Contextual Influences on Life Span/life Course

A Special Issue of Research in Human Development

Jacquelynne S. Eccles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781135066680
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This special issue covers different aspects of life course development. The central argument of the first paper is that human development should be viewed as the product of the interpenetration of cultural and biological processes. The following article outlines how current sociology constructs life courses. The notion of developmental biocultural co-constructivism and specifically the zone within which human development can be expressed is the focus of the third paper. Next, a developmental account of civic engagement and political participation is provided. Finally, the special issue concludes with a paper marking individual differences in patterns of rhesus monkey biobehavioral development through the life span.

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

Karl Ulrich Mayer
Yale University

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.

In recent years, there has been a marked shift in the way human development and human life courses are being perceived. Infants and children are seen as producers, or at least as coproducers, of their own development (Lerner & Busch Rossnagel, 1981). Parent-child relationships and socialization processes are categorized much less as one-way streets where parents and other socialization agents imprint and impose their values and habits on children and adolescents but rather as areas of mutual interaction where it remains open who influences whom more (Krappmann, 2001; Kreppner, 1999). The old idea that teachers effectively transfer knowledge and character has given way to unending reports about unruly classes and resistant pupils. Sociologists have newly celebrated the significance of human agency (Giddens, 1984) and the individualization of life decisions and lifestyles in patchwork biographies (Beck, 1986). 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).

In contrast, development regulated by universal biological principles of maturation and decline (Piaget, 1970); the harsh discipline of families, workplaces, and a variety of other institutions (Foucault, 1977); and life courses determined and constrained by tradition, collective class fate (Thompson, 1976), or the whims of historical catastrophes such as the Great Depression (Elder, 1974), the world wars (Winter, 1986), and the Holocaust (Kertesz, 1992; Levi, 1995) seem to echo pictures of an old past. If at all, it appears as if it is the lack of limits of options, the unlimited flexibilization (Sennett, 2000) and pluralization that pose the postmodern condition.

Under such premises it seems almost odd to raise the question of how life courses are shaped by forces external to the individual person, how historical conditions, the good or bad fortunes of national citizenship or institutional arrangements built the tracks that individual trajectories are bound to follow (Mayer, 1986). Three lines of argument can be used to defend taking up such seemingly outmoded perspectives. 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. A 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. Thus, whether it is at all possible to resolve the issue of growing or declining personal autonomy, of relative degrees of choice and constraint, is open to debate. The 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.

In this article I outline how the social construction of life courses is currently being defined and developed in sociology. In a first step, I summarize my version of a general theory of the social organization of the life course. In a second step, I portray the development of life course sociology over the last 50 years as an intellectual process whereby the life course has emerged as an analytical construct in addition to and separate from such notions and terms as human development, biography, and aging. Moreover, general ideas of how human lives are shaped by social and historical circumstances have been gradually replaced by a kind of differential life course sociology in which contexts are specified according to time and place. After these two introductory stepping stones, I look at the social constraints operating on life courses from the perspective of two different research areas. The first perspective introduces historical periods as a temporal sequence of contextual regimes that regulate life courses. The second perspective looks at cross-national differences in patterns of life courses and especially focuses on institutions as the mechanisms by which lives are channeled in specific ways. Here I argue that the development of life course sociology has benefited greatly from recent advances in the fields of comparative welfare state research (Leisering & Leibfried, 1999) and from the research on "varieties of capitalism" (Hall & Soskice, 2001). I conclude the article with some reflections about the relation between the variable social contexts of life courses and human development.

My aim is not to provide a systematic review that would do full justice to the literature and state of empirical research in this field but rather to present arguments in a more exemplary manner. I rely heavily on my own material (and that of my colleagues) and evidence from the nine cohort surveys of the German Life History Study (Brückner & Mayer, 1998), and I borrow liberally from a wide array of publications that originated in the Center for Sociology and the Study of the Life Course at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which I have directed since 1983. Although I heavily rely on work from my associates in the German Life History Study, they share no responsibility for the edifice I am going to build upon it.

The Life Course from the Perspective of Sociology

With the term life course sociologists denote the sequence of activities or states and events in various life domains spanning from birth to death.¹ The life course is thus seen as the embedding of individual lives into social structures primarily in the form of their partaking in social positions and roles, that is, in regard to their membership in institutional orders. The sociological study of the life course, therefore, aims at mapping, describing, and explaining the synchronic and diachronic distribution of individual persons into social positions across the lifetime. One major aspect of life courses is their internal temporal ordering, that is, the relative duration times in given states as well as the age distributions at various events or transitions.

How do order and regularities in life courses come about? 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). This is often taken to be the most obvious and important mechanism. 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. The 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).

I now illustrate each of these three life course mechanisms in turn. How do institutions corresponding to various subsystems shape life courses? 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, Finns provide by their internal functional and hierarchical division of labor career ladders and the boundaries for job shifts between firms and enterprises, in a similar manner, the institutions of social insurance and public welfare define the status of being ill, the duration of maternity leave, the age or employment duration until retirement, and so on. Family norms and laws constitute the boundaries between being single or in nonmarital unions, married, and divorced. Finally, the spatial structure of societies, as well as forms of property, define the interaction with family roles and forms of household trajectories of residential mobility, household changes, and migration.

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, 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).

There is one important additional point to be made in this context. 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). Sociologists tend to be split on this issue. Some would emphasize cultural scripts, some would stress social norms, and others would bet on rational choice. On the whole, however, sociologists tend to believe ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Lifespan Psychology: From Developmental Contextualism to Developmental Biocultural Co-constructivism
• The Interpenetration of Culture and Biology in Human Development
• Whose Lives? How History, Societies, and Institutions Define and Shape Life Courses
• Civic Engagement, Political Identity, and Generation in Developmental Context
• How Gene-Environment Interactions Shape Biobehavioral Development: Lessons From Studies With Rhesus Monkeys