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INTRODUCTION
Capitalizing on concern: the making of troubled
children and troubling youth in late capitalism

JANET L. FINN
University of Michigan
LYNN NYBELL
Eastern Michigan University

Key words:
adolescence, capitalism, childhood, globalization,
intervention, morality, social work, youth,
youth cultures

Mailing address:
Janet L. Finn
University of Michigan, Department of
Anthropology, 1020 LSA, 500 S. State, Ann Arbor,
MI 48109-1382, USA
[email: jlfinn@umich.edu]

Childhood Copyright © 2001

SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi, Vol. 8(2): 139–145.
[0907-5682(200105)8:2; 139–145; 016820]

Shifts to late capitalism have coincided with reconfigurations of childhood

and adolescence. Talk of globalization, transnationalism and a ‘new world
order’ has coincided with a proliferation of new forms of pathology by
which troubled children and troubling youth are classified and treated. The
characterization of children and youth as focuses of concern is not new, and
many young people, lacking both personal and political voice, suffer very
real consequences of oppressive social conditions. What is at issue here is
not only how particular constructions of pathology and those of childhood
and adolescence are mutually reinforcing but also how they might articulate
with broader cultural and political discourses and with shifting market con-
ditions and logics of capital accumulation.
The ‘medicalization’ of difference, defiance and distress has filtered
beyond the helping professions and become a part of popular discourse on
children and youth. Young people are variably constructed as problems and
victims in powerful if vague discourses of risk and vulnerability espoused by
political leaders, professional helpers, parents and often youth themselves.
Expressions ranging from stubbornness and ‘laziness’ to sadness and sexual
interest are construed as symptoms whose correction calls for new forms of
socializing and disciplining of youthful bodies. Heightened concern for chil-
dren ‘at risk’ has coincided with the rise of the New Right and its discourses
of law, order and moral responsibility; the expansion of global capitalism;

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and the increased privatization and specialization of human service tech-

nologies. Child welfare advocates warn of the fragmentation of children into
bundles of pathology and call for coordinated, child-focused, flexible,
‘wraparound’ interventions to reintegrate their fractured lives. At the same
time, some young people, such as those identified as ‘slackers’, ‘gang mem-
bers,’ ‘punkers’ and ‘rappers’ are vilified by both conservative and liberal
adult critics who blame them for a host of social ills. Others are feared to be
‘at risk’ of falling victim to those very ills. The politics of identification at
work here are not evenly distributed; constructions of pathology play out
along lines of gender, race, class, age and citizenship in ways that locate
problems in the individual, bolster extant constructions of difference and
inequality, and mask possible connections between constructions of pathol-
ogy and structured practices of late capitalism.
The collection of articles in this special issue of Childhood is the prod-
uct of the concerns and conversations of social workers, youth workers,
anthropologists and social psychologists who have been grappling with these
themes over the past two decades. Our work has been informed by our own
painful and contradictory experiences in the negotiation of capitalism and
concern. Some of us were directly engaged in social work and youth work in
the 1980s. Our inability to negotiate the conflicting discourses and patterns
of practice that we confronted every day in our work with children, youth
and families prompted our return to the academy in search of new theoretical
and methodological strategies to make sense of these profound contradic-
tions. Others entered this terrain as cultural scholars interested in the impli-
cation of late capitalism in the lives of children, youth and families. They
found themselves inextricably bound in discourses of trouble and pathology
that demanded careful scrutiny.
Our collaboration began with a panel titled ‘Capitalizing on Concern’
at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1997. At that gath-
ering, a group of social workers and anthropologists came together to
explore diverse constructions of childhood, youth and pathology. We
explored a range of ethnographically grounded analyses that located these
constructions in the larger ‘businessing’ of human services and linked the
cultural politics of pathology to shifting economic conditions. We examined
the roles of professional helpers, policy-makers and popular media in shap-
ing the images and lives of young people. We addressed the conflation of
care and control in the making of social subjects, policy and practices. A
focal point, and fundamental limitation, of the panel was a focus on children
and youth in the USA.
The work of each of the panelists had been influenced in important
ways by the path-breaking scholarship of Sharon Stephens and her contribu-
tors to Children and the Politics of Culture (1995). Stephens agreed to serve
as a discussant on the panel. Her provocative comments both challenged and
encouraged us. Her words provided the impetus for us to seek dialog with

