Landscapes of Lifelong Learning Policies Across Europe: Conceptual Lenses

The analyses carried out in the YOUNG_ADULLLT project show a remarkable variation in the landscape of LLL policies directed at young adults throughout Europe. Common challenges, such as the impact of the Great Recession and the decline of young adults’ labour market conditions, have been tackled by a wide range of interventions in European countries. These interventions vary substantially regarding policy aims, intervention sectors, design levels and target groups. In addition, research has pointed to the fact that LLL policy-making is extremely context-specific. Functional and structural relationships at the regional level show how LLL policies interact with sedimented economic and socio-cultural arrangements, thereby producing specific impacts on the opportunities and constraints faced by young people dealing with the difficult task of managing their biographies. The exploration of the effects produced by policies and discourses on the shaping of the individuals’ life trajectories has proved to be a fecund overarching analytical approach from which to observe the (potentially non-converging) overall aims of LLL policies, namely economic growth and social inclusion. In order to tackle such complexity, we have drawn mainly on three theoretical lenses to elaborate and analyse case studies. Firstly, the Life Course Research approach (Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003) enables considering how biographies result simultaneously from subjective choices, resources and embeddedness in institutional macrosocial frames such as the labour market, welfare and education programmes, as well as in more intangible frames like social inequality. The second theoretical lens is the Cultural Political Economy perspective (Jessop, 2004; Sum and Jessop, 2013), which highlights the relevance of the cultural dimension for understanding and analysing multi-layered social formations such as LLL policies. It places a specific focus on the relationship between the discourses reproduced by policies and the construction of subjectivities and imaginaries. Lastly, the Governance perspective (Benz et al., 2007) calls attention to important shifts in visions and preferred concepts in the political field; furthermore, it helps to address coordination issues among different agents within the State, the economy, the labour market, and civil society. Against this background, this chapter takes a step further by focusing on the opportunity structures and their institutional and discursive components, seeking to integrate them with a third - relational - component. By doing this, we analytically pave the way for the more empirical chapters that follow. Drawing on a rich vein of studies opened by the debate about the notions of life chance (Weber, 1946; Dahrendorf, 1979) and opportunity (Merton, 1968), we can put the concept of opportunity structure in relation to the visions and patterns of action applicable in response to culturally framed problems. Furthermore, we particularly take into consideration how recent research (Koopmans et al., 2005; Roberts, 2009; Dale & Parreira do Amaral, 2015) has problematized the dimensions of discursive and institutional opportunity structures. Discursive opportunity structures shape public discourses circulating at different levels (from international to national, from mainstream to common sense) and determine what a problem is and how to deal with it. Institutional opportunity structures organise the implementation patterns and modes of action according to specific structural features at the national level, contextualising and actualising the discursive opportunity structures in relation to local systems. Given the relevance of the interactions held in the process of policy delivering, in this book we aim to integrate the analysis of the relation between these structures of opportunity. In this chapter, we lay the analytical foundations of this approach. We do so by introducing the concept of sociorelational opportunity structure, which highlights the structure of interactions whereby people negotiate the meaning of the LLL policies they enter (or reject), framing them as opportunities (or not). Socio-relational opportunity structure focuses precisely on the effects of the intersection between individual biographies and LLL policies and emphasises the active character of their participants.