The Creation of the Social Category of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training): Do NEET Need This?

With four volumes in hand, I hoped to learn much about a category of people about whom the necessity of a debate had never occurred to me, since I as well as many people in my direct surroundings have had extended periods in their lives in which their situation fits the definition of NEET (not in education, employment or training). My generation belongs to what already in the 1960s was expected inevitably to become a generation with too many people for the Dutch labour market to absorb in the 1980s. As such, NEET to me signifies one of the most common of situations for people to live in, although I have only recently become familiar with the term. Niito (NEET), by Genda Yūji and Maganuma Mie, was the first Japanese book on the topic of people who are ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’, a concept created by the Social...