YOUNG

This article showcases how young men, from a high school in Aotearoa/New Zealand, made sense of the rules of homosociality, with specific reference to how boyfriends and girlfriends should act in their relationships with one another. Young men talked about the importance of being a ‘good’ homosocial mate, which led them to also talk about the importance of expelling femininity as a way for them to manage their masculine identities and avoid being shamed, and therefore feminized. This article will argue that these reactions to femininity were embedded in a homosocial habitus, influencing how young men made sense of the various overlapping fields of action. Young men’s talk, however, also presented a range of ambivalences that contradicted these endorsements of homosociality. These contradictions are meaningful because of the opportunities they present in disrupting the hegemonic sense-makings of homosociality and gendered roles in (hetero) romantic interactions.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted with 40 young people, aged 15–24, in the Chorlton and Wythenshawe, Manchester, UK. With a focus on alcohol consumption, this article shows how older siblings transmit embodied knowledge to younger siblings. This article finds that older siblings are an important source of protection for younger siblings when starting their drinking careers. Moreover, they play a fundamental role in facilitating open intragenerational dialogue surrounding alcohol consumption. Through highlighting the important role of older siblings in transmitting embodied knowledge to younger siblings during the transition to adulthood, this article argues that there is a need to encourage greater involvement of siblings in formal educational settings surrounding learning about important issues, such as: alcohol consumption; drug consumption; and relationships and sex education, to help ensure consistent messages.

In this article, we take a look at transitions to employment in Armenia for the highly qualified, focusing on students and graduates. Theoretically, we acknowledge the importance of insights from prior research, including the idea of the transition-to-work as a journey, with our research questions aimed at highlighting specific challenges facing Armenian youth following spatialized and sedentary transition pathways; moving abroad for work and entering the local labour market respectively. As evidence, we make use of interviews conducted with 51 young Armenians in the months that followed the Velvet Revolution of 2018. Discussion highlights factors that inhibit highly qualified youth from finding jobs at home, including perceptions of corruption in the workplace, difficulties associated with entering foreign labour markets and the salience of recent political events.

Changes in the forms and cultural meanings of work have gone deep during the last decades, with the transient nature of work becoming the norm rather than the exception. This is impacting particularly on youth employment, as Italy’s case epitomizes. Based on interview and focus group data, our study provides a multidimensional model to read and map the multiple tensions young people experience, at an emotional level, on entering today’s corporations. Our findings show, on the one hand, that young professionals’ expectation of work as a place of social learning and exchange clashes with the corporate focus on assimilating young people into target-oriented environments. On the other hand, both in younger and older workers, we found the experience of labour relationships that struggle to direct themselves towards a creative purpose and a developmental prospect, while tending to collapse emotionally inwards, in a fight for security.

Adolescents’ beliefs regarding inequality have received scant attention in social research. This article tackles the underlying processes that explain adolescents’ justice evaluations of earning gaps across status groups in Chile. I investigate whether their perception of earning gaps and fairness values mediate the relationship between socio-economic status and what they consider a just payment difference. Results show that perceptions of inequality and fairness values emerged as mediators between status and the level of inequality deemed as just, although perception played a stronger role. The results also provide evidence for a consensual legitimacy of inequality across status groups: adolescents from different status groups do not disagree on the fair payment gap. This legitimization of inequality does not necessarily entail acceptance by most youths of the high levels of income inequality in Chile. Their values and perceptions of inequality are anchored in their social standing, and this anchoring has consequences in terms of the legitimization of inequality.