Whose Lives? How History, Societies, and Institutions Define and Shape Life Courses

(2004) - Karl Ulrich Mayer

Journal: Research in Human Development
Link:: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15427617rhd0103_3
DOI:: 10.1207/s15427617rhd0103_3
Links::
Tags:: #paper #LifeCourse #LifeDomain #SocialTheory
Cite Key:: [@Mayer2004]

Abstract

This article outlines how current sociology constructs life courses. First, a set of general heuristics is provided. Second, the development of life course sociology over the last 50 years is traced as an intellectual process whereby the life course has emerged as an analytical construct in addition to such concepts as human development, biography, and aging. A differential life course sociology has gradually developed in which contexts are specified according to time and place. Third, these differential constraints operating on life courses are illustrated from the perspective of 2 research areas. One perspective introduces historical periods as a sequence of regimes that regulate life courses. Another perspective looks at cross-national differences and especially focuses on institutions as the mechanisms by which life courses are shaped. The article concludes with reflections about the relation between the variable social contexts of life courses and human development.

Notes

“Fewer daily working hours, coupled with considerable disposable income, open up a variety of self-chosen milieus and habitus. Ever earlier onsets and ever later conclusions of adolescence and transitions to adulthood are being interpreted as significant extensions of personal autonomy: “getting into one’s own” (Modell, 1991)” (Mayer, 2004, p. 162)

“One line of argument goes back to Immanuel Kant, who insisted in his philosophy of the mind that determinism and autonomy, constraint and choice, are regulative principles of potential knowledge and moral behavior that do not rule each other out but rather constitute different and mutually exclusive modalities of how to view the world.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 162)

“second line of argument reminds us that “individualism” and its opposites are in themselves historically variable sociocultural constructs (Meyer, 1986). The relative extent to which we perceive the person and his or her life as actors with their own scripts is a matter of culturally pre-fixed lenses.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 162)

“third line of argument insists not only that lives in countries less fortunate than the G-7 club are to a much higher extent bound by the arbitrariness of the social class and national citizenship into which one is born but that also after the exceptional postwar periods of relative affluence, constraints and dependency are on the rise.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 162)

“With the term life course sociologists denote the sequence of activities or states and events in various life domains spanning from birth to death.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 163)

“Sociologists primarily look for three mechanisms to account for the form and outcomes of life courses. The first mechanism is the degree and kind to which societies are internally differentiated into subsystems or institutional fields (Mayer & Müller, 1986).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 164)

“The second mechanism lies in the internal dynamic of individual lives in group contexts. Here, one searches for conditions of behavioral outcomes in the prior life history or in norm-guided or rationally purposive action.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 164)

“third mechanism derives from the basic fact that it is not simply society on the one hand and the individual on the other that are related to each other, but aggregates of individuals in the form of populations such as birth cohorts or labor market entry cohorts (Mayer & Huinink, 1990)” (Mayer, 2004, p. 164)

“The educational system defines and regulates educational careers by its age-graded and time-scheduled sequences of classes; its school types and tracks; and its institutions of vocational and professional training and higher learning, with their hierarchical and time-related sequence of courses and certificates. Labor law defines who is gainfully employed and who is unemployed or out of the labor force and, thus, employment trajectories. The occupational structure defines careers by conventional or institutionalized occupational activities, employment statuses and qualification groups, segmentation, and segregation. The supply of labor determines the opportunity structure and, thus, the likelihood of gaining entry into an occupational group or of change between occupations and industrial sectors. Firms provide by their internal functional and hierarchical division of labor career ladders and the boundaries for job shifts between firms and enterprises” (Mayer, 2004, p. 164) On a platter, great explanation.

“The second mechanism for shaping life courses focuses on life trajectories and their precedents. Descriptively, research tends to concentrate on transition or hazard rates, that is, the instantaneous rates at which a well-defined population at risk makes certain transitions, for example, into first employment, first motherhood, retirement, and so on, within given time intervals. The explanatory question for life course research, then, is whether certain life course outcomes are shaped not only by situational, personal, or contextual conditions but also by experiences and resources acquired at earlier stages of the biography such as incomplete families in childhood (Grundmann, 1992), prior job shifts (Mayer, Diewald, & Solga, 164 MAYE” (Mayer, 2004, p. 164)

“1999), prior episodes of unemployment (Bender, Konietzka, & Sopp, 2000), educational careers (Henz, 1996), or vocational training and early career patterns (Hillmert, 2001a; Konietzka, 1999; Solga, 2003).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“Looking for causal mechanisms on the micro level of the individual biography does not resolve the issue of whether the individual is more of an active agent or more of a passive object in the processes that shape the life course or—to put it in different terms—whether selection or adaptation by choice is of primary importance (Diewald, 1999, chap. 2; Nollmann, 2003).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“If material resources, power, and authority, as well as information and symbolic goods, are distributed very unequally within given societies, then it follows that more people have to accommodate than have the opportunity to exert control.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“third mechanism that one can look for in unraveling patterns in life courses has to do with the fact that it is not single individuals but populations that are allocated to, and streamlined through, the institutional fabric of society across the lifetime—for example, the size of one’s cohort, as well as the preceding and succeeding cohorts, influences individuals’ opportunities way beyond individual or situational conditions (Hillmert, 2001b; Ryder, 1965, 1980).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“From the perspective of sociology, then, life courses are considered not as life histories of persons as individuals but as patterned dynamic expressions of social structure.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“Finally, the relation to historical time is crucial for the sociological study of life courses because life courses are embedded in definite strands of historical periods DEFINING AND SHAPING LIFE COURSES 16” (Mayer, 2004, p. 165)

