future are affected by how well timing at the biographical level, related to family time and resources, harmonize with historical time defined as features of opportunity structures in the particular national contexts.

Following Mills (1959/1980) concepts that are helpful for analysis are neither too large for the content of data, nor too narrow to capture its meaning (p. 138) thus this paper will use concepts in a sensitising way (Blumer, 1954) to examine diversity and similarities across the two contexts in order to capture temporal processes in descriptive typologies.

Time and temporalities

Time and temporality have always been important in the social sciences (Adam, 1990, 1995; Mead, 1932, 1936). In life course studies, time and timing at different levels have been centre stage (e.g. Elder,1974/1999; Hareven, 2000). In general sociology, the writings of Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991) have been very influential over the past decades; they conceptualised social change as contingent upon processes of increasing individualisation in ‘late modernity’. ³ Beck’s notion of the ‘risk society’ (1992) in which the future, in the form of uncertainty is brought into the present as risks that can be calculated and managed, has been very influential. ⁴

In other writings on time, the pace and structuring of time itself have been discussed (Adam, 1990). Harvey (1990) addressed what he termed the ‘time-space compression’ that affects perceptions of distance in both time and space, which was related to an overall acceleration of the pace of life in contemporary societies. Nowotny (1994) maintained that a constant busyness binds people to an ‘extended present’ that alters the sense of both past and future. From the mid-1980s onwards, the confluence of a whole range of issues in society and in the social sciences was important for the contemporary interest in time in general and the future in particular.

While Norbert Elias’ Time: An Essay has been taken as a point of departure in much contemporary writings in sociology (e.g. Tabboni, 2001), others have started from Mead’s work (e.g. Flaherty and Fine, 2001). Mead (1932, 1936), writing in the early period when time was the object of interest both in the sciences and in public debate, was a contemporary of Einstein, Bergson and Whitehead. ⁵ Although there are parallels in Mead’s and Bergson’s thoughts about time (Mead, 1936), Mead’s variety of pragmatist thought is important in biographical research because of his notion of the temporal and processual self in an interactional context. Writing about the past–present–future he said:

The past as it appears with the present and future, is the relation of the emergent event to the situation out of which it arose, and it is the event that defines that situation. The continuance or disappearance of that which arises is the present passing into the future. Past, present and future belong to a passage which attains temporal structure through the event. (Mead,1932/2002: 53)

Research on young people and time

The topic of young people and time has been studied from a variety of specific research questions and perspectives and only a tiny fraction of these can be included in a brief overview that aims to give a glimpse of the diversity of studies relevant for the questions addressed here. Survey research has examined young people’s plans for education, housing and employment (Anderson et al., 2005). Carmo et al. (2014) examined young Portuguese’s thoughts about future employment in the lower end of the labour market. Qualitative studies have focussed on how young people’s thoughts are related to wider social change. Some have made a distinction between plans, hopes and dreams in conceptualising how young people envisaged the personal future and that of the wider society (Nilsen, 1999). Lyon and Crow (2012) studied young people’s imagined futures in a restudy of the island community of Sheppey, ⁶ and Cook (2016) examined young Australians’ imaginaries of the long-term future of society, their thoughts about the personal future and how these are related.

A number of studies have concluded that family relationships are formative for young people’s expectations and aspirations for their personal futures. In Irwin’s (2009) study of young people’s orientation to the future based on both qualitative and quantitative data, she found that emotional support in the family was important for motivation in orientation to school work for young people from all social classes, but parents’ education and social status trumped motivation in expectations about higher education. Also drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, Aaltonen and Karvonen (2016) compared Finnish teenagers’ orientations to the future to trace changes or continuities in relation to their parents’ educations and occupations. Parents’ support was important for faith in the future regardless of class background. Woodman (2011) interviewed a sample of young Australians (18–20 years old) about how they felt about the future with reference to relationships, work and education. He found that they mixed multiple temporalities and that thoughts about both the present and the future were embedded in relationships with significant others.

Relationships and events in society beyond the family are of importance too. Reiter’s (2003) biographical study of disadvantaged young Austrians whose transition took place during a period of higher than normal youth unemployment emphasised the uncertainty they felt in life, and how their time horizon was affected by their discontinuous transition to vocational training and employment in an historical period of uncertainty. And Thomson et al.’s (2002) study based on longitudinal data showed how ‘critical moments’ in young people’s biographies shaped their outlook on both the past and the future.

Research on young people’s thoughts about the future in cross-national comparisons helped to identify how some contexts were ‘taken-for-granted’ (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005). In the Nordic countries, a rhetoric of autonomy and independence from parents was related to the support from the welfare state in the form of free education, student loans and other benefits that were not explicitly referred to by the interviewees (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005) (Thomson et al., 2002). Based on a recent three country comparison, Heinz (2014) concluded that particular social and political contexts are important for how the ‘Great Recession’ impacts on young people’s transitions, and although aspirations may still be high, many young people drop out of higher education due to financial pressures in these circumstances.

