New Frontiers in Socialization (Advances in Life Course Research) (Advances in Life Course Research)

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Author: Richard A. Settersten Jr. | Timothy J Owens

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NEW FRONTIERS IN SOCIALIZATION

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ADVANCES IN LIFE COURSE RESEARCH Series Editor: Timothy J. Owens Recent Volumes: Volume 1: Volume 2: Volume 3: Volume 4:

Work, Retirement and Social Policy, 1986, edited by Zena Smith Blau Family Relations in Life Course Perspective, 1986, edited by David I. Kertzer Personal History Through the Life Course, 1993, edited by R. S. Olusegun Delinquency and Disrepute in the Life Course, 1995, edited by Zena Smith Blau and John Hagen

Volume 5:

Self and Identity Through the Life Course in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 2000, edited by Timothy J. Owens

Volume 6:

Children at the Millenium: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going?, 2001, edited by Sandra L. Hofferth and Timothy J. Owens

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ADVANCES IN LIFE COURSE RESEARCH VOLUME 7

NEW FRONTIERS IN SOCIALIZATION EDITED BY

RICHARD A. SETTERSTEN, JR. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA

TIMOTHY J. OWENS Purdue University, Indianapolis, USA

2002

JAI An Imprint of Elsevier Science Amsterdam – Boston – London – New York – Oxford – Paris San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo

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ELSEVIER SCIENCE Ltd The Boulevard, Langford Lane Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright by Elsevier Science, and the following terms and conditions apply to its use: Photocopying Single photocopies of single chapters may be made for personal use as allowed by national copyright laws. Permission of the Publisher and payment of a fee is required for all other photocopying, including multiple or systematic copying, copying for advertising or promotional purposes, resale, and all forms of document delivery. Special rates are available for educational institutions that wish to make photocopies for non-proﬁt educational classroom use. Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier Science Global Rights Department, PO Box 800, Oxford OX5 1DX, UK; phone: (+44) 1865 843830, fax: (+44) 1865 853333, e-mail: [email protected]. You may also contact Global Rights directly through Elsevier’s home page (http://www.elsevier.com), by selecting ‘Obtaining Permissions’. In the USA, users may clear permissions and make payments through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA; phone: (+1) (978) 7508400, fax: (+1) (978) 7504744, and in the UK through the Copyright Licensing Agency Rapid Clearance Service (CLARCS), 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP, UK; phone: (+44) 207 631 5555; fax: (+44) 207 631 5500. Other countries may have a local reprographic rights agency for payments. Derivative Works Tables of contents may be reproduced for internal circulation, but permission of Elsevier Science is required for external resale or distribution of such material. Permission of the Publisher is required for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations. Electronic Storage or Usage Permission of the Publisher is required to store or use electronically any material contained in this work, including any chapter or part of a chapter. Except as outlined above, no part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Publisher. Address permissions requests to: Elsevier Science Global Rights Department, at the mail, fax and e-mail addresses noted above. Notice No responsibility is assumed by the Publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent veriﬁcation of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made. First edition 2002 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record from the Library of Congress has been applied for. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record from the British Library has been applied for. ISBN: 0-7623-0863-X ISSN: 1040-2608 (Series) ⬁ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Printed in The Netherlands.

CONTENTS

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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PREFACE

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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PART 1: THE FIELD OF SOCIALIZATION IN REVIEW NEW FRONTIERS IN SOCIALIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION Timothy J. Owens and Richard A. Settersten, Jr.

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1. SOCIALIZATION AND THE LIFE COURSE: NEW FRONTIERS IN THEORY AND RESEARCH Richard A. Settersten, Jr.

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2. SELF-SOCIALIZATION AND POST-TRADITIONAL SOCIETY Walter R. Heinz

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3. LIFE CAREERS AND THE THEORY OF ACTION Janet Zollinger Giele

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PART 2: SOCIALIZATION IN SPECIFIC CONTEXTS Work Settings 4. UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION TO WORK IN ADULTHOOD: A CONTEXTUAL DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH Daniel M. Hyson v

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5. THE RELATIONSHIP OF TURNING POINTS AT WORK TO PERCEPTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL GROWTH AND CHANGE Elaine Wethington

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6. IN THE SHADOWS OF GIANTS: IDENTITY AND INSTITUTION BUILDING IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMIC PROFESSION Joseph C. Hermanowicz

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Family Settings 7. SOCIALIZATION AND THE FAMILY REVISITED Norella M. Putney and Vern L. Bengtson

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Neighborhood Settings 8. MOVING AND STILL: NEIGHBORHOODS, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, AND THE LIFE COURSE Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Tanetta E. Andersson

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The Work-Family Intersection 9. CAREERS AND LIVES: SOCIALIZATION, STRUCTURAL LAG, AND GENDERED AMBIVALENCE Phyllis Moen and Robert M. Orrange

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The Neighborhood-Family Intersection 10. INDIVIDUAL RISK FOR CRIME IS EXACERBATED IN POOR FAMILIAL AND NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXTS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF LOW BIRTH WEIGHT, FAMILY ADVERSITY, AND NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE TO LIFE COURSE-PERSISTENT OFFENDING Alex R. Piquero and Brian Lawton

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Chapter Title

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Peer Groups and Friendships 11. THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN LATER LIFE Brian de Vries and Colleen Johnson

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Educational Settings 12. EDUCATIONAL PARTICIPATION ACROSS THE LIFE COURSE: DO THE RICH GET RICHER? Aaron M. Pallas

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Medical Settings 13. THE LIFE COURSE AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND A SOCIALIZING RESOURCE IN MODERN MEDICINE Dana Rosenfeld and Eugene B. Gallagher

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Military 14. DIE BILDUNG OF THE WARRIOR CLASS: SOCIALIZATION AND THE ACQUISITION OF CULTURAL RESOURCES James J. Dowd

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Race, Gender, and History as Context 15. RACIAL AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF PHILADELPHIA YOUTH Julie A. Kmec and Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr.

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16. THE IMPRINT OF TIME: HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES IN THE LIVES OF MATURE ADULTS Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Lisa Martin

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Culture and Nation 17. SOCIAL CHANGE, THE LIFE COURSE, AND SOCIALIZATION: BIOGRAPHIES OF LABOR MARKET ENTRANTS AFTER UNIFICATION Susanne Falk and Ansgar Weymann

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Chapter Title

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Tanetta E. Andersson

Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, USA

Vern L. Bengtson

Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, USA

James J. Dowd

Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, USA

Susanne Falk

EMPAS Institute, University of Bremen, Germany

Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr.

Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Eugene B. Gallagher

Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky, USA

Janet Zollinger Giele

Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, USA

Walter R. Heinz

Life Course Research Centre, University of Bremen, Germany

Joseph C. Hermanowicz

Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, USA

Daniel M. Hyson

Independent School District 196, Greenleaf Elementary, USA

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Colleen Johnson

Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, University of California, USA

Julie A. Kmec

Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Brian Lawton

Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, USA

Lisa Martin

Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, USA

Phyllis Moen

Department of Human Development, Cornell University, USA

Robert M. Orrange

Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, USA

Timothy J. Owens

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Purdue University, USA

Aaron M. Pallas

Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

Alex R. Piquero

Center for Studies in Criminology and Law, University of Florida, USA

Norella M. Putney

Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, USA

Dana Rosenfeld

Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky, USA

Richard A. Settersten, Jr.

Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, USA

Brian de Vries

Gerontology Program, San Francisco State University, USA

List of Contributors

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Elaine Wethington

Department of Human Development and Department of Sociology, Cornell University, USA

Ansgar Weymann

EMPAS Institute, University of Bremen, Germany

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Chapter Title

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PREFACE

SERIES PURPOSE AND ORIENTATION

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Advances in Life Course Research publishes original theoretical analyses, integrative reviews, policy analyses and position papers, and theory-based empirical papers on issues involving all aspects of the human life course. Adopting a broad conception of the life course, it invites and welcomes contributions from all disciplines and ﬁelds of study interested in understanding, describing, and predicting the antecedents of and consequences for the course that human lives take from birth to death, within and across time and cultures, regardless of methodology, theoretical orientation, or disciplinary afﬁliation. Each volume is organized around a unifying theme. Queries and suggestions for future volumes are most welcome. Please see http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~towens/ALCR/ Pages/volumes_description.htm

PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME The present volume (Number 7) is subtitled New Frontiers in Socialization. A combination of invited and author initiated papers-all anonymously peer reviewed-this volume seeks to produce a cohesive though wide ranging source of information on both socialization and the life course, as each relates to the other. The volume advances theory and research related to socialization during speciﬁc periods of adult life or across adulthood. We focus on the adult years because most scholarship on socialization pertains to the ﬁrst two decades of life. The book addresses socialization experiences within one or more contemporary contexts – families, neighborhoods and communities, peer and friendship groups, educational settings, work organizations, volunteer associations, medical institutions, the media, or nation and culture. The volume also discusses the processes that occur in these settings, the primary agents of socialization, the content of socialization messages, or the consequences of these experiences for individuals, groups (e.g. age, cohort, sex, race, social class), or society at large. Timothy J. Owens Series Editor xiii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank our conscientious and gracious reviewers with gratitude: Jacqueline Angel, Elizabeth Carpenter, Bertram Cohler, Gregory Duncan, Cheryl Elman, Anne Gauthier, William Gronfein, Sue Hinze, Heather Hofmeister, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, Martin Kohli, Amy Kroska, John Laub, Patricia McManus, Elizabeth Menaghan, Miriam Moss, Eliza Pavalko, Judy Reardon, Stephen Russell, David Segal, Eleanor Stoller, and Amy Wisniewski. Finally, we thank the contributors themselves for choosing the series as an outlet for their work. Richard A. Settersten, Jr. Timothy J. Owens Volume Co-Editors

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PART 1: THE FIELD OF SOCIALIZATION IN REVIEW

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NEW FRONTIERS IN SOCIALIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION Timothy J. Owens and Richard A. Settersten, Jr. The purpose of this volume is to advance theory and research on socialization both within and across speciﬁc periods of the life course. We focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the adult years. Since the bulk of the literature on socialization has heretofore been dominated by problems, issues, and contexts of childhood and adolescence, this decision seems particularly justiﬁed. We thus hope, in some small way, to tip the scales in favor of a more balanced literature. The contributions gathered here – all original and peer reviewed – address socialization experiences within one or more contemporary contexts, such as families, neighborhoods and communities, peer and friendship groups, educational settings, work organizations, medical institutions, the military, history, nation and culture. The volume also discusses the processes that occur within these settings, the primary agents of socialization, the content of socialization messages, and the consequences of these experiences for individuals, groups (e.g. age, cohort, sex, race, social class), or society. The volume includes 17 chapters organized in two parts. Part 1 (The Field of Socialization in Review) serves as the frame. It orients the reader to some of the broader issues and themes of a life course view of socialization. Part 2 (Socialization in Speciﬁc Contexts) forms the mass of the volume. Here we delve deeper into a number of contexts and settings that act, intentionally or not, as important venues of socialization.

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PART 1: THE FIELD OF SOCIALIZATION IN REVIEW Chapter 1 (Socialization and the Life Course: New Frontiers in Theory and Research) by Richard Settersten considers the meanings and uses of “socialization” from the vantage points of psychology and sociology. It explores socialization experiences within and across speciﬁc periods of adult life, as well as within its focal settings (especially education, work, and family). It considers how the life course perspective, as a critical lens for understanding human development, offers exciting new potentials for scholarship on socialization. Because the life course perspective bridges disciplines and levels of analysis while emphasizing matters related to time and place, it offers many new insights into an established topic. Chapter 2 (Self-Socialization and Post-Traditional Society) by Walter Heinz argues for a transformation of the socialization framework into a more dynamic perspective of self-construction over the life course. Beginning with a brief overview of major changes in broader socialization theory, Heinz goes on to discuss selected sociological contributions to individualization of the self. Social constructionism is then introduced as a theoretical framework with the potential to link institutions and socialization. Finally, Heinz pulls the different threads together by delineating convergent perspectives from sociology and social psychology. The result is a sketch of an action theory of self-socialization that takes into account the challenges for an adequate theory of personality and society posed by post-traditional society. In so doing, the author combines selfidentity, agency, biography, and self-socialization as major themes. Chapter 3 (Life Careers and the Theory of Action) by Janet Giele combines existing conceptual and interpretive schemes for understanding the life course with a larger theory of action. The synthesis is accomplished by conceiving of the socialization process and the shaping of life outcomes as a series of dialectical interchanges between person and social context that can be observed from three different perspectives: (1) between social context and the individual, (2) between individual self and life outcomes, and (3) between life outcomes and the social structure. These interchanges, moreover, can be understood as addressing four universal functional problems each social system must face in order to survive, à la Parsons’ theory of action: legitimation and pattern maintenance; integration of sub-subsystems; goal attainment; and adaptation to the environment. To demonstrate how this scheme is applicable to the life course, Giele draws on various classic life course studies and then classiﬁes them according to universal functional problems (innovation and tradition, reform and conformity, success and failure, and precocity and delay). The four functions are again identiﬁed in stories of the key elements required to produce

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a given outcome such as success; and in the developmental processes involved in making life choices. The chapter concludes with an explicit statement of how all three types of interchange connect the social context to individual life course structure, the self to life outcomes, and life outcomes back to social structure. A “Life Course Listener’s Guide” is proposed for collection of data on social context, developmental processes, and actor’s intentions.

PART 2: SOCIALIZATION IN SPECIFIC CONTEXTS Chapter 4 (Understanding Adaptation to Work in Adulthood: A Contextual Developmental Approach) by Daniel Hyson focuses primarily on socialization that promotes positive adaptation within work settings. Sociological and developmental theorists alike agree that success in the transition to work is among the most salient developmental tasks of young adulthood, primarily because it constitutes a critical step in peoples’ life-long socioeconomic careers. Using data from the Minnesota Parent-Child Project (a 25-year ongoing longitudinal study of at-risk children and their families), Hyson highlights the ways in which worker attributes and earlier socialization experiences within other settings interact to affect success in the transition to work in young adulthood. Throughout the chapter, the author makes a case for adopting a contextual developmental model to comprehensively examine pathways to success in adult work. This integrative approach accounts for both individual and contextual factors in a dynamic model of the complex transaction between multiple levels of inﬂuence affecting adaptation to work in adulthood. Chapter 5 (The Relationship of Turning Points at Work to Perceptions of Psychological Growth and Change) by Elaine Wethington employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine self-reported turning points at work and their relationship to perceptions of positive psychological growth and change. According to the author, a turning point at work is a time when a person perceives that his or her work life has taken a different direction from its previous trajectory. Current research and theory in adult development and the life course suggests that work turning points will be associated with work achievements, such as promotions and other upward career moves. However, work turning points may also be related to stress exposure. Dialectical perspectives on adult development and socialization also predict that reports of work turning points will be related to personality characteristics, particularly those enabling people to cope better with challenging events and situations. Wethington’s quantitative analyses stem from data from the MacArthur Foundation National Study of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), a national sample of adults aged 25–74. Her qualitative analyses employ two additional 5

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studies: (1) a sample of 724 MIDUS participants re-interviewed three years later, and (2) 632 residents of upstate New York who took part in the Cornell Couples and Careers Study. Work achievements and difﬁculties were associated with reporting turning points at work. This ﬁnding held net of demographic factors that affect the probability of reporting turning points, personality, and beliefs that may affect how one typically copes with stress. Chapter 6 (In the Shadows of Giants: Identity and Institution Building in the American Academic Profession) by Joseph Hermanowicz notes that major sociological approaches to professions have neglected the people behind the work. In this chapter, people are “brought in” to the study of professions through a case study of American academe. Ambition is treated as a way to frame the study of professionals and professions because it may be viewed as the core requisite for professional entry and success among incumbents. Hermanowicz’s study is based on interviews with three cohorts of sixty scientists working at three different types of universities across the United States. They and academe are studied for how ambition gets narrated as careers unfold in time and place. The results demonstrate how ambition evolves in systematically distinct fashions in conjunction with the organizational environments in which professionals work. Master narratives – shared ways of accounting for passage in a profession based upon one’s work environment – are offered as a way to conceptualize what professions are, in accord with a “people focus.” Chapter 7 (Socialization and the Family Revisited) by Norella Putney and Vern Bengtson asserts that in post-industrial societies characterized by economic and moral uncertainty, marital instability, and a proliferation of new family forms, traditional approaches to family socialization are limited. The authors look at family socialization from a wider perspective by extending the frame of analysis to multigenerational families and by addressing such socialization processes as intergenerational inﬂuence, transmission, and status inheritance. They also posit that affectual solidarity between generations is a largely unacknowledged but necessary condition for positive socialization to occur. Their model accounts for family socialization that is psychosocial as well as structural, where inﬂuence and transmission ﬂows between generations may be reciprocal, and where family socialization can occur throughout the adult years. This broader perspective allows a better understanding of individual change and continuity across the life course. Further, an understanding of intergenerational resemblance and inheritance processes and their linkages to intergenerational bonds of affection and afﬁrmation over time helps in the assessment of family continuity and change across generations and cohorts. Putney and Bengtson forward their argument by presenting recent research ﬁndings on intergenerational socialization using data from the 30-year Longitudinal Study of Generations.

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Chapter 8 (Moving and Still: Neighborhoods, Human Development, and the Life Course) by Richard Settersten and Tanetta Andersson examines neighborhood effects on a variety of life course outcomes. The authors postulate, for example, that the structural characteristics of neighborhoods, the social processes that occur within them, and the speciﬁc combinations of structure and process may affect physical, psychological, and social outcomes. Several aspects of neighborhoods seem especially important to human development, including neighborhood composition (e.g. race, sex, age, and income); the quality of schools and other local institutions; the availability of resources and services; the degree and types of social cohesion, order, and control, and changes in these over time. To date, most scholarship has focused on the impact of neighborhood environments on the social outcomes of children and adolescents. Several prominent theoretical models have also guided most inquiry in this area, including contagion models, models of collective socialization, institutional models, competition models, models of relative deprivation, and models of social disorganization. After reviewing these effects and models, Settersten and Andersson discuss how they might be extended to the development of adults and the elderly. The chapter ends with a discussion of the complexities of handling neighborhoods in research and social policy. Chapter 9 (Careers and Lives: Socialization, Structural Lag, and Gendered Ambivalence) by Phyllis Moen and Robert Orrange presents theory and research ﬁndings related to the micro-level impacts of a major societal transformation – the revolution in gender roles. Such macro-level changes are invariably uneven processes, with society offering mixed messages. Women and men are either socialized into one world but ﬁnd themselves in another, or come to hold variant and even contradictory cognitions and expectations regarding work and family life. In this “half-changed world,” socialization does not provide guideposts but, rather, ambiguity and uncertainty. Not only do the media, parents, and teachers offer mixed messages, but also the structure of contemporary institutions (work, family, gender, and the life course) lags behind societal and personal expectations. People, therefore, must actively engage in the construction of their own life course in a world characterized by structural lag and conﬂicting signals. The resulting double binds produce a sense of ambivalence among many women and men regarding their own occupation and family career paths. Moen and Orrange draw on both qualitative and quantitative data from the Cornell Careers Institute and other sources in an assessment of working men and women at all stages of the life course. They focus, however, on people in their 20s and 30s as they negotiate work and family career plans, options, and expectations. Chapter 10 (Individual Risk for Crime is Exacerbated in Poor Familial and Neighborhood Contexts: The Contribution of Low Birth Weight, Family 7

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Adversity, and Neighborhood Disadvantage to Life Course-Persistent Offending) by Alex Piquero and Brian Lawton asserts that research on the etiology of criminal behavior over the life course has tended to focus either on individuallevel or social-structural-level risk factors. In contrast, this chapter advances the notion that a more complete understanding of crime over the life course should focus on how the relation between individual risk and antisocial behavior varies as a function of familial and neighborhood socialization contexts. To examine this issue, the authors use data from the Baltimore portion of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. Using multi-level modeling, Piquero and Lawton provide support for a family adversity x individual risk interaction in predicting involvement in life course-persistent styles of antisocial behavior. Moreover, their results show that the interaction is exacerbated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Chapter 11 (The Death of Friends in Later Life) by Brian DeVries and Colleen Johnson begins by noting that the death of close friends in later life is an ubiquitous yet rarely studied loss, a surprising limitation of current research given the pivotal role of friends in the lives of older individuals. The authors aim to reduce this gap by drawing upon data from two primarily qualitative longitudinal studies: a study of 150 community-dwelling individuals aged 85 and older and a companion study of 100 individuals between the ages of 70 and 85. In-depth interviews reveal seven broad themes when the seniors reﬂected on the recent loss of close friends through death. The themes are: an accounting of the number of friends that have been lost, the quality of the lost relationship, the context of the loss, the emotional reactions generated by the loss, temporal or life course accounts, the philosophical dimensions of loss, and an accounting of the lost activities. Several themes distinguish the younger old from the oldest old. Speciﬁcally, in contrast to the younger old, the oldest old were more likely: (1) to mention their advanced age and the concomitant normative nature of the death; (2) to comment that they are now the “sole survivors” of a long life; and (3) to question their continued existence and the moral of having lived through loss. These data provide a unique vantage point for observing and elucidating the experience of friendship, bereavement, and life in the later years. Chapter 12 (Educational Participation across the Life Course: Do the Rich Get Richer?) by Aaron Pallas analyzes the social determinants of three different forms of adult education: credential program participation, work-related education, and participation in personal development classes. Drawing on the 1995 and 1999 waves of the National Household Education Survey, the author examines how participation in adult education varies with life course stage and other characteristics of adults. Participation in these forms of adult education

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is surprisingly high, even among those over the age of 65, and is signiﬁcantly higher in 1999 than in 1995. Life stage adds substantially to the predictive power of the models. The effect of life course stage on the likelihood of participation varies across forms of adult education, and also varies by gender. These ﬁndings suggest that individuals and employers judge the value of education to be contingent on an individual’s location in the life course. Chapter 13 (The Life Course as an Organizing Principle and Socializing Resource in Modern Medicine) by Dana Rosenfeld and Eugene Gallagher seeks to redress the neglect of: (a) the role of medicine and medical personnel as agents of socialization in the life course, and (b) how medicine and medical personnel use notions of the life course to socialize individuals into the patient role. In keeping with post-structuralist approaches to regulation and social control, the authors treat modern medicine as a people-processing institution whose goal is, among other things, to produce a person who accepts the logic and practices of modern medicine. This leads many researchers to emphasize the fact that medicine organizes illness around life course expectations as a way to produce standardized, routinized and compliant patients. The authors suggest that the medicalization of the life course and the social construction of childhood and old age as dependent states are fruitful ways to understand the context in which patients are socialized to adopt the role that medicine has created for them. Using secondary sources, Rosenfeld and Gallagher then discuss how these formulations are used in medical interactions with children and elders to produce both compliant patients and a medicalized life course. Speciﬁcally, they examine how the life course is applied and elaborated in medical interactions, suggesting that medical agents often engage in “life-coursing” – that is, how medical agents use the life course as an interpretive resource for approaching physical and mental health statuses and experiences. Chapter 14 (Die Bildung of the Warrior Class: Socialization and the Acquisition of Cultural Resources) by James Dowd focuses on a rareﬁed group whose adult socialization involves an encounter not only with the generic social world of the upper-middle class professional but also with a distinctive segment of this social world – the military. The author’s research is based on extensive interviews with 62 United States Army generals. According to Dowd, more than a little tension exists in this dual experience since, ideally, the army ofﬁcer is expected to demonstrate both a mastery of military skills and the knowledge and sophistication associated with civilian professionals. The socialization of younger ofﬁcers is weighted clearly on the side of military skills. As they advance in rank, however, the focus of socialization efforts shifts from military skills to social skills. Indeed, prerequisite for promotion to general ofﬁcer is the demonstrated acquisition of more than the minimal level of cultural 9

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capital deemed necessary for comfortable passage through the pressured and polished worlds of diplomats, politicians, corporate executives, and military leaders of other services and from other countries. Although it might be argued that this layer of sophistication is the result of individual effort and personal style, which indeed it is, it is also the end-product of speciﬁc institutional mechanisms designed to enable this very outcome. To analyze the ways in which socialization operates in adulthood, Dowd considers four principal venues, each of which serves as an arena, or conduit, for the acquisition of cultural resources. He examines each of these venues in turn in order to explore their contribution to the formation of senior military leaders who are both technically proﬁcient and possess the cultural capital that the rank of general ofﬁcer requires. The author concludes that there is sufﬁcient commonality across the individual career narratives to indicate that the process is not random but a structural aspect of the military career itself. Chapter 15 (Racial and Gender Differences in the Transition to Adulthood: A Longitudinal Study of Philadelphia Youth) by Julie Kmec and Frank Furstenberg derives from the most recent wave of a longitudinal study of nearly 500 families in urban Philadelphia neighborhoods collected over a nine-year time span. Earlier ﬁndings revealed remarkable continuity in success trajectories from early to mid-adolescence despite hazards imposed by poor neighborhoods, low economic standing, and poor schooling opportunities. Despite this stability, qualitative interviews with the adolescents suggested a ﬂattening slope of success and an increasing slope of failure and risk during the transition to adulthood for minority men. They begin their chapter by describing the association between the youth’s performance in 1991 and their socioeconomic standing in 1999 for different race and gender sub-groups. Findings from logistic regressions support the predictions of a growing racial divergence for minority men. The ﬁndings also suggest that early and late adolescent attributes do not mediate the strong effect of race on early adult success. Their research highlights the role of individual characteristics, the family, and peers in socializing adolescents into adulthood. Minority men are the group most likely to have low socioeconomic standing in early adulthood. Moreover, they conclude that among this group, attending a comprehensive public school as opposed to a private or magnet school is the strongest predictor of their poor performance. Chapter 16 (The Imprint of Time: Historical Experiences in the Lives of Mature Adults) by Richard Settersten and Lisa Martin addresses the link between lives and history. Contemporary cohorts of mature adults have experienced landmark historical events and dramatic social change in the course of their lives. Which historical events and changes are viewed as carrying

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signiﬁcant personal effects, and how were they important? Does signiﬁcant variability exist among more speciﬁc cohorts of individuals within the larger group of mature adults? To shed light on these questions, the authors draw on data from the Intersection of Personal and National History, a national probability sample. Using a subset of 1,069 respondents, four separate cohorts are the focus of inquiry: those who entered adulthood between 1920–1934 (N = 153), (2) 1935–1945 (N = 203), (3) 1946–1959 N = 274), and (4) 1960–1973 (N = 439). Surprisingly, the majority of respondents do, indeed, reference the personal effects of macro-level events and changes. Times of war, especially World War II and Vietnam, are most often viewed as having left the most signiﬁcant marks on these individuals and their families. Consistent and signiﬁcant cohort differences underlie ﬁndings for the sample as a whole. The authors turn our attention to historical time as a distal but critical context for human development, and to cohort as an important source of variability in socialization and in life chances, expectations, and experiences. Chapter 17 (Social Change, the Life Course, and Socialization: Biographies of Labor Market Entrants after Uniﬁcation) by Susanne Falk and Ansgar Weymann compares socialization experiences of adolescents and young adults in pre-1989 uniﬁcation of East and West Germany with their post-uniﬁcation professional careers. Speciﬁcally, the authors ask two fundamental questions: Are there differences in the transition from education to employment across cohorts of East and West Germans entering the labor market, and did their subsequent life courses converge after uniﬁcation? To what extent do life course events depend on the speciﬁc institutional arrangements and opportunities of pre- and post-uniﬁcation generations? At the theoretical center of their argument is a concept of individual choices made within the institutional and structural constraints of a society in transition. The authors assess the issue by comparing longitudinal data from three cohorts of East German labor market entrants who graduated from university or professional schools in 1985, 1990 and 1995. Whereas the oldest cohort completed their education, ﬁrst job entry, and ﬁve years of employment under socialism, the youngest cohort graduated under West German conditions. The middle cohort completed their schooling in the German Democratic Republic, but their ﬁrst job entries fell within the turmoil of its collapse and the disarray of the uniﬁcation year. The reference group for comparing the particularities of East German life course events after uniﬁcation is a West German Sample from the German Socio Economic Panel, a retrospective longitudinal data-set which is representative for persons and households in the Federal Republic of Germany.

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1. SOCIALIZATION AND THE LIFE COURSE: NEW FRONTIERS IN THEORY AND RESEARCH

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Richard A. Settersten, Jr. Inkeles, writing in 1969, stated that the term “socialization” is used to refer to an “exceedingly large range of phenomena. It simultaneously describes a process, or input, external to the person, the individual’s experience in the process, and the end product or output” (p. 615). The same is true today, over 30 years later. The concept of socialization has its origins in three disciplines: psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Psychology has emphasized a “central paradox” of socialization efforts: The goal of “adaptive individuation” or personal identity (distinctiveness from others), and the goal of “social connection” or social identity (similarity to others) (Costanzo, 1992). Achieving a balance between these two goals presumably results in healthy adaptation to the challenges of everyday life. In sociology, the tendency has been to focus on how groups are socialized, and the institutions and settings in which socialization occurs. There have been two longstanding approaches to “socialization” (Gecas, 1981). The ﬁrst approach, associated with the theoretical tradition of structural functionalism, emphasizes the conformity and adaptation of individuals to the formal and informal norms of the speciﬁc groups and society to which individuals belong. From this perspective, new members are socialized so that, ultimately, these groups and the society “perpetuate” themselves by transmitting their “culture” from one generation to the next. This view can be critiqued on the grounds that it offers an “oversocialized” (Wrong, 1961) and passive view of human

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life. That is, it emphasizes the simple adaptation and conformity of individuals to imposing social expectations. The other approach, associated with the theoretical tradition of symbolic interaction and its offshoots, instead emphasizes how aspects of individual development, such as self-concept, attitudes, and dispositions, are created and re-created through interaction in social settings. This view is captured in classic sociological debates about the link between personality and social structure (e.g. Gerth & Mills, 1953; House, 1981; Inkeles, 1959; Parsons, 1964). In contrast to the prior view, this view takes individuals to actively construct the self and social situations. Clearly, both approaches seem essential to building an adequate view of socialization. Regardless of whether our focus is on adaptation and conformity or on the construction of identity, we must recognize that human experiences occur in social contexts – some organized and formal, and others less so. Sociological perspectives on socialization therefore emphasize social relationships in these settings and the fact that individuals are members of social groups. Ultimately, to use Gecas’ (1981) phrase, “to be socialized is to belong,” and “all socialization is contextual in that it occurs in some social situation” (pp. 166, 167). This is, of course, similar to the view in anthropology, which focuses on how cultures and subcultures set parameters on the content and experience of socialization. Some see socialization almost exclusively as a process of social control, constraining and imposing signiﬁcant limits upon individuals. Others take socialization processes to gently guide, rather than rigidly dictate, speciﬁc experiences and larger pathways through life. In either case, most of these perspectives assume that social controls are positive for society in that they help ensure social order, but that they are often too restricting for individuals. Yet these restrictive processes may serve some positive functions. True, restrictive processes may reduce the range of potential options available to individuals at any moment and make the life course more selective over time. But they may also lend a sense of predictability and order to life and keep individuals focused on particular pathways. This may maximize the potential for developmental gains (e.g. in reaping the accumulated rewards of particular skills and resources), and minimize the potential for decline, throughout life – what Heckhausen (1999) calls the “management of selectivity.” Of course, these forces become problematic when individuals, and entire groups, are systematically denied options or forced onto undesirable or destructive pathways. The life course perspective, our central lens for examining socialization here, seeks to integrate action-oriented and structure-oriented perspectives, conceptualizing lives as actively created by individuals and groups, but within the conﬁnes of the social

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worlds in which they exist. Models of “agency within structure” will be discussed later. Recent advances in sociological scholarship have led to a view of the life course as a system of age-and time-related rules and regulations, making it an institution of socialization in its own right and a central unit of social structure (for a full discussion, see Settersten, 1999). American scholarship on adult socialization has emphasized informal age norms, especially around the “3 Ps”: prescription, proscription, and permission, which will be discussed below. In contrast, European, and especially German, scholarship, has emphasized how modern nation-states structure the life course, particularly through structural arrangements and the allocation of resources. This is reﬂected in political dialogues in Europe about what kinds of lives societies produce and wish to produce – what Hernes (1987) calls “chronopolitics.” The possible “de-institutionlization” of the life course, and a crumbling of existing patterns, has led to concern about discontinuity in lives, and the structural arrangements that put individuals at risk for discontinuous lives (e.g. Beck, 2000; Heinz, 1996; Levy, 1996). While de-institutionalization – or what Beck (2000, p. 166) calls “institutional individualism” – may bring new freedoms, it also brings new responsibilities. In this scenario, personal achievements and failures are no one’s fault but their own. This scenario therefore brings new risks, as the experimental nature of “do-it-yourself” biographies, to use Beck’s (2000) term, makes them prone to “biological slippage and collapse.” While inquiry into adult development, aging, and the life course has grown exponentially in the past few decades, most scholarship on socialization remains focused on children and adolescents – and on socialization within family, followed by peer groups and school environments. We commonly claim socialization as a “lifelong process” of continuity and change, yet theory and research on human development rarely treats it as such. Only a few papers have been explicitly devoted to socialization beyond childhood, all of which were published two to three decades ago (e.g. Brim, 1966, 1968; Bush & Simmons, 1981; Mortimer & Simmons, 1978; Riley, Foner, Hess & Toby, 1969; Wheeler, 1966). The age-stratiﬁcation framework of Riley and colleagues, which will be discussed brieﬂy below, has emerged as a broad-based framework for understanding socialization and aging. While signiﬁcant change occurs in the ﬁrst two decades of life, we must consider the fact that adult life itself now spans, with great certainty, 50 to even 70 years and beyond. Adults, like children and adolescents, change and must be socialized (and re-socialized) along the way. We know little about socialization experiences in and across speciﬁc periods of adult life, and in its central settings. Most work on socialization during adulthood has focused on the 15

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cultural practices that affect child rearing, value transmission, and personality. It has therefore largely focused on the role that adults play in the socialization of others, especially children. But how are adults themselves socialized? We must begin to explore what adults learn in the central settings of their lives, why they learn it, and how they learn it. Even basic processes by which adults learn may be altered by the characteristics of settings, as Goslin (1969a) pointed out long ago. We must understand continuity and change in these experiences as individuals grow older, as they move into and out of the settings of adult life, settings which themselves change over time. We must learn about the precise agents and sources of socialization (and their relative importance), the content of their messages, how messages are transmitted, and their successes and failures over the short and long term – and for whom these are considered successes or failures. Although individuals enter the adult world with some anticipatory socialization, the socialization experienced in childhood and adolescence is clearly not enough to meet the demands of the adult years. This seems especially true today, given the rapid social change that has occurred during the past century, and given the dizzying pace of life in the contemporary Western world. Indeed, the ﬁeld of human development has changed dramatically during the last few decades, moving away from models that emphasize stability or persistence or ordered change, and toward models that emphasize simultaneous and reciprocal change in both individuals and environments (see Settersten, 1999). What does this mean for how we understand socialization in various settings as individuals move through adulthood? Lessons of a Life Course Perspective The topic of socialization has been approached in a wide variety of ways between and within disciplines. This was true several decades ago (see earlier evaluations by Clausen, 1968; Goslin, 1969b), and it seems even more true today. My intention here is not to offer a discussion of these differences (or similarities). Instead, it is to begin a discussion of what the life course perspective offers the study of socialization. The life course perspective has emerged in recent years as a central lens for inquiry in developmental science, and it offers exciting new potentials for scholarship on socialization. The life course perspective, in bridging disciplines and levels of analysis, and in emphasizing matters related to time and place, offers many insights into how we might take a new look at an old topic. Guided by life course concepts, principles, and methods, we might clarify and more carefully examine:

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• the proximal and distal outcomes of earlier socialization experiences, and the proximal and distal precursors of later ones; • differences and similarities in socialization experiences across speciﬁc life periods; • differences and similarities in socialization experiences across particular contexts (e.g. families, peer groups, neighborhoods, work organizations, educational institutions, health care settings, military environments); • connections between the structure and composition of a setting, and the socialization processes that occur in it; • the objectives of socialization, and the content of messages received, in particular settings; • the agents responsible for socialization in particular settings; • the responses of those being socialized and to those being socialized, in particular settings; • variable versus common aspects of socialization within and between individuals and groups; conformity to, and deviation from, expectations, and the forces that produce conformity or deviation; • whether the socializee is viewed as passive (largely responding to the demands that others make) or active (initiating and seeking experiences); • whether individuals are viewed as being responsible (at least in part) for their own socialization, or whether others are viewed as having exclusive responsibility for socializing them; • whether socialization is viewed as a two-way process, in which both the socializer and socializee are affected by the experience (though not necessarily in same ways or to same degree); • the drives, motives, and needs of individuals versus those of groups or society; and • the costs and beneﬁts of socialization for individuals, groups, organizations, or society. This chapter will focus on some of the most central of these concerns, especially those related to age, time, and place.

SOCIALIZATION, AGE, AND TIME Age and Adult Socialization

111 Most scholarship carries assumptions about the strength of age norms and expectations in shaping the organization and experience of adult life. Sociologists, in particular, begin their work with the assumption that lives are 17

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socially structured, and that age and time become most interesting as a social phenomenon. Life trajectories are calibrated by a sequence of age-linked transitions, times when social personae change, when new rights, duties and resources are encountered, and when identities are in ﬂux. As members of groups, we share notions about the “normal, expectable life” (Neugarten, 1969), of life’s seasons and the markers between them. We have expectations about the timing and sequencing of life transitions. We are aware of when we and others are “on time” or “off time” with respect to those transitions, and of the costs and beneﬁts of timeliness or untimeliness (Neugarten, Moore & Lowe, 1965; Settersten & Hagestad, 1996a, b). But of what are these age-linked expectations made? The answer, in part, depends on how we approach them. Psychological literature emphasizes the ways in which age expectations equip individuals with a “mental map” of the life course, lending a sense of what lies ahead and giving adults a chance to prepare for those experiences. The theoretical focus is on individuals, and how these mental maps, as frames of reference for orienting behavior, fulﬁll important human needs for predictability and order. Sociologists, on the other hand, often have a theoretical interest in how age is linked to larger social systems of control, the division of labor, and the allocation of resources. The essence of sociological theorizing about age norms is best captured in the “3 Ps”: role prescription, proscription, and permission (Riley, Johnson & Foner, 1972). Age norms are prescriptions for, or proscriptions against, engaging in certain behaviors and taking on certain roles at particular ages. Second, there is consensus about these prescriptions and proscriptions. And third, they are enforced through various mechanisms of social control, particularly positive social sanctions to keep people on track, and negative social sanctions to bring back into line those individuals who stray. If an age-normative system is operating, individuals within that system should be aware of the sanctions and consequences for violating norms and sensitive to social approval and disapproval. These sanctions may be informal (e.g. interpersonal sanctions, in the form of persuasion, encouragement, reinforcement, ridicule, gossip, ostracism) or formal (e.g. political, legal, or economic sanctions). Research on socialization will beneﬁt from inquiry aimed at understanding social meanings and uses of age, especially through informal age norms and expectations that individuals hold for themselves and others, and through formal ones expressed in laws and social policies. (For a larger discussion of age structuring and the life course, see Settersten, 2002). Age is linked to time on multiple levels, and these levels must also be addressed in scholarship on socialization. As an index of lifetime, age serves as a gauge for an individual’s general position in life (e.g. infancy, childhood,

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adolescence, early adulthood, midlife, old age), which is then taken as a proxy for social, psychological, or physical statuses. Social time relates to what age means for the roles individuals hold or the behaviors expected of them. In most Western societies, the life course is at least partially age-differentiated, with roles and activities allocated on the basis of age or life period. For example, primary and secondary educational institutions are heavily age-graded; work institutions often structure promotion opportunities and retirement policies and beneﬁts around age and seniority. One could also argue that the modern life course is organized around work time, which is structured into three separate periods: an early segment devoted to education and training for work; a middle segment devoted to continuous work activity; and a ﬁnal segment devoted to leisure and retirement. (These settings will be discussed later in the chapter.) Family time designates generational position in extended family structure. As individuals move up family structures over time, shifts in generational position bring new identities, responsibilities, and relationships. “Family time” also refers to the fact that family members are interdependent, and individual time may or may not mesh well with family time. The scheduling of transitions for members of one generation creates counter-transitions for members of other generations, and these are seldom under our own control. (The family setting will be discussed later in the chapter.) The lives of individuals and larger cohorts are framed and uniquely shaped by historical time. When we ask questions such as “How old are you?” we often do so to anchor individuals historically. We imagine when the person was born and how old they were during important historical events and periods of social change. We assign them membership in a social generation and make assumptions about how they have lived and what they think and value. Historical time is accompanied by many short- and long-term economic, political, and social changes, all of which leave unique imprints on individuals and groups. Other types of times are important to consider in conjunction with age, such as physical time, psychological time, or organizational time. For example, as individuals and groups move through organizations, that movement is often calibrated by time. Educational programs require the completion of a speciﬁc number of credit hours; courses must be tackled at a speciﬁc pace and in a speciﬁc sequence; time limits are set for obtaining degrees. Work organizations operate on speciﬁc schedules and shifts; hours are clocked; production is timed; deadlines are set; sick, personal, and holiday time are monitored and negotiated; timetables are set for promotional tracks. The rhythm of experiences in medical institutions also marches to the clock, as stays are time-bound, patients are scheduled, medicines are given, and rounds are made. Much remains to be learned about the many “times” of our lives – and the experiences, interaction, and synchronization of age 19

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and time at these many levels. These levels reﬂect the movement of individuals and groups as they navigate age strata in the population, generations in their families, social settings and institutions, and the course of history. Time and Adult Socialization The multiple levels on which age and time are linked, as described above, call attention to the dynamic nature of human life. Life course scholarship takes a long view of development, one that hopes to incorporate the whole of life into theory and research. Given the lifelong nature of socialization, that which occurs in speciﬁc life periods cannot be adequately understood in isolation from that which occurs in other periods. From this standpoint, it is important to consider both the proximal and distal consequences of earlier socialization experiences, and the proximal and distal antecedents of later ones. Experiences cumulate over time, and one’s life history becomes a kind of socializing agent of its own, what Hoerning and Alheit (1995) call “biographical socialization.” Socialization that occurs during adult life is therefore inherently “developmental” in that it continuously builds upon previous socialization (Gecas, 1992). Earlier “biographical knowledge and experiences” are changed in the process of living, reprocessed and reshaped in new forms over time (Hoerning & Alheit, 1995). Whether and how these experiences are assembled together as a whole constitutes difﬁcult developmental work. Understanding socialization over the life course is not only about how individuals are initiated into society by various socializing agents and institutions, but also by their own life histories, which are expanded and revised in light of an experienced past and an anticipated future. How we are socialized also seems signiﬁcantly tied to the fact that we will one day die. Life is precious and has meaning precisely because it is limited. Because death is universal and inevitable, it plays a role in shaping the organization and experience of life (Kastenbaum, 1996). Yet decreasing mortality, fertility, and morbidity have combined to make life more predictable. The new securities of lifetime make it possible to plan at many levels and bring new freedom and ﬂexibility. But this new security and freedom also brings new responsibility, risk, and contradiction, which will be discussed later. Much remains to be learned about how individual lives, family and group life, and social institutions have been transformed by new demographic parameters. Scholarship on adult socialization must begin to explore the following time-related questions: How are socialization experiences similar or different across the many decades of adult life? Are certain contexts continuously important across life and others more or less important in particular periods?

