Cradle to Grave: Life-Course Change in Modern Sweden

Jan O. Jonsson, Colin Mills

• Publisher: sociologypress
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781134281497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: History

The empirical study of individuals' life-course is one of the most promising areas of research within sociology today. Increased availability of large-scale longitudinal data and improved statistical methods have made it possible to address theoretically relevant questions about events such as entrance into the labour market, job mobility, divorce and death.

This book consists of studies capturing the life-course from the cradle to the grave. The research questions include long-term consequences of childhood conditions; family formation and school-careers; work and parental leave; gender discrimination in job promotion; divorce and occupational career; persistence in poverty; and the intriguing question of why the highly educated tend to survive everyone else.

The studies shed light on the relation between family and work, on gender inequality, social class differences, welfare state redistribution, and labour market processes. They do this in a particular context, namely Sweden in the post-war period that is, during the decades that formed one of the most advanced welfare states in modern history. One chapter provides a descriptive account of institutional and life-course change in Sweden during that period.

Most authors use the Swedish level-of-living surveys, a unique data set providing ample opportunity to study social processes in a longitudinal perspective. The book will, therefore, be of relevance to those with interests in the Swedish welfare state as well as those with theoretical and reseacrh interests in the reproduction of inequality

Chapter 1
Towards a post-Fordist life-course regime? Generational changes in transitions and volatility

Jan O. Jonsson

Introduction

What is social change? One way of looking at it is to say that successive cohorts of people encounter different living conditions and experience events that may have repercussions for them during their life-course: things that occurred during their childhood may also affect their youth and adult situation. To take a dramatic but obvious example: a war – with its many casualties, destruction of infrastructure and impact on social institutions – can affect several cohorts’ life cycle. Young people’s education is interrupted, families are dissolved, marriage markets become biased and labour-market opportunities are suddenly changed (sometimes for the ‘better’).¹

While social change in connection with events such as wars is immediate and obvious enough, by affecting individuals’ life-course it is stretched out over time and takes routes that are difficult to anticipate. The same is true of technical change, economic depression, migration and the introduction of political reforms. Thus, addressing the causal antecedents of life-course changes is as complicated as trying to provide other macrolevel explanations for aggregate microlevel behaviour (cf. Mayer, 1997). However, irrespective of what factors produce social change, such change can be depicted in the life-trajectories of successive cohorts. That is, the ‘lived experience’ of social change is reflected in: the timing and occurrence of important transitions between life stages such as childhood, family formation, occupational career and old age; the interconnectedness of life domains such as family, school and work; and also in the volatility of transitions between states within life stages, such as family dissolution and reconstitution, unemployment and recurrent education. Indeed, in many theories of social change, its nature is described precisely as a change in the timing and sequencing of transitions between life stages, in the relatedness of life-domains, and in the propensities for changing states within life-cycle stages.

It is the aim of this chapter to describe life-course changes in Sweden and thereby give one picture of social change during the postwar period. That is, instead of the traditional exposition of social change in terms of changes in social institutions or in repeated cross-sectional aggregate statistics, this chapter takes the experienced life-courses of individuals from successive birth cohorts as its point of departure. This will not be a comprehensive picture of social change, but a complementary one; and arguably an important aspect that is often overlooked. The analyses will address in particular the alleged change in modern Western societies from a ‘Fordist’ life-course regime to some kind of ‘post-Fordist’ mode of life. The chapter does not address the much more complex question of what underlies changes in life-course regimes – or their stability – but ends with a short discussion of the emerging pattern of life-course changes in the light of other societal changes in Sweden.

Towards a post-Fordist life-course regime?

There are several interrelated ideas concerning how the traditional industrial society has been and is transformed. Theories of the ‘postindustrial’ society have existed since the 1960s, whereas ‘postmodernism’ and ‘globalisation’ are recent relatives. Inspired by these strands of thought, there is a body of sociological literature suggesting a change away from the industrial mode of life (e.g. Beck, 1992; Castells, 2000; Giddens, 1994; Gray, 1998; Myles, 1993). Such social change means that the typical life-course regime for the industrial society is being replaced by a new one, in particular during the latter half of the twentieth century. I will follow Mayer (1993, 1997) in calling this a change from a ‘Fordist’ to a ‘post-Fordist’ life-course regime, although not all of the authors mentioned use that expression, and there is no coherent theory behind such claims.²

What is central in this change is a purported breakdown of borders between life stages and life-domains, resulting in a greater discontinuity or disorderliness of the typical life cycle. It is also argued that people move more freely within life stages, thus increasing individual volatility. One reason for such mobility is the increasing insecurity of employment, including for the middle class. In total, life becomes much less predictable, partly depending on external causes – such as changes in the economy – and partly because individuals’ own will and choices become more accentuated when traditional bonds to one’s origin are loosened.

In the stylised description of the Fordist life cycle, the sequencing of life stages is the traditional: schooling, then work, followed by family formation, and finally retirement for men; and for women, minimal schooling, perhaps a short spell of work, then childbearing and housework. Changes of jobs and of marital partners are few – the traditional industrial life cycle is both stable and predictable. Gender roles are traditional, with men as providers and women as housewives, and class boundaries are strict, with little intergenerational mobility between social classes and limited opportunities for career advancement. However, industrialisation brings with it successive increases in standards of living, with younger generations always doing better than their parents did.

The post-Fordist life-course is supposed to entail prolonged schooling while family formation is delayed. Work is more often interrupted by recurrent spells of unemployment, education and leave of absence for other reasons. A more fluid labour market, together with changes in individuals’ preferences and greater risks of job loss, causes more frequent job shifts and occupational and class changes. In addition, people become less bound to their social origin in their pursuit of labour-market attainment. Women take a more active part in the labour market, which creates a less rigid division of labour between spouses, and greater tension between paid and unpaid work. In tandem, family life itself becomes less stable, with decreasing marriage rates and increasing propensities for separation. In the ‘postmodern’ era, volatility and unpredictability are key life-course characteristics both in work and family life. Also the long-term generational improvement in living conditions is in question. Inequality, in turn, becomes ‘classless’.

There is no single representative exposition of these alleged changes in modern societies that is described here as a shift from an industrial, or Fordist, mode of life to a post-For...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction: family, work and inequality in a life-course perspective
• 1 Towards a post-Fordist life-course regime? Generational changes in transitions and volatility
• 2 The long shadow of socioeconomic conditions in childhood: do they affect class inequalities in mortality?
• 3 Family formation and participation in higher education: crosscutting life events?
• 4 Giving birth without giving up: return to employment and return to work amongst women
• 5 The sooner the better? Parental leave duration and women’s occupational career
• 6 Divorce and labour-market outcomes: do women suffer or gain?
• 7 Gendered promotion processes in the labour market: do inequalities accrue or attenuate?
• 8 What you see is not always what you get: imperfect information in the job–worker matching process, and its consequences for the attainment of occupational prestige
• 9 Household income dynamics: mobility out of and into low income over the life-course
• 10 Why do graduates live longer? Education, occupation, family and mortality during the 1990s
• 11 The Swedish Level-of-Living Surveys: a general overview and description of the event history data
• Notes on contributors