Although most studies on time do not compare across gender, differences between men and women in experiences of time and perceptions of the future are well established and have been demonstrated in literature that focuses on either women or men, or compares across gender. Women’s experiences of time were the focus in Davies (1989) study of the interweaving of different temporalities in women’s lives. Leccardi and Rampazi (1993) focussed on young women’s experiences of past and future based on a study that compared men and women from a similar framework to Davies’. In recent research, Gill et al. (2016) in a study of young Australian girls, showed how their thoughts about the future were affected by perceptions of expectations to succeed and fear of failing. Samuel and Kanji (2019) demonstrated how the image of the ‘ideal worker’ at an ideological level corresponded with men manager’s experiences and approaches to time. The current paper’s focus on one gender only is thus grounded in research traditions that take the gendered features of society into consideration in all phases of research.

Young people’s relation to time in an intergenerational comparative perspective has only recently become an important topic of study. Snee and Devine (2014) interviewed young people and their parents in a study that focussed on how social class impacts on young people in ‘the middle’ in their decisions about future education in their final year of compulsory schooling. They found that social mobility in the parent generation was important for the aspirations of their children. Leccardi (2012) discussed contrasts of the different cultural period specific conditions of youth for ‘the baby boomers’ and ‘the millennials’. She concluded that the accelerated speed of social rhythm in societies likely give the younger generations a different sense of temporality than that of the parent generation. (Nilsen and Brannen, 2014) compared two generations of British men in the same families in their school to work transitions and demonstrated how historical periods are important for the relevance of intergenerational relationships.

The current paper is based on a three-generation study but the focus here is on the youngest generation of men. Intergenerational relationships are considered important for their perceived trajectories into the future, but with the added dimension of period specific circumstances that vary for each generation over the life course. In a discussion about intersecting temporalities, a theoretical starting point in Mead’s focus on the present is highly relevant.

Study design, methodology and theoretical framework

The ‘contextualist’ life course approach (Elder et al., 2004) is central to the research project ‘Intergenerational transmission in the transition to adulthood’ where 23 Norwegian and 10 British three-generation families were interviewed about their transitions to adulthood. The study has a comparative case-based design (Bertaux and Thompson, 1997; Gomm et al., 2000; Brannen and Nilsen, 2011) thus the number of cases is of less relevance than the thick description and contextualisation of these for typology construction that can capture processes in context (Nilsen and Brannen, 2014; Hantrais, 1999). As Gomm et al. (2000) observed the difference between variable and case approaches is that the former has a large number of cases and few variables, whereas the latter involves few cases and many ‘variables’ to enrich contextualisation. This paper follows in the tradition of Bertaux and Thompson’s (1997) cross-national comparisons between France and Britain based on a limited number of biographical interviews. In the cross-national comparisons, nations are seen as a levels of contexts where social institutions affect individuals’ lives (Kohn, 1987: 714). Bertaux (1990) has also emphasised the usefulness of biographical research in comparative studies in a more poetic way: ‘behind the solo of the human voice, the music of society and culture [can be heard] in the background’ (p. 168).

The systematic sampling followed a sociological rather than a statistical logic (Gobo, 2008; Gomm et al., 2000). The generalisability of the sample is thus enhanced in the sense of findings being transferable to cases of similar properties beyond a particular context (Brannen and Nilsen, 2011). Interviewees were selected on the basis of birth year of the mid-generation (1960–1965), with one child (18+) and one parent prepared to take part. Interviewees were recruited by leaving information folders in workplaces, email, telephone, face-to-face encounters and snowballing. We selected cases from the majority population in both countries and aimed for diversity of social background ⁷ in the mid-generation and gender balance in the sample. Biographical interviews lasting 1.5–3 hours were carried out with family members individually. The interview focussed on the scheduling of the life course, the transmission of aspirations, material resources and care and support during the transition from youth to adulthood, reflections on notions of adulthood, as well as thoughts about the future. Information about education and occupations for members in the extended families within and across generations (siblings, uncles, aunts and grandparents) is included. In the most affluent families, more members across the generations and within the extended family tended to have higher education.

