Life Chances

4 Key excerpts on "Life Chances"

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  Children, Family and the State

  A Critical Introduction

  • Rob Creasy, Fiona Corby(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 12 started with a discussion of life-chances. This is certainly a term or concept that is used a lot with respect to children and young people and there will probably be a number of times when you can make good use of it in assignments. If you get the basics clear in your mind this is something that could be very useful for your studies as a whole. What might be needed to provide a good account of life-chances will include the following:

  • Life-chances is a sociological concept rooted in the work of Max Weber. It relates to any individual’s potential to achieve that which is seen as socially desirable.
  • It is a concept which reflects the fact that society is unequal and that some children have advantages but some face obstacles to being successful in later life.
  • Life-chances are shaped by social factors such as class, gender and ethnicity, each of which can lead to discrimination and disadvantage.
  • A similar-sounding concept, life-choices, argues that success or failure in life is down to individual choices. This idea is individual in nature whereas life-chances is social.
  • Life-choices is a weak argument.

  In discussing life-chances you will probably end up establishing where the concept comes from and what it means before focusing on one particular issue which may help or hinder life-chances.

  Study tip It is always a good idea when writing assignments to explain what you mean by a key term or concept and then support it with a reference or two.

  When it comes to referencing, one is always good but two or more are better. This is because two or more not only show that you have read widely; they also show that the point you are making is sound.

  Be careful with what you choose to read, though. Take your cue from reading lists and always be very careful about what comes up on search engines such as Google or Bing. Choosing the first results from a general search engine often means that you end up with inappropriate reference sources. Your tutors will have put a lot of effort into finding good sources – use them.

  Because life-chances can be seen to rest on the idea of social inequality we moved onto this topic next. Social inequalities are a key feature of life within the UK. There is much that you could do in terms of an assignment on inequality but there are some key points that we think are very likely to find a place within such an assignment:

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  Sustainable Development

  Capabilities, Needs, and Well-being

  • Felix Rauschmayer, Ines Omann, Johannes Frühmann, Felix Rauschmayer, Ines Omann, Johannes Frühmann(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  •  Whilst the operationalization of the capability framework is particularly difficult (Sugden 1993; Anand and van Hees 2006; Gasper 2007), life-chances let themselves rather naturally translate into conditional probabilities, facilitating the gathering of empirical material. Actually, even the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Human Development Index’ which is supposed to have been inspired by Sen’s theories has a more natural interpretation in terms of differential Life Chances across countries than in terms of capabilities. In particular, life expectancy at birth, which counts for one third of the index, is closer to the idea of life chance than to the one of capability.

  Conclusion on Life Chances

  To sum up our discussion:

  •  Life Chances account for both capabilities and well-being in a probabilistic, diachronic and structural perspective. They can be defined as the most likelytrajectories (life courses) for individuals in a given society, or as the set of most likely vectors of functionings or of needs satisfaction level for a given individual in a given society, looked at in a diachronic perspective and knowing his/her birth’s circumstances. As such, it is a fundamentally prospective notion.

  •  Life Chances can be interpreted as ‘rational expectations of well-being’ over the whole life cycle taking first into account initial conditions of the life course and other ascribed characteristics linked to the circumstances of birth (country of origin, race, religion, sex, genetic endowment, parents’ position . . .) and the following succession of positions in social hierarchies. As such they are very close (but more comprehensive than) to what Rawls (1971: 64) calls the ‘expectation of well-being’ for representative individuals holding social positions or offices established by the basic structure.

  •  Life Chances refer usually to objective conditions of well-being more than to happiness or subjective well-being in general. The life-chances perspective focuses on the socially instituted system of expected contributions, legitimate practices, rewards, gratifications and entitlements attached to characteristics such as gender, race, geographical origin, educational level, position in the social division of labour etc. Income and material conditions are only one part of the ‘information set’ of Life Chances assessment. Non-material benefits such as power, authority, influence, prestige, honour – all concepts that play a minor role, if any, in the capability and needs satisfaction approaches – are also important elements of this information set. Therefore, the life-chances discourse addresses frontally the inequities in the distribution of those ‘positional’ goods (Hirsch 1977) whose scarcity is socially organized through the institutions that constitute societies’ ‘basic structure’ (Rawls 1971).

