Changing Landscapes for Childhood and Youth in Europe [1 ed.] 9781443860635, 9781443858984

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Changing Landscapes for Childhood and Youth in Europe

Changing Landscapes for Childhood and Youth in Europe

Edited by

Lynne Chisholm and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis

Changing Landscapes for Childhood and Youth in Europe Edited by Lynne Chisholm and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Lynne Chisholm, Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5898-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5898-4

CONTENTS Authors .................................................................................................... viii Introduction ............................................................................................. xiv Lynne Chisholm and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis Part I: Lifelong Transitions and Transformations Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 The Life-course as Hypertext Lynne Chisholm Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 14 Tomboys and Sissies: Adolescent Boys Talk about Peers Participation in ‘Cross-Gendered’ Sport Activities Katerina Dadatsi and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 39 Greek Young Men Talk about Fatherhood: Critical Perspectives and Challenges Evanthia Tazoglou Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 61 Young People in Search of a Work-Family Balance Siyka Kovacheva and Stanimir Kabaivanov Part II: Communication and Participation Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 86 The ‘Digital Native’ Debate: An Appraisal of Pedagogical and Generational Claims James Côté Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 110 Tech-Savvy Youth and Participatory Research in ‘iScapes’ Kerry Mallan, Parlo Singh and Natasha Giardina

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Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 129 Young Women, Late Modern Politics and the Participatory Possibilities of Online Cultures Anita Harris Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 152 Protesting Online Facebook Groups in the Greek December 2008 Protests Vasiliki Triga and Aphrodite Baka Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 179 Cyberbullying: Teens at Risk or Risky Teens? Michel Walrave and Wannes Heirman Part III: Contours of Belonging and Exclusion Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 208 “I Don’t Know How You Can Say ‘No’ To Them Really”: ‘Citizen’ Students’ Negotiation of the Social Morality of Asylum Mano Candappa, Madeleine Arnot and Halleli Pinson Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 231 “They Are Far More Than We Can Absorb…”: Social Representations of Immigration and Racism in Greek Youth Discourse Lia Figgou Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 252 Generation One Point Five: Migrant Latino Children and Youth Identities in Catalonia Carles Feixa and Teresa López Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 275 Concepts of Citizenship among Young People in Post-Soviet Moldova Pamela Abbott and Claire Wallace Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 290 The Experience of Being Stopped Marcus Herz and Thomas Johansson Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 311 The Available Data on Child Trafficking for Begging in Greece Konstantinos I. Panagos

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Chapter Sixteen ...................................................................................... 328 Transformation of Children’s Lives by their Rights: A New Approach to Agency Daniel Stoecklin

AUTHORS Pamela Abbott is Honorary Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and Professor Emeritus at Glasgow Caledonian University (Scotland). She is a sociologist by training and has carried out research in the UK, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe and Rwanda. Her main research interests are in life quality and gender. Madeleine Arnot is Professor of Sociology of Education and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge (England). She was international director of a five-year study of Youth, Gender and Citizenship in Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan, and researched the social conditions of student consultation and democratic pedagogic rights. She has published extensively on a wide range of social justice and equality issues in education (see http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/ arnot/). Aphrodite Baka is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s School of Psychology (Greece). Her research interests lie in the field of intergroup conflicts, collective identities and qualitative research methods. Mano Candappa is a Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Education, University of London (England). She specialises in migration, forced migration and issues around social marginalisation and human rights with a particular interest in childhoods and the politics of belonging, which she has researched widely in UK and EU contexts (for related publications see www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/HSSE/EFPS_17.html). Lynne Chisholm holds the Chair for Education and Generation at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and is also visiting professor at the University of Oslo (Norway). She specialises in comparative and interdisciplinary youth studies together with the social and cultural analysis of education and learning across the life-course (see http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/~c603207/index_en.html). In her capacity as an international specialist in educational research and policy, she is currently (2013-2016) on secondment to the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg (Germany).

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James Côté is Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) and regularly contributes to three fields: youth studies, higher education studies, and identity studies. He is founding editor of Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, served as President (2003-2005) of the Society for Research on Identity Formation (SRIF), and currently serves as President (2010-14) of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee (34) on the Sociology of Youth. His recent books include Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of the Liberal Arts (2011), Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (2007), Critical Youth Studies: A Canadian Focus (2006), and Identity Formation, Agency, and Culture: A Social Psychological Synthesis (2002). He also maintains a blog monitoring higher educational issues (see www.ivorytowerblues.com). Katerina Dadatsi holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the School of Psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She specialises in school psychology and has worked in schools in the greater Thessaloniki region. Her research interests include the development of gender identities during adolescence, masculinities and schooling and the impact of gender in the transition from education to the job market. Vassiliki Deliyanni-Kouimtzis is Professor in the School of Psychology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). She teaches and researches in the areas of gender and education, youth studies and women’s studies. She has been the director of several projects on gender and schooling and has designed and implemented research and interventions promoting gender equality in the classroom. She is the author of books and articles in both English and Greek languages. Carles Feixa teaches at the University of Lleida (Catalonia) and has been a visiting scholar at universities in Rome, Mexico, Paris, Berkeley/California, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Newcastle. He has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Latin America and is the author of several books and co-editor of the journal Young (published by Sage). He has been advisor for youth policies at the United Nations and Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee Sociology of Youth. Natasha Giardina is the Manager of Learning and Teaching Technologies (Governance and Quality) and a Learning Designer at eLearning Services, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (Australia). Her research interests include blended learning, approaches to building professional

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capacity in the application of learning technologies in higher education, and emerging pedagogies for the digital age. Anita Harris is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University (Australia). Her research interests include youth identities, cultures, citizenship and participation and she has written widely in the field of girls’ studies. Her books include Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2013), Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Activism, Subcultures (edited, Routledge, 2008), All about the Girl (edited, Routledge, 2004), and Future Girl (Routledge, 2004). Wannes Heirman is teaching and research assistant at the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Besides the topic of cyberbullying, he has a broad interest in how ICT are impacting the daily lives of children and teenagers. Currently he is finalising his Ph.D. project, which will focus on how adolescents cope with their privacy on the Internet (see http://www.ua.ac.be/wannes. heirman). Marcus Herz Ph.D. is Assistant Professor and researcher in social work at Malmö University (Sweden) and a member of the research team Social Vulnerability and Social work (SUSA). His research interests and publications include studies on social work, gender, masculinity, ethnicity, and youth studies (see http://www.nav.mah.se/person/id/AC2624). Thomas Johansson is Professor of Education at the University of Lund (Sweden). He has written extensively in the field of gender studies, the sociology of the family and youth research. Johansson’s recent books include The Transformation of Sexuality (Ashgate, 2007), and Young Migrants, with Katrine Fangen and Nils Hammarén (Palgrave, 2011). Johansson has published articles on gender, ethnicity and identity in journals such as Men & Masculinities, Ethnicity, Acta Sociologica, Journal of Family Communication, Young, Journal of Men’s Studies, and the Journal of Youth Studies. Siyka Kovacheva Ph.D. is Associate Professor in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Plovdiv and Head of the New Europe Centre for Regional Studies in Bulgaria. Her research interests are in the field of youth transitions to employment and parenthood, civic participation, changes in family life, including gender and intergenerational relations.

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Stanimir Kabaivanov Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Plovdiv University (Bulgaria). His research interests are in finance, artificial intelligence and application of computational methods in social sciences. He is also an active software developer and interested in the application of software tools for studying economic and social problems. Teresa Lopez Gistau is International Relations Officer at the University of Lleida (Catalonia). She has a degree in Translation and Interpretation from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for Spanish, Catalan, English and French. She has translated many papers and interpreted in numerous conferences and courses on youth. She has also participated in the interuniversity Master’s Programme on Youth and Society organised by the University of Lleida (UdL) and in the EU-funded M.A. European Youth Studies project, and participates in the GENIND and SAHWA projects at the University of Lleida. Kerry Mallan is Professor in the Faculty of Education and the Director of the Children and Youth Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane (Australia). Her expertise lies in children’s literature and youth cultures and the application of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories (see http://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/mallan/). Konstantinos I. Panagos studied law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). He worked as an intern at the Independent Authority Greek Ombudsman (Sector of Human Rights – Sector of Child’s Rights) and the National Committee on Bioethics in Athens. He continued his studies as a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science (Master of Science in Criminal Justice Policy). He is currently a postgraduate student in Sociology of Law at the School of Law, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He also works with the Athens Prosecutors’ Office as a trainee lawyer. Halleli Pinson is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Education, BenGurion University (Israel). Her research focuses on citizenship education, youth identities, education and conflict and the education of refugee and asylum seeking children. She has conducted research on these themes looking both at policy discourses and young people’s experiences in Israel and the UK. Recent publications include Education, Asylum and the ‘NonCitizen’ Child: the politics of compassion and belonging (with Madeleine Arnot and Mano Candappa), which won a Society for Educational Studies prize in 2011.

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Parlo Singh is Professor in the Sociology of Education at the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University and a Senior Academic Fellow in Higher Degree Research Education at the Griffith Institute for Higher Education in Brisbane (Australia). Currently she is theorising boundary-crossing and knowledge transfer through collaborative university-school research partnership work in low socioeconomic status, culturally diverse communities (see http://www.griffith. edu.au/education/griffith-institute-educational-research/staff/professorparlo-singh). Daniel Stoecklin is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University Institute Kurt Bösch in Sion (Switzerland). His areas of research and teaching are the sociology of childhood, children’s rights, street children, participation and the capability approach. He also works with the International Institute for the Rights of the Child in Sion on a training programme in China. He has been involved with several NGO projects in the field of children in difficult situations, and as an independent expert for the Council of Europe regarding children’s participation. Evanthia Tazoglou holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Her interests include the construction of gendered identities, masculinities, the social and psychological impact of unemployment, and gender and education. Vasiliki Triga is Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research interests lie in the field of ICT/internet-based applications and political processes, for example, voting, advice applications and social movements. Claire Wallace is Professor of Sociology and Vice-Principal for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). She has worked in the field of youth research for thirty years, producing a number of books and articles including Youth, Citizenship and Empowerment (Ashgate, 2001; edited with Helena Helve), Youth and Society: The Construction and Deconstruction of Youth in Europe, (Macmillan, 1998; co-authored with Siyka Kovacheva) and Youth, Family and Citizenship (Open University Press, 1992; co-authored with Gill Jones; Japanese edition published in 1996). She has a longstanding interest in issues of citizenship, participation and transition in Eastern Europe and has undertaken a number of significant studies on this topic for the

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European Commission, the World Bank, the European Science Foundation and the British Economic and Social Research Council. She is Director of the New Europe Centre at the University of Aberdeen (see http://www. abdn.ac.uk/socsci/staff/details.php?id=claire.wallace). Michel Walrave Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp’s Department of Communication Studies in Belgium, with responsibility for the research group Media and ICT in Organisations and Society (MIOS). Amongst his research interests are children’s and adolescents’ ICT use. More particularly, he specialises in ICT-use related privacy risks and contact risks, such as cyberbullying (see http://www. ua.ac.be/michel.walrave).

INTRODUCTION LYNNE CHISHOLM AND VASSILIKI DELIYIANNI-KOUIMTZIS The past twenty years have witnessed a resurgence and restructuring of theoretical and research interest in childhood and youth as social conditions, constructions and choreographies. This period has seen the emergence of much stronger interdisciplinarity of perspective together with the beginnings of a global scientific community that not only exchanges ideas and information, but also engages in empirical comparisons and reciprocal theoretical interrogations. Collections drawing on contributions made to international conferences have begun to appear (for example, Bendit and Hahn-Bleibtreu 2008; Nilan and Feixa 2006; Helve and Holm 2005; Leccardi 2012) and there are some examples of attempts to build integrated critical perspectives for specific regions of the world (for example, Agbu 2009; Anagnost, Arai and Ren 2013; Brown, Larsen and Saraswathi 2002; Maira 2009). The early years of life through to adolescence have long attracted considerable attention in psychology, especially in developmental psychology and in connection with psychoanalytical approaches to personality and identity development (and see Mayall 2009, 2005 for a critical view on the dominance of psychological perspectives). Analyses of disadvantage and risk amongst children and young people, based in social welfare concerns, were also well established by the middle of the last century (France 2008; Harslof 2005; Majamaa 2011; McElwee 2007). For its part, educational theory and research has very largely been predicated upon children and young people as the subjects and objects of teaching and learning in formal, non-formal and informal settings and processes (see here for example Chisholm 2013a). During the second half of the 20th century, interest in childhood and youth spread across a range of humanities and social science disciplines, with sociology and its extended scientific communities playing an anchoring role in bringing a diverse range of theoretical insight and empirical inquiry into communication and exchange. During this period, the patterns of young people’s lives were largely set into the framework of

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developmental stages and social transitions, whereas their activities and attitudes were increasingly understood with reference to theories of socialisation and subcultures. This process of emancipation from approaches marked by essentialism, if not more baldly biologically determinism, initially took root in youth studies from the 1970s, prompted by studies of young people’s leisure activities (classically: Hall and Jefferson 1975/2003) and of social inequalities in educational and occupational origins and destinations (classically: Brown 1987; Griffin 1985; Willis 1977). Childhood studies followed suit two decades later, prompted by the consequences of the restructuring of the youth phase, the democratisation of parent-child relations and the incursion of commercialism and consumerism into family life (cf. Alanen 2010; Alanen and Mayall 2001; Chambers 2012; James and James 2004; Qvortrup 1995; Steedman 2005). By the 1990s, the scale and pace of economic and social transformation, increasingly defined through the lens of multi-dimensional globalisation and technological change, made the need for theoretical renewal evident. At the same time, both motivation and opportunities for carrying out comparative and intercultural studies rose. The contexts in which research could be conducted expanded (as the ‘new Europe’ opened up and the Pacific Rim sought greater interchange with Europe and North America) and new channels emerged through which such research could be funded (most notably through EU programmes, but subsequently also by international organisations and initiatives together with enhanced cooperation between national funding councils). During the last decade, childhood and youth studies have thus developed into a lively arena of international and interdisciplinary research activity, one in which pure and applied interests together with purely intellectual and more closely policyrelated concerns interact in a constructively critical manner. Current theoretical interest focuses on the re-conceptualisation of childhood and youth as social constructions within the life-course as a whole, itself undergoing major restructuration in the light of contemporary cultural and economic change and modernisation (Blossfeld, Klijzing, Mills and Kurz 2005; Chisholm, 2013b and in this volume; Corsaro 2011; Handel, Cahill and Elkin 2006; Heinz and Marshall 2003; Irwin 2013; Levy, Ghisletta, Le Goff, Spini and Widmer 2005; Wyness 2006). These reformulations can no longer be adequately pursued within insulated discourses that relate solely to single countries, specific cultures and bodies of knowledge expressed through particular languages. Economic and cultural globalisation processes exert dual and reciprocal influences, in that they restructure societies and identities simultaneously from within

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and without. Digital communication technologies are increasingly opening up physically remote communities to external sources of cultural information and options, whereas denser and more accessible transport and travel draws ever more people into direct contact with diversity. These processes are by no means evenly distributed, so that centre-periphery relations become both more complex whilst equally embodying new kinds of relations of social inequality along with those that already exist and structure patterns of life chances and risks. Young people self-evidently stand at the forefront of such social transformations, both in the sense of being prime actors of change and in terms of being those whose lives will be most persistently marked by change. Recent European analyses (for example, Du Bois-Reymond and Chisholm 2006; Faas 2007) have identified a number of key framing features of contemporary change: social and political transformation following the demise of a divided Europe from 1989; increased migration into Europe from other world regions, significantly associated with flight from bitter poverty, environmental degradation and armed conflict; weakening of traditional gendered divisions of labour and diversification of gendered social relations; and broad-based evolution of democratic values and forms of organisation, placing an ever stronger accent on equality, inclusion and participation. Moreover, the effects of economic restructuring and globalisation on labour markets in Europe have long since produced chronic underemployment and unemployment amongst young people, most particularly and increasingly amongst those with poor education and qualification, whereby the cumulative effects of multiple disadvantage show themselves most painfully in the continuing close correlations between social origin, ethnic-cultural group membership and educational outcomes (Bottrell and Armstrong 2007; Devadason 2007; Chisholm 2013b; MacDonald and Marsh 2001; Scarpetta, Sonnet and Manfredi 2010). Well-qualified young adults must wait longer than ever to find a secure foothold in employment and career; poorly qualified young people may well find themselves waiting for ever – this is the most well-known expression of the deepening polarisation of life chances and risks in European societies, but certainly not the only one, as recent studies focusing on family transitions have well demonstrated (Bottrell and Armstrong 2007; Cole and Durham 2007; Leccardi and Ruspini 2006; López-Blasco, McNeish and Walther 2003; Nilson, Brannen and Lewis 2012; Roberts, Khasan, Dsuzev, Gorodyanenko and Tholen 2003). Since 2009 the consequences of the global financial crisis are proving little short of dramatic for those European countries most severely implicated in the fall-out for national

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economies (with Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain in the forefront). Research has yet to document and analyse the consequences for children and young people, but first-hand assessments suggest that long-established patterns of intergenerational transfers and solidarities that have played key roles in underpinning social continuities in transitions to adulthood in the public and private spheres (cf. Kovacheva 2006) are unlikely to survive intact in the mid-term. Furthermore, once again, it is young people that spearhead civic opposition to the measures taken to contain and manage the financial crisis – for example in Spain and Greece during 2011, where young activists led and sustained mass sit-ins in city squares across the country. Forms of participation based on principles of direct democracy and grassroots social action are taking widespread hold amongst Europe’s younger generations, who are able to make use of digital communication technologies to generate and manage the expression of public opinion in ways that have only become possible in the past decade (cf. Pechtelidis 2011). And this is not simply a European phenomenon, nor is it most vividly expressed in Europe – it is much rather the youth of North Africa and the Middle East that is now populating the vanguard of social and political action for change (Larémont 2012; Iwilade 2013). With specific respect to children’s lives, the issues outlined above filter ‘downwards’ in more indirect ways. Children’s rights to participation and autonomy have been interpreted in practice through a variety of measures at local level that attempt to recognise and invite children’s voice and contribution in the shaping of community spaces and facilities, frequently accompanied by action research projects (for example, see: Cammarota and Fine 2008; Ginwight, Noguera and Cammarota 2006; Percy-Smith and Thomas 2010). Research interest in the democratisation of family life – as expressed in the structuring of domestic space, decision-making with respect to the use of resources and leisure or holiday time, and so forth – is now wellestablished (for example, see: Griffin 2011; Kuhar and Reiter 2013; McDonald and Shildrick 2007; Robinson 2009; Solomon, Warin, Lewis and Langford 2002). However, much literature remains tied to the risks to which children are exposed and how to protect children most effectively from risk, whether in relation to digital technology, diet and exercise, educational performance, social inequalities or indeed violence and abuse in all its guises. And in reverse, the consequences of exposure to and experience of such risks then filters ‘upwards’ in the form of an accumulation of personal and social advantage and disadvantage that prestructures the shaping of identities and trajectories through youth and young adulthood (Bynner 2005; Côté and Bynner 2008).

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This collection has chosen to focus on three areas of current theoretical and research interest. Firstly, the social construction of the life-course is an enduring theme for childhood and youth studies. On this occasion we privilege gendered and family transitions and transformations, which are less well covered in the existing literature than is the case for education and employment patterns. Secondly, the ways in which children and young people are ‘party to’ the societies and cultures in which they live have increasingly moved to the centre of the research stage. On this occasion we turn the spotlight in particular towards migration and poverty as factors that work against inclusion and belonging, but also point to examples of countervailing policy and action. Thirdly, between that which endures and that which attracts particularly strong interest stands that which is novel and suggestive. In this collection, we focus on the potential of virtual worlds for creating and enabling new forms of social and political action. We do not claim that this collection represents a comprehensive account of current work in the field of childhood and youth studies, but rather it offers a snapshot of the current landscape that consciously includes contributions as a set of exemplars from diverse corners of Europe, with additional material from Australia and North America. These contributions are ordered thematically as described immediately above, and not at all according to the corner of the world from which they derive. The suggestion is, therefore, that readers might reflect on the relations between specificities and commonalities in a loose vectoring of theme and context. Each of the chapters can certainly be read singly and in their own terms, but they can also be considered concurrently within and across the three sections of the collection.

Life-course transitions and transformations The collection opens with a conceptual discussion of the social construction of the life-course. Lynne Chisholm argues that the extent to which complexity, differentiation and contingency have become definitively characteristic suggests a shift from linearity to hypertextuality. Social scientists have tried to capture changing constructions of the lifecourse by identifying new life-phases that open up between the increasingly fuzzy borders of the classic categories of childhood, youth and adulthood. At differing levels of analysis, they have described processes of fragmentation, contradictions and disjunctions that arise thereby. However, life-course theory is still embedded in sequential formulations, rather than critically interrogating these and exploring

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alternatives. The chapter thus begins to consider the implications of nonlinear conceptualisations of childhood and youth. Turning attention to more concrete aspects of transition, the second chapter considers the active formation of gendered identity. Drawing on an empirical study from Greece, Katherina Dadatsi and Vasiliki DeliyanniKouimtzis delineate the construction of male identities and the development of boyhood during adolescence. Grounded in the conviction that masculinity exists only in relation to femininity, but is also constructed in diverse and multiple forms, the chapter highlights how masculinity is constructed through adolescent boys’ views of peers who engage in ‘cross-gendered’ sports activities. Sports are strongly associated with popularity and peer status; they are also of major significance in adolescence. Boys’ accounts demonstrate active negotiation between conformity, challenge and contradiction in relation to social ideologies that set sports activities and gender identities into a tensioned field of meanings. In line with a considerable body of research findings (for example, Paechter 2012; Renold 2001; Swain 2004) the chapter concludes that the prescriptive performance of gender identity exerts greater pressure on boys than on girls. As young men approach the prospect of becoming fathers, they must extend their gendered identities to encompass masculinity and parenthood in relation to each other. From a critical feminist perspective, Evanthia Tazoglou’s chapter addresses the ways young Greek men talk about fatherhood. Based on discourse analysis, the account seeks to reconstruct negotiated meanings of fatherhood from the perspective of young men themselves. The analysis uncovers a set of interpretative repertoires they routinely employ, focusing on two dominant and divergent repertoires centred on fatherhood as responsibility and fatherhood as personal engagement. These can both be set into relation with hegemonic masculinity, but they equally include contradictory discourses that point towards reconstruction of the traditional fatherhood model and renegotiation of gendered dilemmas in present-day Greek society. How these tensions are approached and resolved are material to the fine-grained texturing of transitions to adulthood not only for young men, but also for young women. The final chapter of this section also addresses the transition to parenthood, but from the viewpoint of European comparative research in eight countries with differing welfare regimes, labour markets and demographic patterns. Siyka Kovacheva and Stanimir Kabaivanov begin by describing contemporary youth as an extended life-phase that also contains increasingly differentiated internal steps towards independent

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adulthood. This is most readily visible in charting the transition from school to secure and stable working life, but these patterns are intimately interwoven with establishing one’s own household, family and becoming parents. The overall rationale is to achieve satisfactory work-life balance and, where possible, to improve the quality of life between the demands of work and parenthood. Young adults of both sexes actively develop strategies in these respects, which they apply with greater or lesser success according to the specific circumstances in which they find themselves. The analysis thus seeks to identify the factors that determine how far they are successful, placing the information gained in interviews with young working parents into the broader framework of differential policies in the countries under study.

Communication and participation The second section of this collection opens with a critical interrogation of the potential of digital technologies for teaching and learning. James Côté recounts the somewhat extravagant claims that have been made in a North American literature that has already reached a wide readership amongst educationalists and the public at large. These claims are set against the background of research that describes the generational shift from digital immigrants to digital natives, typically concluding that not only digital competence but also learning styles and preferences are changing rapidly, so that today’s children and young people need and want pedagogies and didactics that are distinctly different from those developed in non-digital worlds. The chapter deconstructs the arguments and evidence, in order to bring the debates into clearer proportion. It concludes by emphasising that teaching and learning continue to exist in relation to each other – an exclusive focus on learning risks neglect of how teaching as a set of activities takes place and the extent to which these can be improved or replaced by using digital tools. Côté argues for a judicious and well-balanced combination of conventional and virtual teaching and learning, tailored to the purpose, the context and the participants. Kerry Mallan, Parlo Singh and Natasha Giardina’s chapter switches the focus from formal to informal learning contexts. The authors are working to gain a better understanding of today’s digitally competent youth, and in this context their contribution shows how young people deal with ‘iScapes’, a term used to refer not only to the digital environments created by IT systems, but also to the interconnectedness of online and offline spaces. Using participatory research methods, the authors investigate the ways in which high school students in Australia use new information and

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communication media to construct their identities, form social relations and adopt creative practices in everyday life contexts. New technologies, on the other hand, are important resources in attracting young people to formal politics and they can use these actively to create participatory political practices. Anita Harris’s article focuses on how young women make use of new information and communication technologies, exploring questions about the changing aspects of political participation offered to them by the new media and the need to reconceptualise notions of citizenship. She suggests that, by creating a less intimidating public domain in which young women can act, these politicised virtual spaces represent new directions of activism and contribute to the construction of new participatory communities and the development of new kinds of public selves. Equally, however, the same activities convey, as she writes, “important things about the limits of the kinds of conventional citizen subject positions offered to young women at this time”. Vasiliki Triga and Aphrodite Baka take the discussion about the relationship of the new media and participatory practices further. Their contribution argues that new information and communication technologies could play an important mediating and facilitating role for encouraging political participation and active citizenship amongst young people. The authors discuss the use of the Net by youth social movements for motivating and mobilising for political participation and protest. The contribution is based on a case study of youth protest in Greece following the death of a 16-year-old in the context of police action during a demonstration in 2008. The orchestration and management of the youth protest movement was significantly mediated through blogs, and this communication channel sustained the movement after the street protests as such had waned. By means of content analysis, the chapter is able to show how blogging constructed and conveyed information and argument rapidly and effectively, thus successfully motivating and mobilising political opposition. The final contribution to this section takes up the quandaries that arise from the fact that new communications technologies are open, uncontrolled spaces that individuals and groups may also use in predatory and injurious ways. Michel Walrave and Wannes Heirman’s chapter assesses the nature and extent of cyber-bullying on the basis of a survey amongst young Belgians that sought to discover their possible involvement in and experience of the phenomenon. The results of the inquiry suggest that cyber-bullying is more widespread than had been expected; the study was also able to identify at least some of the factors

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that generate its onset. Those young people who report themselves to be IT-competent, to have independent online access and to spend significant time on the Net are more likely to perpetrate cyber-bullying. This correlates with the fact that boys, too, are more likely to be cyber-bullies, since it is boys who are generally more likely to devote time and energy to IT and the Net (especially for gaming, whereas girls find virtual social networking more attractive). Girls, then, are more likely to become the victims of cyber-bullying, which parallels their greater vulnerability to gendered violence in ‘real’ life.

Contours of belonging and inclusion Belonging and inclusion are not unitary, undifferentiated concepts, nor do they express themselves simply in everyday lives. When people move between countries and cultures, they become the subjects and objects of highly complex structures and relations of memberships and identities. These can seldom be separated from the personal circumstances of formal and social inequalities that, with few exceptions, accompany migration both as antecedents and as consequences. Poverty and its social corollaries are undeniably closely associated with migration. Migration itself is not new to Europe, but it has changed direction: until very recently, Europeans migrated in large numbers to other parts of the world in order to secure a better life. Today, people from other parts of the world migrate into Europe – in the hope of securing a better life. Migration has always been predominantly a ‘young’ phenomenon – young adults are most likely to migrate, voluntarily and involuntarily, and so they will usually become parents in their destination country. In turn, this means that due to their demographic structure, first-generation migrant populations are bound to contain disproportionately high numbers of children and young people. On the one hand, societies rapidly diversify and embrace a wide variety of minority ethnicities and cultures; on the other hand, these changes do not take effect evenly, so that multi-ethnic youth lives alongside older age groups who are much less culturally diverse. Children and young people from migrant and minority backgrounds (and not only those in the first generation) face considerable challenges with respect to the formal and informal dimensions of multi-faceted belongings and inclusions. At the same time, children and young people in general still do not enjoy full personal and social rights as citizens: in some respects, they are also positioned as ‘foreigners’ in their own countries.

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The first two chapters of this section consider the social impact of migration on children and young people on each side of the ‘fence’ of citizenship. The opening chapter analyses the ways young people’s moral agency is constituted in relation to the moral aspects of forced migration and asylum. Drawing on qualitative data from group discussions and individual interviews with ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ students and teachers, Mano Candappa, Madeleine Arnot and Halleli Pinson highlight the complexity of moral judgement amongst ‘citizen’ school pupils in England. Their analysis shows how hostile public discourses on asylum powerfully influence young people’s moral values, even though these discourses contradict the more inclusive ideology of the school. However, in specific cases whereby children seeking asylum were threatened by exclusion from schooling or deportation from the UK, pupils are capable of expressing contestation towards dominant hostile public discourses ideologies and can demonstrate their affiliation to human rights discourses, thus gaining and using resources for developing more autonomous agency in their lives. For her part, Lia Figgou then reports on how young adult Greek citizens construct and reconstruct discourses about migration to Greece. She conducted focus groups with 18-24 year old university students, in which the characteristic tenor is that Greece literally cannot afford to take in migrants on the current scale. For these young people, migration is essentially a law and order issue for a country with fixed borders that must be protected from illegal immigration. However, these accounts included contradictory elements: the students express their agreement with principles of social justice and respect for human rights – which favours open borders – but at the same time they underline perceived negative consequences in terms of integration obstacles and problems both for the migrants and for the receiving country. The next two chapters of this section each address inclusion and exclusion issues from the point of view of migrant youth. Marcus Herz and Thomas Johansson base their analysis on a phenomenological approach to being stopped on the street by the police, drawing on interviews on this subject with four male immigrants between 18 and 25 years old. The chapter concentrates on their feelings, experiences of discrimination and social exclusion, mapping how all this becomes part of these young people’s everyday lives. They must devise strategies to deal with this contingent risk, which becomes an integral part of their identity development and their way of life. Moving on from this, Carles Feixa and Teresa Lopez adopt a differently nuanced perspective, positioning young people from

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Mediterranean backgrounds as a global generation migrating within the region. This contribution explores the psychological, social and cultural implications of this distinct pattern of youth migration in a space that is at once inclusive (considering the social history of Mediterranean cultures as closely related, mutually interpenetrating and open to cross-mobility) and excluding (in the context of sharp North-South barriers to exchange and mobility, complicated by Palestine conflict and Cypriot division). Yet experiencing oneself as a ‘non-citizen’ is not restricted solely to migrant youth. Pamela Abbott and Claire Wallace’s contribution depicts the disengagement from political, economic and social citizenship as expressed by young people in Moldova. This is a consequence of the country’s social and system disintegration following the demise of the USSR and the intense and sometimes violent competition and conflict surrounding territories, resources and national sovereignties. In this context, a particular view of citizenship emerges from the findings, one aspect of which is alienation from the formal system and the state in general. Their analysis is based on interviews with young people and young adults in different circumstances – at school or at university, in stable or in precarious employment. The key finding is that in all of these groups, the majority sees little future for themselves in their own country. This leads them to disengage from constructing their own pathways to integration into Moldavian society and economy, which could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The most desperate forms of exclusion (including via migration) find their expression in human trafficking. In the case of children, enforced beggary – a specific variety of exploitation of the body – constitutes a form of trafficking that has become endemic in southeastern Europe. Konstaninos Panagos describes the ways in which this ‘business’ is organised as enforced beggary in Greece, exploiting children from poor countries in the region and in particular Roma children from Albania. These ‘non-citizen children’ are likely to be classified in everyday life as an annoying outgrowth of the canker of the ‘undeserving foreign poor’ – or at best as the pitiful victims of their undeserving parents, perhaps of their criminal slave drivers. Under such circumstances, the notion that children have – or should have – rights in their own right appears almost to be a side-issue, but it does represent a fundamental shift in perspective that in principle would benefit all children, whatever their formal and informal citizenship status. On the basis of social research with street children in many countries, Daniel Stoecklin proposes that the key to appropriate policy and action lies in combining respect for diversity with the principle of agency. All social

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actors, including children and young people, can recognise, enact and voice lived experiences by using the sensitising concepts that researchers using grounded theory develop and adopt to make sense of the worlds they study and on which they report – in other words, part of the answer to charting and understanding the changing landscapes of childhood and youth, in Europe as elsewhere in the world, lies in a democratisation of the research process that can take respectful account of what children and young people tell us about their lives.

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Chambers, Deborah. 2012. A Sociology of Family Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chisholm, Lynne. 2013a. “Learning in second modernity”. In Learning Lives: Transactions, Technologies and Learner Identity, edited by Ola Erstad, and Julian Sefton-Green, 70-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2013b. “Youth after the Gold Rush”. In Giovanni in una Societa Multimediale, edited by Rafaelle Rauty, 46-54. Salerno: Universita degli Studi di Salerno. Cole, Jennifer, and Deborah Durham, eds. 2007. Generations and Globalization. Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Corsaro, William A. 2011. The Sociology of Childhood. London: Sage, 3rd edition. Côté, James, and John M. Bynner. 2008. “Changes in the transition to adulthood in the UK and Canada: the role of structure and agency in emerging adulthood”. Journal of Youth Studies 11(3): 251-68. Devadason, Ranji. 2007. “Constructing Coherence? Young Adults’ Pursuit of Meaning through Multiple Transitions between Work, Education and Unemployment”. Journal of Youth Studies 10(2): 203-21. Du Bois-Raymond, Manuela, and Chisholm, Lynne A. 2006. The Modernization of Youth Transitions in Europe. Hoboken, N.J.: Jossey Bass. Faas, Daniel. 2007. “Youth, Europe and the Nation: The Political Knowledge, Interests and Identities of the New Generation of European Youth”. Journal of Youth Studies 10(2): 161-81. France, Alan. 2008. “Risk factor analysis and the youth question“. Journal of Youth Studies 11(1): 1-15. Ginwright, Shawn, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota, eds. 2006. Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change. New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America’s Youth. London/New York: Routledge. Griffin, Christine. 2011. “The trouble with class: researching youth, class and culture beyond the ‘Birmingham School’”. Journal of Youth Studies 14(3): 245-59. —. 1985. Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1975/2003. Resistance through Rituals. Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.