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INTRODUCTION

scholars working on similar issues outside the US. We quote here from her
comments:
[This] collection as a whole offers us the ground for thinking about the expand-
ing market in pathologized children and youth that goes beyond the perspectives
developed within any single paper. Specifically, I want to focus on three cross-
cutting issues: 1) how a focus on changing conceptions of youth and youth ser-
vices provides a powerful site for theorizing the emerging landscape of ‘late
capitalist society’ – and conversely, how theories of profound social, economic,
and political changes, roughly since the 1970s, help us to move beyond local
discourses and practices relating to youth to ask larger questions; 2) the chal-
lenges and possibilities that are opened up by work located at the intersection of
theory and practice – specifically (here) at the intersection of anthropology and
social work; 3) the sorts of alternative visions of youth, social order, and agency
that are suggested.
At issue here is ‘how particular constructions of pathology and those of
childhood and adolescence are not only mutually reinforcing, but also how they
might articulate with broader cultural and political discourses and with shifting
market conditions and logics of capitalism’. What strikes me is that a language
of articulation may be part of the problem. Lynn Nybell’s language of ‘melt-
downs’ and ‘containment’ may be more appropriate, insofar as contemporary
youth are located at boundaries between public and private services, and in the
midst of boundaries separating worlds of family, school, community, work, the
street, and state institutions. These boundaries are themselves undergoing dra-
matic negotiation, contestation, ‘meltdown’, ‘containment’ and reconfiguration.
Ethnographically exploratory research on children and youth offers an impor-
tant generative site for seeing the emerging contours of a ‘late capitalist soci-
ety’, whose boundaries and cross-boundary articulations may be very different
from what we have seen before.
Let me be more specific about what I have in mind here. In previous work I
have written about how proliferating discourses on ‘children at risk’ are linked
to a wide range of shadow concerns about ‘risky children’ regarded as signifi-
cant threats to society. ‘Children at risk’ are those whose everyday life condi-
tions and experiences make it more difficult for us to comfortably envision their
worlds within the safe, happy, protected ‘gardens’ of modern childhood. ‘Risky
children’ are those whose lives are seen as deviations from this safe and inno-
cent vision of childhood. Street children, working children, children in gangs, in
courtrooms or rehabilitation centers – these are all children whose childhoods
are seen as lost, stolen, betrayed, and contaminated, to the point where they
themselves become dangerous and contaminating.
A number of the papers emphasize the ways that inequalities of race, ethnic-
ity, class and gender enter into the designation of some children as ‘children at
risk’, to be protected, cared for and brought onto the right path again, and other
children as ‘risky children’ to be controlled, contained, and kept from contami-
nating and undermining society. What really struck me, however, was the way
in which notions of care and control, ‘children at risk’ and ‘risky children’ are
increasingly conflated in contemporary (American) popular discourses and poli-
cies. Janet Finn goes so far as to say that the very notion of a ‘healthy adoles-
cent’ is becoming an oxymoron, that adolescence is pathology and is marketed
as such across class, race, ethnic, and gender lines – though, or course, not tran-
scending these lines. Lynn Nybell writes of children and youth being reconfig-
ured as ‘complex systems’ – as bundles of needs and dysfunctions deemed

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worthy of appropriately multi-faceted ‘wraparound care’ in cases where the