The association between education and social background is well established in sociology (Crompton, 2006; Devine, 2004; Staff and Mortimer 2008). In this instance, the focus on parents’ level of education is not related to social class in itself but mainly to temporality in aspects of family time. Men’s timing of school-to-work transitions has been closely associated with social class over the past century (Roberts, 2013; Brannen et al., 2018). ⁸ When historical circumstances change the synchrony of timing of transitions is altered for some social classes more than for others. The ‘lads’ in Willis’ (1977) study approached their future with confidence, in spite of not having any higher education since the labour market of that time offered a range of opportunities for a variety of skills sets. Structural changes and expansion in the education system over the past decades in both countries have made it more common for people in the younger generations to have education beyond compulsory schooling and higher education has become more important for getting gainful employment (Hobsbawm 1994). For men with low skills, the labour market offers fewer options compared to the situation for their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations (MacDonald, 2008; Roberts, 2013; Brannen et al., 2018), as indeed Willis’ (1977) study demonstrated. When young people have difficulties in finding education and employment the timing of transitions is out of synchrony with family time and can thus become a strain on family resources. As the ‘present’ in Mead’s terms is a site of interaction, family time is an important level of temporality to consider in the current discussion.

Relationships in young people’s lives beyond the family are significant for how they think ahead, as are the circumstances in the contemporary historical period (Nilsen, 1999). The interviews were done from 2014 to 2017. In England this was, and still is, a time of austerity and cuts in public spending as well as increases in fees to universities and colleges. The youth unemployment rate is very high and the prevalence of zero hour contracts is increasing. Norway, with its oil-rich economy was not hit as hard as the rest of Europe by the economic shock of 2008 and the austerity in its aftermath but a labour market with growing demands for academic degrees among the young, in addition to increasing housing prices and high living costs are a problem for many.

In a paper that addresses a particular set of questions, a selection of cases is made from the original sample. These have to be illustrative of traits in the whole sample and point beyond the personal circumstances in the individual biographies; they have to be cases of something (Gomm et al., 2000). This is done by specifying contextual features at different levels and relate the cases to these to demonstrate their validity beyond the particularities of the individuals and show the sociological relevance of the analysis of them as cases in a specific society (Bertaux and Thompson, 1997). Whilst cases in the overall study cover the whole range of educational backgrounds for the current comparisons two pairs of the youngest generation of men from opposite ends of the social class divide ⁹ have been selected to explore how the complexities of intersecting temporalities affect orientations to the future. Comparing extremes across the class spectrum can give a more defined picture of how the interplay of temporal dimensions may inspire particular trajectories over others, than were the intermediate positions included. The analyses identified two descriptive typologies that capture orientation to the future in view of these dimensions. They are based on analyses of the men’s accounts set in the temporal contexts of family and historical period and refer to attitudes in thoughts about the future at a biographical level and how the perceived future trajectory fits in with family and historical time. Thus, the category ‘confident continuity’ refers to a confident attitude to the future where the perceived biographical trajectory is in synchrony with family time and represents a generational continuity that coincides with ideals in current historical circumstances. ‘Cautious contingency’ on the other hand refers to a cautious attitude in a context where transitions are out of synchrony with family time and generational continuity is challenged by the current historical conditions in work and education, hence contingency; the need for keeping options open.

Young men from families of very privileged backgrounds: Confident continuity

In these cases, all three generations interviewed have higher education, as do members of the extended family including grandparents, uncles and aunts. Some were in professions such as medicine and law. Both have older siblings at university.

Young men from families of low skilled backgrounds: Cautious contingency

At the other end of the spectrum are Didrik from Norway and Charlie from England who both came from working-class backgrounds. The only ones in their extended families who had education beyond vocational training were their mothers who both had education at college level without degrees, and Didrik’s brother who was a college student.

Comparing across contexts

There are many differences between the English and Norwegian societies but this section refers only to dimensions relevant for the current comparisons. The system of education which is publicly funded with no tuition fees in Norway, has very high fees in both private and public institutions in England (Brannen et al., 2018) ¹⁰ where students also start university a year earlier. Welfare state provisions for young people including student loans and grants are more generous in Norway. There are however many similarities in topics related to young people, not least with reference to the deregulated housing markets that contributes to social inequalities and delayed timing for moving out of the parental household (Irwin and Nilsen, 2018). Occupational structures across Europe (and beyond) are affected by an increased global division of labour where industry is outsourced to so-called ‘low-cost countries’ and male-dominated low-skilled jobs are becoming fewer and the wages for those left are meagre, especially in Britain with the increase in zero-hour contracts. At the other end of the labour market, the demand for credentials and academic degrees is increasing (Roberts, 2013). As Didrik puts it, ‘there’s too much emphasis on studies nowadays. You MUST have a Bachelor or a Master degree’. This seemed to be a common perception among young people in both countries.

