The Institutionalization of the Life Course: Looking Back to Look Ahead

Abstract

In this article, I review the issues posed 20 years ago in my model of the historical institutionalization of the life course. I (a) recapitulate the claim that the life course has become one of the major institutions of contemporary societies; (b) discuss what has been learned in the meantime, both with respect to the dynamics of social change and to how the sociology of the life course is able to conceptualize them; (c) examine current trends toward an erosion of the institutionalized life course and the structural anchors that keep it in place; and (d) focus on life course politics and their effects on the future of the life course.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Karl-Ulrich Mayer, Ulrike Mühlberger, Richard Settersten, and five anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions and to Jonas Radl and Jan Zutavern for research assistance.

Notes

¹The past 20 years have witnessed an enormous expansion of life-course research and of life-course applications in other fields. It will not be possible to give due credit to this body of work in all the areas touched on in this article. The few selective references given here should be read not as exhaustive documentation but as illustrative of the most salient points. Many of these points are also covered in the available overviews, among them the major handbook of the field (Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003), the volumes of series such as Advances in Life Course Research (e.g., Macmillan, 2005) or Status Passages and the Life Course (e.g., Heinz, 1992), important edited volumes (e.g., Heinz & Marshall, 2003), and volumes linking the life course with aging (e.g., Settersten, 2003).

²See Mayer (2000) and Settersten (1999) for discussions of the issues involved in these approaches.

³The model applies not only to adulthood and old age but also to childhood and adolescence, where chronologization—with respect to position in the educational system as well as to expected stages of development and age-graded behavior—may be even more pronounced.

⁴This is well captured in Dannefer and Uhlenberg's (1998, p. 317) point that today there is more personal choice but also more conformity. The tension is above all a cultural or normative one: between age norms that regulate age-specific choices and appropriate behavior (Settersten & Hagestad, 1996a, 1996b) and life course norms that emphasize individual development and autonomy.

⁵How exceptional this period was has in the meantime become the subject of many historical analyses and has been confirmed again by Maddison (2001) in his sweeping history of the world economy across the last two millennia. Maddison (2001) showed that the “golden age” from 1950–1973 has been by far the most successful historical phase in terms of economic growth up to now, with annual average growth rates of per capita gross domestic product among the advanced capitalist economies that were never reached before and were twice as high as those that followed between 1973–1998 (p. 129).

⁶See Myles (1992) for a discussion of post-Fordism in life-course terms.

⁷The latter terms have been coined by Beck (e.g., Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994). They denote a partial break with modernity in the sense of a radicalization of its principles of reflexivity, individualization, and risk.

⁸ Mayer (2001) also proposes a historical sequence of life-course regimes that he—significantly enough—categorized in work terms: traditional—industrial—Fordist—post-Fordist, and stressed the commonality of the Fordist period as opposed to the differentiation, along the variety of institutional configurations and political economies, in the post-Fordist period.

⁹Economic theories of the family and household often view this specialization in terms of comparative advantage (e.g., Becker, 1981); but such an explanation needs to be contrasted with those of socialization and/or structural constraints. Moreover, rising divorce rates and decreasing welfare state provisions have shifted the economic rationale: They make it more risky for women to specialize in the household role (e.g., O'Connor et al., 1999).