Becoming a pastor

Young ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Lauterbach

Ghana, like a number of other African countries, witnesses an increasing number of smaller independent Pentecostal churches founded by young pastors. These young pastors engage in pastoral careers as a way to achieve social mobility. It is an attractive career path for many young people as it offers opportunities of ascending religious and social hierarchies in a situation where the more conventional modes of achieving success, through education and employment as civil servant, are decreasing.By exploring the careers of young pastors, the article discusses how this particular group of youth are innovative and entrepreneurial in the sense that they create spaces, where they can build up status and where this status is socially recognized. At the same time the young pastors are dependent on more senior pastors in order to make a career. This points to the importance of approaching youth from the perspective of generational dynamics. The argument is that in order to become successful pastors, young people have to engage in complex relations of dependency and at the same time be innovative. A religious setting, like the small independent Pentecostal churches, enables young people to be involved in and transcend these generational relations by drawing on powerful religious repertoires of invoking and claiming access to divine powers.

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042199783
Author(s):  
Minna Nikunen ◽  
Hanna-Mari Ikonen

By studying the moral orders that young Finnish adults (aged 18–30) attach to geographical mobility, this article reveals previously neglected relationships between aspiration and mobility. The 40 young adult interviewees are living in the midst of Finnish political debates about youth aspiration, which emphasise geographical rather than social mobility as a way to enhance employability and demonstrate aspiration. We argue that young people themselves use the discourse of geographical mobility by leaning on morally ordered social positionings which tend to be classed and gendered. They position themselves on a moral map of Finnish society, and in doing so they work and rework the social order and social hierarchies among young adults. The article suggests that notions of global and domestic mobility might best be grasped by focusing on the moral orders of aspiration that young adults also attach to intimate life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn McEwan

As trends of social and economic change allow precarity to inch into the lives of those who may have been more accustomed to security (Standing, 2011, 2014), this paper addresses the response of some young people who are caught “betwixt and between” in potentially liminal states (Turner, 1967). Those whose families have undertaken intra- or intergenerational social mobility and who have made a home in a place, Ingleby Barwick in Teesside, that seems to be of them and for them—an in-between place that is seen as “not quite” middle or working class. This paper draws data from a research project that adopted a qualitative phenomenological approach to uncover the meaning of experiences for participants. Methods included focus groups and semi-structured interviews through which 70 local people contributed their thoughts, hopes, concerns, and stories about their lives now and what they aspire to for the future. Places, such as the large private housing estate in the Northeast of England on which this research was carried out, make up significant sections of the UK population, yet tend to be understudied populations, often missed by a sociological gaze attracted to extremes. It was anticipated that in Ingleby Barwick, where social mobility allows access to this relatively exclusive estate, notions of individualism and deservingness that underlie meritocratic ideology (Mendick et al., 2015; Littler, 2018) would be significant, a supposition borne out in the findings. “Making it” to Ingleby was, and continues to be, indicative to many of meritocratic success, making it “a moral place for moral people” (McEwan, 2019). Consequently, the threat then posed by economic precarity, of restricting access to the transitions and lifestyles that create the “distinction” (Bourdieu, 1984) required to denote fit to this place, is noted to be very real in a place ironically marked by many outside it as fundamentally unreal.


Author(s):  
Nailia Z. Fakhrutdinova

Serious changes are taking place in socio-political life of Algeria. The mass protest movement "Hirak", which began in 2019, after the country's president announced his decision to run for a fifth term, continues to these days. Despite his resignation, a prompt change of political leadership and elections to a new parliament, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in all cities of Algeria insist on further democratization and genuine modernization of socio-political and socio-economic structures, taking into account the interests and needs of young people. Indeed, more than half of the population of Algeria is under 30 years old, and unemployment among them reaches 24%. A distinctive tendency of the protest movement was the active participation of young people, which, according to the new leadership of the country, is the true real wealth of the state. Analysts note the awakening of collective consciousness in Algeria. Hirak's ability to make quick decisions during a pandemic shows that demonstrations are an instrument of extremely broad public momentum. Certain positive shifts towards changes have taken place - the president, who has been in power for 20 years, has resigned. However, the political situation can hardly be called stable. Including the majority of popular revolutionary protest actions in African countries ended with an immediate deepening of conservatism, the strengthening of traditionalism and the surge of radical Islamism. Probably, only in a fairly long-term perspective we can expect a real modernized stabilization of the socio-political situation, without which progressive economic development and its derivatives: an increase in the standard of living of the population and a decrease in unemployment are unrealizable.


