Beyond the equation model of society – the postponement of motherhood in post-state socialism in an interdisciplinary life-course perspective

Abstract

The dramatic decline in fertility in European countries with a state-socialist past and the trend towards postponing childbearing are indicative of the acceleration of the process of European modernization in these countries. Research in this area is dominated by demography and other approaches attempting to “measure” social phenomena within an explanatory framework. Despite its diverse emphasis on materialist, idealist and institutionalist factors, the demographic approach can be criticized for neglecting the interdisciplinary challenge behind the phenomenon. Instead, these approaches operate on the basis of an “equation model of society” that essentially attempts gradually to enhance the illumination of the black box that “contains” the passage of young women to adulthood, leaving them with fewer children born at a later age. While acknowledging the contributions of this research, the article suggests considering the life-course perspective in its full potential as a starting point for an interdisciplinary triangulation of the issue. It argues that a certain life-cours eapproach could supplement the available accounts of causes and consequences with an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon as a “social fact”, studying it in terms of “cultures of postponement” of motherhood.

Keywords:

• fertility decline
• postponement of childbearing
• motherhood
• post-state socialism
• life-course
• culture
• interdisciplinarity
• triangulation

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Metka Kuhar for her comments as well as the participants in the International workshop “Sociology and Interdisciplinarity: Central and South East European Perspectives”, 8–10 May 2008, at the University of Zadar/Croatia, where the first version of this article was presented.

Notes

1. The literature is vast, growing rapidly and highly redundant; more recent indicative references include Billari et al. (2006), Frejka (2008), Morgan and Berkowitz King (2001) and Sobotka (2004, 2008).

2. The use of this label is not intended to suggest oppositions of the kind that constitute “science wars” (Hacking 1999). Yet it does suggest that the various approaches in social science are characterized by considerable correspondence of methodology, epistemology and worldview. For a discussion of the appropriateness of research strategies and methods and their openness to aspects inherent in the field see for example Erzberger (1998) or Flick (2006).

3. The sociological subdiscipline of “mathematical sociology” is an associated approach. While itself an interdisciplinary enterprise bringing together economists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, psychologists, etc., mathematical sociology establishes a considerable distance to the idea of sociology as a “humanistic discipline” that “must be carried on in a continuous conversation with both history and philosophy or lose its proper object of inquiry”, as Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 211) once put it in a normative way.

4. http://www.unece.org/pau/ggp/Welcome.html (accessed 13 September 2008).

5. See Mills and Blossfeld (2005, p. 3) for another EMoS example of the study of the impact of globalization and uncertainty on young people's transitions to adulthood.

6. Following Mayer's (2000) review of 20 years of life-course research, one could, however, lament that the biographical dimension has traditionally been somewhat neglected in life course research.

7. This is not the place for a discussion of definitions of “culture”. Suffice it to refer to Swidler's (2001, p. 12) emphasis on “publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning” and the related focus on phenomena as “beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, and on informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life”.

8. One developmental biologist comments on the progress in producing stem cells from simple skin cells in the following way: “It means every person regardless of age will be able to have children: newborn children could have children and 100-year olds could have children. It could easily happen in the next 30 years” (Pearson 2008, p. 260).