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Handel, Gerard, Spencer Cahill, and Frederick Elkin. 2006. Children and Society: The Sociology of Children and Childhood Socialisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harslof, Ivan. 2005. “‘Integrative’ or ‘Defensive’: Youth Activation in Nine European Welfare States”. Journal of Youth Studies 8(4): 461-81. Heinz, Walter R., and Victor W. Marshall, eds. 2003. Social Dynamics of the Life-course. Transitions, Institutions and Interrelations. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Helve, Helena, and Gunilla Holm, eds. 2005. Contemporary Youth Research. Local expressions and gobal connections. Aldershot/ Burlington VT: Ashgate. Hoffmann, Joan Serra, Lyndee M. Knox, and Robert Cohen. 2011. Beyond Suppression. Global Perspectives on Youth Violence. Santa Barbara CA: Greenwood Publishing Group/ABC-CLIO. Irwin, Sarah. 2013. Reshaping Social Life. London/New York: Routledge. Iwilade Akin. 2013. “Crisis as opportunity: youth, social media and the renegotiation of power in Africa”. Journal of Youth Studies 16(8): 1054-068. James, Alison, and Andrian James. 2004. Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kovacheva, Siyka. 2006. “Youth transitions and family support in a transforming social context: Reflections from the New Member States”. In The New Generations of Europeans. Demography and Families in the Enlarged European Union, edited by Wolfgang Lutz, Rudolph Richter, and Chris Wilson, 145-176. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan. Kuhar, Metka, and Herwig Reiter. 2013. “‘Ideally, mother would say that I can keep it’: negotiating authority and autonomy between parents and adolescents about piercing”. Journal of Youth Studies 16(7): 830-46. Larémont, Ricardo René. 2012. “Demographics, Economics, and Technology: Background to the North African Revolutions”. The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 3(1): 3-17. Levy, René, Paolo Ghisletta, Jean-Marie Le Goff, Dario Spini, and Eric Widmer, eds. 2005. Towards an Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Life Course. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Leccardi, Carmen, ed. 2012. 1989: Young People and Social Change after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Leccardi, Carmen, and Elisabetta Ruspini, eds. 2006. A New Youth? Young People, Generations and Family Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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López-Blasco, Andreu, Wallace McNeish, and Andreas Walther, eds. 2003. Young People and Contraditions of Inclusion. Towards Integrated Transition Policies in Europe. Bristol: Policy Press. Maira, Suanina Marr. 2009. Missing: Youth, Citizenship and Empire after 9/11. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Majamaa, Karoliina. 2011. “Dismissed intergenerational support? New social risks and the economic welfare of young adults”. Journal of Youth Studies 14(6): 729-43. MacDonald, Robert, and Jane Marsh. 2001. “Disconnected Youth?”. Journal of Youth Studies 4 (4):373-91 [http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjys20?open=4-vol_4; accessed 29.04.2014] MacDonald, Robert, and Tracey Shildrick. 2007. “Street Corner Society: Leisure, Careers, Youth (Sub)cultures and Social Exclusion”. Leisure Studies 26(3): 339-55. McElwee, Niall. 2007. At-Risk Children and Youth. New York: Routledge. Mayall, Berry 2005. “Studying Childhood”. In Childhood, edited by Chris Jenks, Volume 1, 119-137. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. —. 2009. Towards a Sociology for Childhood. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Nilan, Pam, and Carles Feixa, eds. 2006. Global Youth? Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds. New York: Routledge. Nilson, Ann, Julia Brannen, and Suzan Lewis, eds. 2012. Transitions to Parenthood in Europe. A comparative life course perspective. Bristol: Policy Press. Percy-Smith, Barry, and Nigel Thomas. 2010. A Handbook of Children’s and Young People’s Participation. Perspectives from Theory and Practice. London/New York: Routledge. Paechter, Carrie. 2012. “Bodies, identities and performances: reconfiguring the language of gender and schooling”. Gender and Education 24(2): 229-41. Pechtelidis, Yannis. 2011. “December uprising 2008: universality and particularity in young people’s discourse”. Journal of Youth Studies 14(4): 449-62. Prout, Alan, and Alison James. 2005. “A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems”. In Childhood, edited by Chris Jenks, Volume 1, 56-80. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Qvortrup, Jens. 1995. “Childhood in Europe: A new field of social research”. In Growing up in Europe, edited by Lynne Chisholm,

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Manuela du Bois-Raymond, and Heinz-Hermann Krüger, 7-12. Berlin: de Gruyter. Renold, Emma. 2001. “Learning the ‘Hard’ Way: Boys, Hegemonic Masculinity and the Negotiation of Learner Identities in the Primary School”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 22(3): 369-85. Roberts, Ken, Galina I. Osadchaya, Khasan V. Dsuzev, Victor G. Gorodyanenko, and Jochen Tholen. 2003. “Economic Conditions and the Family and Housing Transitions of Young Adults in Russia and Ukraine”. Journal of Youth Studies 6(1): 71-88. Robinson, Cara. 2009. “‘Nightscapes and leisure spaces’: an ethnographic study of young people’s use of free space”. Journal of Youth Studies 12(5): 501-14. Scarpetta, Steffano, Anna Sonnet, and Thomas Manfredi. 2010. Rising Youth Unemployment During The Crisis: How to Prevent Negative Long-term Consequences on a Generation? OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 106, Paris: OECD Publishing. Solomon, Yvette, Jo Warin, Charlie Lewis, and Wendy Langford. 2002. “Intimate talk between parents and their teenage children: democratic openness or covert control?”. Sociology 36(4): 965-83. Steedman, Carolyn. 2005. “Childhood”. In Childhood, edited by Chris Jenks, Volume 1, 416-40. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Swain, John. 2004. “The resources and strategies 10-11 year old boys use to construct masculinities in the school setting”. British Educational Research Journal 30(1): 167-85. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour. How working-class kids get working-class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wyness, Michael. 2006. Childhood and Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART I LIFELONG TRANSITIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

CHAPTER ONE THE LIFE-COURSE AS HYPERTEXT LYNNE CHISHOLM Introduction Social phenomena cannot be explained by recourse to determinist theories: this is a sociological axiom and the fundamental raison d’être of the discipline. Those of us who began our academic careers as social scientists after the 1960s certainly learned from the outset that understanding social and cultural phenomena had nothing to do with biological exigencies. Social demographers, for example, taught that economic and social modernisation in Europe and North America had led to falls in birth rates, child mortality and to rising life expectancy – so if anything, society was impacting significantly on biology, and certainly not the reverse. Historically, demographic trends had largely been driven by unpredictable and unstoppable events and processes: disease, climatic change and natural catastrophes. Industrial affluence brought better standards of living and public health and social policies; values and lifestyles responded to the opportunities and consequences that followed. Such one-directional perspectives have long since given way to complex, multi-directional understandings of the relationships between individual, economic and social action, science and technological change, and the shaping of natural environments and human and animal lives. So, for example, bio-medical technologies began to accelerate in the last decades of the 20th century, with the contraceptive pill marking a first watershed in western countries. Today, it seems self-evident that society and bio-technologies constitute highly complex and sensitive relations of interdependence, in which the directions of causalities – were these ever able to be plausibly pinned down – are ultimately of small relevance. Ethics, participation and social responsibility in shaping and responding to technological innovations and their consequences are much more significant, both in public and in scholarly discourses (see, for example, recent contributions to a vast literature: Arancibia 2013; Gerlach,

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Hamilton, Sullivan and Walton 2011; Hanks 2008; Raman and Tutton 2010). Life-course research ultimately has its roots in Chicago-school-style community sociology from the 1920s onwards (cf. Bulmer 1984). Working at micro-sociological level to gain deeper insight into the ways small communities or specific social groups in urban contexts construct and make sense of continuity and change in everyday life, such inquiries inevitably included a focus on individual biographies and the elucidation of life-course patterns. The Polish Peasant and Marienthal studies are perhaps the most wellknown early classics of the genre (Thomas and Znaniecki/Zaretsky 1996 – originally published in five volumes in the USA between 1918 and 1920; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 1971 – originally published in Austria in 1933). Over the course of subsequent decades, life-course theory and research developed into a highly differentiated and interdisciplinary thematic field that encompasses crosssectional and longitudinal designs, using both quantitative and qualitative methods (see, for example, Elder and Giele 2009; Heinz and Marshall 2003; Mortimer and Shanahan 2005).

Life-course, demography and social change Theory and research on the life-course has generally focused on conceptualising, describing and understanding the objective structuration and subjective constructions of human lives ‘as demographically given’, both individually and collectively, and within and between generations, both within families and as aggregate groups. Only in the past two decades have life-course scholars begun to consider the implications of much longer human lives for the social construction and framing social contexts of the life-course (for comprehensive thematic overviews, see Binstock and George 2006; Settersten and Angel 2011). By and large, the focus to date has rested with the implications of a shifting demographic balance between young and old in producing ‘aging societies’ in both advanced (post-) industrial societies (in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific Rim) and, more recently, in the economic development threshold countries of Latin America and Asia. In contrast, little attention has been given to the social correlates of ‘demographically young’ societies, whether in African and Asian countries or – in relative terms – within world regions, countries that are staying younger (via higher birth rates and in-migration levels) as others are more rapidly aging. In the meantime, the inevitably slower pace of research has been overtaken by political debates and policy measures prompted by Europe’s

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declining economic competitiveness and then galvanised by the consequences of the post-2008 global financial crisis. Moves to rise the standard age of retirement together with further reductions in pensions and social benefits are now concretely underway or already implemented in many European countries. In North America, the right to retirement has been long since been occluded by the right to continue paid employment as long as citizens wish – whereby many have little choice but to do so to some extent. In less affluent regions and countries of the world, only a privileged minority can expect to be able to retire with a pension in the first place. However, neither research nor policy have so far paid much attention to the potential economic and social advantages that may result from demographic aging, especially in the light of longer lives with better health. Grandparents, and especially grandmothers, are once again becoming significant elements of their own adult children’s child-care support systems (Esping-Andersen 2009; Luo, LaPierre, Hughes and Waite 2012). This may not always be what grandparents would like to be the case, especially if they cannot decide when and how much they want to contribute. However, more active seniors can also be more involved in social and community participation, and they can contribute more to nonformal and informal learning processes with the gift of life-wide contextualising experience and the luxury of more time to listen and to advise. In a certain sense, at least affluent aging societies may rediscover something of the division of labour extant in simpler, tribally organised societies, in which older adults play crucial political and social roles – whilst avoiding the risk of creating political gerontocracies. At the same time, the past two decades have seen very significant changes in the regulation of youth transitions in Europe, which express themselves not only in higher rates of participation in initial education and training but also in more intense and lengthier quasi-dependency on family and (to an ever declining extent) on the state, well into young adulthood. Youth research has closely documented these developments, which have been accompanied by complex patterns of realignment amongst old and new inequalities and diversities both between and within countries and cultures, including ethnic minority and migrant communities with origins from far beyond Europe as a world region (inter alia, see Alba and Waters 2011; Chisholm and Kovatcheva 2002; Lentin and Titley 2008; van der Velde 2008; for a statistical description, see Eurostat 2011). At theoretical level, an abundant specialist literature has analysed the extension and fragmentation of youth transitions together with the differentiated and liquid quality of youth cultures and identities (for example, see du Bois-

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Reymond and Chisholm 2006; Leccardi and Ruspini 2006; and see Blatterer 2007 for a discussion of the contemporary meaning of adulthood altogether).

Youth in the life-course In response to these kinds of changes, contemporary youth studies now use the term young adulthood to denote a phase of life that (in a blurred manner) follows on from the youth phase and as a conceptualisation that responds to the wide-ranging transformations that have restructured young people’s lives in recent decades. Some accounts of young adulthood focus on socio-psychological dimensions of what have been termed arrested transitions (Côté 2000) or, more optimistically and more socio-cultural in approach, emerging adulthood (Arnett 2004). Others privilege socioeconomic or socio-political dimensions and focus especially on delayed and partial routes to and spaces for autonomy and participation (classically: Furlong and Cartmel 2007). Cultural analyses, for their part, are likely to underline fluid parallel heterogeneities and fast-changing lifestyle trends, reflected in increasingly fuzzy boundaries within and between life phases and prompting reconsideration of theoretical and empirical relationships between youth and generation (for example: Dolby and Fazal 2008; Nilan and Feixa 2006). But whatever the approach taken, all contemporary accounts have their theoretical and empirical roots in extension and fragmentation of the youth phase together with individualisation of youth as personal and social construction. Embodied in the patterns and meanings of young people’s lives, these changes – initially generated by mid-20th century affluence and paradoxically accelerated by its subsequent decline – have now engendered broader reconceptualization of life-course dynamics altogether. Here, the concept of recursivity places the expectation of linearity into question, so that moving from A towards B once only, without detours and never in reverse no longer necessarily holds, nor is defined as normative. This has prompted discussion about the restructuring of concepts and meanings of time for young people, both at the level of concrete practice and in the sense of capturing and realising life-time that has become ephemeral and elusive – youth as the time of one’s life is no longer a clearly definable experience (Chisholm 2013; Leccardi 2005; Reiter 2003; Woodman 2011). The biographical frameworks that young people adopt to situate themselves are hence shifting to a future-present modality, in which dreams collide with reality as today and tomorrow undergo unrelenting

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mutual compression. If the future is anywhere, it is at least also in the here and now. A positive version of how subjects construct and manage a future-present ‘life-time’ presupposes personal, economic and social autonomy, which many young people may not have and some may never wholly secure. In such situations, the future-present becomes a bewildering white-out landscape in which life-time loses meaning altogether (for example, see Hogne 2004). Transformation of the youth phase did not begin after the 2008 financial crisis, but at least half a century ago. Macro-social transformation processes of cultural and economic globalisation and pluralisation, paralleled by deepening legitimation crises surrounding established democratic structures and social institutions, have set the frame for a restructuration of the youth phase that began with its prolongation, moved towards its multiple fragmentation and de-standardisation, and is now reconstituting itself into weakly-bounded and non-linear biographisation – but accompanied by ever deeper and multifaceted polarisations between patterns of life chances and risks. It remains unclear whether the 2008 financial crisis has tipped the generational scales, but current re-interpretations of the youth phase are inclined to underline the weakening and dissolution of objective and subjective boundaries between youth and adulthood – and have begun to posit the notion of ‘transitionless biographies’ (for example, Molgat and Vézina 2008). The logical theoretical consequence of such formulations is the redefinition of adulthood altogether, grounded in the recognition that the youth phase is a modernist construct built on functional separations and sequences that do not match the contingent fluidities of second modernity. This could lead to the emergence of a new immediacy, rooted in a future present which counterfoils the principle of deferred gratification in 20th century social market economies and calls for restructuring of the governance of time and space in everyday and working life.

Restructuring the social life-course Viewed from a life-course studies perspective, what we are ultimately seeing is a prospective overall ‘shift forwards’ in life-course structuring. Life expectancy could possibly extend to 140 years in the mid-range future, so put simply, this means that there is more room for rearrangements and new or recurrent activity phases – spreading out and fitting more in become practicable propositions. The three-phase typology shown below summarises the development so far and the future prospect.

The Life-course as Hypertext

Youth I II III

th

to mid-20 century to early 21st century from mid-21st century

Short Extended Extended

Active Adulthood Long Short Long

7

Age Short Extended Extended

This typology is a stark oversimplification: to begin with, it takes no account of socio-economic, gender or cultural differences. Nor does it reflect the recognition that borders between life-course phases as we know them are fuzzy and have become fuzzier, as life-course patterns have become more contingent and fluid – due both to less predictable economic and social framing conditions and to greater normative acceptance of diversity in ‘making a life’ together with the injunction to engage in active construction and management of self-formation and life-project from an early stage in life. The fragmentations, contradictions and disjunctions that arise thereby – and which have become the very stuff of contemporary youth research – are invisible in this truncated account. Nevertheless, its very baldness enables us to focus on a key issue for theory and research, namely the implications for subjectivities and social relations of a structural forward shift in the fundamental construction of the life-course. How can and might youth be conceptualised and lived when it could last into the fourth decade of the lifespan? What effects might ensue when under these circumstances the numbers of those aged under 20 fall towards 15% of the population? In what kind of ways might the constitution of socialisation and education processes change in consequence? There is a sense in which the personal and social transition to active adulthood – in private and in public life – cannot be delayed forever, so that a structural shift forward can ultimately bring only two basic changes at the ‘back end’: x extended youth/young adulthood for all, and not simply for particular social and cultural groups (as is still the case); x re-definition of adulthood into a more fluid and diversified concept and practice. The first of these changes may be understood at a variety of levels as positive or negative in its implications, but it does not place the life-course as a sequential phenomenon and construction into question. The youth phase, complemented by young adulthood – already invented and wellestablished in the literature – simply takes up more absolute (and,

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according to how rapidly life expectancy increases, possibly relative) room in the life-course. The second of these changes is theoretically more significant because it could lead to a loosening up of linearity and sequence that to date remain axiomatic to conceptualisations of the life-course. One way to begin thinking about what this could mean is to consider the symbolic definition of adulthood in our societies. Adulthood traditionally signifies two qualities: personal and social autonomy, and personal and social responsibility. Autonomy specifies both the freedom to act and the freedom from constraints on action; it demands both a set of rights and access to resources. Responsibility specifies both accountability for one’s actions and a set of obligations towards family and community. It presupposes capacity for rational and moral judgement together with acceptance of the principles of reciprocity and interdependence in social life. In contrast, youth traditionally signifies the absence of autonomy and responsibility. The structuring of youth transitions therefore has thus represented a personal and social process of development and learning that marks gradual and sequenced accession to adulthood. In recent times, the absence of autonomy and responsibility was increasingly understood in positive terms as a moratorium for exploration and experimentation that facilitates a more secure foundation for personal and social autonomy and responsibility in adult life and in democratic societies and polities. Today, the contemporary concept of ‘youth life’ is no longer anchored in the concept of the moratorium as a carefree ‘time out’, but rather in the concept of a distinctive social life-phase sui generis. The modifying adjective ‘quasi’ best captures its essential ‘both-and’ quality – not only autonomous but also dependent, not only also carefree but also carrying responsibility. However, youth studies has hardly addressed the question of what it is that young people will, could or should become – adulthood itself remains a taken-for-granted personal and social location, as yet little subjected to serious critical analysis. What adulthood actually comprises and whether living adulthood is a desirable anchor for one’s life-project have occupied neither researchers’ nor young people’s minds. Furthermore, the idea that adulthood follows on from youth seems so self-evident that it looks strange even to formulate the sequence, let alone to place a question mark around it. In this sense, linearity and sequencing in life-course theorising represent the unquestioned incursion of biology into biography via the relay of time as ‘life-time’. The phrase ‘life-course as hypertext’ consciously calls for a critical re-examination of that incursion, and in so

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doing, raises questions about the nature of our understandings of youth (and childhood) within the life-course.

Lives without courses But what do these core concepts of linearity and sequencing mean? Linearity implies that something moves, or a process unfolds, in a single direction. Sequencing denotes that events, moments or phases take place one after another. This is how the Gutenberg universe operates: patterns of thought, expression and action are expressed in a linear, sequenced and fixed format (though they may not actually have initially emerged in this manner). So books have openings, chapters and conclusions – though we may not always read them thus: some of us are tempted to read the last pages of a detective novel first; drama and film may focus on key scenes and flashbacks; we rove through the daily newspaper and a headline catches our eye, so we skim over the middle of the column to see whether it is really worth reading. Readers and spectators do have choices – but these are set within a framework of linearity and sequence that is initially given, in a single format that is fixed. It is possible to resist the framework – as did famously James Joyce in Ulysses, possibly the first hypertextstyle novel, though still physically published in conventional format. The digital galaxy breaks with these conventions. Linearity is reversible and can be simultaneously multiple (bookmark chronology list, multiple tabs), whereas sequencing cannot be imposed (except covertly via hidden programming, which has been under development in pedagogic software for a decade or so) and can also be rearranged by the reader or user (clicking between live links, browsing paths). In the digital galaxy, linearity and sequencing are designed and suggested, but are not inherent to the framework. This development is only a partial recourse to the structuring of oral traditions, in which the storyteller sets the melody, the rhythm, the fugue and the web of specific connotation – they are the composers and arrangers. In the digital galaxy the listener is invited to take on a more active role as conductor. These kinds of epochal shifts are unlikely to go unnoticed in social and cultural terms, as many scholars argue (classically, Castells 2011; and see Dennis 2007). Hypertext, both verbal and visual, is the matter that makes up the digital galaxy. Hyper essentially means something that is ‘larger than life’ (hypertension, hyperactivity, hypermarket, the sales hype…) – it is text that is more than text, because it can accommodate multi-linearity of structuring and amendment. At minimum it presents the option of nonprescription of linearity and (specific) sequencing, and in so doing it re-

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introduces visual and spatial semantics more insistently into hermeneutic discourse. Hypertext logic more readily enables – but does not necessarily actively facilitate – choices and alternatives. It suggests, but does not automatically impose, reconstitution and re-contextualisation. In principle, that can be understood as potentially fostering autonomy and self-directed participation. So if we conceptualise the life-course as hypertext, what could this potentially imply? x Greater self-direction and self-responsibility in shaping and negotiating lifelines. x More insistent challenges to accommodate consciously and actively to the malleability of purposiveness and actualisation throughout life. x The normative injunction to become larger than life by creating and sustaining individuality of identity and directionality in life-time and life-space. In the sociological world we have lost, we availed ourselves of quasibiological accounts to define major life-phases, albeit that these accounts have increasingly faded into the wallpaper behind the social construction of the life course. First modernity’s enlightenment philosophy worked to free the human soul from its essentialist fetters, but in so doing, its educational concomitants created new prisons of childhood and youth, defined by development, hormones and institutions that were ultimately supposed to usher them safely and successfully into adulthood, itself a haven of linearity and sequencing. These rigidities have long since eased up and are in many ways no longer centrally relevant for describing and understanding the conditions and contingencies of young people’s lives. The dissolution of stable labour markets and the current free fall of social protection and welfare systems in most parts of Europe are placing the very logic and rationale of youth transitions into fundamental question – as if someone had taken the motherboard out of the life-course’s central processor. Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that current critical discourse – following Sennett (1998) – insistently poses the question of the ethics of sustainability of the subject. This is the darker side of the life-course as hypertext, where openness can become loss of orientation and fluidity can turn into anomie. Paradoxically, where there should be no hypertext, it abounds unfettered (sexual abuse and exploitation, human trafficking, family violence, poverty and the consequences of environmental pollution and catastrophe

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for life conditions). Where a bit more hypertext would be constructive, it is scarcer than it might be (equality and diversity, free movement and progression across education tracks and systems and occupational categories and careers, inter-faith understanding…). In the case of life entrances and exits, social scientists will have to learn to live together with the bio-technologists, but in all that comes in between, we can and should extend our capacity to visualise, analyse and understand the nonessentialism of the life-course, which indeed is larger than life.

References Alba, Richard, and Mary C. Waters, eds. 2011. Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective. New York/London: New York University Press. Arancibia, Florencia. 2013. “Challenging the bioeconomy: the dynamics of collective action in Argentina”. Technology in Society 35(2): 79-92. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. 2004. Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties. New York: Oxford University Press. Binstock, Robert H., and Linda K. George, eds. 2006. Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences. Burlington/San Diego/London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 6th edition. Blatterer, Harry. 2007. “Contemporary Adulthood. Reconceptualizing an uncontested category”. Current Sociology 55(6): 771-92. Bulmer, Martin. 1984. The Chicago School of Sociology. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Castells, Manuel. 2011. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 1. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2nd edition with a new preface. Chisholm, Lynne. 2013. “Learning in second modernity”. In Learning Lives: Transactions, Technologies and Learner Identity, edited by Ola Erstad, and Julian Sefton-Green, 70-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chisholm, Lynne, and Siyka Kovatcheva. 2002. Exploring the European youth mosaic. The social situation of young people in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publications. Côté, James. 2000. Arrested Adulthood. The Changing Nature of Maturity and Adulthood. New York/London: New York University Press. Dennis, Kingsley. 2007. “Time in the age of complexity”. Time & Society 16(2/3): 139-55.

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Dolby, Nadine, and Fazal Rizvi, eds. 2008. Youth Moves: Identities and Education in Global Perspective. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Du Bois-Reymond, Manuela, and Lynne Chisholm, eds. 2006. The modernization of youth transitions in Europe. New Perspectives on Childhood and Adolescence113, Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass. Elder, Glen H., and Janet Zollinger Giele, eds. 2009. The Craft of Lifecourse Research. New York: Guilford Press. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 2009. The Incomplete Revolution. Adapting to women’s new roles. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Eurostat. 2011. Youth in Europe. A Statistical Portrait. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union [http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-78-09920/EN/KS-78-09-920-EN.PDF; accessed 26.01.2014]. Furlong, Andy, and Fred Cartmel. 2007. Young People and Social Change. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2nd edition. Gerlach, Neil, Sheryl N. Hamilton, Rebecca Sullivan, and Priscilla L. Walton. 2011. Becoming Biosubjects. Bodies, Systems, Technologies. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press. Hanks, Craig, ed. 2008. Technology and Values: Essential Readings. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell. Heinz, Walter R., and Victor W. Marshall, eds. 2003. Social Dynamics of the Life-course. Transitions, Institutions and Interrelations. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Hogne, Øian. 2004. “Time Out and Drop Out. On the relation between linear time and individualism”. Time & Society 13(2/3): 173-95. Jahoda, Marie, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. 1971. Marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community. Chicago: Aldine. Leccardi, Carmen. 2005 “Facing uncertainty: temporality and biographies in the new century”. Young 13(2): 123-46. Leccardi, Carmen, and Elisabetta Ruspini, eds. 2006. A New Youth? Young people, generations and family life. Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley, eds. 2008. The Politics of Diversity in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publications. Luo, Ye, Tracey A. LaPierre, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, and Linda J. Waite. 2012. “Grandparents providing care to grandchildren. A populationbased study of continuity and change”. Journal of Family Issues 33(9): 1143-167. Molgat, Marc, and Mireille Vézina. 2008. “Transitionless biographies? Youth and representations of solo living”. Young 16(4): 349-71.

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Mortimer, Jeylan, and Michael J. Shanahan, eds. 2004. Handbook of the Life-course. New York: Springer. Nilan, Pam, and Carles Feixa, eds. 2006. Global Youth? Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds. New York: Routledge. Raman, Sujatha, and Richard Tutton, 2010. “Life, science and biopower”. Science, Technology and Human Values 35(5): 711-34. Reiter, Herwig. 2003. “Past, Present, Future. Biographical Time Structuring of Disadvantaged Young People”. Young 11(3): 253-79. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co. Settersten, Richard A., and Jaqueline L. Angel, eds. 2011. Handbook of Sociology of Aging. New York/Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London: Springer. Thomas, William Isaac, and Florian Znaniecki. 1996. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: a classic work in immigration history, edited by Eli Zaretsky. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Van de Velde, Cécile. 2008. Devenir adulte. Sociologie comparée de la jeunesse en Europe. (Becoming adult. Comparative sociology of youth in Europe.) Paris: PUF. Woodman, Dan. 2011. “Young People and the Future. Multiple Temporal Orientations Shaped in Interaction with Significant Others”. Young 19(2): 111-28.

CHAPTER TWO TOMBOYS AND SISSIES: ADOLESCENT BOYS TALK ABOUT PEERS PARTICIPATION IN ‘CROSS-GENDERED’ SPORT ACTIVITIES KATERINA DADATSI AND VASSILIKI DELIYIANNI-KOUIMTZIS The conceptualisation of masculinity Research on masculinity is a relatively new field in academia, mainly developed during the 1990s and emerging primarily due to the impact of feminism that has questioned the conceptualisation of men as ‘the norm’ and acknowledged masculinity as a ‘gendered category’ (Kimmel 2000). This recognition that “men become gendered and questionable [and are] no longer synonymous with the human and the normal” (Wetherell 1993, cited in Archer 2003:14), led to a variety of debates and theorisations aiming at enhancing the understandings on men and masculinities. Much of this work adopts a ‘pro-feminist’ stance, as it accepts basic feminist ideas. Within this perspective gendered identities are viewed as relational and the prevailing idea is that masculinity and femininity are constructed and performed in relation to each other (Skelton 1998). Therefore, one cannot study femininity without simultaneously studying masculinity and vice versa (Francis 1998). Consequently, the study of masculinity becomes a central issue for those adopting a feminist framework. However, not all work on masculinity draws on feminism. Many writers adopt an anti-feminist stance and remain critical towards this field of work. Instead, they remain attached to essentialist ideas that accept the biological differences between the sexes as ‘natural’ and ‘given’, claiming at the same time that men are threatened by modern society who seeks to

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feminise them. These theses are mainly developed by members of the ‘men’s movement’ which argues that masculinity is in crisis (for a more detailed presentation see Messner 1997; Skelton, 1998). As a result, one can distinguish two broad approaches to masculinity: the ‘celebratory’, which regards men as modern society’s victims and supports the need to restore their lost pride, and the ‘critical’, which recognises masculinity as a social construct and examines its multiple forms that operate in a frame of power relations (Archer 2003). This critical approach bases its premises mainly on feminist and poststructuralist theorisations about gender and identity. From this point of view identity is conceptualised as multi-faced, constantly evolving and never fully achieved (Hall 1992). In other words, people construct their identity in different ways, across different contexts and time. Furthermore, this identity construction is strongly influenced by factors such as ‘race’, gender, class and similarly socially structured categories (Imms 2000). Consequently, a critical perspective based on feminist ideas understands masculinity as multiple and changing (Bhavnani and Phoenix 1994), in a constant process of ‘becoming’ (Hall 1992) and as a ‘social accomplishment’ (Nilan 2000) which is constantly constructed through various discursive practices (Edley and Wetherell 1997). Thus, an individual may have access, across time, to a variety of different gender identities and forms of masculinity that are co-formed with various other social positions and discourses (Francis 1999). This recognition of the multiplicity of masculinities greatly influenced academic research, as it initiated a wide number of studies that aimed to depict the various masculinities constructed, negotiated and reinforced in a number of social settings. Research on the construction of masculinity has thus turned its focus in institutions and settings such as the family (Coltrane 2001), the school (Francis and Skelton 2001; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998; Mac an Ghaill 1996), the working environment (Connell 1998), the mass media and sports (Edley and Wetherell 1997; Messner 2002).

Masculinity in the educational setting One of the major fields studied is that of the educational setting. The exploration of youth masculinities constitutes a central issue to current gender research in education (Imms 2000). Such a focus is linked to a perceived ‘crisis in masculinities’ (Francis 1999) and is depicted in worries about boys’ academic underachievement (for a thorough review of the subject see Epstein et al. 1998) and the low rates of men proceeding in post-compulsory education and training (McGivney 1999). Feminist

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research in education, adopting a critical stance, centres on the exploration of emerging masculinities in the various school settings and views these identities as socially constructed, formed through language and reinforced within the educational context (Francis 1999, 2000; Frank et al. 2003; Frosh et al. 2002; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000). More specifically, this kind of research supports the claim that there is no unitary form of masculinity that emerges in schools but, rather, that there are many competing and contradictory forms, each of which serves the purpose of gender regulation in schools. As a consequence, there is a large amount of data on the gendered constructs male youth employ in order to legitimise and favour various positions on masculinity, a practice which ultimately leads into the prevalence of certain dominant ‘identity’ forms over others (Frosh et al. 2002; Martino 1999; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000; Skelton 1997). These gendered constructions are characterised by the effort to maintain the existing gender boundaries; boys are presented as primarily concerned with differentiating and opposing –both themselves and maleness – from girls and femininity (Epstein 1998; Francis 2000; Frosh et al. 2002; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000). At the same time the relevant bibliography suggests that boys also tend to differentiate themselves from same sex peers who do not fully conform to and comply with the socially defined characteristics of maleness (Francis 2000; Pascoe 2007). Another important feature of these masculine gendered identities emerging within schools is the great influence that same-sex peer groups exert in their formation. These boys-consisted groups accent a series of collective meanings regarding boyhood and exert their pressure on individuals to perform in line with the socially accepted and expected gender norms (Martino 1999; Pascoe 2007; Swain 2003). Much of the relevant research has sought to illuminate how schools act as ‘masculinity-making devices’ (Connell 1989, 291) creating various forms of masculinities and sustaining socially prevailing gender hierarchies (see Mac an Ghaill 1994; Connell 1989). Findings suggest that these hierarchies are organised around specific hegemonic notions of masculinity that ‘exemplify what it means to be a ‘real’ boy’ (Swain 2004, 169). These hegemonic constructs of masculinity take form within a framework of characteristics such as hardness and toughness (Skelton 1996), laddish behaviours (Francis 1999), opposition to being seen to work hard academically (Frosh et al. 2002, 198), heterosexuality and homophobia (Epstein 1999; Nayak and Kehily 1996; Pascoe 2007). However, one of the most significant features of a ‘true masculine’ identity appears to be participation in sports (Martino 1999), especially

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sports such as football that are traditionally linked to the masculine ideal (Frosh et al. 2002; Swain 2003, 2004).

The role of sports Being involved in sports – particularly those associated with physical skills, physical prowess and body strength (Burstyn 1999; Davison 2000) – is a matter of great importance when it comes to boys and the gendered identities they construct (Frosh et al. 2002). The importance of sport as a major definer in the construction of masculinity has been highlighted in a number of studies (see, for example Connell 1995; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998; Mac an Ghaill 1994; Martino 1999; Messner and Sabo 1990). Participation in athletic activities appears to be of great importance for adolescent boys not just because it is linked with childhood to adulthood transition, as boys learn to empower and control their bodies (Gilbert and Gilbert 1998), but mostly because it is strongly connected to men’s strength and acts as a reminder of their higher social status (Dunning 1999; Messner and Sabo 1990). This great significance of sports is evident as a boy’s lack of interest or low performance in sports usually results in his marginalisation and alienation from the peer group and evokes issues of questioning his masculine identity (Dunning 1999; Edley and Wetherell 1997; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998). It should be noted, though, that not all athletic activities are viewed as significant and that not all of them are linked to the masculine ideal. Some sports are seen as more masculine than others, as there seems to be a distinct division between male and female ones. In particular individual sports that emphasise beauty of line (e.g. swimming, gymnastics) are regarded as feminine, while the masculine label is attached to team sports and sports associated with high levels of physicality and contact – for example, football and basketball (Alley and Hicks 2005). Among this latter category, football appears as the cornice of masculinity, a ‘key motif in the construction of masculinity’ (Frosh et al. 2002, 12) as ‘doing’ boyness is strongly associated to playing football (Epstein et al. 2001; Frosh et al. 2002; Swain 2000, 2003). Consequently, given the fact that engagement with particular sports is strongly attached to the construction of masculinity, getting an insight into the ways adolescent boys talk about peers participating in ‘cross-gendered’ sports activities is of considerable interest.

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The study of masculinity in the Greek context Research on gendered identities in Greece is a relatively underdeveloped field, as the construction of gender has not attracted academic interest to the extent that it has in other countries, notably in English-speaking scientific communities. Most of the relevant research has historically focused on the study of the existing interrelationship between gender and the educational process (for a more thorough review see Deliyianni-Kouimtzis 2007). Recently, due to the profound impact of postmodern theory, there has been a shift and the research has tried to depict the multiplicity of gendered identities and the role of language in their construction (see Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Sakka 1998, 1999). In such a context, the first systematic attempt to study masculinity and its construction involved the examination of young boys’ views regarding the various performances of masculinity and their values and beliefs about socially assigned gender roles. Topics such as bullying and school violence, homophobia and educational choices have attracted the bulk of research interest (see Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Sakka 1998, 1999; Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Ziogou, 1995). Research findings indicate that young boys in Greece continue to construct their masculine identities based on traditional gender roles. In line with prevailing societal norms specific features that draw on hegemonic notions of masculinity are supported as characteristics for boys/men, (Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Sakka 2005a). Specifically, young boys’ views about masculinity seem strongly influenced by traditional socialisation patterns that promote the image of an impulsive, risky, adventure seeking and ‘macho’ manhood (Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Sakka 2005a). Another characteristic attributed to masculinity and reflected in boys’ constructs of masculinity is physical strength, which is opposed to emotional expressiveness, a characteristic that is regarded as exclusively feminine (Deliyianni-Kouimtzis and Sakka 2005a, b). Another link pointed out by the research in the Greek context is the one between aggressiveness and violence and masculinity. Both aggressiveness and violence appear therefore to be ‘pure’ masculine attributes, an idea supported in the views of both young boys and girls (DeliyianniKouimtzis and Sakka 2005b). Furthermore, it has to be noted that hegemonic ideals play an important role in shaping and defining what is ‘normal’ and ‘socially acceptable’ for a boy. As a consequence, characteristics or behaviours that deviate from the defined framework of ‘proper’ manhood are strongly condemned and boys that support these

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notions are marginalised and frequently labelled as ‘gay’ (DeliyianniKouimtzis 2005). In sum, evidence from research on masculinity in Greece strongly aligns with data deriving from other western countries, according to which hegemonic notions of masculinity appear actively involved in the construction of masculine identities. However, research in Greece primarily focuses on revealing the various forms of masculinity and their content, while the actively constructive aspects of boys’ speech still remain understudied. It is therefore difficult for those that study masculinity to gain a thorough and more complete insight into the everyday life and the various experiences of a boy, namely his common practices and performances of a masculine self.

The study The data presented in this article is part of a doctoral research project aiming at exploring the multiplicity of ways in which adolescent boys’ gendered subject positions are formed, the possible differences in these performances of masculinities and the extent to which the existing gender order and division continue to influence these formations. The study adopted the theoretical premises of ‘critical modernisation studies’, an interdisciplinary approach that is based on feminist ideas and seeks to ‘represent, through the study of youth themselves, both the continuities and transformations in gender identity’ (Dillabough 2001, 23). Through this theoretical lens, masculinity is viewed in terms of a concept that entails both individual and collective agency (Hollway 1995), is performative (Butler 1990) and is constructed within a framework of social inequalities (Archer et al. 2001). Boys are seen as social actors who construct, perform and negotiate a multiplicity of gendered identities (Mac an Ghaill 1996). These constructions of masculinity are largely formed through talk (Edley and Wetherell 1997), as boys draw on those discourses of masculinity that are both available and prevailing in the society and that effect upon the world (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Discourses are to be seen as broad, shared patterns of understanding and language.