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Are certain agents in those contexts more or less important? Is the content of their messages more or less important? How are early socialization experiences built upon, revised, or abandoned thereafter? How do socialization experiences vary for different groups, for example, along cohort, gender, ethnic, social class, regional, and cultural lines? Are there universal socialization experiences that transcend place and historical time? One might argue that socialization experiences in different periods of life vary more in context and content than in process. Certain processes, however, may also be more or less likely at different points in life. For example, during adulthood, self-initiated socialization may be more typical. Adults acquire and lose roles and statuses; experience major transitions in education, work, and family; and encounter periods in which roles and statuses conﬂict with one another. In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, processes related to anticipatory socialization, and also to imitation and identiﬁcation, may be more typical. Young people seem especially consumed with planning and preparing for adult work and family experiences. To be effective, anticipatory socialization must be accurate and clear, though this is increasingly difﬁcult in a rapidly changing world. Nonetheless, transitions are easier to manage when we can prepare for them. Roles are easier to navigate when they are institutionalized and accompanied by rites of passage, and when they are compatible with other roles and the individual’s personality. Experiences that occur on time are more easily managed than those that occur early or late, catching individuals off guard and without signiﬁcant social support. (Yet being off time may also be positive in that individuals who might otherwise be dealing with multiple transitions are able to avoid that strain by hastening or delaying one or more of these transitions.) Of course, individuals cannot, in the ﬁrst two decades of life, fully prepare for all of the roles they will acquire in their lifetimes, even though anticipatory socialization generally relates to experiences that are likely to be acquired by most everyone in a society. New roles come into being; old ones change signiﬁcantly in form or vanish by the time they are reached (or would have been reached). Status acquisition seems especially likely during early adulthood as individuals build careers and form families. This is not to say that status acquisition is easy – despite the joys that marriages and partnerships, children, and promotions bring, they also entail signiﬁcant adjustment. Status losses, though, seem difﬁcult to manage even when we are prepared for them. These losses seem especially likely in later life, as individuals experience widowhood (or, increasingly, divorce), the death of friends, retirement, and some amount of physical decline. (Yet this, too, is changing, as individuals face more – and healthier – years in the latter part of life, bringing new potentials for the 21

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organization and experience of old age.) We should also not assume that status losses are unwanted. For example, couples may desire the empty nest; individuals may welcome a reduction in or withdrawal from work; spouses may ﬂourish after divorce or widowhood. These shifts, though undoubtedly challenging, may be accompanied by developmental gains. Socialization during adulthood may be more “realistic” than that which occurs before adulthood (Mortimer & Simmons, 1978). Socialization prior to adulthood entails learning “new material” and may therefore be more “idealistic,” whereas socialization during adulthood involves an integration of what was learned and its resolution in the face of reality, ﬁnally confronted. Children and adolescents more often assume the role of “learner” in the settings in which they exist (e.g. family, school), and the relationships that they have with socializing agents (e.g. parents, teachers) are more affective and emotional. Adults, in contrast, are often socialized for roles they are already in or are about to take on, and the relationships they have with socializing agents are more secondary and not charged with the same degree of affect (e.g. in work or voluntary organizations). Of course, this is not to say that affect relations do not exist in these more public settings, or that they always exist in more private settings such as the family. Family relationships continue over time but require re-negotiation as individuals assume new roles within or outside of the family or as those relationships need to be renewed or reinvented over time. Children are often socialized to be “nonresponsible, submissive, and asexual,” whereas adults are generally expected to be “responsible, dominant, and sexually active” (Mortimer & Simmons, 1978, p. 425). Yet these trends may reverse themselves again as individuals enter and live through old age. Adults are expected to be productive and independent, yet work roles are given up in later life, and declines in health and ﬁnances may cause dependency on others. Older people are also often treated as if their sexual drives and needs have ceased to exist. Children and adolescents may also be more malleable and open to change. Because adults have many years of experience behind them, they may be more resistant to change and attempts at socialization and re-socialization. As a result, adult socialization may be more self-initiated and voluntary than that during childhood and adolescence. One could argue that adults have more choices than children, or that children cannot control their lives to the same degree as adults. Yet one also might argue the opposite: that the long histories that adults have behind them involve critical decisions that cannot be undone, thereby reducing their later options. As we move through life, we make decisions that eliminate later options, we select or are put onto pathways from which we cannot easily shift, and these decisions and pathways constrain subsequent years. For example,

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pathways through educational institutions and work organizations are heavily age-structured. Future chances are directly tied to prior movement through a series of grades or positions. Early successes may lead to later successes and increase options, just as early failures may foreclose later opportunities. On the other hand, because of their years, adults may have a wider array of strategies and resources for managing differing values and behaviors, and they may have the conﬁdence required to stand apart from others. Given their networks and skills, adults may also be more able to seek advice from others who have had similar experiences, or to restructure friendship groups to ﬁt new needs and interests. Scholarship on socialization must not only focus on formal experiences, but also informal ones – otherwise, much of the “continuing dayto-day, hour-by-hour socialization of adults in informal primary-group relationships” is missed (Brim, 1968, p. 194). For this reason, research will beneﬁt from attention to “linked lives” (Elder & Johnson, 2003) as intimate ties shape life’s experiences and meanings. Interdependent attachments must be approached both in terms of the constraints and the opportunities they create. Interdependence can bring predictability, in that individuals attempt to navigate life together, thereby creating the potential for synchrony. At the same time, interdependence can bring unpredictability, in that changes in the life of one person require adjustments in others, thereby creating the potential for asynchrony. Greater attention must be paid to the “subjective” sides of socialization experiences: How “actors” understand the experiences they have. How they make and remake, and assign and reassign, meanings to experiences as they move through life. And how they set developmental goals, invest resources toward those goals, and cope with both successes and failures. Much also remains to be learned about how individuals self-regulate their development in the face of both age-normative and non-normative demands (see Heckhausen, 1999; Wrosch & Freund, 2001). When developmental demands are non-normative, when historical events or periods of social change disturb existing norms, and as the life course becomes (at least partially) de-standardized, individuals must more actively regulate their development in an effort to compensate for the lack of structure (see also Beck, 2000; Heinz, this volume).

SOCIALIZATION AND VARIABILITY

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environmental inﬂuence (e.g. Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998). Yet we cannot assume that the content and transmission of socialization processes are uniform across a society – or even within a speciﬁc group. When we do, we disregard important individual differences among age peers, and the everyday experiences that individuals have in social settings that produce those differences. We must therefore consider differences in socialization experiences within individuals, and between and within groups, at a given point in time or over time. Group-level comparisons are routinely made across age, cohort, race, sex, and social class lines. Yet is “the” group to which one belongs clear? Are its norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors clear? Individuals are simultaneously members of multiple groups, some of which may have norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors that conﬂict. This is especially likely in a pluralistic society. In addition, some statuses are known and (essentially) invariant, such as sex, race, or membership in a cohort. Other statuses may vary, such as marital or occupational statuses. The problems of socialization are different – and more complicated – in societies in which the bundles of statuses that individuals hold are differentiated and complex. How do individuals resolve these problems? Systematic comparisons in socialization experiences are also needed across generations within families; across nations, cultures, or subcultures; and across species. Coordinated comparisons along each of these dimensions will better reveal the degree to which knowledge about socialization can be generalized. However, group-level comparisons per se tell us little about how or why the attribute that deﬁnes the group is tied to different experiences. In making group comparisons, the relevant processes and mechanisms through which differences are created must also be identiﬁed. These points capture an inherent tension between uniformity and difference. On the one hand, we must consider how individuals and groups are similarly socialized, and even whether there are universal experiences. For example, culture, at a general level, is presumably constituted by a set of shared norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors (see Cammilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997). On the other hand, we must consider how individuals have unique experiences that are conditioned by their personal characteristics and behaviors (e.g. siblings are parented differently), those of socializing agents (e.g. mothers and fathers do not parent individual children identically), and those of the groups to which they belong (e.g. parenting styles differ across social classes and ethnic groups). In light of these complexities, scholarship on socialization must deal not with “simple sub-systems, but with real sub-cultures” whose differences are often disparate and conﬂicting (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997, p. 45). As a result, “culture” (and the approaches to socialization that accompany it) is no longer (at least in contemporary Western societies) a “total integrating system.” Instead, it becomes whatever subgroups share in common despite their differ-

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ences, or it becomes something that must be understood in more “microscopic” and speciﬁc terms. Clearly, our questions and evidence depend on the level on which we focus our scientiﬁc lenses. How “broad” or “narrow” should our view of socialization be, to use Arnett’s (1995) terms, if we are to capture the most important and meaningful action? Wherever our lenses are cast, we must pay systematic attention to the structure and composition of social settings, and the processes that occur in them. Some of these challenges will now be addressed.

SOCIALIZATION AND PLACE Approaches to Social Contexts in Developmental Science That social contexts affect human development is a fundamental proposition of developmental science. Yet the meanings of context and their relation to development must be clariﬁed and addressed more seriously. There are four separate and generally unrecognized approaches to context (see Dannefer, 1992). The ﬁrst approach is to consider context functionally unimportant or analytically trivial in bringing about developmental outcomes. Organismic theorists who posit a universal and ﬁxed sequence of age-bound stages of development take this view, for example. Many developmental psychologists who emphasize shared, predictable “ontogenetic” or “age-graded” changes also take this view. The second approach is to consider context powerful but unorganized. That is, context may be important, but its effects are random and unpredictable. Because contexts are neither organized nor ordered, they cannot be handled scientiﬁcally. This view of context is prevalent among developmental psychologists and biologists, both of which are naturally focused on the processes occurring within an organism than those occurring outside of it. They may nod to the fact that interactions between individuals and environments are important for development, but they make the assumption that environmental forces, in all their complexity, cannot be managed in theory or research. The third approach is to consider contexts organized but passive, constituting a “pile” of inﬂuences that can be identiﬁed but are exogenous and static. These inﬂuences are presumably captured by many of the independent and control variables with which data are routinely analyzed (e.g. “social location” variables, such as sex, race, cohort, or social class). These three views of context, abound in the literature, neither raise nor facilitate important questions about the linkages between contexts and development (though each increasingly acknowledges the importance of context). Only a fourth view adequately does so. This approach is to consider context as sets of dynamically and systematically organized processes that affect 25

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development. Contexts are not only explicitly structured and interactive sets of relationships and processes, but they function independently from human volition. While this view approach is standard for sociologists (though more often voiced than actually practiced), it has received only limited treatment in research on adult development and aging. Contexts have been treated far more systematically in research on child and adolescent development. As we build upon this fourth view, we must incorporate an explicit position on human agency. On the one hand, some perspectives place a strong, and even exclusive, emphasis on the role of volition in determining development; these are models of agency without structure. What is dangerous about agency-oriented arguments, at least if taken to an extreme, is that individuals are blamed for negative outcomes. These arguments may also lead to recommendations that the state need not assist individuals who need help because the problems they face are their own doing. On the other hand, some perspectives place a strong, and even exclusive, emphasis on the role of social contexts in determining or constraining development; these are models of structure without agency. Structure-oriented arguments can be equally dangerous if they are taken to an extreme, in that individuals are assigned little or no responsibility for their circumstances, with the blame for negative outcomes being completely externalized. Instead, our models must consider how individuals actively create their own lives within the conﬁnes of the contexts in which they exist; these are models of agency within structure. While contexts are generally conceptualized as constraining individuals, they need not be. Social contexts also foster individual development, and much remains to be learned about both their enabling and constraining sides. Handling Social Contexts in Developmental Research Most context-based research seeks to identify which attributes of a single context are developmentally positive or negative, and these attributes normally relate to the structure or composition of a setting. For example, neighborhood research has most often focused on indicators of SES, such as the percentage of families in poverty, median family income, percentage of male joblessness; racial composition (especially percent Black); or intersections between racial composition and indicators of SES (see Settersten & Andersson, this volume). While structural and compositional theories of contexts are useful, they are also limited. They say little about the processes in those settings that have a more direct impact on individual development, or the mechanisms through which those effects come about. What is it about a setting, and an individual’s place within it, that produces differences in developmental outcomes? For theory about contexts to be maximally predictive and generalizable, we must know

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about these mediating processes. Clearly, some effective (or ineffective) processes are more prevalent in some settings than others. Yet we must also consider similarities of process that occur across settings, despite differences in structure or composition. Because contexts are far from deterministic, it is invidious to designate a setting as developmentally superior solely because of, say, its race and class characteristics. Instead, understandings of context must combine theory-linked processes with the structural or compositional characteristics of each setting. In addition, we must consider interactions between contexts and how multiple contexts jointly and simultaneously affect development (for illustrations, see Cook, Herman, Phillips & Settersten, in press). Any conception of the environment as a social system must capture how its subsystems interact. There are natural linkages between settings, and we must better understand how settings work together or against one another. This means that contexts should not be studied as single, isolated entities, as they generally are, but as interdependent and interactive entities. Matters of selection are also important to understand. Personal characteristics – such as gender, age, race, social class, or personality traits – determine how individuals are sorted and treated in social settings. But this side of selection processes only partially determines these experiences. The other side is that individuals also select, and themselves shape, their settings, which is in line with the need to better understand self-socialization, as discussed earlier. Theoretical and methodological advances in recent years allow us to better handle contexts in developmental research. For further discussion, see Settersten (1999) and Friedman and Wachs (1999). Social Spaces and Adult Lives Scholarship on adult socialization must be conducted at multiple levels of analysis, linking individual and group experiences to both proximal and distal environments. Central proximal contexts of daily life include family, work organizations, peer and friendship groups, educational and medical institutions, neighborhoods and communities, and religious, political, volunteer, and leisure organizations and settings. Distal contexts also have important bearings on the socialization of adults, including the economy, the state and its policies, historical events and periods of social change (and, in times of war, the military), and nation and culture. The more distal the context, the more difﬁcult it is to measure its structure, composition, and processes. We must consider how the number and type of settings, and the nature of attachments in them, remain similar or change over life. For example, might the number of settings to which individuals are attached, the size of those ﬁelds, 27

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and the extent of attachments in them take the shape of an inverted-U over lifetime? (That is, with fewest early in life, expanding through midlife, and narrowing again in old age.) Interestingly, Clausen (1995) suggests that the number and diversity of settings in which adults can participate, without damaging their major responsibilities, is limited. While a variety of roles in adulthood may be enriching (as it is in childhood), too diverse a variety of roles may lead to “the attenuation of one’s sense of identity” (p. 369). This reinforces the idea that the number and diversity of settings shift as individuals move through life, and that their effects are conditioned by an individual’s age or life period. In addition, it suggests that the likelihood of experiencing disparity between settings may also change over time. For example, individuals, especially women, experience signiﬁcant tensions as they move between, and attempt to meet often-contradictory expectations in, work and family settings. Of course, individuals are encouraged or discouraged along certain pathways, or into or out of certain contexts, via socialization processes. This seems especially true during the early years, as children, adolescents, and young adults receive multiple messages about what they should be working on, and toward, in life. This leads to the question of whether particular agents are more or less inﬂuential, and whether messages from particular agents are more or less important, at different points in life. In addition, when messages from various agents conﬂict, how are they resolved? This task may be especially difﬁcult for young people, given the assortment of (often contradictory) messages received from parents, teachers, peers, and media. Along these lines, little is known about the conditions under which adult socialization experiences may override the effects of childhood socialization (George, 1996). While individuals are heavily socialized early in life, they must, in the end, establish their own attitudes, values, and beliefs – which may or may not match those they were socialized to assume. This leads to the question of whether an ability or need for agency is more or less critical for development in particular periods of life – for example, in adolescence and early adulthood, especially if individuals hope to forge innovative pathways that run counter to those promoted on the outside. Understanding socialization is not simply about understanding the expectations of others. This is only part of the picture. The person him or herself may self-initiate socialization. We must also consider the degree to which those being socialized are taken to be active, and to be more or less active at particular points in life. We must also consider the demands of both others and of self, and especially the degree of conﬂict or congruence between these demands, and how those differences are negotiated or resolved. In addition, it seems important to explore how periods of over- or under-socialization might work for or against individuals at different points in life.

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Similarly, we might consider the degree to which those doing the socializing are taken to be active. To what degree do agents realize their role in socializing others, and to what degree are they aware of their impact on others in the short or long term? For example, some parents actively advocate on behalf of their kids in schools, navigating its bureaucracy and pressing teachers and administrators to provide opportunities; others do not. Some parents press children to achieve, and actively monitor homework and school performance; others do not. The same can be said of management-employee relations in the workplace. Finally, it seems important to consider the degree to which a context of socialization is voluntary (e.g. peers are generally chosen; families generally are not); the degree to which agents are equals or unequals (e.g. peers are generally equals; parents, teachers are not); and the degree to which socialization processes are reciprocal (e.g. just as parents socialize children, children also teach and socialize parents in important ways; these processes are reciprocal). Let me now raise a few issues related to understanding adult socialization within the context of three central settings: family, work and education. These settings are discussed in depth by several other contributors to this volume: family (Hyson; Hermanowicz; Putney & Bengtson; Wethington), the workfamily intersection (Moen & Orrange), and education (Pallas). Several additional settings are covered by other authors, including neighborhoods (Picquero & Lawton; Settersten & Andersson), peer groups and friendships (de Vries & Johnson), medicine (Rosenfeld & Gallagher), military (Dowd), history (Settersten & Martin), and nation (Falk & Weymann). Other chapters highlight matters of self-socialization (Heinz) and action (Giele), and the special concerns of early adult life (Kmec & Furstenberg). Family. Many models of socialization take the family of origin to be the most important context during the early years, and to have the strongest and longest effects on adult life. The literature on child development has emphasized the importance of parents – especially parental control, support, and involvement – in affecting many dimensions of children’s cognitive, psychological, and social development (Gecas, 1992). Of course, siblings, grandparents, and other relatives also play signiﬁcant roles in socializing children, and their inﬂuence is not bound to early life. Over time, many types of family relationships become important elements of this equation. Family ties extend across life, making socialization within the family “most pervasive and consequential” because family relations are “intimate, intensive, relatively enduring, particularistic and diffuse” (Gecas, 1992, p. 170). Changes in demographic parameters have dramatically altered the look and feel of contemporary families (Hagestad, 2003). Contemporary families are tall and narrow in form, with many generations alive at once, few 29

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members in each generation, and each generation signiﬁcantly different from each other in age. For example, children now come to know grandparents, great-grandparents, and even great-great-grandparents; and spouses, parents and children, and siblings survive jointly for long periods of time. What do shifts such as these mean for family-related socialization experiences? These changes bring new opportunities to study family-related socialization over long stretches of time, as children become adults and parents become middle aged, or as children become middle aged and parents become old. While the family sphere remains important throughout life, an individual’s position in the family changes over time. The socialization that occurs is not simply top-down from parents (as agents of socialization) to children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (as targets of socialization). It is also bottom-up, from children to parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. These changes also provide opportunities to study socialization within the context of family relationships other than those between parents and children, such as those between siblings, or between grandchildren and grandparents, which now extend over signiﬁcant periods of time. It provides opportunities to study new and complex forms of family relationships, such as those that result from divorce, remarriage, and unmarried partnerships of many kinds. For example, as Riley (1985), Uhlenberg (1980), Hagestad (1988) and others have suggested, this scenario carries the potential to make family relationship more important because there are fewer relationships in which to invest, they are of longer duration, and they exist across many generations. This may strengthen the importance of the family as a continuous, long-term agent of socialization. The new mix of family and family-like ties brings new types of (and opportunities for) socialization. At the same time, the opposite can also be argued: Family relationships may now be more vulnerable, given the complexities posed by divorce, the time binds faced by parents, the uncertainty of employment, pensions, health care beneﬁts, and the like. The new securities of lifetime, and of joint survival over many decades, may lead individuals to invest less in family ties during particular periods under the assumption that ties can be renewed later on. It also seems important to consider these relationships not only in terms of the living. The dead also serve as agents of socialization, even long after they have died. This seems especially true of parents and spouses. The dead can inﬂuence the living in biological, psychological, economic, political, and social ways (for interesting examples, see Baker, 1991). The inﬂuence of the dead may be just as great – or even greater – than that of the living. The power of the dead is “such that survivors refuse to remarry, abstain from sexual activity, or even commit suicide. On a more positive note, the dead can serve as shining

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role models, immune from the assaults on perfection that often tarnish heroes who live too long and become all too mortal” (Baker, 1991, p. 540). Work and education. Work serves as a life-long source of personal continuity and change, of identity and competence, for adults. Work settings and, increasingly, educational settings are therefore central to adult life. Indeed, work is often taken to be the central activity that organizes the modern life course, which is split into three distinct periods: education, work, and leisure. This structure is reinforced through many laws and social policies (see Settersten, 2003). Life course scholarship is concerned with the structure and content of these periods, and how they have changed historically (e.g. Hendricks & Cutler, 2003; Henretta, 2003). This structure is convenient in that it creates “orderliness” in the entry to, and exit from, roles and activities; at the same time, it is “ageist” in that it restricts opportunities for various activities to speciﬁc periods of life (Riley, Kahn & Foner, 1994). Research on socialization will beneﬁt from explicit attention devoted to these periods and, ultimately, to how individuals experience and assign meanings to them. For example, the boundaries between the three “boxes” have shifted: The trend toward early retirement at the upper end of work life, coupled with an extension of schooling at the lower end of work life, has made the period of gainful work shorter. In addition, early retirement, coupled with increased longevity, has lengthened the period of retirement. There is growing interest in how to build an age-integrated life course, one in which opportunities for participation in all spheres of life are open to people of all ages (see a recent collection of papers edited by Uhlenberg & Riley, 2000). What might these shifts mean for the organization and experience of education, work, and leisure? Given the centrality of work for current cohorts of men and women, much of adult socialization relates to training for a job or career. But work-related socialization cannot be treated as if it ends once credentials are achieved. It continues as jobs are restructured within organizations or as individuals move through positions within or between organizations, taking on new roles and responsibilities and expanding skills or retooling themselves. In addition, while work is a central context for adults, men and women are not equally socialized toward work, or toward the same kinds of work, even today. Women’s accomplishments in and attachments to the labor market have increased dramatically over the past several decades, yet they continue to shoulder most of the responsibility for the raising and caring of children. This accounts for much of the difﬁculty that women feel as they negotiate both spheres. And it accounts for the fact that women’s career patterns are “discontinous” relative to those of men, as women cycle in and out of the labor market in response to family 31

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demands. This raises the issue of meaning: Despite the fact that men and women are socialized to take multiple roles, the roles themselves may not (and probably do not) hold the same meanings for men and women. There is a literature in the ﬁeld of organizational behavior that examines how newcomers are socialized by superiors and co-workers in work organizations (e.g. Settoon & Adkins, 1997), and how the features of a job or organization determine socialization processes and outcomes (e.g. Chao, O’Leary-Kelly, Wolf, Klein & Gardner, 1994). However, much remains to be learned about work as a central context for adult development, as Elder and Johnson (2003) have noted. We must not only explore how work serves positive functions for adult development and identity, but also how it may undermine it. For example, the organization of some workplaces and occupational positions may undermine parenting skills and personality (e.g. Kohn & Schooler, 1983), health (e.g. Pavalko & Smith, 1999), and the meaning of work (e.g. Schooler, Malutu & Oates, 1999).

SOCIALIZATION, INTERVENTION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE Social Intervention and Re-Socialization Many attempts at social intervention are aimed at buffering individuals from negative (and even dangerous) socialization that has not yet occurred or at compensating for that which has already occurred. For example, educational reform is often aimed at countering the potentially negative effects of problematic neighborhoods, peers, or parenting. The model that underlies most social reform is that faulty socialization can be corrected, especially if the timing is right. Many attempts at intervention take early intervention to be ideal in maximizing the potential to neutralize negative effects or promote positive effects over time. This again highlights the question of when individuals are most susceptible to, or most inﬂuenced by, particular settings or agents of socialization (see also Settersten, 1999, for a discussion of developmental “windows” and “frames,” and Settersten, 2003, for how these might be handled in social policies). It also raises the question of when, by whom, and for whom socialization can be deemed “successful” or “unsuccessful” – and whether this is reﬂected both in attitudes, values, and beliefs, on the one hand, and in actual behavior, on the other hand. It raises the question of what the precise goals of socialization are in various settings, and how those goals are best achieved. And it raises the question of how those who have been “incorrectly” or “unsuccessfully” socialized might be re-socialized, and why some individuals who have been “correctly” or “successfully” socialized nonetheless stray at later points. Many social problems

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are deemed to be the result of failed socialization. This raises the question of who is responsible for the socialization of individuals of different ages. Of who oversees and regulates it. Of who is to blame when it goes awry, and of who suffers most when it does. Of who must undergo re-socialization, and of who is worthy of re-socialization and who is not. Of the causes, consequences, and solutions to these misfortunes. Answers to these questions are conditioned by the ideology of a society, and of what is deemed to be the responsibility of the state, families, church, or other bodies. Re-socialization may occur in informal ways, as children, for example, may introduce parents or grandparents to new ways of thinking and living. Or it may occur in more formal, radical ways, in settings such as prisons, reform schools, mental hospitals, therapy groups, or religious or political conversion camps. These institutions or environments explicitly seek to transform the person, to replace previous beliefs, values, and behaviors with new ones. Some of these are voluntary and others involuntary, but all involve a fundamental transformation of identity in which what individuals once were ceases to exist, and in which a new self is born in its place. This calls to mind Wheeler’s (1966) distinction between developmental socialization systems, whose “formal purpose is the training, education or, more generally, the further socialization of the individuals passing through,” and re-socialization systems, whose “formal purpose is to make up for or correct some deﬁciency in earlier socialization” (p. 68). The nature of socialization processes in various settings will therefore depend on the “system” with which it is aligned. For example, because re-socialization requires individuals to shed or “unlearn” old identities, beliefs, and values, it necessitates processes signiﬁcantly different from those in settings of normal “developmental socialization.” Of course, learning can also be incidental and unintended. Schools are a good example of this. While schools have the socialization of children as a central purpose, “incidental” learning also takes place; what is learned is not always the same as what is taught – or at least what is taught is not the only thing that is learned (Gecas, 1981). Self-initiated re-socialization seems a signiﬁcant source of change in normal adult development, with individuals developing their own prescriptions for personality and behavior change (e.g. in seeking therapy or actively altering lifestyles). For many, adulthood is a period of recovery from negative childhood experiences; it is a period in which problematic early socialization must be unlearned and relearned, what Gecas (1992) calls “secondary socialization.” Self-initiated demands and the demands of others need not be incompatible. Some amount of self-initiated change is inﬂuenced by the suggestions others make, just as some amount of what others demand is inﬂuenced by what 33

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individuals want for themselves. Nonetheless, individuals now have greater freedom to choose and make some of their socialization. But they must also carry the burden of managing and unifying disparate and even incompatible experiences, which brings signiﬁcant challenges for the construction and maintenance of the self and identity. Re-socialization is therefore not only about failed socialization. Resocialization seems increasingly necessary for everyone in a fast-paced and ever-changing world in which life spans seven or more decades. The socialization experienced in childhood is not enough to meet the demands of the adult years, and that which did occur may be outdated by the time we need it. This seems particularly true in times of social change. Socialization and Social Change The 20th century has brought dramatic changes in all spheres of life. Signiﬁcant shifts have occurred in demography, urbanization and industrialization, the economy, medicine, technology, politics, and the law. In the wake of these shifts, the life course has become more variable and increasingly complex. What happens when patterns that have long existed begin to crumble? How do individuals, groups, and social institutions deal with the ambiguity that results? The very idea of socialization assumes that there is clear consensus about what individuals are being socialized into, and this begins to dissolve in complex, differentiated, pluralistic societies. Given the pace of change in modern societies, the entire issue of socialization becomes increasingly problematic, especially when many of the changes occurring in family, peer, school, neighborhood, and work environments are considered negative. As Inkeles (1969) suggested long ago, when a society experiences rapid change, strain is placed on existing systems of socialization. Individuals may ﬁnd themselves incompletely or inappropriately socialized to the demands of the roles they are now in or those they will eventually be called upon to play. Roles may become unclear or only vaguely deﬁned – or scripts cease to exist altogether. Individuals must therefore be prepared for “de-socialization” and “successive re-socialization” as they move through adult life (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997). There is an inherent contradiction between notions of “socialization” and “social change.” At the macro level, a common view of socialization is that it perpetuates society, passing on traditions and reproducing ways of thinking and being in the next generation. Yet we know that social change happens. At the individual level, a common view of socialization is that it promotes continuity and stability. Yet we know that socialization may prompt individual change. Traditional models of socialization assume unidirectional action from society

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down to the individual. But this clearly does not reﬂect the complexity of socialization processes as they actually exist, which instead comes with the possibility that individuals, and larger cohorts to which they belong, may redeﬁne or even reject the things asked of them. This is one of the factors that make change a possibility. Given that members of separate generations in the family belong to different cohorts, the family becomes a primary forum within which differences in attitudes, values, and behaviors are actively played out and chasms (sometimes) bridged. The literature on political socialization, in particular, often focuses on the transmission of political attitudes and values across generations within families and, following early theorizing by Mannheim (1928/1952), takes early adulthood to be an especially critical period in which political attitudes and values are crystallized. (For an excellent review of aging and adult political socialization, see Steckenrider & Cutler, 1989. Given the signiﬁcant military histories of those born in the ﬁrst few decades of the 20th century, political socialization must also be understood within the context of military service and war; see Laufer, 1989, and Lovell & Stiehm, 1989.) There are many instances in which socialization is not altogether functional – and instances when it is dysfunctional – for the welfare of individuals, groups, or society. As we begin to draw a more complete (but complicated) picture, we may ﬁnd that the costs and beneﬁts of socialization across these levels may not mesh. For example, socialization in particular directions may beneﬁt the development of individuals at the expense of the groups or society to which they belong, and vice versa. This prompts the need to ask more speciﬁc questions, such as for whom socialization is functional or dysfunctional, how, and why. In times of change, traditional expectations and models may loosen, creating uncertainty both in terms of what individuals expect for themselves, what they expect of others, and what others expect of them. On the one hand, uncertainty may bring new freedoms and the possibility of forging innovative pathways through life. On the other hand, uncertainty may result in individuals clinging more tightly to traditions. Social change may also increase the gap between how individuals hope their lives will unfold and how their lives actually unfold, given structural opportunities or constraints. An illustration: When planful competence meets historical change. In closing, let me offer a few theses to illustrate the power – and contradictions – of social change by developing a few theses related to what Clausen (1991) called “planful competence” and its interaction with demographic change and historical conditions. Let us ﬁrst consider planfulness in conjunction with the demography of an aging society, especially changes in mortality, morbidity, and fertility. On the one hand, these demographic shifts now make it possible 35

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to plan at both individual and collective levels. In the past, it may have been far less possible – or proﬁtable – to plan. Now, those who plan, especially from early on, can presumably reap the beneﬁts of this over a certain lifetime. Life experiences are potentially more predictable and controllable. The certainty of life and time may therefore facilitate planful competence. What is more, planfulness may be all the more necessary in a world with seemingly unlimited opportunities and time. It may be important to carefully select a path early in life in order to build on opportunities along the way. These conditions make choices – and good choices – all the more important. On the other hand, because time is plentiful, individuals may feel little need to plan. Life seems ﬂexible, bringing many opportunities to change one’s course along the way; to revise, defer, abandon, or return to experiences until a later point. While lifetime itself is something we can count on, life scripts have become blurred and lives as they are lived have become more variable. Similarly, consider a few hypotheses related to the intersection between planful competence and historical conditions, especially periods of social change. Do particularly favorable or unfavorable historical circumstances at the transition to adulthood increase or decrease the potential beneﬁts of planfulness? On the one hand, planful competence may matter little during particularly unfavorable historical circumstances; the same may be true of particularly favorable conditions. In hard times, there are few opportunities for anyone; and in good times, opportunities are plentiful for everyone. During hard times, being planfully competent may even have tragic effects on the self: For adolescents high in planful competence, difﬁcult historical times may be personally devastating, as long-held goals are disrupted or relinquished. In contrast, for adolescents low in planful competence, unfavorable historical circumstances bring their life chances closer to those of more planfully competent peers. On the other hand, it may be precisely during hard times that individuals who are more planfully competent are granted precious opportunities, serve to advantage them relative to less competent peers, even though this may be difﬁcult to handle personally. Junctures (and especially mismatches) between aspirations, expectations, and actual experiences offer important departures for understanding socialization. Greater sensitivity to these intersections will facilitate our understandings of how some individuals manage to “stay the course” and others not. Of where, how, and why veering occurs, and whether it comes with consequences. Of whether and why individuals with certain characteristics self-select themselves onto realistic or unrealistic pathways, and whether and why some individuals seem more disposed to plan than other individuals. And in cases where individuals’ aspirations, expectations, and behaviors do not match, fresh insights

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may be gained into the kinds of barriers individuals face (or think they face) and how those barriers might be eliminated or overcome. These, too, are great “silver bullets” for which developmental scientists must search.

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Elder, G. H., Jr., & Johnson, M. K. (2003). The life course and aging: Challenges, lessons, and new directions. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 49–81). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Friedman, S., & Wachs, T. (Eds) (1999). Measuring environment across the life span: Emerging methods and concepts (pp. 357–392). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Gecas, V. (1981). Contexts of socialization. In: M. Rosenberg & R. H. Turner (Eds), Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives (pp. 165–199). New York: Basic Books. Gecas, V. (1992). Socialization. In: E. F. Borgotta & M. L. Borgotta (Eds), Encyclopedia of Sociology (pp. 1863–1872). New York: Macmillan Publishing. George, L. K. (1996). Missing links: The case for a social psychology of the life course. The Gerontologist, 36(2), 248–255. Gerth, H., & Mills, C. W. (1953). Character and social structure: The psychology of social institutions. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. Goslin, D. A. (1969a). Introduction. In: D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (pp. 1–21). Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Company. Goslin, D. A. (Ed.) (1969b). Handbook of socialization theory and research. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Company. Hagestad, G. O. (1988). Demographic change and the life course: Some emerging trends in the family realm. Family Relations, 37, 405–410. Hagestad G. O. (2003). Interdependent lives and relationships in changing times: A life course view of families and aging. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 135–159). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Heckhausen, J. (1999). Developmental Regulation in Adulthood: Age-Normative and Sociostructural Constraints as Adaptive Challenges. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heinz, W. R. (1996). Status passages as micro-macro linkages in life course research. In: A. Weymann & W. R. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 51–65). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Hendricks, J., & Cutler, S. (2003). Leisure in life course perspective. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 107–134). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Henretta, J. (2003). The life course perspective on work and retirement. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 85–105). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Hernes, H. M. (1987). Welfare state and woman power: Essays in state feminism. Oslo, Norway: The Norwegian University Press. Hoerning, E. M., & Alheit, P. (1995). Biographical socialization. Current Sociology, 43(2–3), 101–114. House, J. S. (1981). Social structure and personality. In: M. Rosenberg, & R. H. Turner (Eds), Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives (pp. 525–561). New York: Basic Books. Inkeles, A. (1959). Personality and social structure. In: R. K. Merton, L. Broom, & L. S. Cottrell, Jr. (Eds), Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects (pp. 249–276). New York: Basic Books. Inkeles, A. (1969). Social structure and socialization. In: D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (pp. 615–632). Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Company. Kastenbaum, R. (1996). A world without death? First and second thoughts. Mortality, 1(1), 111–121. Kohn, M. L., & Schooler, C. (1983). Work and personality: An inquiry into the impact of social stratiﬁcation. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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Laufer, R. S. (1989). The aftermath of war: Adult socialization and political development. In: R. S. Siegel (Ed.), Political Learning in Adulthood: A Sourcebook of Theory and Research (pp. 415–457). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Levy, R. (1996). Toward a theory of life course institutionalization. In: A. Weymann and W. R. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 83–108). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Lovell, J. P., & Stiehm, J. H. (1989). Military service and political socialization. In: R. S. Siegel (Ed.), Political Learning in Adulthood: A Sourcebook of Theory and Research (pp. 172–202). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Mannheim, K. (1928/1952). The problem of generations. In: K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 276–322). London: Routledge & Kaegan Paul. Mortimer, J. T., & Simmons, R. G. (1978). Adult socialization. Annual Review of Sociology, 4, 421–454. Neugarten, B. L. (1969). Continuities and discontinuities of psychological issues into adult life. Human Development, 12, 121–130. Neugarten, B. L., Moore, J. W., & Lowe, J. C. (1965). Age norms, age constraints, and adult socialization. American Journal of Sociology, 70, 710–717. Parsons, T. (1964). Social structure and personality. New York: Free Press. Pavalko, E. K., & Smith, B. (1999). The rhythm of work: Health effects of women’s work dynamics. Social Forces, 77(3), 1141–1162. Riley, M. W. (1985). Men, women, and the lengthening of the life course. In: A. Rossi (Ed.), Gender and the Life Course (pp. 333–347). New York: Aldine. Riley, M. W., Foner, A., Hess, B., & Toby, M. L. (1969). Socialization for the middle and later years. In: D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (pp. 951–982). Chicago, IL: Rand McNally & Company. Riley, M. W., Johnson, M., & Foner, A. (1972). Aging and society, Volume 3: A sociology of age stratiﬁcation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Riley, M. W., Kahn, R. L., & Foner, A. (Eds). (1994). Age and structural lag: Society’s failure to provide meaningful opportunities in work, family, and leisure. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Schooler, C., Mulatu, M. S., & Oates, G. (1999). The continuing effects of substantively complex work on the intellectual functioning of older workers. Psychology and Aging, 14(3), 483–506. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1999). Lives in time and place: The problems and promises of developmental science. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2002). Age structuring and the life course. In: J. Mortimer & M. Shanahan (Eds), Handbook of the Life Course. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2003). Rethinking social policy: Lessons of a life course perspective. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 191–222). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Settersten, R. A., Jr., & Hagestad, G. O. (1996a). What’s the latest? II.: Cultural age deadlines for educational and work transitions. The Gerontologist, 36(5), 602–613. Settersten, R. A., Jr., & Hagestad, G. O. (1996b). What’s the latest?: Cultural age deadlines for family transitions. The Gerontologist, 36(2), 178–188. Settoon, R. P., & Adkins, C. L. (1997). Newcomer socialization: The role of supervisors, coworkers, friends and family members. Journal of Business and Psychology, 11(4), 507–516. Steckenrider, J. S., & Cutler, N. E. (1989). Aging and adult political socialization: The importance of roles and transitions. In: R. S. Siegel (Ed.), Political Learning in Adulthood: A Sourcebook of Theory and Research (pp. 56–88). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Uhlenberg, P. (1980). Death and the family. Journal of Family History, 5, 313–320. Uhlenberg, P., & Riley, M. W. (Eds) (2000). Essays on age integration. The Gerontologist, 40(3), 261–307. Wheeler, S. (1966). The structure of formally organized socialization settings. In: O. G. Brim, Jr., & S. Wheeler (Eds), Socialization After Childhood: Two Essays (pp. 51–116). New York: Wiley. Wrong, D. H. (1961). The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193. Wrosch, C., & Freund, A. (2001). Self-regulation of normative and non-normative developmental challenges. Human Development, 1–18.

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2. SELF-SOCIALIZATION AND POST-TRADITIONAL SOCIETY Walter R. Heinz

SOCIALIZATION THEORY IS DEAD – LONG LIVE THE LIFE COURSE? THE TRANSFORMATION OF A CONCEPT Socialization is a concept that used to be applied mainly to the life stages of childhood and youth and the shaping of the personality in the family. It designates the internalization of value-orientations, norms and symbolic meanings as well as the acquisition of social and practical skills by social learning and training. The focus on early life phases, however, was already questioned in the 1960s, when the Social Science Research Council established a “Committee on Socialization and Social Structure” that suggested to extend the concept to “Socialization after Childhood” (Brim & Wheeler, 1966). However, this initiative to consider socialization as a process across the life course, took quite a while to gain popularity among social scientists. There are also indications in developmental and social psychology that contribute to the insight that personality development must be understood as an ongoing process across the life span. There is the well-known model of E. H. Erikson (1982) which conceptualized identity development over eight stages from early childhood to old age, and, more recently, Baltes and associates (cf. Baltes, 1997) who elaborate the concept of life-span development. Another impulse to extend the socialization concept comes from attempts to link the social structure of the life course with the subjective interpretation of life experiences and life events.

