Revisiting the vulnerability ethos in cross-sectoral transition policies and practices for young people in the era of marketisation of education

Introduction

To date, extensive investments have been made in every European Union (EU) country to reintegrate young people considered ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’ of social exclusion into education and work (e.g. Brunila, 2014; Youth Guarantee, 2013). These investments are based on a wide assortment of political initiatives, including nearly all levels of government, i.e. ministries, educational institutions, private companies and cross-sectoral networks. At the EU level, the so called Youth Guarantee is introduced as a key governmental strategy to prevent social exclusion of young people. In Finland, under the Youth Guarantee scheme, thousands of unemployed and under 25 year old young people are being directed into publicly funded or non-governmental organisation-based, short-term projects in order to secure their desired integration into the society (Brunila, 2012a, 2012b). These projects combine specific, quantifiable goals such as promoting employment or facilitating entry into further education and a set of more general objectives, such as building and strengthening for example life-management skills (Brunila and Ryynänen, in press; Kurki and Brunila, 2014).

We argue that these initiatives and programmes, although seemingly benevolent, may actually serve to reinforce, rather than redress marginalisation and exclusion which they aim to redress in the first place. In particular, as we will later show, interventions targeting ‘vulnerable’ young people as a population combined with a certain cultural pessimism and an intensifying need for behavioural regulation endure social and educational inequalities at large. In Finland, a critical evaluation of policies and practices related to transitions is especially salient because it counters the widespread view that Finland exemplifies the Nordic welfare as integral to equality (e.g. Ecclestone and Brunila, 2015; Sahlberg, 2011).

This article discusses the vulnerability ethos in cross-sectoral youth transition policies and practices, and the potential effects it has on young people. In particular, we examine the ways in which the ethos of vulnerability implies and elicits certain kinds of subjectivities for young people. Here, our analyses focus on the ways in which these subjectivities are produced through plural and contingent discursive practices across different sites of transitions. We also examine the possibilities available for young people to resist identifying and naming the power of the discourses of vulnerability.

The ethos of vulnerability and young people

In Western societies, there is a long history of deploying the concept of vulnerability in the management, classification and categorisation of various groups of people such as sex workers, asylum seekers, refugees, as well as disabled and homeless people (Brown, 2011; Ecclestone et al., 2015). More recently also young people outside education or working life have been constructed in policy texts as vulnerable, challenging or dangerous wrong-doers responsible for the situations where they transgress (Brown, 2014; see also Ecclestone et al., 2015; Fionda, 2005; McLeod, 2012).

A more critical examination of the operationalisation of the concept suggests that the ethos of vulnerability in social policy is strongly related to bureaucratic condescension, selective systems of welfare, paternalism and social control (Brown, 2012, 2014). Frank Furedi (2003), for instance, has argued that the popularity of vulnerability in Western societies has fostered ‘a culture of fear,’ where the fear of risk has become central to our experiences of everyday life. As a consequence, some authors have approached vulnerability as an ontological condition with a transformative potential to promote social justice and human rights (Turner, 2006; see also Brown, 2011; Ecclestone and Goodley, 2014). Judith Butler (2009), for instance, writes that vulnerability of a subject is a question of ontological precariousness of life. For her, precarity refers to those material manifestations through which the experience of ontological precarity becomes invisible; it becomes expressed in actual social situations where the vulnerability of a subject emerges, relating for instance to the instability of labour market or changes in the political governance (Butler, 2009). In this article, we focus on the concept of vulnerability and its effects on young people’s lives in this particular yet problematic sense.

Vulnerability is often linked to the well-meaning approach of helping those ‘less well off’ in the society (Brown, 2014, 2012, 2014). The policies and practices targeting vulnerable young people often resonate with good intentions. However, as Kathryn Ecclestone and Kristiina Brunila have argued, in the context of youth education and training where disengagement, exclusion and alienation are recast as causes, outcomes and manifestations of psycho-emotional vulnerability, individually and therapeutically oriented interventions present emotional well-being as a form of social justice in its own right. This has further strengthened the idea of societal problems as individual psycho-emotional deficiencies. Consequently, interventions offer opportunities to learn how to carry individual choices and responsibilities, to become developmental and trainable in the markets of education and work (Ecclestone et al., 2015: 17). Julia McLeod (2012) has demonstrated how young people in the community policy context have been re-inscribed in an individualising, developmental discourse that converts disadvantage into consequences of weak or immature identity formation and self-government, which can then be rectified through micro-management.