Method Recognising that through language one occupies diverse identity positions and makes sense of the world (Potter and Wetherell 1987) leads to placing language and its features at the centre of understandings regarding the formation of gendered identities. Therefore, the

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methodological design of the research focused primarily on language both during the collection and the analysis of the data. Specifically, the collection of the data was accomplished through discussions held within 20 boys in the form of focus groups, which took place in the school setting. Focus groups provide a setting in which participants interact and thus co-form a reality; therefore, they are regarded as a means of obtaining ‘natural data’ (Wilkinson 2004). Moreover, participants within a focus group develop an argumentation, expose and defend their views. Consequently, such a procedure enables an emphasis on language and its constructive nature, which can therefore be more easily detected and revealed (Potter and Wetherell 1987). For the purposes of the present study focus groups were conducted with teenage boys (aged 15-16 years old), senior pupils in junior high school, who volunteered to be part of the study. Each focus group consisted of 4-6 adolescents and lasted approximately 50-60 minutes. The discussions held within those groups were based on a semi-structured interview schedule, which in general contained questions regarding boys’ views on masculinity and femininity. In particular research questions centred on what it means to be an adolescent boy in the school and within the peer group. The analysis of the data was discursive in character and centered both on the descriptive and the constructive character of language. Based on the acknowledgement that people use language to form specific versions of the world and to present and defend them (Edley and Wetherell 1997; Potter and Wetherell 1987), the data analysis endorsed the basic premises of critical discursive psychology (see Edley and Wetherell 1997, 1999). According to this discursive approach, language is seen as an active agent that is placed within specific socio-historic context and it both influences and is being influenced by them (Wetherell 1998). This lens focuses on varied rhetorical uses of language in order to achieve specific goals and construct versions of the self and the world (Edley 2001). The various versions constructed reflect and depend upon specific discourses that are available or prevail in a specific socio-historic context (Wetherell 1998). In line with these theoretical approaches the analysis of the data in the present study had a triple scope: a) to identify the linguistic features used and displayed in order for the various forms of masculinity, and the multiple subject positions they imply, to be constructed;

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b) to identify the broader interpretative repertoires1on which boys based their discursive constructions and gain an insight into their action orientation (that is to say understand the function of these repertoires); and c) to reveal the possible influences of societal factors on these repertoires and their content. Or, differently expressed, the study aimed at exploring the ways through which gender identities are linguistically constructed, while at the same time gaining a better understanding of social life and its influences (Potter and Wetherell 1987). The data presented here concern boys’ discursive accounts regarding peers’ engagement in gender-atypical sport activities, the ways these accounts are organised and voiced and the various implications of these accounts for the formation of gendered identities. More specifically, the two extracts that follow reveal that, when talking about the participation of peers in gender-atypical sport activities, adolescent boys activate and rely on a repertoire that supports the distinction of genders. This repertoire is organised around the dichotomy of genders and places masculinity and femininity in two antithetical poles. However, the boys that participated in this study use this particular repertoire and its features in various ways in order to form discursive accounts that serve different purposes each time. That is to say that when they talk about same sex peers, their accounts support and safeguard masculinity and its hegemonic features. When the talk centres on girls who participate in gender-atypical sport activities, the views expressed allow some minor trespassing of gender boundaries. It should also be mentioned that each boy relies on different and diverse features of the above mentioned repertoire in order to position himself discursively within the topic discussed. Therefore, there are various versions of gendered selves that are constructed. At this point it should be noted that for the purposes of this paper, the material presented has been translated into English. This was a very delicate issue, as one had to minimise the possibility of the item bias (Brislin, 1980). In other words, there was a need to avoid problems that 1

Potter and Wetherell (1987) use the term ‘interpretative repertoires’ rather than ‘discourses’ as the former implies flexibility in the ways in which linguistic components of the repertoire can be put together. They understand interpretative repertoires as linguistic phenomena which have coherence in terms of their content and style and which may be organised around one or more central metaphors (Lyons and Coyle 2007).

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could hinder the analysis of the data because of poor or inappropriate wording, inaccurate articulations or alterations in the meaning and the content of the text. It is thus necessary that “a translation achieves a level of language usage that is equivalent to the original source” (Berkarovitc 1980, 1276). The most recommended technique for this kind of cases is the independent back-translation, which means that “an original translation would render items from the original version to a second language, and a second translator – one not familiar with the data – would translate it back into the original language” (Brislin 1980, 306). This kind of procedure was followed for the purposes of this article: the sample text was translated from Greek into English and then translated back into Greek by a different translator.

Boys engaged in gender-atypical sport activities Overall, boys support and rely on one sole repertoire when talking about same sex peers who chose to be engaged in sports not regarded as typically ‘masculine’: the repertoire of rejection. According to this repertoire, anything not suitably fitting into the masculine ideal is discarded. The extract that follows is indicative of the ways that boys rely on this repertoire in order to negotiate that particular issue. This particular extract also shows that boys may rely on a sole repertoire, but they can also use different discursive paths. In other words, there are two different means by which boys discursively position themselves in relation to peers participating in gender-atypical activities. Nevertheless, both of them are part of the grander interpretative repertoire mentioned above. The extract is part of a conversation that was initiated by the interviewer who asked boys to identify the typical sports activities that boys in their age usually choose. The conversation evolves as following: 1. Interviewer. on the other hand::: are there any boys which are more:: (.) 2. hm:: (.) softer [ 3. Robinio. Y:es (.) Too: many: [ 4. Interviewer. or involved with activiti::es:: [ 5. Robinio. Too::: 6. many::: [ 7. Interviewer. regarded as feminine?= 8. Leandros. =balle:::t = 9. Robinio. = Yes (.)Too::: many: : 10. Interviewer. These::: [ 11. Leandros. Me::: (.) where I go . there is::: (.) nextdoor 12. an aerobic:: class:: (.) balle::t:: and (.) hm:::: (.) eh::: (1) and::: 13. there. there are about::: ten girls? And::: one bo:::y::=

Tomboys and Sissies 14. Robinio. = WhoW::: (.) That’s humiliation::: (.) 15. Interviewer. Humiliation . hm ? 16. Leandros. I mean . ok (.) most of those who::: (.) are there is because::: 17. they da:::nce:::: (.) they have to do some mo::vements:::. to be able to 18. stretch easier:: (0.5) let’s say:: (.) among these boys who go:: the::re(.) 19. some are ::: (.) let’s say ::: (.) friends . I’ve seen them::: (.) I participated 20. in . let’s say. and I’ve watched .them in great:: (.) I’ ve watched 21. them dancing:: (.) eh::: (.) some of them dance let’s sa::y:: (.) 22. break da::nce::: (.), te::chno::: (.) this:: stuff:: (0.5) hip ho::p:: (.) 23. and::: (.) that’s all::: (0.5) they da:::nce::: (.) amazingly . I mean they 24. have stre::tchings::: (05) that’s why they mostly go::: [ 25. Interviewer. so that’s why they 26. are involved: [ 27. Leandros. Yes (.) They mostly do it for THIS reason (.) Normally 28. they don’t want to attend ballet. =. 29. Interviewer. = what if they did want to attend ballet . normally?= 30. Leandros. = It’s just. this stu::ff:: simply exercises them . and they 31. go there [ 32. Robinio. I don’t know how I’ d feel::: 33. Interviewer. Eh:::? 34. Robinio. I should have had a great ne:rve::: 35. Interviewer. You’d should::: (.) why? = 36. Robinio. = because should the others found out . that you attend . 37. ba::lle:t:: (.) they’ d mock you for a lifetime:: (.) Because:: (0.5) 38. Interviewer. in the school? The peer grou::ps? 39. George. That depends on the character doesn’t it? [ 40. Robinio. You::: gu::ys:: [ 41. Leandros And now 42. that I watch let’s sa::y:: these sho::ws:: . let’s say:: (.) “So you think you 43. can da::nce::’’ most of them attend ballet classes. There was not a 44. single person not attending balle::t:: (.) and gymnastics:: = 45. Robinio. = and when you are being called with various 46. nicknames:: 47. Interviewer. What. What kind of names? = 48. Robinio. Sissy 49. Interviewer. Sissy (.) Which could be also true? Or. Not? = 50. Leandros. Not [ 51. George. it’s simply not true: (.) it’ s just (.) you are obliged to 52. attend this: (.) ballet::: (.) gymnastics and stuff like that:: (.) in order to 53. do later on something more:: (.) original (.) breakdance as he says 54. Leandros. hip hop:: (0.5) it helps you out . find. move::ments::: (1) 55. be::: (.) more::: (0.5) At ease (.) [….] 56. Interviewer. Hm::: (.) However . could this . let’ say::: (.) a boy 57. engaged with ballet be:: (.) be hindered from making frie::nds?

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Chapter Two 58. Robinio. YES (.) 59. Interviewer. Hm? 60. George. Eh (.) He will be hindered:: (.) 61. Robinio. Yes (.) Maybe (1) because they will regard him above all 62. like::: [ 63. Interviewer. a sissy::? 64. Robinio. A sissy:: (.) they will swear::: (.) at him:: (.) they will be telling 65. him ‘Go away (.) Go to your companions::’ [ 66. George. they won’t swear at him 67. (.) But. they will mock him more and this will make him psychologically 68. defla::ted:: (.)

Both Robinio2 and Leandros, by the time the topic is introduced, seem pretty keen and eager to further discuss it. Thus Robinio keeps interrupting the interviewer in order to strongly express his assent and declare at the same time that he himself is updated on the issue, has something to say upon it. Leandros at the same time also hurries himself into declaring familiarity with the subject by providing a relevant example drawn from his personal life (l.11-13). By referring to this personal experience he wishes to establish the factuality of his account and, therefore, legitimise his point of view. So he mentions eye witnessing the members of an aerobics class and immediately distinguishing a boy among all the girls (l.13). This remark automatically creates a sharp contrast, as in a room full of girls a boy can also be found. This is not a common situation, as the segregation among boys’ and girls’ activities is one of the most usual tactics, and Leandros makes his point simply by describing it. His reference causes Robinio’s immediate and abrupt reaction. In pejorative terms (note the use of the word ‘humiliating’), Robinio explicitly marks his standpoint: for him any involvement in a so-called ‘girly’ activity needs to be denounced (for example, note the exclamation indicating being badly surprised at the beginning of line 14). Regardless of this reaction Leandros proceeds with elaborating on his thesis and argues for these activities: for him, participation in such an activity is regarded as acceptable, since it is thought of as part of a greater goal: achieving muscular enhancement (l.16-24) which, in turn, will help 2

All boys’ names are pseudonyms. However, it should be noted that during the research procedure, boys were given the option to introduce themselves by using a pseudonym of their preference. So, ‘Robinio’ chose this particular pseudonym for himself, stressing that this was his nickname, which peers chose for him because of his football skills that resemble those of the Brazilian football player Robinio.

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one achieve greater competence in activities such as break-dance, techno and hip-hop dancing. In other words activities strongly associated with popular masculine subcultures. In order to make his argumentation stronger, he brings in points to underline the credibility of his argument: he speaks of friends engaging in such an activity (l.19) talks of his personal experience (‘I’ve seen them’, l.19), notices that this is a ‘must’ for a dancer (l.17), expresses his admiration (‘they dance amazingly’, l. 23) and even mentions their huge stretchings (l.24), a factual evidence of the benefits resulting from engagement with activities like ballet or aerobic. However, there are prerequisites for accepting such an activity. This is explicitly shown in line 27, where Leandros indicates that these boys are not ‘normally’ willing to be involved with ballet, implying that there is a different ‘norm’ for boys and that this activity is, in fact, not a part of this norm. So, he just understands and accepts this kind of activity because (as he declares in l.30) it keeps one fit (also note the use of words, ‘just’, ‘this stuff). Therefore, through this discursive construction of his argumentation, he indicates that in any other case his support might not be provided. In sum, he partly legitimises these boys’ choice and, through his discourse, he provides his support, acknowledging that these boys’ primary goal fits the masculine norms. But at the same time, he carefully pinpoints that should things be different, this support would not be offered. This is a very careful discursive placement, as he probably does not wish to be regarded as an extreme and possibly even prejudiced opinion holder. Therefore he provides an account that carefully reveals an equation that for him seems of importance: any athletic activity a boy may have should be in line with masculinity and its demands. However, this is an argumentation that does not seem to convince Robinio, who breaks in once more and by using an incomplete hypothetical utterance (l.32) declares his uneasiness with such an eventuality. So he declares that he, himself, would not know how he would feel, provided he was involved in such a situation and he states (in line 34) that one ‘must have a great nerve’ in order to cope with such a situation. He gives some more information in lines 36-37, where he refers to the teasing one must endure falls his peers get to know his activities. He even uses an extreme case formulation (Pomeratz 1986) (‘for a whole lifetime’) in order to express the magnitude of this teasing. Robinio, at this point, clearly distances himself from such practices and declares his strong disagreement. At this point one should also note his apparent uneasiness to further debate on this issue. Robinio seems quite reluctant to give more details

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and further develop his arguments; he only does so after being questioned by the interviewer and after being interrupted by Leandros who, once more, vividly supports his previous thesis. So, he finally mentions that a boy engaging in such an activity runs the risk of being called a ‘sissy’ by his peers. However, he does not get the chance to provide any further explanation since Leandros interrupts and declares his firm disagreement (line 41). Then, George speaks for the first time and, in line with Leandros, supports this kind of activities as a means for achieving a fit and firm body. Note the use of the phrase ‘obliged to’ (l.51) that he uses. George, drawing on Leandros’ discourse, presents participation in such activities not as optional but as obligatory for someone aiming at distinguishing in popular dancing styles (such as break dance). The use of the word ‘more original’ is also indicative of his effort to construct participation in aerobic or ballet classes as a first step one has to take in order to succeed later in other more important activities. As the discussion proceeds the interviewer re-poses a former question which had remained unanswered: what are the implications of engaging in these kinds of activities, and most particularly what are the implications as far as relationships with peers are concerned (l.56-57). The boys’ responses are in accordance. Both Robinio and George vividly claim that these boys will endure peer isolation because of the label ‘sissy’ attached to them (note the use of the adverb ‘first of all’ indicating that attaching the label ‘sissy’ is the very first reaction to one’s engagement in such an activity, l.61) and that people will make a fool of them. As a result these boys will be psychologically distressed. The interesting point here is that both boys immediately come up with an answer and that their utterances complete each other. They speak in turn, and albeit the interruptions, one gets the feeling that in the end there was just one speaker. Their accordance hence indicates that they talk about an issue and its implications that are taken for granted, that is, there is a general consensus regarding the possible outcomes of a behaviour that does not fit the gendered standards and norms. Compliance with specific gender-appropriate behaviours and norms automatically leads into acknowledging one’s crossing of the gender borders, which ultimately leads to rejection and dismissal. Summing up, one can clearly detect that the boys used two different discursive patterns in order to construct their argumentations, which were the following:

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1. Participation in certain gender-atypical activities must be marked by gender specific aims in order to be accepted (a thesis expressed by Leandros). 2. Any such participation is automatically discarded, as it is equated with gender boundarycrossing (a thesis expressed by Robinio). While Leandros positions himself in a careful and non-judgmental way and provides some ‘supporting evidence’, Robinio is adamant in his opinion, which insists that immediate rejection of such a boy will ensue. However, despite this differentiation they both acknowledge the very same thing, which also constitutes the essence of their theses: that participation in gender-atypical activities is not masculine and violates the established gender norms. They do not doubt the fact that certain activities do not fit into the masculine ideal of sporting prowess and toughness (Frosh et al. 2002; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000). As the literature suggests, popular masculinities are constructed and sustained through ‘coolness’, physicality of the body, sporting excellence (particularly in the so called ‘hard sports’), competitiveness and physical strength (Francis 1999). Thus, whatever does not suit this ideal is automatically equated to femininity and could be a source of disgrace. This finding supports the idea that gender identities are constructed based on bipolarity and thought of as mutually exclusive identities (Francis 2000). Belonging to one group also means embracing its ideals and living to its norms. As a consequence there is no possibility that one might possess any features that do not absolutely and totally fit the expected gender norms.

Girls in gender-atypical sport activities But what about the girls? What happens when girls participate and engage in sports activities that are not regarded as feminine? In such a case boys position themselves in a slightly different way. More specifically, when talking about girls, adolescent boys draw on a somewhat more flexible repertoire: participation in gender-atypical activities entails some risks but is not prohibited. In the following extract, the same boys talking in the previous illustrative example now express themselves regarding girls’ participation in a cross-gendered activity. This extract takes place after that shown above: immediately after speaking about boys, the same participants started talking about girls.

28

Chapter Two 69. Interviewer. Hm:: (.) While for a girl . let’s say. Which may be 70. enga::ge:::d in (.) kick boxing . Won’t they .be mocking her . as 71. much? = 72. Robinio. = No::: (.)Not at ALL:: [ 73. George. hEy (.) it is::: more ori::ginal:: (.) A::: 74. (.)tomboy (0.5) than a . boy turning I don’t know:: (.) into sissy 75. Interviewer. Is it more acceptable . maybe. as well ? = 76. Robinio. =YES 77. George. Yes (.) I know many girls:: [ 78. Leandros. Hey (.) I’ ll talk about an : (.) incident. We 79. were with my teammates in::: (.) in the sports field . down the::re:: (.) 80. we were . we were preparing for a match . And::: (.) now 81. we were watching a girl who had::: (.) she was wearing shorts. And 82. she had a le::g . it was::: (.) manly . I mean. masculine leg. She had:: 83. (.) this thing:: [ 84. George. Quadriceps? 85. Leandros. And now. We were saying . “This must be a man” (.) it 86. wasn’t::: (.) she had kind of . her ba::ck on us . and she had a towel on 87. her head. Her hair wasn’t long . it was short (1) em:: . we were saying 88. ‘‘Man. Man. Man. He’s. now getting ready . to come out::” (.) when 89. he turned around . we see a Gi:::rl::: (.) we all . our mouths fell open 90. [laughing] 91. Interviewer. you were in shock? (1) 92. Leandros. and::: (.) Ok:: (.) this girl had strength . so much:: (.)she hurt a 93. lot of . players. She had::: le::gs: (.) what::; (.) what can I say:: (.) I 94. don’t know::: 95. Robinio. Like Batista [laughing]

One can easily note that Robinio’s response comes immediately, in a hurried manner (l.72), and is both firm and absolute: a girl’s participation in a cross gendered activity does not have any negative consequences. Note, for example, the double negation and the use of the extreme phrase ‘not at all’ (l.72), which serve as ways of emphasising his point. George instantly interrupts to express his agreement and characterises this kind of a situation as a ‘more original’ issue (l.73), attributing a positive connotation to this particular adjective. In other words, for both Robinio and George, being actively engaged in a cross-gendered activity does not lead a girl into social isolation and mockery, but it is a possibility that could potentially be viewed positively. George continues and explains why things are different when it comes to girls (l.73-74): one prefers a ‘tomboy to a sissy’. At this point one should focus on two important points. Firstly, George directly compares girls and boys against each other and so constructs the masculine identity

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as rigid and fixed, not susceptible to any variation. In contrast feminine identity is constructed as broader and more apt to include atypical gender features. Secondly, George uses a label signifying gender-crossing (tomboy), equivalent to the one attributed to boys (sissies). Both of these terms are correlated to an individual’s sexuality and both are opposed to the dominant heteronormative ideology. Thus, a correlation between gender identities and the possession of particular features becomes evident. George’s account provides Leandros with an opportunity to present the others with an illuminating example coming from his own personal experience (l.78-83). So, as he quite vividly depicts the muscularity and the bodily stiffness of a girl playing football, he constantly repeats in his talk the word ‘man’ (l.88), a signifier that this girl’s body was equivalent to that of a man’s. In order to strengthen his argument he talks about how both he and his male friends were misled into believing that this body belonged to a man (l.85-89). He therefore links a girl’s engagement in football (which may be the primary athletic activity associated to masculinity) with loss of femininity. At this point, Leandros seems to be eager to ‘protect’ the masculine character of this particular athletic activity. Taking into account that football is considered a fundamental element of manhood, he wishes to make sure that there are no misunderstandings regarding this connection. So he deprives this girl of her feminine bodily characteristics. He does not wish to fully denigrate her, as he also lets slip some kind of credit for the girl. Note, for example the way he chooses to talk about this girl’s leg ‘this thing’ (l.83) signifying his astonishment and also the way he concludes his turn of speech by referring to this girl’s accomplishments, not without expressing his amazement (l. 92-94). However, he wishes to ensure the fact that football is an activity destined to those who possess particular physical characteristics, which are associated to and mark one’s strength and physical power. Therefore, football primarily concerns boys and in the case a girl gets involved, this means that she must conform to the masculine ideal. It seems that, to him, crossing the gender boundaries also means differentiating oneself from the gender norm. In sum, it seems that contrary to the discursive constructions used while talking about boys, the participants seem more at ease with the possibility of a girl engaging in gender-atypical sport activities. Nevertheless, this fact does not mean that a girl’s gender identity remains untouched. On the contrary, one’s femininity may be doubted, though not necessarily.

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Discussion The analysis of the above two extracts shows that the adolescents who took part in this particular research project position themselves in ways that sustain and support the dichotomy of genders: whatever is masculine cannot be feminine and vice versa (Francis 1999, 2000). The various ways through which they organise their talk and argumentation clearly reveal their intention to ensure this kind of differentiation among the genders. Masculinity and femininity are, therefore, constructed as antithetical and mutually excluded notions (Pattman et al. 2005). They underpin this dichotomy rhetorically through the construction and presentation of femininity as ‘the other’ and ‘the different’ and through the maintenance of a number of dipoles (Paechter 1998). Safeguarding masculinity and its characteristics appears as a primary concern among boys (Archer 2003; Davies 1989; O’Donnell and Sharpe 2000; Paechter 1998; Pattman et al. 2005). More specifically, it aims at accomplishing a triple scope: a) differentiating themselves totally from girls, b) ensuring their recognition as true men and c) ensuring a safe position within the hierarchical system that controls the organization of gendered identities. Within this framework the area of sports is divided into masculine and feminine activities, each of which is linked to specific gender-related characteristics. This dichotomy sustains a primal distinction made between the masculine and the feminine, according to which masculinity is exclusively associated with strength and power. This is evident in the accounts that were produced: boys explicitly associate any activity another boy undertakes as one that should aim at both confirming and enhancing his physical status. The maintenance of a fit and firm body seems of great importance to men who might (as Leandros points in the first extract) even find themselves engaged in atypical activities while trying to achieve this particular goal. This engagement with one’s physical characteristics also reveals the great significance placed in the body, which remains a major definer of someone’s masculinity. Besides, relevant findings support the claim that boys’ masculine identities largely depend on and what they do with/to their bodies (Swain 2004). As masculinity continues to organise itself around stereotypical features that sustain and cultivate men’s strength and physical superiority, sports remain “a key signifier of a successful masculinity” (Swain 2003, 302) that guarantees one’s acceptance in the club of ‘true men’ (Frosh et al. 2002; Skelton 2001). Another interesting point that needs to be stressed is the rigidity that characterizes the performance of masculinity. Boys position themselves in

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regard to same sex peers involved in atypical sport activities in ways that clearly show that there is little if no tolerance when it comes to crossing the established gender borders. The possible consequences of border crossing are clearly demonstrated in their accounts: whoever does not conform to the given gender norms and violates the gendered order is denigrated, becomes the ‘other’ and feminine characteristics are attached to him. This ‘othering’ appears to play a crucial role in the effort to support and maintain a certain hierarchical order, which favours men’s hegemonic position (Connell 1989; Edley and Wetherell 1995; Paechter 1998, 2007), as it is organised around the denigration of those failing to fit the dominant model of masculinity. This is accomplished through the use of heterosexist verbal put-downs that render particular boys as effeminate or gay (Frosh et al. 2002; Martino 1997; Swain 2004). Therefore, it seems that boys try to monitor and polish peers’ performance of masculinity through the activation of homophobia, which acts as a factor that protects their gendered identities, a means of social regulation amongst them (Butler 1990). In sum, the various discursive positions taken, and the multiple ways by which these boys seemed to interact discursively with each other, along with their need to distance themselves from certain practices, indicate the highly significant role played by peers in the construction of masculinities (also see Chimot and Louveau 2010; Connell 1995; Martino 1997; Pascoe 2003). Indeed, many writers have drawn attention to how peer groups seem to act as a type of infrastructure in which boys’ masculine identities are constructed and performed (see Connell 2000; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998; Mac an Ghaill 1994). Masculine identities thus continue to be more strictly delineated and more fixed around certain characteristics, while this is not necessarily the case for feminine identities. This comes in line with a great body of evidence suggesting that boys experience great pressures in order to ‘do boy’ in particular ways (Frosh et al. 2002; Jackson 2002; Renold 2001; Salisbury and Jackson 1996; Skelton 2001). In conclusion, one should note that the various ways boys use to talk about masculinity and femininity and the activities ascribed to them seem largely influenced by stereotypical standpoints which favour gender segregation and condemn any attempt to trespass the existing gender boundaries. Thus there are particular limitations in ‘being’ and ‘doing’ a boy and a girl, organised around the biological features of the sexes. It seems that despite the current efforts to re-negotiate gendered identities, gender construction continues to rely on stereotypic notions of masculinity

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and femininity (Deliyianni-Kouimtzis 2005). However, this kind of research also reveals the multiplicity of discursive ways that boys use in order to construct gendered aspects of the self. The above analysis indicates that there is a variety of ways one can use in order to rhetorically construct their gender identity and serve specific purposes (Frank et al. 2003). Finally, since specific versions of athleticism are promoted as genderappropriate, particularly as far as masculinity is concerned (Anderson 2005), it would be really interesting to gain a further insight into the ways young people use to negotiate their own involvement in gender-atypical sports. So far the relevant research centres mostly on the experiences of adults involved at a professional level is such sports (see Chimot and Louveau 2010; Mennesson 2009; Polasek and Roper 2011). Therefore future research may be directed into broadening our understanding about the formation of gender identities by exploring the ways young people view their participation in such activities and the strategies they use to sustain their gender identity.

Notes Transcription notation The form of notation used is the one proposed by Potter and Wetherell (1987), based on the model developed by Gail Jefferson. [

a marker of overlap between utterances.

=

at the end of a speaker’s utterance and at the start of the next utterance indicates the absence of a discernible gap.

(.)

indicates a pause which is noticeable but too short to measure.

(3.5) numbers in brackets indicate pauses timed to the nearest tenth of a second. :

one or more colons indicate an extension of the preceding vowel sound.

.

a full stop before a word or sound indicates an audible intake of breath.

()

round brackets indicate that material in them is either inaudible or there is doubt about its accuracy.

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[]

33

square brackets indicate that some transcript has been deliberately omitted. Material in square brackets is clarificatory information.

Underlining indicates that words are uttered with added emphasis; words in capitals are uttered louder than the surrounding talk.

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Salisbury, Jonathan, and David Jackson. 1996. Challenging Macho Values: practical ways of working with adolescent boys. London: Falmer Press. Skelton, Christine. 2001. Schooling the boys: Masculinities and primary education. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. —. 1998. “VIEWPOINT: Feminism and Research into Masculinities and Schooling”. Gender and Education 10(2): 217-27. —. 1997. “Primary Boys and Hegemonic Masculinities”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 18(3): 349-69. —. 1996. “Learning to be ‘Tough’: the fostering of maleness in one primary school”. Gender and Education 8(2): 185-97. Swain, John. 2004. “The resources and strategies 10-11 year old boys use to construct masculinities in the school setting”. British Educational Research Journal 30(1): 167-85. —. 2003. “How Young Schoolboys Become Somebody: the role of the body in the construction of masculinity”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 24(3): 299-314. —. 2000. “‘The money’s good, the fame’s good, the girls are good’: the role of playground football in the construction of young boys’ masculinity in a junior school”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 21(1): 95-109. Wetherell, Margaret. 1998. “Positioning and Interpretative repertoires: conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue”. Discourse and Society 9(3): 335-56. Wetherell, Margaret, and Jonathan Potter. 1992. Mapping the Language of Racism: discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wilkinson, Sue. 2004. “Focus group research”. In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by David Silverman, 177-199. London: Sage, 2nd edition.

CHAPTER THREE GREEK YOUNG MEN TALK ABOUT FATHERHOOD: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES EVANTHIA TAZOGLOU1 Introduction Across the past two decades, academic interest in masculinities, that is, examining the contemporary social position of men and the ways they arrange and experience their gendered identity has expanded considerably (Armengol and Carabi 2009; Brittan 1989; Connell 1995, 2000; Edley and Wetherell 1999; Edwards 2006; Hearn and Pringle 2009; Kimmel, Hearn and Connell 2005; Mac an Ghaill 1996; Willot and Griffin 1997, 2004). Although the gender studies literature has continued to focus mainly on women and young girls, describing and analysing female roles and identity development, recent research has shown that the arrangements and multiple patterns of masculinity are equally of specific interest. In addition, researchers such as Connell (2002) have drawn attention to the implications of cultural diversity for gendered constructions of and negotiations around masculinity. Extant research findings indicate that continuous and radical economic and social changes render traditional male identity precarious and fragmented – to the extent that it is plausible to describe contemporary masculinity as in deep crisis (Horrocks 1994; Melluish and Bulmer 1999; Siemienska 2005; Thomas 1996; Vered and Dyck 2011; West 1994; Whitehead 2002). As Meth and Pasick (2000) conclude, masculinity today is associated not only with many privileges but also with heavy burdens. In this context, feminist perspectives point out the complexity of gender relations and the problematic nature of the singular ‘traditional’ male role at individual, 1

Acknowledgement: The present study was funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation in the context of post-doctoral research grants.

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social, organisational and cultural levels, suggesting thereby a new concept of multiple masculinities (Coles 2009; Connell 1995, 2000; Griffin and Phoenix 1994; Hearn 1994, 1996; Lusher and Robins 2009; Mac an Ghaill 1996; Seidler 1993; West and Zimmerman 1987; Willot and Griffin 1999). Furthermore, female identities have broadened as a consequence of women’s changing expectations and roles and have been enriched with new values which were considered in the past as associated primarily or solely with men and masculinity (such as economic independence and professional success). However, masculinities have not yet experienced a similar, complementary process (Arnot et al. 1999; Paechter 2007), although it seems clear that such developments must take place in order to engender further social change and greater gender equality (Deliyanni-Kouimtzi and Sakka 2005a; Deliyanni-Kouimtzi and Sakka 1999). Despite the increasing interest and research, issues around fatherhood remain largely under-theorised. Fatherhood at the beginning of the new century is described in the literature as a rather amorphous phenomenon, and researchers characteristically focus on its tensions and strains (for example, see Adams et al. 2011; D’Enbeau, Buzzanell and Duckworth 2010; Hearn 1996; Hobson 2002; Lupton and Barclay 1997; Marsiglio, Day and Lamb 2000; Lamb and Lews 2007; Natalier and Hewitt 2010; Yoshida 2012). In general, however, the literature seems either to neglect fatherhood or to mention it only briefly. Researchers have indicated that because of the different experiences and expectations of both sexes, men are taught the importance of appearing hard and dominant –whether they feel it or not, whereas women are taught to be caring and expressive (Beynon 2002; Connell 2002; Wall and Arnold 2007). Thus, with respect to the parental role, women learn that motherhood is associated with caring and relating closely with one’s children, whereas men learn that fatherhood is associated with providing (Ehrensaft 1984; Fox 2001; Kenway 1996; Ranson 2001; Segal 2007; Singley and Hynes 2005). Ehrensaft (ibid.) suggests that fathers experience fatherhood as something you do whereas women experience motherhood as something you are. The historical distinction between the private and the public is an issue of particular importance for the development of male and female identities. This distinction, accompanied by the gendered division of labour, leads to a differing integration of parental identity by men and women (Connell 1995; Ehrensaft op. cit.). Our notions of masculinity and femininity are closely connected with this division. The gendered division of labour in childcare is a fact, and is an integral element of the broader division of labour (Connell 2002). As Connell notes, production relations

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are one of the key dimensions of gender construction, which are linked directly with modern gendered hierarchy, by which hegemonic masculinity – represented by the working male – is identified as socially and economically dominant. Though it has been well established that men can fulfil the parenting roles and tasks classically allocated to mothers, it remains the case that in contemporary western society few men actually do so (Craig 2006; Doucet 2006; Miller 2011; Risman 1986). Consequently, contemporary discussions on parenthood continue to be closely linked with motherhood as practised by women. The widespread neglect of fatherhood as a research topic effectively reproduces traditionally gendered assumptions about and implications for parenthood, reinforcing the notion that masculinities are associated entirely with the public sphere but not the private sphere of human activity (Lupton and Barclay 1997). So economic and political life is culturally defined as a men’s world, while domestic and family life is defined as a women’s world. The economic and social transformations of the last two decades in Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, have certainly exerted pressure on men for change. Research evidence indicates strong demand for more active participation of men in family life and greater willingness to take on the role obligations of paternity (Dermott 2008; Featherstone 2009; Fletcher and StGeorge 2011; Johansson and Klinth 2008; Lee, Blair and Hardesty 1994; Palm 1993). This has led to the suggestion that we are “moving toward a social ideal of father as co-parent” (Craig 2006, 261) and fathers, as well as mothers, should have a caring and nurturing relationship with their children. Greek women’s participation in paid work reflects and prompts change of values and in the ways they conduct family life and relationships in everyday situations (Athanassiadou 2002; Kataki 1998). Rising rates of male unemployment have concomitantly challenged men’s roles and have amended the framing of gendered negotiations in the family (Tazoglou 2007; Tazoglou and Deliyianni-Kouimtzis 2007). Whilst the expectations placed upon paternal roles have shifted, Greek fathers today do not seem noticeably readier to adopt a more participatory model of fatherhood (Deliyianni-Kouimtzi and Sakka 2005b). Moreover, the paternal role remains strong within the context of a traditional concept of the father’s function in the family, a function that has seemingly not been affected by the changes occurring in women’s lives. Men are invited to respond successfully to the new developments and challenges related to their women-partners and children. Studies on adolescent gender identities indicate that boys do try to broaden their male identity by claiming greater participation in childrearing but simultaneously they wish to maintain the traditional role of the breadwinner, thus effectively opting for distant

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fatherhood (Deliyianni-Kouimtzi and Sakka 1998; Sakka and DeliyianniKouimtzi 2006). Against this kind of background it is evidently of great interest, as Connell (2002, 2005) specifies, to understand more about how dominant definitions and constructions of masculinity are assured within social and cultural arenas where ideologies, representations and practices are formulated. In an earlier text on the subject, Connell (1995) describes how the task of ‘being a man’ involves taking on and negotiating what he terms as hegemonic masculinity. Men’s identity strategies and practices are thus constituted through their complicit or resistant stance to prescribed dominant masculine styles. Gender studies research that focuses on masculinity needs, then, to investigate processes of change and to ascertain to what extent and in what manner values that were formerly not associated with masculinity have become assimilated into ideal conceptions of masculinity. Morgan (1992) suggests that an appropriate research strategy would be to study precisely those situations – such as fatherhood – that challenge and ‘threaten’ the ideals, values and practices of extant hegemonic masculinity. As Maridaki-Kassotakis (2000) notes, the Greek literature offers little theoretical analysis and empirical evidence on fatherhood and masculinities. Those studies that have been carried out focus mainly on the exploration of the experiences and understanding of fatherhood by men who become fathers for the first time (Archontidou 2010; Dragona and Naziri 1995; Froudaki 2005; Krasanakis 1991). Few studies describe the notion of fatherhood, the associated behaviours and the images of fatherhood that young adolescents have (see here Sakka and DeliyianniKouimtzi 2006). Given the scale of current social and economic change in Greece today, and within this not least the implications for changing gendered ideologies and practices, re-definition of gendered relations and in particular re-negotiation of masculinities appear to be inevitable. In this context, research that investigates how young Greek men approaching the (future) prospect of paternity construct their views and negotiate the changing nature and meaning of fatherhood in relation to male identities is evidently of special interest. The study reported below is a contribution to this agenda.

Young Greek men and fatherhood: An exploratory study The study reported here explores how young Greek men understand the meaning of fatherhood by focusing on their perceptions of fatherhood and their images of the paternal role in the family context. In particular, it

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aims to examine, firstly, the patterns that young men use to describe the meaning of fatherhood in relation to their gendered identities and, secondly, the way that these patterns reproduce or alternatively challenge dominant gendered ideologies of fatherhood and masculinities in Greek society. Twenty-seven unmarried male university graduates – from the city of Thessaloniki and the small northern town of Drama and aged between 22 and 26 – participated in five focus groups, each containing between five and eight persons and lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. Focus groups elicit research data as an interactive process, in the form of everyday open conversation in which participants actively engage with one another, ask each other questions and raise controversial issues. Research on the perceptions, models and practices of fathering has predominantly been conducted using quantitative research methods. This has not revealed how men construct their own views of fatherhood and whether they are in conflict between traditional and more alternative models of fathering. However, as Wilkinson (2003) points out, focus groups facilitate research access to shared accounts as well as differential accounts, and hence they offer actively negotiated, socially mediated material for analysis. This suits both the topic and the life-stage under consideration here: such young men find themselves in a crucial transition period in the planning of their adult professional and family lives, and, as we have seen in the above discussion, conceptions of masculinity and fatherhood are intensely social, ideologically suffused constructions. Earlier studies also suggest that male university graduates experience and express a greater degree of confusion with respect to defining and negotiating the notion of fatherhood in relation to masculine identity (Griswold 1993; La Rossa 1988). The focus group participants were recruited via snowball sampling, initiated by means of everyday contact at the local university and extended through the initial participants’ own social networks. The focus group discussions took place in a neutral and easy-access location; the researcher took care to adopt a non-directive approach to encouraging the discussion and to establish an environment of trust and safety for the expression of views and experiences. The focus group themes covered three main topics: notions of fatherhood and motherhood; constructions of the ‘good father’; and images of fatherhood in the family context. Participants also received advance information about the nature of the study and were invited to pose any queries they might have had about the purpose and method of the research. They knew that they could withdraw their participation at any stage in the process; assurances of confidentiality and anonymity were

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explicitly given. Names and personal details used in this report have been changed accordingly. The tape-recorded discussions were fully transcribed, in order to apply a thematic analysis that focuses on making sense of the accounts that these young men employ to construct their gendered identities in relation to fatherhood. Their discourse thus constitutes a social and cultural practice that constructs gender identities. Thematic analysis involves the identification of themes and categories with the greatest explanatory power, adopting the steps of grounded theory: close familiarisation with the transcript material, initial coding into meaningful categories, identification of key themes and re-organisation of the coded material into these broader and higher-level thematic blocks (see here Braun and Clarke 2006; Patton 1990). As Braun and Clarke (2012) suggest employing both a deductive and inductive approach to the coding process provides a more comprehensive and valid account of the data. Codes were developed on the basis that they addressed the aims of the research and that they provided insights into understanding male identity and their roles more generally. Essentially, the findings suggest that these young Greek men use two main patterns to construct their views of fatherhood: firstly, in terms of personal care and emotional involvement and secondly, in terms of responsibility for providing. These are now presented below.