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Kohli (1988, 1991), for instance, suggests to combine the research on the institutionalization of the life course with the study of social meaning and personal experience which unfold in individual biographies. These developments not only extend the concept of socialization from childhood and youth to adulthood and even old age, they also indicate how to re-conceptualize the relationship between social structure, cultural norms and personal agency. Furthermore, cultural modernization, increasing ﬂexibilization of careers and weakening of institutional control have been promoting an individualization of the life course. These social changes are altering the meaning and direction of socialization: it shifts from parental instruction to individual construction, from internalized social control to self-initiated learning and development. Almost half a century ago, Becker and Strauss (1956) looked at adult socialization from the perspective of careers and personal identity. They argued that even regular careers create problems of pacing and timing. Today, there is an increase of short-term career episodes, more pressure to switch careers and a loose coupling between social structures and personality. Becker and Strauss (1956, p. 260) anticipated this development and gave the advice not to become too involved with one’s task, organization and co-workers: “This enables one to get off an escalator and to move over to another with a minimum of psychological strain”. In post-traditional society not only careers but living conditions and social relationships are changing more frequently which requires persons to construct and reconstruct their self in response to contextual discontinuities and multiple options. The construction of the self still occurs in ranges of opportunities and constraints because the life course is embedded in a social structure of unequal access to the social resources, education, employment and social networks. The impact of life experiences on the construction and reconstruction of the self does not occur in a social vacuum – social origin, level of education, citizenship and gender continue to make a signiﬁcant difference (cf. Mayer, 1995; Marshall et al., 2001). The accelerated pace of modernization and social mobility across the life course has been a decisive feature of the last decades of the 20th century. The end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall, the political and economic integration of Europe, the new economy, the internet technology and volatile labor and stock markets have a strong impact on life chances and life plans of the citizens in the post-traditional societies of Europe and North America. These large-scale political changes have led to a heightend risk consciousness for an increasing number of citizens. This risk consciousness also concerns life course transitions which are anticipated and performed with more personal sensitivity

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regarding the potential consequences of choices on one’s living circumstances. At all stages of life, persons have to rearrange their past experiences and social positions in view of alternative pathways and declining social guarantees for a stable life course. Consequently, theories of societal modernization have been reaching their climax in European social science with the proclamation of post-modern society and its travel companion “individualization” (cf. Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994). Individualization is seen as the core characteristic of post-traditional society. It indicates a shift from standardized, institutionalized life course patterns that constitute an age- and gender-bound temporal order of life towards the individualized biography. This structural and cultural transformation calls for increasing personal ﬂexibility in adapting to life course contingencies and to prevent social exclusion. Evidence of such transformation can be found in cultural guidelines and institutional practices that are emphasizing self-management and competitive individualism in labor, stock, and entertainment markets. However, the extent to which biographies are really set free from cultural norms concerning age-related participation in societal institutions and are becoming less dependent on social class and gender inequalities is still an open empirical question. An answer may be provided by analyzing to what extent socialization becomes more self-initiated than reproductive. Macrosocial transformation is turning the life course into a lifelong learning context which makes primary socialization less consequential for the entire life span than in traditional society. Therefore, socialization in the family may not be sufﬁcient anymore for preparing for a ﬂexible life course which consists of self-monitored learning and acting that depend on the person’s initiative and competence to select between new locations, networks, social and organizational environments. Though the family is still the primary context for socialization, peer-groups, social networks and organizations in pre-school, school, neighborhoods and work settings are ﬁelds of interaction that provide experiences and challenges for social identity formation. In this context, the inﬂuence of the family on their members’ biographies becomes more indirect and is changing to parental management of the child’s environment by opening or restricting social contacts and institutional participation, for instance concerning the timing and duration of education pathways. Recent secondary analyses of long-term parental inﬂuence suggest (cf. Harris, 1999), that the role of children’s self-efﬁcacy in forming social relationships has a strong effect – independent from parental inﬂuence – on how they construct their actions, select options and appraise outcomes. In the evolving biography the increasing variety of pathways and diversity of action contexts 43

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challenge the individual to actively select and combine social resources in order to accumulate the competence for dealing with opportunities and restrictions across the life course. Thus, socialization in family, school and work as internalization of social control will be less effective than guided participation and “co-construction” of practices and meanings that stem from negotiations and appraisals of the self in social interactions. My proposal is also encouraged by recent developments in childhood socialization research (Bugental & Goodnow, 1998) and the revival of constructionist socialization theory (Grundmann, 1999) that converge in assuming that socialization is a lifelong process which goes beyond social reproduction and implies individual agency. Recent dynamic models of socialization focus on interaction and negotiation of meanings that lead to self-deﬁnitions and the working out of common understandings between newcomers and inhabitants of organizations which are crucial for entering and maintaining social relationships. Negotiation of meanings and changes of habits are bound to the person’s sense of self-identity which is always implied when role changes and transitions across the life courses are at stake. This suggests that the stages and transitions of the life course initiate bi-directional socializing processes that lead to individualized arrangements with changing social contexts. Furthermore, changing social structures demand that persons acquire different social-cultural models which makes the continuity of taken-for-granted cultural practices or habits less likely. Though Bugental and Goodnow (1998) focus on childhood, they present ample evidence for an extension of the hitherto received socialization concept which suggests its rethinking by stressing the active part played by the individual. Thus, contemporary theories about child development and socialization in the life stage of childhood are beginning to conceptualize the individual as an agent who is involved in role-taking and role-making vis-à-vis multiple social settings that shape her/his self-development. This “identity-based socialization” builds on “the acquisition of shared norms and routines that facilitate the smooth, coordinated ﬂow of group-level activities as well as the acquisition of skills and knowledge that are valued within a group” (Bugental & Goodnow, 1998, p. 401). Changing times and the notion of self-construction have led life course researchers like Elder (1994) to drop socialization as a research paradigm and to substitute it by the life course paradigm. However, the transformation of the socialization concept into a life course framework can only be a partial one. We still have to account for variations in self-initiated adaptations to multiple options and ﬂexibility requirements that characterize the modern life course. According to the individualist code, variable temporal sequences and uncertain

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outcomes of transitions demand self-reﬂexive interpretations of events and actions across the life course. This means that the person initiates and manages socialization experiences in order to coordinate actions and contexts over time. In post-traditional society, the consequences of action are embedded in multiple events, multiple signiﬁcant others, multiple organizational memberships, and multiple social networks – events, others, memberships and networks are facilitating and also restricting the range of choice. Though the notions of personal autonomy and self-construction loom large in the individualist code of the post-traditional society and suggest that socialization is not up to date anymore, structures of social inequality make the idea of free choice ideological. The concept of constrained choice, which refers to the unequal distribution of resources, is more adequate. Furthermore, how individuals are coming to terms with the intended and unintended consequences of choice in the life course is an important, though neglected issue, that also calls for a rethinking of traditional socialization approaches (cf. Dannefer, 1999). I have presented two arguments for rethinking socialization without giving it up. There is the increasing inﬂuence of socializing contexts beyond the family that expect and promote self-initiated and responsible action. And, there is a shift from social control and styles of parenting to the interactive shaping of the self. Substituting “socialization” for “life course” would lead to a neglect of the complex interrelationship between different life chances and the individual competence for self-construction. This raises the question, how the self did become the central player in the construction of the life course. An answer lies in the social structural and cultural changes that gave rise to the post-traditional society.

POST-TRADITIONAL SOCIETY: THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF THE SELF The transformation of the social class structure of industrial society, its value systems and ideologies can be reconstructed as a process of social change from collective to individualized identities. This process dates back to the 19th century and was ﬁrst observed by de Tocqueville who analyzed how democratic society and individualism co-developed in North America. He argued that when equality exists, everybody looks for his/her beliefs and convictions to her-/himself and turns all emotions towards the person. According to de Tocqueville, Americans are highly mobile in their activities, they are constantly in motion, however, at the same time they have strong beliefs in the basic principles of hard work and family morals. Equality among citizens does not mean economic equality but self-reliance concerning life plans and life 45

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styles; they “adopt habits and interests to act only according to their own will” (de Tocqueville, 1985, p. 306). In a society of equals, ranking criteria of “honor” do not exist like in the pre-industrial European society, instead there is a pluralization of criteria for individual recognition and social esteem which promotes a rational conduct of everyday affairs, based on self-interest. The self constructs itself in such a way that the person imagines that her/his fate depends only on her-/himself. De Tocqueville regarded democratic institutions as necessary to guarantee political freedom and to provide a framework for balancing private interests with the community. He observed that in the USA it is the voluntary associations that are creating bonds between equal citizens that can promote intellectual, cultural and moral concerns. These associations are channeling or directing self-interested actions towards the common good: “Enlightend self-love” motivates citizens to engage in mutual support. De Tocqueville clearly saw the ambivalent connotations of early American individualism, at the same time he suggested that there is a reciprocal relationship between social institutions and the way individualism is expressed in a society. Almost 150 years later, Bellah et al. (1985) are asking whether individualism, as expressed and lived by the middle classes, is still the cultural and practical core of United States’ society. Their research documents the inﬂuence of individualist role models that incorporate the ideal of a person, “in which the self has become the main form of reality” (1985, p. 143). Middle-class individualism replaced the early “moral” individualism which has given way to “utilitarian” and later to “expressive” individualism as a result of changed social and economic conditions. These conditions are related to an emphasis on status mobility and the pursuit of occupational and economic success by calculating strategies. The goal of individual achievement dominates educational and cultural activities, technical solutions are sought for solving problems that derive from a growing lack of certainty concerning aspirations and outcomes for self-initiated action. In contrast to de Tocqueville’s observation, the U.S. middleclass self of the last quarter of the 20th century experiences the ambivalence of individualism, because it rests on utility and technical rationality and lacks social commitment. The very meaning of success has become uncertain: “. . . while a high degree of personal initiative, competence, and rationality are still demanded from individuals, the autonomy of the successful individual and even the meaning of success are increasingly in doubt” (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 150). In order to create an orientation for the self, “communities of memories” are essential which can provide meaning in the institutional context of success-driven social mobility. A community of memory substitutes the moral institution of communal commitment. As de Tocqueville observed, these institutions and

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associations used to mediate between society and the person by contributing to sense-making for the self in reference to civil values and role models. Bellah et al. (1985) do not link their discussion to the concept of the life course, but their reconstruction of individualism can be extended to post-traditional society, where there is another shift from communal to the biographical memory. This creates the risk of social alienation, when the self is dissociated from collective practices of commitment, obligation, loyalty and solidarity. When the rules of biographical construction are changing to “patchworking” and “networking” (Alheit, 1996), socialization becomes associated with temporal variations of life chances and short-term commitments. Recent social theory and criticism have taken up the individualism debate in two versions. There is a skeptical account of the personal consequences of ﬂexibilization in economic and cultural life by Sennett (1998) and a more optimistic reading of the state of the self in the post-traditional “risk society” by Beck (1992). According to Sennett, the new economy of ﬂexible capitalism has not only led to a change of values and life styles but has also altered the construction of personal character. The self is not motivated by loyalty and mutual obligation anymore and has no long-term goals. Compared to past generations, there is a hectic pace of life which puts people under pressure to drift between localities and loyalties. Such a social context reduces the chance to be able to tell a linear life story. This is most obvious in the present labor market which creates working conditions that turn people into pawns. Employment settings cannot provide or promote long-term life plans anymore, only temporary responsibility for common aims and short-term loyalty to a common enterprise are required. Since there is no continuity in social relationships, interpersonal trust which is essential for establishing social bonds cannot develop. What remains is a superﬁcial motivation to collaborate in work teams and projects. The traditional conditions for self-afﬁrmation do not exist in short-term teamwork because this context does not create commitment to co-workers and the organizations. According to Sennett’s (1998, p. 31) evaluation of the post-traditional socialization the ﬂexible economy has “created a conﬂict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives”. To become a successful employee or starting a business means not just to develop a self-reliant personality but also a preference for non-committal relationships and a disregard for a continuous life history or consistent biography. Such a character ﬁts working and living conditions where localities and contents of work are becoming irrelevant, where working in networks or projects is performed with a generalized attitude of ﬂexibility without responsibility. The individualized self is reduced to narratives that 47

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mirror the personal experiences with short-term work episodes, insecure jobs, increasing risks and institutional interventions. Sennett’s skeptical account of the individualization of the self emphasizes experiences of loss, caused by the restructuration of work in a ﬂexible capitalism. He deplores that experiences cannot be narrated with dignity because they are dissociated from careers and pathways that people used to follow in their occupational lives in the industrial society. Sennett compares the human condition at the end of the 20th century with the stable work conditions and bureaucratic organizations of the industrial society, which provided persons with a reliable socio-cultural framework for becoming authors of their life histories. Because of this nostalgic bias, he underestimates the potentials for selfdevelopment in decentralized and competence-centred ﬂexible organizations. In his view, ﬂexibility creates drifters and uncommitted team workers who must lack a sense of biographical continuity and personal integrity. This assessment of post-traditional work, however, fails to take into account the chances for self-directed decisions and actions in a world of work that never was without risky career options (Kohn & Schooler, 1983; Rodin et al., 1990). By overgeneralizing the degrading effects of the restructuring of work, which is creating a biographical vacuum, Sennett neglects the active role of the person in deciding for or against certain work conditions, in accepting and rejecting demands for occupational and regional mobility. A more optimistic, though no less ambivalent analysis of post-traditional society is presented by Beck (1992). Modern societies are characterized by the erosion of traditional ways of living which have been replaced by risky action spaces. Institutions tend to assign the responsibility for shaping one’s own life to the person by making him/her accountable for biographical decisions. The life course turns into a “biography of choice” between options which confront the person with high demands for weighing alternatives, coordinating outcomes and repairing failures. Therefore, Beck argues like Sennett, that there are biographical breaks, short-term relationships and more ﬂexible self-identities. Because cultural taken-for-granted orientations, conventions and rituals have lost their relevance for life course decisions, the person has to compensate by an increasing effort in self-management. Hence, the individualization of the self means to work out one’s own script of options concerning the timing and duration of education, partnership, marriage, employment and retirement. In contrast to Sennett’s assessment, Beck emphasizes that the biography is becoming the major code for the development of post-traditional self-identity, as a representation of the relationship between the self and the world that must and can be structured and restructured by the person. This cultural code is based on the transformation of the social organization of work and employment.

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Careers turn into ﬂexible employment trajectories with multiple options that do not promise long-term continuity anymore. Therefore, with increasing frequency, breaks at transitions and in life stages have to be managed by the person’s reﬂexive coordination of past experiences, consequences of present action and anticipations of future events. The individualized self is constructed by reﬂecting events and actions in terms of the biographical memory. However, when the timing of transitions and the duration of life stages become less regulated by institutional provisions, it becomes difﬁcult to construct biographical continuity. In post-traditional society, there are indeed multiple options for entering and leaving social relationships, educational pathways and occupations for which rules of selection are weakly deﬁned by cultural norms. Therefore, coming to terms with alternative pathways, lifestyles and jobs directs the person towards her-/himself and turns individual intentions into the main reasons for legitimizing one’s actions (cf. Kohli, 1991). The individualization of the self culminates in post-traditional society, the life course markers shift from external conditions and events like seasons, birthdays and other rituals like examinations etc. to a sequence of episodes that contribute to the shaping of a person’s life as a more or less self-initiated life history. This corresponds with a de-standardization of the programmed trajectories, increasing variations in the timing and duration of transitions in relation to family, education and employment. As the discussion of individualism as the dominant code of post-traditional society shows, the change from moral to communal and biographical criteria for self-identity has ambivalent personal consequences. On the one side, there is a wider range of options for individual decisions, on the other side, there is increasing ﬂexibility without social responsibility. This diagnosis gives socialization a new meaning: it prepares the individual to come to terms with temporal variations in life chances and the outcomes of biographical choices. The concept of post-traditional society tells us much about the changing conditions for identity construction, but little about the ways persons are shaping their self. Let us look for an answer to social construction theory, which emphasizes the person’s participation in their social environments in the construction of a subjective reality.

SOCIALIZATION AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF Processes of socialization appear in a new light in the framework of social constructionism which is elaborated in the classic discussion of this paradigm by Berger and Luckmann (1967). In the tradition of the sociology of 49

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knowledge, socialization refers to the dialectical relation between personality and social structure. The basic assumption is that there is a double constitution of social reality – social objectivation in the form of institutions and subjective reality by processes of socialization. Berger and Luckmann distinguish between primary and secondary socialization, which represent the basic stages of the induction of the individual for participation in society: from the primary family to the secondary institutions of school and work. They deﬁne socialization as “the comprehensive and consistent induction of an individual into the objective world of a society or a sector of it” (1967, p. 130). Successful socialization means that there is a high degree of symmetry between the objective and the subjective dimensions of reality. The main process that underlies or drives socialization is internalization which is based on the child’s identiﬁcation with signiﬁcant others. The main learning material is language and its medium is conversation between the child and reference persons. According to this concept, socialization is neither total nor ever ﬁnished; its primary sequence is ending when the concept of society is represented in the mind and is carried over into a secondary socialization. Secondary socialization concerns the internalization of institutional norms and practices as subworlds by acquiring role-speciﬁc vocabularies and points of view that lay the subjective foundation for tacit understandings in everyday and institutional life. For example, changing careers or occupations requires that the person reorganizes her/his conversational apparatus. A person has a coherent self when she/he is competent in integrating the history of socialization experiences, that is roles, attitudes and self-concepts. It is obvious that the social constructionist perspective does not emphasize action and its appraisal by the person as a basic source of the self. In contrast to the traditions of functional sociology, Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 134) stress that “subjective biography is not fully social. The individual apprehends himself as being both inside and outside society”. Nevertheless, they neglect that the biography is not just a narrated life history but a result of a series of balancing actions with their intended as well as unintended consequences. They focus on the increasing complexity of the distribution of knowledge in society and point to possible discrepancies between subworlds that may lead to discontinuous life histories and less successful or even failing socialization. This argument disregards that the criteria for success and failure are culture- and context-dependent and change from traditional to post-traditional society. Therefore, it is hardly convincing when they suggest that unsuccessful socialization results from “different signiﬁcant others mediating different objective realities for the individual” (p. 167). This statement reﬂects a concept of the self in which the person is seen as something like a container which

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internalizes different layers of society. This also holds for their characterization of the individualist “as a social type who has at least the potential to migrate between a number of available worlds and who has deliberately and awarely constructed a self out of the material provided by a number of available identities” (p. 171). Such a description of an almost post-traditional self, however, fails to adequately analyze how persons actively coordinate and integrate actions and their consequences across the life course. Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) theory of internalization and conversation suggests a long-term effect of socialization which is only threatened by crisis situations and unexpected life events which are calling for explicit procedures for reality conﬁrmation. However, in post-traditional society there are frequent demands and challenges across the life course which occasion persons to reﬂect in terms of their biography. Entering and leaving social organizations, for instance, starting a job, returning to the labor market after a period of family responsibility or unemployment, early or postponed retirement call for new arrangements between the self and social contexts. Those experiences neither require a switching of worlds nor processes of re-socialization. They rather provoke more intense self-management which leads to adaptation to new contexts via recurrent processes of self-initiated socialization. This is not to say that connecting events and life transitions via socialization does not need communicative competence. According to Habermas (1988), who adopts basic principles of the theory of symbolic interaction, communicative competence contributes to the reproduction of both the social system and the individual life worlds. It links cultural modes of interpretation, social motivation and self-identity. Socialization not only prepares the individual through meaningful interaction for social participation but also for self-reﬂection. Habermas (1988) elaborates G. H. Mead’s (1934) concept of the self by connecting the dialectic relation between I and me with the biography. Going beyond conversation and the coordination of multiple role identities, self-identity means also to be able to reﬂect one’s life history. To stand in for one’s own biography means to have found out how one wants to be and to reconstruct one’s personal past as resulting from actions caused by the self as a responsible actor. These thoughts extend the meaning of socialization as a mechanism for acquiring a generalized competence for participating in communicative action and for preparing the person for balancing between his/her life history and life worlds. In this process persons are becoming accountable in terms of their interactive competence and life styles. Habermas (1988) observes that in post-traditional society the coordination of action is shifting from language and conversation to regulative media like money and power which also inﬂuence socialization processes. This means that the life world becomes colonized by 51

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technical and economic rationalities. The consequence of this social change is that more or less comprehensive cultural knowledge gives way to a variety of subsystems of knowledge. Under such conditions, family-based socialization is losing touch with the changing life course because there is a growing discrepancy between the guidelines and experiences parents can provide and the life course contingencies their offspring will be confronted with. Therefore, youth and young adults have to solve transition requirements that their primary socialization cannot prepare them for. This situation may create irritation and failure in shaping one’s self, but it also provokes creative, innovative solutions in selecting and combining different pathways to adulthood when self-initiated coordination of multiple roles and optional futures are possible. A similar view is presented by Giddens (1991) who argues that posttraditional society offers a plurality of choices between diverse and segmented social contexts and life styles. The micro dynamics of the life course become evident in life plans which are “typically revised and reconstructed in terms of alternatives in an individual’s circumstances or frame of mind” (1991, p. 85). In post-traditional society, the life course acquires an internal reﬂexivity because it is not guided anymore by pre-established loyalties in private and public affairs. The life course is less dependent on external reference and is becoming the person’s more or less planful project instead of a sequence of normatively regulated status passages (Heinz, 1996). Like Beck (1992), Giddens (1991, pp. 148–149) sees more gains than losses in the normative disembedding of the life course: “It allows the self to achieve much greater mastery over the social relations and social contexts reﬂexively incorporated into the forging of self-identity than was previously possible”. By compensating for the declining relevance of life orientations that used to be provided by kinship, community, class membership and the state, the person has to administer her/his matters and to coordinate movements through time and space by planfulness and reﬂexivity. Without specifying the construction mechanisms of self-identity, Giddens (1991) concludes that the self has become a reﬂexive project. Life course transitions are de-ritualized and the self must be explored and constructed in a reﬂexive process of connecting personal and social change. Contemporary self-identity, thus, differs from the traditional self which derived meaning from a continuous life course with implicit predictability across life stages. Somewhat similar to Berger and Luckmann (1967), Giddens (1991) reduces a person’s accomplishment of self-identity to her/his capacity to keep a particular narrative going; the development of self-identity occurs in relation to transitions which constitute the life course. It is reﬂected in the autobiography which is not just an interpretative reconstruction of past events but also as an anticipation of possible futures.

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Giddens (1991) shares the focus on narratives of coherence with Berger and Luckmann (1967) who put the emphasis on conversation as the medium of socialization. It seems that these theoretical approaches lack empirical grounding, they mirror the theoretical concerns of post-modernism and legacy of symbolic interactionism which neglect social structural imperatives and the uneven distribution of resources. While Giddens (1991, p. 139) praises the extended “panorama of choices” that gives the individual “the possibility of a partial or more full-blown reskilling in respect to speciﬁc decisions or contemplated courses of action”, he loses sight of the fact that the consequences of making wrong choices are charged to the person who has to come to terms with the consequences of her/his actions. An increase of options also increases the risk of unintended consequences or misjudgements. This raises the question about the social resources and personal competences that are required for developing and managing self-identity in view of changing living circumstances and unintended consequences of one’s actions (cf. Dannefer, 1999). Social constructionists explain the self as a product of a stepwise internalization of the symbolic world through conversation. This socialization approach sees the person more like a container of social meanings than an active part in the coordination of her/his life course. The concept of communicative competence takes this notion a step ahead by linking cultural frames of meaning with self-identity and the capacity to attend to one’s life course in a self-reﬂexive manner. When applied to the post-traditional destandardization of the life course, these approaches must be supplemented by a closer look at the ways the self and socialization are connected when persons are confronted with the panorama of choices.

AGENCY AND SOCIALIZATION In the past decade, developmental and social psychology have contributed innovative conceptual and empirical approaches that promote a revision of the traditional concept of socialization. Central is Baltes’ (cf. 1997) general lifespan approach. This approach is compatible with Brandtstädter’s (Brandtstädter & Lerner, 1999) action-oriented analysis of self-development. Baltes (1997) argues that aging is a balance of gains and losses across the life span. Successful development is basically the relative maximization of gains and the minimization of losses in psychological functioning. This meta-theoretical concept of life-span development postulates three core processes: selection, optimization and compensation. They operate as constructive processes at all stages of the life course. Selection concerns the speciﬁcation of and commitment to 53

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goals/preferences, optimization relates to resources and skills for achieving goals and compensation has to do with the activation of resources and skills that counteract the decline in goal-relevant means. Research in this conceptual framework has focused mainly on intellectual development, with consistent results concerning the mechanics and pragmatics of cognitive functioning. For the rethinking of socialization it is an important insight that cognitive pragmatics imply self-identity because they relate to cultural practices rooted in social interactions which accompany the life history and regulate cognitive aging (Baltes & Staudinger, 1996). Furthermore, different social practices and patterns of knowledge are associated with life-span trajectories via socialization and reﬂect the contribution of culture in the compensation of declining personal means and resources. Because of its focus on intellectual functioning across the life span, Baltes’ (1997) conceptual framework does not elaborate the central role of selfidentity in the process of selecting from different cultural scripts for the timing of and involvement in transitions from one life stage to the other. From the perspective of self-identity, the person’s experience, management and appraisal of life events and action outcomes as gains and losses is crucial for understanding success and failure in life course tasks. For instance, socialization sets in when criteria for assessing the outcomes of biographical decisions are changing across life stages. Shortcomings of another kind apply to recent theorizing about self-development (Brandtstädter & Lerner, 1999). Self-development is seen as a product of internal working models of ourselves and the social world we are participating in and as being related to experiences of the effects of action. Socialization in this framework is the activity of constructing plans and of negotiating a balance between aims and accessible resources. The notion of intentional self-development, however, fails to specify the cultural and social embeddedness of this process and underrates the interactive history of the self which is implied in the initiation, maintenance and elaboration of self-reﬂexive action across life stages. In order to remedy the restrictions inherent in life-span developmental psychology, we turn to a social-psychological approach which presents promising ideas concerning the self in the context of the life course by introducing the concept of agency. According to Harré (1998, p. 3), the self is “a site from which a person perceives the world as a place from which to act”. The self is a point of view, a starting point of action and a line of life; it is the personal version of agency, that is the capacity to manage and monitor one’s own actions. The self as an agent of her/his life course represents personal distinctness, continuity and autonomy concerning the way social roles are adopted and stories about one’s life history are told.

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In this framework, the role of narratives in the retrospective construction of the self is emphasized as a way of establishing a time-related self-portrait in terms of one’s biography. Biographies are seen as being organized around significant, personally meaningful episodes that not only consist of remarkable events, successes and failures but also recollect the intended and unintended outcomes of decisions across the life course. To nominate agency as a core concept for understanding socialization in a life course framework in post-traditional societies, means not only to take into account social contexts and actor-driven developmental processes, but also the temporal and institutional aspects of human lives. Linking developmental and social psychology is promising to better understand how persons deal with opportunities, constraints and discontinuities across their life course. Since the contexts of human lives change over time and differ according to economic and cultural conditions, socialization as a self-initiated learning mechanism that mediates between social structure and personality development gains in importance. It is evident that self-reﬂexive action and participation in social interaction are important for self-development across the life stages. An adequate account of self-development implies socialization because the person is accountable for the consequences of actions which causes him/her to reﬂect on intentions and the range of options available for further actions. This is made explicit by Staudinger and Greve (1997, p. 11): “The self is . . . not just product but rather also engine of development”. It follows that a new look at socialization gains from both life-span developmental psychology and social psychology by conceptualizing the self as agent and appraiser of actions across the life course. Transitions and life stages require the person to translate socially anchored knowledge and age-role speciﬁc action patterns into a biographical project. Such a translation can neither be explained by theories of individualization nor by concepts of self-development across the life span alone. Self-construction is a process of socialization across social contexts where the self is the agent of assessments of outcomes of actions concerning the timing and duration of entering and leaving life stages in terms of the biography. Both the social construction theories of the self and the concept of biography regard instabilities, episodes, irritations and turning points as experiences that promote biographical reconstructions via self-identity which set the agenda for new processes of socialization. The self-as-agency approach emphasizes that social structure and cultural traditions are not determining the life course but that it is shaped by individuals who are interpreting life events and actions in terms of their self-identity. This view is also expressed by Elder and O’Rand (1995, p. 457): “Despite the empirical evidence on links between life transitions, the agency of individuals and their life choices ensure some degree of 55

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loose coupling between social transitions and stages.” Though the range of choices is constrained by unequal access to options (Dannefer, 1999), agency operates in wide or narrow opportunity structures. Evidence for this assumption will be presented in the closing chapter of this paper. A converging framework that builds on the concept of agency has been developed by Elder for more than two decades (cf. Elder, 1998; Elder & O’Rand, 1995) which bridges human development and life course theorizing. In contrast to the demographic notion of the life cycle which reﬂects an orderly succession of events across a person’s life and presumes a well-organized, functional association between normative standards, social roles, socialization and social control, the life course framework takes into account post-traditional culture and social structure. The complexity of role conﬁgurations and the individualized timing of transitions and movements through the social structure (Levy, 1996) require frequent coordination and choice. This framework regards compliance to age norms, orderly sequences of social roles and transitions as problematic because social timetables as well as age norms have become less standardized (cf. Settersten, 1997; Heinz & Krüger, 2001). Elder presents three basic concepts (1998, p. 953ff) which are compatible with the notion of self-as-agency in the life course: (1) Social pathways which inform the choices and actions that shape individual life courses and their implications for human development; for instance, careers which deﬁne role entry, durations and exit of organizational participation. Social pathways are connected to and to a certain degree regulated by societal institutions, the state, communities and social networks. These agencies provide resources and tend to constrain the range of life course options (cf. Mayer, 1997; Leisering & Leibfried, 1999). (2) The temporal aspects of socialization in the life course that matter in relation to transitions, durations and trajectories: “Each transition, combining a role exit and entry, is embedded in a trajectory that gives it speciﬁc form and meaning” (Elder, 1998, pp. 955–956). Because post-traditional society is characterized by overlapping transitions and uncalculable durations of organizational memberships, there is a need for the individual to develop strategies for coordinating multiple organizational involvements. Being intime or being off-time concerning role sequences and durations affects life course continuity, for instance early or late parenthood, short or long spells of unemployment. (3) Transitions that connect social contexts and personal agency: “People bring a life history of personal experiences and dispositions to each transition, interpret new circumstances in terms of this history and work out lines of

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adaptation that can fundamentally alter their life course” (Elder, 1998, p. 957). As I have argued, individualized transitions are consequences of the destandardization of life course sequences and age norms in post-traditional society. This leads to an increase of the subjective and social relevance of the biography as the temporal context for initiating, implementing and appraising pathways in the life course. Elder (1998) also suggests to substitute the traditional concept of socialization and proposes instead a set of linking mechanisms between changing times and biographies. These mechanisms concern ﬁrst the life-stage principle which modiﬁes the effects of social change in institutions across the life course and second linked lives which indicate that several biographies meet, for instance in families or close social networks. This extends the relevance of life course events to co-experiences. Third, control cycles, somewhat similar to Baltes’ (1997) concept of compensation, concern the experience of having little or no control over transition outcomes. Such situations call for strategies of regaining control, for instance by reducing discrepancies between attainable goals and available resources. Fourth, situational imperatives which vary according to social routines and role demands and require different levels of self-directions, for example the imperatives of a volatile labor market which demand self-directed improvements of skills. Fifth, and most important for rethinking socialization, there is the accentuation of biographical experiences which operates like a selection device in new situations and life stages by bringing speciﬁc self-identity criteria into play. For example, young adults attempt to select occupations, ﬁelds of study and engage in activities in which they feel competent not just because of their educational investments but also as an expression of interests that reﬂect their self-identity. Though the linking mechanisms outlined by Elder imply the concepts of agency and self-identity, they still do not fully specify the pivot for the subjective translation of social structural opportunities and constraints into the life course and how the individualized timing and sequencing of transitions between life stages is constructed. In post-traditional society, the translation mechanisms centre around the initiation, performance and evaluation of actions in terms of self-identity which is a reﬂexive product of a person’s biography. I reviewed the contributions of developmental and social psychology for a revision of the concept of socialization which can be summarized by the notion of self-development as a process of balancing gains and losses across the life course. In the post-traditional life course reﬂexive self-development or selfguidance becomes mandatory: the self-as-agency initiates and appraises actions which construct the person’s biography in view of changing opportunities and 57

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constraints. It follows that the notion of socialization should be recast in a way that takes agency and biography into account.

SELF-SOCIALIZATION IN THE LIFE COURSE: AGENCY AND BIOGRAPHY Inspired by the ground-breaking work of Giddens: self-identity as a core feature of post-traditional society; Baltes: selection, optimization and compensation interact across the life course; and Elder: linking mechanisms create a loose coupling between social structure and the life course, the two principles for building a self-socialization framework are in my view: (1) Individuals construct their own life course by attempting to come to terms with opportunities and constraints concerning transition pathways and life stages. (2) Individuals select pathways, act and appraise the consequences of their actions in terms of their self-identity in reference to social contexts which are embedded in institutions and markets. These two principles incorporate self-identity as agency that constructs a loose coupling between structural locations, institutions and individual actions by planning, negotiating and redirecting pathways across the life course. The individual timing of transitions and the duration of life stages are informed but not determined by shared cultural meanings, institutional regulations and interpersonal relationships which facilitate and restrict the pursuit of life goals. The concept of self-socialization corresponds to the post-traditional life course which is neither an elevator nor an escalator but a biographical accomplishment in the sense of an active, meaningful integration of events, pathways, organizational participation and network involvements across time. By introducing self-socialization we do not have to fall back on the notion of re-socialization which was used by Berger and Luckmann (1967) in order to account for the effects of career switches on personal identity. Self-socialization indicates that actions and their appraised consequences are the most important ways of reality maintenance and for constructing subjective reality, and not conversation – as suggested by social construction theory – but rather the initiation and reﬂection of action and its outcomes. The life course in post-traditional society confronts the person with a series of partial transformations of self-identity that are accomplished by constructing links between biography and the outcomes of having selected between pathways. Linear concepts like career are of limited usefulness for understanding socialization and biography because education, employment, family and

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retirement careers have lost their clear timing of entry and exit and have become less predictable across the life course. Temporary role conﬁgurations which require to combine parts and pieces of episodes of public and private involvement are spreading, for instance the student worker, the single parent who is a temporary worker, the single mother in a work creation program. In posttraditional society, career movements and occupational turning points have more or less lost their cultural and personal deﬁnition as crisis, though there are few institutionalized repair services for transition or career breaks. The grammar of careers can neither guarantee continuity nor explain why a person is entering or leaving a career line. As we have seen, the building blocks for self-socialization in the life course are mental representations of experiences with signiﬁcant others, situational imperatives and the consequences of one’s own actions. With increasing complexity and instability of contemporary role conﬁgurations and transitions ﬂexible arrangements and biographical reﬂexivity are called for. Since selfsocialization promotes biographical reﬂexivity, transitions and status sequences in the life course not only depend on opportunity structures, career contingencies, institutionalized rationality, but on the self-as-agency, as the architect of the life course (Heinz, 2000). Thus, the concept of self-socialization recognizes that the life course is a biographical accomplishment which consists of a meaningful integration of events, pathways, transitions, memberships in organizations and networks across time. One’s own life course is a major context of self-socialization because it is constructed as an “emergent structure” (Mayer, 1995) from appraised consequences of the person’s actions concerning the timing and duration of transitions and life stages. By focusing on agency, self-identity and the appraisal of action outcomes, my proposal shows some similarity to the concept of “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Here, gender socialization is explained in an ethnomethodological framework as the accumulation of self-directed episodes of doing gender. Gender is constructed in social contexts with reference to female and male role expectations as the biography is constructed in social contexts with reference to life stages and age categories. In principle, biographical agency operates like “doing gender” which “involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional and micro-political activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine natures” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 126). Accordingly, “doing biography” in the context of life stages and transitions requires the person to act vis-à-vis developmental tasks and social expectations which are embedded in a complex of social practices. However, criteria for entry, maintenance and exit from organizational memberships are becoming less 59

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obligatory in regard to age categories. In post-traditional societies, doing adolescence, doing young adulthood, doing adulthood and doing old age can rely less and less on institutionalized criteria, conventionalized behaviors and organizational routines. Therefore, the person has more options and runs higher risks in accepting, performing or rejecting activities that are age-related. For instance, when the timing and duration of transitions between life stages is becoming a product of ﬂexible arrangements with uncertain options and overlapping pathways, processes of self-socialization are essential. When age-related self-identity is enacted in contexts that are only partially institutionalized, there are options to reproduce or to modify normative expectations in the light of one’s biography and the availability of resources for performing according to the life-stage principle. Finally, I would like to present some research results that show that the notion of self-socialization is useful for analyzing life course transitions. “Doing biography” or biographical agency is a topic that is well suited to check the empirical relevance of self-socialization. It will be applied in a context of transition discontinuities that young adults are confronted with in shaping their early work careers. In the last two decades, there has been an increasing destandardization of occupational careers and a decoupling of training and occupation in Germany. In order to ﬁnd out about the effects of these changing opportunity structures on career decisions and actions of young workers, we conducted a longitudinal study which focused on the transition pathways and appraisals of action outcomes (Heinz et al., 1998; Heinz, 2000). Our research is grounded in the theoretical assumption that transitions from education to employment are linked to self-socialization which translates experiences with occupational selection, employment opportunities and career options into biographical accounts and further decision-making. As I have stressed several times, self-socialization refers to individual agency in various social contexts over time. The shape of work transitions and trajectories is not just resulting from adapting to labor-market opportunities and by complying with human resource management, but also from the person’s selection and management of educational, employment and career alternatives. By comparative case-analysis, based on focused interviews, that were conducted over a period of six years in the 1990s, we constructed an empirically grounded typology of biographical agency (based on a databank containing over 770,000 lines of text). This typology distinguishes between six types or modes of biographical agency vis-à-vis work and career. We regard these modes of biographical agency as reﬂecting self-identity which is documented in the ways our respondents are appraising the outcomes of their transition-related actions. The modes vary according to the contingencies of transitions and career lines,

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generate different patterns of life course decisions and actions and stretch across work and non-work situations. This typology is a heuristic device for reconstructing how persons are actively shaping their transitions in the employment system. We have found six modes of biographical agency: (1) Company identiﬁcation: The ﬁrm is regarded as a kind of home, interpersonal relations at work are highly valued, support and recognition are expected in exchange for trust and loyalty, even when the income is moderate. (2) Wage-worker habitus: Employment is regarded as a necessity and sometimes as a burden. In order to improve income and working conditions, jobs and employers will be changed; most highly valued are job security and continued employment. (3) Career orientation: Careers in a company and promotion are favored over occupational alternatives. In order to advance to higher level positions, much time is devoted to further education. (4) Optimizing chances: Occupational success, advancement and a wide scope of shaping one’s work history is most important. This is attempted by keeping occupational pathways open and by accumulating additional qualiﬁcations. (5) Personality growth: The occupation is claimed to be primarily a space for fulﬁlling personal interests. Conditions at work, promotion and income are appraised mainly in respect to what they contribute to the maintenance or extension of self-direction. (6) Self-employment habitus: Autonomy in economic and business activity is highly valued; risks are taken in order to become a more or less independent actor concerning goals and conditions of work which are seen as opportunities for business success. Statistical analyses of career lines of our sample across eight years document that discontinuity dominated in the 1990s and that there is not one main pattern, but a variety of transition paths (Schaeper et al., 2000). Career breaks have become a wide-spread experience of skilled workers and employees. The ways of arranging with the experience of discontinuity in the life stage of young adulthood are related to the respective mode of biographical agency. For example, young workers whose mode of biographical agency was either company identiﬁcation or wage-worker habitus tended to reduce their aspirations while those with the mode of optimizing chances selected a strategy of “temporary time-out”; young workers with the mode of career orientation concluded from their appraisal of transition outcomes to extend their range of options by accumulating additional certiﬁcates as tickets for entering new career lines. 61

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Our exploratory data analysis suggests that there is a correspondence between modes of biographical agency and the way discontinuities are handled and further transitions are shaped by young workers. Across a period of ten years from late adolescence to young adulthood, the young persons interviewed in our study managed to transform their training and work experiences into relatively stable patterns of biographical agency which generate personally meaningful ways of dealing with or even initiating career interruptions.

CONCLUSION In contrast to the traditional notion of socialization, which emphasized the internalization of norms and meanings, self-socialization is the process of coming to terms with outcomes of one’s own actions by constructing a meaningful link between the biographical past and future in the present. This approach sensitizes the researcher to study the relationship between self-identity, biography, and, most importantly, the consequences of actions. As Dannefer (1999, p. 109) has recently pointed out, “Focusing on the consequences of action directs theoretical attention to the process involved in self-production . . .”. Instead of the term “self-production”, I propose the term self-socialization because it promotes a better understanding of the ways intentions, actions and self-identity are related with changing social contexts across the life course. These relationships are the product of sense-making in terms of the individual biography, and they are social in their origin because they are embedded in the cultural practices and opportunity structures of post-traditional society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Werner Dressel, Thomas Kühn, Hilde Schaeper and Andreas Witzel for their constructive criticism that considerably improved this paper. I am also grateful for the thoughtful and productive comments of an anonymous reviewer.

REFERENCES Alheit, P. (1996). Changing basic rules of biographical construction. Modern biographies at the end of the 20th century. In: A. Weymann & W. R. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 111–128). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Baltes, P. B. (1997). On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny. American Psychologist, 2, 366–380.