Charlie and Didrik ¹¹ came from families where vocational skills had been more common for men than academic education over the generations, much like the families of the ‘lads’ in Willis’ (1977) study. Where Charlie worked for a very low pay in a zero-hour contract, Didrik had his scant income from benefits that he was slightly embarrassed to talk about. Charlie had the necessary grades to continue his education but the increased college fees made this impossible. Didrik could not make use of the free education in Norway because he lacked a full upper secondary diploma. Neither of them wished to take up loans. They both emphasised the importance of personal contacts and networks ¹² for finding work because of the overwhelming numbers of applications to menial jobs in both countries. As Didrik said, if you knew someone who knew someone it was easier to be considered for employment. ¹³ The difficulties both faced in getting a job and a wage that made them able to set up an independent household meant there was a contingent quality about their future lives, hence ‘cautious contingency’ as the typology that described their orientation to the future. In their present situation family support was of crucial importance. Both longed to become independent of their families and thought this very important for their future lives. Although it would be an exaggeration to say they were ‘prisoners of the present’ ¹⁴ (Sennett, 1998: 91), events at different levels of temporality and normative expectations in historical time were not in synchrony.

Alfred and Andrew came from similar families where higher education was the standard across generations. It was therefore not a matter of ‘if’ they were going to university, but a question of ‘what’ subjects to study. The variations in the systems of education across countries made the life course phase gap wider than the two year age difference would imply since Andrew was well into his education whilst Alfred had not started his. Their orientation to the future is called ‘confident continuity’. While they were confident they would get the education of their choice, the wider situation in society was beyond their control but their trajectories represented continuity with reference to their families. Andrew was a little worried about the unemployment rate in the UK, but in more abstract than concrete terms since he was confident about finding employment. Alfred was unsure about what education he would eventually settle for, but he was also confident that he would get a job. They were both worried that the steep housing prices would be an obstacle for establishing an independent life. Thus a certain vagueness about the long term future was evident in their accounts but still an unspoken confidence that they would get by and that their families had the means to support them should they need it.

Concluding discussion: Intersecting temporalities and orientations to the future

The study this paper is based upon is set within a contextualised life perspective with a focus on multi-layered contexts. The present circumstances vary considerably at all levels of temporality: biographical, family and historical period. The future is unknown but orientation to future from any present situation is never context free. Following Mead’s thought the future is already in the present in that the foundation of any trajectory is laid in the past; it is in the past and the present not only seen from the level of biographical time, but also from that of family time and historical time.

The analyses has suggested two ways in which family time and resources are aspects of both present and past circumstances and thus an important basis for orientation to the future. Transitions for Alfred and Andrew were in synchrony with family time and the family context was important in providing a ‘script’ (Buchmann, 1989) to relate to regarding education level, if not type. Their future was on tracks in the sense that they were expected to opt for an academic degree and the financial and other material support they needed to do so would be provided without conditions. Alfred was about to take a gap year, and Andrew had had one before he started his studies. The very notion of a gap year suggests a break in a linear temporal pattern in biographical time, but when taken up by many it becomes standard practice rather than an exception, especially among middle class young (Cuzzocrea, 2018; Heath, 2007; Vogt, 2018). They both wished to find employment in well-paid occupations that were interesting and worries about the long term were put on hold as their educations made ambitions for future occupations achievable. In their lives there was a continuous trajectory between past, present and future at the levels of biographical and family time. Thus the future they envisaged in the present was not only contingent upon their personal decisions in the past and in the here and now; their attitude of confidence was related to future trajectories that have come to be regarded as a standard for a successful transition to adulthood in wider contemporary society.

In spite of parental support, Didrik and Charlie both lived in present circumstances they would have liked to change. Their biographical timing was not in synchrony with family time. The broader period specific conditions in both countries demanded skills sets and credentials that were beyond their reach because neither had followed the prescribed ‘successful’ trajectory for their cohorts in their respective national contexts. Because of this their immediate plans were more to do with keeping the future at bay – the gap that had to be bridged in order to make their occupational ambitions achievable was too wide to consider in the present. The future they would like to have seemed in the present more like a dreamscape than a realistic destination. Family time and biographical timing were not in synchrony and in the long run support towards their upkeep could become a strain on family resources. Family support had a different meaning for them than for Alfred and Andrew since they were in a situation where they felt dependent; intergenerational relations were thus important not for the ‘script’ they could provide as an inspirational trajectory but as support that helped in getting by on an everyday basis in the present.

Combining insights from Mead’s notion of the present and Hareven’s multi-level time perspectives have helped to identify two types of orientation to the future that are based in structural conditions that cut across national boundaries. The emerging findings suggest that the prescribed standard for normative biographical trajectories in this historical period in Norway and Britain has more affinity with middle class lives and does not provide a model that working class young men can easily fit into; for Didrik and Charlie there was an a-synchronicity between the levels of biographical, family and historical time. Their situation is thus not related to ‘private troubles’. It has everything to do with ‘public issues’ (Mills, 1959/1980) as the opportunity structure in terms of diversity of well-paid occupations has deteriorated in both countries (MacDonald, 2008; Roberts, 2013). This affects all young people but the effects on biographical timing in working class men’s lives seem more profound.