Some concerns about young people have produced a turn in the form of cross-sectoral and state-sponsored interventions informed by market-oriented aims and language as well as different strands of therapy (industry), counselling, psychology and neurosciences. These ideas have generated widespread support for state and EU-sponsored initiatives across different areas of social policy, designed both to build the attributes and competences of emotional well-being and mental health in the present, and prevent problems in the future (Ecclestone, 2012; Ecclestone et al., 2015). In various settings, including youth work, youth education, training, guidance and rehabilitation projects, preparatory programmes, as well as adult and community learning, typical initiatives have included programmes for emotional education and pedagogy, happiness and well-being, anger management and behavioural training, as well as peer mentoring and life-coaching as part of the whole-institution support systems (Ikävalko, 2014). In Finland, the traditional ethos on youth work concerning empowerment and voluntary participation is increasingly challenged by short-term interventions and ideologies and practices responding to social problems as individualised risks and problems.

Similarly, the role of education seems to be slipping away from knowledge-based education to skills training and even towards infantilisation (Furedi, 2009). Education has started to focus more and more on enabling and supporting people, especially in becoming more accountable for their fate in the labour market with proper emotional skills included (e.g. Ecclestone, 2012). Regarding young people, the emphasis on capabilities and the psycho-emotional dimensions of inequality counters the ways in which policy pathologises young people ‘considered vulnerable of serious structural inequalities’ (Ecclestone et al., 2015).

Data and analysis

In this article our focus is on cross-sectoral policies and educational and work-related programmes in Finland that are targeted to youth and young adults aged 17–29 outside education and/or work. The provision of these programmes and initiatives is organised by various educational institutions, municipalities or associations and funded either by the EU, ministries or the government. Here, transitions are understood not as developmental, natural and self-evident processes, but as intertwined with social differences, such as age, gender, health, social class and ethnicity.

We are interested in examining the ways in which the forms of circulating power in youth transition phases operate by guiding young people to reproduce what is expected of them and also to utilise strategies and insights they are offered or compelled to take part in. Here, our focus is on the ways in which subjectivities are produced through plural and contingent practices across different sites of transitions. We acknowledge that discourses regarding youth transitions do not simply describe them but create them, not only as objects but also as subjects. In addition, in this article we analyse the possibilities available for young people to resist the identifying and naming power of the discourses of vulnerability.

We acknowledge the processual nature of subjectivity, which problematises assumptions requiring a stable subject, as well as the naturalisation of the relation between the subject and politics (Lloyd, 2005). Such an approach helps to bridge a symbolic–material distinction and signals the ever political nature of ‘the real’ (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014). This type of analysis also enables us to view the structure of the forms of power connected to youth transition policies and practices and to investigate the effects of the vulnerability ethos on young people. It also challenges the taken-for-granted nature of things, and opens up areas for a more critical analysis of power that is implicit within the policies and practices in managing young people. In addition, it enables particular concentration on effects, what discourses do to actors’ decision-making processes and how they enable young people in particular to envision their next moves.

Our approach could also be characterised as nomadic as our data include but are not limited to note taking, interviews, self-interrogation, and policy documents. Nomadic and poststructural perspectives applied in this research provide a way to analyse conditions, restrictions and possibilities to become a subject, not merely an object, in specific discourse related to the relevance in activities targeted to young people (e.g. Davies, 1998; Lloyd, 2005). It follows that in this research we do not study individual projects and programmes nor the young people participating in them as such. Also, we have followed the ideas of some recent poststructural ethnographers who consider data becoming constituted when the research subject drifts in different research fields, in which s/he is positioned in different ways depending on the context of the situation (Ikävalko and Kurki, 2014; St. Pierre, 2000).