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Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (Eds) (1996). Interactive Minds. Life-Span Perspectives on the Social Foundation of Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society. London: Sage. Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reﬂexive modernization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Becker, H. S., & Strauss, A. L. (1956). Careers, personality, and adult socialization. The American Journal of Sociology, 62, 253–263. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart. Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co. Brandtstädter, J., & Lerner, R. M. (Eds) (1999). Action and self-development. Theory and research through the life-span. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Brim, O.,& Wheeler, S. (1966). Socialization after childhood. New York: Wiley. Bugental, D. B., & Goodnow, J. J. (1998). Socialization processes. In: W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds), Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol. 3, 5th ed., pp. 389–462). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Dannefer, D. (1999). Freedom isn’t free; power, alienation and the consequences of action. In: J. Brandtstädter & R. M. Lerner (Eds), Action and Self-development. Theory and Research Through the Life-Span (pp. 105–131). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Elder, G. H., Jr. (1994). Time, human agency, and social change: Perspectives on the life course. Social Psychological Quarterly, 57, 4–15. Elder, G. H., Jr. (1998). The life course and human development. In: R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 1, Theoretical models of human development (pp. 939–992). New York: Wiley Elder, G. H., Jr., & O’Rand, A. (1995). Adult lives in a changing society. In: K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine & J. S. House (Eds), Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (pp. 452–475). Needham Heights. MA: Allyn and Bacon. Erikson, E. H. (1982). The life cycle completed. New York: Wiley. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grundmann, M. (Ed.) (1999). Konstruktivistische Sozialisationsforschung. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1988). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (2 Vols). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Harré, R. (1998). The singular self. London: Sage. Harris, J. R. (1999). The nurture assumption. Why children turn out the way they do. New York: Free Press. Heinz, W. R. (1996). Status passages as micro-macro linkages in life course research. In: A. Weymann & W. R. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 51–65). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Heinz, W. R. (2000). Selbstsozialisation im Lebenslauf: Umrisse einer Theorie biographischen Handelns. In: E. M. Hoerning (Ed.), Biographische Sozialisation (pp. 165–186). Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Heinz, W. R., Kelle, U., Witzel, A., & Zinn, J. (1998). Vocational training and career development in Germany: Results from a longitudinal study. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22, 77–101. Heinz, W. R., & Krüger, H. (2001). The life course: Innovations and challenges for social research. Current Sociology, 49. Kohli, M. (1988). Normalbiographie und Individualität: Zur institutionellen Dynamik des gegenwärtigen Lebenslaufregimes. In: H.-G. Brose & B. Hildenbrand (Eds), Vom Ende des Individuums zur Individualität ohne Ende (pp. 33–53). Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

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Kohli, M. (1991). Lebenslauftheoretische Ansätze in der Sozialisationsforschung. In: K. Hurrelmann & D. Ulich (Eds), Neues Handbuch der Sozialisationsforschung (pp. 303–317). Weinheim: Beltz. Kohn, M. L., & Schooler, C. (Eds) (1983). Work and personality. Norwood: Ablex. Leisering, L., & Leibfried, S. (1999). Time and poverty in western welfare states. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, R. (1996). Toward a theory of life course institutionalization. In: A. Weymann & W. R. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 83–108). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Marshall, V., Heinz, W. R., Krüger, H., & Verma, A. (Eds) (2001). Restructuring work and the life course. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mayer, K. U. (1995). Gesellschaftlicher Wandel, Kohortenungleichheit und Lebensverläufe. In: P. A. Berger & P. Sopp (Eds), Sozialstruktur und Lebenslauf (pp. 27–47). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Mayer, K. U. (1997). Life courses in the welfare state. In: W. R. Heinz (Ed.), Theoretical Advances in Life Course Research (2nd ed., pp. 146–158). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodin, J., Schooler, C., & Warner Schaie, K. (Eds) (1990). Self-directedness: Cause and effects throughout the life course. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass. Schaeper, H., Kühn, T., & Witzel, A. (2000). Diskontinuierliche Erwerbskarrieren und Berufswechsel in den 1990ern: Strukturmuster und biograﬁsche Umgangsweisen betrieblich ausgebildeter Fachkräfte. Mitteilungen aus der Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, 33, 80–100. Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character. The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. New York/London: W. W. Norton. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1997). The salience of age in the life course. Human Development, 40, 257–281. Staudinger, U. M., & Greve, W. (1997). Das Selbst im Lebenslauf: Brückenschläge und Perspektivenwechsel zwischen entwicklungs- und sozialpsychologischen Zugängen. Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie, 28, 3–18 (Special Issue “The self in the life course”). Tocqueville, A. de (1985). Über die Demokratie in Amerika. Stuttgart: Reclam. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151.

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3. LIFE CAREERS AND THE THEORY OF ACTION Janet Zollinger Giele In the growing ﬁeld of life course studies there are many bits and pieces of evidence that suggest connections between childhood background, the larger social context, and adult outcomes. But there are few, if any, formal statements of just how these connections are made. Socialization after childhood is known to have an impact on adult careers (Brim & Wheeler, 1966). The importance of luck, opportunity, and disadvantage has also been documented by Jencks (1972) and Wilson (1987). One begins to see that a complex formula is needed to understand how earlier experiences shape the life outcomes of whole segments of a population. As Elder (1974) and Clausen (1993) have shown in their classic studies of children who grew up during the Depression, adult outcomes are the result of a complex layering of experience in which both childhood socialization and later opportunities play a part. The story of the connection between these early and later parts of life is what social scientists mean by the life course. Yet the ﬁeld of life course research up to now has remained relatively simple in its theory of causation and consequences. Although there are a number of excellent examples of research explaining outcomes ranging from delinquency or homemaking to political activism, relatively little effort has been made to generalize across a range of major life course outcomes. Nor has there been much attention to the consequences of various career outcomes for social structure and the institutionalized life course. The life course has been treated as the end point of explanation rather than part of a larger interdependent system in which life outcomes have consequences for the larger social system. What is needed is incorporation of the life course perspective

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into a larger theory of action that recognizes the two-way interaction of social context and individual lives, and the dialectical nature of forging a life path. My purpose in this paper is to relate an emerging theory of the life course to a broader theory of action that Parsons (1937, 1951) and his colleagues (Parsons, Bales & Shils, 1954) constructed in the 1950s. Other sociologists have argued that a general theory of action is still the central theoretical problem of social science (Coleman, 1986; Dannefer, 1999; Giddens, 1979). Essential to such a theory is a focus on the purpose or goals of the actor and how his or her choices are both shaped by the surrounding social context and in turn affect it. This paper will show that by using an action framework, one discovers considerable convergence among the ﬁndings of classic life course studies, despite difference in the methods and disciplines of the investigators. In a very general way, it becomes possible to suggest differences and similarities among life paths as well as the ways they reinforce or challenge the existing social structure. The upshot is that the Parsonian theory of action, which has often been criticized for its abstraction, is infused with a dynamic element by being shown relevant to the life course of individuals. At the same time the life course perspective, which has lacked a larger theoretical framework and has focused so much on individuals, now gains a more differentiated picture of social structure, and is broadened to recognize in a more systematic way the impact of the on-going organization and functioning of the larger society. This paper describes three major steps for integrating the life course perspective with a larger theory of action. The ﬁrst is to review classic life course studies in order to conceptualize the dependent variable, namely, the major types of life outcome and life careers that social scientists have so far tried to explain. The second step is to identify key factors that shape these life outcomes – what are usually termed the independent variables. Finally, having put together causal factors and life outcomes, the third step is to suggest how the theory of action can encompass both the antecedents and consequences of individual lives. Merton (1957) and O’Rand (1998) show how empirical research can advance the development of theory by calling into question old assumptions and posing new questions. This chapter, by beginning with a classiﬁcation of current life course studies, helps to codify existing research at the same time that it poses a new question about the interrelation of socialization, life careers, and the impact of these careers in turn on the social structure.

MAJOR TYPES OF LIFE CAREERS To classify major outcomes in the life course literature, it is necessary both to collect the leading studies on which to base such a comparison and then to sort

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them according to a meaningful set of categories. One might think that there would be an almost inﬁnite number of ways to distinguish among major life patterns and outcomes. But, in fact, investigators focus on themes that they ﬁnd important (Mills, 1959), and on what the society considers signiﬁcant (Merton, 1957). Topics are clumped around the types of life outcomes that are particularly problematic or contested in modern society: for example, legitimate vs. delinquent careers (Sampson & Laub, 1993); the delayed adulthood of the baby boom cohort (Easterlin, 1980; Littwin, 1986); or changes in women’s roles (Gerson, 1985; Levinson & Levinson, 1996). Sociologists Dannefer and Uhlenberg (1999) raise the question of how to classify life course phenomena and distinguish among three levels of analysis, at the level of the individual, the population, and representation in the larger culture. In this paper the focus is primarily at the individual level, but my larger purpose is to show how a codiﬁcation scheme for conceptually ordering life course outcomes is also congruent with normative expectations of the individual, the community, and the larger society. This congruence in the classiﬁcation scheme from micro to macro levels turns out to be an essential step to placing life course research within a larger theory of action. The major types of life course outcome can be grouped under four large rubrics depending on whether the focus is: (a) innovation or tradition, (b) rebellion, reform, activism, or conformity; (c) notable success or ordinary attainments; and (d) precocious adaptation, ﬂexible timing, delay, or stagnation. I ﬁnd a correspondence between these themes and Parsons’s paradigm of four universal functions that all action systems, including the individual, must be able to perform in order to survive. Studies of innovation or traditionalism in life patterns can be interpreted as primarily concerned with (L) the latent pattern maintenance function, which has to do with the creation and continuity of a person’s or social system’s distinct identity and with actions taken in accord with basic values and beliefs. Studies of political activists, reformers, rebels, and deviants have to do with conformity to existing norms and institutions and thus concern (I) the function of integration, which involves coordination of competing loyalties and imperatives. Those biographies and studies of the life course that focus on extraordinary success or failure as compared with ordinary achievements have to do with (G) the goal attainment function, and meeting basic needs and realizing personal and socially sanctioned goals and purposes. A fourth group of life accounts describes unusual precocity, or delay, and new role combinations for using time and other resources to achieve one’s ends. These studies are focused primarily on (A) the person’s more or less effective adaptation to existing circumstances. These four major outcomes are depicted as various themes of life careers, L, I, G, and A, in Fig. 1. 67

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Life Course Development

Themes of Life Careers (L) (I) (G) (A)

Latent Pattern Maintenence Integration Goal-Attainment Adaptation

Fig. 1. Major Themes in Life Careers.

It turns out that classic studies of the life course generally focus on one or more of these four challenges as being of particular interest in the lives of those whose careers are being followed. While every person has to grapple with each of the four functional challenges (pattern maintenance, integration, goal attainment, and adaptation), most researchers tend to be selective and focus on a single theme that is of greatest interest to them. To show the usefulness of the classiﬁcation, I describe below some of the major life course studies as they distribute themselves under each of these major themes. My selection of the studies is informal and preliminary, focusing primarily on works published since 1970 by social scientists, and thus omitting many earlier works by anthropologists and sociologists and many important contributions by historians and biographers. This compilation also omits two other major life themes: accounts focused on mental and physical health that concern the mind and body; and spiritual biographies that concern non-material reality and the world of meaning. Innovative and Traditional Careers In some historical periods and in some places, legitimacy of one particular life pattern rather than another is at stake. Life stories under those conditions tend

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to revolve around the distinction between experiences that push an individual toward or away from tradition or innovation. How one resolves the issue is concerned with the function of maintaining or changing a larger cultural pattern. One version of this drama is the depiction of choice between a rural or modern way of life as seen in Elder and Conger’s (2000) description of Iowa farm youth, Kohli’s (1995) reﬂections on rural-to-urban migration in Europe, and Maynes’ (1995) collection of European biographies of upwardly mobile artisans and self-educated peasants. Another group of studies concerns women’s choices between traditional homemaking and modern careers (Gerson, 1985; Levinson & Levinson, 1996). Also relevant, but not covered here, are the several studies of immigration and acculturation (such as Thomas and Znaniecki’s [1927] Polish Peasant in Europe and America) which depict the tension and pull between ethnic origins that are rural and traditional and American culture that is urban and progressive (see also Mead, 1942). Rebellion and Conformity Studies focused on the individual’s relationships with others typically describe those involved in outright deviance or in political activism on the left or the right. These relationships have to do with the function of social integration which is a variable that in its negative valence is found in conﬂict and rebellion or in positive form as the smooth interweaving of individual life with surrounding social networks and institutions. Delinquent lives are chronicled in ways that contrast those who transgress the law with those who go straight (Sampson & Laub, 1993). Apart from crime and delinquency, the type of career most commonly studied in connection with a person’s relation to the community is social activism and political stance. For example, various studies have compared women activists such as the moderate temperance women of the nineteenth century with the more liberal suffragists (Giele, 1995); the advocates for and against abortion (Luker, 1984); or economic and cultural conservatives (Klatch, 1987). Newman (1996) used a life course perspective to contrast the different political identities of older and younger baby boomers of a northern New Jersey suburb: the high school graduates of the early 1970s were rebels with a distinct political identity, whereas the graduates of the early 1980s were politically uninvolved and apathetic, “just there.” Notable Success and Ordinary Attainment In contrast with the types of life story that treat tradition or conformity as problematic, accounts of those who are very successful treat what is 69

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considered to be success as a given that is clear and well deﬁned. Many typical themes of successful lives appear in Brokaw’s (1998) account of the veterans of the Second World War, The Greatest Generation. The “greatest generation” was above all successful in winning a war, then in returning to civilian life, and setting in motion unprecedented growth and prosperity for the whole nation. Their story is a story of goal attainment, where deﬁnitions of success represent the realization of widely shared goals. In a follow-up of one hundred Harvard students interviewed between 1939 and 1942. Valliant (1977) distinguished those who were more and less successful and showed differences in career progress, marriage stability, number of friends, income level, health, and happiness. Clausen (1993) in American Lives, after pointing out that there are many ways of deﬁning success, noted that these life stories usually contained some reference to occupational achievement, satisfaction, health, and moral integrity. He then set out to describe the types of earlier life patterns, especially “planful competence,” that preceded success later on. Of the four types of life story outlined here, the most numerous are the portraits of success. Elder’s (1974) Children of the Great Depression, like Brokaw’s subjects, endured hardship, rose to unprecedented heights, and became the ﬁrst in their families to gain higher education and rise from poor origins to middle class status. Elder and Conger’s (2000) Children of the Land also describes children who negotiate the developmental tasks of childhood and adolescence with remarkable success. Accounts of successful black women come from Slevin and Wingrove (1998) who portray African American pioneers and professionals who achieved solid middle class or upper middle class status. Other studies deal with success but in a more limited way. Gustafson and Magnusson (1991) compare Swedish girls’ typical patterns of achievement during adolescence that display high and low ability and achievement patterns that may persist into adulthood. Rosenfeld and Spenner (1988) also use a narrow lens to operationalize the concept of women’s work identity in terms of job vs. career. The career-oriented are more likely to see any work they do, and any pay they receive, as part of a career, whereas the job-oriented do not. Precocity, Flexibility, and Delay Like the studies of success, the stories of precocity, ﬂexibility, and delay are based on a clear conception of what constitutes achievement; the question is why some people arrive more quickly and easily at their goal. Variations in strategy address the theme of adaptation to a changing social context where a lock-step pattern or an institutionalized life course may actually be

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dysfunctional. Easterlin (1980, 1993), for example, studied the differences in timing of World War II veterans and the baby boom generation. The veterans came into a booming economy with rising wages and were quick to marry, become established in their jobs, and have children. But their children born between the late 1940s and mid 1960s came into a crowded labor market and as a result stayed in school longer, were slow to settle on a career and establish a household. In The Postponed Generation, Littwin (1986) contends that the younger people were roughly a decade behind in their development compared with their parents at the same age. Timing and ﬂexibility of timing appear to be salient issues, especially to those who face constricted opportunity. In their study of 5,000 Australian women’s pathways to professional careers, Poole and Langan-Fox (1997) found that some of the biggest questions on women’s minds were whether to have children and when to have them. Bateson (1990, 2000) contends that the older pattern of a direct and monolithic path to achievement is actually dysfunctional in a rapidly changing global society. She suggests that an improvisational style of “composing” a life may be better suited to the modern world.

IMPACT OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND SOCIALIZATION ON THE LIFE COURSE Having outlined several main themes in life course outcomes, we now come to the question of what produces these results. There is a possibility, of course, that each person’s life to some degree touches on all four themes, and that the career themes outlined here either result from specialization among persons in what they are known for, or from the researcher’s selection of a particular focus and of individuals who exemplify it. Whatever the reasons for these themes, the ﬁelds of life course research and life-span development are not yet at a sufﬁcient stage of maturity to give a behaviorally genetic account of which factors produce which types of outcomes. Nor can we explore here the various different ways that the four themes might be intertwined within a single life. One can list, however, the main types of inﬂuence that the classic life course studies discuss as bearing on the careers that unfold. Life outcomes are the result of an interactive process that occurs when the individual encounters particular expectations, opportunities, or barriers in the current social context. Gerson (1985, p. 213) states the relationship between individual and social action as resulting from a dialectical process: “Women’s adult choices are neither the predetermined result of early childhood socialization nor mere reﬂections of static purely coercive social structures, although each of these factors plays a role.” Women’s decisions and choices “develop out of a 71

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negotiated process whereby they confront and respond to constraints and opportunities, often unanticipated, encountered over the course of their lives.” Poole and Langan-Fox (1997, p. 223) state a similar theme: “. . . that contextual factors are not a backdrop against which human agency is enacted but rather the framework within which agency is constructed.” Thus, in the examples drawn from the four major life history themes, there is always a commingling of description that relates both to the person and to surrounding circumstances. Further reﬁnement is needed in conceiving the various kinds of social context and the nature of the inﬂuence they exert. Fortunately, a number of sophisticated new research projects are under way such as the Chicago Neighborhoods Study (Earls & Buka, 1998) that specify the various types of social context that socialize the individual and provide a stage for life development. Recent studies of acculturation (Nguyen, Messé & Stollak, 1999) also examine the impact of ethnic involvement, neighborhood, and household structure on a variety of personal outcomes ranging from health and mental health to school performance and delinquency. These new studies of acculturation, health, and delinquency implicitly share the ecological perspective of Bronfenbrenner (1979), who pictures the person as embedded in a social structure of ever smaller circles that range from the society at large, neighborhoods and communities, and special purpose groups such as families, schools, work, and play networks, to an individual’s particular role set. Similarly, Giele and Elder (1998) distinguish four such levels of inﬂuence on the individual life course ranging from the more general to more speciﬁc: (1) temporal and cultural location; (2) institutional framework and social networks; (3) goal-oriented groups and activities; and (4) individual role expectations. These four levels of the social context are found in the embedded rectangles depicted in Fig. 2. Associated with each level is both an aspect of social structure and the internalized personal representation of that level as it is experienced. Thus historical and cultural location is experienced by the person in terms of the legitimation of personal identity. Institutional and social ties are experienced as membership in a network. Involvement in goal-oriented collectivities, such as the family or workplace, give rise to a greater or lesser sense of personal agency. Finally, individual role transitions and obligations are realized in the timing of life events and roles that represent the concrete demands of the immediate environment. In the following section, those life course studies that particularly deal with success and accomplishment are combed for the factors that appeared to lead to success. The major explanatory factors in the success stories include all four levels of the social structure: culture, institutions and communities; face-to-face

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collectivities (e.g. work, family, schools); and individual role obligation. Each dimension also has two sides: one that has to do with opportunities and external constraints; the other, with socialization and internalized expectations. Cultural Patterns and Individual Life Pattern Thomas Weisner (1996), an anthropologist, tells us that any time we try to understand human development in one place or another, we will discover enduring adaptive problems and developmental concerns that appear because there are “ecocultural features” that inﬂuence human development everywhere. The resulting narratives describe a gestalt that is “not structured according to conscious logic, but according to unconscious logic, . . . deﬁned by emotional rather than rational motivations” (Holloway & Johnson, 1997, p. 68). A recurrent theme in Brokaw’s World War II success stories is the desire to escape from poverty experienced during the Depression and the eager search for achievement when it becomes possible. Elder and Conger (2000) in their accounts of youth in the Iowa farm crisis of the 1980s describe the key elements of a typical adolescent’s life. Family investment in the land leads to a rich network of connections in the community and multiple caring adults. The young person in turn has to work hard for low economic returns but feels counted on and gains skills that impart a sense of mastery. All these experiences funnel into successful pathways through adolescence to adulthood. The life stories of black professional women described by Slevin and Wingrove (1998) refer to similar themes. But instead of the family on the land in the matrix of a caring community, it is the family in the black church that gives children a culture that provides overall meaning to their lives as well as a chance to be supported, gain experience in speaking and leadership, and ultimately have so much conﬁdence that they achieve outstanding success. In contrast to these success stories told against a backdrop of hardship, the delayed segment of the baby boom generation described by Littwin (1986) grew up in afﬂuence, experienced a sense of entitlement, and did not have to contribute to the family economy. They came into the labor market without the skills needed at the time and as a consequence had to endure unemployment, menial jobs, and low pay that seriously delayed their transition into adulthood. Many other plot lines are evident in connection with other major life careers. Women who chose between domesticity and careers, such as described by Gerson (1985) and Levinson and Levinson (1996), told stories about circumstances and events that either reinforced their initial orientation or caused them eventually to switch course. Bateson (2000) in Full Circles, a collection of the lives of students and elders at Spelman College, particularly focuses on the life

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story plots that tell of successful adaptation to unforeseen events and that imply that a more rigid or traditional course would have led to truncated development and less satisfaction. Institutions, Community, and Belonging Certain themes concerning informal social control are virtually identical in Elder and Conger’s stories in Children of the Land and Slevin and Wingrove’s account of successful black women’s life stories. Both refer to close knit communities and to the fact that everybody knows everybody. Children cannot get away with bad behavior without other adults either reporting them to their parents or taking a direct role in disciplining them. Teachers are known in the community and frequently are also relatives of the families whose children they teach. Elder and Conger refer to the small towns in rural Iowa as “undermanned communities” that make every child feel needed and accountable to someone. The strength of such community supports in the lives of the successful is in sharp contrast with the weak or inadequate social control experienced by inner city youth or delinquents and criminals (Wilson, 1987; Sampson & Laub, 1993). A quite different theme emerges in the descriptions of white girls’ and women’s lives, particularly the expectation that feminine women will be selfsacriﬁcing in putting others’ needs ahead of their own. Sadly, the process can result in role diffusion and depression (Miller, 1976). Brown and Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads shows the theme of conformity to group norms to be a recurring stumbling block for adolescent girls, with the result that they stiﬂe their own active participation in order to “ﬁt in.” Bateson (2000) too recognizes this peril and notes that in women’s lives self-sacriﬁce is frequently erroneously equated with what is good for the self. Change in economic opportunity is perhaps the master trend that organizes an individual’s general social environment. Whether a depression, a boom, wartime, or peacetime, all the major institutions of society are affected. Jobs come and go. Marriages and births take place or are delayed. All these changes touch the individual who in turn responds by decisions on education, work, residence, and household formation that either fulﬁll the existing cultural ideal or shape a different path. World War II created new jobs for women not only in the government and military but industry. Julia Child, the famous chef, who graduated from Smith College in 1934, reported to Brokaw (1998, pp. 300–301), “In the mid-thirties a woman was expected to become a teacher or a housewife, take care of children, and do the laundry. I didn’t have anything but an eagerness to help . . ..” But as a result of the new war-time opportunities, Child rose to a responsible position supervising forty people, was given a responsible 75

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position in the government’s Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, and traveled widely. Martha Settle Putney, an African American woman from Pennsylvania enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), attended Howard University, and received a master’s degree but found no teaching jobs. But after joining the WAC she became one of forty black women selected for ofﬁcers’ training and later earned a Ph.D. in history (Brokaw, 1998, p. 190). Both Child and Putney were catapulted into positions of responsibility by the tremendous shifts caused by the war. Easterlin and other demographers analyze the opposite scenario, the glut of new workers born in the baby boom, together with a closing down of opportunity, that led many young people to delay household and family formation and instead double up with relatives in order to raise their income per adult equivalent (IAE) (Easterlin, Macunovich & Crimmins, 1993). Littwin in The Postponed Generation illustrates these patterns as they began to take shape in the 1970s in the life experiences of baby boomers who were then making the transition to adulthood. Group Goals and Personal Agency All the success stories abound with recollections of self-conﬁdence and of having had clear goals of achievement, even if only a determination to leave a poor or unsatisfying life behind. Brokaw’s Lloyd Kilmer was determined never to have his wife and family experience the poverty he had known as a child. One of the successful African American women interviewed by Slevin and Wingrove (1998, p. 66) reported that after serving in a menial job and as a domestic, “I knew there had to be something better.” The individuals in these success stories all had been taught to be the best, exceed the norm, get an education to better themselves, and do well at any job they undertook. As a result, in the case of the farm kids observed by Elder and Conger, they excelled in school, in social relationships, self-conﬁdence, and management of their affairs. So long as there is a ﬁt between a person’s qualiﬁcations and the jobs available, things go well. But if the labor market becomes crowded, a person’s skills no longer needed, or the rewards shifted to a different kind of role from that for which one was trained, the person is likely to alter direction as a response to external events and change goals, priorities, and self assessment in order to manage successfully. Poole and Langan-Fox (1997, p. 227) call this process one of “ﬁnding out” about oneself. Gerson’s (1985, pp. 118–119) interviews with women veering from initial domestic orientation toward careers found that women who made this change had experienced declining rewards

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for domesticity, whereas those who shifted from careers to homemaking had encountered lower rewards for work than they had expected. Role Obligations and Individual Life Events On top of a legacy of expectation, social support, and a clear set of priorities, those who succeed are also well equipped to face the work and solve the problems that confront them. Their skills and experience cover a wide range of activity and behavior from good manners (“Good manners will take you to the White House”) to getting along with difﬁcult people through resourcefulness and resilience (by “making stepping stones out of stumbling blocks”) (Slevin & Wingrove, 1998, p. 25). The successful learn to cope with failure and try again; they are disciplined, accustomed to hard work, and able to contend with difﬁculty and discrimination. Brokaw (1998, p 45) summarizes the value of difﬁcult experience: “the military training and discipline required to win World War II became an accelerated course in how to prepare a young generation to run a large, modern, and complex industrial society.” Certain defenses, well rehearsed, also seem to have helped blacks. Parents taught their children “You are just as good as any one else,” and “When they call you ‘nigger,’ just tell them, ‘I would rather be a Negro than poor white trash’” (Slevin & Wingrove, 1998, p. 25). A recurring theme in the success stories is the early conﬁrmation of a person’s competence and ability which comes when there is a good ﬁt between skills and personality and what is actually required in the job. By contrast, self-doubt is induced along with considerable wandering in the wilderness, even among very talented and able people, when the ﬁt is less than optimum. This is one of the sub-texts of Bateson’s (1990, 2000) illustrations of improvisation and turning points in the life course of the successful women she interviewed. A second theme is the luck of having the right parents, falling in with the right or wrong crowd, or making a good marriage. Laub and Sampson (1993) show that it was men who somehow found healthy social ties, a steady job and a good marriage, who were able to leave delinquent careers behind. Similarly, Valliant (1977) in his study of Harvard men shows how important is friendship to good adaptation. And Bateson (1990, 2000) in her recounting of improvisation in successful women’s lives shows how they made use of their social ties in positive ways and created others as they went along. Perhaps education is the single most powerful factor mentioned repeatedly in connection with being able to take advantage of opportunity. The availability of the GI Bill after World War II to the men and women who served in the military was critical to the success stories of Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. 77

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Elder shows the same phenomenal impact among the men who were the Children of the Great Depression, as does Clausen in American Lives.

LIFE COURSE STUDIES AND THE THEORY OF ACTION We now come to the theory of action as an overarching conceptual scheme for linking together social context, life structure, and life careers. This is an unusual proposal for two reasons: ﬁrst, because sociology abandoned the theory of action and its important purpose of explaining connections between micro and macro levels of social action as it lost touch with community studies and became more individually and behaviorally oriented (Coleman, 1986); and second, because life course research, having grown out of several disciplinary traditions (historical demography, the sociology of age, developmental psychology, and longitudinal survey research) remained relatively atheoretical and relied heavily on the chronological order of life events to suggest causation. The principal techniques for life course analysis have been qualitative methods, multivariate models, and survival analysis that linked individual characteristics to particular outcomes (Elder, 1985; Mayer & Tuma, 1990). Except for several well-known investigations on individual’s active choices in shaping their future lives (Kohn & Schooler, 1983; Mortimer, Lorence & Kumka, 1986), few attempts have been made to describe variations in social context that both affected individuals and in turn were shaped by them. Now, in bringing together life course studies with the theory of action, there is a new opportunity to overcome the deﬁcits of both analytic traditions. The single most important beneﬁt is a clearer model of the ways in which micro and macro levels of the social order interact. Action theory, which has often been criticized both for its tendency toward abstraction and its static picture of a society without people (Homans, 1964), has a place for individual stories. The life course perspective, which has lacked an analysis of social structure, can beneﬁt from including a dialectical process in which the individual is shaped by social structure and in turn also helps to shape it. Thus the concluding task of this paper is to demonstrate that the study of life careers and the theory of action can be brought together in a uniﬁed model. There are three steps in the argument. First, as already outlined in the opening section of this paper, it is necessary to conceive of life course outcomes (“careers”) in terms that are congruent with the major terms of the action paradigm (pattern maintenance, integration, etc.). Next, as argued in the second section of this paper, one has to identify several levels of social structure (culture, institutions, collectivities, roles) and pinpoint their contribution to shaping the life course.

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Finally, as will be shown here, the dynamic links between social structure and life course (through socialization and opportunity) and from life course outcomes back to social structure (through life careers) must be spelled out so that action between self and society is depicted as truly reciprocal. One of the main challenges in constructing a comprehensive theory of action is to conceptualize dynamic processes in ways that dovetail with different levels of social structure and with key elements of the life course. Ideas about how to accomplish this come from two recent theoretical contributions to the life course literature: Brown and Gilligan’s (1992) “Listener’s Guide”; and Giele and Elder’s (1998) formulation of a “Life Course Paradigm.” Both of these works give clues to dynamic processes that link together social context, life structure, and life career. By joining the two frameworks of Brown and Gilligan and Giele and Elder, I shall outline a “Life Course Listener’s Guide” to serve as a theoretical map for further research on all three interchanges, as shown in Fig. 3. Brown and Gilligan’s “Listener’s Guide” The contribution of Brown and Gilligan’s work is in spelling out the dynamic processes in the development trajectory that links the individual’s life structure to a set of life choices and eventually life outcomes. In their “Listener’s Guide” Brown and Gilligan (1992) describe four dimensions of development that every adolescent must negotiate. These dimensions are congruent with Parsons’ four system challenges. Brown and Gilligan developed their scheme to describe four main features of life stories that they identiﬁed in their interviews with one hundred adolescent girls at the Laurel School in Cleveland. They systematically listened to their tapes four times to isolate each of these components. These four types of listening are focused on different aspects of a girl’s behavior that roughly correspond to the four functional problems outlined in the theory of action. Plot. Brown and Gilligan ﬁrst listened to a girl’s story as geographical plot of a psychological landscape and story plot for the drama that linked the who, what, where, and why of the narrative. This overall “plot” roughly corresponds with the culturally sanctioned pattern that is the backdrop and surrounding context of a person’s life (latent pattern maintenance). Voice of the “I.” The second time through, the authors listened for the self, the voice of the “I” in the narrative. This voice of the “I” and the description of the self are signs of agency and refer to setting priorities and to success or failure in attaining one’s goals (the function of goal attainment). 79

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Location in Time and Place Linked Lives Human Agency Timing of Life Events

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Fig. 3.

Life Course Development: Plot, Relationships, “I”, Learning

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Relationships. In their third time listening to the tapes the investigators were particularly attuned to the way the girl dealt with relationships, especially the realities of race, class, sex, institutionalized norms and values, and the ways that these expectations structured the young woman’s social world. This dimension directly corresponds to the problem in action theory of how a person is integrated into a web of social rules and relationships (the integrative function). Reality-testing and learning. The fourth round focused on the way the person adapted to her social reality – with resistance, capitulation, silence, or knowing and not knowing (the adaptive function). Depending on whether she used one strategy or another, and how she handled learning (“knowing and not knowing”), the girl dealt with reality and relationships in a more or less mature way. In Fig. 3, the major aspects of personal development described by Brown and Gilligan are depicted as processes that link individual life structure to life career. Giele and Elder’s “Life Course Paradigm” The Listener’s Guide particularly focuses on the actions of individuals. In the synthesis provided by Giele and Elder, emphasis is on the external social inﬂuences as well as internal factors that shape individual action. In Methods of Life Course Research, Giele and Elder (1998) present a schematic representation of four key factors that shape the life course. The impact of the social order on the individual is represented by historical and cultural “Location in Time and Place” and the memberships in various communities and social groups that are indicated by “Linked Lives.” The actions of the individual are described in terms of “Human Agency” and “Timing of Life Events.” In Fig. 3, these factors that shape the life course are depicted as interchanges between social context and the individual life structure. This life course paradigm with its four key elements represents a convergence in two streams of work that Giele and Elder pursued independently: In Two Paths to Women’s Equality, Giele (1995) identiﬁed four factors – cultural background, social membership, individual goal orientation, and strategic adaptation – that she used to explain why some women followed traditional gender roles while others were innovators. These dimensions were derived from Parsons’s (1966) four basic system functions and pictured societal values and institutions and informal groups as transmitting inﬂuences to the woman that affected her life pattern. In addition, Giele’s model was bi-directional: the individual might retreat or conform to past standards, or as in the case of reform leaders, attempt to transform the social structure “upward,” by inventing an 81

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innovative role for herself, challenging group norms, institutional rules, and societal values. This interactive model of interrelated life course change and feminist activity also applied to Giele’s research on Wellesley College graduates and other college alumnae groups who showed a clear shift toward multiple roles among women born after 1930. These new life patterns likely contributed to the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s (Giele, 1988). In Fig. 3, the connections between individual careers and the larger social structure are pictured as feedback loops in which a particular type of career such as innovation or tradition is particularly relevant to continuity or change in a particular aspect of the social context, in this case, the cultural patterns that go with a given time and place. Reform, rebellion and conformity have to do with continuity or change of institutions. Different types of success affect the goals of particular collectivities such as work or family. Precocity and delay relate to the various ways that roles are deﬁned and carried out. Together, Brown and Gilligan’s dynamic description of individual development and Giele and Elder’s structural maps of social context and individual life provide us most of what is needed to describe the construction of the life course in a more dialectical and bi-directional fashion. But it remains to make more explicit the nature of the dynamic links between macro and micro, and between social structure and individual action. A Life Course Listener’s Guide To join the life course with the theory of action, we need an encompassing framework that shows how the key elements are intertwined. This is done by extending Brown and Gilligan’s idea of listening beyond individual plot and story line to two other dimensions of life stories – the nature of the social environment and the intentions of the actor. These links are represented in Fig. 3 as links between social context and life course structure. Links between life structure and career outcomes appear in developmental processes such as were described by Brown and Gilligan in their Listener’s Guide. Finally, the actions embodied in life paths and career outcomes link the individual back to the surrounding social structure and either help to reproduce it or change it. Socialization and opportunity. Just as Brown and Gilligan listened for the evolving structure of the life course as it unfolded in plot, relationships, the active self, and learning, so also it should be possible to “hear” the structure of a social environment through the reports of an individual describing her life. In the review of classic life course studies we have already identiﬁed

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characteristics of the culture, community, labor market, and resource environment that block or facilitate unusual success. If one were to pick another life course outcome to be explained, for example, a woman’s choice of a multiple role pattern rather than traditional homemaking, what would be the characteristics of the surrounding social structure that one would listen for? I am currently interviewing college-educated women for such a project. Although the project is not yet complete, it already appears that each woman’s life story can be coded according to the four different aspects of the social structure that shape the self: namely: (1) cultural location, which has an impact on identity; (2) institutional and community reference groups, which deﬁne what behavior is good; (3) goals and priorities of workplace and family; which deﬁne a woman’s status at work and at home; and (4) role expectations, which spell out what a woman is expected to contribute. Among the women I have interviewed, I ﬁnd that certain background characteristics are associated with particular types of life course careers. The women with the most innovative life patterns tended to come from locations where they stood out as different from the majority – such as a Jewish girl from South Dakota, or a black woman from a Boston suburb with both a mother and a father who held doctoral degrees. The innovators also came from communities and social networks that expected them to work and also have families. (One of these women who graduated in the late 1970s from an elite college with high expectations for women, and is now a partner in a law ﬁrm and mother of three children in middle school, conﬁded that she found it shocking to return to college reunions and ﬁnd so many women not working.) At the collectivity level, the women with multiple roles reported their work was critical to the ﬁrm. They were well rewarded with high incomes, and their income was considered essential to the household. At the role level, these women typically experienced work environments where long hours and high productivity were expected. In their families, also, they had devised schedules and a division of labor to share parenting with husbands, nannies, and day care. Intentions and consequences. In addition to listening for the impact of social structure on a woman’s life, a Life Course Listener’s Guide would also try to understand what the person intends by her actions, how she expects to live in the future, and what she hopes to accomplish (the feedback from life careers to social context in Fig. 3). In tracking these actions we are looking for the ways that individual action feeds back to the larger social structure by altering it or reinforcing it. In this form of listening, social structure is to be thought of more as the object of individual action than its source. The actions that are of particular interest in this phase of the interpretation are those which express the purpose, intent, or agency of the actor. When looking 83

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for signs of intent and purpose, what does one “listen” for? My experience with interviewing women role innovators suggests that the four different aspects of life structure and the self come into play in shaping the acts of the individual. These actions have implications for: (1) cultural expectations about women’s acceptable roles; (2) institutional rules and arrangements regarding qualiﬁcations and eligibility for promotions, etc.; (3) speciﬁc shared goals at work and in the family; and (4) options for adaptive behavior related to time, resources, training, and career change. The person’s actions will tend to reinforce or change various aspects of the larger social structure. In interviews with role innovators, these different types of action appear in various guises. For example, action directed at cultural expectations is evident in a lesbian’s eager participation in the research project “because I ﬁgured you wouldn’t get many of us, and I wanted to make sure that we were represented.” In a similar vein, a high level black marketing executive surmised that, “You would want to hear my story.” Attitudes and behavior related to institutional arrangements are evident in a woman law partner’s expression of disappointment and lack of support for younger colleagues who “. . . think they can have it all and don’t do their work because they are on the phone all the time checking things at home.” Actions related to goals of workplace, self, and family come through in talk about making money now so that one can fund children’s college education and do good works and make less money later on. Efforts to create room for adaptation are evident in attempts to gain ﬂexibility in scheduling, opportunities for further training, and more free time. A Note on Variability in Life Careers and Modes of Action The foregoing theoretical discussion has of necessity focused on the most congruent or “pure” life careers by using as examples those life stories that are a distillation of particular themes such as innovation, reform, success, or precocity. In real life, however, most people’s lives probably range on a continuum between extremes, and any given individual may display an action proﬁle that is innovative or highly successful or otherwise exemplary in one domain but not in another. In addition, the proﬁle captured at one stage of life may look somewhat different when examined at another. All these complex possibilities can be accommodated within the expanded life course model to yield an array of potential reﬁnements: for example, the person with a high capacity for cultural innovation may rely on conformity to everyday norms in other realms. In the meantime, treating each mode of action as having the property of a variable allows the investigator to look for the many interesting outcomes that result from mixing and matching extreme and moderate propensities and varying the combination over time.

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CONCLUSION This paper brings together life course research that is fairly atheoretical with the highly abstract theory of action. The argument proceeds through three major steps. The ﬁrst step is to conceptualize different kinds of life careers as the initial focus of explanation. Existing life course studies can be grouped according to the predominant theme in the life careers that is being described (such as cultural innovation and tradition, political activism and conformity, notable and ordinary success, and precocity and delay). The second step is to identify the major inﬂuences from the surrounding social structure that shape the individual self and life structure (culture, institutions and community, group membership, and role expectations). The third step is to construct an overarching conceptual framework showing how social structure affects life structure, how life structure shapes individual careers, and how life careers in turn feed back into the surrounding social structure. The resulting explanatory model thus identiﬁes three major structures that mutually affect each other in a larger system of action: (1) the social context; (2) the individual life structure; and (3) various life careers. In addition, the model reveals the dynamic links between each of these elements that form three sets of dialectical interchanges. The interchanges between social structure and the individual life course are found in socialization and the opportunity structure and are illustrated in the classic life course studies by the inﬂuence of cultural identity, belonging to speciﬁc groups, a sense of goals or personal agency, and learning to carry out particular roles and duties. The interchanges between self and career are found in the developmental processes described by Brown and Gilligan’s “Listener’s Guide,” namely: the overarching story, relationships, voice of “I,” and silences and learning. The interchanges linking the life career back to social structure are found in both deliberate and unintended actions of the individual that challenge or reinforce a given cultural pattern, institutional rules, group goals, and allocation of resources. Each set of dynamic links between structure and individual, individual and life career, and life career back to social structure can be decomposed to reveal a common set of functional interchanges that correspond with the four-function paradigm of the theory of action: latent pattern maintenance, integration, goal attainment, and adaptation. The suggested methodology for collecting data on these links is based on Brown and Gilligan’s Listener’s Guide and is broadened beyond developmental processes to be a “Life Course Listener’s Guide.” It is recommended that the life course researcher “listen” for the echoes of social structure (as conveyed through socialization and opportunity) and for the consequences of the individual’s action (as captured by statements of the actor’s 85

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intent and purpose), as well as for the developmental choice points outlined by Brown and Gilligan. Using this expanded model of the life course and a revitalized theory of action, it should eventually be possible not only to map life careers more fully but also to suggest more precisely which combinations of antecedent factors lead to which kinds of outcomes, life patterns, and careers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author thanks Richard Settersten, Annemette Sorensen, Dale Dannefer, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this chapter. Recognition is also due Meg Lovejoy for her outstanding research assistance and thoughtful discussion of many of the issues raised here in relation to women’s changing life patterns. Support for this research came from the Dean’s Discretionary Fund of the Heller School of Brandeis University and a Research Support Award from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University.

