New biographies in the ‘risk society’? About future and planning

Abstract

If the ‘first modernity’ construed the meaning of future as a time of experimentation and possibilities, contemporary modernity defines it rather as an uncertain dimension, as such more a limit than as a resource. This new semantic framework also deeply shapes the ways and forms in which young people's biographies come to be defined. While new ways of relating to the future and time are delineated, the ‘life plan’ constitutes increasingly less the principle capable of structuring biographies. Particularly visible in the biographical constructions of young people, these forms of temporalisation do not imply, however, the pure and simple loss of the future. Rather, as recent research would indicate, a number of the young people appear to be actively involved in the construction of forms of mediation between the need for subjective control over future time and the risky and uncertain social environment of today.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my thanks to Barbara Adam for editorial help. A different and extended version of this paper was published as ‘Redefining the future: youthful biographical constructions in the 21st century’ in Du Bois-Reymond & Chisholm (2006).

Notes

1. Beginning with the French Revolution, and for nearly two centuries, in Western societies the meaning of action, not only individual, but also collective, has been linked to the future (Neckel, 1988).

2. According to social phenomenology, in modernity the life plan ‘becomes a primary source of identity’ and ‘the basic context in which knowledge of society is organized in the consciousness of the individual’ (Berger et al., 1974, p. 73).

3. According to German philosopher Hermann Lübbe (1998), due to the intense processes of contemporary change in which the velocity of technological innovation is wed to a speed-up in life rhythms in globalised space, even the dimension of the present now ends up by contracting. From this standpoint one can verify a loss of the present itself as an area for choice and thoughtfully worked out action.

4. In several occasions Zygmunt Bauman stressed this coincidence.

5. Whereas, for young women, the biographical ‘main road’ was structured around private time for the family and its priorities.

6. According to Reiter's (2003) explorative study of biographical time in a group of Austrian disadvantaged young people, their cognitive strategy ‘is to act and react within a foreshortened time perspective, to keep all the uncertainties outside the horizon of hoping and planning’ (p. 274). However, according to Reiter, the results of this research show the ‘unbroken adherence’ of disadvantaged young people to the idea of a ‘normal biography’, structured by given biographical norms instead of by ‘the motive of self-realization’.

7. A process well described by Robert Castel (1996) in his reflection on contemporary individualism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carmen Leccardi

*Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, 8, 20126 Milano, Italy. Email: [email protected]