Redefining the link between structure and agency

This chapter explores the changing forms of the relation between agency and structure in the de-standardized contemporary youth life course, taking time as an analytical tool. At the centre of the analysis lie the processes of social and cultural change that characterize our era, starting from the crisis of the future and the dynamics connected to the redefinition of historicity. In the new century there are firm reasons to believe that social acceleration, an authentic mark of globalization, has become a true feature of our present (and future). As a consequence, we face the passage from the modern phase of time–space compression to one in which the present itself contracts. In this latter context, contemporary young people construct their experiences and shape their lives. Their “situational identities” can be considered as the joint result of these processes and of contemporary individualization dynamics. The second part of the chapter, using empirical results of two researches currently carried out in Italy, analyses in particular how young people make use of a specific “time work” (Flaherty) – an expression of temporal agency – to domesticate their difficult relation with the medium- to long-term future. Through these forms of temporal agency young people are able “to use time against time”: to reconquer agency even though the accelerated contemporary temporal scenario tends to hinder them from implementing their choices.