Examining how youths in fourteen industrialized societies make the transition to adulthood in an era of globalization and rising uncertainty, this collection of essays investigates the impact that institutions working with social groups of youths have upon those youths' abilities to make adult decisions determining their life courses. Covering both Europe and North America, the book includes case studies, and contains country-specific contributions on conservative, social-democratic, post-socialist, liberal and familistic welfare regimes, as well as data from the GLOBALIFE project. Filling the gap in the market on the micro effects of globalization on individuals, and taking an empirical approach to the topic, this impressive volume brings the individual and nation-specific institutions back into the discussion on globalization.

Globalization has been strongly shaping and transforming both national economies and individual careers in recent decades. These profound changes have had significant consequences for individual careers of men and women both during and after their employment career. This impressive new collection focuses on the effects of the globalization process on late-midlife workers and the exit from employment – a relationship that has up to now mostly been neglected in social science literature on aging and employment. The research documented within these pages poses several important questions: * Has globalization produced fundamental shifts in late-midlife workers’ labor market participation and late careers? * What transformations in old age career mobility can we observe? * How are these transformations filtered by different national institutional settings? With an impressive array of contributions, this volume will interest students and academics involved in the study of sociology, welfare and globalization.

Youth and the future What will become of today’s young people in Australia, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America? Will they be supportive of the world they live in? Or are they doomed to be criminal drop-outs? The authors investigate to which extent different and contradictory trends of social modernisation and economic progress determine the biographical development and social integration of young people in different countries and world regions. Thus, the authors look at the role young people themselves can play in the future; either as construc tive social actors or as a problematic – and partly excluded – group unable to face the challenges of a permanently changing world.

Based on contributions from international experts, this volume provides an up-to-date account of globalization's influences on individual life courses in nine different modern societies, and of cross-nationally varying political strategies to mediate this influence.

Globalization, Uncertainty and Women's Careers assesses the effects of globalization on the life courses of women in thirteen countries across Europe and America in the second half of the 20th century. The book represents the first-ever longitudinal analysis of micro-level data from these OECD countries focusing exclusively on women's relationship to the labor market in a globalizing world. The contributors thoroughly examine women's employment entries, exits and job mobility and present evidence of women's increased labor market attachment and reduced employment quality in most of the countries studied. They also systematically consider the life course changes influenced by larger transformations in society and, in doing so, explicitly link the phenomena of globalization to individual women's lives in Europe and North America.

Underpinned by the fact that the globalization process and the subsequent increased level of market uncertainty have paved the way for employment flexibility in modern societies, this book examines the labor market chances of young adults in the US and in ten European societies over the past three decades. As young adults represent a very vulnerable labor market group, flexible and insecure employment tends to be pronounced especially at labor market entry. The contributors therefore explore which groups of young adults are especially affected by increasing employment insecurities.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Policymakers throughout Europe are enacting policies to support youth labour market integration. However, many young people continue to face unemployment, job insecurity, and the subsequent consequences.Adopting a mixed-method and multilevel perspective, this book provides a comprehensive investigation into the multifaceted consequences of social exclusion. Drawing on rich pan-European comparative and quantitative data, and interviews with young people from across Europe, this text gives a platform to the unheard voices of young people.Contributors derive crucial new policy recommendations and offer fresh insights into areas including youth well-being, health, poverty, leaving the parental home, and qualifying for social security.

How have the immediate school-to-work transition and the early career changed in different labour market entry regimes since the early 1980s? How do institutional frameworks differ with regard to insecurity perception? Ellen Ebralidze investigates these topics from a cross-national perspective while focusing on Denmark, the darling of flexicurity literature. The results show that in all the labour market entry regimes, the school-towork transition has become increasingly difficult, and flexible forms of work are more typical in the first job. Furthermore, the liberal institutional framework of the United States seems to produce a similarly low degree of job-loss worry among young people in their early career as the Danish paradigm.

Crossings to Adulthood: How Diverse Young Americans Understand and Navigate Their Lives assembles chapters written by members and affiliates of the Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood on pressing issues facing young, coming-of-age Americans in an increasingly diverse, globalizing world. Based on over 400 interviews with young adults from different racial, class and regional backgrounds, the chapters provide an in-depth look at how young Americans understand their lives and the challenges, risks, and opportunities they experience as they move into adulthood during changing and uncertain times. Chapters focus on how these young adults understand markers of adulthood such as leaving home, launching careers, and forming relationships, as well as issues particularly salient to them including politics, diversity, identity, and acculturation. Contributors are: Pamela Aronson, Arturo Baiocchi, Erika Busse, Patrick J. Carr, Laura Fischer, Constance A. Flanagan, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., Douglas Hartmann, Maria Kefalas, Vivian Louie, Charlie V. Morgan, Jeylan Mortimer, Laura Napolitano, Lisa Anh Nguyen, Wayne Osgood, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Sarah Shannon, Teresa Toguchi Swartz, and Christopher Uggen. Crossings to Adulthood: How Diverse Young Americans Understand and Navigate Their Lives is now available in paperback for individual customers.