Findings: Discussion Fatherhood as personal care and emotional involvement Many participants construct the notion of fatherhood as personal care and emotional involvement to childcare. In particular, these young men view father as an active co-participant in the childcare and as an emotionally engaged figure within the family setting. They indicate that they wanted very much to be involved with the child as a friend and playmate. There was a strong sense in young men’s accounts that their notion of a ‘good father’ included displaying availability and sharing activities with their child – playing together, watching TV, going for a walk, having fun together – as they say “in every moment of its life”. Consistent with recent research which has shown that fathers are now more involved with their children on the amount of time they spend with them, they are more accessible to their children and they make arrangements for the care of their children (Lamb and Lewis 2007), many

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young men described their image of a father who is more committed to spending time with and taking care of his child: Int: What does fatherhood mean for you? G: Unfortunately, a father’s prime concern is not so much to show love but to earn money in order to give his child material goods, offer studying opportunities, education, to provide them with everything for their future. I think that this feeling … the feeling of selfless love has been lost, hasn’t it? The feeling that I want to be close to my children, in every moment of their life, play with them, have fun with them, not only because it is a moral duty, or because it can make me feel better as I did my duty towards my children, myself, society or whatever the case but because I really feel so. F: … and I think that we act in a very negative way. Instead of investing emotionally, we still invest economically, we think that this is fatherhood. Our concern is to offer them resources to study foreign languages, wear nice clothes, go to University, but we do not play with them, discuss, watch TV or go for a walk with them. A: I would say that for me, fatherhood means active participation in a child’s life with a sense of interest. You should have emotional contact with the child, a personal relationship, talk with your child, go for a walk and try to understand them. M: I would like to play with my children. I think that the relationship between a father and a child is reciprocal. Not only does the child see through his father a person who loves and take cares of them but also the father can see his child as a good opportunity to feel things which daily life and responsibilities prevent him from living. Talking about beautiful feelings, imagine playing with your child at the beach and being actively involved in this. It is good for your mood and you can also understand things about yourself through your relationship with your child. It is not bad for a father to feel like a child when he’s with his child for a while…

Moreover, as the above extract illustrates, these young men see fatherhood as an opportunity for intimacy with the child and a fulfilling parental experience. For them “having a more personal relationship” and “active participation in a child’s life” seems to be mainly about developing a close and loving relationship with their child. They assume that their involvement with the child would be reciprocal and that they would gain emotional satisfaction and reward from the child in return, as expressed by one respondent in these words: “…but also the father can see his child as a good opportunity to feel things which daily life and responsibilities prevent him from living”.

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It is important to emphasise that the notion of provider as a father’s ideal was criticised by these men. The dominant understanding of fatherhood as synonymous with providing prompted hesitancy and regret, as in this statement: “Unfortunately, a father’s prime concern is not so much to show love but to earn money … provide them with everything …” “Instead of investing emotionally, we still invest economically … These young men suggest that the most important aspect of fathering is the emotional closeness between father and children. However, such practices of emotional expressivity could be readily taken up in negative terms by traditional norms and perceptions about masculinity and fatherhood, as masculinity prizes the external rather than the internal world and predisposes men to control their emotional states (Miller and Bell 1996). In this context, quotations like “…what is right for a man and what is right for a father”, “it isn’t something ‘normal’ or ‘right ‘for a father”, constitute characteristically illustrations of the pressure and heavy burdens that these young men have to deal with: N: There are so many perceptions about a mother and a father. I mean what is right for a man and what is right for a father. Sometimes, I can’t believe that. For instance, a man must be tough, not very close to his child. He is not allowed to cry, let alone in front of his child. A caress is considered to be normal for a mother, whilst not for a father (…), it isn’t something “normal” or “right”. Int: How do you feel about that? N: To be honest, this sometimes makes me feel angry. I wouldn’t change my personality if I wanted to show some things to my child, even if they are not associated with the ‘traditional’ male roles or the right ones. I don’t like the distinction between a mother who takes care of the child and the father who just regulates the family’s rules and controls everything. T: Yes, I agree. And you don’t care about traditional roles or things which could be regarded as female attitudes (…) when I talk about active involvement in childcare, I mean that you are trying to develop a close relationship with your child. It is important for both parents to do whatever they want without being restricted by gender roles. For instance, a man may like cooking, just like me. If my future wife doesn’t like cooking, I will definitely cook at home without thinking that since I am a father, I have to show a ‘male’ image to my child.

As the men argue, practices and ideologies of caring remain strongly associated with femininity. However, they suggest that men are as capable as women of taking a nurturing role without being restricted by gendered

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roles, as in this example: “a caress is considered to be normal for a mother, whilst not for a father (…)”, “I don’t like the distinction between a mother who takes care of the child”, “… I have to show a ‘male’ image”. As Sunderland (2006) indicates, new fathers are presented as being just as capable as mothers with regard to child rearing, and it has become common in literature to address ‘parents’ rather than ‘mothers’. In this context, these men describe an affectionate and sensitive to his child’s needs father, open to express his feelings of love towards his child, without being afraid of that. The following extracts are an example of the “sensitive”, “affectionate”, “available”, “non-traditional”, “emotionally present within the father-child relationship” “or even more maternal” ideal of being a father that the young men construct: C: I don’t like when fathers are tough … it’s good to tell his son or daughter “I love you”, just this. Most fathers don’t like saying that, they are very tough [ Int: Really? R: They may feel like saying it but [ C: but (…) yes it is difficult [ R: others think that men shouldn’t show how they really feel C: yes, you are right. We are all men [laugh] R: Indeed [ X: Showing love and sharing emotions are more important than providing money. D: A father must be ready to give love and support to his child; he must also be affectionate and respect his child’s feelings. L: A father should be authentic and not accept traditional roles. He also needs to show understanding and be interested in his child’s welfare, interact with them and always be close to them. V: I agree with you. Fatherhood means sensitivity, affection, support, availability and, perhaps, a bit of maternity? Int: What do you mean by this?

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It seems that these men critically challenge the dominant gendered accounts and expectations about being a father and a man. Their views of fatherhood as “caring”, “love”, “affection”, “closeness” and “expressivity” do not conform to the accepted masculine characteristics and attitudes that were traditionally considered as associated primarily with men. Indeed, as Doucet (2006) points out, involved fathering continues to clash with hegemonic cultural ideas of masculinity. These values which young men use in their accounts of fatherhood constitute the ‘new’ elements of masculinities. It appeared to be very important to these men that they could adopt a new model of fatherhood within the family context. However, the young men argue that they should reject and resist to the conventional assumptions about “tough (men) fathers” or “(men) fathers as providers” and ignore what the “social patterns”, “standards” and “social models” promote as the ideal father: Y: A father shouldn’t define himself based on the social patterns. He must be free to feel and show love, tenderness and everything to his children, to express his feelings. Int.: And what do the social patterns tell? Y: The social patterns show that we must undertake a defined role. For me, a good father should feel, think and act in the way he wants, in the way he believes that is good for him and his family. It would be good, if sometimes he felt just like a mother, did in a sense that it is not a shame if you gave a kiss or a hug to your child (…) K: Indeed, it is a standard, a social model. But is it enough for our paternal feelings?

Apparently, these young men are striving to define fatherhood in a less traditional way. As some of them indicate, their own fathers adopted a more distant model of fatherhood. However, they would like to father their own child in a more active and emotionally involved way. It is interesting to see that they construct fathering images by trying to combine both ‘masculine’ manners of behaviour (as in: “… they keep a distance in contrary to mothers”) and their ‘feminine ‘counterparts (as in: “… so warm or sensitive like my mother”) into a new model. As the respondent in the following extract argues: “I don’t understand fatherhood and motherhood on a competitive basis”.

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P: I would like to resemble my own father but I have to fill some gaps. Int: What do you mean by this? P: As a father he was relatively tough, I mean he wasn’t so warm or sensitive like my mother. However, in general most fathers are like that, they keep a distance in contrary to mothers. But I don’t like that. I will combine both when I have my own children … I think that this combination is the ideal one for a father and the most productive one for the children. S: I will devote my free time my future child. I want to take the stroller and go out with my baby, something that my grandfather never did with my father. What pity! D: If fathers accept the importance of closeness, they will give another perspective to the sense of fatherhood. For me, fatherhood means active participation, both practical and emotional in a child’s life without thinking that it is a mother’s responsibility. I don’t understand fatherhood and motherhood on a competitive basis. They are not so much differentiated (…)

These young men are trying to construct a reality in which fathers and mothers should be equally and complementarily involved – practically and emotionally – with childcare in the family life. By constructing fatherhood as an image which can be expressed in different ways and not necessarily as a relationship of providing, the men challenge the idea that men’s only contribution to family is as providers. They actually seem to negotiate the traditionally defined ways of ‘masculine’ fathering and ‘feminine’ mothering, by emphasizing the view that those are neither contradictory nor in competition as concepts and practices. In this context new constructions and adult roles for these young men who are approaching the (future) prospect of paternity are revealed by reflecting images of equal gendered relations in their adult family life. However, these men understand that their expectations of engaging as an ‘involved’ father are difficult to achieve in practice, as they have to deal with the restrictions of the dominant patterns which position men as being driven by traditionally defined gendered roles and ideologies.

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Fatherhood as responsibility for providing Some participants construct their views of fatherhood as responsibility for providing within the family context. In particular, these young men identify two dimensions of providing: firstly, financial providing and, secondly, providing safety, protection and practical support for their family. Within their accounts the image of a good provider is primarily associated with the male ‘breadwinner’ model. The extract below highlights the importance of the economic provider as a father’s ideal: Int: How you would describe ‘fatherhood’? E: It is basically a responsibility. Int.: What do you mean by ‘responsibility’? E: Mainly a responsibility (…) It is a responsibility if you have children. You must take care of them, you must bring them up … I mean you must have money, you must have a job (laugh) [ S: You are right. A job is necessary, fatherhood makes a person more mature, you should be responsible for everything (…) Z: First of all, it is the provision of goods to your children. If you are a father, you have this responsibility. You must earn money and provide everything to your family, wife and children. You have to deal with many expenses, you cannot cut down everything. The only thing that can be cut down is your own personal expenses (laugh), even the cigarettes (…) children want certain things and have a lot of expenses.

These young men suggest that economic providing is “responsibility” and “moral duty” for a real man and father – as one respondent said, “it is the most important factor for a man, for a father”. Consistent with research which has shown that for most men their perceived role as family provider meant that engagement in paid work was a very important part of their sense of identity (Beynon 2002; Wall and Arnold 2007), our participants suggest that being a father and a man means being able to have paid work and earn a sufficient income to ensure that one’s children’s needs are provided for: “you will try to provide everything … no matter what economic situation you are”. However, by constructing fatherhood in this way, the young men indicate that where these expectations of the ‘breadwinner’ ideal cannot be fulfilled, this would be regarded as a personal failure: “and if I can’t offer, it will be my own fault”. This finding is consistent with previous research on adolescent and adult gender

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identities in Greece which shows that breadwinning is the strongest characteristic of male identity (Sakka and Deliyianni-Kouimtzi 2006; Tazoglou 2007), as the following extract illustrates: F: It is the responsibility of a man to be in charge of everything, you must be ready to provide everything to your child: money, clothes, food (…) everything it needs. R: Basically, when you give birth to a child, a man is forced to deal with the situation financially. You will try to provide everything … no matter what economic situation you are in. You may not have enough money for your own self, you should find a way to raise your child. I think it is a duty in your life, the duty of your life. It’s a father’s duty. W: Fatherhood means being responsible, you must settle, have a fixed and sufficient income to provide to your family. A child must be brought up well. Int: So do you think that the economic factor is so tightly linked to fatherhood? W: It is the most important factor for a man, for a father. And if I can’t offer it, it will be my own fault. R: Definitely yes. F: A father is always the one who has to find some money, a father is always a good provider.

It appeared to be very important to these men that the needs of their family members are prioritised over their own, as the next extract illustrates. Although the men accept and understand the financial contribution of their (future) wives, they still value and perceive themselves as the major breadwinner within the family setting: “He is still the one who has to find money for his family”. Furthermore, in their eyes, being a good provider is strongly associated with masculine honour, status and power, as “the man must be the pillar of the house”. Their use of the phrase “pillar of the house” constitutes characteristically an illustration of what it essentially meant to be a man. A: I think fatherhood is the responsibility of the father to take care of his child, to work wherever you could so as to earn money for your family. To be more specific, the economic responsibility is the first priority when you are a father, you must minimise your own needs and desires in order to provide everything to your children. I mean, ok a mother can also

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contribute financially but for a father is … how can I say that? He is still the one who has to find money for his family. Int: Why is the only one? A: You must be the pillar of the house. The man must be the pillar of the house. It is his own role in the family.

Further, it seems that these young men construct the notion of providing as practical support and protection to their family members. They therefore perceive themselves as figures of “stability” and “safety” in the family. There was a strong sense in their accounts that expression of power and authority are associated with their paternal role within the family setting. As Brandth and Kvande (1998) point out, it could be assumed that one’s work and financial provision defines one’s gendered power. Apparently, these young men assume that there are different functions that fathers and mothers fulfil in a family – mothers have greater responsibility for caregiving and fathers for breadwinning and control. Within this perspective, the men suggest that a ‘good father’ is a rational being who in the family context is “strict”, “tough”, “the strongest one”, “the most decisive”, “dominant” and “not so vulnerable like a mother”. It has been argued that these men see the father as a patriarch when talking about “the head of the family”, and as an emotionally inexpressive male (Lupton and Barclay 1997), as this extract illustrates: T: In my opinion, it’s the responsibility of the father to deal with all difficult situations in order to protect his child. You must bring them up. It is your duty to give and protect. This is fatherhood. I mean nothing more. P: Father must be able to provide everything. And sometimes perhaps he has to be strict towards his kids. It is necessary to be strict, not vulnerable like a mother. Sometimes, he has to be a little tough too. He is the head of the family. Int: What do you mean when you say “the head of the family”? P: The head, the strongest one in the family, the most decisive – the one who has power and can protect the others. An economically independent father, ready to support and protect his kids and his family, who is ready to deal with all the external dangers and problems. O: Yes, I agree. A father can have a great influence on his kids, as he is the major figure of stability and safety and … I don’t want to say that he has

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the dominant role in the family (…) it is too “heavy” but something like that. He is there to provide goods and protection to his family.

These young men seem to construct a traditional image of fatherhood around the concepts of the male breadwinning model, emotional distance and masculine power in the family. Apparently, the notion of hegemonic fatherhood seems to influence their constructions. They actually develop a pattern which firstly, reproduces the traditional gendered division of characteristics and roles within the family context and secondly, the dominant forms of ‘true’ masculinity. Within this perspective, it is assumed that these young men approaching the (future) prospect of paternity construct traditional views of their adult family life and a complicit stance to prescribed masculine styles and practices.

Summary: Conclusions This study has highlighted how young Greek unmarried male university graduates approaching the (future) prospect of paternity construct their views of fatherhood and paternal role in relation to male identities. The findings suggest that these young men are using two main different and contradictory patterns to define and negotiate the meaning of fatherhood: firstly, in terms of personal care and emotional involvement and secondly, in terms of responsibility for providing. Thus, it can be argued that there is not one dominant fathering model in the Greek society – it seems that both traditional and new images of fatherhood in some sense merge. In particular, findings show that some young men construct their views relying primarily on traditionally gendered beliefs and assumptions about fatherhood. They construct an image of fatherhood that is predominantly associated with the provider role as this is a criterion for measuring their status, power and value as men and fathers in the family context. This is a consistent finding – men recognise the ‘breadwinner’ model as a father’s ideal (Beynon 2002; Doucet 2006; Segal 2007; Wall and Arnold 2007). It seems that these men develop hegemonic representations of masculinity, represented by the working male. In this context, it is assumed in a way that their very nature of maleness becomes embedded in the gendered division of labour. Further, these men are presented as occupying a more distant fathering model where emotional expressivity is not regarded as a normative masculine behaviour. Within this perspective, it seems that they maintain and reproduce the stereotype of fathers as providers and the traditional gendered division of roles inside the family.

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However, it was found that many men construct an alternative image of fatherhood that is centred on the emotional involvement, intimacy and active caring. It seems that these men develop new images of fatherhood and critically negotiate gendered accounts and roles that were considered as associated solely with women and motherhood. Apparently, they tend to re-define the elements of a ‘new ’male identity and a ‘new’ father image. This finding is consistent with previous research that points out that there is a notable shift in the image of fatherhood (Craig 2006; Ranson 2001; Sunderland 2006). Within this perspective, it seems that these men’s constructions question old patterns of behaviour and offer new role models for fatherhood. We may thus argue that this study’s findings are of special interest given the fact that Greek society remains basically traditional regarding gender identities and relations (Deliyianni-Kouimtzi and Sakka 2007; Katakis 1998; Maratou-Alipranti 1995). Young unmarried men are indeed trying to broaden their images of fatherhood and this entails facing up to personal conflicts as well as stereotypical socio-cultural expectations and constructions of fatherhood. It is suggested that these men tend to negotiate and shape new forms of masculinities and adopt new gendered roles during their transition to adult family life. In this context, it seems that a ‘new’ father image is beginning to reveal itself. The outcomes of this study are supported by research carried out in other western societies, which suggests that gradual change in terms of how men are approaching fatherhood is taking place (Doucet 2006). Yet to what extent do these young men’s views really reflect the ‘new father’ image? This question is rather more complicated to answer. It has been argued that this shift is due to broader social, economic, political and legal changes, so that understanding contemporary fatherhood in Greece necessitates recognition of these framing factors as drivers of a renegotiation of gendered relations and practices in work and family contexts. This study focused on a small number of participants and a specific group of male university graduates; its findings cannot automatically be generalised. Further research should, therefore, explore the views of young men from different educational and social backgrounds and the ways that they shape their gendered identities in relation to fatherhood. To sum up, it seems that fatherhood is a situation that challenges the values and practices of masculinity. The contribution of this study lies in that it explores how young Greek men who find themselves in a crucial transition period in the planning of their adult life construct their views of fatherhood. It can be argued that these men are more sceptical towards the

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concept of the ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ man. The most promising finding of this study is that young men are inclined to re-negotiate the changing meaning and practices of a ‘new-father’ model by integrating new values and strategies in their future adult roles as partners and fathers. Further, they seem to resist the heavy burdens, restrictions and characteristics that are stereotypically defined as ‘masculine’ and have been attributed to them. In adopting this perspective, young men might come to develop and experience relations of gender equality and mutual active and emotional involvement in their future family setting.

References Adams, Matthew, Carl Walker, and Paul O’ Connell. 2011. “Invisible or involved fathers? A content analysis of representations of parenting in young children’s picture books in the UK”. Sex Roles 65: 259-270. Archontidou, Domna. 2010. The status and the role of the new father. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Kapodestrian University of Athens, Greece. Armengol, Joseph, and Angels Carabi. 2009. Debating masculinity. Harriman, Tennessee: Men’s Studies Press. Arnot, Madeleine, Miriam David, and Gaby Weiner. 1999. Closing the Gender Gap. Cambridge: Polity Press. Athanassiadou, Christina. 2002. Young educated women and the reconciliation of the private and public spheres in the planning of their adult lives. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Beynon, John. 2002. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Brandth, Berit, and Elin Kvande. 1998. “Masculinity and childcare: the reconstruction of fathering”. Sociological Review 46(82): 293-313. Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. 2012. “Thematic Analysis”. In APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology: Foundations, Planning, Measures, and Psychometrics, edited by Harris Cooper, Vol. 2, 57-71. Washington, DC: APA books. Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. 2006. “Using thematic analysis in psychology”. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2): 77-101. Brittan, Arthur. 1989. Masculinity and Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Connell, Robert. W. 2000. The Men and the Boys. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Kyriazis, Nota. 1998. “Women’s Employment and Gender Relations in Greece: Forces of Modernization and Tradition”. European Urban and Regional Studies 5(1): 65-75. La Rossa, Ralph. 1988. “Fatherhood and social change”. Family Relations 37(4): 451-457. Lamb, Michael, and Charlie Lewis. 2007. Understanding fatherhood. A review of recent research. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. LeeBlair, Sampson, and Constance Hardesty. 1994. “Paternal involvement and the well-being of fathers and mothers of young children”. The Journal of Men’s Studies 3(1): 49-68. Lupton, Deborah, and Lesley Barclay. 1997. Constructing fatherhood: Discourses and experiences. London: SAGE. Lusher, Dean, and Garry Robins. 2009. “Hegemonic and other masculinities in local social contexts”. Men and Masculinities 1(11): 387-423. Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín. 1996. Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas. Buckingham: Open University Press. Maratou-Aliprnati, Laoura. 1995. Family in Athens: Family patterns and practice [In Greek]. Athens: EKKE. Maridaki-Kassotakis, Katerina. 2000. “Understanding Fatherhood in Greece: Father’s Involvement in Child Care”. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa 6(3): 213-219. Marsiglio, William, Randal Day, and Michael Lamb. 2000. “Exploring fatherhood diversity. Implications for conceptualizing father involvement”. Marriage and Family Review 29(4): 269-293. Melluish, Steve, and Don Bulmer. 1999. “Rebuilding Solidarity: An Account of a Men’s Health Action Project”. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 9(2): 93-100. Meth, Richard, and Robert Pasick. 2000. Men in therapy: challenge to change. Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Miller, Tina. 2011. “Falling back into gender? Men’s narratives and practices around first-time fatherhood”. Sociology 45(6): 1094-1109. Miller, Joe, and Calvin Bell. 1996. “Mapping men’s mental health”. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 6(5): 317-327. Morgan, David. 1992. Discovering Men: Sociology and Masculinities. London: Routledge. Natalier, Kristin, and Belinda Hewitt. 2010. “‘It’s not just about the money’: Non-resident father’s perspectives on paying child support”. Sociology 44(3): 489-505. Paechter, Carrie. 2007. Being girls, being boys: learning masculinities and femininities. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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Palm, Glen. 1993. “Involved fatherhood: a second chance”. The Journal of Men’s Studies 2(2): 139-153. Patton, Michael Q. 2002. Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 3rd edition. Ranson, Gillian. 2001. “Men at work: Change or no change in the era of the ‘new father’”. Men and Masculinities 4(1): 3-26. Risman, Barbara. 1986. “Can men ‘mother’? Life as a single father”. Family Relations 35(1): 95-102. Sakka, Despoina, and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis. 2006. “Adolescent boys’ and girls’ views of fatherhood in the context of the changing women’s position”. Gender and Education 18(1): 51-74. Segal, Lynne. 2007. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing men. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Seidler, Victor. 1993. Unreasonable men: Masculinity and social theory. London: Routledge. Siemienska, Renata. 2005. “Winners and Losers: Gender Contracts in the New Political and Economic Situation”. International Journal of Sociology 35 (1): 3-39. Singley, Susan, and Kathryn Hynes. 2005. “Transitions to parenthood: Work-family policies, gender and the couple context”. Gender and Society 19(3): 376-397. Sunderland, Jane. 2006. “‘Parenting’ or ‘mothering’? The case of modern childcare magazines”. Discourse and Society 17(4): 503-527. Tazoglou, Evanthia. 2007. Unemployment and Gendered Negotiations: A Critical Socio-Psychological Approach to Unemployed Married Men and Women. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece [In Greek]. Tazoglou, Evanthia, and Vassiliki Deliyianni-Kouimtzis. 2007. “Unemployment and Political Psychology”. In Political Psychology: Theoretical and Empirical Studies, edited by Georges N. Galanis, 4973. Athens: Editions Papazisi. Thomas, Philip. 1996. “Big boys don’t cry? Mental health and the politics of gender”. Journal of Mental Health 5(2): 107-110. Vered, Amitand, and Noel Dyck. 2011. Young men in uncertain times. New York: Berghahn Books. Wall, Glenda, and Stephanie Arnold. 2007. “How involved is involved fathering? An exploration of the contemporary culture of fatherhood”. Gender and Society21: 508-527. Wet, Pamela. 1994. “Do men make the rules or do the rules make men? Growing up male in an Australian country town”. Masculinities 2(2): 46-59.

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West, Candace, and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender”. Gender and Society 1(2): 125-151. Wetherell, Margaret, and Nigel Edley. 1999. “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices”. Feminism and Psychology 9(3): 335-356. Whitehead, Stephen. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and Directions. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wilkinson, Sue. 2003. “Feminist Psychology”. In Critical Psychology: Introduction, edited by Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky, 247-264. London: Sage. Willott, Sara, and Christine Griffin. 2004. “Redundant Men: Constraints on Identity Change”. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 14(2): 53-69. Willott, Sara, and Christine Griffin. 1999. “Building your own lifeboat: Working-class male offenders talk about economic crime”. British Journal of Social Psychology 38(4): 445-460. Willott, Sara, and Christine Griffin. 1997. “Wham bam, am I man? Unemployment and masculinities”. Feminism and Psychology 7(1): 107-128. Yoshida, Akiko. 2012. “Dads who do diapers: factors of affecting care of young children by fathers”. Journal of Family Issues 1(3): 451-477.

CHAPTER FOUR YOUNG PEOPLE IN SEARCH OF A WORK-FAMILY BALANCE SIYKA KOVACHEVA AND STANIMIR KABAIVANOV The weakening of the institutions that regulated and normalised the life course in the first modernity, together with the loss of clear-cut life-stage markers (Bauman 2005; Leccardi 2006) have strongly affected the situation of young people in Europe. Gaining autonomy in the 21st century has become a complex transition process that the young have to pass through and manage under the conditions of growing social risks and biographical uncertainty (Chisholm and Kovacheva 2002; Du Bois Reymond 2008). Significant consequences of the social change underway are the prolongation of the period of youth and the de-standardisation of youth transitions to employment, independent housing and parenthood. Young people today spend more time passing between the degrees of the educational system, between it and the labour market, and then between various forms of employment. At the same time most of them delay the formation of own family and parenthood or decide not to have children at all while the forms of partnership and living arrangements become even more varied (Chisholm et al. 2003). The interdependency, diversification and often reversibility of youth transitions act to turn youth into a risk-laden group in late modern societies (Walther et al. 2006; Jones 2009). The often conflicting interplay between youth transitions to work and family formation today raises the question: how do young working parents manage to combine paid work and unpaid care as parents? Usually this group is neglected in youth studies and media analysis in favour of the more spectacular activities of protesting students or unemployed youth. In practice, this group also accumulates various tensions and problems with social significance. In this paper we attempt to answer the above question

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on the basis of results from the study Quality of Life and Work in a Changing Europe1. This was a comparative research project including the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from eight European countries. In this paper we analyse the survey data gathered in the project which allows the comparison between the satisfaction with the achieved work-family balance of young working parents and the rest of the employed in European countries with differing welfare regimes. The integration of paid work and family life is studied as influenced by the organisational change in modern business companies and the wider social transformations in European societies. The choices that young people make for work and parenthood are embedded in the set of opportunities and constraints on the level of the household, company and country.

Researching work-family balance Work-family balance has been the target of numerous empirical studies since the late 20th century applying different theoretical perspectives and research methods (Heinz 1991; Frone 2003; Crompton and Lyonette 2006; Lewis 2009). This paper builds on a sociological understanding of the concept as a social construct reflecting the set of social opportunities and constraints which the individuals and households face when playing their social roles in the life domains of work and family in a satisfactory way (Kovacheva 2010). Individual satisfaction with the reconciliation is a key empirical indicator of the concept but it should be underlined that achieving a balance between work and family life is not only the result of individual preferences and psychological skills for life management but are also shaped by wider social trends in the different layers of social context. On the macro-level the models for reconciliation of paid work and unpaid care are strongly influenced by the European and national economic and demographic trends, shifts in social policy for encouraging employment or family support, and dominant public discourses. On the meso-level we take into consideration factors from the workplace such as the duration and organisation of working time, management policies and practices and organisational culture. On the micro-level important determinants of the work-family balance are individual characteristics such as gender and age, education and qualifications, household situation and income, values and negotiation practices between the partners. The overlaying of different layers of social context is a complex process in 1

We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission and the fruitful cooperation with the colleagues in the project team (see http://www.projectquality.org).

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which support measures introduced in one context are undermined by restrictions active on another layer. While previously work-family research focused on the negative side of the interaction, experienced as conflicts and stress (Lyonette et al. 2007), at present a growing number of studies examine the positive side – the flow of resources and skills (Carlson et al. 2006). Both the interference and the enrichment between the domains have two directions – from the work to the family and from the family to the work. The approach in this paper is trying to measure the conflicts and risks, as well as the successful mobilisation of resources for a satisfactory fulfilment of the two social roles – that of employees and of parents. Frequently the problem of reconciliation between paid work and unpaid family care is presented as a women’s problem, a choice between career and motherhood (Back-Wicklund 2006; Hakim 2000). In reality this is a problem facing both men and women, although in different ways. In the labour market and household economy, men and women have different positions and resources and meet different role expectations. The gender pay gap in combination with traditional gender stereotypes contribute for the dissatisfaction with the reconciliation for both men and women. It is also important to consider the differences in the models for integration of work and family linked to the life course because the responsibilities and experiences in the two domains are subject to shifts in the individual biography. Additional difficulties for the analysis come from the diversification and individualisation of the life course and particularly of youth transitions between family of origin and family of destination (Du Bois-Reymond2008; Kovacheva 2010). Under the conditions of a growing ambiguity of individual life plans (Leccardi 2006), young women and men are faced with double uncertainty for both jobs and families (Reiter 2008), and the result is very often a crisis of the normative expectations about gender roles (Fodor 2006).

Methodology of the study Quality of Work and Life in a Changing Europe was an interdisciplinary and cross-country project carried out between 2007 and 2009 (Back-Wiklund et al. 2011). It examines how European men and women living in different welfare state regimes and working in companies with different organisational cultures manage to achieve quality of life. It also sought to understand the influence of common trends such as growing global competitiveness, work intensification and increasingly demanding parenting upon individual strategies for balancing work and private life.

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This internationally comparative perspective was applied in order to offer insights into the ways in which European workplaces could be transformed into healthy organisations ensuring a mutual enhancement of work effectiveness and employees’ wellbeing. The issues of quality of work and quality of life were addressed at three levels: the macro-level of state social policy, the meso-level of the organisation of work and the workplace, and the micro-level of the individual employees and their families. The participating countries were chosen to represent the five main policy regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990; Kovacheva et al. 2011) with the UK as liberal, Sweden and Finland as social-democratic, the Netherlands and Germany as corporatist, Portugal as sub-protective and Bulgaria and Hungary as post-socialist. Four companies in each of the eight European countries were selected from the service sectors one of the fast growing sectors in European economy, which however is not sufficiently studied (Ackroyd et al. 2005). The expectation was that these companies (one public hospital and three private firms from the financial, retail and telecommunication business in each country) would offer diverse conditions for achieving a satisfactory work-life balance for their employees – from the most advanced in the telecommunications company to the most traditional in the supermarket for example. The hospitals and the banks were subject to radical changes with a significant impact on the quality of work. The study employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection (van der Lippe et al. 2011) in three stages. At first, secondary analysis was carried out on existing cross-national data sets that included indicators relevant for measuring the quality of work and quality of life and official statistical data was used to present the economic, demographic and policy trends in the participating countries. The second phase comprised of a detailed survey with the personnel of the selected 32 companies in the eight countries, covering employees’ working conditions and household situations. In order to understand how social change impacted on work-family balance and general wellbeing of working men and women, the third stage of the research included an indepth case study of one of the companies in each country. This consisted of interviews-in-depth with between eight and twenty participants at various levels of the organisation, followed by innovation groups focusing on the future trends and prospects for their companies to turn into healthy organisations (Lewis et al. 2011). In this paper we make use only of the survey data collected in the second stage of the project. The survey made use of a questionnaire especially designed to capture the multifaceted relation between quality of work and life and how they

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were affected by the opportunities and constraints at the country, organisation and individual level. Building upon the job demand-controlsupport model (Karasek and Theorell 1990), the indicators measured job demands such as the length and the organisation of working schedules, work intensity and job insecurity. Work resources were operationalised as flexibility of working time and place, support from managers and colleagues, work autonomy and family friendly organisational culture. The indicators for household demands and resources were constructed in a similar way. Thus household constraints included the need to care for children and sick family members and the time spent on housework while household resources included partners’ support, informal support from the extended family and household income. The strategy, when devising the questionnaire, was to include as many internationally recognised indicators as possible while at the same time recognising the specific features of the national context – for example caring for a sick relative outside of the household was included because of its significance in the South and East European countries even though it seemed a rare practice for the Northern countries and vice versa, addressing a question to a workers’ representative was included as an indicator for individual agency in search of a work-family balance, even though it might be limited in Bulgaria, Hungary or Portugal. The questionnaire was translated from English into the local languages of the research team and then translated back into English by experts with English as a first language and all versions were once again discussed. The survey data was collected in 2007 after a lengthy process of getting the agreement of organisations to participate in the study as some companies conduct their own employee surveys and did not want to provide extra burden on their employees while in others the agreement of the workers’ councils had to be provided first and then that of the management. The survey respondents were selected in a probability sampling design from the list of employees provided by the human resources managers in the participating companies. Individual employees were positive to the study and readily filled in the questionnaires, once management permission for the survey was given. Finally the combined data set included 7867 filled in questionnaires from 32 companies in 8 countries. Data were coded and later on analysed with SPSS statistical tools. A general rule was followed that analysis should keep track of nominal, ordinal and interval variables to guarantee that appropriate methods are used depending on the input type and meaning. Three major comparison criteria have been defined based on gender, occupation and country of the

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respondents. For basic analysis and to general overview we have used cross tabulation and common statistical measures such as average and standard deviation. In particular for variables of cardinal type, standard deviation has provided an opportunity to check for the coherence of the input information and if there have been more or less compact group of respondents that are similar in their needs, status and requirements. Table 1. Number of respondents per country and organisation Bulgaria Finland Germany Hungary Netherlands Portugal Sweden UK Total

Finance N=193 N=218 N=199 N=204 N=189 N=527 N=195 N=193 N=1918

Retail N=200 N=113 N=167 N=192 N=305 N=384 N=107 N=204 N=1672

Telecom N=195 N=472 N=518 N=401 N=221 N=299 N=212 N=308 N=2626

Hospital N=201 N=164 N=317 N=150 N=313 N=163 N=162 N=181 N=1651

Source: van der Lippe et al. 2011: 60.

To achieve a better understanding of the multi-faceted notion of worklife balance some variables have been re-coded (compared to the original formulation in the questionnaire) and combined into new variables that are used to represent a general concept (for example “Enrichment”). With regard to these transformations, we have followed two important rules: -

-

variables have been re-coded only when they belong to the same group and express the same concept, but where the original coding does not allow to combine them directly (for example because one of the variables has 5 points for the biggest enrichment at work, while the other variable has 5 points for the least enrichment at work); variables have been combined into a new single variable only if they are really related to the same concept, and the difference between them is that they represent different aspects of these concepts.

Regression has been used to demonstrate the importance of different variables and their contribution to the overall work-life balance. A check has been made on the use of the regression methods that there are no outliers (values that are too extreme and can cause distortion) and non-

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linearity. For a more detailed account of the methods of analysis used in the whole project see van der Lippe et al. (2011).

Comparing young parents and other employees Almost 10% of all respondents fit the criteria for young parents (aged up to 35 and having children below 6). The largest shares of young parents were among the interviewed in Portugal and Bulgaria and the smallest in the Swedish sample. With regard to the type of organisation most young parents were employed in the telecom companies while the financial sector had the fewest young parents among the employees. Women dominated the group of young parents, which also corresponds to the overall gender proportion in our research and reflects the gender balance of the entire sector in the EU. The data collected during our interviews allows for comparing worklife balance satisfaction for young parents and all employees. The analysis is based on a set of compound measures, each of them composed of several variables (van der Lippe et al. 2011). Thus quality of life evaluated the overall life satisfaction through respondents’ rating of four statements, whereas work engagement was a short version of the flow scale developed by Schaufeli and colleagues (2006) and satisfaction with work-family balance was measured on a five-point Likert type scale with three statements based on Valcour (2007). All employees scored high on the scale measuring the satisfaction with work and a feeling of work engagement. This was followed closely by the high score on the satisfaction with their quality of life while the satisfaction with workfamily balance was significantly lower. The comparison between the young working parents and the rest of the employees showed that the two groups did not differ in their positive experience of flow at work but the target group of young parents received significantly lower scores on the other two indicators and in particular on the satisfaction with work-family balance. The analysis established significant gender differences among the young working parents on some of the indicators. For example, young women reported lower work autonomy compared to young men, but at the same time they had higher work satisfaction and higher sense of enrichment between work and family. Some of the measured differences between the countries were also statistically significant. Thus young parents in the United Kingdom had the highest scores on most of the satisfaction indices while the young respondents in Portugal showed the lowest results. In Bulgaria, the young employed parents took a middle

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position with particularly low scores on work enrichment and work autonomy. The highest scores of satisfaction with work-family balance and of quality of life were found among the young parents working in hospitals in Sweden, Netherlands, Portugal and Bulgaria, as well as among the young employees in the financial companies in Finland and the UK. Figure 1. Satisfaction variation between young employees and the whole sample

In the next paragraphs we focus on the satisfaction with work-family balance. What are the factors on national, organisational and individual level that impact upon the experiences of young working parents from combining work and family?