The data sets include policy documents, news reports, programme guidelines as well as interview and ethnographic data. We draw our data from five separate studies included in the research project Youth on the Move led by Kristiina Brunila as follows: Kristiina Brunila’s study consists of educational and training programs for young people experiencing unemployment, poverty, prison and educational failure. Elina Ikävalko’s study focuses on the formation and (new) practices of peer support of young adults with the background of mental health problems with special focus on the guided functional peer support (GFP) model and culture house projects. Tuuli Kurki’s study focuses on training programmes for young adults with migration backgrounds. Katariina Mertanen’s study is related to training of young people considered ‘at risk’. Anna Mikkola’s study focuses on psychotherapeutic education of primary school-aged children and youth.

While the amount of our data is rather extensive, we have used it selectively for the purposes of this article. We read our multiple interview data together in and across in order to gain understanding of the ways in which the ethos of vulnerability in youth transition policies and practices plays out.

Vulnerability in policies and practices related to young people

Our data indicate that within policy arenas vulnerability is associated with young people with a variety of backgrounds and characteristics (see also Ecclestone et al., 2015), including riskiness, mental health, and learning problems or migration, special education and/or criminal background (see also Ecclestone and Lewis, 2014; Ikävalko, 2014; Kurki and Brunila, 2014). Throughout our data, in program guidelines, policy documents and leaflets as well as in the interviews with people, who educate, train and guide young people, the following characteristics were attached to the youth:

Low self-esteem, fragile self-image, criminal mind, too dependent, depressed, unsocial, mentally unstable, vulnerable, inpatient, angry, broken identity, lack of problem-solving skills, impulsive, lack of metacognitive skills, learning difficulties, speech defect, lack of initiative skills, confused, needy, unclear, tense, gullible, anxious, resentful, lack of emotional skills, lack of vigilance, lack of life management skills, lack of social skills. (Extracts from youth project documents (2000–2015), such as final reports, web-pages and leaflets)

The list above also demonstrates how a seemingly different and wide range of societal problems become as ‘portfolios’ of the individual mindsets (see e.g. Garland, 2001: 198). These results are in accordance with previous research arguing that nowadays the diffusion of vulnerability includes nearly all youth with any social or personal problem or difficulty with learning, social relationships or coping with uncomfortable feelings (Ecclestone and Lewis, 2014: 207). In the increasingly behaviourist age, there is a risk that vulnerability becomes used as a stand-alone term (Brown, 2011) and when linked with this kind of individual-based approach found in our data it ensures that young people are blamed for their problems.

The following excerpt from the Action Plan for Child and Youth Policy 2012–2015 shows that there is a somewhat emerging tendency in policy and practise to view youth as a population with an inherent state of vulnerability:

In enhancing the health of children and young people precautionary action carry a vital part, especially when actions are directed to age group as a whole or to specially defined risk groups. This is the case especially when there are no detected symptoms or problems. (Action Plan for Child and Youth Policy 2012–2015)

This subsequently predisposes all youth to developing dysfunctions at some time in their lives. It follows that interventions (early intervention in particular) impinge on not only those youth that show signs of abnormality, illness or deviancy, but increasingly every youth. The difficulty with this kind of orientation is that these kinds of normative descriptions easily slip into naturalised prescriptions (c.f. Burman, 2008). It is no surprise that the concept of vulnerability has been considered as vague and nebulous (Brown, 2011).