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  Imagining Regulation Differently

  Co-creating for Engagement

  • McDermont, Morag, Cole, Tim, Morag McDermont, Tim Cole, Janet Newman, Angela Piccini(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  ‘Life Chances’ is a widely used phrase, adopted by UK governments to headline their policies on children, families and poverty but with different ideological foci depending on which political party has championed the concept. In particular, the use of the concept by the UK’s Coalition and Conservative governments (2010–16) placed responsibility on individuals to explain their claims of denigration of ‘society’, rather than on the state. The ideological work of the use of this concept has been to emphasise the role of individuals in ‘actualising’ their Life Chances through, for example, some form of entrepreneurial economic activity to lift them out of poverty – an agenda that we were keen to avoid replicating in the making and selling of jewellery that the project encouraged.

  However, this is not the only use of the concept as several governments and think tanks (New Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments, the Centre for Social Justice, the Fabian Society) have used the term ‘Life Chances’ performatively to produce different effects. The Conservative government’s Life Chances strategy did not define the concept of Life Chances, but linked it to tackling poverty and disadvantage and making opportunities more equal, emphasising the ‘family’ and parenting strategies and capabilities (Lister, 2016). This located successful Life Chances in the two-parent heterosexual family, the cornerstone of a strategy aiming to ensure that parents stay together. Announcing this strategy, former Prime Minister David Cameron (2016a) stated that:

  Families are the best anti-poverty measure ever invented. They are a welfare, education and counselling system all wrapped up into one. Children in families that break apart are more than twice as likely to experience poverty as those whose families stay together. That’s why strengthening families is at the heart of our agenda.

  The very notion of Life Chances can, however, be traced back to the sociologist Max Weber (1978), who first framed the concept when expanding on Marx’s analysis of the social/economic factors that inhibit/enable the advancement of different class-based groups. Weber believed that people’s Life Chances were conditioned by economic and structural determinants, and that members of a class (where there is a shared likelihood of obtaining goods and a position in society) shared common Life Chances. Some believe that Weber’s concepts have been mistranslated (Abel and Cockerham, 1993), with Lebensführung (life conduct) and Lebensstil

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  South Africa's Emergent Middle Class

  • Grace Khunou(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Tanner Lectures, political philosophers and economists have discussed the appropriate sphere wherein equality should be promoted. A key development in this discussion is the incorporation of a central role for personal responsibility into the definition of fairness (Ferreira et al., 2011); that is, equality of opportunity is often described as an ideal compromise between different perspectives on equity, because it retains the vital dimensions of egalitarianism, while simultaneously allowing for differences in outcomes based on effort, merit and other relevant criteria. Allowing outcomes to differ is critical because this entails that choices can have consequences, and consequences can in turn help to inform and reward individuals’ behaviour.

  This analysis will follow the approach by John Roemer (1998), who acknowledges this tension between egalitarianism and effort by differentiating between two potential sources of unequal outcomes, namely circumstances (factors exogenous to the person, such as gender, race, family background or place of birth) and individual efforts (outcome determinants that can be affected by individual choice). Essentially, this forms the basis of a simple binary view of the fairness of Life Chances. Within this conceptual framework, a level playing field is one where one’s fate is largely determined by one’s own efforts, rather than being determined by inherited factors and circumstances such as one’s family background, gender or race.

  Our approach acknowledges the New-Weberian school, in as much as we wish to ascertain the extent to which factors such as inequality of Life Chances among individuals and families are structured on the basis of class. One central claim in the New-Weberian tradition is that variations in market positions arise out of differences in the possession of market-relevant assets that determine Life Chances. Inspired by this work, instead of merely investigating how Life Chances limit choices, we invert the question and investigate how class influences the ability to escape from poverty and enables the next generation to form their own choices.

  3. Data

  The two panel studies used in this paper are KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) and National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS). Most of the analysis conducted in this paper comes from the first wave of NIDS. The first representative national panel study, conducted by the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, NIDS is a large and representative survey, with 31163 individual observations and 6921 households in 2008. The survey includes detailed information about living conditions, education, household formation, occupation, income and expenditure. In addition, it includes various questions on subjective well-being and satisfaction levels. Consequently, we can use this dataset to compare the living conditions, education and labour market outcomes as well as self-perception for a representative sample of youths, coming from different class backgrounds.

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