child’s dysfunctionality exceeds categories of normality and acceptability. Max-
ine Jacobson explores various sorts of multidisciplinary team approaches to
child sexual abuse in urban, semi-rural and ‘frontier’ communities in Montana,
and, in a wonderful phrase, highlights the ‘malfunction junctions’ that represent
contradictions emerging at the places where practitioners get stuck in traffic,
where it becomes difficult or impossible to act in a world that is changing in
unpredictable ways around them.
Linwood Cousins’ discussion of the criminalization and pathologization of
poor, black youth reminds us that we have not transcended older structures of
power and inequality, legitimized by discourses of morality and culture that
argue for social control of dangerous and morally contaminating ‘deviants’. But
Rachel Heiman’s suggestive discussion of ‘slacker’ discourses, the labeling of
mostly white, middle class, heterosexual males as lazy, lacking in political moti-
vation, work morality and cultural creativity – reminds us that new notions of
personhood and society may be emerging alongside and in uneasy relation to
older structures.
What is going on here with respect to these new notions and practices center-
ing on pathologized youth? Let us return for a moment to the modern construc-
tion of adolescence. This was supposed to be a predictable, universal stage of
biosocial development, characterized by a period of ‘normal turbulence’ and
routine playing with identity as the precursor to settling down into the stable,
work-oriented world of adulthood. The labeling of some youth as pathological
because they deviate too far from the script, i.e. they are too political, rebellious
or sexual, is not new. Nor, as we have seen, is the pathologizing and control of
adolescents in the ‘dangerous’ classes and racial and ethnic groups. What does
seem to be new is the extent to which all youth are now going into the ‘pool of
pathology’ to be subsequently fished out by different sorts of nets.
Thus, adolescence – as the period of flexible trying on of roles and playing
with identities – may be increasingly the model for ‘adulthood’. But this form of
subjectivity must first be cleansed of its adolescent emphasis on collectivity,
political questioning, and social experimentation. The sorts of adults now
needed are individualized, depoliticized, flexible subjects. The pathologization
of adolescence and its related modes of treatment may be one way of getting us
from here to there.
What I want to argue here, on the basis of these provocative papers, is that a
focus on the ‘expanding market in troubled children and troubling youth’ opens
up windows onto the formation of new sorts of persons, social orders, and forms
of control that we really do not get from other perspectives. This focus helps us
to see how a current late capitalist society is structured by relations of gender,
class, race, and ethnic inequalities that look all too familiar to us, but it also
opens up our vision of what may be qualitatively new in the contemporary
period – including forms of control couched as social care.
If we take seriously this idea that we are living through a period of profound
and wide-ranging ‘meltdown’ and ‘containment’ and reconfiguration, then we
have to acknowledge that such changes cannot take place without profound and
often wrenching changes in our own minds and bodies, and especially in the
minds and bodies of our children. There is surely dire need for new forms of
‘care’ here, both individual and social. But it should not be surprising to us, in
light of capitalism’s apparent ability to commodify and co-opt almost anything
in the interest of profit, that there is now a burgeoning market in services for
troubled children and troubling youth, and that these services conflate care and
control in ways that are often as difficult to sort out as they are disturbing. What

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INTRODUCTION

sorts of alternative visions of youth, social order, and agency might be opened
up by critical, ethnographically grounded explorations of the expanding market
in troubled children and troubling youth? These papers, especially when read
together, provide powerfully suggestive and compelling ground for further
explorations. (Stephens, 1995: 1–7)

Inspired by Stephens’s words, we sought to expand the ground of critique

and possibility. We sought out others struggling with the contested terrain of
childhood, youth and pathology, who broadened our perspectives on the
global portent of these concerns and deepened our respect for Stephens’s
contribution to a critical understanding of childhood, youth and the new
world order. We engaged scholars working on similar themes in diverse cul-
tural and national contexts. This special issue is the product of the emergent
connection of youth scholars, practitioners and advocates sharing our com-
mon concerns, recognizing intriguing differences and building on the partial-
ity of our knowledge.
Christine Griffin’s provocative critique of the persistence of represen-
tations of young people as troubled or troubling in European and US youth
research opens the special issue. Griffin locates late 20th-century youth
research in historical and political context. She explores the possibilities and
constraints of radical youth research and considers the value of such
approaches in relation to emergent theories of globalization and the notion of
a ‘global youth culture’. Griffin cautions that critical youth research itself is
risky but necessary if we are to disrupt the ‘youth as trouble’ paradigm and
imagine new narratives of youth.
Janet Finn examines discourses of adolescence and pathology and
practices of human service professionals in the US alongside a trajectory of
20th-century capitalism. She is concerned with the proliferation of for-profit
treatment programs for troubled and troubling youth and their present and
future implications. Finn argues that pathologies of adolescence are repre-
sented through images and discourses that both encode deeply held certain-
ties and exacerbate broader anxieties about the late capitalist order of things.
She illustrates her concerns with a close reading of advertisements for ado-
lescent treatment in a leading social work journal.
Linwood Cousins reminds us that racist discourses of youth, violence
and fear are not new. Rather, they continue to be reinvented and deployed to
‘explain’ the troubles facing urban, low-income and black schools and com-
munities in the US. Cousins exposes the role of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ in pro-
moting social policies informed by narrow discourses of morality and
character that elide complex social, political and economic realities. He chal-
lenges the notion that ‘the social is simple’, reveals risk as ‘big business’ and
disrupts the morality discourse with a nuanced and ethnographically
informed understanding of ‘trouble’.
Lynn Nybell draws attention to programs of neoliberal educational
and social service reform as locations from which to examine shifting