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4. UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION TO WORK IN ADULTHOOD: A CONTEXTUAL DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH Daniel M. Hyson Socialization is viewed by developmental psychologists and sociologists as a process by which individuals learn the values, beliefs, and skills deemed appropriate and important by the societies in which they live, allowing them to adapt to their environments and function effectively within their communities (Kimmel, 1990; Mortimer & Simmons, 1978; Shaffer, 1999). While the study of socialization in both disciplines has historically focused on childhood and adolescence, much recent sociological work has stressed how earlier socialization experiences can affect adult adaptation. As a factor promoting adaptation to the work setting, we examine the “work ethic.” Persons who possess a strong work ethic not only describe work as an important part of their lives and their identities, but also demonstrate its importance through responsible behavior at work. Several components of the work ethic have been assessed: work “involvement,” “self-concept,” “identity,” and “readiness.” The ﬁrst three of these dimensions (see Lawler & Hall, 1970; Mortimer & Lorence, 1995) refer to the salience of work for one’s life, identity and personality. The fourth, work readiness, references the behavioral expression of the work ethic, the extent to which workers demonstrate that they understand and can perform the responsibilities and duties required of them in a job. Few, however, have simultaneously examined both psychological and

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behavioral components of the work ethic. We believe that this is essential to understanding successful performance in the work setting in adulthood. The longitudinal study we describe later in this chapter examines the work ethic from this multifaceted perspective. To understand adult adaptation to work, we must not only address what occurs in the work context, but also individuals’ experiences and behaviors in other contexts and at prior developmental stages. To explain individual differences in the work ethic, prior socialization in the family, peer groups, schools and neighborhoods, and the ways in which these experiences affect the process of socialization to the work setting, must be examined. Experiences in non-work settings both affect, and are affected by, experiences in the work setting. To best address the effects of this range of variables that cut across both age periods and contexts, we employ an integrative model that is organismic, contextual, and developmental in orientation. This model draws upon at least two popular perspectives: the eco-developmental approach proposed by Szapocznik and Coatsworth (1999) and the developmental-contextual view described by Vondracek, Lerner and Schulenberg (1986). Szapocznik and Coatsworth’s framework takes Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory and builds upon it, adding a prominent developmental perspective. The authors highlight how the ever-changing salience of, and interaction between, multiple factors across time inﬂuence the development of an outcome. Individuals must negotiate different salient tasks at successive stages of their development; their resolution of these tasks is inﬂuenced by various sets of factors at each stage. While originally set forth to predict drug abuse, this model provides a promising framework for integrating past research on pathways to competence in the young adult work domain. Using this multisystem, integrative perspective, we may take account of both the contextual inﬂuences (e.g. socio-economic factors) that are the focus of much sociological research in this area, as well as the individual and social factors (e.g. intelligence, academic achievement) highlighted in psychological studies. Vondracek, Lerner and Schulenberg’s (1986) model is similar to Szapocznik and Coatsworth’s, but it provides additional emphasis on the role of the individual in shaping his or her own development. Drawing on person-in-context models of development, these authors stress that it is the goodness-of-ﬁt between person and environment that is most important. The ﬁt at one point in time elicits feedback, which then has an impact on individual choices and later outcomes. From these frameworks, three primary hypotheses were generated. First, we predicted that measures of initiative across developmental stages, as well as academic achievement, would be related to elements of the work ethic in

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adulthood. It is widely understood that success in school leads to success in the workplace. Much empirical support for this linkage derives from the longstanding sociological research tradition in status attainment (Featherman, 1980; Grusky & DiPrete, 1990). Academic potential and high school achievement predict students’ plans for post-secondary education (Pimentel, 1996; Tiggemann & Wineﬁeld, 1989). The amount of schooling a person obtains is a strong inﬂuence on occupational prestige and earnings (Pallas, 2000). Academic achievement during high school is thus a meaningful predictor of success given its relevance for college admission and post-secondary educational attainment. Grades and other indicators of academic success are also expected to be important, given their relation to cognitive skills, for those who seek employment immediately after graduating from high school. The skills tested in most schools and on most achievement tests, however, do not include all the aptitudes a student may need to succeed. Indeed, recent work has begun to suggest that doing well on achievement tests may not be the only school-related measure of interest in predicting adult work. Developmental and educational policy research has consistently indicated that functional and social skills acquired in school predict adaptation to work later in life. If, in school, children learn certain work-relevant competencies (e.g. how to self-regulate, work independently, and interact effectively with others), they will be more likely to embark on a pathway to success in the work world (Grubb, 1989; Hyson & Roisman, 1999; Levinson, 1995; Levinson & Brandt, 1997; Peterson, 1982). Erikson (1968), in fact, argued that the most signiﬁcant task of this period is for children to develop a sense of “industry,” deﬁned by Erikson as a belief that the child can “make things and make things well” (p. 124). Our second hypothesis was that socioeconomic status (SES) would likely affect role models and educational and training opportunities available to youth earlier in life. Poor children have more limited access to quality education and are less likely than their more advantaged counterparts to graduate from high school or to get a GED (Kozol, 1991; Stern & Eichorn, 1989). It may be more difﬁcult for students in inner-city schools to meet national performance standards, such as those outlined in the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994 and GOALS 2000, due to the more limited school funding, teacher training and access to resources (Wilson, 1996). Without this training, youth would likely ﬁnd it more difﬁcult to develop the necessary functional and social skills to make a successful transition to adult work. Third, middle childhood variables were also expected to have an indirect and a direct effect on adaptation to work in adulthood. Not only were they predicted to have an indirect effect on adaptation to adult work through the impact they 95

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have on adolescent variables, but they were also expected to exert a direct effect because of the unique role development in middle childhood plays in preparing youth for adult work. Child and adolescent development does not necessarily follow a stable path. Consequently, adaptation at one developmental stage is not always predicted most strongly by behavior at the previous stage. For example, it is well-documented that adolescence is a time of great exploration and instability. Middle childhood adaptation, as a result, may often be less closely related to behavior in adolescence and more indicative of how individuals will behave when they enter the more stable adult work world (see Eccles, 1999, for further discussion of the importance of middle childhood). Middle childhood initiative, in particular, was predicted to play an important role. Erikson (1963) argued that, by middle childhood, children should have resolved their internal psychological conﬂict between “initiative” and “guilt” and be in the process, as noted earlier, of negotiating the tension within them between “industry” and “inferiority.” The degree to which youngsters have effectively tackled the conﬂict between initiative and guilt by the time they reach middle childhood should then be tied to their likelihood of successfully negotiating later developmental issues, including the transition to work in adulthood. In addition, middle childhood is the time when most children are just starting their formal schooling. One of the primary tasks for children at this early stage in school is to learn to read. Research has shown that children who are delayed in learning to read are at an increased risk for later maladaptation in a variety of areas, one of which is work (see Slavin, 1994, for a review of research in this area). Testing the Integrative Model: The Parent-Child Project To illustrate the integrative approach and to test the hypotheses outlined above, we highlight analyses of data from a sub-sample of 146 participants (76 males, 70 females) from the Minnesota Parent-Child Project, a 25-year longitudinal study of at-risk children and their families. The mothers of the original 267 participants were recruited while receiving prenatal care at public health clinics in Minneapolis, MN, in 1975. At the time of delivery, the mothers ranged in age from 12 to 34 years, with a mean age of 20. Fifty-eight percent were Caucasian, 16% were mixed race, 14% were African American, and the remaining 3% were Native American or Latino (see Egeland & Brunquell, 1979, for a more detailed description of the sample). In addition, because the study was originally designed to examine antecedents of child maltreatment, mothers were selected based on their risk for maltreating their children. Poverty was one of the primary risk factors used in the

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selection process. The child participants have been followed from before birth until age 26. The outcome variable examined here is drawn from the 23-year assessment. Exemplifying the integrative perspective on socialization to work, this study takes an organizational-developmental approach. Because, according to this perspective, development is both cumulative and coherent, effective negotiation of developmental tasks at one stage makes it more likely that persons will succeed in negotiating subsequent developmental tasks. Those who have difﬁculty negotiating earlier developmental tasks are not doomed to a life of insecurity, however. Successful negotiation of later developmental tasks can alter their internal working models and help put them back on a path to positive adaptation (Sroufe, 1979; Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986; Waters & Sroufe, 1983).

MEASUREMENT In line with this theoretical perspective, assessments on the Parent-Child Project were designed to measure participants’ success in negotiating salient tasks at each stage of development. Participants were assessed frequently (intervals between assessments ranged from between three and six months in infancy and early childhood to one and a half years in late adolescence and early adulthood) and by multiple informants, using a variety of interviews, questionnaires, and observational procedures. Participants’ adaptation to work in adulthood was assessed when they were 23 years old. Based on a face-to-face interview, as well as participants’ responses to questionnaire items, one of two trained Parent-Child Project researchers assigned a rating reﬂecting the participants’ work ethic on a 5-point scale. Those receiving high scores on the scale: (1) demonstrated that work was important to their lives and their identities, and (2) did not engage in irresponsible behavior at work (see Appendix for the full rating scale).1 The predictors of the work ethic were the level of initiative in middle childhood and adolescence, academic achievement in middle childhood and adolescence, and salient indicators of personal resources and the context (i.e. IQ and socio-economic status) (see Hyson, 2001, for a more complete description of these variables). Initiative in middle childhood was measured using an average of participants’ standardized scores on sub-scales from the Devereux Elementary Behavior Rating Scales-Second Edition (DEBS-II) (Spivack & Swift, 1982), assigned by the participants’ teachers in the second, third and sixth grades. Sub-scales chosen for the composite measured participants’ level of organization, initiative in group discussions and activities, need for direction in completing work, and perseverance. 97

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The adolescent initiative measure addressed similar issues, but drew upon items from a semi-structured Parent-Child Project interview with the participants’ high school teachers. Speciﬁcally, it consisted of a composite of teacher responses to a series of seven questions selected because of their conceptual relation to the construct of initiative (i.e. “persistence in completing work,” “ability to work independently,” “welcomes challenge with enthusiasm/not easily discouraged,” “draws on own resources to overcome difﬁculty,” “works on his or her own with some assistance from others,” “refuses or avoids task,” and “withdraws or gives up.”) The measures of academic achievement used in this study included a composite of overall standard scores from administrations of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) (Dunn & Markwardt, 1970) when the participants were in the ﬁrst, second, third and sixth grades and an average of the Passage Comprehension and Calculation standard scores from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement (Woodcock & Mather, 1989, 1990), completed by participants at age 16. This study not only examined measures of initiative and academic achievement, but also included measures of personal resources and context. Intelligence was assessed when the participants were in third grade using an abbreviated form of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) (Wechsler, 1974). Participants’ Full Scale IQ standard scores were used in the analyses reported here. SES was represented in this study by a composite based on the following variables: maternal employment, maternal education and household income when the participants were age 16. The composite was calculated by creating z-scores for each indicator and then taking the mean of the z-scores. Z-scores were then transformed into t-scores to produce a positively scaled distribution.

RESULTS The ﬁndings provide support for the three hypotheses outlined earlier and indicate the importance of using an integrative model in examining socialization to work in adulthood. Intercorrelations were ﬁrst examined among measures of initiative and academic achievement in middle childhood and adolescence, IQ, SES in adolescence, and the work ethic (see Table 1). The predictors were all interrelated at least moderately. The highest correlations, however, were predictably between measures of academic achievement in middle childhood and academic achievement in adolescence and between IQ and achievement in both developmental periods. As expected, based on the hypotheses discussed previously, initiative in middle childhood and adolescence and academic achievement in middle childhood and adolescence were all signiﬁcantly associated with the young adult work ethic as well.

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Intercorrelations Among Predictors and Work Ethic at Age 23. 1

1. Work ethic (age 23) 2. Initiative (2nd, 3rd and 6th grades) 3. Academic achievement (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 6th grades) 4. WISC-R IQ (3rd grade) 5. Initiative (age 16) 6. Academic achievement (age 16) 7. SES (age 16)

2

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7

1.00 0.76*** 0.26** 0.70*** 0.29***

1.00 0.21* 1.00 0.64*** 0.29*** 1.00 0.36*** 0.18* 0.35*** 1.00

1.00 0.35*** 1.00 0.24** 0.14 0.20* 0.26** 0.14

0.45*** 0.36*** 0.43*** 0.49*** 0.31***

*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

To address how these indicators of initiative, academic achievement, personal resources and context are related across time to work ethic in young adulthood, longitudinal path analyses were conducted. The hypothetical model tested in these analyses has several important characteristics (see Fig. 1).

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First, it is based on the assumption that initiative and academic achievement in different phases of the life course will have unique effects on work ethic in adulthood. The participants’ levels of initiative or academic achievement at each developmental stage are predicted to inﬂuence the same phenomena at the next developmental stage. In addition to the indirect effects they exert through this cumulative process, initiative and academic achievement from middle childhood are also hypothesized, as discussed earlier, to have direct effects on work ethic in adulthood. Finally, measures of IQ and of SES in adolescence are included in each of the equations to examine the effects of personal resources and context on the outcome variables (i.e. initiative in adolescence, academic achievement in adolescence, and work ethic in young adulthood). Due to missing data from different assessments during the course of the Parent-Child Project, the sample size for these analyses was limited to 141. Cases without a young adult work ethic rating were ﬁrst eliminated. Given the centrality of this outcome to the questions being addressed, it did not seem appropriate to impute any of its values. Next, cases with missing data on more than two of the predictor variables were also eliminated. For cases with missing data on two or fewer of the predictor variables, values were imputed for the missing data points using the series mean substitution method. The results of these analyses are depicted in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Relations Between Initiative and Academic Achievement Across Developmental Phases and Work Ethic in Young Adulthood.

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Directional path coefﬁcients in this ﬁgure reﬂect the Beta weights obtained from the regression analyses. Only signiﬁcant paths among measures of initiative, academic achievement, IQ, SES and work ethic are shown. The multiple R2 for the regression model predicting the work ethic is indicated on the ﬁgure directly below the dependent variable. The ﬁndings provided partial support for the hypothesized model. Both initiative and academic achievement show signiﬁcant stability across developmental phases, but neither initiative nor academic achievement in adolescence is related to the adult work ethic. Examination of the lagged effects in the model shows that initiative in middle childhood predicts academic achievement in adolescence, but academic achievement in middle childhood does not demonstrate a similar association with initiative in adolescence. Surprisingly, measures of personal resources and context were not found to be strong direct or indirect predictors of adult work ethic. IQ was found to be signiﬁcantly related to academic achievement in adolescence (Beta = 0.22, p < 0.05), but not to adult work ethic. SES was not associated with any of the adolescent or adult outcomes. Other research by the ﬁrst author, however, has demonstrated that both of these variables may be better predictors of adult career maturity than of adult work ethic (Hyson, 2001). As we hypothesized, these indices of personal resources and context may affect the role models and educational and training opportunities available to individuals as they mature. While these models and opportunities likely affect work ethic as we deﬁne it here in some way, they may be more likely to affect the way adults think about and explore potential careers. Most importantly, however, only middle childhood initiative was found in this study to signiﬁcantly predict (Beta = 0.27, p < 0.01) the work ethic in adulthood. While these results appear inconsistent with prior research indicating the importance of academic achievement in predicting successful adaptation to the work world, recent work has suggested that adolescent roles and tasks, including academic achievement, may take on a different meaning for children of differing socioeconomic status (Burton, Obeidallah & Allison, 1996). Participants in the study described here were recruited at birth because their families were living in poverty. Now that they have reached young adulthood, many of them are still poor, and the majority of them are seeking out entry-level, generally low-skill jobs. In adapting to these types of jobs, academic achievement, especially as it is measured on standardized achievement tests, makes little difference. As a result, it is initiative, and not academic achievement, that more strongly predicts positive motivational and behavioral adaptation to work for the young people in this sample. Employers in these settings seek individuals who can function independently and show perseverance, not necessarily those who have been successful academically. 101

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Furthermore, as previously mentioned, it should not be surprising that middle childhood initiative in particular is important for the work ethic in young adulthood, since the most salient development issue of the early-middle childhood period is considered to be the tension between “initiative” and “guilt” (Erikson, 1963). It is important to note that, as shown by Zero-order Pearson correlations (see Table 1), initiative in adolescence is indeed correlated signiﬁcantly (R = 0.20, p < 0.05) with the young adult work ethic. In the longitudinal path analysis predicting work ethic described above, however, when both adolescent and middle childhood initiative were entered simultaneously, only middle childhood initiative was found to account for unique variance in the young adult outcome. Thus, while both middle childhood and adolescent measures are correlated with the young adult work ethic, adolescent initiative does not explain any additional variance in the work ethic over and above that accounted for by the middle childhood measure. It is important to acknowledge, however, that differences in the skills tapped by the middle childhood and adolescent measures may also contribute to this pattern of findings. The DEBS-II scales tap general skills, pertaining to organization, initiative, self-direction, and persistence, that are reflected in young adult employment capacity and work-related attitudes, such as the work ethic. The adolescent measure of initiative, based on teacher ratings of adolescent behavior regarding school tasks, may be more education specific. Furthermore, the middle childhood measure of initiative taps teacher ratings in the second, third, and sixth grades. As a result, it may be more reliable than the adolescent initiative measure which is based on teacher ratings at age 16 only.

CONCLUSION From the perspective of social and educational policy, the ﬁndings reinforce the importance of individual initiative and of context in preparing youth for the transition from school to work. Some young people who are low achievers may be capable of making a successful transition to work if they are taught “soft skills,” such as how to work independently and how to persist at difﬁcult tasks (see Hyson, 1999; Wilson, 1996, for further discussion of the importance of “soft skills”). Work preparation programs in schools should recognize the importance of these variables and consequently should be designed to address a variety of student needs. Moreover, from a practical standpoint, these results offer further support for the current movement to begin at an earlier age to prepare students for socialization

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to work in adulthood. Current special education law (Public Law 105-17) mandates that a transition component be included in the Individual Education Plan of all students with disabilities by age 14. The results outlined here suggest that the process for socio-economically disadvantaged children in general may need to begin as early as in ﬁrst grade. From the very beginning of school students should be learning the functional, social and academic skills necessary for success in the workplace. While they may still be many years away from their ﬁrst “real job,” what children learn at this age can form the foundation for a smooth transition later in life. The ﬁndings from this study extend work conducted in a general community sample, the Youth Development Study (see Mortimer & Finch, 1996), with an at-risk poverty sample. The YDS indicates that important work-relevant values and self-concepts are formed through early work experiences in adolescence (Mortimer et al., 1996; Grabowski et al., 2001), and that the advantages of stable and moderate investment in work apply to youth at all socio-economic levels (Mortimer, forthcoming). While some might view the use of a poverty sample in the Parent-Child Project as a limitation because of the constraints it may place on generalization of ﬁndings to a broader population, we would argue that the sample studied here is representative of exactly the population we most need to study, not only because impoverished youth are understudied in this ﬁeld, but also because they are most in need of innovative intervention to help them make a more successful entry into the workforce. As scholars such as William Julius Wilson (1987, 1996) have noted, the poor are more likely to be unemployed or employed at a wage insufﬁcient to allow them to support a family, increasing the likelihood that they will remain in poverty. This work will hopefully offer some insights as to how to break this cycle and to help all youth – including poor youth – make a successful transition to work in young adulthood. Finally, it should be acknowledged that young adulthood, especially in an at-risk sample such as the one examined here, is still a period of transition in the work lives of individuals. While it is important to examine predictors of success in negotiating this transitional period, the predictors found to be most important in predicting success in work at this stage may not be the same predictors that are important in predicting success in work at a later stage in life. Future studies should investigate pathways to success in the transition to work not just in young adulthood, but in adulthood as well. Are the same variables important in predicting socialization to work in young adulthood and in subsequent adulthood? Does a successful negotiation of the transition to work in young adulthood predict socialization to work in adulthood? 103

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Future studies will also need to consider the effect of societal change on the process of socialization to work. Not only are many young adults unprepared for the changing labor market, but the market also offers them less security. Gone are the days when adults started in a business right out of high school and worked in that same business until retirement. Most adults in today’s labor market change jobs multiple times in the course of their adult work life. In addition, it is more common in this era for workers to either work and go to school simultaneously or to alternate between periods of time in work and periods in school. This trend is related to the declining economic position of workers who lack college credentials. Because of this more ﬂexible and often unstable work pattern, adults must possess a wide variety of skills, including general work-related skills, so that they can adapt to the range of different job settings they will likely encounter over the course of their careers (Mortimer, 2000). Given the many and varied economic and technological changes our society is currently experiencing, this is a particularly important time to be studying the process of socialization to work in adulthood. Moreover, due to recent welfare reforms, an increasing number of new and inexperienced young workers are seeking employment. With both work and workers changing so rapidly, it is imperative that we understand how individuals make an effective transition to adult work. To fully understand this transition, however, we believe that it is essential to employ a contextual developmental model. We need to consider both contemporaneous factors in individuals’ lives and important aspects of individuals’ prior developmental histories. It is only through a careful examination of the interaction among these factors across developmental phases that we can truly begin to comprehend the process of socialization to work in adulthood. For this model to be adequately tested, continued prospective, longitudinal research is essential. While the costs of such long-term study can be great, it provides our best opportunity for understanding how individuals are socialized to succeed in this important domain of adult functioning.

NOTE 1. To assess interrater reliability, 10% of the cases were scored by both coders. The resulting intraclass correlation coefﬁcient was 0.74. Discrepancies were discussed and a consensus reached. Inconsistencies or ambiguities in the coding scheme were corrected and relevant cases re-scored. For the 143 cases on which data were available, the mean score was 3.49 (Standard Deviation = 1.05). Although the scores were moderately positively skewed, all scale points were represented in the sample.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Parent-Child Project, directed by Byron Egeland, L. Alan Sroufe and W. Andrew Collins, is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (R01MH40864). Jeylan Mortimer deserves special acknowledgment for thoroughly reviewing earlier drafts of this chapter. I would also like to thank Byron Egeland for providing feedback concerning the planning of analyses and the reporting of results described here. Glenn Roisman, Michelle Englund, and Jessica Siebenbruner, graduate students and staff on the Parent-Child Project, should also be acknowledged for the considerable time and effort they contributed to the designing and coding of the outcome measures used in the analyses presented above.

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Hyson, D., & Roisman, G. (1999). Young adult employment and its developmental antecedents: Examining the predictive importance of work-relevant competencies. Manuscript in preparation. Kimmel, D. C. (1990). Adulthood and aging: An interdisciplinary, developmental view. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Lawler, E. E., & Hall, D. T. (1970). Relationship of job characteristics to job involvement, satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 54, 305–312. Levinson, E. M. (1995). Best practices in transition services. In: A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds), Best Practices in School Psychology-III (pp. 909–915). Washington, D.C.: National Association of School Psychologists. Levinson, E. M., & Brandt, J. (1997). Career development. In: G. G. Bear, K. M. Minke & A. Thomas (Eds), Children’s Needs II: Development, Problems and Aternatives (pp. 533–545). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists. Meyer, R. M., & Wise, D. A. (1982). High school preparation and early labor force experiences. In: R. B. Freeman & D. A. Wise (Eds), The Youth Labor Problem: Its Nature, Causes and Consequences (pp. 277–347). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mortimer, J. T. (forthcoming). Working and growing up in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mortimer, J. T. (2000, March). Transition to adult work roles. In: B. B. Brown (Chair), Adolescence in the 21st Century. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Chicago, IL. Mortimer, J. T. & Finch, M. D. (1996). Work, family and adolescent development. In: J. T. Mortimer & M. D.Finch (Eds), Adolescents, Work and Family: An Intergenerational, Developmental Analysis (pp. 1–25). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mortimer, J. T., & Lorence, J. (1995). The social psychology of work and organizations. In: K. Cook, G. Fine & J. House (Eds), Social Perspectives on Social Psychology (pp. 497–523). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Mortimer, J. T., & Simmons, R. G. (1978). Adult socialization. Annual Review of Sociology, 4, 421–454. Neeman, J., Hubbard, J., & Masten, A. S. (1995). The changing importance of romantic relationship involvement to competence from late childhood to late adolescence. Development and Psychopathology, 7, 727–750. Pallas, A. M. (2000). The effects of schooling on individual lives. In: M. T. Hallinan (Ed.), Handbook of the Sociology of Education (pp. 499–525). New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Peterson, R. M. (1982). Developing good workers (Report No. 143). Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 251 630). Pimentel, E. E. (1996). Effects of adolescent achievement and family goals on the early adult transition. In: J. T. Mortimer & M. D. Finch (Eds), Adolescents, Work and Family: An Intergenerational Developmental Analysis (pp. 191–220). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Schill, W. J., McCartin, R., & Meyer, K. (1985). Youth employment: Its relationship to academic and family variables. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 26, 155–163. School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 [On-line]. Available: www.stw.ed.gov Shaffer, D. (1999). Developmental psychology: Childhood and adolescence (5th ed.). New York: Brooks/Cole. Slavin, R. E., Karweit, N. L., & Wasik, B. A. (1994). Preventing early school failure: Research, policy, and practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

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Spivack, G., & Swift, M. (1982). Devereux elementary school behavior rating scales. Devon, PA: The Devereux Foundation. Sroufe, L. A. (1979). The coherence of individual development: Early care, attachment, and subsequent developmental issues. American Psychologist, 34, 834–841. Sroufe, L. A., & Fleeson, J. (1986). The coherence of family relationships. In: R. A. Hinde & J. Stevenson-Hinde (Eds), Relationships Within Families. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, D., & Eichorn, D. (1989). Overview. In: D. Stern & D. Eichorn (Eds), Adolescence and Work: Inﬂuences of Social Structure, Labor Markets, and Culture (pp. 3–13). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Szapocznik, J., & Coatsworth, J. D.(1999). An ecodevelopmental framework for organizing the inﬂuences on drug abuse: A developmental model of risk and protection. In: M. Glantz & C. R. Hartel (Eds), Drug Abuse: Origins and Interventions. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Tiggemann, M., & Wineﬁeld, A. H. (1989). Predictors of employment, unemployment and further study among school-leavers. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 62, 213–221. Vondracek, F., Lerner, R. M., & Schulenberg, J. E. (1986). Career development: A life-span developmental approach. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Waters, E., & Sroufe, L. A. (1983). Social competence as a developmental construct. Developmental Review, 3, 79–97. Wechsler, D. (1974). Wechsler intelligence scale for children – revised. New York, NY: Psychological Corporation. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Vintage Books. Woodcock, R. W., & Mather, N. (1989, 1990). WJ-R tests of achievement: Examiner’s manual. In R. W. Woodcock & M. B. Johnson, Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery – Revised. Allen, TX: DLM Teaching Resources.

APPENDIX Minnesota Parent-Child Project 23-Year Work Ethic Scale This scale is designed to assess participants’ work ethic. In making this rating, coders should consider two primary sets of issues: (1) the degree to which the participant indicates that work is an important part of his or her life and identity/sense of self, and (2) the level of irresponsible behavior the individual reports having engaged in at work in the past year. Participants’ current work status is only one of many criteria coders should consider in making their judgments. Participants who are currently unemployed may receive any score except a ﬁve on this scale, depending on the importance 107

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they appear to place on ﬁnding a job and on working in general and upon the level of irresponsible behavior they have demonstrated in whatever work experiences they may have had in the past year. In judging the level of importance (e.g. work is very important, important, somewhat important or of little or no importance) participants place on working, coders should consider participants’ responses to direct questions concerning the importance of work in their life. For those who are unemployed at the time of the assessment, coders should take into account whether they are currently looking for a job, and if so, how they are going about looking. In addition, raters should examine responses to questions about the things participants look for in a full-time job to see if these responses show that work is an important part of the participant’s life and identity (e.g. participant cites some “intrinsic” criteria, such as having a job related to his or her career goals, or having a job that makes him or her happy). In assessing participants’ level of irresponsible behavior, coders should examine the frequency with which participants have engaged in a variety of irresponsible activities at work in the past year. Low frequency behaviors will be deﬁned in this context as behaviors in which participants report engaging once a year. Moderate frequency behaviors are reported to have occurred 2-4 times per year. High frequency behaviors should be behaviors that the participant engages in ﬁve or more times per year. Among behaviors coders should consider are: tardiness/truancy, discipline for breaking rules, not doing the best job one could, staying away from work for no good reason when expected to be there, messing up on purpose to get back at other people at work, and alcohol and drug use on the job. An individual may be “bumped” up the scale if they have worked full-time since they were 21 years old. An individual may also be bumped down the scale if they haven’t worked at all in the last two years, or have frequently changed from job to job. 5. Participant demonstrates an outstanding work ethic. Individual is currently employed and indicates that working is a very important part of his or her life and identity. There is evidence of at most one or two isolated instances of any irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. ANCHOR CASE FOR 5: Participant is currently employed and says that work is both a very important part of his current life and of his identity. He also reports that he plans to stay in his current job “for awhile.” While he admits having been late for work once in the past year, he claims that this was because his car broke down and says that he experienced no

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repercussions at work as a result of being late. He has also only once not done the best he could at work. In addition, he cites many intrinsic characteristics which are important to him in potential jobs. 4. Participant demonstrates a good work ethic. (a) Individual is currently unemployed, but indicates that working is a very important part of his or her life and identity. There may also be evidence of a low frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year, but this is not necessary for an individual with this proﬁle to receive a 4. (b) Individual is currently employed and indicates that working is at least an important part of his or her life and identity. There is also evidence of a low frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. 3. Participant demonstrates a moderate work ethic. (a) Individual is currently unemployed, but indicates that working is an important part of his or her life and identity. There may also be evidence of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year, but this is not necessary for an individual with this proﬁle to receive a 3. (b) Individual is currently employed and indicates that working is at least an important part of his or her life and identity. There is also evidence of a moderate frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. (c) Individual is currently employed and indicates that working is a somewhat important part of his or her life and identity. There is also evidence of a low frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. ANCHOR CASE FOR 3: Participant is currently employed and says that while work is very important to him to pay the bills, it is only fairly important in comparison to other things in his life and not too important in affecting who he is. Whether or not he stays in his current job will depend on pay. If he ﬁnds something better, he will move on. He reports having been late to work a couple of times, upsetting his boss, but receiving no other consequences. In addition, he stayed away from work for no good reason when he was expected to be there once in the past year. The important things he looks for in a job are also primarily extrinsic characteristics. 2. Participant demonstrates a minimal work ethic. (a) Individual is currently unemployed and indicates that working is a somewhat important part of his or her life and identity. There may also be evidence of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year, but this is not necessary for an individual with this proﬁle to receive a two. 109

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(b) Individual is currently employed, but indicates that working is a somewhat important part of his or her life and identity. There is also evidence of a moderate frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. 1. Participant demonstrates little or no work ethic. (a) Individual is currently unemployed and indicates that working is of little or no importance to his or her life and identity. There may also be evidence of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year, but this is not necessary for an individual with this proﬁle to receive a 1. (b) Individual is currently employed, but indicates that working is of little or no importance to his or her life and identity. There is also evidence of a high frequency of irresponsible behavior at work in the past year. ANCHOR CASE FOR 1: Participant is currently unemployed and says that work is not too important right now for him either in relation to other things or in making him who he is as a person. He is not currently looking for work and cites mainly extrinsic qualities he looks for in a potential job. He also reports having been late for work ﬁve or more times in the past year.

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5. THE RELATIONSHIP OF TURNING POINTS AT WORK TO PERCEPTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL GROWTH AND CHANGE Elaine Wethington Over the past decade, despite an expanding economy, American workers have had to adjust to increasing long-term job insecurity. Many must retrain to meet job expectations, or change careers over the course of their work lives. These changes in employment patterns and work demands have confronted adults with multiple transitions, choices, and decisions over the course of their work lives. These changes may also have led to shifts in the ways young and middle-aged workers typically view the role of work in their lives, their long-term commitment and loyalty to work organizations, and their deﬁnitions of career. The aim of this study is to explore perceptions of psychological growth and change during adulthood, in the context of work. Social scientists have typically studied role transitions, socialization and psychological change that involve entering or leaving major life roles (Settersten, 1999). This study explores work transitions, socialization, and psychological growth and change using the concept of “turning point” (Clausen, 1995; Elder, 1998). Clausen (1995, 1998) utilized a self report design to study turning points, asking people to identify what they believed were the times when their lives “took a different direction from that in which one had been traveling” (Clausen, 1998, p. 202). Rather than reporting major events or role transitions that radically changed the course of life, many participants in

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Clausen’s study reported “changing attitudes and feelings or personal development” (p. 205). Clausen labeled these latter reports “little” turning points, and suggested that they could be analyzed as indicators of perceived personal growth and change across the life span. The study utilizes three studies of self-reported turning points at work. The measures used in these studies replicate Clausen’s methods. The ﬁrst study (N = 3,032) is the MacArthur Foundation National Study of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS, Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998), a national random-digit dial telephone sample of the lower 48 states. The second (N = 724) is the Psychological Turning Points Study (Wethington, 2000), a national telephone study follow-up to the MacArthur Foundation National Study of Midlife (MIDUS). The third (N = 632) is the Cornell Couples and Career Study (CCCS; Moen, Harris-Abbott & Roehling, 1999), a sample of middle class employed couples in upstate New York, primarily professionals and managers. The national studies represent Americans from age 25–74, the full range of typical career experience. The New York study targets a population working in companies and other organizations that are rapidly adapting and reorganizing in response to a changing economy. Participants in all of these studies were asked if they had experienced a “turning point” in job or career over the past several years. Those who reported turning points were asked to describe what event or situation triggered the turning point, and what impact the experience had on their lives. What Is a Turning Point? According to Clausen (1998), self-reported turning points reﬂect personal judgments and appraisals of the course and meaning of one’s life, as well as adaptations to important role transitions with social meaning (college graduation, marriage, or the birth of a ﬁrst child). Self-reported turning points include highly personalized periods of change or decision, such as changes in working conditions that tested the strength of commitment to a particular job or career. Self-reported turning points are thus quite distinct from reports of major life events and life transitions (Gotlib & Wheaton, 1997). Self-reported turning points are nevertheless useful to study because they offer a snapshot of how people at a particular point of time in history experience psychological growth and change across their course of life. This paper approaches the analysis of turning points at work and adult socialization from two related theoretical perspectives, the life event and the autobiographical memory perspectives. The ﬁrst perspective derives from research on stressful life events and chronic difﬁculties (e.g. Brown & Harris,

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1978). The life event perspective assumes that turning points at work are consequences of signiﬁcant changes in work, career trajectory, or work involvement. The impact on the person is determined, at least in part, by the objective characteristics of the situation itself. The second perspective derives from research on autobiographical memory processes. The assumption of this approach is that the report of a work turning point is constructed by the process of assigning meaning to past events, in the context of the present (Ross & Newby-Clark, 1998). Clausen (1995, 1998) utilized the second approach extensively in his studies of turning points. Clausen observed that many people designated internal, psychological changes or reinterpretations of commitments to roles as where their lives went on a different trajectory. Such internal changes are by deﬁnition not visible to an outside observer. Although events and difﬁculties may provoke turning points, the post hoc appraisal of an event as a turning point is dependent on individual factors that may have little to do with the objective, observable features of the event (cf. Lazarus, 1999). Indeed, perceptions of a situation as constituting a turning point may change over a person’s life, depending on intervening events. What may appear to be a critical life turning point in early adulthood (being laid off from an Internet start-up ﬁrm) may appear less signiﬁcant as a result of subsequent events (going back to school and changing careers). The autobiographical memory report has its difﬁculties, primarily methodological ones that result from its reliance on self-report rather than investigator observation. But it has considerable virtues for describing the processes of personal growth and change that contemporary Americans derive from work, particularly in tempestuous economic times. Work changes may be more likely to be perceived as “turning points” if conscious awareness of an important change has emerged in the context of subsequent events. Theoretical Perspectives on the Emotional Meaning of Work What does work mean to contemporary Americans? Theorists have long observed that work gives people a setting for productive activity, identity development, and accomplishment, as well as ﬁnancial sustenance (Rothman, 1998). The occupation or career is a major form of social integration into society. Occupations and careers constitute a means of socialization into adult roles and responsibilities, as they change across the life course and in the context of particular task demands. Research on socialization through work is intimately connected to theories of positive psychological growth across the life span. Brieﬂy stated, socialization to responsibility across adulthood is encouraged by confrontation and management 113

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of increasingly complex demands at work and other social roles symbolic of peak adult functioning (Erikson, 1963). The assumption of the psychological approach is that social patterns of role responsibilities in modern societies developed to be consistent with the maturity and ego development of people of particular ages. Successful passage though transitions associated with maturity results in acceptance of social responsibility and emotional fulﬁllment from meeting those responsibilities (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson & McKee, 1978). Theorists have typically differed in how they deﬁne and envision the socialization processes of work, career, occupation, and by implication, adulthood. Socialization theories fall into two general categories, social structural and dialectical theories of growth and change. More traditional sociological perspectives on socialization emphasize the social patterning of events and transitions across the life course, in typical roles (e.g. Havinghurst, 1972). Applied to career or occupation, work transition events such as entry, career consolidation, and retirement are keyed to age. According to this perspective transitions are confined to relatively narrow age groups, and the transitions are apt to be appropriate to the maturity, experience, and life situations of those passing through the transition. For example, “off-time” transitions are posited to pose challenges to successful adjustment. Those who enter career jobs very early in their lives might encounter difficulties because of coworkers’ attitudes toward the new hire’s alleged lack of maturity. Those who enter career jobs later in their lives could encounter difficulties because of social judgments that stigmatize late entrants as “laggards.” Psychological, developmental, and life course perspectives on socialization emphasize a dialectical process of development, shaped by the interaction between environmental demands and individual choice. Individual history, experience, and talents have an impact on the timing and content of transitions (e.g. Baltes, 1993; Brim, 1992; Clausen, 1993; Riegel, 1975; Vaillant, 1977). “Off-time” transitions are assumed to pose less challenge to those who are prepared for them because of their education, preparation, experience, personality, and talent. Dialectical theorists differ considerably in how much they emphasize the inﬂuence of social demands, patterning, and norms on adjustment to transitions during adulthood. However, all share the assumption that the individual is an active agent in the process of socialization, and that conﬂicts and decision periods are at the nexus of socialization and successful development. Growth occurs in periods of crisis, i.e. “effective adaptation to stress permits us to live” (Vaillant, 1977, p. 105). Dialectical perspectives as well emphasize the role of demands, challenges, and stress in promoting psychological change (e.g. Thurnher, 1983). They have

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also been applied to explain why stress exposure has positive, rather than negative consequences in some instances (Aldwin, Sutton & Lachman, 1996), including perceived personal growth (e.g. Park, Cohen & Murch, 1996; Wethington, in press). In tandem with the rise of dialectical approaches to understanding adult socialization, the concept of “career” has been shaped by changes in the longterm economic commitment of organizations to their workers. Post-World War II research on “career” conceived of it as a trajectory patterned by job demands set by organizations (e.g. Super, 1957). Through the 1960s and 1970s, theorists began to see career as deﬁned in a dynamic tension between the demands of organizations versus individual desires for self actualization, encouraged by other social institutions (e.g. Sarason, 1977). During the 1990s, in the midst of new threats to lifetime job security, the term “career” began to be applied to the person, rather than to the job embedded in the organization. Speciﬁcally, beliefs grew that it is the individual who must make the career, independent of organizational commitment or stability (e.g. Keegan, 1994). In the beginning of the 21st century, self-help books extol the virtues of the self-directed career, independent of traditional work organizations. Although historical evidence is scant, what there is suggests that since the 1950s work may have become more important to the development of a sense of maturity among Americans, both men and women. Veroff, Douvan, and Kulka (1981), analyzing data on the sources of happiness and unhappiness in national samples of Americans, concluded that from 1957 through 1976 work became more salient to both men and women as a source of identity. In 1976, both men and women appeared to have higher expectations for acquiring gratiﬁcation through their jobs, and these higher expectations had an impact on both increased conﬂict and greater satisfaction experienced through work. Empirical research on identity derived from jobs and career (e.g. Clausen, 1993) suggests that the movement of more women into lifetime career jobs increased the emotional salience of work for women throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Some recent theoretical work on adult development suggests that the salience of work to identity – and its consequent impact on continuing socialization across the life course – has continued to increase since 1976. Keegan (1994), near the turn of the 21st century, pointed out that demands for personal investment and responsibility at work were increasing and spilling over into other aspects of life. Speciﬁcally, to meet the contemporary expectations for “professionalism” Americans must develop the capacity to “invent our own work . . . to be self-initiating, self-correcting, self-evaluating . . . guided by own visions . . . to be accomplished masters of our particular work roles, jobs, or careers” (Keegan, 1994, pp. 152–153). 115

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Study Research Questions To summarize, this study examines self-reports of personal growth and change in relationship to work and career, reported by respondents as “turning points.” Research and theory in adult development and the life course suggest that work turning points will be associated with characteristics of work life that deﬁne success, such as promotions and other upward career moves (Keegan, 1994; Levinson et al., 1978). Reporting a work turning point may also be related to being a professional or a manager, occupations that pose demands for active career management as well as cognitive complexity (Keegan, 1994). Work turning points may be related to adaptation to stress, with turning points more likely among those exposed to work stressors (Wethington, in press). Dialectical perspectives on adult socialization also predict that reports of work turning points will be related to personality characteristics (Vaillant, 1987). It is likely that the relevant personality characteristics are those typically associated with reactions to life stressors and beliefs associated with appraisal of and coping with challenging events and situations (Thurnher, 1983; Vaillant, 1977). These characteristics and beliefs include level of insight into the self, the capacity to reﬂect on and to make sense of changes, learning from experience, self-directedness, and negative affect. In sum, demands produce adaptation and change (Vaillant, 1977).

DATA This study utilizes a mixed quantitative-qualitative analysis approach. Three studies of work turning points are used; key characteristics of the datasets are summarized in Table 1. Quantitative approaches are used to explore the distribution of work turning points in the population and to predict who will report a work turning point. I address questions about the content of work turning points using a qualitative approach, by categorizing people’s descriptions of them. The quantitative analyses are conducted on data about work turning points from participants in the MacArthur Foundation National Study of Mildife (MIDUS). This is a national sample generated by random digit dialing selection procedures. The exact response rate for MIDUS could not be computed because only about half of the people contacted were eligible for the interview, and only eligible participants are included in calculating the response rate. This estimated response rate was 70% for the telephone interview, 86.8% for the completion of the subsequent mail questionnaires among telephone respondents, yielding an overall response rate of 60.8% (0.70 ⫻ 0.868). For greater detail on

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Table 1.

