Contenu du sommaire

Difficulties in Classifying Youngsters. Youngsters thwart the plans of the statisticians. If they don't immediately fall outside his reckoning through not belonging to any household, as is the case with young workers living in hostel accommodation or those youngsters housed in specialized establishments, they lend themselves badly to classification, even when using the most tried-and-tested grids. Frustrating the opposition between active and inactive, they circulate between the intermediate statuses of soldier, probationary employee or even unemployed. But these statuses frequently designed with them in mind, now prove inadequate in accounting for the indivisible continuum that has formed between the position of the youngster who is assisted by his parents or by the school and that of the adult in gain ful employment. So we find them relegated to downgraded statistical categories in populations of people «to be counted separately» or as active persons or unemployed persons «on the fringe». Nonetheless, this prolonged instability does not mean the same for all youngsters irrespective of their social origin, the adolescence of youngsters from the working class coinciding only very briefly and superficially with that of youngsters from other social classes. The academic qualifications of youngsters from working-class backgrounds are the least valued on the job-market but if employers persist in seeking out that manpower for its vigour and submissiveness, they are however no longer able, as in the old days, to take them on openly as youngsters and they have dropped job titles such as «lad», «boy» or «lass» for titles suggesting a genuine «skill», thereby getting round the youngsters school qualifications by fobbing them off with empty promises. The difficulties encountered by the statistician in classifying these unclassifiable youngsters prompt him to fall back on the criterion of age, ostensibly more unequivocal. But the numerical precision of this variable, which they set against the vague and arbitrary definitions produced by the common-sense rift «young»/«old» merely conceals the important social crux that is at the heart of the drawing up of these lines of demarcation.

Youngsters with no Prospects and Temporary Employment. Using a body of monographic studies conducted during the nineteen seventies in several housing estates and in a variety of short-term residences and hang-outs in the Paris area, and drawing on academic and professional case-histories, anattempt lias been made to illuminate the conditions in which the «youngsters» from these abodes —a group which in this case has a genuine collective existence— enter onto the job market and try to work out ways of bringing about a relative improvement in their status, notably by using the openings made available by the boom in temporary employment. To understand the confrontations taking place on the job market presupposes a detailed knowledge of the conditions in which these youngsters grew up, of the relationship between them and «their» community —a closed and hated world— and of the way they experienced their school failure and above ail their relegation to the «cast-off» sections of the Technical training Colleges. If a sub-culture does emerge in these communities, it is constituted first and foremost through the feeling of shared indignity. Starting from their first work-experiences, lived out collectively on the highly distinct level as a gang-spirit, the majority of the youngsters discover that all hopes of professional advancement are barred to them and that they are robbed of any future. In the specific conditions of their home community, adolescents develop a System of attitudes peculiar to themselves, a peculiar form of «realism» which leads them to turn down the unskilled jobs offered them by heavy industry (the factory, the assembly-line, clocking in) and by petty commerce (the «flunkey's» tasks which lay them open to repeated humiliation) and to seize upon the formula of temporary jobs; in other words, they commit themselves to a logic of the «piece-meal», by seeking out unstable, interchangeable and high-risk jobs which nonetheless offer a potential opportunity to «try one's luck». There is a likeness between the structure of the outlook as fostered by life within the home community and what is expected from workers who regularly sign on for temporary employment. Naturally these youngsters entertain a whole variety of relation-ships with temporary work —those of resignation and fatalism, in some cases, in others those of realism or ruse. The fact remains that temporary work appears to make professional virtues out of behaviour traits formerly judged to be symptoms of social maladjustment, and that this situation serves the interest of a certain class of firm. In certain respects, the behaviour of these youngsters, studied in the mid —seventies, foreshadows in an extreme form that of large sections of working youngsters, demoralised, disappointed and placed in a precarious predicament, both as a resuit of the worsening economic recession and the transformations in the System of schooling which accentuate further still the rift between the aspirations of the individual and the opportunities really offered him by the economic System.

