This paper examines the prerequisites of young Finnish people’s life course construction in the context of the interplay of late modern individualisation, which is inseparably intertwined with the prevailing neoliberal policy ideology, and the continued significance of social structures. The focus of the study is on how the processes of both social change and social reproduction are reflected in the field of education, which is one of the most significant contexts in which young people build the foundations of their future lives.

Even though the Finnish education system is still fairly equal in European comparison, there is compiling evidence of social stratification of urban comprehensive schools to which neoliberal education policies have clearly contributed. The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the ways in which the neoliberal school choice policies and the consequent stratification of schools contribute to the persisting – or even increasing – importance of social structures in life course formation. As it is often argued that transitioning from youth to adulthood has become more difficult, prolonged, non-linear, and individually varied, this study asks also how the social contexts of family and school are related to those resources that young people need in navigating this increasingly complex and risk-fraught historical time of late modern individualisation. This study approaches its aim from three viewpoints: educational institutions, families, and individuals.

Instead of adopting an ‘either individualisation or social structures’ perspective (c.f. Rasborg, 2017), this study draws upon and contributes to those scholarly discussions which aim to integrate theorisations of individualisation and ‘traditional’ social structures. The view on individualisation adopted here does not exclude the traditional forms of stratification but recognises that their importance can be accentuated by individualisation (Curran, 2018; Dawson, 2012), that they are overlaid with new forms of differentiation (Rasborg, 2017), and that all individuals are not equally ‘individualised’ (Bauman, 2007a; Mills, 2007; Skeggs, 2004). The study builds on those theoretical approaches that have combined some of the main tenets of the individualisation thesis (Beck, Giddens, Bauman) with the work of Bourdieu and, hence, concurs with those views that see elements in the individualisation thesis allowing for the examination of the interplay between individualisation and social stratification (e.g. Rasborg, 2017; Woodman, 2010) and recognise the generative capacities and mechanisms in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (e.g. Farrugia & Woodman, 2015; Mills, 2008; Reay, 2004b).

Drawing on the interactionist criticism of individualisation (see Dawson, 2012) related to both ‘cultural class analysis’ (e.g. Savage, 2000; Reay, 2005) and the theoretical works linking reflexivity with habitus (e.g. Adams, 2006; Farrugia, 2013), and on Dawson’s (2012) conceptualisation of embedded individualisation that builds on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, individualisation is not viewed as leading to the weakening or diminishing of ‘traditional’ forms of social inequalities, but instead it is seen to be embedded in and influenced by social structures. Furthermore, the distribution of risks is heavily shaped by social structures (see Curran, 2018), and individualisation does not diminish but can actually accentuate the importance of the continual forms of stratification (Dawson, 2012).

The data of this study come from the comparative, mixed-methods research project Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe – Access, Coping and Relevance of Education for Young People in European Knowledge Societies in Comparative Perspective (GOETE; www.goete.eu). The GOETE project involved eight European Union countries including Finland and it was funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research. The various datasets collected in the project included surveys with 1) lower secondary school students (in Finland 14–15-year-old comprehensive school ninth graders); 2) their parents; and 3) principals of primary, lower secondary, general upper secondary, and vocational upper secondary schools. In Finland, the GOETE surveys were conducted in three cities: Helsinki (capital city, 604,000 inhabitants, Uusimaa region), Turku (180,000 inhabitants, Southwest Finland region), and Tampere (217,000 inhabitants, Pirkanmaa region). The principal survey included questions about governance of education, relevance of education, as well as access to and coping with the demands of education. The student survey assessed respondents’ experiences regarding their educational trajectories to date, their attitudes, expectations, and aspirations towards their continued participation, and their views of the future. The parent survey, in turn, assessed respondents’ views in relation to school choice, progression, and problems and support experienced to date as well as views on the child’s lower secondary school. With regard to students and their parents, the data collection started with selecting the schools: lower secondary schools were the main sampling unit selected at random from a sampling frame. The sample was stratified into three categories (the socio-economic composition of lower secondary school’s student population, hereinafter school SES: disadvantaged, average, and affluent) according to the socio-economic context of the schools. In Finland, the main criteria for classifying the schools were the socio-economic structure and unemployment level of the schools’ catchment areas as assessed by official statistics. The analysis methods for the Finnish principal data (N = 104), student data (N = 624), and parent data (N = 318) included both ‘traditional’ (e.g. descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations and chi-squared tests, principal components analysis, analysis of variance) and more advanced statistical methods (e.g. confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, multi-group modelling, MIMIC modelling). Given the breadth of the study, this paper focuses only on some of the most interesting and enlightening results in relation to its aim.

Principals’ views reflected the neoliberal education policy context. Over 10% of the Finnish principals stated that their school’s main objective is supporting the most gifted students in achieving their full potential – a view that can be seen to reflect the prevailing policy discourses and principals’ aim to maximise the results of the school and, thus, to thrive in the local school market. The principals ranked personnel recruitment and student admission criteria as the most important decision-making areas in their work the latter of which is still a rather surprising finding in the Finnish context. The results also add to the compiling evidence of the stratification of schools in urban Finland, which is an increasingly important feature of the ‘spatial and temporal’ context in which youngsters construct their future. The study shows that school SES is a predictor of parents’ satisfaction with their child’s school. This suggests that school SES is connected – in addition to the immediate prerequisites of producing learning results – to the extent to which schools can invest in those aspects of their functioning that are related to learning more indirectly, such as home-school cooperation and a safe and encouraging school culture. This indicates that there are differences in the prerequisites of the life course construction of Finnish young people based on the school they attend. Lastly, this study shows that students with higher levels of social and cultural capital did not worry about their future as often as those with less capital. The family background of those students whose parents are highly educated contributes positively, both directly and through increased support for schooling, to their self-concepts and self-efficacy beliefs. These positive self-beliefs reduce their future worry and, thus, protect them from its potentially negative consequences, thereby reducing the risk of related negative path dependency in their life course.

Adams, M. (2006). Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity: Towards an Understanding of Contemporary Identity? Sociology, 40(3), 511–528, Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Curran, D. (2018). Beck’s creative challenge to class analysis: from the rejection of class to the discovery of risk-class. Journal of Risk Research, 21(1), 29–40. Dawson, M. (2012). Reviewing the critique of individualization: The disembedded and embedded theses. Acta Sociologica, 55(4), 305–319. Farrugia, D. (2013). Young people and structural inequality: beyond the middle ground. Journal of Youth Studies, 16(5), 679–693. Farrugia D., & Woodman, D. (2015). Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer, Bourdieu and reflexivity. The British Journal of Sociology, 66(4), 626–644. Mills, C. (2008). Reproduction and Transformation of Inequalities in Schooling: The Transformative Potential of the Theoretical Constructs of Bourdieu. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(1), 79–89. Mills, M. (2007). Individualization and the Life Course: Toward a Theoretical Model and Empirical Evidence. In C. Howard (Ed.), Contested Individualization: Debates about Contemporary Personhood (pp. 61–79). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rasborg, K. (2017). From class society to the individualized society? A critical reassessment of individualization and class. Irish Journal of Sociology, 25(3), 229–249. Reay, D. (2004). ‘It’s all becoming habitus’: Beyond the Habitual Use of Habitus in Educational Research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 531–444. Reay, D. (2005). Beyond Consciousness? The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. Sociology, 39(5), 911–928. Savage, M. (2000). Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Skeggs, B. (2004), Class, Self, Culture, London: Routledge. Woodman, D. (2010). Class, individualisation and tracing processes of inequality in changing world: a reply to Steven Roberts. Journal of Youth Studies, 13(6), 737–746.