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Sample Characteristics of Three Studies of Work Turning Points. National Study Of Midlife (MIDUS)

Psychological Turning Points Study (PTP)

Cornell Couples and Careers Study (CCCS)

Target Population

U.S. population

Random follow-up to MIDUS

Dual earner couples in upstate New York

Mode of Administration

Self-administered

Telephone

Telephone

Year Data Collected

1995

1998

1998

Sample Size

3032 (weighted)

724

632

Mean Age

47.0

41.7

53.6

Age Range

25–74

28–76

29–74

the MIDUS sample and response rate see Mroczek and Kolarz (1998). The interviews took place in 1995. A series of weights was developed that adjusted for differences in: (1) the probability of selection, and (2) differential non-response by SES, race, age, gender, and other factors. Use of the weight adjusts for differences between the MIDUS sample and the adult U.S. population. All analyses that estimate population prevalence use weighted data. The weighted sample N is 3,032. Two studies provide the opportunity for more in-depth analyses. These studies are the Psychological Experiences Study (PTP; Wethington, 2000) and the Cornell Couples and Careers Study (CCCS; Moen, Harris-Abbott & Roehling, 1999). The Psychological Turning Points Study re-interviewed 724 MIDUS participants, randomly selected. The PTP data were collected from January through September 1998. The PTP survey was administered on the telephone. The study repeated the work turning point questions from MIDUS, with additional probes. Interviewers in PTP were trained to probe tactfully for concrete information, if the respondent was vague about details in response to the initial probes. This longitudinal design allows for a prospective prediction of who reports a work turning point in PTP. The second source of detailed data is the Life Transitions Module of the Cornell Couples and Careers Study (CCCS, N = 632). CCCS was designed as a study of middle-class couples pursuing dual careers. The sources of the CCCS sample were companies and organizations in upstate New York, including manufacturers, health organizations, and universities. The interviews took place in 1998, approximately the same time as the PTP data collection. Because of the nature of the sample, the CCCS is not a representative sample of the working 117

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population, although its participants are likely to resemble a regional or national sample of professionals and managers. These are people for whom the concept of career could have special emotional salience. Measures of Turning Points at Work In MIDUS respondents were asked seven questions about the occurrence of turning points in the 12 months prior to the interview. One question was about work or career. The concept of turning point was deﬁned in an introduction to the question sequence: The following questions are about what we call psychological turning points. Psychological turning points are major changes in the ways that people feel or think about an important part of their lives, such as work, family, and beliefs about themselves and about the world. Turning points involve people changing their feelings about how important or meaningful some aspect of life is or how much commitment they give it.

The question about turning points involving changes at work or career was: With this deﬁnition in mind, in the past 12 months, did you have a psychological turning point that involved your job or career? This could be an experience like increasing the amount of effort you put into your job or career, cutting back on your job to spend more time with your family, deciding to change careers, now or in the future, or leaving your job to do something different

If respondents checked yes to having a work turning point in MIDUS, they were asked to write about what happened and what impact it had on them. The MIDUS questions about turning points were developed in three small-scale pilot studies exploring different ways of describing this concept for participants (Wethington, Cooper & Holmes, 1997). The telephone interview studies yielded more extensive data about turning points. In CCCS, respondents were asked whether they had had a work turning point in the three years preceding the interview, and in PTP, the ﬁve years preceding the interview. In both CCCS and PTP, respondents were asked what happened, and (in PTP) when it happened and what impact it had on them. The extra probes in PTP were: In what year did that happen? (In what month?) Brieﬂy, what happened? What impact did this have on you? Reported work turning points are common in all three samples. In the MIDUS study, 25.6% of participants reported a work turning point taking place in the 12 months preceding the interview. In PTP, 49.6% of respondents reported a work turning point in the past ﬁve years, 20.6% in the year preceding the interview. In CCCS, 57.6% reported turning points in the past three years (the percent in the 12 months preceding the interview cannot be determined).

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Analysis Strategy The narratives for work turning points in PTP and CCCS were coded for their themes. An interactive process was used to develop the code, which emerged from classiﬁcation of responses. All turning points were double-coded, and discrepancies resolved by a third coder. The major theme for coding was the cause to which people attributed their turning points. The attribution was then classiﬁed as a job or career change, and whether it was prompted by external events (e.g. company going out of business) or by personal choice (e.g. deciding to change to a more secure career).

RESULTS Distribution of Work Turning Points in MIDUS by Age, Gender, Education, and Occupational Status Table 2 presents data on the distribution of work turning points in the population. The largest of the representative datasets (MIDUS) is used for these analyses because MIDUS was weighted to represent the population. Turning points at work are the most frequently reported turning points in MIDUS and PTP (Wethington, Kessler & Pixley, in press), an indirect indicator of the salience of work to identity. Work turning points are similarly distributed by age, education, and occupational status in both PTP and CCCS. (In PTP and CCCS, however, overall reports of work turning points do not differ signiﬁcantly by gender.) Age, gender, educational attainment, and professional/managerial occupational status are all signiﬁcantly related to reporting a turning point at work in MIDUS. Women report signiﬁcantly more turning points at work than men. This is true across all age groups (Table 2, panel 1), educational attainments (panel 2), and occupational statuses (panel 3). Overall, younger people are more likely to report work turning points. People with at least some college education are also signiﬁcantly more likely to report a work turning point. This ﬁnding might seem to contradict well-known observations in life events research that lower status people will be more exposed to stressors (Thoits, 1995). However, it may also indicate that designation of a situation as a turning point is likely to be affected by appraisal and autobiographical memory factors as well as by the event itself (Thurnher, 1983). And, turning points may also be caused by positive events, which could be more common among higher status workers. Consistent with the latter interpretation, respondents working in professional and managerial jobs are more likely to report turning points at work (Table 2). 119

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Table 2.

Reports of Work Turning Points by Gender, Age Group, Education, and Occupational Status (MIDUS). Men (N = 1317) (%)

Women (N = 1715) (%)

25.7 25.4 25.5 17.3 12.3

34.5 29.9 29.6 22.1 12.8

Chi 2

16.81**

39.37***

Less Than High School High School Some College Completed College

11.4 19.9 26.8 29.3

16.2 23.6 36.4 36.4

Chi 2

25.70***

40.49***

Professional or Manager Others

29.8 20.4

38.3 24.9

Chi 2

13.25***

25.07***

Age Age Age Age Age

25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65–74

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

Causes of Turning Points at Work Table 3 presents coded narrative data from CCCS and PTP on the causes to which people attribute work turning points. Not surprisingly, the predominant cause reported in both samples is a job or career change. In CCCS, 46% of men and 51% of women reported that a job or career change “caused” a turning point. The proportions attributing a turning point to a job or career change in PTP are higher, 68% of men and 69% of women. Job insecurity is mentioned by 25% of CCCS men and 13% of CCCS women. A smaller proportion of PTP participants (7%) attribute their work turning point to job insecurity, consistent with the somewhat less insecure job climate for professionals nationally in 1998, in comparison to upstate New York. However, the proportions of CCCS and PTP participants who attribute a work turning point to actual layoffs are roughly similar (7–8%). It is notable that most participants do not attribute work turning points to family issues, however women do so more frequently than men. For example, 78% of CCCS women and 72% of PTP women do not spontaneously attribute work turning points to work-family conﬂict. This was somewhat surprising, given recent research that scaling back work commitments and hours is a popular

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Table 3.

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Reported Causes of Turning Points at Work, by Gender, CCCS and PTP (Up to Three Mentions Coded Per Respondent). CCCS Men N (%)

Job or Career Changes Layoffs Job Insecurity Other Negative Job Promotions, Awards, Recognition Retirement Work-Family Issues Own Illness Other

PTP Women N (%)

Men N (%)

Women N (%)

78 (46) 12 (7) 44 (25) 19 (11)

89 9 24 19

(51) (5) (13) (11)

123 12 14 11

(68) (7) (7) (6)

121 10 12 15

(69) (8) (7) (9)

25 (14) 5 (3) 14 (8) 2 (1) 11 (6)

39 4 39 7 10

(22) (2) (22) (4) (6)

20 31 24 13 18

(12) (17) (13) (7) (10)

18 22 48 17 19

(10) (13) (28) (10) (11)

CCCS percentages based on reports from 174 men and 180 women who reported turning points at work. PTP percentages are based on 180 men and 174 women. Column percentages add up to more than 100 because up to three mentions were coded per respondent.

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strategy to balance career demands and family in dual-earner couples (Becker & Moen, 1999). On the other hand, the ﬁndings are consistent with an autobiographical memory perspective. Scaling back can be perceived as a temporary strategy rather than a permanent one that affects long-term work commitment (Wethington, Pixley, & Kavey, in press). The gender difference is consistent with previous observations that women are more responsive to family demands (e.g. Kessler & McLeod, 1984). Table 3 also shows that positive as well as negative events and situations can trigger turning points. For example, retirements can be construed as positive events (the majority mentioned were planned). Many of the job and career changes reported were also positive, voluntary changes, which will be described in more detail below. Another way of looking at the cause of a turning point is to consider whether it was attributed to an external event, or whether it was attributed to choice or self-direction. Five different types of reported choices and constraints emerged from the narrative descriptions of turning points. One was deciding to “cut back” on career involvement to accommodate family demands, personal ambitions, failing health, or aging. Its opposite was to decide to increase career involvement. A third category consisted of job changes caused by company reorganization and downsizing (involuntary job changes). Another category was choosing to change jobs in order to realize ambitions, improve career 121

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Table 4.

Self-Reported Choices for Job and Career Changes, CCCS and PTP, by Gender (Percents). CCCS

Cut Back In Career Involvement Increase In Career Involvement Involuntary Job Change Voluntary Job Change Other Job Change Gender Difference Chi2

PTP

Men

Women

Men

Women

13.3 10.2 43.0 26.6 7.0

24.7 21.4 28.6 22.7 2.6

16.1 6.7 25.6 40.0 11.7

24.3 6.4 26.0 31.8 11.6

17.63, p < 0.01

4.60, n.s.

trajectory or salary, or to pre-empt a layoff (voluntary job changes). A ﬁfth was a job change that was described as a combination of the preceding two. The distribution of reports is summarized in Table 4. The major difference between the two samples is that more of the job changes in CCCS are speciﬁcally described as involuntary, while in PTP a larger proportion are described as voluntary. This is consistent with the job market in upstate New York, where major employers contracted in the 1990s while other parts of the U.S. boomed. One might predict, given the emphasis on self-direction in professional and managerial occupations (e.g. Keegan, 1994), that people in those occupations would be more likely to report job changes that they pursued themselves. However, this is not the case. Other analyses (not presented) show that professionals and managers do not make more voluntary job changes than those in other occupations. The large proportion of forced job changes reported in the CCCS data, where the majority of participants work in professional and managerial occupations, suggests that location constrains the use of self-direction as an adaptive strategy. Turning Points at Work and Perceptions of Personal Growth Do those who report a turning point at work believe it resulted in personal growth and change? Table 5 examines whether those who reported a turning point spontaneously reported personal growth as an outcome of the experience. Data like these are available only from PTP because CCCS did not include questions about perceived impact. The answer is a guarded “sometimes.” Most men (61%) and women (62%) reported positive impacts, even though the majority of reported causes were spontaneously described as either stressful or challenging situations. Many of the positive impacts are related to successful mastery or resolution of the

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Table 5.

123

Summary of Self-Reported Impacts of Work Turning Points, by Gender (PTP): Selected Most Frequent Responses.

Positive Impacts Shifted Focus to Personal Life Greater Self-Conﬁdence Enjoyed the Challenge Relief from Stress More Money Negative Impacts Financial Loss Life Disrupted Increased Stress

Men

Women

61%

62%

11 4 9 7 7

11 7 8 8 2

39%

38%

6 3 5

7 4 4

situation that caused the turning point, such as a career change that turned out well, or an impending layoff that was resolved by starting a successful business of one’s own. Intrinsic rewards (e.g. greater self conﬁdence) predominate over extrinsic impacts (more money). For example, 11% of participants reported that the major impact was a welcome shift of energy away from career to personal life. (This was the most frequently endorsed positive impact.) These are instances not only of “cutting back” to resolve work-family conﬂict, but also shifts to less demanding careers that allowed time to pursue volunteering or other, more rewarding interests. Others reported gaining more self-conﬁdence, enjoying new challenges and achievements, and relief from stress. In contrast, frequently-mentioned negative impacts of work turning points reﬂect a lack of perceived mastery over work (more stress) and life in general (ﬁnancial losses and life disruptions). Negative events undoubtedly have negative impacts, but many respondents also report that they have positive impacts. Whether or not a turning point is perceived as having a positive or negative impact may be related to whether the job or career change was brought about by personal choice or external events, and also to the type of situation that brought about the turning point. The relationship of the impact of work turning points to the type of provoking situation is presented in Table 6. The ﬁrst panel displays the relationship of personal choice to self-reported impact. Involuntary job changes are the most likely to have a negative impact (64.7%). Voluntary job changes are the most likely to have positive impacts (81%) (closely trailed by the job changes that could not be classiﬁed). Consistent with the notion of “scaling back” 123

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Table 6.

ELAINE WETHINGTON

Perceived Impact of Work Turning Points by Self-Reported Cause of Turning Point (PTP).

Self-Reported Choice for Job or Career Change Positive Impact (%) Cut Back In Career Involvement Increase In Career Involvement Involuntary Job Change Voluntary Job Change Other Job Change

62.3 70.0 35.3 81.0 78.9

Negative Impact (%) 37.7 30.0 64.7 19.0 21.1

Selected Speciﬁc Events Triggering Turning Points

Going Back to School Retirement Changing Career Becoming Self-Employed Promotion Becoming a Parent Own Illness Laid Off

Positive Impact (%)

Negative Impact (%)

85.7 79.4 78.9 76.5 62.5 53.3 44.8 33.3

14.3 20.6 21.1 23.5 37.5 46.7 55.2 66.7

(Becker & Moen, 1999), cut backs in career involvement are also predominantly perceived as positive (62.3%). However, it is evident that people can also perceive good things resulting from bad events, and vice versa, suggesting that the subsequent events after the change play an important role in its long-term psychological impact (e.g. Brown & Harris, 1978). The second panel of Table 6 displays positive and negative impacts by types of speciﬁc events that were reported as triggering turning points. (Due to the many different types of triggers, a selection is discussed here.) On average, people tend to view retirement, an event involving choice, as having a positive impact (79.4%) and being laid off, usually an involuntary situation, as having a negative impact (66.7% negative). However parenthood, which is also often the result of choice, is less consistently perceived (46.7% negative, 53.3% positive), and more ambivalently perceived (in analyses not shown, half of new parents report both positive and negative impacts). This suggests that control over the outcome of a change may also be an important factor in determining appraisal of the impact. Similarly, having a career turning point caused by illness tends to be negatively perceived (55.2% negative), with negative impact more likely reported by those who contracted chronic and incurable illnesses rather than a temporary state of illness or disability.

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What Predicts Reporting a Turning Points at Work? The presentation in the previous section about self-reported causes and impacts of work turning points suggests that difﬁculties at work and changing jobs will be associated with reporting a turning point. However, the data are inconclusive about cause because only those who reported a work turning point provided information. What remains unclear is whether some situations or events are more likely to result in the report of a work turning point, a prediction consistent with the life event perspective. It also leaves unclear whether certain types of people are more likely to experience a turning point than others. That is, can one predict prospectively who will report a work turning point? The fact that the Psychological Turning Points Study was a follow-up to the MIDUS can be used to test a number of different propositions about how work situations and individual differences may be associated with reporting a turning point. In the PTP, respondents were asked to report about any work turning points occurring in the last ﬁve years. The MIDUS contained measures of job stress and job insecurity, collected three years before the PTP. MIDUS also measured aspects of personality and beliefs that might increase the propensity to report a turning point at work. The PTP included a series of questions that asked about job losses and promotions or getting a “better job” in the past ﬁve years. These sets of measures were included in a series of logistic regressions that examined the contribution of pre-existing chronic stress, personality factors, and life events to provoking the report of a work turning point. Table 7 summarizes the analyses. Variables were entered in groups to assess the relative contribution of different sets of factors to reporting a turning point at work. For these analyses, only respondents who were employed at the time of the MIDUS data collection in 1995 were included. Column 1 displays the relationship of some key demographic factors to reporting a work turning point, and is the “baseline” to which subsequent models are compared. Only the dummy variable coding for having some college education is a signiﬁcant predictor. The model ﬁts the data poorly. Column 2 examines whether job conditions reported in 1995 are signiﬁcantly related to reporting a work turning point in 1998. Chronic job stress (a composite of rating of interpersonal stressors and demands at work) is not related to reporting a work turning point, but feeling a lack of job security in 1995 is signiﬁcantly related. The overall estimated ﬁt of the model improves signiﬁcantly. However, the percent of cases predicted correctly is only a little increased from baseline, indicating a relatively poor ﬁt. Column 3 controls for two types of job changes that the more qualitative analyses of turning points identiﬁed as important, job losses and promotions or 125

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Table 7. Logistic Regression of Work Turning Points on Demographic Indicators, Chronic Stressors, Recent Work Events, and Personality, PTP (N = 479). b Age (Years) Professional/Manager Some College Female Job Stress 1995 Job Insecurity 1995 Promotion Since 1995 Job Loss Since 1995 Neuroticism 1995 Insight 1995 Reappraisal 1995 Self Direction 1995 Turning Points 1995 Constant % Predicted Correctly

b

b

–0.01 –0.29 0.95*** 0.28

–0.01 –0.25 0.94*** 0.27 0.02 1.43*

0.00 –0.11 0.66* 0.22* –0.03 1.21 1.37*** 3.53***

0.35 63.1

0.25 64.1

–1.17* 70.6

b 0.00 –0.14 0.69* 0.05 –0.13 1.29 1.37*** 3.69*** 0.05 0.20 0.13 –0.31 0.44*** –1.37 74.8

The regressions are conﬁned to respondents who were employed in 1995. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.

changes to “better” jobs. The dummy variables include only the job changes that took place since the MIDUS interview. Both types of job changes are signiﬁcantly related to reporting a work turning point and their inclusion substantially improves the ﬁt of the model, predicting more cases correctly. The coefﬁcient associated with job loss is larger than that associated with promotions, even though job losses are reported much less often. The analysis suggests that if the PTP had included more detailed measures of life events involving work and other aspects of life affecting work, such as the onset or worsening of chronic health problems, I could have predicted more cases of work turning points. Finally, column 4 examines whether personality and belief factors, measured in 1995, predict reporting a turning point at work. Four multi-item personality and belief measures are included: (1) trait Neuroticism, (2) how much the respondent analyzes past events to gain self-insight, (3) how much the respondent uses reappraisal to cope with stress, and (4) how much he or she relies on self-direction rather than direction from others (Wethington, in press). In addition, I included a count of the number of turning points reported by the participant in 1995 (ranging from 0 to 7). This count may reﬂect some combination of unmeasured personality factors, unmeasured stressor exposure,

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or a response style that increases the probability of reporting a work turning point. Among this set of variables, only the number of turning points reported in 1995 is a signiﬁcant predictor (and it improves the ﬁt of the model). Controlling for these factors does not reduce the coefﬁcients for job loss and promotions, suggesting that environmental change and self-directed action to improve one’s career or job promote self-perceived psychological change to a greater degree than pre-existing differences in personality characteristics.

DISCUSSION This study examined self-reports of personal growth and change in relationship to work and career, reported by respondents as “turning points at work.” Research and theory in adult development and the life course suggest that work turning points will be associated with characteristics of work life that deﬁne success, such as promotions. Work turning points may be related to adapting to negative work events, particularly situations that are resolved successfully. The study examined as well whether reports of work turning points are related to personality characteristics that are related to the successful management of demands and challenges. The study found that challenge and stress produce adaptation and change (Vaillant, 1977). First, the study found that turning points at work are related to achieving success at work. Reporting a psychological turning point is significantly related to having received a recent promotion or having changed to a better job. Analyses of the intensive data suggest that promotions and getting better jobs are perceived as contributing to perceived positive growth and change for many who experience them. It is important that many of the improvements in career are described as self-directed. In fact, perceptions of experiencing growth and change are more frequently mentioned as impacts than increased extrinsic rewards from a better job, such as more pay. The results tend to reject the idea that work turning points are more frequently reported by people who work in professional and managerial occupations. This is because the relationship of occupational status with work turning points is not signiﬁcant when educational attainment is controlled. It is possible that higher education per se may provide a capacity or tendency to perceive personal growth and change, and that its effects transcend occupation. Reports of turning points are strongly related to involuntary job loss (and other situations indicating job insecurity). However, it is notable that not all of the reported long-term impacts of work turning points involving job loss are negative. The qualitative data suggest that people believe they derive positive 127

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feelings of growth and change from stressful situations that they were able to resolve well (cf. Pearlin & Schooler, 1978; Thoits, 1994). The analyses examining the role of personality in experiencing work turning points are more complex to interpret. By themselves, personality factors measured in 1995 do not predict the propensity to report a work turning point in 1998. But it is clear from the qualitative data that people are active agents who make choices, such as career changes, that may later be appraised as turning points. Take as an example people who make pre-emptive job changes in order to avoid layoffs. They undoubtedly differ from people who are unable to anticipate layoffs, or who cannot organize themselves before the layoff to ﬁnd another job. Perhaps they differ in characteristics such as foresight, boldness, and fear of failure, characteristics that MIDUS did not measure. But they may also differ in level of resources or live in regions of the country where opportunities to change jobs are more or less abundant. Alternative Interpretations A study based on self report data – in essence, post hoc appraisals of events that people now regard as signiﬁcant and life-changing – cannot produce conclusive answers to questions about the impacts of recent economic changes and reorganization of ﬁrms on the emotional salience of work in adult development and change. The fact that about a quarter of women and about half that proportion of men report that work-family conﬂict “caused” a work turning point could mean that work has become more salient to identity over time, relative to family roles. However, it could also mean that people believed talking about family demands was an inappropriate response to the questions. The study of self-perceived turning points is relatively new, and historical comparisons are not readily made. This study is also limited by not being able to track actual changes in perceived personal growth or role identiﬁcation over time. Neither MIDUS nor PTP contained appropriate measures to conduct such analyses. There is also considerable reason to believe that appraisals of past events change over time, depending on distance from the event and intervening events that may change the “meaning” of them (e.g. Ross & Newby-Clark, 1998). Recall of personally signiﬁcant events is also afﬂicted with a number of recall biases that may affect interpretation. For example, a person who reports a job change that turns out well might be motivated to claim credit for initiating it. And a person reporting a job change that turned out badly may be motivated to blame someone else for the situation. Thus the qualitative analysis of reported attributions may reﬂect more about how “things turned out” than what actually

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happened. It might also reﬂect the high moral value that Americans give to self-initiative as a form of adaptation. Implications for Future Research Despite these limitations, this study has many useful implications. The study has made a contribution to understanding perceptions of personal growth and change – self-perceived “role socialization” – in response to challenging and stressful events. The qualitative results imply that stress exposure is not necessarily problematic. People make choices in their lives that expose them to more stress and challenge. Challenges that are within the capacity of people to resolve themselves through hard work and effort may contribute to perceiving positive growth and change (Park et al., 1996). Clearly, people must learn from experience how to choose the most manageable challenges (Brim, 1992), because prolonged chronic stress that cannot be resolved is physically and emotionally harmful (e.g. Brown & Harris, 1978). A major task of continuing successful adaptation to adult life is the testing of one’s capacities to cope with difﬁcult situations and to master them. Adults are active agents in their own socialization to greater responsibilities in the domain of work and career. The study also underscores that research on life history and signiﬁcant personal events would gain from applying the ﬁndings of experimental research on autobiographical memory. Although the study was not able to identify personality factors that explained why some transitions were appraised as turning points, a companion study (Wethington et al., in press) suggested that appraisal of job changes may be affected by life stage and the level of family responsibilities (cf. Ross & Newby-Clark, 1998). Thus an important implication is that appraisals of stressful situations do not reduce to individual differences in traits (Updegraff & Taylor, 2000). Rather appraisal is formed dynamically in a transaction between people and their environments (Lazarus, 1999).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The collection of the Psychological Experiences Study (PTP) data was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, directed by Dr. Orville Gilbert Brim. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the collection of the Cornell Couples and Careers Study (Phyllis Moen, P.I.). I am also grateful for the support of the National Institutes of Aging Program Project 2P50AG11711–06, Project 3 (E. Wethington, P.I.). I thank Orville Gilbert Brim, Phyllis Moen, Corey L. M. Keyes, Jonathan Haidt, and anonymous reviewers for their comments on this research. 129

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Ross, M., & Newby-Clark, I. R. (1998). Construing the past and future. Social Cognition, 16, 133–150. Rothman, R. A. (1998). Working: Sociological perspectives (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Sarason, S. B. (1977). Working, aging, and social change. New York: Free Press. Settersten, R. A. (1999). Lives in time and place: The problems and promises of developmental science. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co. Super, D. E. (1957). The psychology of careers. New York: Harper and Brothers. Thoits, P. A. (1994). Stressors and problem-solving: The individual as psychological activist. Journal of Health of Social Behavior, 35, 143–160. Thoits, P. A. (1995). Stress, coping, and social support processes: Where are we? What next? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, (extra issue), 53–79. Thurnher, M. (1983). Turning points and developmental change: Subjective and objective assessments. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 53, 52–60. Updegraff, J. A., & Taylor, S. E. (2000). From vulnerability to growth: Positive and negative effects of stressful life events. In: J. H. Harvey & E. D. Miller (Eds), Loss and Trauma: General and Close Relationship Perspectives (pp. 3–28). Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. Vaillant, G. E. (1977). Adaptation to life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Veroff, J., Douvan, E., & Kulka, R. A. (1981). The inner American: A self-portrait from 1957 to 1976. New York: Basic. Wethington, E. (In press). Turning points as opportunities for psychological growth. In: C. L. M. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds), Flourishing: The Positive Person and the Good Life. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Wethington, E. (2000). Expecting stress: Americans and the ‘midlife crisis.’ Motivation and Emotion, 24, 85–103. Wethington, E., Cooper, H., & Holmes, C. S. (1997). Turning points in midlife. In: I. H. Gotlib & B. Wheaton (Eds), Stress and Adversity Across the Life Course: Trajectories and Turning Points (pp. 215–231). New York: Cambridge University Press. Wethington, E., Kessler, R. C., & Pixley, J. E. (In press). Psychological turning points and the “midlife crisis.” In: C. Ryff, R. C. Kessler & O. G. Brim (Eds), A Portrait of Midlife in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wethington, E., Pixley, J. E., & Kavey, A. (in press). Turning points at work. In: P. Moen, It’s About Time: Couples and Careers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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6. IN THE SHADOWS OF GIANTS: IDENTITY AND INSTITUTION BUILDING IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMIC PROFESSION Joseph C. Hermanowicz

Sociologists have offered two major clusters of ways in which to view professions. The classic cluster consists of delineating the traits that occupational groups possess that situate them along a professional continuum (Greenwood, 1957; Marshall, 1939; Parsons, 1949). Such traits typically include restricted access, protracted training, certiﬁcation, esoteric knowledge, and self-regulation. Some studies have examined how permutations in these characteristics stratify professional communities (for example, Heinz & Laumann, 1982, in the case of law; Freidson, 1970a, in the case of medicine). The more contemporary cluster, emerging and developing out of the political climate of the 1960s, emphasized not the functional requirements of the earlier view, but the power embedded in the institutional relations between professions and patrons. Whether it was a story of “needs” professions imposed on clients (e.g. Johnson, 1972), of market organizations extolling intellectual domination (e.g. Larson, 1978), or of the consequences that these arrangements have on the actual work that workers do (e.g. Freidson, 1970b), professions were understood not by their form but by their orchestrated outcomes. Abbott’s (1988) ecological perspective expanded this collective view, observing how professions exist and evolve on planes of jurisdictional disputes.

111 Advances in Life Course Research, Volume 7, pages 133–162. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0863-X

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In looking at both classic and contemporary views of professions, however, a major piece of the picture has been left out: the people behind the work. Looking across the professions ﬁeld, we have developed little sense of what professional work means to its practitioners, with how a profession is constructed through experience and its interpretation, or with how these meanings and interpretations change in conjunction with the trajectories and turning points of a professional career. In this article, I seek to ﬁll part of the “people void” in professions research by putting forth a view that emphasizes the organizational context in which workers work. I take the American academic profession as a case to explore how varying social contexts of work – here, the different types of universities that employ academics – set parameters on how the professional life course is subjectively experienced, interpreted, and presented. I will attempt to demonstrate how this view enables us to conceptualize professions in a different way: professions may be understood not in terms of deduced traits or power relations but in terms of socially organized accounts (Orbuch, 1997; Scott & Lyman, 1968), or narratives, that build and communicate identity, both individual and institutional. The present work is explicitly based and builds upon previous work on the topic (see Hermanowicz, 1998). It seeks to extend the previous research in two explicit ways, the ﬁrst empirical, the second theoretical. First, based on the data at hand, it delineates typical career paths of academics, along with their deﬁning characteristics. Second, using the career patterns identiﬁed, the work suggests a different way in which to view how identities get built at both individual and institutional levels – through the organizationally constrained, “real-life” accounts of careers. This paper has four parts. First, I discuss ambition as a way to frame the study of professionals and professions. I emphasize the need to study ambition sociologically by locating it and how it evolves within the times and places of which professionals are a part. Second, I describe the design and method of the study. Third, I present ﬁndings in how ambition ﬁgures and gets described in careers followed by three groups of academics. Finally, based upon the ﬁndings, I present and develop a way in which to view professions: as organized sets of narratives possessing “master” forms that correspond to the organizational worlds in which professionals work.

AMBITION AS IDENTITY FRAME The very traits that mark professions render them the most difﬁcult to enter and, once in, the most difﬁcult in which to succeed at progressive levels (Goode,

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1978). This social fact points us to one dominant characteristic that situates how and why professional careers begin and transpire and how professional work is experienced within the context in which it is performed: ambition. As the term is often used throughout culture and as it will be used here, ambition refers to a strong will to accomplish (Epstein, 1980; Spenner & Featherman, 1978). Taken as a master component of professional entry and subsequent success among incumbents, ambition offers itself as a key to understanding how the work-lives of professionals are oriented and unfold. It should be understood that not all professional aspirants or incumbents have ambition in the same degrees or in the same forms, but they all have come to possess (whether or not they still possess it) a desire for success in lines and at levels of work assigned high social esteem. Moreover, while ambition may be taken as a master component of professionals, it clearly may not be the only attribute that facilitates their attainment. Ambition may operate with other characteristics, such as ability or skill or economic resources, to produce observable outcomes. The point is that the odds of entry and continued success in professions render ambition more central than other, interacting ingredients: people may be skilled or resource-rich, but without passion are unlikely to ﬁnd themselves moving in and up a bonaﬁde profession. The story of modern professionals, then, becomes an analysis of ambition and its own life course in the work sphere. Ambition thus is the major point of departure and theoretic interest, for to see it and its chronology is to see how contemporary professionals construct, experience, and interpret their passage in the world of work. As a concept, though, ambition has received little systematic treatment. People can be confused as to whether it is “good” or “bad,” indicative of ill intent or a robust life (Epstein, 1980). Even Aristotle was so mystiﬁed by the concept of a will to achieve that he could not resolve what to call it. In fact he used “ambition” and “lack of ambition” to refer to the extremes of the very characteristic that he claimed was desired. A healthy striving mediated by the polar excesses of grandiosity and indolence is what Aristotle ultimately called the “nameless virtue.”1 Merton’s explanation of the institutionalized drive for recognition similarly underscores virtuosity rather than vice in the motivation to achieve (Merton, 1973a). Recognition from people who are competent to judge a contribution, whatever the ﬁeld or endeavor, is the prime indicator that one’s work in that ﬁeld has contributed to its advancement. The quest for recognition is compatible with, indeed satisﬁes, institutional goals, so long as in practice, people remain bound to ethical guidelines undergirding work in their given occupational arena. Ambition for great attainment is thus both expectable and 135

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essential to lines of work whose members are ultimately judged by originality, invention, or heroic achievement. Professionals, from astronauts to athletes, compose this segment of labor. The inattention to ambition is especially remarkable for societies that attach high value to success, variously deﬁned. In what follows, I deal with this absence by posing time and place as two dimensions on which to examine how ambition ﬁgures in the way professionals and professions get constructed. These dimensions are adopted to treat ambition not merely as an individual characteristic, unbounded by the groups of which people are an interactive part. Rather, following the Chicago School insistence that social phenomena have a temporal and spatial locatedness outside of which they cannot be properly understood (Abbott, 1997), ambition is here conceived as a relational phenomenon that is socially situated in the context of work. It matures, thrives, ﬂuctuates, and dies in and as a result of contexts. Professionals and professions do the same, in accord with ambition’s life course. The deeper rationale and signiﬁcance of employing these dimensions is the subject to which I now turn. People in Time Studies of the life course have offered theoretic frameworks in which to study the formation and unfolding of occupational self-identity. Of particular importance is Daniel J. Levinson’s (1978) major study, The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Levinson’s work established the idea of a “dream,” akin in many ways to ambition, as a vehicle for understanding how people organize their passage through life. Levinson drew on the life histories of forty men, between the ages of thirty-ﬁve and forty-ﬁve, who were employed as business executives, university biologists, novelists, and hourly workers in industry (see also the companion volume, The Seasons of a Woman’s Life [Levinson, 1996]). Levinson put forward a stage theory of adult development in which aging could be viewed as a process that involved periods of “structure building” and “structure changing.” In this perspective, the life course consists of a series of alternating stable and transitional periods that shape adult development and conceptions of self.According to Levinson, a life “dream” emerges between the ages of about seventeen and thirty and represents the key concept around which lives are organized and from which individuals derive a sense of evolving self-identity. The dream, most often rooted in one’s occupational life, has the quality of a vision, an imagined possibility of self that generates excitement and vitality. In young adulthood the dream may be poorly articulated and only tenuously connected to reality. For example, it may take a dramatic form as in the myth of hero: “a great artist, business tycoon, athletic or intellectual superstar

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performing magniﬁcent feats and receiving special honors” (Levinson, 1978, p. 91). In early career stages, people face the developmental task of giving the dream greater deﬁnition and ﬁnding ways to live it out.As useful as Levinson’s perspective is for our present concerns, it also bears signiﬁcant shortcomings. The perspective is ahistorical; it does not consider how past experiences shape individuals. Like other “stage theories” of aging (for example, Erikson, 1950), Levinson’s approach to adult development takes a “cohort-centric” view of socialization (Riley, Foner & Waring, 1988). People are studied outside of the socially contingent circumstances that uniquely shape and characterize them and their life courses (for example, Super, 1957).The ways in which self-identities form and unfold are, however, subject to events and experiences that arise in unique periods of time and that vary from individual to individual. Shared events and experiences lead to the idea of a cohort or generation whose members are characterized by deﬁning moments or periods that morally set them apart from those who have passed before and from those who are yet to pass (Mannheim, 1952; Ryder, 1965). In the case study to be presented shortly, I will also use cohorts, which will allow for a more complete account of how people’s self-identities arise in light of varying social experiences related to age and maturation. I will use cohorts to draw distinctions in how the young, old, and middle-aged craft self-identities and perspectives on their careers, perspectives that differ systematically from one another. This use of cohorts draws attention to the sociocultural meanings that people assign to their careers given their age and past experience (Neugarten, 1979; Neugarten & Datan, 1973; Wells & Stryker, 1988). People in Place Studies of the life course have been less informative about how self-identities arise in speciﬁc contexts of work. Levinson used life histories of people from occupational groups, but the people were studied as if they were detached from these groups. Studies of adult development have sought to derive universally experienced stages, deﬁned by periods of innate challenge or “crisis” (for example, see Baltes, 1979; Erikson, 1950, 1959, 1982; Levinson, 1978, 1996; Sheehy, 1976). They have been less attentive to how self-identity emerges out of the particular settings in which people work. In an important article, Dale Dannefer (1984a) sparked debate by proposing that the study of adult development was in need of theoretic reformulation (see also Baltes and Nesselroade [1984] and Dannefer [1984b]). Dannefer argued that the prevailing mode of studying the life course – the ontogenetic model – “is not an appropriate foundation for its subject matter because it tends to treat 137

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the individual as a self-contained entity and fails to recognize the profoundly interactive nature of self-society relations and the complexity and variability of social environments” (Dannefer, 1984a, p. 100). One must indeed question a mode of inquiry that leads to such invariance in adult development and socialization, a mode most readily apparent in stage theories of aging (Erikson, 1950; Levinson, 1978, 1996). The alternative is a sociogenic approach (Dannefer, 1984a), which grounds the study of adult development in the highly variable and contingent social contexts of which people are a part. By placing people in their social contexts, we elevate the study of development by addressing how development may be different among people as a result of their exposure to various opportunities, constraints, and turning points. For academics, we are led, therefore, to the social contexts in which academic work is done, in which academic lives are led. The literature in the sociology of science speaks most directly about academe and represents the largest systematic body of cumulative knowledge on the profession. A heavy stream of research that has examined the nature of stratiﬁcation in science is most germane to the present purpose because these studies, like this work, examine different contexts of academic practice (Allison, Long & Krauze, 1982; Allison & Stewart, 1974; Cole, 1970; Cole & Cole, 1967, 1973; Crane, 1965, 1969, 1970; Fox, 1985; Gaston, 1978; Hagstrom, 1971; Hargens, 1969; Hargens & Hagstrom, 1967; Long, 1978; Long, Allison & McGinnis, 1979; Long & McGinnis, 1981; Reskin, 1977, 1979; Zuckerman, 1970, 1977). As much as these studies have told us about the process of stratiﬁcation in science, we know remarkably little about the details of “what life is like” on the inside. Most of the stratiﬁcation research has been undertaken with cross-sectional surveys, which, though possessing the virtue of breadth, fail to provide a picture of the ﬁner-grained cultural dynamics at play in any given setting where academic work is done. The stratiﬁcation research has been almost exclusively quantitative, often seeking statistical models to predict measurable outcomes in careers, outcomes such as publication productivity and citation rates. In addition this literature, and the larger family to which it belongs, have largely bypassed issues of “self ” and identity.

DESIGN AND METHOD This work is based on a national study of academics – physicists speciﬁcally – who work in a variety of universities that may be classiﬁed into three types for comparative purposes: elite – universities that place the highest premium on research (such as Cal Tech and Harvard) and whose departments of physics

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ranked at or near the top of the assessment conducted by the National Research Council (NRC) (Jones, Lindzey & Coggeshall, 1982; Goldberger, Maher & Flattau, 1995); pluralist – universities that emphasize research as well as mass teaching and service (most often large state universities such as Colorado and Michigan State) and whose departments of physics ranked in the middle of the NRC assessment; and communitarian – universities that primarily emphasize teaching and service but not necessarily at the exclusion of research (such as Mississippi and Nevada-Reno) and whose departments of physics ranked at or near the tail or the NRC assessment.2 This differentiating scheme of universities and their departments has been used in previous research (Hermanowicz, 1998), and is re-employed here for its explanatory utility. Top, middle, and tail departments were built into the study design to permit comparison of scientiﬁc careers that are experienced under different structural and cultural conditions – the prevailing resources and expectations that situate and help deﬁne each of these types of schools and the careers found in them. Eighty-seven percent of the scientists in the study have worked only at their present institutions; thus changes in career, identity, and ambition that stem from mobility are small. In other words, low inter-institutional mobility provides a comparatively stable social context in which to assess variation in identity and career experience. The orientations that people bring to their work are both structurally and culturally constrained. Differences in the social structures of institutions make opportunities more available to some than to others (Crane, 1965; Long, 1978; Long & McGinnis, 1981), a fact that is reﬂected in scientists’ appraisals of their own successes and failures. People who see themselves “at the top” in one environment may see themselves in the middle or near the bottom in others because the people in these places work according to different performance norms. The cultural and structural differences among types of schools lend to their being portrayed as distinct social worlds (cf. Becker, 1982). Entering each of the worlds – elite, pluralist, or communitarian – is much like entering different parts of the world at large. In some respects the worlds resemble one another. In each of them one ﬁnds people involved in similar activities, using similar talents. But in other respects the worlds differ systematically from one another. A scientist who subscribes to the expectations of one world would feel like – and be viewed as – an outsider in a world far removed. In addition, the study design involved a sampling of scientists of three distinct cohorts, which would permit an assessment of careers among scientists of different ages and hence different lengths and types of experiences in the profession. The cohorts were deﬁned by those who received their Ph.Ds prior to 1970; 139

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Table 1. Institution

Number of Scientists, by Type of Academic Institution and Cohort. Pre-1970

1970–1980

Post–1980

Total

Elite School 1 School 2

8 1

6 —

6 2

20 3

6

5

7

18

3 3 1

3 2 —

3 2 2

9 7 3

22

16

22

60

Pluralist School 1 Communitarian School 1 School 2 School 3 Total

© 1998 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

those who received their Ph.Ds between 1970 and 1980; and those who received their Ph.Ds after 1980. A total of sixty physicists were included in the study. Roughly equal numbers of scientists (around 20) were selected randomly by cohort and institutional type; the institutions themselves were selected for their ability to capture as many scientists as possible to ﬁll the “cells” of the research design. Two schools comprise the elite, one the pluralist, and three the communitarian (which tend to have the smallest departments). A summary of the research design and the distribution of respondents by institution and cohort is presented in Table 1. All of the scientists were asked a set of questions about their professional biography and how they have experienced their careers. The interview protocol was divided into six parts, each dealing with social-psychological aspects of career experience, including: location in the division of scientiﬁc labor; past aspirations; present aspirations; generalized deﬁnitions of success and failure; ambition; and self-doubt about work. Under assurances of individual and institutional anonymity, the interviews were conducted in person by the author at the scientists’ ofﬁces; they averaged ninety minutes in length; all were tape-recorded and transcribed.