Youth-of-all-Work and the Decline of the Small Employer. Up until the creation of the Agence Nationale pour l'Emploi (the ANPE; National Employment Agency) responsible for assisting and finding jobs for ail unemployed persons, there already existed in Paris and the Paris area placing services intended for the under-eighteens alone. The majority of these youngsters had no school training beyond CEP level. (Certificat d'études primaires: Primary Education Certificate, the earliest nationally-recognized qualification for French schoolchildren, obtained around the age of fourteen). They were recruited principally by lesser Parisian employers who found in them the cheap work force they needed. This article is based on the observation of one of these services in the course of the last years of its operation as well as on the analysis of job offers and around fifty interviews with employers, carried out in 1971. At that time employers complained about a shortage of apprentices and the difficulty in recruiting and above all in keeping on unskilled youngsters as a result of the extension of the school-leaving age to sixteen and, more broadly, as a result of further study, following primary school, by a large proportion of working-class children. The analysis of the reasons which bring employers to apply to youngsters rather than to other categories of the work force shows that the type of job they offer them are defined more by the social characteristics of the persons for whom the jobs are intended than by the technical characteristics of the jobs themselves. Whether it be a job as messenger, packer, shop-assistant or office-help, the employers are doubtless looking for physical toughness, but they are looking above all for the adaptability of the youngsters to a wide range of tasks (cleaning, running errands, selling, manufacturing), a technical as well as a moral quality. This is why nationality, skin-colour, sex, physical appearance, in short the sort of person one is, are for these lesser employers so many tell-tale signs of one's suitability for the jobs offered. Certain major concerns, such as banks, insurance firms, industrial companies, also apply to this agency but only for those posts which are insecure or deemed to require minimal skill. Occasionally lumped together with the handicap ped or society outcasts, youngsters are placed in competition with pensioners, students, women or foreign workers, when it cornes to looking for jobs with a high turnover rate.

The Invention of the «Senior Citizen» The distribution into age-groups and the definitions of the legitimate practices associated with them follows the emergence of instruments specialized in the welfare of the different age-groups. The invention of a new stage in the life-cycle bridging maturity and old age «the third age»* - is to a large extent the resuit of the widespread development of Systems of retirement and the modes of collective treatment of old age which are linked to these. Whereas it was formerly only reserved for a certain category of individuals, indeterminate with respect to age —the destitute-the collective management of «old people» is tending to become the current formula for the maintenance of persons henceforth labelled «the elderly». The institutionalisation of the maintenance of old people was accompanied by the implementation of bureaucratic techniques of administrative and financial management, by the training of full-time specialized officers and at the same time by the production of classifications intended to designate and distinguish the area of activity of these different agencies. The progressive differenciation of the agencies handling the needs of old people is directly linked to the spread of retirement Systems to encompass ail social categories. Pension aid funds have had to face demands for new forms of welfare, and have been able, by increasing the funds held by them and allotted to the care of old people, to meet these demands financially. These funds, which have increased considerably with the emergence of supplementary pension funds, constitute one of the elements at stake which are at the root of the formation of a relatively autonomous field of agencies competing for their control and management. The production of new facilities catering for «the elderly» and the representation of old age which is associated with this («old age is a new lease of life») are essentially offshoots of this struggle. The formation of this field and, associated with this, the constitution of old age as an autonomous age-class whose properties are basically a function of advancing years i.e., «the elderly» — all these phenomena necessarily obscure the fact that the definition of old age is the object of conflicts between the social classes, a fact we are reminded of by the history of the setting up of modes of collective treatment of old people which initially catered for the working classes. The emergence «the third age» may not however be solely accounted for in terms of a manipulation of those needs competed for by the entire body of agencies concerned by the care of old people. The evolution of the maintenance of the elderly by specialized institutions, and the increasing earliness at which it takes place result from deep changes in the relations between generations. It would seem that these transformations affected more particularly the middle classes who find in the concept and functions of the «third age» a sort of social identity and an outlet for their need to fulfill certain activities. *«Troisieme âge» here translatee neutrally as «third age», corresponds to the earlier years of retirement, whether supported or not by a pension-assured income. The French formula corresponds to the Anglo-saxon formula «senior citizen».