National factors that influence work-family balance The countries participating in the survey belonged to different welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990; Gallie 2007). Thus the socialdemocratic/universalistic regime was represented in our sample with the companies in Sweden and Finland; the corporatist/continental by Germany and The Netherlands; the liberal regime by the United Kingdom; the subprotective by Portugal, and the post-socialist/Eastern European by Hungary and Bulgaria (Kovacheva et al. 2011). These countries have distinctive combinations of social service provision by the state, the market and the family and different institutional forms and degrees of support for working parents. The national context which limits how young people combine their work and family duties includes several components such as flexibility and security of employment, duration and compensation of parental and childcare leaves, standard of living, level and forms of

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social and economic inequalities and types of national cultures (Kovacheva 2010). All of them have implications on company policies as well as on individual and household decisions in pursuit of an optimal work-family balance.

Inequality in living standards Both the country differences in the standard of living of the population as a whole, as well as the in-country differences between the income groups have been shown to have a strong impact on the quality of work and life of the individuals (Böhnke 2008; Fahey and Smyth 2004). The income inequality inside the country has a much higher influence on the degree of satisfaction of the individuals in poorer societies than on those living in richer countries. Official data (Eurostat 2010) about the countries in the study show that the UK as the country with a liberal regime has a high standard of living of 118.9% of the EC27 average as measured by GDP per capita in PPS and high income inequality as measured by a Gini coefficient of 33. In contrast the two post-socialist countries Bulgaria and Hungary have both low living standards and low income inequality. Portugal with a sub-protective welfare regime has a low economic standard similar to that of Hungary but also the highest Gini index of 37. The four Northern and Western European countries form the group with high living standard and low inequality with the two countries belonging to the universalistic regime – Sweden and Finland having much lower Gini indices than those with the corporatist regimes such as The Netherlands and Germany. An additional factor influencing the satisfaction with work-family balance on the national level is the wide spread belief about the injustice of the income inequality among the population of the post-socialist countries (Tilkidziev and Dimova 2010) and a feeling of a growing gap between the East and West countries in the union (Mitev 2005; Sirovatka and Bartakova2008).

Parental leave and access to childcare facilities As expected, the young parents had used various forms of parental leave several times more frequently than the other respondents in our sample, and this conclusion held true for all the countries in the study. Cross-country differences in the degree of using maternity, paternity, parental, and child-sick leaves were mostly due to the way these were regulated in the national legislation (see here Kovacheva et al. 2011: 46-8).

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However it should be noted that these practices were also dependent upon the policies in each company that could tamper or undermine the leave options in assistance of young working parents. The survey found that in all European countries the use of parental care leave was a widespread practice. The greatest shares of respondents who had used such leave were in Sweden and Finland – the two countries with a universalistic regime. In Sweden, for example, the share of fathers who had used parental leave in the past year was the highest – 60.4%. The leave for caring for a sick child was used again most often in those countries: 72% in Sweden and 53.7% in Finland, but only by 9% of the young working parents in Portugal and 6.2% in The Netherlands. The other indicator – accessible day care for children – gave similar results. Again it was in Finland and Sweden where the proportion of those agreeing with the statement that it was ‘easy’ and ‘very easy’ to find such care were the highest (55.9% and 52% respectively). In contrast about a half of the young working parents in the UK and Portugal reported that it was ‘difficult’ and ‘very difficult” to find day care. Regarding access to unanticipated day care for children our data analysis also found significant differences between the participating countries. For example in Finland more than half of all young parents (55.9%) enjoyed quite easy access to such arrangements, but this was so for only 31.9% of the respondents in Bulgaria, 31.3% in the UK and 30.7% in Hungary. The two post-socialist countries still have a wide set of public childcare centres but these have gradually become inadequate in the past several years due to privatisation of the premises and the closure of many crèches in particular (Kovacheva 2010).

Organisational factors To study company and work specific factors we used indicators measuring the restrictions and opportunities for young parents to achieve a satisfactory work-family balance. Among the constraints we focused on the length of the working time, the intensity and the insecurity of work. In regard to the supports we studied flexibility of working schedules and working place, the work autonomy and career prospects.

Length of working time This indicator is based on the actual number of working hours and provides information about the time spent in work, which might differ from contractual working time. By studying the actual number of working

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hours we accounted for two distinct effects – the extra workload and the additional working time. Our analysis shows that young parents in general worked fewer hours than the rest of the respondents. Figure 2. Number of actual hours worked per week

This difference was clearly discernible in The Netherlands, Germany and the UK – the countries that also have higher proportions of employees with part-time jobs. Portugal and the two post-socialist countries Hungary and Bulgaria did not follow this pattern – there the young parents worked almost the same number of hours as the other employees. In these three countries approximately 10% of young parents worked longer than the number of hours set in the employment contract. Furthermore, only in Bulgaria was the share of young parents who worked more than 60 hours per week greater than the average for all interviewees. Our results point to the following behavioural model: when young people become parents in countries with a corporatist or liberal welfare regime, they reduce their working hours in order to spend more time with their family and children. Young people of Southern and East-European countries follow exactly the opposite strategy: they work longer to increase their income and/or to demonstrate as much work devotion as the other employees, so as to meet expectations about the ‘ideal employee’. Such a lengthy working schedule however is a precondition for work-family imbalance and a low satisfaction with quality of life. Part-time employment is one of the ways used for reconciliating work and family demands. Definitions of part-time jobs vary between countries, so we set an upper limit of 35 hours per week.

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Figure 3. Contractual part-time work

Figure 3 shows that young parents as well as other employees widely used the model of taking jobs with reduced working hours in the search of work-family balance. Part-time work was most common among young working parents in The Netherlands, here reaching 60%, followed by those in Germany and the UK. In Portugal, Hungary and Bulgaria the proportion was no higher than 5%. It is notable that the share of young parents with part-time jobs in those three countries was lower than the share among all employees. In the countries with a corporatist regime the situation was the opposite – here it was the young parents who held part-time jobs more often. In The Netherlands in particular the high living standard and the cultural norm about the ‘ideal parent’ made this model for achieving a work-family balance widespread (Prag et al. 2011). Virtually everywhere the share of young women working part-time was higher than that of young men, but this difference was more significant in countries with conservative and liberal welfare regimes than in the post-socialist countries. This in turn has a negative impact on career opportunities for women and accounts for gender inequalities in the labour market in the countries that have higher shares of women employed on a part-time basis.

Flexibility of work Work flexibility in terms of time and place is another strategy used to achieve a better reconciliation between work and family responsibilities. Our research showed that young parents practiced the various forms of flexibility such as flexible starting and finishing times of the working day, compressed working week and working occasionally or regularly from home more often than their older co-workers. However this was largely

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dependent on the national labour legislation and local company policies and traditions. The share of young parents taking advantage of flexi-work varied from 72% in Sweden to 26.2% in Finland. Between 10.3% of young parents in Netherlands and up to 26.10% in Germany relied on a compressed working week, whereas from 6.2% in Finland up to 27.10% in Sweden worked from home. Sweden came out as the country providing the greatest opportunities for adaptable work schedules and working from home. On the contrary, Finland, The Netherlands and Bulgaria are countries with relatively low flexibility of working schedules. It should be noted that in the first two countries young parents widely used a different work flexibility option, that of reduced working hours This option was available only to a very tiny fraction of the employees in Bulgaria. Flexibility of work might also be related to the contractual conditions of the job. Fixed-term jobs, temporary contracts, agency work or zero-hour contracts have contradictory influence upon the quality of work and workfamily balance of young people. They allow young parents to meet childcare demands more easily but also lead to less income and security for the individuals and their households. The effect of this type of flexibility upon the work-family balance depends on whether this flexibility is led by employees or forced by the employer under the pressure of market competition (Tang and Cousins 2005). Figure 4. Forms of flexibility of work among young parents

Our data set did not reveal large differences between young parents and other employees regarding this type of work flexibility. Except for Finland there were no statistically significant differences between the proportions of young parents with fixed-term or other non-standard contracts and the average scores for the whole sample. While other

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research (Bradley and van Hoof 2005; Roberts 2009) has found evidence for a concentration of young people at workplaces with low social security, this was not confirmed in the data gathered from the companies participating in the Quality of Life project – banks, hospitals, telecom and supermarkets, which were chosen as big employers in their respective countries.

Work intensity This indicator is important for our model, as it reflects both physical and psychological pressure experienced by individuals at their workplace (Karasek and Theorell 1990). Its negative impact on work-family balance is due to the transfer of stress levels from the workplace to the family home. For estimating work intensity we have taken into account different job aspects such as the subjective evaluation of the amount of physical efforts required, the speed of task completion, required precision, emotional involvement, time using information technologies, and other. This variable, formed as a scale comprised of 9 statements with values ranging between 1 and 4, enables the measurement of significant country differences. The young working parents in Bulgaria received the highest score of 2.94 and those from Sweden the lowest score of 2.3. There were no large differences between young parents and the sample average, but the survey established significant gender variation with young women reporting higher work pressure than young men.

Work autonomy In previous analysis (Kovacheva and Kabaivanov 2009) we found a significant correlation between autonomy and quality of work in the service sector as a whole. Work autonomy can have both negative and positive effects on the satisfaction with work-family balance depending on whether the employee perceives it as a resource or a burden in managing the work tasks. In the questionnaire this indicator was developed as a fouritem scale of the answers to 8 questions concerning employees’ freedom to take decisions and control over the work process. This measure was derived from the job control scale developed by Karasek and Theorell (1990). In all countries the young parents reported lower than average work autonomy. The cross-country comparison showed that the young parents in the UK companies had the highest level of autonomy while those in Portugal received the lowest score. Young female employees in all companies reported lower autonomy at work than men.

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Career prospects and job security Taking on supervisory responsibilities also acts as a factor influencing work-family balance of employees, as it raises the amount of time and effort spent at work at the expense of the time left for household tasks while at the same time provides more opportunities for work autonomy and higher overall satisfaction with work conditions. The survey established that in Finland, Sweden and the UK the share of young parents at supervisory positions was higher than the average for all respondents, while in Bulgaria it was considerably lower. It can be expected that in countries where the young parents had less access to supervisory positions at work the negative impact of taking managing positions would prevail over the positive effects. Thus it would be harder for young parents to achieve the desired work-family balance. Young parents scored higher than the rest on the scale measuring job insecurity – an indicator based on respondents’ rating of a series of statements initially developed by Kraimer and colleagues (2005). This observation was confirmed by the employers’ reactions to the current crisis by the mass practice of laying off young employees first (European Commission 2010). Higher job security was expressed by the young employees in the Nordic countries with universalistic regimes and in the Netherlands, while those in Portugal reported the lowest value. However the young respondents from Portugal also believed they have the best opportunities for career growth, quite in contrast to young employees in Hungary who saw their career prospects as the most limited.

Household factors Although there are many household specific factors that can influence work-family balance, our research focused on quantitative features amenable to direct measurement, such as the number of persons in the household and income. For young parents the first item is particularly important as it indicates the number of children (below the age of 6) in the family and thus the amount of time and efforts required to take care of them. The indicator ‘financial situation of the household’ was based on the respondents’ subjective assessment of this situation on a 5-point scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. While income size is strongly related to the general economic conditions in the country, the indicator that we used allowed to examine how the young working parents compared their living standard to other households in their country and consequently whether they felt economic pressure to work longer or search for additional jobs or

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they could accept to work less hours and have more time for childcare and family activities. Figure 5. Household financial situation*

*Proportion (%) of respondents assessing their financial situation as “very good” and “good”.

The data in Figure 5 are interesting, and not only because the selfevaluation of respondents’ household situation closely reflects the economic situation of the respective countries. The figure shows significant inter-generational differences. Thus in Western and Southern European countries the younger households reported lower income than the older households while in Eastern European countries the ratio was the inverse – it was the young employees that considered their financial situation as ‘very good’ and ‘good’ more often than the rest. The higher income of the young in post-socialist countries is due to the higher qualifications they have in comparison with the old, the similar number of hours that they work in a week and, most importantly, to the common practice of parental support which continues even after the young form their own family – a result confirmed in other studies as well (Biggart and Kovacheva 2006).

Individual characteristics Individual characteristics are included in our model not only because they are very important for the quality of life and work-family balance but also because they allow for the disclosure of those factors that have a specific impact on the group of the young working parents. Our analysis

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includes gender, age, and health status and education level as core individual characteristics. Young parents came out as the group with high education level (postsecondary and university education). The cross-country variation was the greatest in the shares of young employees with post-secondary vocational education – from very low in the UK and The Netherlands to as much as 40% in Finland. These differences are to a large extent due to the specificities of national education systems. Education has a significant influence on work-family balance because of two related factors: career prospects are strongly linked to formal educational achievement levels, and the context of necessity and opportunities for lifelong learning. As expected, young parents had another good starting point for achieving a satisfactory work-family balance: their better health in general. In all countries studied the young employees evaluating their health status as ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ outnumbered the respondents who did not do so. Employees’ health condition has both direct and indirect effects on work satisfaction and work-family balance, which was confirmed in our further analysis.

Results from the regression analysis In order to measure the combined impact of the various factors working on the country, organisational, household and individual level we conducted a linear regression analysis both separately for the groups of young working parents and additionally for the whole sample, then compared the results. Table2 presents the model of factors explaining the satisfaction with work-family balance of the group of young parents. Comparing the results of this regression model explaining young parents’ satisfaction with the model created for all employees (which we do not present here), we found several groups of significant factors that influence work-family balance.

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Table 2. Regression analysis explaining work-family balance for young parents Nonstandardised coefficient (Constant) Actual work hours Supervisory position Type of contract Work demands Work autonomy Job security Career prospects Gender Date of birth (age) Education level Health status Number of household members Household financial situation Flexible work schedule Compressed work week Ability to work from home Use of maternity/paternity leave Use of parental leave Use of sick childcare leave Easy access to childcare services Easy access to unanticipated childcare

Standardise d coefficient Std. error Ǻ 19,18762 0,002394 -0,04774 0,059435 -0,02468 0,049822 0,060721 0,072362 -0,0884 0,06277 0,265268 0,038697 0,087845 0,028666 0,06806 0,055335 -0,05688 0,009682 0,043762 0,018584 -0,10187 0,036463 -0,12455

T

Sig.

-0,9132 -1,05693 -0,60354 1,603945 -2,1349 6,163829 2,217903 1,767202 -1,43389 1,105191 -2,68368 -3,26086

0,361488 0,290952 0,546366 0,109233 0,033159 1,28E-09 0,026921 0,077684 0,152107 0,269504 0,007475 0,001171

0,003853

0,101973

0,918811

0,02879

-0,15503

-3,95975

8,37E-05

0,048263 0,054876 0,079938 0,075312

0,035408 0,040276

0,879489 1,061427

0,379475 0,288907

0,087259

0,07894

0,045453

1,10538

0,269422

0,013857 0,060035

0,008933

0,230815

0,817534

-0,06211 0,069775

-0,03492

-0,89017

0,373716

0,017962 0,058489

0,01198

0,3071

0,75887

0,001117 0,018399

0,002531

0,060698

0,951619

-0,03657 0,018811

-0,07944

-1,94424

0,052316

-17,5222 -0,00253 -0,03587 0,079911 -0,15449 0,386903 0,085825 0,050659 -0,07934 0,0107 -0,04987 -0,1189

0,003436 0,033699 -0,114

Factors valid for both groups These were factors that were significant in both groups although the degree to which they influenced work-family balance differed between young parents and the other respondents. Thus work demands linked to the physical and psychological pressure at the workplace were important for all employees but had a stronger impact on the group of young parents. This can be explained by the extra pressure resulting for this group, which has fewer resources to deal with family issues. The highest value for this

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variable was observed among the respondents in Bulgaria (2.94) followed by those in Sweden (2.60) and Portugal (2.57). It could be expected that polices reducing work pressures would have a stronger positive effect on work-family balance for the employees in these three countries. Career prospects came out as another significant factor for achieving a better quality of work and a higher satisfaction with work-family. The young employees are at the beginning of their career trajectories and feel a stronger pressure to divide their efforts between building a successful career and family responsibilities and to invest more time in raising children. Our research showed that this factor ‘career prospects’ had a smaller effect in the group of young parents than in the whole sample. In a similar way the young employees who were also parents of very young children were less troubled by the prospect of losing their current job. This also means that they had a weaker sense of belonging to the company for they were currently working. Therefore, by investing in creating opportunities to manage both work tasks and family responsibilities, company managements could build a better relation between the company and young employees. The comparison of the two regression models also shows that the financial situation of the household is a significant factor for the workfamily balance in both groups. However it was more important for the young working parents that for the rest of the employees. This is related to the higher expenses of this group for their housing transitions and necessity to care for young children while still at the beginning of their career route.

Factors specific for young parents The analysis showed that work autonomy was significant only for the work-family balance of young employed parents. The ability to have control over one’s work was important for young parents, because this allowed them to have a more flexible working schedule and more easily meet both work and family requirements. While permanent employment contracts prevail in all countries studied (their share varied from 91.20% of young parents in Bulgaria down to 64.20% in Finland), the young were more positive towards non-standardised contracts and schedules. Flexible starting and ending of the working day and the opportunity to work from home were among the flexible forms of work that young parents most preferred. Giving the young more autonomy to organise their daily work in terms of time schedules and workplace would have a strong positive effect on their work-family balance.

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In the regression analysis gender did not come out as a factor with an impact on young parents. We believe that this is due to the fact that, when becoming parents, both young women and young men meet with higher demands and greater risks for an imbalance between work and family. This finding did not hold true for all countries and, in Bulgaria for example, young women reported significantly less satisfaction with work-family balance. A larger sample of young employees might allow establishing a greater weight of the gender differences in achieving a higher quality of work and life. It is also worth noting that the use of maternity/paternity leaves did not turn to be an important determinant of the overall satisfaction and balance. This is due to the fact that only 26% of young parents in our data set had children aged two years or younger (and only 5.6% had children under one year old). Despite the differences in the national legislation, these types of parental leave usually do not cover parents of children aged three or more years. However, the other options for childcare (such as leave to care for a sick child and opportunities to take emergency leaves) become more important for parents who have returned to work after parental leave.

Conclusion This paper has analysed work-family balance for young parents working in service sector companies in Europe and the factors that influenced their strategies to achieve it. The pursuit of work satisfaction and balance with other life domains was linked to the various resources and constraints imposed on employees by the social and organisational context and their personal and household situation. Overall life satisfaction reflected both conflicts and enrichment between work and family life, including individual choices and abilities to mobilise resources and negotiate with family members, employers and social institutions in society at large. Youth is a life stage that is particularly vulnerable to conflicts between work and family because of its transitional character. Young people have fewer lived experiences and fewer resources to rely on when making decisions how to meet work requirements at the early stage of their career and household demands when they have only recently become parents. On the country level, easy access to childcare services, leave for taking care of children when they fall ill, and at the company level work autonomy, flexible work schedules and opportunities to work from home, are factors that are likely to raise the satisfaction of this group of employees with their work-life balance. At the same time such support measures meet with the

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constraints of the growing intensity of work under the pressure of increased market competition in European workplaces and the notions about ‘the ideal employee’ as one with full devotion to work and no family responsibilities. Traditional gendered notions about the ‘ideal parent’, as well as the rising intensity of parenting in late modern societies bring additional strain to the equation between work and family transitions that young people try to manage under the conditions of growing uncertainty. Our study confirms once again that achieving a work-family balance requires a dedicated approach by social institutions at all levels, one which takes into account the specificity of age and the life cycle.

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Kraimer, Maria, Sandy Wayne, Robert Liden, and Rowe Sparrowe. 2005. “The role of job security in understanding the relationship between employees’ perceptions of temporary workers and employees’ performance”. Journal of Applied Psychology 90(2): 389-398. Leccardi, Carmen. 2005. “Facing Uncertainty: Temporality and Biographies in the New Century”. Young 13(2): 123-146. Lewis, Lane, 2009. Work-Family Balance, Gender and Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lewis, Suzan, Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes, Dorottya Redai, and Margarida Barroso. 2011. “Healthy Organizations”. In Quality of Life and Work in Europe: Theory, Policy, Practice, edited by Margareta Back-Wiklund, Tanja Van der Lippe, Laura Den Dulk, and Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes, 165-185. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lyonette, Clare, Rosemary Crompton, and Karin Wall. 2007. “Gender, occupational class and work-life conflict: A comparison between Britain and Portugal”. Community, Work and Family 10(3): 283-308. Mitev, Petar-Emil, ed. 2005. The New Young. Bulgarian Youth and European Perspective. Sofia: East-West. Prag, Patrick, Maria das Dores Guirero, Jouko Natti, Michael Brookes, and Laura den Dulk. 2011. “Quality of Work and Quality of Life of Service Sector Workers: Cross-national Variations in Eight European Countries”. In Quality of Life and Work in Europe, edited by Margareta Back-Wiklund, Tanja Van der Lippe, Laura Den Dulk, and Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes, 77-94. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reiter, Herwig. 2008. “‘I would be against that, if my husband says: You don’t work’ – Negotiating Work and Motherhood in Post-State Socialism”. Sociological Problems, Special Issue Vol. IL: 193-211. Roberts, Ken. 2009. Youth in Transition. Eastern Europe and the West. Palgrave Macmillan. Schaufeli, Wilmar, Arnold Bakker, and Marisa Salanova. 2006. “The measurement of work engagement with a short questionnaire. A crossnational study”. Educational and Psychological Measurement 66(4): 701-716. Sirovatka, Tomáš, and Helena Bartakova. 2008. “Reconciling Work and Family in the Czech Republic and the Role of Social Policy”. Sociological Problems, Special Issue Vol. IL: 77-96. Tang, Ning, and Christine Cousins. 2005. “Working Time, Gender and Family: An East-West European Comparison”. Gender, Work and Organization 12(6): 2005: 527-550.

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PART II COMMUNICATION AND PARTICIPATION

CHAPTER FIVE THE ‘DIGITAL NATIVE’ DEBATE: AN APPRAISAL OF PEDAGOGICAL AND GENERATIONAL CLAIMS JAMES CÔTÉ Introduction In the early years of the 21st century – and the third millennium – mass educational systems around the world are facing numerous challenges, ranging from declining governmental support to how to adapt the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to educational settings. Advocates of these technologies argue that they can revolutionise both classroom teaching and enhance learning. At the same time, cash-strapped schools and governments are open to suggestions about ways to solve their financial problems, including adopting ICTs. The more ardent advocates claim that these new technologies can revolutionise or even replace traditional pedagogies (Gomez 2007; Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Prensky 2001, 2006; Tapscott 2009), and some colleges are looking for ways to do just this. For example, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA claims to have online programmes under development that are capable eliminating classrooms and professors (Kolowich 2009a). The enthusiasm for the new technologies is further fuelled by claims that a generational change has taken place with the arrival of ‘digital natives’ – those born after the early 1980s who have grown up using computers, the Internet and related ICTs. It is claimed that digital natives learn far better with these new technologies than with the older, ‘low-tech’ or ‘no-tech’ pedagogies. Those who promote the digital native concept sharply contrast contemporary students with previous generations. This sharp generational contrast at this point in history – a

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new millennium – adds a sense of urgency that has apparently lent a greater sense of importance to the adoption of these technologies. However, in order for the argument about the urgency in their adoption to be true, the digital native must be valid. This chapter examines that claim in terms of its underlying generational and pedagogical assertions by asking the questions: are there sharp generational differences in the use of these new technologies; and do these new technologies allow for superior educational experiences that benefit students over traditional pedagogies?

The generational divide claim The more ardent technology advocates, like Prensky and Tapscott, claim that the putative digital native generation are tech-savvy multitaskers, who are capable of learning on their own, especially from the Internet, when they are given the chance. For example, Prensky is noted for the claim “teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the Internet is” (Tapscott 2009, 139). And Tapscott asserts “schools should be places to learn, not teach … now that students can obviously find the facts they’re looking for in an instant [on the Internet]” (Tapscott 2009, 134). These claims challenge traditional pedagogies, undermine the authority of teachers and educators, and open the door for the wholesale adoption of certain high-tech software and hardware, some of which have become common accoutrements of popular culture (such as computer tablets and smart phones). While it is understandable that those students who are bored with school would endorse anything that might add some excitement to classes, like using computers, for a variety of reasons, educators should approach these claims like any other proposed change: by critically analysing the arguments and evidence. In this case, the claim that an entire generation is tech-savvy needs to be examined (that is, the claim of generational homogeneity), as does the claim of sharp differences between generations in their usage pattern of ICTs (that is, the claim of generational differences in usage patterns).

Generational homogeneity With respect to the claim of generational homogeneity, the evidence is clearly showing that not all people born after the early 1980s are tech-savvy. Although the younger demographic may currently be more likely to be early adopters of some technologies – by merit of their

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greater leisure time allowing them to spend more time using them – even in affluent countries some young people do not even own a computer, and others do not know how to navigate through even basic programmes. In these societies, there is still an economic ‘digital divide’ that is largely socio-economic, but there is also a ‘second digital divide’ within each age group comprising those who are not comfortable with computers and related technologies even if they could afford them, and many of these young people grew up with technologies and are studying in today’s schools (see here Vaidhyanathan 2008). When we look outside the affluent societies in which these technology advocates live, the ‘global digital divide’ is obvious. As of June 2010, less than one third of the world’s population had access to and was using the Internet. Access and usage ranged from a low of 10.9% in Africa to 77.4% in North America, with Europe coming in at 58.4% (Internet World Statistics 2010). Indeed, a 2010 study from South Africa found that age was not the relevant factor in ICT sophistication; rather, experience was key, as made possible by access and opportunity. Of the 14% of a large sample of South African university students that corresponded to the digital native stereotype, most were from middle or upper socio-economic groups, spoke English or Afrikaans, and had easy home access to the technologies. The authors of that study refer to this as ‘digital apartheid’ (Brown and Czerniewicz 2010). An Australian study by Kennedy et al. (2010) developed a similar typology based on the usage patterns of over 2000 university student ICT users born after 1980. The most savvy group, which they termed “power users”, constituted only 14% of the sample (this group used a wide range of technologies and did so very frequently, including web 2.0 usage like web publishing and file sharing). The second most savvy group they called “ordinary users”, and they made up 27% of the sample (characterised by web and mobile use, but the infrequent use of games and web 2.0). Both of these groups had more males than females. Some 60% of the sample was either “irregular users” (the 14% with moderate use of web and mobile technologies) or “basic users” (45% of the sample who used mainly mobile phones but infrequently used web technologies). These latter two groups had more females than males. The authors of this study concluded that pedagogical transformations based on assumptions about the digital skill levels of current students would not be justified. Because only a minority of

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students are ‘tech-savvy’ in ways that give them some independence from instruction, technologies that are useful in educational settings would have to be carefully introduced, with appropriate instruction on their use. The authors insist that “it is the use of technology based on misguided assumptions about the technological experiences and educational expectations of students that should be discouraged” (ibid., 339-40). Others have made note of similar deficiencies in the claims ofgenerational homogeneity. In their review of the evidence Bennett, Maton and Kervin (2008) were unable to find convincing evidence about either the existence of a generation of digital natives among Australian university students or that current students have a preference for technologies as part of their education. They found that at best 2025% of the university students they studied could be considered techsavvy in terms of their usage of technologies. Nor were they able to find evidence for distinctive ‘learning styles’ among current students (see Pashler et al. 2008). Indeed, certain claims, such as a preference for multitasking, are not only unsupported, but research on multitasking suggests that it can be counterproductive to learning (for example, Kirschner and Karpinski 2010). On the basis of these and other findings, Bennett and colleagues (op. cit., 782) conclude: “Our analysis of the digital native literature demonstrates a clear mismatch between the confidence with which claims are made and the evidence for such claims.” They continue by noting that educators “have every right to demand evidence and to expect that calls for change be based on well founded and supported arguments”, but “many of the arguments made to date about digital natives currently lack that support”. In sum, in the developed countries studied, there is little evidence for the existence of a distinctive generation defined principally by their relationship with technologies. Technology advocates seem to have been engaging in ‘generational myth-making’, misappropriating a sociological concept without exercising due caution. The advocates of the digital native claim have been committing a common error made by those who adopt a generational approach in attempting to explain and predict social trends. This is the error of homogenisation, whereby all members of a given birth cohort are assumed to have the same psychological and behavioural traits. Unfortunately, this conceptual error can lead to further errors: over-generalisation, exaggeration, and the selective use of evidence (see Bennett et al. 2008), as in the case of the claim of sharp differences in the usage patterns between generations.

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Generational usage patterns Like the above generational claim, the empirical evidence does not confirming the claim of sharp generational differences in usage, especially the claim hinging on the concepts of ‘digital natives’ versus ‘digital immigrants’, as Prensky (2001, 2006) frames it (the latter would have been born before the 1980s). For example, in Canada, a 2007 population survey found that the generational differences in Internet use were small when those 45 to 54 years of age were compared to those 15 to 24; the difference was 85% and 94%, respectively, between so-called ‘immigrants’ and ‘natives’ to the digital world (Veenhof and Timusk 2009). Moreover, when the actually usage of the Internet was examined, it was the older ‘immigrant’ using it in a more sophisticated manner. Another Canadian study of 2313 Internet users polled in 2008 by a large survey research firm found that the youngest age group used the Internet almost entirely for leisure and entertainment, while older people used it more to manage their finances and for self-education and information gathering – generally using the Internet in a more sophisticated manner than younger users (Ipsos-Reid 2008). This study also found that the younger users sensed this, with only 28% of teens considering themselves ‘very skilled’ in Internet use. In fact, the teens in this random population sample spent only 13 hours per week on the Internet compared to 19 hours for adults, and only 37% of teens rated Internet use as an important part of their day, compared to 51% of adults in the sample. These findings are supported by a 2010 American survey of 1000 banking customers, which found that those over 30 had more sophisticated ICT use patterns than those under 30, suggesting that ‘growing up’ with these technologies is not responsible for savviness (Wells Fargo 2010). And they are further supported by a UK study of 2350 respondents, which found gender, education, and experience with and breadth of use of ICTs, explain more variance in ICT usage than age (Helsper and Eynon 2010). The authors of this study concluded that it is very clear … that it is not helpful to define digital natives and immigrants as two distinct, dichotomous generations. While there were differences in how generations engaged with the Internet, there were similarities across generations as well, mainly based on how much experience people have with using technologies. (ibid., 515)

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Thus, contrary to the digital native claim, the accumulating evidence from population surveys comparing generations is clearly showing that the most sophisticated ICT age-demographic groups who were not reared on these technologies. What is more, when the computer skill levels and usage patterns of the most educated among the younger cohorts are examined, the digital native claims of tech-savviness become further suspect. For example, a study of American university students found that most overestimated their skill level for basic applications like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (Grant, Malloy, and Murphy 2009). Students’ perceptions were worst for the spreadsheet programme Excel, where most (69%) rated themselves as average, but could not even perform basic operations. For the word-processing programme Word, their performances were better on basic tasks like bolding text, but most could only perform one half of the moderately difficult tasks (like justifying paragraphs), and none of the advanced tasks, like using a clipboard. A second study of the digital savviness of university students involves the ethnographic analysis1 of American university students’ researching skills (Kolowitch 2011). This multi-institution project found that the majority of students relied on Google searches as opposed to using libraries’ more extensive and appropriate databases. However, even Google searches tended to be done poorly, because most students did not understand the basic logic of searches. Only a small proportion – 7 of 30 students in one study, or 23% in another – could conduct competent literature searches. The researchers concluded: Today’s college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar. … [para 17]. Years of conditioning on Google had not endowed [these] students with any searching savvy to speak of, but rather had instilled them with a stunted understanding of how to finely tune a search in order to hone in on usable sources. (ibid, para 20)

As a consequence of the conditioning to Google, all but 10% of the students failed to narrow their searches when they could, and instead 1

The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) project involves a series of studies conducted at four American universities: Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois. Rather than collecting survey data, two anthropologists were the lead researchers conducting open-ended interviews and making direct observation.

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perseverated with Google’s ‘any word anywhere’ technique, which of course overwhelms the searcher with irrelevant sources (not to mention that Google does not link to all academic journals, and even if they do link to journals will not necessarily give the students free access to articles as many library databases do). Frustrated by their lack of progress in finding relevant sources, students would often change their topic to something that could be researched in the rudimentary Google way. These ethnographic investigations lead to the conclusion that today’s students are far too confident about their digital abilities, and in fact most need remediation in digital technologies applied to academic settings, yet they do not ask for help because of their over-confidence. Quite simply, they ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’ To make matters worse, because of the digital native stereotype, their teachers have been assuming that they have these abilities, so current students are not being taught ‘what they don’t know’ about these technologies. What is needed is instruction to increase competencies in the serious use of these technologies, showing students how to break the bad habits they developed through playing with them in non-educational settings. A third study of the savviness of university students found that the overuse of Facebook adversely affects academic performance (Kirschner and Karpinski 2010). This study found that Facebook users reported earning lower grades (a 3.06 GPA versus a 3.82 for non-users – a 20% difference) and spending fewer hours per week studying than non-users (averaging in the range of 1 to 5 hours per week, versus 11 to 15 hours per week for non-users). It thus appears that many current university students are overconfident in their use of the new technologies with educational applications and do not realise how their misuse or overuse adversely affects their academic performance. The word savvy actually means ‘shrewd and adept with practical knowledge’. Given the consistent finding that at best one-quarter of young people in developed countries seem to be well versed in computer hardware/software, only this minority would qualify for consideration as savvy, depending on how much they use these technologies in positive ways that enhance their lives and their education. As the studies of usage patterns discussed above suggest, many young people are using ICTs in pre-programmed ways that take up enormous amounts of leisure time. Indeed, large numbers of young people actually seem more ‘slavish’ to the technologies, feeling insecure when they do not have them within arm’s reach. Given the six to eight hours per day now taken up by them

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(mainly for entertainment and social networking), is this really a shrewd way to spend one’s time, especially if healthful, intellectually stimulating, and pro-social activities are displaced (see here Bauerlein 2008)? Indeed, on the whole, these studies suggest that, rather than being led into the digital age by their students, educators should doing more to teach current students how to use these technologies in a more sophisticated manner so they can benefit from them in broader and deeper ways. In this respect, the digital native stereotype seems to be doing young people a disservice because it is obscuring serious skills deficits that might be interfering with full functioning in higher educational systems and the workplace, where computer literacy is often taken for granted by the very teachers and employers who are dismissed by technology advocates as Luddites (see here Kolikant 2010).

Pedagogical claims The claim that various new technologies are necessary properly to educate current students is often appended to the charge that teachers are Luddites who are too wedded to old teaching techniques, like the lecture format (Tapscott 2009, 128). Tapscott further argues that old university “broadcast pedagogies” like the lecture should be abandoned in favour of collaborative techniques that have been made possible by the Internet. Recent research, however, casts doubt on this characterisation of professors. For example, a 2010 study of 939 American professors concluded that they are no Luddites when it comes to Web 2.0 tools … 80 percent of professors, with little variance by age, have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, or Google Wave. Nearly 60 percent kept accounts with more than one, and a quarter used at least four. A majority, 52 percent, said they used at least one of them as a teaching tool (Kolowich 2010).

But, even if all professors were Luddites, technologies are tools, not outcomes; they are means, not ends. Indeed, the above study finds a consensus among professors that these technologies will not become the primary medium of teaching, but supplements to it. The confusion between means and ends seems to be responsible for some fuzzy thinking about so-called new collaborative pedagogies ostensibly made possible by Web 2.0 (interactive) software. While the concept of

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collaborative learning may indeed sound novel, this pedagogy is far from new. Indeed, proposals to increase collaborative learning date back to Rousseau (the 1700s), through Dewey (the early 1900s), to Freire (the 1960s), and fed the progressive education movement that transformed schools around the world in the 20th century. Claims of an imminent paradigm shift in pedagogies sparked by new technologies are thus suspect, and smack of ‘old wine in new bottles’. What is new is the technology to expedite this type of learning, not the pedagogy. Thus, evidence for the pedagogical utility of these technologies should be evaluated to look for ways to improve pedagogical delivery, as we will now do.