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assumptions about who children are, what they need and how they can be
helped. Using illustrations from one demonstration project of ‘wraparound’
services in the US, she suggests that these emerging programs are aimed at
children who cannot be located on the developmental grids of normality and
dysfunction that have guided social service intervention. She argues that
these programs may embed notions of children as ‘complex systems’ – ideas
and images that differ significantly from modern accounts of child develop-
ment as a linear, staged and goal-oriented progression.
Maxine Jacobson takes the multidisciplinary team approach to child
sexual abuse as a generative site for research. Reporting on her innovative
field research with three teams in Montana, she explores ways in which
shifting meanings of childhood, constructions of sexually abused children
and the structuring of team practice pose problems for members. Jacobson
addresses the dilemmas that child welfare professionals face as they draw on
practice models informed by deeply held certainties about the problem of
child sexual abuse and confront the limits of those models. Jacobson argues
that the multidisciplinary team approach is part of the larger businessing of
human services which focuses on ‘simple fixes’, exacerbates the crisis-dri-
ven nature of intervention, and inhibits critical inquiry into the meanings of
childhood and sexual abuse.
Jason Pribilsky presents a compelling discussion of the emergence of
nervios as an affliction experienced by rural Ecuadorian children, mainly
boys, whose fathers are part of the transnational migration circuits moving
between highland Ecuador and the USA. He examines the increasing preoc-
cupation with child cases of nervios as a generative site for understanding
the local meaning and practices of childhood within broader national and
global political and economic processes. Pribilsky shows how redefinitions
of childhood in communities undergoing rapid socioeconomic transforma-
tions are bound up in changing notions of parenting, household economy
and the justifications for migration itself. He argues that nervios may have as
much to do with shifting forms of child-centeredness as it does with parental
absence as it is popularly explained.
Rachel Heiman draws attention to groups that are often neglected in
social science research, namely young members of the professional-manage-
rial class. She takes up the links between shifts in transnational capitalism,
media and popular culture representations of ‘Generation X’ and the individ-
ual subjectivities of white middle-class youth in the US. In doing so, she
demonstrates how clinical discourses of care, blame and pathology so often
focused on the ‘risky children’ and ‘delinquent youth’ of the poor and work-
ing class have spread to the relatively privileged classes, and, ultimately, to
all youth.
Mary Nolan’s article focuses on complex and conflicting notions of
youth activism and agency in post-unification Germany. Through ethno-
graphic descriptions of two contrasting sites of youth activism – the Love

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INTRODUCTION

Parade in the heart of Berlin and an alternative community center in the

Bavarian city of Nürnberg – she explores tensions in and between pluralities
of youth. She also demonstrates the ways in which young people must nego-
tiate through a ‘social nexus of fears and aspirations and exclusions’ in
which youth are variously pathologized as targets of cleansing and control,
dismissed as frivolous and apathetic, and celebrated as the ‘key to the future’
in constructing national identity in the new Germany. She raises important
questions about what youth activism means, and about what forms of agency
are perceived as threatening and to whom.
The voices of children and youth are largely silent in the cacophony of
concern to which the contributors are responding. However, young people
are claiming spaces and moments in their homes, schools and streets and
through alternative media to talk back to constricting representations. Finn
illustrates young people’s use of the Internet as a means to speak publicly of
their experiences and challenge discourses of care and control. Nybell
quotes a youngster who reminds adults of his status as a child. Pribilsky sug-
gests that nervios may be a form of resistance by which boys claim their
place in the household and resist a system that is preparing them for their
future place in the circuits of transnational capitalism. As Heiman’s and
Nolan’s contributions illustrate, young people are also engaged in cultural
production and political expression that speak to their critical and creative
agency and challenge adultist representations of what counts as culture, poli-
tics and ‘youth’. We hope this collection will serve as a base for building
linkages to other scholars, activists and young people who share our concern
for the making of youth and pathology under late capitalism and our hopes
for an alternative vision. Together we can forge new alliances, disrupt
entrenched certainties and open the possibilities for transformative thought
and action.

Reference
Stephens, Sharon (ed.) (1995) Children and the Politics of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

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