The following excerpts from three different youth project reports illustrate the variety of interventions and activities in cross-sectional youth transition policies and practices within the ethos of vulnerability. These intervention and activities include among others therapeutic discussions concerning emotional and psychological well-being, self-esteem and anxieties, and coaching and mentoring with respect to the subject’s emotions:

Young adults who are seen to be in danger of alienation, need support and intimacy. The importance of handling their emotions is crucial. (Youth project final report, 2000)

Expressing one’s emotions in a pleasant and secure environment is crucial for the young person’s survival. (Extract from a project report, 2000s)

Migration can be a mentally difficult process. Only a few can be prepared on how stressful integration can be. Many immigrants feel strong emotions and reactions, which may confuse and scare. All may seem strange and difficult. Also feelings of despair are common. This, however, is completely normal reaction to change. Information helps to understand and accept feelings. This will make it easier and helps move forward. (Extract from Mental Health Services for Immigrants, 2015)

Some young people we interviewed considered these types of interventions as rewarding and providing a good starting point for them while they were involved in the projects (see also Brown, 2014). For instance, one of the young people we interviewed told us that the most important thing he had learned from the project was that he had finally started to believe in himself. Another youth had learned to believe that it is now all up to him, that he can do it, if he wants to. It seemed common that young people sought their problems as well as the answers to their problems themselves.

In terms of subjectivity and power, the ethos of vulnerability tends to educate and train subjectivities that are suitable, obedient and independent, self-disciplinary and self-responsible, and as a result, young people are able to make the choices that they are supposed to make. Young people then comply with such demands in order to be recognised as ‘properly’ flexible, active, self-disciplined and responsible. Comments by the young people such as ‘Now I know it’s all up to me, I can if I really want to. I know of course, that I have to work hard’ demonstrate how the outcome of the ethos of vulnerability focuses on the subjectivities described before.

While the act of speaking might offer the possibility to change the power dynamics, it is not always to the benefit of the young person (see also Brunila, 2014). The problem is also that this type of discourse tends to disguise normative views about desirable attributes, attitudes and dispositions, and reduce knowledge to eliciting knowledge offered in educational settings and to knowledge about feelings and the coaching of appropriate emotional responses (see Ecclestone et al., 2005). Furthermore, this type of individualisation of societal problems tends to lead to the consideration of young people as vulnerable and fragile instead of capable while the larger framework of the ‘social’ disappears.

Contradictions of vulnerability

When we analysed the interviews about activities in which young people had taken part, it appeared that the aims and activities of the youth programmes did not always correspond with the interests of the participants:

I only wanted to get some ideas for future plans regarding education but instead I had to talk about my emotions all the time. I felt a little bit like I was considered as an idiot or something. (Youth interview, 2014)

I just recently realized that we are considered as young people at risk here in the project. I did not know that. It was a bit of a surprise. (Youth interview, 2012)

In some cases, the young people we interviewed resisted notions of themselves as vulnerable (see also Brown, 2014).

In the policy documents young people with migration backgrounds – young immigrant men in particular – were described not only as vulnerable and at risk, but also as a special security risk and danger to the social order if not properly integrated. Then again, there are also many instances in which the vulnerable subjects themselves spoke about how to both resist and comply with being categorised as vulnerable, as the following excerpt from a youth project report indicates:

Not every student wanted to have a (mental health) diagnosis so that the aim of the project to provide diagnoses raised a lot of discussion. (Youth project report, 2015)

Our data indicate that in some youth programmes, diagnostic practices were in the centre of the focus. In some cases, educators who were not licensed to conduct official diagnoses devised their own informal tests as an alternative and observed how some participants embraced a resulting diagnosis of learning difficulties as a springboard for believing in themselves. For these and other participants, a diagnosis of emotional and psychological problems seemed to free them from confronting questions about intelligence or ability, and offered a chance for new educational identity (see also, Brunila and Siivonen, 2014).

All these extracts could be analysed as a form of activity that both opens up and circumscribes subjectivities through forms of speaking and being heard that involve confession of, and attendance to, psycho-emotional ‘mistakes’, legacies and vulnerabilities. By eliciting individuals’ problems through expected and appropriate modes of being and knowing, the vulnerability ethos tends to encourage participants to locate these in the self rather than in the society. Likewise, these extracts demonstrate how the ethos of vulnerability operates aiming to ‘autonomise’ and ‘responsiblise’ the self without shattering their formally autonomous character (see also Brunila, 2011). This discourse connects political rhetoric and regulatory youth programmes to the self-steering capacities of the subjects themselves, creating individuals who are mentally and emotionally healthy, emotionally literate, adaptable, autonomous, self-responsible, flexible and self-centred. At the same time, they are resilient enough to take responsibility for the emotional damages that marketisation causes (Brunila and Siivonen, 2014).