Laptops When they first became affordable, there were great hopes for laptop’s pedagogical applications. However, since those honeymoon days, schools at all three educational levels that once embraced laptops – even supplied them to students – have been dropping them (Hu 2007). At the university level, professors have been banning them from their classrooms because they are distracting to other students, to teachers, and to the students using them, many of whom use the various entertainment and communication features during classes, especially when Wi-Fi (wireless connectivity) is available (Tibbetts 2007). As systematic evaluations of laptop use in universities are being published in peer-reviewed journals, these concerns are being validated. For example, one study found that compared with non-users, laptop users spent considerable time multitasking and that the laptop use posed a significant distraction to both users and fellow students. Most importantly, the level of laptop use was negatively related to several measures of student learning, including self-reported understanding of course material and overall course performance. (908)

This multitasking involved spending almost one-quarter of the lecture time checking e-mail, instant messaging, surfing the Internet, and playing games. As a result, their grades in these courses were 5% lower than were those who did not use a laptop. Another study found that students using laptops were less satisfied with their course than students who did not use them (Wurst, Smarkola and Gaffney 2008). Still, an evaluation of the potential benefits of laptops must also take into account the type of learning being undertaken. In general, laptops

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are often no better for taking notes because most students continue the bad habit of trying to write everything down without mentally processing it first (Jairam and Kiewra 2010). There have been some attempts to use laptops as part of group problem-solving collaborations (Nicol and MacLeod 2005), but not all course curricula lend themselves to this form of learning. Many university courses are content-oriented, especially lower-level ones. These lower courses also tend to be large, and this content sometimes provides a foundation for later learning abstract principles in advanced courses. Only after a certain amount of content is understood, and a number of principles are learned, can students usefully collaborate in solving hypothetical, abstract problems (see here Willingham 2009). In this case, students need to be patient while they work their way up learning curves. The claims of technology advocates about the universal utility of laptops simply interfere with this pedagogical necessity and do students a disservice by giving them unrealistic expectations. So, do students benefit from in-class laptop use? Based on the current literature, laptops may have certain applications in classroom settings, but generally not in large lecture classes when they are not an integral part of a lesson plan requiring all students to focus on educational material, except on an individual basis for those students who need them to compensate for special problems in writing notes. And, do students like in-class laptop use? Those who find lectures boring and prefer to entertain themselves might say yes, but many exusers who have become serious about their education report that they are happy to be free of the habit. For other students, it appears that they are an inconvenience, and as one report noted, “many students who own laptops do not carry them to class because they are bulky, heavy, and ‘uncool’” (The New Media Consortium 2006).

Clickers Clickers, also known as audience response systems, have become very popular in some large lecture courses. These devices allow students to select answers in a true/false or multiple-choice format in response to questions usually presented on PowerPoint slides. Do students prefer these devices to conventional classroom techniques of delivering and deliberating information? Studies are finding that about half of students indicate they enjoy clickers, but a sizable percentage is either ambivalent or downright hostile to them (Graham et al. 2007). A substantial minority of students, about 15-20%,

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report that they are not comfortable with clickers (Hoekstra 2008), and some 10% of students will not buy them even when they are part of a course requirement (Caldwell 2007). Some students experience difficulties with simple matters like registering their user-numbers properly. The advent of smart phones and computer tablets may address some of these problems, but latest technologies are also expensive to buy and use. The key factor affecting the acceptance of clickers by students seems to be whether they are used primarily for the benefit of the instructor (for example, for taking attendance or easy grading) or for the students (Graham et al. 2007). And, they must match the pedagogy. Clickers appear to be more suited to training students in certain vocational-type skills for which there are clearly correct answers, whether they are content-retention or problem-solving abilities (Caldwell 2007). Thus, clickers are more often found in the STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. On the other hand, good teachers using active-learning approaches, such as class discussions that involve students in reasoning through problems, have been able to enhance learning outcomes long before clickers came along. One study investigated this by comparing the same course taught with clickers versus active class discussions of material, finding no difference in learning outcomes (Martyn 2007). Do today’s students benefit from this technology? The published peer-reviewed research is mixed concerning the effectiveness of clickers in terms of both learning engagement and learning outcomes (Morling et al. 2008). Student reactions are more positive when clickers are used in ways that they perceive to be in their interest; these involve formative evaluations and active learning of the principles of a discipline (Carnaghan and Webb 2007). One study summed up the issues, noting that a certain amount of student engagement must precede the use of clickers, and that clickers cannot produce engagement on their own: The clicker itself does not ensure engaged, active students in the classroom, but rather is a tool that may facilitate that process, depending in part upon the expectations that students bring to the large lecture class … If students want to be involved and engaged, they are more likely to perceive clickers positively in terms of both learning and involvement processes. (Trees and Jackson 2007, 35)

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Podcasts Podcast technologies present more clear-cut issues than do clickers because they are basically an extra service provided to those students who are willing to view them, either as part of an online (or distance) course(Fernandez, Simo and Sallan 2009), or in a regular classroom course. Because of this, there is not the implicit coerciveness as in some clicker use. But, do current students prefer them to regular lectures? The answer appears to be a definite “no”, except in the cases where there is no choice, as in certain distance courses, and then it is not really a question of preference. Do students benefit from them in conjunction with attending classes? The answer to this is maybe, depending on how serious the student is and the type of programme in which it is used. When podcasts are made available, it appears to be mainly keen students who listen to, or view, them. Unmotivated students who do not bother to attend class or pay attention if they do attend are unlikely to take the time to listen to podcasts. At the same time, the research suggests that attendance is not seriously affected (Copley 2007; White 2009). Thus, the promise of this technology seems to be to help serious, engaged students to review material, a supposition supported by the fact that mainly professional schools are using them. However, good quality video podcasts are expensive to produce, and may require two camera people to film each lecture being ‘captured’, or a well set-up classroom with expensive start-up and overhead costs (Bowness 2008). From what has been published, students appear to be generally happy with podcasts – apparently much more so than with clickers. One source reports that clickers received an evaluation of 3.5 out of 5 in response to a survey question asking students how much the technology helped them learn, while podcasts were given a score of 4.5 out of 5 (Harpp 2008). However, the satisfaction is far from unanimous, with about one-quarter voicing various forms of dissatisfaction (Evans 2008). Do student benefit from podcasts? The available literature is mixed. Some studies find no increased benefits (for example, Copley 2007). Several studies have found that podcasts must be regularly used in conjunction with the lecture for enhanced learning (‘hybrid learning’; for example, see Carle, Jaffee and Miller 2009), while one study found that they can substitute for the lecture, so long as students are highly motivated and take notes (McKinney, Dyck and Luber 2009). Could podcasts replace lectures? It is doubtful, any more than did courses in previous decades when they became available on videotapes

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or on certain public television stations. Podcasts are simply a new generation of technology that can make certain types of learning easier by reinforcing information delivered by live lectures. Most students apparently like the structure of live lectures, and the option of interacting with instructors. If students could do without this structure, the lecture system would have broken down long ago: students would simply have gone to university libraries, where most accumulated knowledge has been stored, and read voraciously to educate themselves (see here Kolowich 2009b).

Online Courses Of all of the new technologies, the strongest claims have been made about online courses, perhaps because of the stakes: this delivery medium constitutes the heart of potentially lucrative enterprises that have drawn the attention of large corporations. Some ardent technology advocates would like to see all university-level instruction go online, so that students can learn at their own pace and with their own ‘style,’ presumably drawing much of their ancillary knowledge from the Internet. Indeed, in the United States online university programmes have been growing at a far faster pace than conventional classroombased ones. Online courses increased by between 9.7% and 36.5% annually between 2003 and 2007, as opposed to an annual growth of only about 1.5% per annum for classroom-based courses (Allen and Seaman 2008). About 20% of American students took at least one online course in 2007 – some four million students (DeBolt 2008). In spite of this, not all online start-ups have been successful (Terris 2009). But do today’s students really prefer online courses over conventional courses or even over low-tech distance courses of the past? Studies do show that most students are generally satisfied with online courses. One recent study found that students rated factors like convenience and flexibility highly; but they were less enthusiastic about discussion boards and e-mails among students, even though they missed the socialising aspect of regular classes (Walker and Kelly 2007). Points of dissatisfaction cited by students included feeling isolated because of a lack of face-to-face contact with their classmates and professors, feeling that there was too much reading and too many assignments, as well as insufficient constructive feedback. Encountering problems with the technology can also be an issue with many students, in terms of both software and hardware. In one study, only one-third of the students

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surveyed had no complaints (Walker and Kelly 2007; see also Bolliger and Wasilik 2009). Still, do students benefit from online courses over conventional courses? In assessing this question, it must first be acknowledged that online courses, by their very nature, should be smaller than most conventional lecture-type courses. Although they should optimally have fewer than 20 students, online courses typically have between 20 and 40 students, because beyond 40 students, the workload for the instructor becomes unmanageable (although some schools push numbers into the 80s). This is because, in the absence of the efficiency of the lecture hall, instructors must monitor each student and require participation of each student through a series of assignments and postings in discussion groups. Thus, it should not be surprising if research shows that online courses ‘engage’ students more. Without this engagement, students would be learning entirely on their own and simply taking tests. If that were the case, it is doubtful that online courses would be very popular. A recent exhaustive review of the literature by the U.S. Department of Education emphasised the need to make exact comparisons between online and classroom-based courses: Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. (U.S. Department of Education 2009, xvii)

In other words, a true comparison of online and classroom-based courses would require comparing courses of the same size and, to be totally fair, with the same number of assignments and other requirements. Yet this is rarely the case in the evaluation research reported in the literature, making these comparisons a matter of ‘apples and oranges’. Two recent peer-reviewed ‘reviews of reviews’ similarly argue that interpretations of studies evaluating the two forms of education are problematic (Abrami et al. 2006; Kanuka and Kelland 2008). In general, they found inconsistent results, ranging from no differences between online and classroom-based courses, some differences in specific instances, and small positive effects overall in favour of distance education, but with wide variation among the studies (that is, mixed findings, with at best a trivial effect – 4% – for distance learning overall, but with many studies revealing negative effects).

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Hence, it appears that online courses can be just as good, or bad, as classroom-based courses. Good courses in either medium have committed teachers who design the curriculum to engage students and move them up a learning curve, while giving realistic feedback about their achievements in the subject matter and their potential to further pursue it. Good courses also have committed students who are prepared to engage themselves in the subject matter and move up a learning curve, while listening to feedback about their performance and potential to further pursue that subject matter. In these respects it is telling that, while online courses enjoy some popularity among today’s students, there is no evidence of a mass exodus of from conventional courses.

The politics of online courses Before leaving the topic of online courses, several additional issues need to be considered to put the digital native debate in context because there are several important political issues involved in any decision to adopt them in a wholesale fashion. These issues arise because politicians and university administrators are currently taking notice of the digital native claims that promises online courses as a quick remedy to financial problems. Given that online courses are in fact no better or cheaper than conventional courses when exact comparisons are made, the popularity of the digital native rhetoric appears to be related in some ways to other political agendas, one of which involves the exploitation of faculty labour. The faculty who do, or could, teach these courses need to be considered in any implementation. Their satisfaction is obviously very important, because unhappy teachers are likely to breed unhappy students. Indeed, the research suggests that faculty satisfaction with online courses is highly correlated with student satisfaction, especially when students perform at higher levels (Bolliger and Wasilik 2009). Faculty are more satisfied when they feel that their students are actively involved, participate at appropriate levels, and maintain effective communication with them. Teacher satisfaction is also affected by institutional factors, such as recognition and adequate remuneration for their work, opportunity for promotion and tenure within a reward system, adequate technical support, and recognition that online teaching is more time-consuming than regular classroom-based courses – including release time for course development (Bolliger and Wasilik 2009). Yet these forms of support are often lacking, in cause or consequence of the fact that most

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faculty teaching these courses are in precarious contractual positions, involving low pay, benefits, and security (Eubanks 2009). In many institutions, the growing number of online course offerings and the expanding coterie of part-time and contract instructors is seen as the first warning shot across the bow in the impending war against tenure. In these institutions, online course are mainly taught mainly by part-time instructors shut out of full-time positions. These itinerate academics have to cobble together packages of part-time work to earn a living wage. In addition to the low pay, online courses can be more time-consuming for instructors than regular courses, both in terms of set-up and monitoring student communication (answering e-mails can be a burdensome task that may have to be completed in evenings and on weekends, or may displace other work to those times). Thus, it should be no surprise that there are widespread suspicions that moves toward online courses are part of a money grab, especially when universities partner with the corporations that deliver them (Stripling 2009).

Conclusions On both counts, the claims of technology advocates fall short: there is no evidence of a radical generational shift or difference in techsavviness or ICT usage patterns in favour of those born after 1980, and the pedagogical value of the various new technologies is less than what has been declared. At most, about one quarter of those born in the last 30 years have the level of acuity with the new technologies that correspond with the ‘digital native’ stereotype, and all of the technologies have limitations: laptops do not universally engage students or increase students achievement (they can actually have the opposite effect); the effectiveness of clickers depends on why they are used and on the motivations of the teachers and students using them; podcasts can reinforce lectures, but they can be expensive to produce and do not interest all students; and online courses do not offer a financial savings or pedagogical advantage over classroom-based course of the same size and academic standard – they can offer improvements over the old forms of distance learning, but they also have the potential to proletarianise the professoriate. The evidence examined above suggests that while the new technologies can facilitate learning, they cannot replace teachers, as some would have it. Ardent technologies advocates like Prensky and Tapscott have it wrong: the Internet is a library, not a teacher. In fact, there is strong evidence that the majority of current students actually

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need to be taught how to use these technologies more effectively in educational settings. In this respect, the ‘digital native’ stereotype has done harm to many current students who are expected to function above their computer competency levels. Jones and Healing (2010) offer the following commentary on the harm that is being done to current students: The … Digital Native arguments rest on a simplistic form of causality suggesting that technological change in the world leads to changes in attitudes, and even brain function as well as behaviour. This kind of argument is not new and generational metaphors have been used repeatedly to capture a sense of shifts in culture, from baby boomers to millennials … In popular use, such overgeneralizations are largely benign, but when they become an accepted and an even received wisdom, they hold dangers. Policy-makers make use of generational metaphors to describe future intakes of students and to frame plans for the development of educational infrastructures. Teachers begin to design their courses for a presumed audience of [digitally savvy] students. (ibid. 354)

Why then, does the stereotype persist? Several explanations for this persistence have been offered by other social scientists having reviewed the evidence and found it lacking. Borrowing from Stanley Cohen’s (1972) concept of the moral panic, Bennett et al. (2008) argue that ardent technology advocates have created this form of panic by evoking a media-driven sense of urgency claiming the need for immediate changes in education systems (moral panics are characterised by a hiatus between evidence and reality that favours zealotry over reason). More recently, Bennett and Maton (2010) have offered two additional explanations for why the current discussion has been resistant to “the intellectual rigour it requires and deserves: ‘historical amnesia’ and the ‘certainly–complacency spiral’” (ibid., 328). Historical amnesia involves the ‘forgetting’ of past claims about how technologies would revolutionise education (for example, the impact of television in the 1950s and 1960s), while the certainlycomplacency spiral involves the repetition of an idea so often that it is taken to be self-evident. With respect to the digital native concept, they describe this as follows: Belief replaces considered debate, and echoing commonsense perceptions of fundamental change and citations of similar claims made by other authors’ substitutes for research evidence. Each proclamation

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of the existence and needs of ‘digital natives’ thereby iteratively amplifies and reinforces the sense of certainty and encourages intellectual complacency. Rather than representing bold conjectures to be tested, claims become unquestioningly repeated as if established facts, restricting the possibility of open, rational debate. Intellectual complacency over the veracity of claims (whether digital natives exist, whether they take the form ascribed and whether education needs changing in the ways called for) is masked by the urgency and stridency with which calls for change are made. (ibid., 328)

Finally, although the above literature review may have simply exposed some misconceptions that have created unfortunate biases, the worst case scenario is that certain interest groups have agendas that have nothing to do with the desire to deliver high-quality education to otherwise alienated students, and everything to do with the marketisation of education defined by the hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism (see here Levidow 2002). Countries that currently face huge cuts to educational budgets may be particularly vulnerable to these promises of simple solutions, especially if politicians and policy-makers are naïve enough to accept the myths about digital natives and their supposed preference for online course delivery. As revealed above, there are numerous problems with a wholesale adoption of the digital native rhetoric, so it is particularly galling if what is being promoted are cost-cutting measures that seek to deliver low-budget mass educations at the expense of students and their teachers. Indeed, if the rhetoric is uncritically accepted at the national policy level, we risk handing over control of our educational systems to the corporations that control these technologies and their delivery. If countries do this, they will not only allow these corporations to define pedagogies, but they will allow these corporations to delegitimise university autonomy in defining academic standards and learning outcomes, especially for liberal education. The liberal arts and sciences will not likely survive if the university system is defined as a virtual marketplace. Moreover, if universities are left to survive in an unregulated marketplace, countries may find themselves in a situation that characterizes the current ‘Wild West’ situation in the USA with respect to online schools like Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix where economically disadvantaged students have been driven into debt pursuing degrees of dubious value (see here, for example, Blumenstyk 2010). Players in this for-profit marketplace have made it clear that they intend to de-legitimise traditional education and replace it with their

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own delivery formats and curricula. If politicians are naïve enough to go for these quick-fix solutions, we may witness something like a ‘hostile takeover’ where a corporation buys its competition and then shuts it down, closing up shop and firing now-redundant employees, as has been happening in the USA in the for-profit sector (Frontline 2010). If this spreads to other countries, university systems around the world might become dependent on multinational corporations, which in turn will control curriculum based on profitability. These corporations will then be free to produce a ‘hidden curriculum’ for the manufacture of consent to their (neo-liberal) interests. In addition to a loss of the university as a place for free enquiry unfettered by means-ends logic, this would be disastrous for many students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds whose labour market vulnerability will be further exploited, and it is bad news for teachers, whose role will be de-legitimised. Individually, teachers forced to teach online courses will face further wage exploitation, and reduced career security and benefits. Professors forced to turn their lectures into podcasts and courses into online packages might lose their intellectual property rights. Collectively, the teaching profession could experience a further proletarianisation characterised by technological labour-displacement and a loss of collective bargaining. Before we get to this point, we must all ask politicians who might be tempted by quick technological fixes: “Do we really want to hand over control of our education systems to corporations?” In this worstcase scenario, the digital native rhetoric is merely a Trojan horse that gets corporations into our universities and allows them to take them over, sacking them first.

References Abrami, Philip C., Robert M. Bernard, Anne Wade, Richard F. Schmid, Eugene Borokhovski, Rana Tamim, Michael Surkes, Gretchen Lowerison, Dai Zhang, Iolie Nicolaidou, Sherry Newman, Lori Wozney, and Anna Peretiatkowicz. 2006. “A Review of E-Learning in Canada: A Rough Sketch of the Evidence, Gaps and Promising Directions”. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 32(3): 1-70. Allen, Elaine, and Jeff Seaman. 2008. Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States. Needham, MA: The Sloan Consortium.

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Bauerlein, Mark. 2008. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. New York: Penguin. Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton, and Lisa Kervin. 2008. “The ‘Digital Natives’ Debate: A Critical Review of the Evidence”. British Journal of Educational Technology 39(5): 775-86. Bennett, Sue, and Karl Maton. 2010. “Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology experiences”. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 26(5): 321-31. Blumenstyk, Goldie. 2010. “Kaplan Suspends Enrollment at Campuses Where Federal Investigators Found Recruiting Abuses”. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 6. [http://chronicle.com/article/Kaplan -Suspends-Enrollment-at/123835; accessed 27.04.2014]. Bolliger, Doris U., and Oksana Wasilik. 2009. “Factors Influencing Faculty Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning in Higher Education”. Distance Education 30(1): 103-16. Bowness, Suzanne. 2008. “How Technology Is Transforming the Lecture”. University Affairs December: 14-17. Brown Cheryl, and Laura Czerniewicz. 2010. “Debunking the ‘digital native’: beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy”. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 26(5): 357-69. Caldwell, Jane. 2007. “Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips.” CBE – Life Sciences Education 6: 9-20. Carle, Adam C., David Jaffee, and Deborah Miller. 2009. “Engaging College Science Students and Changing Academic Achievement with Technology: A Quasi-Experimental Preliminary Investigation”. Computers & Education 52(2): 376-80. Carnaghan, Carla, and Alan Webb. 2007. “Investigating the Effects of Group Response Systems on Student Satisfaction, Learning, and Engagement in Accounting Education”. Issues in Accounting Education 22(3): 391-409. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Copley, Jonathan. 2007. “Audio and Video Podcasts of Lectures for Campus-Based Students: Production and Evaluation of Student Use”. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 44(4): 387-99. DeBolt, David. 2008. “Universities See Double-Digit Increase in Online Enrollment, Study Finds”. Chronicle of Higher Education,

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November 12. [http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3457/univ ersities-see-double-digit-increase-in-online-enrollment-studyfinds?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en; accessed 27.04.2014]. Eubanks, Michelle Rupe. 2009. “Online Study Ups Workload for Instructors”. TimesDaily.com, April 18. Evans, Chris. 2008. “The Effectiveness of M-Learning in the Form of Podcast Revision Lectures in Higher Education”. Computers & Education 50(2): 491-98. Fernandez, Vicence, Pep Simo, and Jose M. Sallan. 2009. “Podcasting: A New Technological Tool to Facilitate Good Practice In Higher Education”. Computers & Education 53(2): 385-92. Frontline (PBS Documentary). 2010. College Inc. [http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/; accessed 02.12.2010]. Gomez, Jeff. 2007. Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. New York: Macmillan. Graham, Charles R., Tonya R. Tripp, Larry Seawright, and George L. Joeckel III. 2007. “Empowering or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems”. Active Learning in Higher Education 8(3): 233-58. Grant, Donna M., Alisha D. Malloy, and Marianne C. Murphy. 2009. “A Comparison of Student Perceptions of their Computer Skills to their Actual Abilities”. Journal of Information Technology Education 8: 141-60. Harpp, David. 2008. “Let’s Enhance the Classroom Experience: We Should Provide Whatever Assistance we can To Empower Students, Including Recorded Lectures”. University Affairs March: 40. Helsper, Ellen Johanna, and Rebecca Eynon. 2010. “Digital Natives: Where Is The Evidence?” British Educational Research Journal 36(3): 503-20. Hoekstra, Angel. 2008. “Vibrant Student Voices: Exploring Effects of the Use of Clickers in Large College Courses”. Learning, Media and Technology 33(4): 329-41. Hu, Winnie. 2007. “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops”. New York Times 4 May [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=2 ; accessed 25.02.2014]. Internet World Stats. 2010. Usage and Population Statistics. [http:// www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm; accessed 25.02.2014]. Ipsos-Reid Survey. 2008. Canadian Teenagers Are Leading the Online Revolution? Maybe Not… 27 February. [http://www.ipsos-na.com/ news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=3829; accessed 25.02.2014].

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Jairam, Dharmananda, and Kenneth Kiewra. 2010. “Helping Students Soar to Success on Computers: An Investigation of the SOAR Study Method for Computer-Based Learning”. Journal of Educational Psychology 102(3): 601-14. Jones, Chris, and Graham Healing. 2010. “Net Generation Students: Agency and Choice and the New Technologies”. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 26(5): 344-56. Kanuka, Heather, and Jennifer Kelland. 2008. “Has E-Learning Delivered on Its Promises? Expert Opinion in the Impact of ELearning in Higher Education”. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 38(1): 45-65. Kennedy, Gregor, Terry Judd, Barney Dalgarno, and Jenny Waycott. 2010. “Beyond natives and immigrants: exploring types of net generation students”. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 26(5): 332-43. Kirschner, Paul A., and Aryn C. Karpinski. 2010. “Facebook and academic performance”. Computers in Human Behavior 26(6): 1237-45. Kolikant, Yifat Ben-David. 2010. “Digital natives, better learners? Students’ beliefs about how the Internet influenced their ability to learn”. Computers in Human Behavior 26(6): 1384-91. Kolowich, Steve. 2009a. “Hybrid Education 2.0”. Inside Higher Ed28, December. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/28/Carnegie; accessed 25.02.2014]. —. 2009b. “Fans and Fears of ‘Lecture Capture’”. Inside Higher Ed9, November.[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/09/captur e; accessed 25.02.2014]. —. 2010. “Professors and Social Media”. Inside Higher Ed 4, May. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/04/socialmedia#ixzz 1bQnthtHq; accessed 25.02.2014]. —. 2011. “What students don’t know”. Inside Higher Ed 22, August. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/22/erial_study_of_st udent_research_habits_at_illinois_university_libraries_reveals_alar mingly_poor_information_literacy_and_skills; accessed 28.02.2014]. Levidow, Les. 2002. “Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-strategies”. In The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets and Management, edited by Kevin Robins, and Frank Webster, 227-48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Martyn, Margie. 2007. “Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach”. Educause Quarterly 30(2): 71-5. McKinney, Dani, Jennifer L. Dyck, and Elise S. Luber. 2009. “iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?”. Computers & Education 52(3): 617-23. Morling, Beth, Meghan McAuliffe, Lawrence Cohen, and Thomas M. DiLorenzo. 2008. “Efficacy of Personal Response Systems (‘Clickers’) in Large, Introductory Psychology Classes”. Teaching of Psychology 35(1): 45-50. Nicol David, and Iain MacLeod. 2005. “Using a Shared Workspace and Wireless Laptops to Improve Collaborative Project Learning in an Engineering Design Class”. Computers & Education 44(4): 459-75. Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. 2008. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. New York: Basic Books. Pashler, Harold, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork. 2008. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence”. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9(3): 105-119. Prensky, Marc. 2001. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. On the Horizon 9(5): 1-6. —. 2006. Don’t Bother Me, Mom  I’m Learning: How Computer and Video Games Are Preparing Your Kids For Twenty-first Century Success – and How You Can Help! Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers. Stripling, Jack. 2009. “So Many Students, So Little Time”. Inside Higher Ed, 24 March. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/ 03/24/heh; accessed 25.02.2014]. Tapscott, Don. 2009. Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World. New York: McGraw-Hill. Terris, Ben. 2009. “Online University, Struggling to Attract Students, Loses Investors as Well”. Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus, 9 December. [http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Online-UniversityStruggling/9148/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm _campaign=Feed%3A+chronicle%2; accessed 25.02.2014]. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL). 2011. [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/22/erial_study_ of_student_research_habits_at_illinois_university_libraries_reveals _alarmingly_poor_information_literacy_and_skills; accessed 25.02.2014]. The New Media Consortium, 2006. The Horizon Report: 2006 Edition. Stanford, CA: New Media Consortium.

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CHAPTER SIX TECH-SAVVY YOUTH AND PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH IN ‘ISCAPES’ KERRY MALLAN, PARLO SINGH AND NATASHA GIARDINA Introduction New media technologies now form a central part of many young people’s lives, both in and away from school. The increasing take-up of home computers and hand held mobile devices (smart phones, tablets) with high-speed connections in many western countries and the increased use of information communication technologies (ICT) as part of the leisure lifestyles and school-based experiences of many young people have given rise to epithets such as ‘tech-savvy’, ‘digital natives’, ‘cyberkids’, ‘google generation’, and ‘net generation’ or ‘n-geners’ to describe young people (see Holmes 2011). Furthermore, the “time-space compression” (Harvey 1989) associated with developments in global communication systems offers possibilities for networked connectedness for youth, ushering in new forms of communication, identity formation, and social relations. For researchers engaged in the study of youth, these developments in young people’s increasing participation in ICT open up numerous research possibilities not only in the way young people engage with new media technologies, but also in what their participation with these new media means for them. Documenting the experiences, practices and social engagements of youth in new iScapes requires the development of a conceptual and methodological framework that integrates the everyday experiences of youth with the multiple space-place connections facilitated by new media and network ICT systems. The term iScape attempts “to capture the ubiquity of technology as it weaves into the fabric of everyday life, especially in relation to how individuals use the Internet to establish interconnectivity and construct identities” (Mallan, Ashford, and Singh

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2010, 265; Stewart 2007). We use the term iScape building on Appadurai’s (1996) use of the metaphor ‘scapes’ to explain the complex dialogic construction of social environments through which information, technology, people, money and ideas move. Briefly, Appadurai (1996) posits five scapes to analytically distinguish between the global flows of people (ethnoscape), technology (technoscape), capital (financescape), images (mediascape), and ideologies (ideoscape). Three concepts, namely technoscape, mediascape and ideoscape, were particularly useful to our study of ‘tech-savvy’ youth navigating identities and social relations in online/offline spaces. By technoscape, Appadurai refers to the global connectedness of ‘smart’ technological hardware, which in turn facilitates the rapid, almost instant, movement of information (ideoscape), images (mediascape), money (financescape) and sounds across what were once impervious boundaries. A number of the youth interviewed in our study spoke of the ways in which e-technologies such as Skype1, Facebook, email and texting were used to maintain social relations with friends even though they may not be located in the same geographic place. Information was sourced regularly through Google and Wikipedia, and entertainment was via online music, movie and television sites. While Appadurai sees scapes as the ‘building blocks’ of contemporary imagined worlds, we conceive of iScapes, not as building blocks, but as interconnecting networks through which identity work is undertaken. The conceptual flexibility of iScapes encompasses both the imagination and the individual, and concerns particularly how individuals imagine themselves as they navigate and experience these iScapes. While Appadurai’s argument is concerned with the global political economy and the need for consideration of the shifting relationship between human movement, technological flow, and financial transfers, our interest is more localised. Rather than utilise technoscape as it is conceptualised by Appadurai, we see iScapes as a way of capturing the different zones that young people engage with as they negotiate the constraints and incentives of a technologically mediated existence. Just as Appadurai considers both the relationships and disjunctures between his five scapes, we too conceive of young people’s movement across iScapes as inevitably connected, but also separated. Thus the concept of iScapes refers to the construction of individual subjectivity or identity within and between the scapes of etechnologies and landscapes. The “i” refers to both to the individualism of the Western self, as well as the digital construction of “me” in and through the e-spaces of technoscapes – MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so forth (Mallan, Ashford and Singh 2010, 267). 1

Morphed into FaceTime on Apple devices for some users.

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Crucially, we propose that digital environments do not replace other local-geographic spaces (for example, shopping malls, cinema, schools), but extend and integrate these social spaces across online and offline worlds. The symbolic boundaries between off and on line worlds may be strongly or weakly insulated in various temporal-spatial relations. For example, we found in our study that parents insisted on strong insulation boundaries between online and offline times and places. Mobile devices could not be used at the dinner table, online activity had to cease at 9pm, and youth were not permitted to visit particular websites. In this way, parents exercised control over the flows of communication across spaces in the geographically bounded place of the home. Similarly, although all students at one school were expected to purchase and bring a laptop computer to school each day, the rules regulating the use of this technology were strongly policed. These rules stipulated when and where the wireless connectivity of the technology could be activated, which sites could be visited and how much time could be spent at these sites. As Boyd and Marwick (2011, 5) argue, “finding a way to manage boundaries” is an important challenge for teens. This challenge is particularly complex in relation to navigating social networking sites (SNS) or networked publics because material (texts, photographs) uploaded onto these sites is potentially accessible to multiple audiences (friends, family, teachers, employers, researchers). While some commentators have suggested that teens do not value privacy, as evidenced by the volume of material uploaded onto public networked sites, our study revealed that young people were very aware of how they represented themselves in these public spaces. As Marwick and Boyd (2011, 114) argue, “the need for variable self-presentation is complicated by increasingly mainstream social media technologies that collapse multiple contexts and bring together commonly distinct audiences.” The term ‘context collapse’ refers to the “flatting of multiple audiences in one” (ibid, 122) – a condition that has been exacerbated by time-space compression and the popularity of networked public sites or social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so forth. The collapsing of contexts then poses problems for how young people represent themselves in networked publics, specifically how they navigate around the symbolic boundaries of multiple audiences. Marwick and Boyd (2011, 116, 119) suggest that “social network site users select ‘markers of cool’ based on an imagined audience of friends and peers” as part of a larger process of using social media “instrumentally for self-conscious commodification”. So while material is shared in networked publics, it may be coded in particular ways to ensure that is accessible by only

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specific audiences. Tactics used to navigate these spaces include, “creating ‘fakesters’ to obscure real identities”, “strategically concealing information”, “coding communication to strategically appeal to different audiences” (ibid., 122-123). In this way, young people constitute boundaries in spaces such as navigating publics (SNS including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) that appear as if they have no boundaries. So if material shared on networked publics is potentially accessible by multiple audiences, the key questions becomes what is shared, with whom, how, when, where and why? And what happens when contexts collapse? These questions were also central to our own research engagement with young people constructing identities in online/offline spaces. Specifically we were interested in constructing a number of contexts, offline (focus groups, interviews) and online (survey, discussion forums, narrative profiles) to engage youth in sharing accounts of identity construction. We envisaged that ‘doing ethnography’ in this way would produce tools and artefacts that not only elicited information useful for our research project but was also useful to the young people participating in the study (Law 2004; Stewart 2007).

Researching youth identity in online/offline spaces: Navigating boundaries Researchers working in youth studies and new childhood studies over the past two decades have developed a set of perspectives that challenge dominant developmental paradigms, as well as provided exemplary research which addresses the following key issues; the complexity of power and exploitation; empowering strategies for youth and children; commitment to reflexivity as part of a researcher’s interrogation of self and an acknowledgement of young people as ‘reflexive social agents’ (Hey 1997; McRobbie 1991). A unifying thread that runs through many of these studies into children and youth is how to engage in forms of participatory research, whereby young people are recognised as agents of knowledge about their own lives and are active participants in the research endeavour. This paper focuses on the nature of participatory research and how it can be understood and employed when researching children and youth. The aim is to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded discussion of participatory research methodologies with respect to investigating the dynamic and evolving phenomenon of young people growing up in iScapes. Participatory research with children and young people emerges from a wider societal and political understanding of children’s rights, respons-

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ibilities and relations to adults. From a policy perspective, moves to acknowledge children as citizens, who have equal rights to be heard, are integral to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC 1989). Kellett et al. (2004) note that interest in conducting participatory research with young people has increased since the UNCRC. However, as we discuss below, notions of what constitutes participatory research, the motivations for and perceived outcomes of listening to the voices of youth and children, and the practical considerations of research designs vary markedly across research in the field. Long standing issues such as power inequality, constructions of childhood and youth, and notions of children’s rights continue to be negotiated between the various parties and their respective interests in the research process. We turn now to our study, which attempted to adopt the principles of participatory research to involve high school students in innovative and agential forms of technologically-based research collaboration. Over the period of initial data collection (2006-2008) and subsequent data analysis (2009) we have witnessed massive changes to the online/digital environments or iScapes, including the growth of social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and the rapid take up of smart phones using a variety of platforms, and wireless networks with accelerated speeds of download and upload of data. In keeping with our focus on research methodology, we consider more the processes rather than the outcomes of these studies.

