Pathways toward Adulthood in Times of Crisis: Reflexivity, Resources and Agency Among Young Neapolitans

This chapter illustrates the pathways towards adulthood of young people living in the Naples area, a context where youth unemployment, traditionally high, has been further aggravated by the crisis. We understood adulthood here as a situation where an economic independence and a definition of the occupational profile have been achieved. In the conditions where processes of individualisation and destandardisation disorganised the structured pathways to adulthood and the crisis has reduced work opportunities, young people are deeply affected by uncertainty and precariousness. Not all of them, however, are equally disoriented or unarmed in facing the fluidity and the constraints of contemporary society. Reflexivity, in fact, seen as the capacity to reflect on one’s own abilities, possibilities and life course turns out to be a crucial resource. Adopting the terminology of biographical research, we call the reflexive process of imagining, trying out, assessing, thinking over, struggling with and working things out as biographical work, which today more than ever constitutes a key tool to find one’s own way to adulthood.