THE LIFE COURSES OF AMBITION In a comparative study of orchestra musicians and hockey players, Robert Faulkner (1974) observed a set of behaviors associated with professional socialization, including adaptation to failure, wherein professional members

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realize their dim chances of “making it big.” Noting patterns of adjustment as applicable to musicians and athletes as to other high-aspiring occupational groups, Faulkner generalized that “[a] predominant theme in the literature on socialization presents life as movement from youthful idealism to more or less realistic mobility motivations, more or less contented adjustments which progressively conﬁne behavioral potentialities and imputed identities within an acceptable range and to which an individual becomes committed” (Faulkner, 1974, p. 136). The achievement ambitions of scientists can similarly be seen to become more “realistic” over time and across settings, suggesting the broad applicability of this trend. At the same time, however, this generalization hides key differences in the development of self and career. The achievement ambitions of the scientists proceeded to unfold in systematically distinct and often dramatically different ways. “Cooling-out” (Goffman, 1952) can be seen as the core concept to describe this process, but again, the outcomes of being cooled present signiﬁcant differences across contexts. Building on life course research, our task is to locate people and their ambitions in time and place, and hence within the opportunities and constraints that their work cultures and structures present. Communitarians The starkest changes in outlooks on self and career are seen in communitarians. The academic world that they entered presented sharp contrasts to the worlds that they had known as graduate students. This new world was, for most, one they had never known. Table 2 lists the graduate schools the scientists attended. Some communitarians had come from the elite. Many had come from pluralist schools, where the research programs often approximate those of the elite. Like several other scientists, the one quoted below – sixty years old – spent his graduate career at a major research institution with an illustrious history in physics, the University of California at Berkeley. I thought I could maybe make some nice discoveries, but I had realized early on that the probability of making a major discovery like Einstein or Newton, those kinds of major discoveries, would probably be completely out of my grasp, reality being what it is. But I thought maybe with some luck (a lot of interesting results come out of just pure luck), [I could], if I stumble around and ﬁnd something that hasn’t been observed before. I thought, well, there is always a reasonable chance that I might be able to ﬁnd some new thing. I realize that’s not going to be possible for me to do, to accomplish much more than I already have, considering the rate at which I’ve made progress. Over the time that I’ve got left to do productive work, the chances are I won’t really make any major or even minor discoveries. I think that if one has limited talents, then you are going to make rather limited contributions. I think now that my contributions will be rather limited. I can look back and see what opportunities slipped through my ﬁngers.3

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Table 2. Graduate Institutions of Scientists, by Current Institutional Identity. Elites (N = 23)

Pluralists (N = 18)

Communitarians (N = 19)

Berkeley Birmingham Bombay Cal Tech (2) Chicago (2) Cornell Harvard (2) Landau Institute London Milan M.I.T. (5) Minnesota Northwestern Pennsylvania Princeton William & Mary

Berkeley Chicago Columbia Cornell Harvard (3) Illinois (3) Indiana Johns Hopkins Maryland M.I.T. (2) Oxford Pennsylvania Purdue

Arkansas Berkeley (2) Cal Tech Colorado CUNY (2) Georgia Iowa State Louisiana State Minnesota Missouri Nebraska NYU Syracuse Tokyo Wisconsin Wroclaw Virginia

© 1998 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Structural constraints imposed by the communitarian world were evident in how people viewed the reaches of their involvement and impact in the ﬁeld. Constraints took many forms but were always thought to place limits on how far one could go. They included lack of equipment, small department size, a low density of expert colleagues in specialty areas, low graduate student enrollments, limited research assistance and funding, and less access to mainstream journals. To speak of structural constraints, then, is to speak of what opportunity looks like for those on the inside. I’ve always been kind of a lone wolf-type person; I haven’t had many collaborators. I’ve worked with students and post-docs, people like that, but I haven’t really collaborated with the big dogs in the ﬁeld. [If I had], obviously it would have made my contributions greater, because I would have been working with people that had more resources. I could have contributed more that way, simply by joining in a bigger effort. It would have probably enhanced my reputation because I would have been associated with people that [other] people would know more about. Just to be in the swim, so to speak, being associated with these other groups.4

For some of the scientists, the communitarian world is paralyzing. Expectations are completely dashed. Their professional life bears no resemblance to what they had earlier envisioned. What was previously viewed as professional work now

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seems more like a “job.” In ways unique to communitarians, scientists were sometimes cooled-out to the point that they froze professionally. In neither of the other two worlds do we ﬁnd an account of a career that has basically come to a halt. In such a career, only the bare requirements of the academic role – coming to class to teach – are met, and then only with some reservation. One [guy] looks upon his work here as sort of a job. He has a lot of outside interests and it’s not much different than putting in your time as a bank manager. I think when he was younger he had hoped to have a career involving both teaching and research, and he found it difﬁcult to continue his research. It was probably [because] he didn’t have sufﬁcient interest in his research in order to persevere in a department where you are very much on your own. We didn’t have good machine-shop facilities; we didn’t have technical help, and so you really had to do just about everything on your own, and it was not easy. If you were at, say, Harvard or Yale, you would have a lot of support; your teaching duties would be lighter. So it was extremely difﬁcult. He just didn’t want to put in the level of effort required. He was not promoted to full professor; he remained an associate professor.5

Even those who did not enter the communitarian world with an elite school background, or with the grand hopes that such a background normally inculcates, had to make adjustments in outlook. As pragmatic as some of their initial aspirations were, many communitarians found that their world could not satisfy their goals or interests. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to be doing twenty years down the road, ten years down the road. I was envisioning developing a relatively strong working group. If I could bring in people who could support me and what I was trying to do, and I could interact with them, we could have a pretty good working group in, say, astrophysics, stellar evolution, or in nuclear astrophysics. Initially it looked very promising, [but it never came to pass]. So my aspirations were blunted at a relatively early stage. Within the ﬁrst ﬁve or six years I could see that nothing was going to really be fulﬁlled and promises were not going to be kept. I wanted to be doing research, I really wanted the research to work extremely well, as most researchers do. I would say that my aspirations haven’t been fulﬁlled at all. To that degree it’s been very unsatisfactory in my mind. It’s been very unrewarding. My professional development has been somewhat thwarted. I’m not doing today what I had expected I would be doing. And so you learn to release those kinds of fantasies and deal with reality and take what’s given to you. You make the very best you can out of it.6

Work contexts can clearly be observed for how they condition the way in which people come to understand the course they have followed. Following Mead (1932), self-identities are not ﬁxed in time but are routinely revised through a process in which individuals, at any given point, account for the past in light of a desired future. To gain the fullest perspective on self, career, and ambition, therefore, we need to examine not only the scientists’ conceptions of where they have been and how they have arrived to where we presently ﬁnd them but also their conceptions of where they see themselves going professionally, with how they conceive of a future self. 143

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Communitarians’ images of their future selves capture a measure of growth in early phases and then level off. In the early phases of their careers, young scientists have yet to hold secure positions, and their more romantic dreams are still being cooled. The future selves in these phases differ the most from how people see themselves in the present. Following these phases, individuals often appear to lose momentum. Communitarians are quicker than elites or pluralists to realize that they have gone as far as they will ever go. This is made possible by the relative lack of social control in middle and late lifephases in the communitarian world. The most pressing social control applies to the master role of teaching: failure to satisfy assigned duties brings sharp reprimand, but “failure” in other domains is tolerable. The most striking changes in outlook among communitarians are thus found in the middle and older cohorts. As communitarians age, their interest in science wanes signiﬁcantly. The scientist quoted below, age 60, illustrates this trend. Studying physics hasn’t really moved me much further here from where I started, meaning that what drew me into physics at ﬁrst, I thought well, there are a lot of interesting secrets in nature that could be discovered and that this would give me a much better understanding of the world around me and all that kind of stuff. But I ﬁnd now that physics has not provided those answers or that satisfaction, and I don’t think it ever will. One has to question, what’s really the point of it? I might decide that I don’t want to be active in the day-to-day research program, rushing down to the lab, putting this together and that together, and so on. Cranking out results. I guess I’ll probably give up doing that. I’m not sure exactly what I will do really, to tell you the truth. I might get interested in peripheral things. I ﬁnd computers kind of fascinating; that’s something that I didn’t have any exposure to while I was a student; it’s all new. And I may ﬁnd something else that interests me, but it probably won’t be what I’ve been doing for the last twenty-ﬁve years or so. It will probably be something different.7

Leaving science altogether after a long career is, of course, viewed by the science community as a legitimate exit. For the majority, a “cold” exit is the norm (National Research Council, 1991). But a phenomenon found primarily among communitarians is that of getting stuck. For many, science fails to take them where they had once hoped to go. Getting stuck brings about ambivalence. A sixty-two-year-old scientist illustrates this pattern.What do you dream about now in terms of your career? That’s a problem. That’s a problem. I don’t know. I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I can see ultimately stepping down [from teaching], so I think my self-identiﬁcation as a physicist is rather complete. I read, I play tennis, I bike, I do other kinds of exercise thing . . .. I’d like to get another idea. You have maybe one or two ideas in your life, if you’re lucky.

How would you describe the period that you are in now?

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Approaching fallowness again. I don’t like it; I don’t have any ideas. Maybe what I probably ought to do is either take a leave of absence or retire or a very long sabbatical – maybe a combination of a leave of absence and a sabbatical and go somewhere else and try to learn something else. I don’t know if I’m smart enough to work on this [experimental work] because I don’t think I have the energy to do experimental work anymore. That requires an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm – to get an experiment to work.8

Entrepreneurial interests often accompany getting stuck. Such interests sometimes involve ventures that would remove scientists from their roles as professors, as the scientist above makes clear. In many instances a scientist’s technical training is not applicable to the new venture (for example, opening up a bookstore, playing the stock market, or joining a real estate brokerage). In other instances, the technical aspects of science – but not exclusively of physics – are applied in technology development, consulting, and other envisioned roles. Sometimes individuals believe they will enter these roles while simultaneously keeping their university ties, and at other times the pattern parallels the one cited above: they contemplate leaving academic science altogether. Entrepreneurial themes are conﬁned to communitarians’ accounts. A scientist more at home in the elite or pluralist world might scarcely know what to make of these extraprofessional references. Because these ﬁndings are not isolated to one or even a few individuals, they cannot be dismissed as exceptional. They represent a pattern, which says more about the social world in which these individuals work than about the individuals themselves. What it says, I argue, is that this world provides comparatively fewer opportunities for ambition. The consequences of limited opportunity are seen in how scientists adapt their careers to their environments: they decelerate and often lose interest in their work altogether. I’ve started considering small businesses and ways of making money by devising products, and I think that might be an interesting alternative . . . something like writing software or applying some of the stuff in the lab – applying diamond ﬁlm research to making new products and selling them. Also just doing something totally different that’s more in the mainstream of the economy, like selling insurance or the stock market, something like that. I haven’t really been getting more involved either in the stock market or anything else, but I have thought about it as an alternative, mainly because the monetary rewards are so much greater. It would have to be a full-time job because you have to know what’s going on, you have to read the newspapers, you have to see how the stocks are doing. It’s a full-time job. That’s what everyone tells me. I may very well do that because you can make so much money. Probably a six-ﬁgure salary would not be out of the question if you devote eight, ten hours a day to it.9

Pluralists Cooling-out proceeded differently among pluralists. In the communitarian world we often heard how scientists made radical transformations in their outlooks. 145

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In many instances it was not so much a matter of having to settle for something less: many felt they had to settle for something altogether different from what they had once expected. Pluralists also cool-out, but in the end the process leaves most in a different frame of mind than that of their communitarian counterparts. Most pluralists retain conﬁdence in their ability to proceed with major scientiﬁc work. The prospect of achieving greatness, however, has been considerably dimmed. Once their goals were centered on extraordinary accomplishments. Now their plans are scaled to the prospect of doing “solid” work. The people and careers they found on entering this world shaped their outlooks. I think by the time you’re a graduate student you at least have a decent perspective on what kind of structures are out there – what kind of universities work in which ﬁelds and what kind of atmospheres they have. There’s a gradual narrowing of the pipeline as you get to higher and higher places. You would normally do your postdoc at the very best places. I was at Harvard [for my postdoc but also] had an offer from Princeton. Each place might have two postdocs a year, but they aren’t going to have a faculty job in your [specialty] ﬁeld more than once every three or four years. And so you end up moving a little bit down the stepladder. I think if I were at a place like M.I.T. or Princeton there might be more of a push. I might feel more driven because you’re around people who are the best in the world and they let you know it, and it inspires you to work harder. I think this is a more relaxing atmosphere. I’m not quite as driven as I was. As a graduate student, I was very singularly directed towards succeeding in physics, and I devoted a huge fraction of every day to work. I would get up around eleven o’clock, go to work around noon, work until ﬁve, come home, have dinner, and then work again until midnight, and then go to bed. I do other things now. I’m married and I have a life outside of my work.10

Notice the references to life outside of physics. Familial and extracurricular references are evident in pluralists’ and communitarians’ accounts, but rarely in elites’ (discussed later). This is especially noteworthy because interview questions were designed to elicit responses exclusively about the career; no questions asked directly about family or leisure. In effect, all three groups were exposed to the same “stimuli” in interviews, but their responses to these stimuli fell into different patterns. Among elites, work is the sole focus of the narrative. All other aspects of life, even those that may impinge on the career, are excluded from commentary. In Goffman’s (1952) terms, nonwork sources of satisfaction act as substitutes for a level of identiﬁcation and reward with work that is not possible in a pluralist world. In abandoning their hopes for scientiﬁc greatness, pluralists turn to other aspects of life to compensate for the loss. My aspirations were to be at a higher-prestige university, initially – Berkeley, Harvard, M.I.T. – types of places like I went to as a student. I was able to get into the best programs as a student . . .. Ideally, I would have, at that time, would have wanted to be a successful scientist at one of those leading institutions. My view of life and career and institutions in

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general has changed a lot. I think I’m quite content not to be there. It’s hard enough at what I would consider a second-tier institution like [this one] . . .. I’m looking for more personal stability now. I want to be able to spend some time on things other than my profession. My family – I just had two kids. That is important to me as well.11

Pluralists’ conceptions of a future self likewise capture the central trend that characterizes their collective aspirations: a striving for strong, solid (but not exceptional or weak) achievement. Scientists often express the hope that they will “continue” – that they will ﬁnd challenging problems and projects. This is as true of older scientists as of younger ones, suggesting the rapidity with which the cooling-out process begins and solidiﬁes. A scientist at an early point in his career (age 35) highlights these themes. I’m in a state now – I think I would like to do interesting work now, for the rest of my life, but I don’t have any ultimate goal out there at this point that I’m trying to reach. I’m actually thinking about starting to do a little bit of science writing on the side, nonﬁction articles for magazines.12

Elites Finally, cooling-out among elites constitutes a different pattern still. Entering the elite world, scientists let go of their most majestic visions of grandeur. Like pluralists and communitarians, they saw themselves becoming more “realistic.” Hopes of following in the footsteps of Newton, Einstein, and Fermi were set aside. But unlike pluralists or communitarians, elites continued to hold out hope for making major scientiﬁc breakthroughs. The question was not whether they would achieve greatness but at what level. Even though they gave up on fantastic visions (which could, anyway, be excused as youthful idealism), their momentum was unshaken. They were in a world where nearly all examples of careers illustrated the kinds of greatness to be achieved, short of Einstein and Copernicus. They became members of departments considered among the most distinguished in the world. By this overly simple standard, they had risen to the pinnacle of their profession. It is easy to understand, therefore, why many claimed that their aspirations increased in spite of having let go of their most romantic expectations. I’m afraid my ambitions have grown. I want to do something good now. You replace one anxiety with another. First of all I had [a] survival anxiety. Now I have the anxiety that I’m given this remarkable opportunity very few people in history have had, that is, to work for some major research university with a secure position. I have no excuse really. If I don’t do something really good it’s because I wasn’t smart enough.13

This scientist illustrates a more general pattern. Elites claim that their careers will falter only as a result of limitations posed by their own ability. Their 147

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environment is seen as facilitative. It is structurally conducive to carrying out major scientiﬁc work. It possesses capable and plentiful colleagues, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. Access to major funding and publication outlets is comparatively easy. Modern and technically advanced equipment is on hand, as are technical staff. It is a world in which nearly all of the human, physical, and ﬁscal resources are in place for major work. The burden is thus seen to fall directly on the individual. [Being here] has been the biggest plus. A fantastic institution. Terriﬁc colleagues. I’ve had from the beginning very good support from the department. The students here are terriﬁc. When you don’t know something, there is always somebody who can answer it for you. That’s fantastic. It’s been a great place. I don’t want to leave. You know I’ve been here for a long time.14

The communitarian world contained elements of unhappy sentiment, and members voiced their gripes about their situation. Elites tell a different story. The institution is cast as a haven, an unfettered greenhouse for the mind. It has not been hard to get resources [here]. The [school’s] management is a very convenient one in which to work. I have encountered very little so-called university politics here. I hear tales of some people at other universities, and it’s always left me a little bit wondering how I managed to escape it.15

The pace of occupational life among elites appears swift; discussion with them about the future resonated with special meaning. Much of their self-identities is staked in what lies ahead. Elites are most often “future-oriented.” What is notable is that this concern with “what is next” ﬁgures as much in the accounts of the young as in those of the relatively old. Careers are constructed with language that calls attention to what is waiting: the next project, the next article, the next experiment, the next talk, the next proposal. We see the image of a future self in the account of the scientist below, who at mid-career eloquently describes an identity he hopes to assume. The dream is to discover some fantastic new effect that knocks the socks off my friends and colleagues, that knocks the socks off the community, so that when I walk down the corridor, the young students know me and say, “There goes [Silverman], he invented the [Silverman] effect.” That’s what I want; I want my effect. I want to be the ﬁrst person to predict such and such an event and for it to be . . . I can even smell what it’s like already. It has to be something which once you think about it, is very reasonable. Very surprising at ﬁrst sight, but at second sight, yes, of course, that’s how it had to be. I want one of those. I want my Josephson effect, my fractional quantum pull effect.16

Images of the self in the future can, of course, go beyond the days in which one will be living. Contemplation of how the career will look after one is gone speaks ever more of ambition’s hold on people’s relations with their profession. In the account below, the end of a career is equated to the end of life.

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I would like to be remembered as a good teacher, which I think is quite unusual, but I really care about classroom lecturing and I love doing it. I’m good at it. I read the obituaries in The New York Times; it’s the ﬁrst thing I read every day. I want one, and I want it to say that he was a fantastic teacher; his students adored him, and he taught a generation of physicists. That’s one thing, and the other thing I want is: he was a brilliant researcher. He invented Effect X. I don’t want the 500 publications, like the people in the biochemical communities. I don’t want those things. I’m happy to publish three or four, ﬁve or six papers a year. I don’t want big grants. I don’t want money. I want to do something which is a subchapter in the next history of solid-state physics. It doesn’t have to be the whole chapter. It’s not like discovering superconductivity. But I want my own section “5-point-something.” And it has to be beautiful. I don’t want to ﬁnd something that’s just hidden away and if you dig deep enough it’s there. It has to be elegant, and it has to be describable using very elegant pictures of mathematics.17

In moving from the young to the old, the key difference is the object of ambition, not the existence of ambition. By late-career phases, normally when physicists are around their mid-ﬁfties, we see changes in how future selves are set. An emphasis on the process of “becoming” remains, to the extent that this process involves continued professional development and activity. But the future self contains less of the idea that one will become something substantially different. Older physicists have come to the realization that they have gone just about as far as they will go. They believe any status change will, in all likelihood, be small: their careers have peaked. The images they offer stress continuity. Older elites do not aim for greatness. For several, greatness has already been achieved; now it must be preserved. Even those older physicists whose claims on greatness may be meager or nil still mention “being busy.” I will continue writing papers and listening to talks. The things that I would fear most is the ability not to travel. Now I travel too much. But there is so much enrichment in talking to other people. I’ll give you an example: since the end of the year, May 15th [it is September 14th], I have been in Europe four times and one time all the way around the world. I went from [here] to Paris and then to Montpelier. And then I went to Tokyo. Next week I have to go to Florida to give a talk on astrophysics. Then I have to go to Seville, and then to Rome, and then I will be back – all within ten days. So at the end of my career, I would like to keep doing that. It would be hard not to be able to go [places] where there is science being done.18

Elites were frequently ambivalent about retirement, much in contrast to communitarians. They often insisted they would never retire. Even those who said they might retire envisioned schedules that differed little from those of the present. The senior woman physicist quoted below is typical. Well, I’m sixty-three, almost sixty-four . . . I plan to keep working as long as [my] health is good. This is fun for me. I like it . . . [A]fter I ofﬁcially retire I just plan to keep working . . . I don’t think my lifestyle is going to change that much . . . I know it sounds ridiculous, but I enjoy it. Nobody tells me to work as many hours a day as I do. [I’m] usually here

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at six o’clock or a little after six o’clock in the morning and then I leave at about 7 p.m. Then I usually do a few things in the evening after dinner. It was just like I was as a graduate student. I haven’t changed that much. I work many, many hours during the week. I do it because I enjoy it.19

PROFESSIONS AS NARRATIVES We have known that productivity is enhanced by the prestige of university departments (Allison & Long 1990; Allison & Stewart 1974; Cole & Cole 1967; Crane 1965; Long 1978). As Long and McGinnis stated: “Once employment is obtained in a speciﬁc context, individual levels of productivity soon conform to characteristics of that context” (Long & McGinnis, 1981, p. 422). And we have known that age mediates this relationship, a pattern that has been explained by accumulative advantage. Feedback through recognition and resources successively beneﬁts the productive while lack of such feedback successively impoverishes the less productive. The distribution of productivity becomes increasingly unequal as cohorts of scientists age (Allison & Stewart, 1974; Cole, 1979; Merton, 1973; Zuckerman, 1977). We have not known, however, how these changes are experienced and meaningfully interpreted by people themselves. Nor have we acquired a sense of the consequences that these changes entail for ambition, career, commitment to work, and, ultimately, how a profession may be characterized in light of these dynamic qualities that situate occupational life. This work has revealed how people learn survival and acceptance norms in their local occupational environments, learning how to be more ambitious than they once were, learning how to let their ambitions subside, and/or learning how to let their ambitions go. Furthermore, while life course theory has suggested frameworks for thinking about how lives and careers develop (e.g. Levinson, 1978, 1996), an ontogenetic perspective has prevailed. Here we have seen how lives are variously, rather than monolithically, lived. Rather than viewing the career as a set of pre-formatted stages through which incumbents pass, this sociogenic approach has explicitly treated occupational context as a constitutive force in adult socialization and development. What happens to ambition and consequently to professionals and the profession at which they work in these three organizational environments? This study suggests three broad characterizations: even though the targets of ambition are perceived to become more “realistic” by people across settings, among elites ambition grows and remains a central component of their self-identities throughout the life course. Pluralists modify their ambitions more signiﬁcantly in early and mid-career stages, and by mid-career the ambition of

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the typical pluralist, while still “alive,” has tempered. Communitarians dramatically modify their ambitions early in their careers such that by early-middle phases one readily hears accounts of ambitions that have died, careers that have become “stuck,” and lives that have been re-oriented away from work. More speciﬁc generalizations may be drawn to illuminate the key distinctions across cohorts within settings. Eight dimensions of identity surface from the data to ground these comparisons; these dimensions together with the substantive ﬁndings among the three groups of scientists are presented in Table 3.20 Career phases in the table are deﬁned loosely the avoid the problems of cohort-centrism characteristic of ontogenetic stage theories. Early career is deﬁned as the assistant professorship, normally lasting up to seven years. Middle career is deﬁned as the associate professorship, normally lasting around 5 to 10 years, and on into the ﬁrst ﬁve or so years of the full professorship. Late career is deﬁned as the full professorship roughly beyond its ﬁrst ﬁve years. Elites, pluralists, and communitarians focus their early careers on research, the expected fruits of which translate into promotion and tenure. But it is in these ﬁrst few years as assistant professors when major changes in self and outlook on the career take root and develop over an ensuing period of time. By middle career phases the focus of the career becomes more diversiﬁed among pluralists who increasingly emphasize teaching, and shifts more radically still among communitarians who are in this stage completing the process of significantly modifying their ambitions. Among elites in the middle career, research continues to unequivocally hold sway, even as occasional members declare their interest and seriousness with which they take the teaching role. These patterns hold and intensify into late career. Professional dreams follow an accompanying pattern of evolution across the settings. They intensify among elites who see and come to learn how to narrate an early career in which ambitions grow. Pluralists begin to re-scale their ambitions in ways that are exempliﬁed and realizable within their environment. As we heard from the accounts, dreams of communitarians are radically diminished shortly upon arrival. These patterns hold and intensify through middle and late phases. Senior elites maintain their status and involvement as senior pluralists curtail invovlements and see their ambitions subside; typically professional dreams among senior communitarians are no longer found. All scientists who have passed through the ﬁlters and survived the competitions to get into faculty ranks in the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries seek great recognition – this is compatible with the institutional goals of science (Merton, 1973a). But as the foci of careers change and as the fuel for 151

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Table 3.

Characteristics of Ambition, Self, and Institution in Academe.

Dimensions of Identity

Elites

Career Focus In Early Career In Middle Career

Research Research

In Late Career

Professional Dreams In Early Career In Middle Career

Pluralists

Communitarians

Research Research and Teaching Research and Teaching/ Teaching

Research Teaching

Intensify Intensify

Re-scaled Diminish

Research

Teaching

Remain Steady

Subside

Diminish Subside/ Extinguish Not present

Recognition Sought In Early Career In Middle Career In Late Career

Great Great Great

Great Average Average

Great Minimal None

Orientation to Work In Early Career In Middle Career

Moral Moral

Moral Moral/ Utilitarian Moral/ Utilitarian

Moral Utilitarian

In Late Career

In Late Career

Moral

Utilitarian

Work/Family Focus In Early Career In Middle Career In Late Career

Work Work Work

Work Work and Family Work and Family

Work Work and Family Family/Leisure

Attribution of Place

“Burden”

“Happy Medium”

“Stymieing”

Overall Satisfaction

Medium

High

Low

Form of Narrative

Becoming

Becoming/Being

Being

professional dreams replenishes itself or runs dry, the recognition that scientists seek also evolves in systematically distinct ways. Elites seek great recognition through their careers, their self-identities ﬁrmly staked in achievement. Pluralists come to seek average recognition in mid-career and generally sustain that orientation into late career. Faced with comparative lack of opportunity and constraints of seeing research expectations realized, communitarians come to seek little or no recognition from the wider professional community. As careers in all three settings begin with a primary research focus, the orientation that elites, pluralists, and communitarians bring to their work is

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moral, compatible with institutional goals. Realization that these goals can only be moderately satisﬁed or not satisﬁed at all makes pluralists, but especially communitarians, develop a utilitarian outlook on their work. Science becomes more of a means to an end and (particularly among communitarians) a “job,” rather than a vocation and calling. Changes in work orientation are accompanied by the way in which scientists narrate the relative place of work and family in their lives. Work remains central for elites (even as families arrive, develop, and impose demands on time), but for pluralists and especially communitarians, families assume a more signiﬁcant role in identity construction and self-presentation. The above patterns lead to overall characterizations of work-place and the person. The elite world is viewed by elites as a “burden” because institutional mandates for achievement and the internalization of lofty performance norms demand sustained effort. Succeeding in the elite world by satisfying these expectations becomes an “obligation” felt at both institutional and individual levels. For these reasons, satisfaction among elites can best be characterized as “medium”: institutional position provides an objective measure of success but at the same time continuously asks that one great accomplishment be replaced by another, thus leaving many elites in a perpetual state of never feeling fully satisﬁed. The communitarian world is viewed by communitarians as “stymieing” because most have had to make substantial and unexpected adjustments in the kind of career to lead. Consequently, satisfaction among communitarians can best be described as “low.” This is not to say that communitarians never come to achieve a sense of satisfaction and peace with their place in the profession; as we earlier heard, many of them do just this. But even after this process is completed by late career, the typical account underscores these issues as highly consequential in shaping the person who presently speaks as someone who has “come to be.” The pluralist world is viewed by pluralists as a “happy medium” because it allows them to pursue their work without giving up on all of their ambitions. At the same time, it does not pose the onus of expectation characteristic of elites. Pluralists can embrace research to a degree, even to a high degree, just as they can (especially in middle and late phases) identify more with teaching – all without serious sanction. Variety, as their collective identity attests, characterizes life in the pluralist world. These conditions lead to relatively high overall satisfaction with self and institution. In light of these systematic differences, how may we use the empirical material on hand to conceptualize the academic profession in particular and professions in general? 153

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This study has shown that elites, pluralists, and communitarians use different rhetoric to publicly present their life courses. The process of learning how to embrace and intensify ambition, modify, or reject it, is not individual or random: it is a group project, following a predictable pattern, geared to the organizational opportunities and constraints of one’s work environment. Knowing “how to be” an old and acceptable elite entails a signiﬁcantly different repertoire of roles, practices, and rhetoric than knowing how to be an old and acceptable communitarian. To achieve a more abstract and generalizable understanding, we may interpret these differences by adopting the concept of the master narrative. Master narratives are here deﬁned as the dominant communication patterns that characterize how people order and present their passages through time and place (cf. Buchmann, 1989; Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988). We can posit four structural and cultural dimensions along which differences in these academic worlds arise. These structural and cultural distinctions represent ways to differentiate not only this sample of worlds and the narratives found in them but the population of elite, pluralist, and communitarian worlds that make up the whole academic system. Structurally, worlds differ in the number and range of opportunities available to people (Allison & Stewart, 1974; Glaser, 1964; Merton, 1973c; Pelz & Andrews, 1966; Zuckerman, 1977). Ambition varies across worlds because different worlds offer different opportunities for ambition. Worlds vary in their wealth of human, ﬁscal, and infrastructural resources. These differences produce inequities (both in number and in quality) in opportunities to get ahead. Second, worlds differ structurally in the predominant systems of reward or incentives extended to individuals (Glaser, 1964; Pelz & Andrews, 1966; Zuckerman, 1977). Deﬁnitions of achievement vary across worlds, so that in one (especially the communitarian) world, achievement in teaching or in administration carries equal weight with achievement in research. Failings in any one of those roles, including research, is excusable, though failings in all three normally results in sanction. By contrast, in another world (especially the elite), achievement is normally deﬁned by research. Elites most easily forgive failings in administration and/or teaching. Failure in research, however, is like a knife in the side. Culturally, worlds differ ﬁrst in the expectations governing role performance (cf. Merton, 1973b). People in these worlds hold systematically different beliefs about what constitutes “achievement” – they must, since conforming to the moral, institutional career deﬁnes most scientists as failures once beyond the earliest phases. Worlds therefore have their local deﬁnition. Elites mandate greatness. Pluralists and communitarians, by contrast, gravitate toward other and more pragmatic outcomes; greatness becomes an increasingly all-too-distant dream.

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Second, worlds differ culturally in the symbols that characterize careers said to be standard (Zuckerman, 1977). Elites instill in one another ambition for greatness if only because greatness embodies the pantheon – the heroes whose photographs line the corridor walls, who come to the meeting rooms to give talks, who have trained great minds that in turn have trained the current elites. In other worlds, greatness is a more far-removed curiosity. Boundaries between worlds arise along each of these four dimensions. We may therefore speak of different worlds of opportunities, of incentives, of expectations, and of symbols. And we may just as easily speak of opportunity boundaries (limitless or limited), incentive boundaries (many or few; narrowly or widely deﬁned), expectation boundaries (high or low), and symbolic boundaries (grand or unornamented) (cf. Lamont, 1992). We must also be aware that these attributes are highly intercorrelated. One attribute often gives rise to or feeds off of another. Where we ﬁnd a world of plentiful opportunities, we are also likely to ﬁnd a world of potent incentives, of high expectations, and of mighty symbols. Where we ﬁnd a world of meager opportunities, we are also likely to ﬁnd a world of faint incentives, of low expectations, and of mild symbols. At root, these structural and cultural distinctions account for and describe the internal differentiation of a profession. Thus prevailing conditions in these worlds work to produce distinct master narratives. Elites see themselves and are seen by others as pushing to get ahead, their self-identities competitively staked in attainment and recognition. The life course consists in principle and often in practice of a steady upward climb. This is a world in which the self is in a perpetual mode of becoming; the master narrative of this world embodies this mode. The leading trend among communitarians consists of being. They describe themselves in ways that highlight steadiness. They often “get stuck,” largely because the four sociocultural conditions in their world do not favor upward mobility. After early career phases, little social control regulates or helps to inspire peak performance. Their master narrative underscores this leveling-off. Pluralists portray themselves in both ways, particularly after early career phases when jobs are secure. The most typical pluralist strives in early and midcareer and levels off thereafter. The typical pluralist in late career decelerates gradually as elites continue their upward climb and as most communitarians have generally come to a halt. Science and other professions, therefore, may be viewed as an array of narratives, each characterized by a script that individuals have followed or are attempting to follow. To a degree, narratives can be chosen, emphasizing the role of agency. The choices available to individuals may be set in terms of a continuum of proscriptiveness and permissiveness (cf. Parsons, 1951). The roles that 155

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elites can perform in keeping with local standards are few. The elite world is, thus, highly proscriptive, setting clear and comparatively inﬂexible parameters on exactly which roles count as legitimate and valued. The esteemed scientist is engaged and remains engaged over the career, although the speciﬁc forms of engagement may vary across life. The young scientist performs the role of the budding researcher, whereas the more advanced scientist may play more of a role as manager in addition to researcher – as a national spokesperson for the ﬁeld, an administrator, an executive ofﬁcer, a diplomat, or some other role. Moving from the elite to the pluralist and communitarian worlds, roles become less proscriptive and more permissive. Different kinds of careers become increasingly possible and acceptable, and we ﬁnd different narratives that reﬂect this heterogeneity in outlook, orientation, and ambition. Thus communitarians talked about turning away from science, entertaining and often acting on entrepreneurial, recreational, familial, and leisurely interests, and doing so with few social costs. Elites are more inclined to judge others on the basis of their latest scholarly work. Whether one became an oil magnate or was an all-star tennis player is secondary or altogether irrelevant. The worlds of science and the narratives they spawn exist, therefore, at different positions on a moral playing ﬁeld. Having a narrative provides a reliable basis on which to predict the world in which any otherwise anonymous scientist works. Based upon results here, identiﬁcation of that world spells out a host of ways, discussed through the eight dimensions of identity above, for how self, career, and ambition will most probably transpire. The way in which people narrate their work – in science, law, medicine, or politics – thus provides a basis for seeing how self and profession get constructed. Continuity and change at both individual and institutional levels are fundamental properties of this construction project, as some previous approaches to professions have emphasized, but from different vantage points (e.g. Abbott, 1988). On the one hand, learning a career narrative consists of change as individuals adapt and develop a match between themselves and their work environments. On the other hand, this change is sought for in the interests of and often brings about continuity and harmony between self and institution, most often reﬂected in people’s descriptions of “coming to terms or peace” with their careers. On the institutional level, the organizations in which professional work is done “get built” and endure through these narratives, becoming representations of the kind of career most typically found within them at a given point in time. At the same time, however, institutions change, and narrative is both a manifestation and impetus for this evolution. In the case of academe, “institutional upgrading” – state colleges becoming universities, universities seeking to

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grow in stature, wealth, and inﬂuence – is a phenomenon that captures such change. The sources of institutional change are both endogenous and exogenous and express themselves through the four posited sociocultural determinants of occupational life (opportunities, incentives, expectations, and symbols). Examples of endogenous sources of change include modiﬁcations in governance and administrative practices (e.g. policies on recruitment or promotion – such as getting outside letters for peer review, which directly alters incentives and expectations). Examples of exogenous sources of change include funding and the labor market. A severely contracted academic labor market in many ﬁelds can be seen to increasingly push freshly minted Ph.Ds from elite schools to pluralist and (even more so) to communitarian ones; their presence, growing mass, together with what work they produce can alter the identity, status, and “sound” of those institutions – manifest in changes found in the expectations, opportunities, incentives, and symbolism of those social worlds. By contrast, tightened funding poses constraints which limit both individuals and institutions to blossom into elites. A key point is that while this study has presented “career composites” for three kinds of organizational environments, those environments can change in important ways that affect the very composites. Were a similar study conducted twenty-ﬁve years ago, or were one replicated twenty-ﬁve years from now, we would likely see systematic differences in self, institution and how narrative links the two. These should be clearly seen among the fruits of a sociogenic approach, sensitive to time and place, to how professionals and professions exist and evolve.

CONCLUSION Merton explored the idea, originating in Newton’s aphorism, that if people see farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants (Merton, 1965). But most scientists, like most people, are not giants, nor do most scientists, like Newton, scale lofty heights (Gustin, 1973). As Cole and Cole found, “a relatively small number of scientists produce work which becomes the base for future discoveries . . .” (1973, p. 228). Their data strongly suggested that most research is rarely cited by the bulk of the science community, and even less so by the most distinguished scientists who produce the most signiﬁcant work (Cole & Cole, 1973). Most scientists, thus, work not on the shoulders but in the shadows of giants: ambition, career imagery and unfolding, and narrative capture the way in which luminaries and abstract conceptions of greatness deﬁne a moral career, 157

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which become a guide for measurement and interpretation by people working the shared occupational terrain. Only through living a real-life career do people adapt to a series of locations outside the secular pantheon of their ﬁeld. This could be as true for scientists as for other professionals, from lawyers to physicians to business executives. This paper began by identifying two main clusters of ways – trait and power perspectives – that sociologists have used to view professions. Future work would beneﬁt from search parties that ﬁnd and bring people into their professions – they have long been missing in professions research, yet they represent an additional mode of inquiry into occupations. From sports to ﬁnance, much remains to be found about identity and institution building based upon actual people’s experiences and interpretations of what they do and how they see themselves doing it. Ambition and its chronology offer a key inside these occupational worlds, their people, and the causes and courses of their careers.

NOTES 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, lines 1125b-1151b. 2. Rankings of the departments sampled from the 1982 study are similar to those of subsequent 1995 study. Fieldwork for this project was conducted in 1994, just prior to the release of the latter rankings; thus the earlier ranking study was used. 3. Interview No. 31. 4. Ibid. 5. Interview No. 40. 6. Interview No. 27. 7. Interview No. 31. 8. Interview No. 35. 9. Interview No. 30. 10. Interview No. 59. 11. Interview No. 56. 12. Interview No. 59. 13. Interview No. 23. 14. Interview No. 14. 15. Interview No. 13. 16. Interview No. 23. 17. Ibid. 18. Interview No. 8. 19. Interview No. 14. 20. I emphasize that these dimensions, and the points made in the discussion of them, are generalizations. No social world is internally homogeneous, and I have in the preceding discussion noted several within-world patterns (e.g. those communitarians who identify more strongly with science as job versus those who see science as profession). Moreover, some internal heterogeneity is composed of people institutionally located in one world but possessing, both objectively and subjectively, several characteristics of

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self and career found in other worlds (e.g. an elite who stops doing research, embraces teaching wholly, and whose record and rhetoric comes to resemble communitarians; or a communitarian who has managed to live a “miniature version” of an elite career, producing a record and rhetoric resembling some elites). These are exceptions, though, not the norm. Exceptions are of theoretic and practical interest, however. Limits of space preclude a full treatment here, but additional research would be well-received that examines the conditions under which fractions of people (or even single individuals) in one world come to “look” and “sound” like those more characteristically found in another. In academic parlance, this question addresses the conditions that produce and sustain anomalously sized ﬁsh in their respective ponds.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank James Dowd, Warren Hagstrom, and Barry Schwartz for providing numerous helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Research for this work was made possible by the National Science Foundation (grant number: SBR-95-01420), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. Tables 1 and 2 and interview data are reprinted from The Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists – Their Passions and Professions with permission by the University of Chicago Press, copyright 1998.

