YOUTH EMPOWERMENT AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION OF PRECARIOUSNESS

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"...1.2.1. The social coaching stage 

"The young subjects, in their various negotiations with society, to get out from the bottleneck of social precariousness, interact with other individuals. This interaction is communicative/persuasive2 and aims to arouse inside a certain commitment towards a real action of change3. In their quest for solutions, they seek for solutions and get into contact with other actors. This contact tends to affect their original apprehension and their idea of resignation. The effect of otherness creates a cognitive space of domination, of power and therefore of relationships that inevitably lead to the mentor's control of the young subject by the coach. The state in which the subjects present themselves to their coach is that of social prey of the societal precariousness system. 

"At this stage, the social coach enjoys undeniable legitimacy. The social coach, being a shelter for the social prey, its structural power is based on the intensity of his relationship to the subjects and the social status identity that it enjoys. He is a campaign director against resignation who uses persuasive strategies towards subjects in search of identity. It has a flow of information and knowledge that cannot be available to young people. 

"The idea of social coach appears to understand the contribution of an individual in the construction of the social and professional identity. The social coaching role is central in the construction of a dual identity in the young subject. On the one hand, it participates through counseling and the dissemination of a flow of information and knowledge to the implementation of a work of internalization of identity traits in young subjects. On the other hand, the social coaching influences and tends to guide the entrepreneurial choice of young people. It then happens to be what Dubar calls "identity for others" which elucidates the problem of entrepreneurial choice. Youths are confronted with their limited rationality which designates in the sense of Herbert Simon a cognitive limitation that weighs on the formation of mental states and on the decision-making of agents – young subjects –. 

1.2.2. The phase of entrepreneurial consciousness 

"In its communicative otherness to its social coaching environment, young subjects receive a wave of informations that will affect their belief concerning the whole sociocultural system. The information received by young people impacts on their level of perception; level of perception that depends of the level of confidence young subjects have in their social coach. The social or relational distance between the young subjects and the environment with which they enter into negotiation to escape their precariousness, within a given social space, is determined by their degree of proximity. 
The construction of a new social space suggests a renewal of relations and thus newly negotiated interests, which the system of social precariousness did not allow to consider as the original confinement space of the young subject. In this case, the social distance between the latter and the precarious social environment is relatively small. The need to break away from this social net calls for a review of the possibilities of individual situational mutability in the sense of distancing the precarious environment in order to operate a relational contiguity to a new social environment conducive to social change such as entrepreneurial empowerment. 

"The contact of the young subjects with their new environment is built on the relational distance. More this distance is reduced, more a structure of social trust is structured, and then more the subjects will be influenced by it: "I entered this trade through friends", "I was born in the craft industry where I made "(...) it's a cousin who told me about it (...)”. The individual decision-making process of self-empowerment will be fundamentally influenced by this contact. Contact built on the new information that will help them to forget the state of complete insecurity – material and immaterial – in which they abide. 

"As a psychic stimulus, the informant or social coach will provoke a reconfiguration of self-perceptions in society. This psychic reconfiguration is like a formatting element that influences the processes of mental cognition. Psychobiological places are revitalized; the young subject welcomes solutions proposals with doubt. They are in a complex vagueness that reflect a psychobiological reality of complex of choice proposals: "I had several commercial opportunities that were proposed by relatives", "I have done in several types of businesses, but with the experiences of some people in the field, I thought I could make a living in the art business". The topics are part of a logic of gains and losses in the medium and long term. The emergence of a complex of psychobiological rationalities of the young subjects is correlatively constituted by the flow of propositions that it receives. The business idea will emerge as a refusal to return to the original state of precariousness and therefore as the fear to go back to a state of social precariousness. The age of the subject, the social constraints, the socio-cultural influence, etc., contribute to put him in a state of introspection which circumvents the imperative of making an ultimate choice among the range of propositions available to him. The discourse of the young subjects evades around the rhetorical recurrence of time: "I saw the past time (...)"; "At 27, we must not waste time (...)"; "The time was chosen from (...)". 

"The universe of possibilities in which young people live leads them to sort out information references. This choice of references is unduly a social stimulus. At this level, contacts with other actors of the requested sector are established. The young subject will collect a set of data from those concerned in the popular domain. These data are of various kinds: the type of products sold; unit market value, outlets, their source of origin, supply networks; working capital, profits, etc. They rationalize them in terms of feasibility and in terms of budget choices to better project themselves into the entrepreneurial action proper."

  

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