Whose Lives? How History, Societies, and Institutions Define and Shape Life Courses

This article outlines how current sociology constructs life courses. First, a set of general heuristics is provided. Second, the development of life course sociology over the last 50 years is traced as an intellectual process whereby the life course has emerged as an analytical construct in addition to such concepts as human develop-ment, biography, and aging. A differential life course sociology has gradually devel-oped in which contexts are specified according to time and place. Third, these differential constraints operating on life courses are illustrated from the perspective of 2 research areas. One perspective introduces historical periods as a sequence of regimes that regulate life courses. Another perspective looks at cross-national dif-ferences and especially focuses on institutions as the mechanisms by which life courses are shaped. The article concludes with reflections about the relation between the variable social contexts of life courses and human development. In recent years, there has been a marked shift in the way human development and human life courses are being perceived. Infants and children are seen as produc-ers, or at least as coproducers, of their own development (Lerner Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). Parent–child relationships and socialization processes are cate-gorized much less as one-way streets where parents and other socialization agents imprint and impose their values and habits on children and adolescents but rather as areas of mutual interaction where it remains open who influences whom more (Krappmann, 2001; Kreppner, 1999). The old idea that teachers effectively trans-fer knowledge and character has given way to unending reports about unruly classes and resistant pupils. Sociologists have newly celebrated the significance