Just a Phase?

Abstract

What Young (1971) described as the ambivalent position of youth was largely a product of the changing patterns of employment associated with industrialisation. Child labour was essential to the early phase of the industrial revolution, as it had been to the preceding family based economy, but became less important as the factory reform movement gained ground and technological innovations yielded more efficient forms of production (Evans, 1983). By the time compulsory education was introduced towards the end of the nineteenth century, children were no longer so central to the working of the economy and demand for their labour had already declined (Musgrove, 1964). The expansion of the education and apprenticeship system absorbed the potential labour surplus and regulated entry into the labour market, hiving young people off from the rest of society and committing them to a state of ‘limbo’ between childhood and adulthood (Young, 1971: 141). Subsequent developments, rooted in changing patterns of production and employment, have further magnified the ambivalent position of youth and have resulted in longer, more fragmented journeys into adulthood. What implications this has had for drug use will be considered below. Whereas the previous chapter concentrated on the agential processes associated with leisure and consumption, the analysis presented here examines how the choices young adults make about drug use vary with age, work status and domestic circumstances.

Young people certainly do seek to inhabit worlds (the pub, the club, the disco floor) in which they are in control. But so do adults, who also indulge in leisure, use it as a source of fantasy, a place to act out ‘subterranean values’. The distinctive nature of youth culture must be explained, then, not by reference to leisure itself, but to young people’s position in work and family, to the ‘reality’ from which leisure is, on occasion, an escape (Frith, 1985: 360).