“as well as in the collective life history of families and birth cohorts” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“Life courses are subject not only to historical circumstances at any time but also to the cumulative or delayed effects of earlier historical times on the individual life history or the collective life history of birth cohorts (or marriage cohorts or employment entry cohorts).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166) Implementation of Education Acts for example

“individual life courses are to be seen as part and product of a societal and historical multilevel process.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“the life course is multidimensional” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“the life course is a self-referential process. The person acts or behaves on the basis of prior experiences and resources” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“Therefore, one must expect endogenous causation already on the individual level. Via aggregation this then also becomes true for the collective life course of birth cohorts or generations. Individuals’ and generations’ pasts facilitate and constrain their futures. This is the meaning of the phrase die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen (the contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous) characterizing the interdependency of generations.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“through the manner in which people live and construct their own individual lives, they reproduce and change social structures.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“The largest part of variation will usually be expected to reside in those external structures within society that are closely tied to the division of labor, that is, the occupational structure and the structure of employment in various industrial sectors and the educational systems.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166) Purpose of focusing on the early transitions

“The second-largest source of variation sociologists tend to locate would be in the division of labor within households, that is, the way women and men in families and other unions allocate their lifetimes for economic and family roles (Ben-Porath, 1979; Sørensen, 1990)” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“third important source of variation life 166 MAYE” (Mayer, 2004, p. 166)

“course sociologists would look for relates to the differential intervention of the state in the form of the modern welfare state (Huinink et al., 1995; Leisering, 2003; Mayer & Müller, 1986). It is, therefore, the so-called welfare mix (i.e., the relative importance and manner of interconnectedness of economic markets, the family, and the state across historical time and across contemporary societies) that sociologists see as the major determinant of life course patterns (EspingAndersen, 1999).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 167)

“FIGURE 1 The “archaeology” of comparative life course sociology.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 167)

“there is the universal human condition handed down by an evolutionary process spanning many thousands of years. In this respect one can easily recognize that maturation and functional decline; sexual and material reproduction; and social hierarchies based on age, gender, and collective symbols form an underlying constant in shaping life courses (Linton, 1945)” (Mayer, 2004, p. 169)

“Life courses are said to have developed from a traditional/ pre-industrial type, to an early and late industrial type, and after that to a postindustrial type; from the Fordist to the post-Fordist life cycle; from the standardized to the destandardized life course (see Table 1).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 170)

“The next stage is postulated to be the industrial, Fordist life course regime. It is characterized by distinct life phases: schooling, training, employment and retirement, stable employment contracts, and long work lives in the same occupation and firm. A living wage for the male breadwinner could allow women to stay at home after marriage. The risks of sickness, unemployment, disability, and old age were covered and softened by an ever-more comprising system of social insurances.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 170) This is where the NCDS cohort was when they were first born. Experiancing a move into new epoch

“The postindustrial, post-Fordist life course regime, in contrast, can be characterized by increasing destandardization across the lifetime and increasing differentiation and heterogeneity across the population. Education has expanded in level and duration; vocational and professional training, as well as further training, have proliferated. A number of life transitions have been delayed, prolonged, and increased in age variance, and the degree of universality and of sequential orderliness has decreased. Entry into employment has become more precarious; first work contracts are often temporary; and employment interruptions due to unemployment, resumed education or training, or other times out of the labor force have increased. The rate of job shifts increase and occupations are increasingly not lifelong. Careers become highly contingent on the economic fates of the employing firms; therefore, heterogeneity across working lives increases. Downward career mobility increases relative to upward career opportunities. Working lives shorten because of later entry and frequent forced early retirement. The experience of unemployment becomes widespread but is concentrated in women, foreign workers, young people, and older workers” (Mayer, 2004, p. 172) This is the time period we are working with here. Starting with the NCDS cohort transitioning into this post-Fordist life course regime.

“For the postindustrial, post-Fordist life course regime or life course disorder, a manifold of culprits have been named: educational expansion and its unintended effects, the women’s movement, value changes, individualization and selfdirection, weakness of trade unions, de-industrialization, the labor market crises with spiraling structural unemployment, globalization of economic markets, and the demographic crunch produced by the low levels of fertility and decreasing mortality.” (Mayer, 2004, p. 173)

“The holistic assumption of overall regulation regimes resulting in specific patterns of life course outcomes such as “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” is more postulated than proven (Boyer & Durand, 2001; Mayer & Hillmert, 2003; Myles, 1993).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 173)

“There are also a priori reasons why an overly “sociologistic” construction of the life course is untenable. It would imply that actors are largely influenced by external factors (or chance). This would necessarily lead to beliefs in low efficacy of their own actions and would result in low self-esteem and low life satisfaction. Such a general outcome is inconsistent with the empirical evidence of psyches as positively self-equilibrating systems (e.g., in the Berlin Aging Study; Baltes & Mayer, 1999).” (Mayer, 2004, p. 180)

“One might well argue, therefore, that the genetic, physical, and psychological constraints on how people live out their lives and the interindividual variations resulting from them are not only non-negligible but also probably overwhelming compared with the determinants resulting from sociocultural differences (Rutter, 1997). I” (Mayer, 2004, p. 181)