青年工人的成年转型困境——评席尔瓦的《无可达标:波荡时代美国青年工人的成年转型》

Working-Class Youth's Dilemma of Transition to Adulthood:A Review on Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

在一定时期内顺利完成学业、获得稳定工作和经济独立、结婚成家并为人父母,是美国青年工人实现成年转型的传统模式。但过去数十年美国社会不平等的持续扩大,使青年工人的成年转型陷入困境。基于美国两个传统工业城市的长期调查,《无可达标:波荡时代美国青年工人的成年转型》一书发现,社会不平等的加剧通过制度化的风险转嫁和个体化的自我重建两个关键机制,彻底重塑了青年工人的成年转型模式。本文首先梳理出该书的一个分析框架,并据此呈现社会不平等如何通过教育、工作等制度化的风险转嫁机制,冲击青年工人的家庭结构并瓦解其传统成年模式,让他们"无可达标",并促使其转向以"治疗创伤—自我成长"为内容的个体化的新成年转型模式。本文还提取出该书论证过程中的一条暗线,即通过对比青年工人和中产阶级极为不同的成年转型路径,突出社会不平等对青年工人成年转型的灾难性影响。本文认为,该书的主要研究发现破除了既有文献对成年转型的"中产式"理解,所使用的分析框架为考察中国城市化进程中新生代农民工的成年转型,尤其是注重中国家庭文化伦理和家庭组织结构的关键影响,提供了重要参照。

American working-class youth transits to adulthood in traditional way by completing school, finding a stable job, making one’s economy independent, getting married and having children timely and smoothly. However, the expansion of social inequality in the past few decades has made it in trouble. Based on a survey of two traditional industrial cities, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty finds that the expansion of social inequality has completely reshaped the model of transition to adulthood through two mechanisms, namely institutionalized risk transfer and individualized self-reconstruction. This review first sorts out an analytical framework of the book, and shows how social inequality impacts the family structure of young workers and disintegrates their traditional way of coming age through the two mechanisms mentioned above, prompting them to turn to the new individualized"treating trauma and self-growth"model. The review also extracts a hidden clue of the book, which highlights the disastrous effects of social inequality on young workers by comparing the very different coming age paths of working-class youth and their middle class counterpart. The author argues that the main findings of the book have broken the"middle-class"understanding of the transition to adulthood of existing literature;and the analytical framework used in the book provides an important reference for examining the transition to adulthood of the new generation of migrant workers under the process of urbanization in China.