The book addresses one of the most urgent social problems in many countries, the uncertain school-to-work transitions of young people. As a result, a ‘transition machinery’ has been created, consisting of various education and training measures realised by e.g. teachers and youth workers.

The volume demonstrates that discourses related to youth transitions do not simply describe young adults but create them. For example, young people are expected to be active citizens who make themselves attractive to employers, and those who fail in doing so may be labelled having psychological deficiencies. When failing transitions, resulting in lack of higher education or unemployment, are treated as individual’s problems rather than rising from structural factors, the solutions are likewise individualized. The book thus underlines the importance of analysing power relations reflected by gender, health, social class, and ethnicity.

The articles of the book combine perspectives from young people, policymakers, teachers, and youth workers in Iceland, Finland, Sweden, and England.

A central question for this article is how social sciences teachers in middle school (age 10-12) relate to and talk about school’s fundamental democratic values as crucial parts of the teachers' assignments. The article aims to provide insight into how the teachers thereby position and constitute themselves as social science teachers and how this is intimately connected to their didactical practise. Three social science teachers were interviewed and in the analysis various subject positions were identified. The results show that teachers are trying to balance between the subject content they are required to work with, and a democratic assignment which is often interpreted in terms of students’ influence and participation. The difficulties to fully carry out student participation in every day teaching evokes interpretations of the democratic assignment as a question of what general approaches a teacher should have towards students, and a general mission to empower and equip students for the future. These approaches are strongly influencing how the informants construct themselves as teachers. However, it is also shown that the subject content of social sciences to some extent may enforce the possibilities of achieving the aims of a democratic assignment, which strengthens the argument that both the process of becoming a teacher and the challenges of the democratic assignment need to be situated and further developed within the contexts of specific school subjects.