Skills of adults working with children and young people are facing new challenges. The environment of children and young adults are in a constant change, which requires sensibility to recognise everyday phenomena and ability to respond to changing needs. (Action Plan for Child and Youth Policy 2012–2015)

In addition, our data show that some of the youth workers we interviewed experienced serious dilemmas while using activation measures and simultaneously attempting to correct and treat the wounds caused by young people’s earlier encounters with the ‘system’. However, there seems to be an overlying assumption that contemporary youth’s living environment is fundamentally different from that of previous generations, which in turn demands that adults working with youth acquire new skills, as the excerpt above from the policy document shows.

Transformative potential of the concept of vulnerability?

We believe that critical voices offer ways of seeing and thinking about activities as a possibility for an alternative discourse. This is crucial to understand because the choices young people in transition make stem not so much from the individual, but from the condition of possibility – the discourses related to transitions, which prescribe not only what is desirable, but also what is recognisable as an acceptable form of subjectivity.

Thinking in discursive terms creates possibilities for seeing how certain discursive constructions are appropriated while others are discarded, relegated, irrelevant or even threatening. Only then does it become possible to take up and engage in an alternative discourse with new ideas and values. We argue that this kind of critical approach could create ruptures in power relations, at least locally, in a certain space and time. We would also like to point out that young people’s transitions within the vulnerability ethos are not simplistically repressive or emancipatory. Instead, a discursive understanding illuminates agency as a subject-in-process and as the effect and redeployment of power (e.g. Butler, 2008; Davies, 1998; Ecclestone et al., 2015; Foucault, 1985).

According to Butler, it is the very constitutivity of the subject that enables them to act in these forms of power, which are not just regulating but also productive (Foucault, 1985). From this perspective, we can theorise the subjectivity of young people as in flux, changeable and unstable but also as a crucial focus for political understanding and action because the subjectivity of young people is the product of the discursive practices that name it, not a substance or an essence that exists prior to it.

What about the transformative potential of the concept of vulnerability that has been suggested in some previous studies? Judith Butler links the notion of vulnerability to that of ‘precarity’ as a vehicle for new forms of power and resistance:

… precariousness [is] a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as differentially distributed [is] one important dimension of the unequal distribution of conditions required for continued life … precaritisation as an ongoing process [avoids reducing] the power of precarious to single acts or events. Precaritisation allows us to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no one centre that propels its direction and destruction. (Butler in Puar, 2012: 8; see also Ecclestone et al., 2015)

Butler writes, that we must ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or a set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible. According to her, this requires a new ontology and rethinking concepts such as precariousness, vulnerability and interdependency. By ‘ontology’, she does not refer to fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any social and political organization (Butler, 2009: 2). On the contrary, this kind of being is ‘always given over to others, to social and political organisations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others’ (Butler, 2009: 2–3). This understanding of being is linked to the idea that subjects are always constituted through norms, which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognised. These normative but not deterministic conditions produce a historically contingent ontology. Our capacity to discern and name the ‘being’ of the subject is dependent on norms that generate that recognition (Butler, 2009: 3–4).

For Butler, interruptions or inadvertent convergences with other networks might produce subversive citation that disrupts the sedimented iterability of subjectivity (Butler, 1997: 135 in St. Pierre, 2000). This could be considered as a way of resistance (Kurki and Brunila, 2014; Kurki and Ikävalko, in press) because these ideas are not meant to turn people inwards or to feel weak.

The following extracts are from a news report concerning a culture house project in Helsinki, where the functional peer support takes place. The journalist was interviewing a staff member and two young peers about their views and experiences concerning the peer support.