2021 ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Yun Young Kim ◽  
Young Jun Choi

This chapter aims to explore the role of education and social investment, with special attention on the effects of shadow education on social mobility in Korea. It analyses how family background and shadow education influence educational attainment and, subsequently, how educational attainment affects incomes, using data from the Korea Education and Employment Panel (KEEP). Since this 'broken social elevator' is not a problem faced only by Korea — most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have 'sticky ceilings' and 'sticky floors' — the chapter then discusses the direction social investment policies should take to reboot social mobility. It argues that in order to minimise the effects of family background on educational attainment and labour market outcomes, social investment policies should actively play a redistributive role.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao ◽  
Kevin Wong ◽  
Po-san Wan ◽  
Victor Zheng

This article, which is based on a comparative telephone survey conducted in 2016, examines the relationship between social mobility experience and the life satisfaction of people aged 18 to 35 in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Using both objective and subjective measures of social mobility, we found that young people’s perceptions of their own social mobility and that of the entire youth population correlated positively with life satisfaction. However, the objective upward experiences of intragenerational and intergenerational mobility did not have a significant effect on life satisfaction. In addition, the objective upward experiences of individuals were found to be uncorrelated with the perceptions of their own social mobility and that of the entire youth population. These findings suggest that young people will not become more satisfied even if they themselves have actually experienced upward mobility, because their positive perception of social mobility depends on whether they can move upward to their desired status. It is the expected social mobility and the competence to achieve rather than the actual past mobility experience that could affect the life satisfaction of the young generation in Taiwan and Hong Kong.


2018 ◽  
pp. 59-90

This chapter examines countries' performance regarding youth unemployment. Although the labour market situation of young people has started to improve in a number of countries since the Great Recession of 2007–8, youth unemployment still remains very high across Europe. High youth unemployment rates reflect young people's difficulties in securing employment, or the inefficiency of the labour market. Germany and the Netherlands have established the most effective institutions to achieve a high integration of 15–19 year-olds in education and employment. Indeed, both Germany and the Netherlands are amongst the highest performing countries in the EU for making sure their young people are in employment. Austria and Denmark also achieve good youth labour market and employment outcomes. Meanwhile, countries like France and the UK try to facilitate school-to-work (STW) transitions by lowering labour costs through subsidies or low employment protection.


2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (781) ◽  
pp. 196-198
Author(s):  
William Reno

Young people in African countries often can't afford marriage and other conventional hallmarks of adulthood. Yet they have developed valuable skills in the struggle to get by.


2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald D. Vale

Many years of training are required to obtain a job as an academic scientist. Is this investment of time and effort worthwhile? My answer is a resounding “yes.” Academic scientists enjoy tremendous freedom in choosing their research and career path, experience unusual camaraderie in their lab, school, and international community, and can contribute to and enjoy being part of this historical era of biological discovery. In this essay, I further elaborate by listing my top ten reasons why an academic job is a desirable career for young people who are interested in the life sciences.


Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-413
Author(s):  
Janice McLaughlin

The right to a supported independent life is a central dimension to disability politics. This focus has been used to challenge institutionalised living and the exclusion of disabled people from areas such as education and employment. The importance given to independence has also led to a critique of care. This critique has been a point of contention between disability studies and feminist theorising. In this article I argue it is important to return to these debates because contemporary conditions mean advocacy of independence is being co-opted into rhetorics of self-sufficiency. At the same time care on its own does not offer a productive alternative. The article draws from an ESRC project undertaken with disabled young people to advocate for the importance of both supported independence and of support being caring. It concludes by arguing that an expansive welfare state is required to create the conditions that can make that possible.


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