Young Farmers and Old Peasants The growth of senior citizens' clubs in a rural environment is merely a minor symptom of wider transformations in kinship interchange between different generations, notably within peasant families. A monographic survey carried out in a village in the Bas-Maine reveals that the setting up of these clubs is linked to the growth in the number of peasants who are either retired or not in gainful employmenf, who have had to hand over prematurely the running of the farm to their children. But the shortage of effective heirs to the estate which affects a good many peasant families and which betrays the weakening of the position of the family as such within the machinery of social reproduction would not alone have sufficed to ensure the success of the senior citizens' clubs had there not taken place a simultaneous dismemberment of the village group. The isolation of the old peasants was effectively bound to increase given the individualisation of farm labour (linked to mechanization) and the withdrawal into the nuclear family that accompanies this. The senior citizens' clubs, by seeking to rally isolated peasants in order to put a stop their isolation, doubtless constitute a sort of 'self-management of welfare' of old people; but we may ask ourselves whether their essential social function is not more concerned with cushioning and legitimizing a loss of social status, a function which they implicitly fulfil. The discarding of aged parents by their children necessarily creates moral and affective problems, as illustrated by the borderline case of parents being sent to Old Peoples Homes. To analyse the socio-medical care of old people is to grasp the ways in which the bad conscience of the individual insidiously becomes the good intentions of society at large.

Generational Tension and Cultural Change : Reflections on the Case of Vienna. The Freudian theory of Œdipal conflict is not unrelated to the development, in Austria, of the struggles between the generations which, at the close of the 19th century, worsened in the intellectual section of the bourgeoisie. The entirety of the intellectual output of that period effectively bears the stamp of this conflict, as witness the recourse to the term Jungen to designate the political, literary and artistic movements which shook the Viennese cultural milieu at that time. The literary movement which emerged in the 1880's under the name of Jung-Wien rallied together the young middle-class intelligentsia, disappointed by German nationalism and the antisemitism which was linked to it; the identity of the group whose works were highly heterogeneous on the stylistic level rested essentially on a common definition of «modernity», as a mode of existence and a form of sensitivity detached from history, and also on a pessimistic and egocentric world-view. No more than had been the case with the Jung-Wien, the unifying basis of the artistic movement Secession which succeeded it was not aesthetic principles; it merely took up the principles peculiar to the two movements which preceded it; from the populist Jungen, the theory of cultural generation and the revolt against corruption; from the Jung-Wien, anti-historical modernism and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The psychological exploration of the relations between the generations which characterizes this movement and which will find consummate expression in the writings of Freud, springs from the trauma suffered by a generation confronted by the dissolution of liberalism in ail its aspects. But unlike those who saw in that crisis the collapse of rationalist culture, Freud interprets the unique experience of that generation in terms of the universal relationship between father and son.

Illegitimate Children. Zahoua's long account tracing the story of the emigration of her family and describing the relationships both within her family and outside it (and, beyond that immediate experience, the relationships with French and Algerian society) is, to a large degree, the product of the peculiar position she occupies within her family. This position, enabling her to adopt both the point of view of the observer and that of the observed leads her to a genuine analysis of her condition —that of an émigré and that of an expatriate family's daughter. However, self-analysis in her case quickly turns into social analysis. Through her attempts to objectify her own predicament she is doubtless aiming, initially, to master a situation frought with conflict and achieve a balance between the contradictory pulls to which she is subjected. At a deeper level, however, she touches on the hard facts of the emigre's predicament and exposes its illusions and dishonesties. By proceeding in this way, she lays bare ail the contradictions inherent to emigration and all the conflicts it provokes. These conflicts, invariably described in psychological terms, are here formulated in their true sociological dimension insofar as the author both sets them out and describes the social conditions which gave rise to them. It is therefore frequently the case —witness the very example of Zahoua that the respective situations of the parents and of the children correspond to two sets of personal dramas which are both distinct yet inseparable. Severed by the gulf created by emigration, the children appear to the eyes of their parents, who no longer recognize themselves in them, as «bastards, endless sources of perplexity, in short, illegitimate children». Over and above the unhappy relationship with her parents, Zahoua lays bare the intrinsicality of the unhappy condition of the émigré.