A peer, diagnosed with severe depression, tells to the journalist:

[In the culture house] I can be as anyone else, they don’t take me as ill, I don’t have a stigma of being ill, I can do things and it makes me happy. (Yle News, March 2013)

A staff member of the culture house project reasons the purpose of these kinds of activities:

We used to struggle for the right to say that we are ill. Now we must go forward and say that in addition that we are ill, we are also healthy. (Yle News, March 2013)

The news report highlights that young people under rehabilitation should have opportunities to go to places where other youth are, for example, to youth centres, and that they are more than just patients or their diagnosis. The interviewed young people said, that the most important thing was, that other people are not taking them as someone who is ill, but as someone who can do things.

These kinds of statements can be read as resistance to the ethos of vulnerability as they make the category of mental health wavering and variable. Regardless of the diagnosis of mental health problems, these young adults want to become recognised as capable of doing things that are important to them. What makes this resistance to the individualising and categorising discourse of vulnerability is, that it is not just a question of some pre-defined individual skills but becoming recognised as capable and not-just-ill by others. It also means to get recognised as something else then a problem or being vulnerable in the sense of inability. According to Butler, it is precisely this act of recognition by others that constitutes the subject as ‘being’.

However, policy categories of vulnerability to worsening structural risks tend to keep expanding into a more diffuse spectrum of psycho-emotional vulnerabilities seen to arise from commonplace, mundane, serious and traumatic experiences alike (Ecclestone et al., 2015; see also Ecclestone et al., 2014). In this way, more people are drawn into an expanded agenda of psycho-emotional risks that no longer targets just specific groups but, increasingly, everyone. This is how the vulnerability ethos enables to form a compelling strand of regulative and productive power that permeates policies and practices related to transitions, encompassing subjects that can be known and spoken about. Normalising young people’s problems, policies and practices inadvertently undermines subjectivity among them. Young people, who cannot know themselves, are not subjects but objects in the vulnerability ethos. It is crucial to acknowledge that psycho-emotional interventions and behavioural training can be quite useless when problems young people experience are gendered, racialised and classed (Gillies, 2011).

Conclusion

The results of the study illustrate the ways in which vulnerability features heavily in both formal policy texts and in the everyday language and practices of transition interventions with young people. It seems that young people tend to be recognised through the prism of inherent vulnerability with a parallel notion of a self that is damaged and fragile. Thus, the role of interventions in the vulnerability ethos is to help young people to cope with their difficulties in an empowering way, through a process in which they learn to deal with their emotions and leads to social survival, and most importantly, coping in the labour market. The status of vulnerability seems to shift societal problems to individual problems where young people blame themselves for their circumstances and problems. The results of our study show that despite good intentions, the ethos of vulnerability is a mechanism emphasising personal accountability and stigmatisation. This kind of approach runs the risk of producing an impression of a life course where only individual planning and choosing what one wants to be and do, matters (see also Brunila et al., in press).

More policy and professional discourses insist that young people must develop competences of resilience, self-discipline and continuous self-development (e.g. Bottrell, 2009; Walther, 2006). The shift of responsibility from social/society to individual has increased vulnerability which is especially evident in the sphere of working life where workers have been considered disposable without obligation on the part of the ‘social fabric’ to take care of them. This means that young people are obliged to compete in order to avoid being disposed – since once being disposed, it easily becomes constructed as personal rather than structural failure. Similarly, any young person finding transitions, participation and achievements difficult or irrelevant, becomes easily characterised as vulnerable. Individual responsibility, competitiveness, and vulnerability thus form an entangled knot in the quest for (economic) survival.

We argue that the key question that needs to be addressed more thoroughly is, what are the conditions of possibility for the production of subjectivities of young people as socially excluded, at risk or simply vulnerable? Taken further, the kind of orientation we have elaborated here would enable more nuanced explorations of how policies and practices related to young people’s transitions both have been unable to meet their interests and could overcome some of these obstacles. If we understand vulnerability as a social and situational position, and following Butler, as an ontological condition, it then becomes much more than just a mental state or a question of capacities of an individual. This kind of understanding of vulnerability can challenge the pathologising or individualising policy discourses on young people considered vulnerable and at risk. This would also provide more possibilities for young people themselves to multiply the constituted subjectivities.