This post contains my notes for Prof. Phyllis Moen’s doctoral seminar Topics in Life Course: Work and Well-Being in Turbulent Times at the University of Minnesota, Fall 2022. The seminar, in Phyllis’s own words, was to “adopt a gendered life course, stress process, intersectional approach” to “address the health and well-being implications of, and inequities around, the changing nature and culture of paid work, along with ongoing disparities around both paid work and unpaid family care work.” The seminar was very informative and could not be summarized in one single post. Consequently, my focus will be on the broad principles of the life course pespective as an epistemology.
Principles of the life course perspective
The life course perspetive emphasizes the influence of social institutions, structures, and public policies on individual lives (Kohli, 2007). Rather than focusing on only macro or micro factors, the life course perspective embeds personal experiences in the broad social context. It further highlights the importance of social timing, which refers to the ways that age shapes whether, when, how, and to what end one’s experience is shaped by social and historical context (Carr, 2018).
While sociologists have adopted a variety of conceptual frames for studying the life course, Elder’s (1994) articulation is arguably the most influential. Conceptually, Elder’s paradigm underlines four key principles: (1) lives are embedded in and shaped by historical context; (2) the meaning and impact of historical context is contingent on the timing of lives; (3) individuals construct their own lives through their choices and actions, yet within the constraints of historical and social circumstances, and (4) lives are “linked” through social relationships. In addition to these four well-recognized principles, recent sociological studies have identified intersectionality—the emphasis on identity differences and similarities—as a fifth principle (Cho et al., 2013; Choo & Ferree, 2010; Fan & Moen, 2022; Homan et al., 2021). In what follows, I will briefly explain the meaning of each of the five principles.
Historical time and place
The life course of individuals is shaped by historical context, both temporally and spatially. The temporal dimension of historical context can be understood as a cohort effect and a period effect. The cohort effect represents the influence of differences in birth year, which expose individuals to different historical worlds, with their constraints and options. In other words, social change differentiates the life patterns of successive cohorts, such as older and younger women before World War Ⅱ (Elder, 1994). By contrast, the period effect represents the influence of a social event on changing pre-existing patterns or norms. It affects people of all ages, although it may do so to varying degrees (George, 2014). For example, COVID-19 has changed both old and young people’s understanding of how work can be organized, e.g., in-person and remote work.
The spatial dimension of historical context highlights the importance of place in shaping individual lives. Place can be defined as broadly as one’s nation, or as narrowly as one’s neighborhood. Research has shown that both nation-level charactesitics (e.g., economic development and cultural values) and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., social integration, poverty, and crime) can affect individauls’ attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and life course outcomes (Sampson et al., 2002). For instance, the COVID-19 may impact individuals in China and the U.S. in dramatically different ways. While historical time or place are hardly destiny, they do play essential roles in shaping one’s social locations, interpersonal relations, and life trajectories (Carr, 2018).
Timing of lives
The shaping power of historical context is contingent on when it occurs in a person’s life, i.e., the timing of lives. However, instead of focusing on biological age, the life course perspective highlights the importance of social timing—the incidence, duration, and sequence of roles throughout the life course (Elder, 1994). For example, marrying at age 17 may mean that a young person is especially likely to drop out of high school, divorce, have many children, and hold a poorly paying job that does not require a high school diploma (Carr, 2018). By contrast, persons who marry for the first time at age 35 likely have already completed their education, perhaps earning a graduate degree, and having spent many years in the paid work force prior to marrying. Yet marrying at age 35 may mean that one will have only one or two children (Bumpass, 1900).
Aging is further viewed as a series of role transitions rather than as a single event or mere passage of time. According to this view, it is the role trajectories—the way roles are played out over the life course—that matter for individual outcomes. For instance, knowing whether or not a woman is employed at any one point in time may be less useful than knowing the duration and patterning of her labor-force participation throughout adulthood (Moen et al., 1992). Similarly, knowing a man’s income at any one point in time may be less useful than knowing the flow and patterning of income throughout his career (Frech & Damaske, 2019).
Agency and constrained choices
While the life course persepctive puts a great emphasis on social structures, it also recognizes that human beings can take actions and make decisions, individually and collectively, that affect their life pathways and outcomes (Settersten, 2020). This human agency is embodied in the pre-reflective capacity to defy social dictates, in the ability to innovate when routines break down, in the capacity to act within socially prescribed role expectations, and in the retrospective analysis of decisions made at turning points and transitions (Hitlin & Elder, 2007). Morever, human agency in the life course persepctive is construed in social relations, which does not merely rely on individual’s own cognitive and emotional reappraisal (Thoits, 2006).
Yet freedom of choice is not distributed evenly throughout the population. Persons with fewer economic resources have fewer opportunities to seek out and pursue desirable options, while characteristics such as age, race, gender, physical ability status, sexual orientation and religion may further create obstacles for some individuals (Carr, 2018). More fundamentally, the scope of personal agency has been prescribed by social institutions and historical stages. What is to be talked about, to be pursued, and to be transformed has been implicitly stipulated. As Karl Marx (1926) declares, “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
Linked lives
Life course is not experienced independently by individuals. As Elder (1994) notes, human lives are typically embedded in social relationships with kin and friends across the life span. Social regulation and support occur in part through these relationships. Processes of this kind are expressed across the life cycle of socialization, behavioral exchange, and generational succession. The misfortune and the opportunity of adult children, as well as their personal problems, are thus intergenerational. For instance, a childhood in the Great Depression often meant hard times, whereas children of World War Ⅱ frequently experienced employed but absent parents. Similarly, children affected by China’s one-child policy enjoyed more resrouces, but lacked emotional support from siblings and faced more burden of providing for the aged.
Life course sociologists also recognize that life domains are linked. Even within a single individual, work and family choices affect one another; working full-time may preclude one from being a stay-at-home parent, or intensive parenting demands may prevent one from working as many hours as one would like (Carr, 2018). Moreover, in the context of globalization, links between individual life experiences are often beyond direct social relationships and across geographical boundaries. For example, a strike in the US may bring more investment and jobs to China.
Intersectionality
The study of life course is incomplete without the principle of intersectionality. While its precise definition and scope is still debated, scholars have distinguished three approaches of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered (Cho et al., 2013; Choo & Ferree, 2010). The first, emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. For example, Lahey (2017) studies how black women’s cumulative experiences of occupation, industry, and physical conditions decrease their labor force participation at older ages.
The second approach sees intersectionality as a process: highlighting power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. For instance, Badawy & Schieman (2021) find that schedule control, which is often conceptualized as a valuable job resource, exacerbates the effect of job pressure on role blurring for women but not for men indeed. This has something to do with the broader cultural expectations and pressures on women to devote themselves to family and domestic activities, despite women’s rising participation in the labor force.
Finally, the third approach regards intersectionality as shaping the entire social system. This approach pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with specific formal and informal institutions. Instead, it looks for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. In my own research, I find that women’s confinement to exploitative occupations and family work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely due to a complex interplay of cultural, religious, and political factors.
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