Growing up in networked spaces: A participatory research project Our study’s focus on online and offline worlds raises significant issues that relate directly and indirectly to youth’s participation in Australia’s global knowledge-based economy, particularly their engagement with online technologies, and their experiences as consumers and producers of cultural materials and practices. By attending to both online and offline activities, we seek to understand how cultural technologies, both ‘global’ and ‘local’, are resources drawn upon differentially by young people in the process of developing strategies for constructing social identities, managing social relationships, and engaging in creative activities. Our research concentrates specifically on students drawn from four high schools and the multiple and diverse online and offline worlds they inhabit. The data collected for the initial study comprised two urban and two regional sites in Queensland, Australia, with a total of approximately 170 students participating in the study. The aim of our research was to examine how youth understand their own constructions of personal and

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collective identities and relationships as they negotiate the shifting social terrain of online and offline spaces. The purpose and scope of this chapter does not allow space to engage with the data analysis and interpretation that arise from these objectives. Rather, our dual focus is on the participatory research design of the project and the self-reflexive account of our methods and approach. As the preceding discussion explained, participatory approach aims to be democratic and non-hierarchical – a goal which is rarely, if ever, fully realised. By adopting a participatory approach to methodology, we felt confident that youth in our project would be given ‘voice’ in speaking about the culturally-complex ways they construct their identities and how these are bound up with the locally and globally grounded specificities of everyday life. In other words, we aimed to develop a research that was would provide opportunities for students to speak freely about their ideas in both focus groups and online forums. With these considerations in mind our research was designed to counter the passive subject position, and adult-youth power imbalance, by engaging youth in an active way so that they would become narrators of their own experiences and knowledges. Our research therefore supported the fundamental idea that youth are active agents in many of the online and offline spaces they inhabit (see Jans 2004). Our research methodology extended participation to the school communities by involving multiple avenues for communication and feedback from teachers and parents. We achieved this through working with teachers from the schools who volunteered to be the ‘liaison teachers’ for the project, and by briefing and dissemination sessions we offered the schools at the commencement and conclusion of the project. The diagram below (Figure 1) illustrates a macro-level participatory model that informed our research approach. Its inclusion here is intended to provide a broad map of the processes and stages of the research design from conceptualisation – implementation – review. Our research design and methodology developed from the above macro-level framework and proceeded on the assumption that the methodology would ensure youth’s active participation, provide for multiple approaches to data collection and analysis that are responsive to both the changing dynamics of a network society and current theorising of identity under conditions of liquid modernity. Our research approach combined traditional ethnographic approaches (for example, case study and use of artefacts) with more recent adaptations (for example, netnography) that are conducive to behaviour in online environments. Netnography is a specific way of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in

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virtual environments, using “rigorous online guidelines combined with an innate flexibility” (Kozinets 2002, 63). The procedure contains a number of steps and stages, but generally involves identifying and evaluating online forums or communities that will provide the ‘site’ of the research, collecting direct and observed data, and data analysis, contextualisation and interpretation. Netnography distinguishes itself from face-to-face ethnographic studies because it “is based primarily on the observation of textual discourse” (Kozinets 2002, 64). The research website was designed to provide such a site for netnographic analysis as well as serve as a networking space (similar to Facebook) whereby students and researchers would interact with each other. Figure 1. Macro-level framework to guide the participatory research

Online/offline modes of participatory research: Advantages and limitations Three fundamental principles were core to our model of participatory research, and they are outlined below: x Links with the school communities were maintained from the outset through: information and dissemination about the research via faceto-face meetings; correspondence (with students, parents, teachers,

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and principals); professional development sessions; and circulation of printed outcomes of the research. x Reflexivity was built into both the research data collection and analysis phases to ensure that non-exploitative relations between researchers and students and schools were maintained and research methods ensured reflexivity by asking questions such as: Whose interests are being served? Who benefits? Whose voices are heard? x Transparency of process was maintained by a strict adherence to ethical procedures and guidelines and the public dissemination of research papers. We ensured that there was a commitment to a shared purpose and that we were receptive to the needs and special circumstances of the schools and their students (for example, respectful of timetable commitments, school bus timetables, and extra-curricular activities). Therefore, by maintaining a commitment to shared agency throughout the research we attempted to create a partnership that minimised dominantsubordinate or active-passive relationships between researchers and participants. Despite adhering to these principles, some of the limitations of a participatory approach have provided us with an awareness of the paradoxes inherent in such research practices. Mannion (2007) argues that the discourses surrounding participatory research with youth must themselves be subjected to critique in order to reveal the relations of power inherent within them. One of the issues Mannion raises relates to the intergenerational interactions inherent in participatory research across both spatial (occurring within politicised and often shifting spaces) and relational (as an expression of the power relations between adults and children) domains (2007,406). In terms of Mannion’s intergenerational argument, the previous section discussed how our project attempted to flatten power hierarchies. However, we acknowledge that the very nature of academic research with school-age students makes this a somewhat impossible endeavour, despite the best intentions. Our project encouraged participation in two separate spatial zones: (i) by making informal focus group and reflexive interview spaces available for the voices of young people to be heard about issues that directly affect them; and (ii) by developing a purposeful, interactive online space, whereby through the research website, participants could respond to and ask questions on the discussion forums with their peers and the research team. The first participatory spatial zone of the project – making the voices of youth heard in focus group interviews – was accomplished to a certain

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degree by the design of the semi-structured interviews in the first instance; and, in the second instance, through the publication and presentation of the recorded data. It can be argued, however, that students’ voices are ventriloquised through our own academic discourse, which frames their comments through a theoretical lens that we have found most amenable for interpretation and analysis. Despite this inevitable outcome, an equally valid way of reflecting on this data flow is to conceptualise it within Castells’ (2000) notion of landscapes of global liquid modernity. In this way, the data flows (from collection to analysis to dissemination) enable the voices (adult and youth) to intermingle and move across different discursive terrains – journals, conference venues, professional development forums, university lecture theatres. Thus, rather than reify research knowledge, the flow of data can be seen as merging disparate knowledges that are forged generationally, experientially, and analytically. The second participatory spatial zone – the research website – contains two main parts: an ‘open to the public’ area for publicising the project, listing research outcomes and providing biographies and contact details of the project team members, and a secure area designed for participant interaction and data collection. Within this secure area, participants could complete and submit their responses to the online narrative profile and also participate in online discussion forums, even to the extent of suggesting their own topics for discussion. To access the secure area, each participant had a unique username and password; this was contained on a special participant ID card that was issued upon the receipt of a signed permission form (see Figure 2). Participants liked the idea of membership in the project, particularly as this membership was represented by the ID cards: it was informally observed that participants were eager to show off their ID cards to their non-participating peers. Yet, despite their eagerness for membership, actual response rates for the discussion forums were minimal, which made it difficult to fulfil this participatory aspect of the research design and to conduct the netnography. Response rates for the online narrative profile activity were higher, but only when the activity was administered by the research assistant in face-to-face sessions during class time. This lurking membership versus active participation issue complicated the practical administration of the project, but at the same time, clearly reflected wider trends evident in the data. For example, students commonly reported that they enjoyed watching YouTube and followed the site assiduously, but few participants reported uploading material to the site. Thus, the research website, like other social networking sites, can be seen as a paradoxical space that lures participants with the promise of belonging, but in reality

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individuals chose their own particular forms of participation or nonparticipation. To extrapolate to the broader societal context, Wegner’s (2002, 1) point that “if it is true that the cultures of modernity are marked by universalist aspirations… it is equally true that they have given rise to all kinds of particularisms” offers a way to consider the students’ actions ‘as tech-savvy’ youth within the participatory framework. Figure 2. Sample ID card for student participation

Growing Up In Networked Spaces An ARC Discovery Project at QUT and Griffith University Website: https://olt.qut.edu.au/edu/networkedspaces Participant ID: Username: Password: Please go to the website to take part in the study! Valid until: December 2008 Direct enquiries to: XXXXXXXXXX

Tech-savvy youth: The myth of collective identities Youth’s apparent enthusiastic take up of ICTs has resulted in them being defined as the ‘tech savvy generation’ (Dolezalek 2003) and other cyber-related epithets as we suggested in our introduction. As Foth and Adkins note, “in today’s networked society, e-mail, instant messaging, online e-chats and other applications are instrumental in establishing and maintaining social ties” (2006, 117). The popular media have also been instrumental in fuelling the discussion about youth and their high levels of integration with new media technologies often promoting a ‘cyber-kid’ discourse which “propagates a belief that young people are universally, naturally and deeply engaged with the internet and its potentialities” (Holmes 2011). However, the media are only partly responsible as social theorists similarly coin and circulate names for youth groups and subcultures based on membership and style (see Hebdige 1979; Sweetman 2004). Drawing on Britzman (1991), Cook-Sather notes how educators

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and researchers tend to fall back on “well-worn and commonsensical images that are, in fact, social constructs” (2002, 12). Our research project grappled with the notion of tech-savvy youth in both theoretical and practical ways. Initially, we defined this group generationally, in the sense that today’s youth constituted a tech-savvy generation. However, we also acknowledged from the outset that young people’s actual access to technology remains uneven. Implicitly, the parameters of the project assumed that the subject group would be young people with access to and knowledge of a variety of technological applications. To achieve this ideal sample, we relied on local knowledge of colleagues for nominating schools that were technologically progressive in their teaching and learning programmes. In our initial approach to schools, our attempts to define the concept of tech-savvy youth to principals, liaison teachers and participants proved a challenging exercise. In letters and research applications to schools and education authorities, the project was defined in the following terms: “The research study will investigate how young people construct their own identities and form social relationships in their everyday lives, especially as this may involve technology.” Here, the term tech-savvy was included in the title of the project, but not in its description, with the resulting implication that tech-savvy is an automatic quality of youth. Explanations of the project to liaison teachers tended to focus on youth’s knowledge of and involvement with new media technologies. In emails, phone conversations and meetings, members of the project team talked about young people’s use of social networking sites, instant messaging, internet searching, mobile phone use, and multi-tasking skills. A further challenge we faced in the early stages of the project was how to define our ideal subject group (tech-savvy youth) in a way that potential participants could identify with and would find appealing. This element of identification was crucial when we were seeking eligible participants. One successful strategy we used was the creation and dissemination of a promotional DVD, which was shown to students in class groups and at assemblies as part of a larger presentation to promote the project and encourage participation. Instead of simply defining tech-savvy youth explicitly, the DVD explored the concept of tech-savvy youth implicitly by incorporating a wide variety of popular cultural artefacts such as images, song lyrics, video, news articles, and excerpts from teen fiction, and also by its fast pace, strong musical score and quickly cycling imagery.

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Figure 3. Screen capture images from promotional DVD

The DVD was enthusiastically received by students and successful in increasing awareness of the project and encouraging student participation. We suggest that this might be because the multi-sensory, fast-paced, and pop-culture-saturated nature of the presentation echoed the media-rich environments our target group already inhabit. However, in noting the appeal of the DVD for students we are mindful of its seductive marketing potential and our complicity in its mass media manipulation. As Willis asks in relation to the complex issue of semiotic possibilities and cultural commodification: “Are the young becoming culturally literate and expressive in new ways, or are they merely victims of every turn of cultural marketing and mass media manipulation?” (2003, 405). While students appeared to recognise the ‘hailing’ in an Althusserian sense of the DVD, it did not necessarily mean that they understood or agreed with definitions of themselves as being tech-savvy. Indeed, the data reveal that participant knowledge about what it means to be tech-savvy remained relatively low. In the online narrative profile, respondents were asked what tech-savvy meant, and also whether they considered themselves to be tech-savvy. Of the 57 students who participated, 60% did not think that the term was appropriate to describe themselves. In analysis,

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this may have been because many students did not understand what the term meant: 23 students specifically mentioned in their responses that they did not know what tech-savvy meant, and field observations by the research assistant during administration of the activity in schools reveal at least six instances where students paused in completing the narrative profile to look up the term tech-savvy on Google. However, in one of the focus groups, nine participants discussed appropriate terminology for their generations, and described themselves as “cyber kids”, “the cyber extreme generation” and “Generation Z”, and in nearly all the focus groups, participants mentioned their skills with technology with regards to the perceived technological incompetence of parents and teachers. Our findings here are consistent with those of Holmes (2011) who completed a study on youth Internet usage in the UK. Holmes (2011) challenged cyberkid discourses which constructed a generational divide in terms of technology usage, arguing that “young people are not all broadly engaged with the internet and, secondly, where broad use is occurring, this can take divergent forms” (ibid., 1115). This point about the discursive construction of categories in participatory research is taken up by Mannion, who draws on the insights of Christensen (2004), to argue that we need to “reflexively investigate our own ideas about what it means to be ‘an adult’, including the categories used to describe generational categories” (2007, 408-9). The generational relationship can also be understand in terms of Giddens’ comment that self-identity has become “a reflectively organized endeavour” (1990, 5). Furthermore, as Beck (1994, 13) notes, “individuals must [now] produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves”. In other words, ‘tech-savvy’ may not be part of youth’s particular narrative of identity that Giddens regards comes with the lifestyle of living in late modernity. As researchers, we came to realise that in our attempts to design a project that was grounded on certain assumptions about young people, we needed to remain mindful of the condition under which our knowledge was produced, and be prepared to destabilise that knowledge when the situation demanded it.

Concluding comments Participatory research, like other philosophical approaches to qualitative research, can fall between the crack that separates intention from action. The conditions which contribute to this disjuncture are varied: institutional (such as funding timelines and guidelines), generational (for example, the inevitable mismatch between world views of researcher and

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researched); ideological (such as constructions of youth and the attribution of labels and young people’s own labels and constructions of themselves); and practical (for example, negotiating agreed spaces for young people’s exercise of agency within competing conditions for ethical consent from schools, parents, universities). Despite the ostensibly inclusive and empowering aims of participatory research, such projects continue to face many conceptual and practical challenges. Children’s participation in research may be understood in a variety of ways, from providing spaces for the voices of young people to be heard in their own terms, through to projects which are co-designed and co-conducted by adults and children, and even to projects completely designed and conducted by young people. Yet each of these types of participation may be challenging to achieve in practice. For example, Cook-Sather (2002, 389) warns that we may risk “essentializing student experiences and perspectives” in the process of seeking to capture students’ voices. Furthermore, as Cross (2005, 334) notes, in our attempts to achieve more participatory and open research we may be pushing “at the boundaries of research as it is conventionally conceived” (see also Bond 2011). The key principles of participatory research that influenced our approach stemmed from a genuine concern for: reducing the power relations between researcher and researched; learning from young people’s accounts of their experiences with new media; and committing to a process of self-reflexivity at all stages of the research process and its aftermath. Compounding these dilemmas is the way in which research can never be totally free of politics or ideologically neutral. As Stewart (2007,15) argues: “Ideologies happen. Power snaps into place. Structures grow entrenched. Ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat.” The politics of who asks the questions in research with children will inevitably be tied to adult-child power relations, as Mannion argues. However, child-led or “insider” participatory research does not automatically explicate the “ongoing nuances and intricacies of subjectivity” inherent in even apparently equitable research relationships (Hodkinson 2005, 133). Even providing spaces in the research for the voices of the subjects can be a challenge. While Alderson (2000,8) has argued for a renegotiation of the adult-child relationship by having researchers respect “young children’s agency and personal powers in a changing world”, she also points out that it can be difficult, to involve children fully as co-researchers because funding bodies often require detailed research designs well in advance of project commencement, which can preclude the involvement of children in the important planning phases (Alderson 2001,151). More specifically, Kellett et al. (2004)

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discuss several commonly perceived barriers to child-led research: a “competence barrier”, a “knowledge barrier” and a “skills barrier” which may inhibit the development of research projects which focus on child/youth researchers as active agents. By taking a reflexive approach and theorising ‘barriers’ as ‘symbolic boundaries’ structured by power relations which need to be carefully navigated and negotiated, we challenged our own assumptions about the possibilities and limitations of young people’s active participation in university based research projects. Again as Stewart (2007) argues: “The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react. There’s a politics to being/feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not), to energies spent worrying or scheming (or not), to affective contagion, and to all the forms of attunement and attachment” (ibid., 16). Our attempt to stand back from our research has afforded us new insights about participatory research with respect to methodological and theoretical issues. The macro level framework (in Figure1 above) developed for the project provided us with a sound conceptual and methodological foundation that could be transferred to other settings and research into youth to support further evaluations of participatory research. The underpinning precepts of links, reflexivity, and transparency that informed the research design proved sustainable and successful and adhered to the principles of participatory research as being nonexploitative and having self-awareness. Although our research was not designed initially to have students as research partners, in revising our approach, attention needs to be given to how young people could be best involved so that process is negotiated to the satisfaction of both parties – researchers and researched. Specifically, we need to consider how researchers involve young people in ways that capitalise on the conditions of ‘liquid modernity’ – namely, time-space compression, the collapsing of contexts, and the rise of networked publics. The potential of social networking sites for research with young people needs to be harnessed, particularly, given the rise of Facebook usage and phenomena such as Facebook “creeping” – “the process of scoping out another’s Facebook page”, Facebook stalking, and Facebook official (relationship status) as young people engage in constructing identities on and offline (Fox et al. 2013, 9). The speed at which SNSs have evolved has led to the emergence of new forms of “netiquette” which researchers need to navigate and investigate (McLaughlin and Vitak 2012, 300). One area in which students’ interest in social networking could have been utilised was in seeking their ideas and design for an online

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communication space. Our intention to have a dedicated website available for students from the four schools to talk with each other proved unsuccessful. We assumed that students would find this a welcoming communication space, but their non-participation sent a clear message about our wrongheaded assumption. Given the popularity of social networking sites among the students, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube may have proved a more successful alternative. By contrast, students enthusiastically participated in the focus groups, group interviews, and narrative profiles. Research into youth and new technologies struggles to keep pace with the evolving technologies that shape young people’s lives. As this paper has demonstrated we are also in need of developing new approaches to participatory research that can work with the collaborative nature of these technologies. As our project demonstrates, attempts to work with familiar forms of online networking are not necessarily met with enthusiasm. Many young people utilise blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook which enable more extensive and creative forms of participation (Fox et al. 2013). The image, sound-bite, and catchy phrase flow rapidly across space in everyday encounters (Stewart 2007). While researchers have investigated how school-aged children and youth use these technologies, they are yet to realise the potential of these new technologies as part of the design component or context of participatory research. Indeed focus groups and online surveys appear to be the most common research instruments used in investigating young people’s use of technology (see Bond 2011; Marwick and Boyd 2011; Fox et al. 2013; Boyd and Marwick 2011; Holmes 2011; McLaughlin and Vitak 2012). Participatory research has the potential to exploit the distributive aspects and immediacy of new media to investigate the convergence between the local and global, especially how young people’s uses of such services impact on their own contributions to participatory cultures.

References Alderson, Priscilla. 2000. Young Children’s Rights: Exploring Beliefs, Attitudes, Principles and Practice. London: Save the Children/Jessica Kingsley. —. 2001. “Research by Children”. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4(2): 139-153. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Beck, Ulrich. 1994. “The Re-invention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernisation”. In Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, edited by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, 1-55. Oxford: Polity Press. Bond, Emma. 2011. “The Mobile Phone = Bike Shed? Children, Sex and Mobile Phones”. New Media Society 13(4): 587-604. doi: 10.1177/1461444810377919. Britzman, Deborah P. 1991. Practice makes practice: a critical study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: SUNY. Boyd, Danah, and Alice Marwick. 2011. “Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies”. Paper presented at A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, England. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise and Fall of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Christensen, Pia. 2004. “Children’s Participation in Ethnographic Research: Issues of Power and Representation”. Children and Society 18(2): 165-176. Cook-Sather, Alison. 2002. “Authorizing Students’ Perspectives: Towards Trust, Dialogue, and Change in Education”. Educational Researcher 31(4): 3-13. Cross, Beth. 2005. “Split Frame Thinking and Multiple Scenario Awareness: How Boys’ Game Expertise Reshapes Possible Structures of Sense in a Digital World”. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26(3): 333-353. Dolezalek, Heather. 2003. “Tech-savvy Students”. Training 40(1): 20. Foth, Marcus, and Barbara Adkins. 2006. “A Research Design to Build Effective Partnerships between City Planners, Developers, Government and Urban Neighbourhood Communities”. Journal of Community Informatics 2(2): 116-33. Fox, Jesse, Katie Warber, and Dana Makstaller. 2013. “The Role of Facebook in Romantic Relationship Development: An Exploration of Knapp’s Relational Stage Model”. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships Online First Version, 6 January: 1-24. doi: 10.1177/0265407512468370. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, David. 1989. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.

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Hey, Valerie. 1997. The Company She Keeps: Ethnography of Girls’ Friendships. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Hodkinson, Paul. 2005. “‘Insider Research’ in the Study of Youth Cultures”. Journal of Youth Studies 8(2): 131-149. Holmes, John. 2011. “Cyberkids or Divided Generations? Characterising Young People’s Internet Use in the UK with Generic, Continuum or Typological Models”. New Media & Society 13(7): 1104-122.doi: 10.1177/1461444810397649. Jans, Marc. 2004. “Children as Citizens: Towards a Contemporary Notion of Child Participation”. Childhood 11(1): 27-44. Kellett, Mary, Ruth Forrest, Naomi Dent, and Simon Ward. 2004. “‘Just Teach Us the Skills Please, We’ll Do the Rest’: Empowering Ten-YearOlds as Active Researchers.” Children & Society 18(5): 329-43. Kozinets, Robert. 2002. “The Field behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities”. JMR: Journal of Marketing Research 39(1): 61-72. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London and New York: Routledge. Mallan, Kerry, Barbara Ashford, and Parlo Singh. 2010. “Navigating iScapes: Australian Youth Constructing Identities and Social Relations in a Network Society”. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 41(3): 203-25. Mannion, Greg. 2007. “Going Spatial, Going Relational: Why ‘Listening to Children’ and Children’s Participation Needs Reframing”. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28(3): 405-20. Marwick, Alice, and Danah Boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience”. New Media Society 13(1): 114-33. doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313. McLaughlin, Caitlin, and Jessica Vitak. 2012. “Norm Evolution and Violation on Facebook”. New Media Society 14(2): 299-15. doi:10.1177/1461444811412712. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen”. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, London: Duke University Press. United Nations. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner. Wegner, Phillip. 2002. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

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Willis, Paul. 2003. “Foot Soldiers of Modernity: The Dialectics of Cultural Consumption and the 21st Century School”. Harvard Educational Review 73(3): 390-415.

CHAPTER SEVEN1 YOUNG WOMEN, LATE MODERN POLITICS AND THE PARTICIPATORY POSSIBILITIES OF ONLINE CULTURES ANITA HARRIS Introduction This contribution examines some of the ways young women use new technologies in order to open up debates about young people and political participation. Young women are under-represented in many conventional forms of political practice and often use new technologies in undervalued ways. It is widely acknowledged that they feel more alienated from, and less entitled to participate in formal political activities than young men, but are more likely to be engaged in informal, localised politics or socialconscience style activism (Vromen 2006; Roker 2008). Similarly, some research suggests that young women have less access to new technologies and experience lower usage of the internet (Livingstone et al. 2005), and that their enjoyment and confidence in using technologies diminishes as they reach post-primary age (Haas et al. 2002; Christensen et al. 2005). This picture is complicated by other findings that young women are amongst the fastest growing group of Internet users (Mazzarella 2005, 2), but there is a general consensus that young women and young men use new technologies differently. While it is critical to inquire which young women and which young men, it remains that youth participation in both politics and technology continues to be structured by gender, alongside other dimensions of social experience, such that even when equivalence of participation can be achieved, different value is attached to modes of participation. From the point of view of those seeking to increase young women’s participation in technology-enabled political practice, the 1

First published in the Journal of Youth Studies Volume 11, Issue 5, October 2008, pages 481-495 and reproduced here with the permission of author and publisher.

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objective often becomes to attempt to recruit young women to conventional (masculinist) practice, and/or highlight those who are already involved. In doing so, however, we can fail to see the political possibilities in young women’s current engagements with new technologies. The purpose of this article is then to consider the ways that many young women currently use technology, and to then reflect on what might be political about these uses, rather than to designate political uses of technology and look for young women within these. In particular (although not exclusively), I focus on young women’s use of the Internet. New technologies are often perceived as an important way to get young people to connect with politics, but the kinds of politics and political activities that are typically imagined in this process can be fairly narrowly defined. For example, technologies such as mobile phones and the internet have been seen as especially important resources in facilitating young people’s involvement in conventional politics, for example, in assisting them to retrieve information about formal political or civic matters, to learn about and engage with election campaigns and politicians, and to develop political knowledge and foster activism (see Kann et al. 2007). At the same time, it is acknowledged that young people are disenchanted with formal politics and that until traditional political institutions and processes respond to their needs and interests, even imaginative efforts to enhance young people’s engagement with the present structures are likely to have limited effect (Harris et al. 2008). This perspective focuses on the destabilising effects of globalisation, deindustrialisation and individualisation that have made traditional forms of participation and citizenship less viable for young people, as the state loses its authority and the public sphere contracts. Accordingly, there is also a certain amount of academic and practitioner interest in other kinds of technology-enabled activity that could be described as socially and politically aware, but not conventionally political. One important example of this is what can be described as ‘online DIY cultures’, which refers to young people’s blogs, e-zines and websites that operate as spaces for expression and dialogue about political and social issues in light of youth marginalisation from and disenchantment with formal politics. The analysis of such spaces often draws on Fraser’s (1997, 116) popular concept of ‘counterpublics,’ which she defines as ‘parallel discursive arenas’ that historically have ‘contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech.’ Finally, those who research youth also attend to their participation in social and personal uses of new technologies. It is widely acknowledged that this is a much more common

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way for young people, and young women in particular, to engage with new technologies than either of the above. There is a considerable amount written about why young people construct personal homepages, how they use mobile phones, and what risks face them in their social networking online. Typically, however, these activities are not considered in the context of political participation because they are seen as personal, if not exactly private. In this article I want to explore these last two kinds of activities: online DIY culture and social/personal uses of new technologies, from a gendered perspective. In doing so, I hope to open up some questions about what counts as politics, and what is possible as politics for young people, and young women in particular, at the present moment. I argue that it is important to look at less conventional technology enabled political and social activity in order to understand how these are operating as emergent modes of participation in a new political environment. I suggest that we need to take seriously young women’s styles of technology-enabled social and political engagement, as they represent new directions in activism, the construction of new participatory communities, and the development of new kinds of public selves. The enthusiastic take-up of these practices by young women in particular tells us important things about the limits of the kinds of conventional citizen subject positions offered to young women at this time. In particular, it suggests that some young women are seeking alternative modes and spaces to engage in activism, especially in relation to feminist and anti-racist agendas, in light of the contraction of the conventional public sphere and the encroachment of corporate and government interests on to youth political cultures. It also indicates that some young women are keen to create unregulated, albeit public spaces for peer communities where they can express their personal interests and concerns away from adult intervention. At the same time, it reveals the challenges for young women of constructing public selves at a time when young female citizenship is operationalised through consumption and display rather than political agency. As argued elsewhere (Harris 2004a), young women have been targeted as ideal neoliberal citizens, primarily as individual consumers with no collective orientation, and I suggest here that their use of new technologies indicates their active negotiation of this interpellation.

Young Women and Changing Paradigms An exploration of the politics of online DIY culture and social/personal uses of new technologies requires contextualisation within a long history

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of thinking beyond conventional paradigms of participatory practice. One of the most significant critiques has come out of feminist approaches to citizenship studies and their expansion of definitions of participation beyond standing for office or joining a party to include acts that occur within the broader public sphere, including civil society (see Lister 2003). This is especially important if women’s participation is to be properly accounted for, as it is often through less formal activities, such as grassroots organising, voluntary associations and local networking around seemingly private issues that women engage in politics. A strict division between the public and the private obfuscates these activities. Feminism establishes how traditional definitions of both what political participation is and where it should happen are in fact gendered definitions. The need to interrogate the normative assumptions within paradigms of political participation is even more heightened in the case of young women, who are subject not only to patriarchal but age-based exclusions. Within youth studies there is a strong tradition of critical analysis of adultgenerated indicators for measuring youth participation. There is much evidence that shows a disjunction between how politics is commonly understood and the everyday ways that young people reflect on social and political issues (see Bhavnani 1991; Manning and Ryan 2004; Harris et al. 2007). As claimed by Henn et al. (2002, 169, quoted in Manning and Ryan 2004, iv): Young people tend to think of ‘politics’ merely as what goes on in parliament rather than ‘things that affect my life’ and to discount their own political involvement and activities… [W]hen they are encouraged to talk about politics in their own terms, a wider definition of politics emerges and there is evidence of a much higher level of interest and activity.

This is particularly relevant to young women, for whom formal politics is somewhat unwelcoming given the significant under-representation of women in parliaments across the Western world. Consequently, it is no surprise that a survey of major studies on youth and politics reveals that young women experience lower levels of political confidence than their male counterparts (Hahn 1998, 108). At the same time, however, young women in many countries are more likely than young men to be involved in social action or community or activist organisations (Vromen 2006; Roker 2007; Harris et al. 2008), and as Roker (2008, 259) also notes, “it is some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged young women who are getting involved in action.” In other words, young women’s everyday engagement with political and social issues and action is significant, but this is not reflected or supported at the level of formal politics.

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There is also a gap between adult-centric notions of participation and good civic and political engagement, and the kinds of participatory practices that young people, and young women in particular, create and value. As Vromen (2006, 1) has found in her Australian research, ‘gender still permeates political institutions but “…young women now adopt a broader range of practices in both reinforcing and changing those institutions.” However, this range of practices is not always recognised or valued. One key area of concern is where participation should occur. Often, ‘good participation’ is defined as young people’s membership, taking part, or sharing decision-making in pre-existent programmes, forums, bodies and activities that have been crafted by adults, for example, youth roundtables, liaison with government representatives, and involvement in local council initiatives. Young people’s participation in activities with one another, outside of adult control, is often trivialised and/or problematised. This is evident in criticisms of young people’s explicitly youth-led political activity, for example, in protests against the war in Iraq, as well as in their everyday peer community building, for example in the panic over young people’s use of social networking sites. Similarly, the decision of many young people to not participate in conventional civic and political activities is frequently constructed as apathy and cynicism that can be corrected through education and access, rather than as a rational choice to dissociate themselves from alienating and impotent institutions. The contributions of feminism and youth studies in expanding perspectives on participation are particularly relevant in the context of recent social change that has created fundamental shifts in meanings and practices of citizenship, representation and engagement. Globalisation has disrupted the continuity between citizenship and the nation-state, deregulation and privatisation have reduced participatory opportunities in the public sphere, and individualisation has undermined collective identifications (Bauman 2001). Young people are increasingly called upon to participate in the polity and in civil society, and to develop their civic knowledge, and yet this is in an environment of reduced opportunity for the mobilisation of a traditional citizenship identity and its associated activities. As many have argued, consumption has replaced production as a key social driver, and this has seen young people targeted as rights-bearers and decision-makers as consumers rather than in any more politically meaningful sense (Miles 2000). Thus while young people are alienated from political decisionmaking they are also contending with the commercialisation of their civil rights, which are reconstructed as choices, freedoms and powers of

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consumption. Products and expressions of youth culture and youth voice are increasingly appropriated by big business, young people have less public physical space to occupy (Bessant 2000; White and Wyn 2007), and as Bauman (2001,49) argues, what is left of the public sphere is now “colonised by the private” and “the public display of private affairs”; all of which leaves young people with fewer spaces for self-expression, critique and collective deliberation of political and social issues. This context for youth participation has particular meanings for young women. As argued by McRobbie (2000, 2007) and Harris (2004a), there is an intense focus on young women as the vanguards of the late modern socioeconomic order that foregrounds this diminished citizenship. This has occurred through a dovetailing of feminist and neoliberal agendas resulting in a complex nexus of economic, political and social interest in the expansion of girls’ education and employment and the promotion of new family, sexual and reproductive practices for a new global work order. This investment in young women is apparent in government policies, nongovernment programmes and a culture industry that targets young women as its primary market. Young women are produced as ideal consumers and skilled choice-makers who approach work, education and family as a series of personally calculated and flexible options disembedded from social structure. They are invested in as those least likely to hold onto modern identities or collective practices, especially political ones, and therefore best positioned to prevail in times that demand individualisation and the forfeit of a traditional rights-based citizenship identity. As McRobbie (2007, 733) argues, the promotion of young women as the ideal “subjects of capacity” for the new socioeconomic order has been secured through an illusion that we live in a post-feminist time in which young women have no need for social justice politics, or indeed, any conception of themselves as political subjects. As she writes (2007, 734), “the means by which such a role in economic life are being made available substitute notional ideas of consumer citizenship in place of political identity.” The production of young women as ideal consumer citizens for current times has seen them increasingly regulated by government, big business and consumer culture in relation to almost every aspect of their lives, including the most personal and the bodily: their sexual behaviours, leisure activities, study and work, relationships and of course consumption patterns. McRobbie (2007, 734) describes this as “pervasive practices of biopolitical activity” and argues that it is by “these means of containment … [that] women are removed once again from public life, the political sphere and from the possibility of feminism.” For young women who continue to seek to insert themselves into the political sphere and to

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engage in feminism, it becomes necessary to manoeuvre around these biopolitics. Accordingly, their cultural and political action may take on new forms, and emerge in liminal spaces between the public and private and through strategies that are designed to both evade surveillance and strategies of containment and reach out to youth (see for example Mitchell et al. 2001, 22). New kinds of young women’s politics might then deliberately avoid conventional activism and formal political processes, as these themselves have become either redundant or techniques of regulation. At the same time, new kinds of young female sociality might also work harder to operate outside of regimes of governmentality. Another effect of this regulation of young women is then that they may seek alternative ways to express a public self through participation in a peer-constructed community where they can attempt to stake a claim for themselves on their own terms. Young women’s involvement in online DIY cultures and in social networking can illustrate how they are using new technologies to grapple with shifting boundaries between public and private, their interpellation as consumer citizens, the contraction of a traditional public sphere and in particular the absence of spaces for critique, self-expression and peer dialogue, and a loss of faith in conventional politics and formal political institutions. Activities such as blogging, virtual community engagement and personal website maintenance can be understood as examples of those ‘broader range of practices’ that young women engage in to create new kinds of politics and new meanings of participation. However, in some manifestations they also reveal the difficulties of contending with the kinds of citizens young women are rewarded for being: consumptionfocused and on display. Next, I turn to an analysis of these uses of technologies to explore the ways these activities reflect the possibilities and limits of young women’s participatory practices and citizenship status in late modernity.

Online DIY Cultures The first of these activities, online DIY cultures, constitute technologyenabled practices that are socially and politically aware, but not conventionally political. These include websites that are created by young women and express political points of view on topics of relevance to young women. These often set out key ideas about girl-centred feminism and anti-racism, and direct readers to offline activities that may be activist or cultural. These sites are often, although not always, inspired by the early 1990s ‘riotgrrrl’ or ‘grrrlpower’ movement which saw punk and

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feminism come together in a new young women-oriented scene focused on music, left wing politics, art and writing (see Harris 2004a). Many bear the hallmarks of the original medium of riot grrrl culture: zines (a comprehensive inventory of e-zines and blogs and other grrrl media can be found at Elke Zobl’s site http://www.grrrlzines.net/). They include websites that combine personal points of view, political analysis, strategies for activism, artwork, links to other relevant sites and information about ‘real life’ activities that relate to the focus of the site. These are sometimes collectivelyconstructed and represent a loose affiliation of young women or can be individually authored, in which case they are usually known as blogs; that is, websites that are individually written and narrative based. (Here I am using the term ‘blog’ in a fairly specific sense, to refer to selfpublished, regularly updated online narratives that include socially and politically engaged content. I discuss personal journals later). While it is difficult to measure, mainly due to definitional challenges, some researchers have claimed that young women are the largest group of creators and readers of blogs (Orlowski 2003; Bortree 2006), while others contend that both women and youth are represented at least as frequently as adult men, but that young women outnumber young men (Herring et al. 2004). However, unlike blogs authored by male political pundits, women’s blogs are taken less seriously, valued less within blogging culture and in the mainstream, and less likely to be ranked highly or linked to (Ratliff 2004; Gregg 2006). Similarly, girl-centred websites created by and for young women have been a significant subgenre of personal websites since the early 1990s, but have not generally received attention as a politics outside of feminism. I would suggest however that both girl-centred websites and blogs are important practices of ‘counter-public’ construction in that they are forums for debate and exchange of politically and socially engaged ideas by those who are marginalised within mainstream political debate. However, what is sometimes frustrating for analysts is that these forums are not necessarily outcome-oriented; or rather their end function is often simply to exist as a space for expression and debate. They tend to operate for information sharing, dialogue, consciousness-raising and community-building, but can also be playful, leisure-oriented and mix up personal and political material. They often focus on having a voice and building a place for speaking rather than agitating for change through appeals to political institutions, the state and its actors (see Melucci 1996). In this regard, they can be seen as just one manifestation of a wholesale shift in activism from the traditional social movements of the 1960s to a postmodern style of localised, decentralised and individualised politics. There is of course overlap, and some blogs, e-zines and websites connect

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up with more conventional political campaigns, activism or advocacy. However, they often advocate individual strategies, political practices based in youth cultural experiences and culture-industry oriented activism. These include practices like culture jamming (altering an advertising slogan or image to undermine its message), examples of which can be found on the website of the Jammin’ Ladies at http://jamming. wordpress.com/, or radical cheerleading (groups gathering in public with pom poms calling out political ‘cheers’), exemplified on the website of the Dutch grrrl collective Bunnies on Strike at http://bunniesonstrike.cjb.net/. Young women who are involved in these kinds of activities often articulate a need to act as cultural producers at a time when they feel overwhelmingly interpellated as consumers (see Stasko 2008). Many talk about the need for a new kind of feminist practice that takes into account the encroachment of the culture industry into every aspect of their lives, including politics (Harris 2004b). Using the Internet as a space that exists between the public and the private enables them to negotiate a desire to organize and communicate with others with a need to avoid surveillance and appropriation of their cultures and politics. It also operates as a safer and more welcoming space for young women than traditional political forums. However, it must be acknowledged that participation in online DIY culture, especially the creation of politically and socially engaged websites, occurs amongst only a minority of young women. Most do not have the resources, time or subcultural capital to engage with these kinds of activities. Moreover, the feminism that is drawn upon in the specifically ‘grrrl’ online cultures is of a specific kind that has its roots in what is often seen to be an elite, white, USA-based scene. This is in spite of its international take-up. However, what is also worthy of note is the popularity with young women of youth-led Internet sites that do not necessarily focus on feminist or women’s issues. For example, two important Australian-based websites run for and by young people are Reach Out! and Vibewire, which focus on social services and media respectively, and are overwhelmingly used by young women (Vromen 2007). Vromen’s (2008) research shows that sites such as Vibewire are valued because they offer a place in the media, which is perceived as the site of power in an information society, for young voices to be heard and for young people to be engaged. She has also found that participants appreciate the more open kinds of youth communities that are created through these sites, and that, in contrast to the usual argument, these are perceived to actually bring together diverse groups of youth who hold different opinions on issues rather than simply cater to the like-minded.

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However, while online DIY cultures are an important, albeit minor practice in young women’s technologically enabled political activities, it remains that if we want to talk about where the girls are in terms of uses of new technologies, we have to turn to much less intentionally political practices, that is, social networking.

Social Networking ‘Social networking’ has a specific meaning related to the creation of personal profiles on sites such as MySpace and Facebook and the engagement in online interaction with others who also have profiles. These sites feature profiles, friends and a public commenting component. Boyd (2007a,1-2) explains: Once logged into one of these systems, participants are asked to create a profile to represent themselves digitally. Using text, images, video, audio, links, quizzes and surveys, teens generate a profile that expresses how they see themselves. These profiles are sewn into a large web through “Friends” lists. Participants can mark other users as “Friends” … [They can then] use the different messaging tools to hang out, share cultural artefacts and ideas, and communicate with one another.

However, social networking can also be used as a catch-all phrase to mean the various ways that technology is used by people to meet up with others, often peers, and communicate about personal issues. This can include the use of organised, commercial social networking sites, the construction of independent personal websites and journals, the use of Internet chat rooms or bulletin boards, photo and video sharing websites and texting and image sharing via mobile phones. In both its broad and specific definition, social networking is a very popular use of new technology by young women (Boyd 2007b). Even before the phenomena of Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LiveJournal, Youtube and so on, research has shown that girls have tended to use new technologies more frequently for social purposes through email, chatting facilities and Instant Messaging, whereas boys have been more likely to play and download games and music (Lenhart et al. 2001; Tufte 2003, quoted in Mazzarella 2005, 2). Young women have also been wellestablished as heavy users of text messaging since the early take-up of mobile phones amongst youth in pioneer countries such as Finland (Kasesniemi 2001). Social networking technologies are often perceived as frivolous or problematic because of their association with youth and femininity, as illustrated by a current debate within blogging communities about gender

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difference in journal-style uses of the Internet (see Herring et al. 2004; Gregg 2006). Nowhere is this more evident, however, than in the broader public debate about the risks facing young women in their use of the Internet. There is a growing body of literature on the dangers of social networking, wherein young women’s own perspectives are not always prominent, and there is little regard for what Driscoll and Greg (2008,14) describe as “the forms of literacy involved in being able to control and realise ‘what you’re being’ in online spaces”. Current approaches to social networking are heavily weighted towards addressing the risks that face young people, and often young women in particular, by revealing personal information that might become embarrassing, by exposing themselves to online predators, and by spending too much time away from ‘real life’ (see for example Dewey 2002; Wolak et al. 2003; and for a critique, Gregg 2007). Young women’s social networking is perceived as a risky behaviour that needs to be managed by responsible adults. When their own points of view are solicited, young women tend to demonstrate significant competencies in regard to risk (Driscoll and Greg 2008,14), and widely report that they use these social networking technologies to simply stay in touch and communicate with their friends (Clark 2005; Boyd 2007b). Very early research on young women’s use of bulletin boards (Kaplan and Farrell 1994) notes that these are activities perceived by young women as an extension of their immediate, offline social worlds. Australian research on young women’s use of online chat rooms has found that they use chatting facilities for social interaction and to maintain connection with friends in ways that are outside of adult monitoring and freer of some of the social mores they feel constrain their offline lives (Gibian 2003). UK research on mobile phones (Henderson et al. 2002, 508) supports this perspective that young women enjoy the opportunities that are offered by communication technology “to claim greater personal and sexual freedom in a movement from the domestic to more public spheres.” Early research with young women who create personal websites (Takayoshi et al. 1999,99) has found that this activity is valued because, in their words, “it allows (girls) to speak out and no one can stop them.” In summary, research with young female users of social networking technologies shows that they enjoy creating and using a space where they can engage with friends, sometimes meet new people, and express themselves in a public forum where they are not under parental or other authoritarian control. Profiles on social networking sites and personal webpages and blogs often reflect this peer orientation strongly through their design and discursive style. To adults they are often hard to ‘read’, and can appear

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aesthetically messy and full of banal, inconclusive exchanges. As Kaplan and Farrell (1994, 8) note in relation to bulletin boards, “the sociability of [the] exchange seems its sole reason for being”, and this is primarily a peer-to-peer sociability that confounds those it excludes. In this respect, there is a case that social networking is a way for young women to create new participatory communities for and by their peers. As Barnes (2007, 2) suggests, “teenagers are learning how to use social networks by interacting with their friends, rather than learning these behaviours from their parents or teachers.” This capacity to bypass adults in the construction of public communication communities is seeing young people generating public selves in their own ways. This is qualitatively different from traditional constitution of youth cultures or subcultures, which have also operated to allow young people to create identities and spaces of their own, because of the reach offered by the global stage and the large-scale participation on the part of ‘ordinary’ youth that characterise online social networks. This in turn has implications for young people’s political participation in two significant ways. First, theorists such as Boyd (2007b) suggest that these kinds of youth communities ought to be understood as counterpublics, even though the content of the sites is usually personal rather than related to matters of the public good. She suggests that social network sites are places where young people ‘write themselves and their community into being’ (2007b, 13-14) in view of an audience, and that they do this online because they have very little access to real public spaces (2007b, 19). She says “their participation is deeply rooted in their desire to engage publicly” (2007b, 21). Social network sites are therefore an important way for young women in particular to participate in a public sphere, regardless of the fact that the nature of their public expressions is not necessarily political. Second, others have argued that social networking facilitates or can be a precursor to ‘real’ participation. That is, it is valued insofar as it can lead to the formation of communities or collective activities focused on civic or political practices (see for example Burgess et al. 2006, 2). This kind of analysis of social networks sits within a larger body of work on the political significance of virtual communities, where claims and counter-claims are made about their capacity to empower the marginalised and to deliver more democratic modes of communication. In the next section, I explore these and other arguments about the political possibilities of both social networking and online DIY culture in depth.

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Do Online DIY Cultures and Social Networking Constitute Political Participation? I would suggest that there are several ways in which both online DIY cultures and, more controversially, social networking, ought to be included in the conversation about young women’s political participation, but there are some important arguments that qualify these interpretations. First, I would argue that these activities are about creating a public self, which is the first step in seeing oneself as a citizen. They give young women an opportunity to bring the private into the public in ways that were unprecedented prior to new technologies. Whether or not these private matters can then be worked into joined up publicly deliberated public issues is an open question, but it is clear that many young women are attempting the work of public self-making in the counterpublics of online DIY cultures, while others are simply engaged in creating public identities that can connect with others, which may be valuable in itself. Moreover, literature that looks at social networking as a technique for young women’s identity construction work demonstrates that the kinds of public selves they create can be undermining of gender expectations. New technologies facilitate young women’s capacity to play with gender and to resist feminine stereotypes, for example by acting more confidently than they might be face to face, and by feeling less constrained by gendered norms about appearance, especially in the cases of pre-video mobile phones, instant messaging and chatrooms (Henderson et al. 2002; Gibian 2003; Thiel 2005). However, many would claim, along the lines of Bauman (2001, 106-7), that these young women are merely filling what is left of public space with personal stories and troubles, without any capacity for these to be, as he says, “translated as public issues (such that) public solutions are sought, negotiated and agreed.” From this perspective, the kinds of communities and dialogues that occur in online DIY cultures and social networking cannot be political because they infrequently move beyond personal sharing. In other words, as Vromen (2007, 52) points out, there is a question whether this kind of use of the Internet “can progress from fostering individualised participation into more collectively oriented participation with the capacity to foster deliberation.” This is most clearly a problem in social networking, for online DIY cultures often explicitly attempt to make this move beyond the personal to a structural critique, and sometimes work towards public solutions. It can appear though that even the structures of the messaging tools of social networking (emphasis on expression rather than listening, lack of closure or resolution, absence of

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moderators) seem to work against the conventions of democratic deliberation, as does the style of much interaction (see Davis 2005, 130). For example, as Kaplan and Farrell (1994, 8) note in relation to bulletin boards: “the conversations among these young women and their contacts on the boards often seem, at least to an outsider, driven more by the desire of the participants to keep the conversation going than by their desire to achieve understanding of or consensus about some topic or issue.” Even so, I would argue that there is much to be gained from understanding how young women interact online. Feminists have noted that traditional ideas about deliberation and how public conversations should look are gender biased (Tannen 1995). Sociability and the capacity for deliberation are not necessarily inconsistent, and in fact the former may even expand the conventions of the latter. Coleman (2006, 258) has written that it is “random sociability that makes the internet such an attractive place for young people”, and to learn from this, “policy designed to promote democratic online interaction must resist the anxieties of managed communication and take its chances within networks of autonomous and acephalous interaction.” In other words, online deliberative democracy and random social networks of unmanaged participation are not mutually exclusive, and to draw young people into deliberative democratic practices online requires adaptation to their preferred modes of interaction. Social networking activities are also not cut and dried in terms of their relationship with conventional politics or activism. They do not always sit easily on the ‘private’ side of the divide, but negotiate this very border. For example, there is a considerable amount of activism and social justice campaigning that occurs on these sites. MySpace, for example, has over 33,000 ‘government and politics’ groups. Kann et al. (2007, 4) suggest that “this merging of social networking and online politics has the potential to integrate political discourse into youths’ everyday lives.” Perhaps an indication of this is that in defiance of the stereotype, research has found that a majority of polled MySpace participants had voted for a candidate for public office, while only 21% had voted for a contestant on an Idol show (Jenkins 2006). There are many examples of online DIY cultures and social networking sites using public space to debate matters of the common good. Just one small illustration is a current political campaign established by young women on Facebook regarding new policy about government management of Indigenous Australian communities. Notwithstanding this issue of what kind of public conversation counts as politics, there is perhaps a thornier one of what kinds of public selves are being constructed in these sites by young women. The very project of

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making a self that is publicly visible is contained within the new discourses of femininity for young women that link success to image, style, and visible work on oneself rather than a more robust concept of citizenship (McRobbie 2000; Harris 2004a). Hopkins (2002) argues that young women have become the stars of a postmodern contemporary culture obsessed with omnipresence of identity, image and celebrity. She says (2002, 4) “the new hero is a girl in pursuit of media visibility, public recognition and notoriety. She wants to be somebody and ‘live large’.” Being ‘somebody’, however, means living a celebrity life: looking good, having a watched and envied persona, and engaging with leisure and consumption rather than politics. Thus the public selves that young women are encouraged to create are not political subjectivities, but self-inventing celebrity selves who gain status from their take up of consumer culture. McRobbie (2007, 734) suggests that it is through the construction of ‘spectacular femininity’ that a shift away from the political is made possible, as an emptied out, consumer-oriented citizenship is in part “predicated on the … visible luminosity of youthful female subjects.” For young women creating public identities online, the goals of self-expression and peer connection are bound up with being on display as a consumer citizen. What seems indisputable, though, is that these activities allow young women to take up virtual public space at a time when physical public space for young people is diminishing. As noted by White and Wyn (2007, 240-1), there has been “a considerable narrowing of places where young people can comfortably hang out freely”, owing to the mass privatisation of public space and the intensification of the regulation of that space. If young people have few free spaces left to them, then these online activities indicate a desire to create and occupy new public spaces beyond these constraints. Bessant (2000, 117) notes that “young people are not ‘moved on’ in this new social space and public sphere as they have been in the streets and shopping centres… Likewise, the presence of young people in most electronic space is not prohibited or subject to curfews as it is in the actual social and political space of modern industrial capitalism.” The rise of the shopping mall as the ‘public’ space for youth and for young female consumers in particular (Harris 2004a) and its demand on participants that if they wish to enjoy this space they must spend money, also increases the appeal of non-commercial spaces of sociality and community for young women. Relatedly, then, both online DIY cultures and social networking signify a desire to be a cultural producer, that is, to actively engage in the construction of one’s cultural world, rather than simply consume. There is

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considerable pleasure to be taken in the design and upkeep of personal websites and blogs, especially when youth culture artefacts are used creatively and playfully in order to attribute them with new meaning (see for example Reid-Walsh and Mitchell 2004). Young women have been the primary targets of a shift to consumer citizenship for youth, and these creative uses of new technologies demonstrate how they play with, negotiate and sometimes resist the encroachment of the consumer imperative on their everyday lives. The idea of talking back to youth consumer culture is an explicit political agenda of many girl-centred websites, but even the engagement with the products of this culture as evident in the profiles and conversations on social network sites often reveals a critical agency rather than passive consumption. However, there are concerns raised about the potential for such practices to remain free from corporate or government interests, that is, for young people to craft out truly public spaces, given the encroachment of interested parties, including corporate media, the advertising industry and also mainstream politics, upon them (see Castells 2007). There is some evidence that young people are moving away from the sites taken over by major corporations (for example, MySpace having been bought by NewsCorp and YouTube by Google), and towards less commercial networking sites (see Boyd 2007b; Castells 2007; with Microsoft’s recent negotiations to buy a stake in Facebook, its fate will be interesting to watch). However, it remains that the Internet and mobile phones have been an enormous boon for those seeking to capture the youth market, and at best young people who use them are engaged in a constant negotiation of advertising interests (Barnes 2007). But even if corporate and government interests are advancing on youth online spaces, parents and other authority figures are some way behind, and in this regard, these activities allow young women to connect with their peers away from the prying eyes of the adults in their lives. In this sense, they contribute to the making of a whole lot of albeit ‘thin’ youth communities to which their members feel a commitment and in which they actively participate.

Conclusion In order to situate young women in the debate about youth, new technologies and political participation, it is important to expand definitions of participatory practice and to take account of the new socioeconomic landscape, which has radically changed the meaning of citizenship, politics and participation. Online DIY cultures and social networking are important examples of the ways that young women are

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negotiating the absence of traditional citizenship identities and the emergence of new, somewhat problematic ones in their place. Young women engage in these activities at times to develop new modes of activism and political subjectivity, but more often to create unregulated, public spaces for peer communities and to construct public selves. These practices reveal the challenges for young women in positioning themselves within a regulatory culture that rewards them for their capacity as ideal neoliberal consumer subjects. I have suggested that the ways in which young women are using new technologies demonstrate that, in the light of the so-called crisis of youth political engagement, and in concert with the pressures to perform as particular kinds of consumer citizens, many are already doing their own kinds of participation. This is a different argument than the idea that an emergent collectivist politics or conventional civic or political activity will flow out of such practices. It is not always or even predominantly the case that conventional or activist offline participation emerges out of these. The work of Livingstone and her colleagues (2007, 307) from the UK Children Go Online project suggests that we must be cautious about the assumption that once young people are online in some capacity they will be drawn to ever more civic or political uses of the Internet. But it is important to recognise the ways that simply participating in online cultures and networking is a form of developing citizenship skills, regardless of any specific involvement in political causes. Kann et al. (2007, 2) argue that this kind of “participatory culture has the potential to enhance youth participation in politics (in part because) it promotes the key democratic values of involvement and openness.” More than this, though, I would suggest that we need to consider the value of these practices in themselves, rather than only looking towards what ‘better’ or more conventional participatory practices they might turn into. It is important to acknowledge in the face of the widespread youth citizenship panic that young people, and young women in particular, are participating in their own communities and are expressing a desire to occupy public space on their own terms. Riley et al. (2007, 3) draw on the work of Maffesoli to make a case that activities of these kinds are both a sovereignty-oriented and socialityoriented politics that reject traditional political structures and instead invest in self-determination and social affiliations. As they say, “[f]or Maffesoli (1996) politics occurs in terms of survival, in the ability to create spaces to enact cultural rituals that enact sociality, solidarity, sovereignty, hedonism and vitality.” For young women especially, these activities may provide less intimidating, more familiar modes for doing politics and for acting as

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citizens. They also provide opportunities for placing matters on a public agenda that are not formally political, but are at the heart of contemporary issues in the lives of young people: for example, school and study, sexuality, mental health, family relations and so on. These constitute an everyday politics for young people and need to be taken seriously as the kinds of issues in which they are deeply engaged. I have argued that it is vital to talk about online DIY cultures and social networking when we discuss young people, and young women in particular, in relation to new technologies and political participation. I would suggest that conventional recruitment strategies to get them into conventional participation are misdirected, even when new technologies are utilised, because young women are grappling with a new political environment. Its features include a contracted public sphere, an increasingly impotent state, a blurring of private and public and a hyperregulation of young people, and young women in particular, as good consumer citizens. This article has offered some ways that we can grapple with the meaning of participation in spaces created by and for other young people that are being forged by young women in response.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Rachel Brooks, Paul Hodkinson and the two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Ariadne Vromen and Melissa Gregg for very helpful conversations, and to Lesley Pruitt for research assistance.

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CHAPTER EIGHT PROTESTING ONLINE FACEBOOK GROUPS IN THE GREEK DECEMBER 2008 PROTESTS VASILIKI TRIGA AND APHRODITE BAKA Introduction The violent death of 15 year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos that was caused by the firing of a policeman’s gun on 6th December 2008 in Athens triggered massive urban street protest, especially amongst young people and young adults. Protest actions took place daily in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece’s two big cities, as well as in smaller cities across the country. Numerous protest actions also took place in other European countries. In terms of participation, duration as well as intensity and diversity of the mobilisations, the scale of this protest constituted an extraordinary collective movement in Greek political history (Baka and Garyfallou 2011; Gavriilidis 2009; Kalyvas 2011; Sotiris 2010). Its unique quality also lay in the use of new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to orchestrate the protest: mobile phones, online social networks, blogs and online forums were widely employed (Tzatha 2009). ICTs served to disseminate information about the precipitating event itself, to mobilise participants to take part in a variety of protest actions (solidarity rallies, demonstrations and occupying buildings) and to network and bring together numerous social groups for a common purpose. This chapter explores how online social networks (SN) contributed to the December 2008 events in Greece, and, in particular, how Facebook groups were used. Drawing mainly on social psychological theories of collective action such as collective identity theory (Simon and Klandermans 2001) and the elaborated social identity model (ESIM; Drury and Reicher 2009, 2005, 2000), the study focuses on identity issues as these are negotiated in the descriptions of the selected Facebook groups. The analytical focus is located firstly, on the ways Facebook groups present the collective

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identities that they adopt and employ for inviting Facebook users to join. Secondly, the study addresses heterogeneity issues among and within Facebook groups and the ways these are managed to organise and embrace various subgroups with different social identities. Finally, the study places emphasis on accounts of intergroup relations and especially the protesters as out-groups relating with the police and the media, and the resulting consequences. In the next section we will briefly address the role of online social media and their use by youth in political engagement and collective action. Subsequently the theories that explore collective action and social movements will be discussed along with the specific theoretical framework employed in this study. The findings are prefaced by information about the methods used; the contribution closes with summary remarks.

Online social networks This analysis focuses on social groups that are formed and act in the online public sphere. However, the discussion will avoid the determinist and somewhat sterile debate regarding the transformative (or not) effect of ICTs on society and politics between ‘cyber-optimists’ and ‘cyberpessimists’ (Breindl 2010). That said it is more pertinent to account for the decision to choose online social networks (SNs) as the core data source for the investigation into social protest. Online SNs are perceived to have altered communication via the Internet, especially for youth. Various studies underline the fact that ICTs provide young people with alternative means of political engagement and participation (Ohlin et al. 2010; Thackeray and Hunter 2010). Moreover, online SNs and, more specifically, Facebook, apart from its massive reach, can provide an easily accessible space for political participation and engagement in high-quality political discussions (Gueorguieva 2008; Kushin and Kitchener 2009; Vitak et al. 2011; Williams and Gulati 2009), which may also differ from the traditional offline forms (Chadwick 2012). Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular online social network and, according to Boyd and Ellison (2008), it constitutes a ‘networked public that supports sociability, just as unmediated public spaces do’ (ibid., 221). By and large, Facebook users participate under their real names via their profiles, which render them to some degree accountable for their actions vis-à-vis their networks (Triga 2011). In addition, young people’s presence in these online public spaces has increased channels of interactivity and networking for disseminating a message and mobilising

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participation (Hands 2011; Leung 2009). Further, social network sites are claimed to be unique in that they encourage users to articulate and make visible their networks to friends and strangers (Boyd and Ellison op. cit.). Well-known examples of extended and effective SN use for social protest include the 2009 Iranian elections, in which Twitter was used as an important tool of digital protest (Hands, op. cit.) or the 2011 Arab spring, where the use of Twitter and Facebook were seen as essential in the organisation of the revolts (Nunns and Idle 2011). Given the popularity of online SN, the research community has been prompted to study how social movements use them for specific purposes. Thus far empirical studies have addressed questions related to cultural and personal communication between users and activists, forming new spaces of contact, interaction and mobilisation (Chadwick op. cit.; Earl and Kimport 2011; Gillan et al. 2011). At very low transaction and coordination costs, online SN predominantly help groups and individuals to connect, communicate, mobilise and take action on a topic of mutual interest, independently of other social or personal connections and affiliations (Ellison et al. 2007, Papacharissi 2009). This way a parallel readjusted public sphere has emerged (Gerbaudo 2012). SNs also reinforce online mechanisms that users employ for strengthening their offline identities. This does not mean that they radically alter political engagement (Baugartner and Morris 2010). Instead they are auxiliary to offline dynamics (Theocharis 2012), since they also contribute to the inclusion and empowerment of excluded and dissident voices, even if only to a limited extent (Milioni and Panos 2011). In the present framework, ICT and new media are perceived as spaces of action where discourse is produced and used and where participants make and enact movements in a ‘politics of connections’ (Carroll and Hackett 2006; Castells 2009, 2012; Tambini 1999). After having specified the role played by online social networks, this discussion now turns to theories of social movements (SMO); this body of literature furnishes the conceptual lens to study the December 2008 youth protest in Greece.

Social Movements: State of the art Social movements constitute social phenomena that are studied by all social science disciplines (Klandermans 1997; Lievrouw 2011; Van de Donk et al. 2004). Below we discuss briefly various theoretical paradigms, which, despite their differences, researchers have often combined in order to study SMOs in various contexts (Della Porta and Diani 2006; Snow et al. 2004).

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Theoretical paradigms based on collective behaviour theory and being heavily influenced by the crowd psychology of Le Bon, conceptualise social protest as ‘contagious’, disruptive and violent. In this sense it is necessary to quell, or at least control and at best avoid any sort of social protest. Protesters are attributed with irrationality and emotionally charged behaviour, which is, nevertheless, expressed in an organised and strategic manner (Crosby 1976; Gurr 1970). Despite the fact that such theoretical paradigms are considered as outdated (Goldstone 2004), it still has its supporters. Among the latter we select to refer to one of the most common arguments that protest is rather a criminal act than an alternative form of democratic participation, while individual participation in grassroots mobilisations is often treated as a mixture of personal pathology and social disorganisation (McAdam 2003). Such arguments are pertinent also with regards to the 2008 December protests since mainstream media in Greece and elsewhere had characterised the protests at the time as ‘disruptive’, ‘violent’ and ‘Europe-threatening’ (see Economides and Monastiriotis 2009). Further it was said that the events were either the peak of the gradual emergence of deviant subcultures (such as ‘Exarcheia’) in urban centres that threatened social wellbeing (Smith 2009), or the result of media ‘priming’ that predominantly triggered discrimination against the police (Hugh-Jones et al. 2009). Another theoretical paradigm that is focused on a more macroscopic level is the so-called ‘political opportunity structure’. This conceives collective action as a means to achieve a goal especially when the appropriate political opportunities are present in the wider socio-political context. What is of great importance in this theory is the effect of social protest at the political level rather than its actual content and means used for the organisation of social action (Kriesi 2004; McAdam op. cit.; Tarrow 1998). According to this paradigm, a plausible explanation for the 2008 December events could be a deep political and financial crisis in the country. Similar yet different in various respects another theoretical strand, known as the new social movement theory, emerged with the view of providing explanations for the new, identity-based social movements that appeared in the late 1960s and after. According to the basic premises of this theory the new social movements are characterised ideologically by new discourses in an effort to break down the traditional reasonings attributed predominantly to social class (working classes, minority groups) (Laraña et al. 1994). A fourth theoretical paradigm draws on social psychological approaches. Such approaches adopt a more communicative-discursive and cultural stance since they define SMOs as social constructions that carry

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meanings and identities (Johnston and Kladermans 1995; Laraña et al. op. cit.). Emphasis is placed on the social construction of the meaning attributed to social action, processes of identity formation and culture before and during the protests. Focusing especially on those approaches that explain how collective identities are built and change in social action, we identify three theoretical models. First, the classic Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1978) that treats collective actions as the results of the strategies adopted by minority groups in the process of social change. Identification with the group determines the individuals’ perceptions of socio-structural characteristics and predicts the likelihood of their participation in social change processes. That said social identity a) underlines group-based emotions and brings together the perception of injustice and collective action; b) politicises and, thus, motivates collective action by channelling broader social identities into more specific protest organisations; and c) predicts both structural and incidental types of collective disadvantage. However, social identity is understood as a well-defined entity, rather than as a socially constructed category or a social strategy, that can be prone to change in the course of action. As a result such a conceptualisation of social identity fails to explain social change. To address this shortcoming Simon and Klandermans (op. cit.) have proposed through their Collective Identity Theory that collective identification develops gradually within a series of events that politicise the individuals and transform their interactions with the social environment. Collective actions, such as protests, are the main events that principally contribute to collective identification. This then leads to a ‘collective identity’ that is structured through acknowledging shared grievances, blaming the opponents, and calling the rest of the society for support and participation. The third model, the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM), moves a step forward. In particular, it stresses that ‘people’s sense of their social position (social identity) changes to the extent that in acting on their identity (participating in a protest) they are repositioned as a consequence of the understandings and reactions of an out-group (treated as oppositionalists by the police), and this repositioning leads to a new sense of identity as well as new forms of actions (oppositional violence)’ (Drury and Reicher 2009, 713). Deriving from Social Identity Theory, the two theoretical models, namely Collective Identity Theory and ESIM, take into consideration the structural and ideological variables of the social context in which collective action takes place, such as inequality, illegitimacy, and boundary impermeability, which influence the emergence, the timing and the forms

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of collective action adopted by social activists. Whereas Collective Identity Theory (Simon and Klandermans op. cit.), underlines the interpersonal processes that lead to group formation and collective action, such as shared grievances, allocation of the opponent and sensitisation of the general public, ESIM highlights the intergroup processes of collective action and their consequences in the empowerment of the protest groups (Drury and Reicher op. cit.). In an effort to delve into ESIM, we note that an ingroup of protesters includes those who have decided to participate in the action due to multiple determinants (Drury and Reicher 2005). These may range from a sense of outrage expressed in radical action and the willingness to alter the existing constellation of power relations, or a sense of disapproval expressed in some sort of legitimate and lawful action. Protesters consist initially of a majority group that can be seen as moderate aiming at expressing its views to the authorities, and a minority group that can be seen as radical aiming at competing for power and rightness with the authorities. Despite the differences in the intensity of the social action between the two groups (there might be many others depending on the determinants), they are both perceived and treated as homogeneously dangerous by the authorities, the ‘outgroup’. This leads to the radicalisation of collective behaviour. This process involves subsequently a shift of the protesters’ views about the ‘outgroup’, as well as, a change of the ‘ingroup’ identity, which results in a transformation of the relation between protest participants and the authorities. The view that police action is targeted against anyone who opposes it prevails and functions as a unifying force for the ‘ingroup’ (Drury and Reicher 2009). Turning to the present study we should initially underline that it adheres to the fourth theoretical paradigm, which draws on social psychological approaches. This choice is mainly justified by the scope of our study, which is to examine the ways in which participants in specific Facebook groups define their identity and actions regarding the 2008 December protest events in Greece. More specifically, we are interested in the construction of the conflict based on common identifications of ‘ingroup(s)’ and ‘outgroup(s)’, since we expect that participants (members) in Facebook groups share common views. So after having selected the relevant Facebook groups for the 2008 December protests, the analysis will focus on identifying categories of ‘ingroup(s)’ and ‘outgroup(s)’ as constructed by the representations of members and their shared grievances as well as the ways in which they handle heterogeneity issues. In parallel, the analysis will attempt to identify moderate and radical lines of argumentation employed against the ‘outgroup(s)’.

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Since our research goal is to unravel how the action discourse is constructed and employed online by various groups that participated in the selected protest events, we employ the ESIM to explain in what ways the collective identity is used as a spark that triggers participation, mobilisation and identity construction. Although it is evident that through the use of ESIM the explanation of mobilisation and protest action is based on category definitions of the scope and content of collective action (Hopkins and Reicher 1997), it thus becomes crucial to elaborate further on how the notion of categorisation will be treated in our study. More specifically, by focusing on the discourse of selected Facebook groups, we are searching for the ways in which the category boundaries of every group are defined so as to attract members to join the group. Those who become members are perceived to be attributed with common social categories that situate them against ‘others’ which are the ones that the group is fighting against. Hence the final premise in our theoretical framework refers to the formation of certain groups based on social categories while others emerge based on antithetical social categories (Billig 1987). While ESIM explains how changes in identities and action occur though interaction, our study does not explicitly focus on processes of change and, more specifically, psychological changes resulting from participating in the protest events. This is due to the nature of our data, which is considered as rather static, being produced during or after the protest events. We attempt nevertheless to address this limitation by drawing more emphasis on the rhetoric, which is equally perceived as action and that is why we will not only explore the ways in which Facebook groups define their category boundaries, but we will also investigate the ways in which the opposing groups are represented (Hopkins and Reicher op. cit., 266).

Methodology The study is based on data collected and extracted from the written material published online in the descriptions of selected Facebook groups. Facebook groups constitute one of its most popular applications since any user can create a group on a specific topic of interest in which the rest of Facebook users can become members, participate in its ongoing activities, receive information and interact with others who follow the specific group. The common point of reference among the group members is their interest in the theme around which the group was created. The theme is outlined in the profile of the page where the group is described. This section is called

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‘description’ and this is where usually every group presents its basic scope, principles, beliefs or, in other words, its identity. Group descriptions are considered important since they represent the group, set its boundaries and function as a ‘call’, or an invitation for including or excluding future members. Members are supposed to share and accept what has been stated in the descriptions of every group. The descriptions of the selected Facebook groups make up the analytical material of the study. The Facebook groups that we have selected emerged after a search in the Facebook webpage for groups that contained in their title the following keywords: ‘Grigoropoulos’ or ‘Alexis Grigoropoulos’, and ‘December 2008’. The number of groups that appeared was higher (approximately 60) than the 46 ones that were finally chosen. The reason we finally focused on 46 groups is that these ones included a written description that was publicly available. The range of the groups’ membership was from 12 to 112678 members. Yet the majority of the groups (31) had from 100 to 5000 members. The period in which the collection of our data took place with periodical searches using the same keywords was from March 2009 until December 2010. The description of a Facebook group may be one line long or a lengthy text, but this is not important since all textual data was gathered in a separate folder. The data was then analysed based on qualitative content analysis (Ahuvia 2008; George 2008; Smith 1995). Specifically, the interest, as in traditional content analysis, lies in highlighting the themes that appear in the content of the discussion and interpretation of these themes. The main objective is not only to focus on the identification of the dominant quantitatively theme but also to search for the variety of issues and proceed with their interpretation. The major analytical strategy involved the identification of ‘commonplace’ aspects of the accounting practice (Condor and Gibson 2007, 121). This entails repeated readings of all the transcripts that lead to the identification of the themes in which the content of discussions was classified. Subsequently, repeated readings of the descriptions contained within every theme led to the identification of separate lines of argument. Facegroup descriptions were firstly analysed according to the definition they used to represent their members and invite new ones to participate. In this way, five categories of Facebook groups were identified. Secondly, within each category the classified descriptions were analysed according to the argumentation lines they used to promote action, manage heterogeneity issues and represent their ‘outgroup(s)’.

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Results The analysis brought to the fore 46 Facebook groups that contained in their title the relevant keywords and were created after the shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos. Subsequently the groups’ descriptions were analysed in terms of their constructions of the ‘ingroups’ and ‘outgroups’ of the protest and collective action and were classified in five thematic categories, which are discussed in detail below.

1. ‘Against the police’ Most of Facebook groups (20 groups) that were created after the shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos present themselves as groups that aim at the conviction of the shooting and the police actions. Thus they invite Facebook users to join based on sharing the same views towards the murder and the police. It is interesting to note that their opposition to the police is declared even in the title of the groups (Table 1). Six of them use the name of Alexis in their title along with the name of Kaltezas, who was another adolescent killed by the police during protests in 1993. This way they presuppose that the people who will join the group are already aware of police arbitrariness. There are five more groups that overtly adopt a position against the police either through the employment of diminishing or ironic comments or by directly accusing the police as consisting of murderers (Group, 5, 10, 11, 13 and the last 20). The rest of the groups (9) denounce in their titles the murder of Grigoropoulos by pointing at the unreasonable murder of the victim and the unjustified behaviour of the murderers. Moving into the analysis of these groups’ descriptions, police denouncement becomes even more profound. Twelve (12) descriptions (Group 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16 and 18) make reference to previous incidents of police killing or harassing citizens, thus presentingGrigoropoulos’s murder as another murder in a series of police murders. The role of the police is hereby represented as abnormal since it is defined as a group that instead of protecting citizens kills citizens who have committed no previous crime. In all group descriptions, police is the central theme that is additionally presented as being protected by the political system. The political system is accused of providing cover to police criminal acts by allowing policemen to act in an arbitrary manner.

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Table 1. ‘Against the Police’ Facebook groups Group title

No. No. Members Links

1. 1985: MICHALIS KALTEZAS-2008: ALEXIS GRIGOROPOULOS

1444

26

2. MICHALIS KALTEZAS-ALEXANDROS GRIGOROPOULOS

49

0

3. Alexandros Grigoropoulos  Dead without a reason …

76

3

4. Exemplary punishment for the murderers of the 16-yearold Alexandro Grigoropoulo!

1177

9

5. Goodbye to the 15-year-old who was killed by the cops

62311

339

6. Kaltezas, Temponeras, Grigoropoulos no more tolerance

455

2

7. Michalis Kaltezas (1970-1985)/ Alexandros Grigoropoulos 412 (1993-2008)

10

8. Michalis Kaltezas (1970-1985)-Alexandros Grigoropoulos 24 (1993-2008)

0

9. Michalis Kaltezas (1970-1985)-Alexandros Grigoropoulos 412 (1993-2008)

10

10. Victims of Police … They should not be forgotten

175

2622

11. *UHHN3ROLFHǼȁǹȈ - Greek urban killer ǼȁȁǾȃǿȀǾ 58 ǹȈȉȊ-ĭȅȃǿǹ

0

12. HE WAS JUST 16 YEARS OLD!!!

1244

6

13. I DON’T WALK IN DANGEROUS PLACES … BECAUSE I WILL BE KILLED BY A POLICEMAN.

1243

12

14. ALL TOGETHER, LET’S SEND A MESSAGE FOR THE UNJUST MURDER OF A 15-YEAR-OLD

6508

22

15. 6/12/08 we don’t forget!!!!

711

1

16. A BIG GOODBYE TO ALEX

360

5

17. ALEXANDRE GRIGOROPOULE YOU ARE ALIVE YOU ARE ALIVE!!!

49

0

18. No to the repeated vilification of human rights

12

1

19. You have killed the wrong Alexis … Kougias should have been the one

23355

78

20. The next bullet is going to point at us! Shame and disgust 31 for the murder of Alexis

0

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While this construction of the police is the common denominator for all groups included in this category, the groups are differentiated as to the strength of the arguments employed. Thus some of them use quite strong and insulting adjectives to refer to the police and, in particular, to the policemen who shot Grigoropoulos. ‘Most of them are disturbed, hiding their personal deficiency under the uniform… Anthropoids without brain, education and training, full of complexes and hate towards the other…’ Say No to the killer cops who gradually kill every one of us. Killers’ (Group 4)1

In other group descriptions, the intensity of the arguments used to depict the negative role of the police is expressed through the detailed description of the shooting (eight descriptions). Finally other group descriptions include comments demanding the severe punishment of the two policemen involved in the event as well as the reorganisation of the police, as an institutional instrument, in order to prevent its arbitrariness. ‘Until when are we going to witness such events, people in charge? Why ‘humans’ like him carry a gun? Will the truth reveal or there will be an effort to cover this event as it was done in the case of the Cypriot student a few months earlier?’ (Group 3)

The common element of the first line of argumentation that is composed by 20 Facebook groups is that their identity is structured upon theiropposition to the ‘outgroup’ rather than the definition of the identity elements of the ‘ingroup’. This rather loose manner of attributing characteristics to the ingroup presents the groups as ‘open’ to any potential member who shares common feelings against the police. Some groups, in particular, contain very general and broad categorisations of ‘us’ including everyone who can be potentially at a risk of being killed by police, like ‘our kids, our friends’ (Group 1). This is further sustained by the use of the argument that anyone can be found in the position of the victim, generalising in this way the danger entailed by the police actions.

1

All extracts were originally in Greek. For the purpose of the present chapter they have been translated into English by the authors. All the annotations have been kept from the original text.

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2. ‘Pro social action’ The second category of Facebook groups that we discuss comes second also in terms of the number of groups that it contains (ten). The principal aim of these groups based on their descriptions and titles is to encourage action through protesting in the streets. Especially in four groups the orientation to action becomes evident in their titles by the use of the phrases ‘revolution’ and ‘everybody in the streets’ (Groups 3, 4, 5 and 6) (Table 2). Table 2. ‘Pro social action’ Facebook groups Group title

No. Members

No. Links

1. Cops killers  Dead the 16-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos

12684

103

%L]GH