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7. SOCIALIZATION AND THE FAMILY REVISITED Norella M. Putney and Vern L. Bengtson Family socialization has changed, and it has to be reconceptualized to reﬂect our changing society. Traditional perspectives on socialization hold that families are the primary socialization agents of children, teaching them what they need to know in order to function in their society or social group. Another tenet is that childhood socialization has crucial, lifelong effects on individual functioning and well-being. Hence the socialization of children is seen as one of the basic functions of the family along with the provision of sustenance, nurturance and security. In the traditional socialization approach, emphasis is on the conscious teaching of culturally prescribed roles, attitudes and behaviors through social learning mechanisms. Psychoanalytic perspectives emphasize the unconscious dimensions of socialization whereby children internalize the lessons conveyed by parents through modeling or exhortation. Indeed, there are certain attitudes that seem to emanate from a socialization that is both deep and enduring. This perspective acknowledges the tenacity of some habits and worldviews acquired in childhood and how difﬁcult it is to change them. We suggest that family socialization is more complex than the traditional approach – with its heavy debt to structural-functionalism – allows. In a postindustrial society characterized by rapid social change and marital instability, and where the employment of mothers of young children has become normative, the traditional approach to socialization with its central concern for normatively prescribed social roles is no longer adequate. We need to better understand the underlying mechanisms of intergenerational socialization, where inﬂuence and transmission ﬂows between generations may be reciprocal, and where socialization occurs across the adult years. We suggest this contemporary

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approach to socialization already is evident in the literature even though at present it lacks theoretical coherence. A contemporary perspective sees family socialization as a dynamic, interactive process between parents and children across generations, one that occurs in social and historical contexts. We look beyond the traditional understanding of socialization and its almost exclusive reliance on social learning by including such socialization processes as intergenerational status inheritance, deﬁning inﬂuences, cognitive schemas, and the socialization effects that inhere in intergenerational affectual solidarity. Affectual solidarity between generations seems to be a largely unacknowledged but necessary condition for positive socialization to occur. As a theoretical concept, socialization is not value neutral. Socialization was a core element of the reigning theoretical perspective of mid-century American sociology, but it was later attacked for its functional ideology and normative biases. Recently, however, socialization seems to be enjoying a sort of renaissance in family research, whether as a ﬁeld of study or an explanatory concept. Uncoupled from functionalist presuppositions, we suggest socialization has considerable theoretical utility in the ﬁeld of family research, especially in the study of multigenerational family inﬂuence and transmission patterns and their mechanisms. In this chapter we consider ﬁrst the various theoretical perspectives that have informed our understanding of family socialization, their usefulness, and indeed their validity, in a changing social environment. We trace how family socialization research has evolved over the past several decades. Second, we elaborate on our call for a broader conceptualization of family socialization. In support of this proposal, we present research investigating a variety of socialization processes in different content areas. Third, to examine family socialization is to confront several debates in the family and sociological literatures as well as in the policy arena. Are families still important as the primary socialization agent of children? Are peers more inﬂuential than families in affecting life course trajectories and outcomes? Has the employment of mothers damaged socialization processes and harmed children? In the third section we examine these debates and the socialization research that addresses these issues. Fourth, we consider the long term inﬂuence and potency of childhood socialization. A related question concerns the relative inﬂuence of childhood as compared to adult socialization. There are divergent responses to these questions. We suggest that the research ﬁndings pertaining to these issues may vary by the socialization content area being investigated. Fifth, we present new research on intergenerational family inﬂuence and transmission processes using data from the University of Southern California’s 30-year Longitudinal Study of Generations. This research focuses

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on the intergenerational transmission of educational aspirations, self-esteem, and value orientations, and their effects on adult well-being across three decades of rapid social change. We discuss the implications of this research for multigenerational family continuity across generations.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY SOCIALIZATION What Do We Mean by Socialization? In its classical formulation, socialization refers to the preparation of a child for participation in adult society – the basic social process through which an individual becomes integrated into a social group. This occurs by way of the individual learning the group’s culture and his or her role in the group. (LeVine, 1969; see also Brim & Wheeler, 1966; Parsons, 1955). The family of origin is regarded as the primary site of socialization. During the growing up years children internalize the values, attitudes, skills and roles that shape their personalities and result in their integration into the larger society. Drawing from symbolic interactionist and identity theories, this process is deemed essential to the formation of the child’s self. By learning to play various social roles, the child’s social self emerges. The idea of “role” preparation and performance is central to this sociological deﬁnition of socialization. Socialization theorists have recognized that socialization is not limited to just childhood, but applies to the learning of any new social role and its attendant values, attitudes and customs (Goslin, 1969). By this deﬁnition, socialization – the learning of new social roles – can be seen as a lifelong process. Theorists also have recognized that socialization can be reciprocal, as between parents and children; its direction may reverse, with children teaching their parents or grandparents (Glass, Bengtson & Dunham, 1986). For example, teenagers may have to socialize their parents to the facts of their own maturation and changed status and hence their parents’ changed status in society. In the ﬁrst (and only) Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Goslin (1969) described three different perspectives on socialization (in itself reﬂecting the giant shadow of Parsonian thought): A psychological view of socialization as the acquisition of impulse control, where identiﬁcation and internalization are considered important processes; an anthropological view of socialization as enculturation or the intergenerational transmission of culture; and a sociological perspective which views socialization as role-training. According to this third perspective on socialization – which at the time was closely aligned with structural functionalist assumptions about the nature of society and the 167

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individual’s place in the social system – the needs of individuals are secondary to the needs of the social system (Brim, 1966). Bluntly stated, this view of socialization assumed that the purpose of child training is social conformity and the content of training is set by social norms – the glue, which allows the social system to cohere. Brim (1966) notes that more complex conceptualizations emphasized the socialization process itself as well as adaptation mechanisms, but again for the good of society. Drawing on psychoanalytic and symbolic interactionism precepts regarding motivation and behavior, Parsons (1951) saw primary socialization, which occurs in the early years and shapes the basic structure of the personality, as differentiated from secondary socialization, which is more specialized roletraining orientated to the institutional needs of the social system. From this perspective, early experiences in the family of origin are seen as having enduring and consequential effects on individuals and their lives. As we will discuss later, this is an empirical question around which there is considerable debate. Although Parsons (1951) emphasized psychoanalytic and symbolic interactionist processes in his conceptualization of socialization, it was social learning theory which proved most compatible with the functionalist priorities given to social roles and their enactment (LeVine, 1969). According to social learning theory, much of human behavior is acquired through instruction, modeling, and the imitation of other people’s behavior (Bandura, 1969). Parsons (1951) theorized that social norms not only regulate human behavior, they are constitutive of human nature. Through modeling, the role demands of society are internalized and the normative structure of society becomes self-imposed. The Evolution of Family Socialization Research: The Life Course Perspective It is not surprising that there is congruence between the historical periods of a given society and the development of particular sociological perspectives. It can now be seen that the postwar period in American society was an unusually stable and optimistic time, a fertile context for the development of a theory premised on societal equilibrium and normative consensus. Parson’s (1951) structural functionalism emerged as the dominant sociological paradigm. Its hegemonic status lasted until the 1960s, coincident with a marked acceleration of social change and conﬂict. Parson’s theory of the social system and the structural functionalist assumptions on which it was constructed were not able to accommodate the new conditions and uncertainties. The theory’s presuppositions no longer held; its empirical validity became questionable. Against this backdrop, other theoretical perspectives such as conﬂict, social exchange, social constructionist, phenomenology, critical theory and feminist theories grew in importance.

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The study of human development began to shift from its earlier focus on developmental stages and the socialization of children for successful role enactment, to one that recognized family socialization as a constellation of dynamic, intergenerational influence and transmission processes – beyond the restrictive normative structures of “the social system,” or mechanistic models of social learning. The earlier stage perspectives came to be regarded by many researchers as over determined views of human development that could not accommodate the heterogeneity of adult development (not to mention women’s lives), diversity, agency or structural and historical change (Elder, 1994). Similar critiques embroiled traditional socialization theory, which Parsons (1951) theorized as the central mechanism of structural functionalism. Functionalism and traditional socialization theory could not be reconciled to the society-wide weakening of normative prescriptions and the erosion of gender role stereotypes and behaviors. Ultimately, Parson’s formulation of sex role typing – the assignment of instrumental roles to men and expressive roles to women – may have been the most controversial of traditional socialization tenets, galvanizing a generation of feminist scholars (Osmond & Thorne, 1993). One result of this critique was that the socialization approach became more transactional in focus with greater emphasis on human agency (Elder, 1994). Nevertheless, by the 1970s, a growing interest in the life course paradigm supplanted the traditional structural-functionalist socialization model as a research framework. Soon after the publication of their Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Goslin, 1969), socialization researchers lost interest in traditional socialization theory, and soon thereafter it was absorbed by other, more useful theoretical perspectives, especially the life course perspective (Elder, 1994). Increasingly, developmental scientists are employing a life course perspective that acknowledges the complex interplay of individual development, family inﬂuences and environmental forces (Elder & O’Rand, 1995). This shift in emphasis, however, has not negated a continuing interest on the part of family researchers in socialization processes. In the study of intergenerational relationships and generational continuity and change over time, family socialization is an essential linking explanation. At the same time, the life course perspective is just that, a paradigmatic framework that guides research but by itself does not generate testable hypotheses. Socialization, incorporated into the life course perspective as well as other theoretical approaches such as interpretive and interactionist perspectives, remains a useful theory for generating research hypotheses about the complex processes of human development. Shorn of its functionalist presuppositions, socialization is a fruitful approach for the examination of intergenerational inﬂuence and transmission processes. 169

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CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FAMILY SOCIALIZATION RESEARCH Family socialization refers to more than the social learning processes of instruction, modeling and imitation (Bandura, 1969). Under the rubric of family socialization, researchers have investigated other mechanisms of intergenerational transmission and inﬂuence, such as: status inheritance (Biblarz & Raftery, 1993), which some investigations treat is distinct from socialization; the direct and indirect effects of parent-child affective solidarity (Bengtson, Biblarz & Roberts, 2002); “deﬁning” inﬂuences, an aspect of symbolic interactionism (Starrels & Holm, 2000); and cognitive schemas, as informed by attribution theory (Benson, Arditti, DeAtiles & Smith, 1992; Putallaz, Castanzo, Grims & Sherman, 1998). Socialization processes can operate consciously and unconsciously, at multiple levels – individual, family, and structural – in adulthood as well as early childhood and adolescence (although their content will vary). Socialization inﬂuences can be bi-directional; there may be lagged effects. Part of the analytic task is to specify the underlying mechanisms and the conditions under which transmission mechanisms are more or less likely to operate or have an effect. Current literature suggests that the concept of intergenerational family socialization has wide application in a variety of domains or content areas in family research. Researchers have examined the intergenerational transmission of social psychological traits such as self-esteem and self-efﬁcacy, social interaction patterns and parenting styles, marital happiness and the propensity to divorce. The socialization model has been used to investigate spousal or dating abuse, career aspirations and achievement, attitudes such as gender ideology or political ideology, religiosity, value orientations such as individualism or materialism, drug and alcohol abuse, and delinquent and criminal behavior. Researchers have identiﬁed the intergenerational transmission of vulnerability factors – or resiliency factors – which become activated under certain conditions or stresses (Caspi, Wright, Mofﬁtt & Silva, 1998). In the following section, we elaborate on some of this contemporary socialization research. We do not attempt to cover all the topics that are included in socialization studies, for example, the effect of birth order on outcomes. In family socialization research, parent-child similarity or congruence on a given outcome measure, such as values or aspirations, is a common analytic method for empirically ascertaining socialization effects. Status Inheritance as a Socialization Mechanism Status inheritance – the transmission of parental socioeconomic status which also carries with it parental attitudes and values – is an under appreciated

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mechanism of intergenerational socialization. The mechanism of status inheritance links structural factors, such as the family’s socioeconomic location, with social psychological processes, such as the transmission of attitudes and aspirations, to affect socialization outcomes. Status inheritance can operate through multiple pathways. Parents situate their children in a socioeconomic context relative to income and wealth, residential location and a network of kin and potential peer relations, with related structural opportunities and constraints. This affects children’s perceptions and expectations of what is possible and what they can aspire to. Parents’ statuses affect their ability to invest in their children’s human capital, primarily education, which has signiﬁcant implications for children’s aspirations and achievements, values and psychological well being (Bengtson, Biblarz & Roberts, 2002; Biblarz & Raftery, 1993; Coleman, 1988). Parents’ statuses are strong predictors of the aspirations, values and self images they seek to cultivate in their children. As a socialization mechanism, status inheritance relies on Kohn’s (1969) widely applicable theory linking the characteristics of occupations, as differentiated by education and class, with parental child rearing values. Kohn and his associates (Kohn & Schooler, 1983) demonstrated that workers in white-collar jobs that reward self-reliance and creativity generalize these values to the socialization of their children. Similarly, workers in blue-collar jobs that reward conformity and obedience then apply these values in their child socialization practices. Parents’ norms and values compatible with their parenting goals in turn are transmitted to their children. Status inheritance beneﬁts are not limited to tangible resources. For example, parents who have succeeded in their own work careers may transmit positive attitudes about employment to their children who in turn may develop high aspirations for themselves. McLeod and Kessler (1990) found that parents’ socioeconomic status can operate as a developmental factor as well as an indicator of ﬁnancial resources for children. This may occur through the prior socialization of resilient personality characteristics, as Elder (1974) found in his investigation of children who grew up during the Depression. Intergenerational Affective Bonds as Mechanisms of Socialization Several studies have examined the relationship between bonds of emotional closeness in multigenerational families and socialization outcomes, such as selfesteem, attitudes and values, and the propensity to provide assistance to family members in times of need (Bengtson, 2001; Rossi & Rossi, 1990; Roberts & Bengtson, 1996; Silverstein, Parrott & Bengtson, 1995). The affective quality of parent-child relations works in two ways. It acts directly on intergenerational 171

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transmission through its inﬂuence on youths’ psychological well being and adjustment. It also acts as a mediator for the effects of other socialization mechanisms (Bengtson, Biblarz & Roberts, 2002). The following research, in different content areas, illustrates how affectional solidarity between parents and children serves as a mechanism of intergenerational socialization. The intergenerational transmission of self-esteem. In an examination of the long term effects of parent-child affective relations, Roberts and Bengtson (1996) demonstrated that self-esteem in adulthood has its roots in the affective climate of the parental home. Close parent-child relations in the family of origin were found to enhance a youth’s self-esteem, which in turn became a psychological resource brought forward into adulthood. They demonstrated that it is the stability of earlier self-esteem that is the conduit through which parent-child relations in the family of origin shape self-esteem in adulthood. Parent-child affective bonds and the propensity to provide social support. Silverstein, Parrot and Bengtson (1995) investigated how the quality of the parent-child relationship years earlier predicted the propensity of adult children to provide support for elderly parents, and how that varies by gender. Intergenerational relationships in the older family are viewed as the culmination of lifelong patterns of family experiences and inﬂuence. This study demonstrated that intergenerational affection between parents and children measured years earlier plays a direct role in motivating support from daughters, while for sons affective bonds inﬂuence support only indirectly by increasing social contact. The authors suggest that the different causal mechanisms found for sons and daughters reﬂect a traditional division of social support labor, gender role patterns learned in the family of origin. Whitbeck, Hoyt and Huck (1994) focused on the inﬂuence of family history and the family interaction patterns learned in the parental home. They demonstrated that interaction patterns and role expectations established in early childhood family processes remain remarkably stable, in turn affecting the propensity of multigenerational family members to provide elder support several years later. Perceptions of early family relationships inﬂuenced both contemporary relationships and felt concern about parents’ well being. Parent-child affective bonds had their most consistent effects on the provision of emotional support to elderly parents. Parental support and the inheritance of violence in intimate relations. The intergenerational inheritance of abusive behavior is a frequent topic of family and deviance research. Simons, Lin and Gordon’s (1998) panel study of dating

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violence exempliﬁes how the early parent-child affective relationship – as distinct from parental control and monitoring – can serve as an explanatory variable in the intergenerational transmission of violence in intimate relations. The authors examined transmission processes in the causal relationship between corporal punishment in childhood and delinquent behavior in adolescence. Two socialization mechanisms were tested: imitation, and direct experience. They found that a negative parent-child affective relationship did attenuate the association between corporal punishment and the child’s risk for this antisocial behavior. Referencing Bandura’s (1977) later writings on social learning, the authors observed that adolescents don’t just imitate their parents’ violent behavior toward each other. They ﬁrst evaluate the likely outcome of this kind of behavior and then adopt behaviors that seem to have positive consequences. Simons et al. (1998) suggested that children are unlikely to construe violence between parents as having a positive outcome for either one. Yet corporal punishment by parents was shown to affect the likelihood of dating violence among adolescents. This is because years earlier the child learned from ﬁrst-hand experience that violence toward an intimate other does change behavior, at least for the short term. Results such as these add complexity to models of intergenerational transmission processes and are consistent with the conclusion that preexisting parent-child affective relationships are important determinants or conduits of socialization outcomes. Conditions and Mechanisms of Socialization Processes

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The literature suggests that the focus in contemporary socialization research has moved beyond direct examination of modeling or transmission effects to explicating their underlying mechanisms – to specifying the conditions, timing and context of family socialization processes. This is a departure from earlier socialization research which was centrally concerned with societal needs and preparing children for successful role occupancy. Although in different content areas, the following studies reﬂect this trend.

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Cognitive schemas as mechanisms of socialization. Benson, Arditti, De Atiles and Smith (1992) used attribution theory to examine causal schemas as mechanisms underlying the intergenerational transmission of interaction patterns in intimate relationships. They tested the proposition that the attributions that emerge in the intimate relationships of young adults reﬂect the images they constructed in childhood about intimate relationships and their causal explanations based on the perceived quality of their parents’ marital relationship. Such causal schemas about intimate relationships are thought to be the mechanism 173

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for parental inﬂuence on children’s attributions and interaction patterns in intimate relationship years later. To show how powerful causal constructions can be, Acock and Bengtson (1980) demonstrated that children’s attributions about parents’ attitudes were stronger predictors of children’s attitudes than were the actual attitudes of parents. The experience that young adults have in their relationships with their mothers and fathers and the attributions they make contribute to their causal schemas about intimate relationships. Benson et al. suggest this formulation of causal schemas may represent a more subtle socialization mechanism than modeling, one which explains how the scripts for intimacy that are written during childhood become activated later in intimate relationships, especially marriage. Deﬁning inﬂuences. Drawing from symbolic interactionist theory, Starrels and Holm (2000) examined “deﬁning” inﬂuence as a distinct socialization mechanism. Two mechanisms were compared: mothers’ deﬁning inﬂuence, and mothers’ modeling inﬂuence, on their adolescent children’s plans for marriage and parenthood. “Deﬁning” is construed as one aspect of symbolic interactionism. Through symbolic interaction, agents of socialization, such as parents, deﬁne their expectations for their children who in turn perceive and internalize these expectations. Alternatively, social learning focuses on observational learning or instruction from parents as well as from extrafamilial sources. The authors asked: Were mothers’ expectations concerning their children’s plans to marry and have children consistent with their children’s plans – seen as deﬁning inﬂuences? Or were mothers’ actual behaviors more consistent with children’s family formation plans – seen as modeling inﬂuences? The authors also examined the conditions under which intergenerational similarity is more or less likely to exist, and the relative importance of parents, siblings, and non-familial inﬂuences on adolescent daughters’ and sons’ intentions to marry and become parents. Starrels and Holm (2000) found that “deﬁning” inﬂuences were stronger over time than modeling inﬂuences for both sons and daughter. Why would this be the case? The authors speculate that perhaps the verbal communication of parents’ desires and expectations for children is a more proximate and direct form of socialization, making it more inﬂuential than behavior that occurred years earlier. In general, family inﬂuences were found to be greater than nonfamily inﬂuences. Socialization for youth unemployment. There are early childhood antecedents of young adult unemployment, but to what extent do they represent socialization mechanisms? Caspi, Wright, Mofﬁtt and Silva (1998) examined precursors to youth unemployment using prospective data collected from early childhood

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to young adulthood. They focused on whether poverty and welfare dependency are transmitted intergenerationally, and whether the transmission mechanisms are direct. They found that young adults did not simply model their parents’ unemployment. Personal characteristics such as low self-esteem or problem behaviors, and family characteristics such as poverty or family structure, began to shape employment prospects years before young adults entered the labor force. The authors concluded that unemployment per se is not directly transmitted across generations through modeling processes. What does seem to be occurring is the family transmission of vulnerability factors that increase the risk of unemployment. This suggests that what is transmitted across generations are the mechanisms that may produce unemployment.

ARE FAMILIES STILL IMPORTANT? DEBATES AND CHALLENGES ABOUT SOCIALIZATION The socialization of children has long been regarded as one of the most important functions of the family. Have social changes over the last several decades, such as economic restructuring and the disappearance of the family wage, alternative family structures, and rising maternal employment, rendered the nuclear family a less adequate vehicle for providing children with essential skills for adult functioning? Have families lost their functions – their importance? In recent years heated debates have surfaced in public discourse and among family researchers about the well being of American families and children, and indeed about marriage itself as a social institution. We focus on three such debates. All bear on the socialization functions of families and the changes that have occurred in family well being over the past several decades. (1) Are families still important in American society, or has increased divorce and the decline of marriage so weakened families that they can no longer effectively socialize their children? (2) Do peers matter more than parents in terms of their inﬂuence on developing children? Are peers the true primary socialization agents? (3) Has the increase in the employment of mothers, especially mothers of young children, been detrimental to the development and socialization of their children? Fueling these debates have been the dramatic increase in divorce, high rates of cohabitation and out of wedlock child bearing, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and women’s employment patterns. The Decline of Marriage and the Family A decade ago, Popenoe (1993) issued a challenge to conventional wisdom about the strength and well being of American families. His thesis is that there has 175

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been a decline in the family’s structure and functions since the 19th century, changes that have accelerated greatly in the past twenty years. Popenoe and other proponents of the “family decline” hypothesis focus on the negative consequences of the changing family structure – resulting from divorce and single parenthood – on the psychological, social and economic well being of children (Popenoe, 1993). They lament the declining respect marriage now receives (occurring not only in the U.S. but also in most Western nations [Cherlin, 1999]), and have wrung their hands over the disappearance of the traditional (read 1950s) nuclear family. They are particularly worried about the employment of mothers. These scholars argue that the social norms legitimating the pursuit of individualism and materialistic values, and the increase in alternative social groups and living arrangements for the satisfaction of basic human needs, have fatally weakened the family as a social institution and as an agent of socialization. The studies below shed light on these assumptions. The inheritance of marital instability. There has been considerable research exploring the intergenerational transmission of marital unhappiness and divorce and their effects on children’s socialization outcomes. While it is clear that the marital instability of one generation is often carried forward to the next (Amato, 1996; McLanahan & Bumpass, 1988; Webster, Orbuch & House, 1995), the mechanisms by which this occurs are less well understood. It has been even more difﬁcult to tease out family transmission processes from context, such as the inﬂuence of peers and schools, or the effects of economic and normative structures in a given historical period. In a longitudinal study of the intergenerational transmission of divorce, Amato (1996) identiﬁed offsprings’ problematic interpersonal behavior as the primary mediator of parental divorce effects. Findings supported a socialization thesis. Parents model poor interpersonal behaviors, such that their children do not learn the skills and attitudes conducive to success in their own marriages. Webster, Orbuch and House (1995) examined the pathways by which different childhood family structures affect the next generation’s marital quality and success. They applied two theoretical perspectives. The ﬁrst is socialization, deﬁned here as inadequate parental supervision and the lack of role models, typically found in single parent homes. This leads to dysfunctional learning, which then negatively affects the adult child’s marital quality and stability years later. The second perspective, conceptualized by Caspi and Elder (1988), focuses on parental conﬂict and negative interaction styles which are passed on to children and later enacted in their marital relationships. Webster et al. (1995) found that although adult children’s family history was unrelated to their marital happiness, there were signiﬁcant differences by family history in their

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perceptions of marital stability. Compared to those with other family histories, adults from divorced families were the most likely to perceive their marriages as unstable and to see a greater likelihood of divorce. Further, among those in less than happy marriages, children of divorce were more likely to engage in negative interactions which then strained the marital relationship. Webster et al. concluded that the results best supported the parental conﬂict and interaction style perspective rather than the socialization perspective. The Webster et al. (1995) study is an important piece of family research that has made a signiﬁcant contribution to our understanding of how parental divorce affects children’s marital outcomes. We wonder, however, about its theoretical conclusion. In our view, one of the interesting things about this study is how socialization was deﬁned. It seems to us that the hypothesized parental conﬂict and interaction style perspective, which posits that children learn interaction styles from their parents that are maintained across time and carried into their own marital relationships, is in fact a socialization process. This study identiﬁed the mechanisms and conditions whereby divorce is transmitted from parents to children. Through social learning, or perhaps through the more subtle mechanism of cognitive schemas (Benson, Arditti, De Atiles & Smith, 1992), children inherited their parents’ negative interaction styles which then adversely affected their marital stability. In another study using longitudinal data, Feng, Giarrusso, Bengtson and Frye (1999) investigated how marital stability and quality is transmitted from middle age parents to their young adult children and how this varies by gender. The authors were guided by social learning theory which speciﬁes that because of modeling effects, children are likely to repeat their parents’ styles of interpersonal and marital behavior. Findings indicated there was a transmission of divorce from parents to daughters but not from parents to sons. However, the intergenerational transmission of parental marital quality was not found. The authors suggest that because the intergenerational transmission of marital quality may be due to modeling, which is most likely to occur when children observe their parents’ marital behavior more frequently, transmission may be better tested with children who were living with their parents in the base year. Attributions about divorce and its effects. Much of family research emphasizes the negative inﬂuence of parental divorce on child outcomes, with many studies focusing speciﬁcally on the disruption of socialization processes which can result from divorce. For example, the stresses resulting from divorce have been shown to diminish parenting effectiveness and disturb the primary socialization environment, making children more susceptible to problems (Ge, Conger, Lorenz & Simons, 1994; Ross & Mirowsky, 1999). At the same time, studies 177

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have shown that a majority of children are not seriously affected by divorce in the long run and have outcomes similar to children from intact families (Ahrons, 1994; Anseltine, 1996; Emery 1999). But some researchers, notably those of the “family decline” contingent, have been almost shrill in their condemnation of divorce and what they see as the demise of the nuclear family. Their focus has been on the “disastrous” consequences of changing family structures on the psychological and economic well-being of children (Popenoe, 1993; Whitehead, 1996; Wallerstein, Lewis & Blakeslee, 2000). They see divorce, the diversity of family structures, and the employment of mothers as having seriously weakened the family as the site for guidance and inﬂuence. There is another perspective, however, that focuses on the strengths of multigenerational families. This view recognizes that divorce can create new difﬁculties for individuals in the short term, but suggests that families are adaptive and resilient. Empirical evidence indicates that despite changes to family structures and functions, intergenerational family members tend to remain connected, mutually inﬂuential and important to each other (Bengtson, 2001). It is possible, then, that parental divorce and its effects on children’s socialization may not be entirely negative. For example, in an investigation of how parental divorce links to adolescent depression, Anseltine (1996) found that youths in single parent homes were relatively resilient to the emotional effects of family turmoil and parental conﬂict, whereas these stresses caused youths from intact families to become depressed. Although youths in single parent families were signiﬁcantly vulnerable to ﬁnancial distress, the divorce experience seemed to have promoted their positive emotional adaptation. This leads to another issue concerning divorce and socialization – researcher agendas. Does the research on marital instability transmission include an evaluative element – the positive assessment of intact nuclear families and the “wrongness” of divorce? We suggest it does, to the extent that family socialization is understood as preparing children for successful participation in the stable society we have known. But social changes have overtaken us. Now as we evaluate the effectiveness of family socialization in a society where marital instability and a plurality of family forms have become common, it may be useful to avoid pathologizing divorce and to focus instead on how family transmission processes in the context of divorce may or may not be adaptive to changing social conditions. Are Peers more Important than Families? The second debate revolves around Judith Harris’ (1998) controversial book, The Nurture Assumption, which claims that parents are not really that

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important in shaping the lives and destinations of their children. Harris (1998) debunks the widespread belief that people’s adult lives are determined in large part by their childhood experiences. It’s not parents who socialize children, but other children who do the socializing. With an unacknowledged nod to sociobiologists (Troost & Filsinger, 1993), Harris suggests that about half of the personality differences between individuals are attributable to genes, with the other half attributable to the non-family environment. She questions the nurture assumption that culture is something parents teach their children and that this is how culture is passed down from one generation to the next. Instead, she believes that a child may acquire a trait such as aggressiveness from other, slightly older children. The influence of an adult society is indirect. One of the basic premises of child and family development research over the past several decades has been that parents, in what they do in interaction with their children, provide a primary basis for their offsprings’ later behavior. But Harris (1998) presents an alternative hypothesis that parental inﬂuences do not matter, except in the contribution of genetic predispositions. Whatever a child’s parents or families do to them, it is overshadowed in the long run by what their peers do to them. Our review of the family socialization literature suggests that a more measured approach to the parent versus peer controversy would be useful. Socialization in families is a complex phenomenon encompassing multiple and interacting processes and mechanisms that are manifested in a number of domains with different effects. In some domains, such as delinquency, the inﬂuence of peers is indeed consequential. In other domains, however, parents are the primary agents of socialization. Deviance: The role of family, peers and agency. Perhaps anticipating Harris’ (1998) assertion that peers matter more than parents in child outcomes, Aseltine (1995) examined the relative inﬂuences of parents and peers on adolescent deviance. He notes that in the domain of deviance, the role of peers in fostering deviant behavior in adolescents is well documented, while support for parental inﬂuence or “control” theories of deviance is more equivocal. In this study, Aseltine (1995) provides empirical evidence of reciprocal inﬂuence among parents, peer groups and deviant behavior. He identiﬁed a mutually-reinforcing social process through which problem behaviors are fostered and maintained. Adolescents are introduced to drugs and associate with groups who use drugs, while at the same time shielding these activities from parents’ control efforts – monitoring. This sets in motion a pattern of interaction between parents and adolescents, which in turn facilitates persistent drug use. 179

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Aseltine (1995) suggests these ﬁndings may provide a corrective to the tendency in recent research to depict socialization as a potent one-way process where socialization forces, whether by parents or by peers, simply act upon youths. Rather, those who are being socialized play a necessary role in directing and inﬂuencing the socialization process. Socialization for adolescent drug and alcohol abuse. In another study of adolescent deviance, Barnes, Reifman, Farrell and Dintcheff (2000) investigated the relative inﬂuence of parents and peers on adolescent alcohol abuse, and came to a somewhat different conclusion than Aseltine (1995), and certainly counter to Harris’ (1998) hypothesis. Using growth curve analyses, the authors analyzed separately (rather than in combination) the effects of parental support and parental monitoring on adolescent drug abuse outcomes. They found that supportive and nurturing parents changed how receptive adolescents were to the limits associated with parental monitoring. As we discussed, parental affection and support can serve as a socialization mechanism, in this case to facilitate parental monitoring of adolescent problem behaviors. Barnes et al. (2000) see parental socialization as particularly powerful because it occurs early in the child’s development and continues through adolescence. Speciﬁcally referencing Harris’ (1998) claim that parents matter little in childhood outcomes, Barnes et al. emphasize that their results afﬁrm that the socialization of children is a critical function of the family. The Employment of Mothers Has the employment of mothers damaged socialization processes and harmed children? At the beginning of the 21st century, the employment of mothers of young children has become normative. Marital instability and the impact this has on women, who are usually the custodial parent, has been a major factor in the dramatic increase of mothers of young children who now must enter the work force. How harmful, or beneficial, is this for children’s development and socialization? Research findings have been equivocal. Moreover, family researchers have not always been neutral on this subject. Some theorists’ discourses on motherhood have warned women of the ill effects of full-time employment – because theorists themselves felt mothers should not work (Turner & Troll, 1994). Early studies tended to examine the effects of mothers working as a social problem, without considering the family’s socioeconomic status, the mother’s occupational status, or the impact of her working on the quality and quantity of family interaction (Acock, Barker & Bengtson, 1982).

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A common hypothesis is that changing gender roles and increased maternal employment have decreased the inﬂuence mothers have on their children. The purported negative impact of maternal employment is based on the assumption that the time a mother spends in the labor force is inversely related to the time she spends with her children. Yet, psychological studies have found little evidence that mothers in dual-earner households interact with their children less frequently, and even if they do, they may compensate for the time away from home by providing more intensive socialization at home (Kalmijn, 1994). The effect of maternal employment on young children varies by the mothers’ education and occupational status (Kalmijn, 1994; Moen, 1992; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994). Parcel and Menaghan (1994) documented that the working conditions mothers experience on the job can be an asset to the socialization environment that children experience in the home. Moreover, it is the paid working conditions of both parents that inﬂuence the content of child socialization in the home. Wolfer and Moen (1996) found that in addition to the mothers’ job characteristics, the effects of maternal employment on daughters’ life paths varies by race and daughters’ life stage when mothers worked. For Black daughters, mothers’ employment was positively associated with daughters’ outcomes. On the other hand, Coleman (1988) has argued that maternal labor force participation may limit the social capital needed to effectively transmit norms and behavior patterns across generations. Here, social capital refers the quality of the parent-child relationship that requires both the physical presence of parents and their attention and involvement. Kalmijn (1994) examined the inﬂuence of mother’s occupational status on children’s educational attainment, and found that it had a strong effect on their schooling, independent of father’s education and occupation. Results demonstrated the positive effects of maternal labor force participation on child outcomes through the high-status jobs many married women now hold. This was not always the case. Kalmijn (1994) indicates that the relative inﬂuence of mother’s education and occupation on child outcomes has changed over time. In the context of traditional gender roles (as prevailed only 30 years ago), mothers who worked, generally in lower level positions, had less inﬂuence on their children’s educational and socioeconomic outcomes than did mothers who stayed at home. As theorized by Kohn (1977), the socialization practices of employed mothers depend on the kind of work she does. Mothers employed in the professions are likely to focus more strongly on the value of education and transmit this value to their children than are mothers employed in clerical positions. Because of changing roles for women, mothers have become increasingly important role models of socioeconomic achievement for their children. Evidence suggests that 181

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the economic resources and occupational role models that mothers provide are now as important as those traditionally provided by fathers. Such ﬁndings on the changing inﬂuence patterns of employed mothers on their children demonstrate the importance of historical context on socialization processes and outcomes.

DOES CHILDHOOD SOCIALIZATION LEAVE AN ENDURING LEGACY? A continuing research agenda concerns the long-term effects of childhood socialization, whether it persists over the life course, and if so under what conditions. A related issue concerns the relative potency of childhood socialization as compared to adult socialization. Such questions are central to the family’s role as the primary agent of socialization, and to issues of continuity and change in multigenerational family relationships across time.

Early Socialization Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, many social scientists have suggested that early childhood socialization is primary and endures across the adult years (Brim, 1966; LeVine, 1969; Penrod, 1983). It is during early socialization that the bulk of the unconscious material of the personality is laid down and defense systems develop. These unconscious personality components are seen as relatively inaccessible to change through simple socialization methods. It is the stability of the unconscious component of the individual personality that accounts for their resistance to change. Many personality traits fall into this category. Recent longitudinal studies have demonstrated the stability of a number of dimensions of personality across the life course (Giarrusso & Bengtson, 1996). Whether traits of “masculinity” or “femininity” fall into this category has generated some of the most heated debates in socialization research (Osmond & Thorne, 1993). Behaviorists, on the other hand, suggest that the potency and durability of learning that occurs in early childhood is a consequence of the frequency of contact with primary socializers and learning situations, their primacy in the child’s life, and the intensity of rewards and punishments that these socializers administer (Bandura, 1969; Brim, 1966). Parents and the expectations they have for their child’s behavior are of high salience to the child over extended periods of the child’s life. It is difﬁcult to change what was learned in childhood because

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much of it was learned under conditions of reinforcement. All this, of course, has implications for adult socialization. Other researchers take a structuralist position on socialization. The life course perspective directs our attention to how structures and social change inﬂuence individuals’ life paths, their interaction, and the importance of timing. This yields an understanding of socialization as more than a proximal or distal process, but one that is also contingent and historically embedded (Moen, Erickson & Dempster-McClain, 1997). Theorists who take a structuralist position on life path trajectories and events (e.g. Kanter, 1977; O’Rand & Campbell, 1999; Umberson, Chen, House, Hopkins & Slaten, 1996) would regard the childhood socialization perspective as an over socialized view of attitude and behavior pattern acquisition, overestimating early childhood effects on outcomes and neglecting or underestimating the effects of structures and sociohistorical conditions. The effectiveness of childhood socialization also is related to the pace of social change. Even in relatively unchanging societies, socialization in childhood cannot prepare a person for all the situations and roles he will confront in adulthood. Rapid social change can bring cultural discontinuities where successive roles to be learned do not build upon each other, or may conﬂict with what was learned earlier, rendering much of childhood learning inadequate. In this case, the long term stability of early childhood socialization may be maladaptive. Examples are where one’s occupational skills become obsolete, and changes in the gendered division of labor which have variously undermined different cohorts’ role expectations in adulthood, particularly as they have related to women’s move to full participation in the labor force. Another theoretical issue to consider in evaluating the strength and duration of childhood socialization concerns volition, the extent to which the messages of early socialization are subject to the choices individuals make in adulthood as they respond to changing environmental conditions (Gerson, 1985). We suggest there is validity to all of these perspectives on the lasting inﬂuence of early socialization. Much depends on the socialization domain we are talking about, and historical context. To demonstrate this point, we consider two domains of socialization: religiosity and gender role beliefs. Early Childhood Socialization or Adult Experience? In times of rapid social change, the relative effects of childhood socialization on individuals’ attitudes may be reduced or even nulliﬁed while individuals’ adult experiences become more important (Moen, Erickson & DampsterMcClain, 1997). During such periods, some socialization domains are more 183

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salient in people’s lives than others. In the last half century, gender role norms and behaviors have changed in almost revolutionary ways, as have women’s lives (Moen, 1992; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994; Stacey, 1991). In this case, we might expect childhood gender role socialization to exert a weaker inﬂuence on women’s adult decisions and behaviors than more proximal events or opportunity structures. Religiosity is another domain of socialization, but in the present historical context has been less central to the currents of social change. In this situation, we might expect childhood religiosity socialization to have more enduring effects. The following studies illustrate this complex interplay of childhood socialization inﬂuences and social change on individuals’ life paths. Parental inﬂuence and religiosity. Myers (1996) examined factors that conditioned the ability of parents to transmit their religiosity to their offspring, and how the experiences of adult offspring modiﬁed earlier family inﬂuences on religiosity. Three hypotheses were tested: family socialization, which emphasizes family of origin inﬂuences on attitudes and behaviors; the cultural broadening theory, which states that as youth enter college or leave home, adult contexts are more inﬂuential with time; and the channeling hypothesis, which states that friendship networks have the strongest direct effect on the church commitment of adults. Results showed that parents’ religiosity is the primary inﬂuence on the religiosity of their adult offspring. A high level of father’s education, a low level of mother’s education, and parents’ traditional family structure enhanced this transmission effect. Although the recent experiences of adult offspring did affect their religiosity, these experiences did not reduce the inﬂuence of parents and family context. Myers (1996) concludes that, “. . . parental inﬂuences have considerable staying power even as offspring move out of the home and form independent households” (p. 864). In the area of religiosity, there seems to be an enduring effect of childhood socialization. We must remember, however, that this effect is historically contingent. Gender role beliefs and childhood socialization. In a widely cited qualitative study of parental inﬂuences on women’s occupational and family choices, Gerson (1985) found that gender role socialization was a poor predictor of behaviors in adulthood, especially in times of rapid social change. In a departure from traditional socialization approaches, she emphasized that women make choices. They do not simply respond to early childhood messages, nor are they totally subject to structural conditions. In Gerson’s (1985) view, gender socialization theories tend to adopt an over socialized conceptualization of women’s lives because they ignore volition, and they do not distinguish feelings from behavior. Women’s early attitudes do not determine in any simple

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way how they will behave in adulthood. There are qualiﬁcations to Gerson’s ﬁndings, however, primarily because her sample was limited to one “exceptional” cohort of women – baby boomers – and she relied on retrospective reports. It would have been instructive had she included in her study women of other age groups who grew up in different historical periods. As a result, her conclusion that the gender role socialization messages of childhood have little effect on women’s family and occupational outcomes is questionable. Moen, Erickson and Dempster-McClain (1997) took up the issue of gender role socialization in a more complex longitudinal analysis. They examined the transmission of two gender attitudes from mothers to daughters: gender role beliefs, and work role identities. A key research objective was to untangle the relative effects of early childhood socialization and adult experiences on daughters’ gender role attitudes. In view of the broad societal shifts in gender norms and expectations that had occurred over the last few decades, the authors wondered if mothers still inﬂuenced their adult daughters’ gender role attitudes and work role identities; or if mothers and daughters had both been affected by the changes in women’s opportunities and expectations, a period effect. The authors found evidence of the effects of socialization as well as life course experiences on gender role beliefs. In terms of daughters’ work role identities, only their own life course experiences and status were relevant, not their mothers’ work role identity or work status. Relative to socialization effects, the authors conﬁrmed that mothers’ attitudes were more important than role modeling behavior in transmitting these attitudes. The study demonstrated the potential for attitudinal change in early adulthood and the importance of adult experience in shaping attitudes.

SOCIALIZATION IN MULTIGENERATIONAL FAMILIES: NEW RESEARCH What we have tried to show in this review is that family socialization remains a useful theory in family research. We presented empirical ﬁndings from studies of family socialization in several content areas to demonstrate the theory’s range of applicability. Although not always explicitly stated, this contemporary understanding of family socialization is evident in much of the family literature. Socialization research not only complements the life course approach, it can facilitate such research by generating testable hypotheses. To demonstrate this thesis, we present new research on intergenerational family socialization, based on the University of Southern California’s 30-year Longitudinal Study of Generations. 185

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Multigenerational families are important settings for studying socialization processes and their effects over time. A major issue in family socialization research relates to how demographic and sociohistorical change has affected intergenerational inﬂuences on children’s life course trajectories and outcomes. This has been difﬁcult to measure, primarily because of a lack of longitudinal data charting trends in socialization and career outcomes across multiple generations within families. The Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG) now allows us to empirically evaluate these questions. The LSOG began in 1971 with data from 2,044 individuals: 516 grandparents (randomly selected from a population of 840,000 individuals enrolled in a Southern California HMO), 701 of their middle-aged children, and 827 of their early-adult or late-adolescent grandchildren. Their great-grandchildren were added to the study as they turned age 16, beginning in 1991. The study became a longitudinal investigation in 1985, at which time we began repeated assessments at three-year intervals, yielding a total of seven waves of measurement between 1971 and the most recent 2000 survey. The LSOG enables us to investigate continuity and change in family intergenerational relationships over time and with the aging of each generation, and to explore the impact of these changes on the well being of individuals and their families. In this research (Bengtson, Biblarz & Roberts, 2002) we focused on intergenerational inheritance and transmission and how these socialization processes operate in different historical contexts. Our objective was to analyze parentchild socialization processes and how they have changed over the past 30 years. We asked: Have intergenerational family inﬂuences weakened in recent generations as a result of changing occupational opportunity structures, increased parental divorce, and women’s increased labor force participation, particularly among mothers of young children? Three intergenerational inﬂuence processes were examined: status inheritance; social learning; and parent-child affective solidarity. Data collected from four generation families over the last three decades allowed us to examine different generations at the same developmental age on a variety of individual, family and structural variables – a generational sequential design. Using a life course perspective, our study was guided by the following assumptions. First, families continue to be the primary context of socialization despite their diverse forms and structures. Second, parents continue to link their children to life-shaping socioeconomic resources and systems of privilege or discrimination. Third, parents inﬂuence children’s attitudes, values, desires and relationships with others through modeling, instruction, control, and warm and supportive relations. Fourth, self-esteem, career aspirations, and value orientations, our outcomes of interest, take form relatively early in life,

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particularly from intergenerational inﬂuences within families. These personal attributes can be passed down from generation to generation in families, promoting continuity over multiple generational lines and many decades of history. We highlight some of our major ﬁndings. Parental Inﬂuence on the Aspirations of Youth Contrary to the fears of those who cry “family decline,” we found that overall the inﬂuence of mothers’ and fathers’ status achievements on the educational and occupational aspirations of sons and daughters has not declined over generations, despite the increase in parental divorce and maternal employment. The inﬂuence of parent-child affective solidarity strongly affected children’s educational aspirations, particularly when there was a close affective relationship with the mother. This effect was similar for both G3s and G4s. On the other hand, for G3s, solidarity with fathers was less important for children’s aspirations than that of mothers; and for G4s, father-child affective bonds made no difference at all. Our data indicate that this weakening of the effects of children’s affective solidarity with fathers from G3s to G4s was attributed to parental divorce. We also examined the effects of maternal employment on the transmission of aspirations. The effects of parents’ statuses on their children’s aspirations were somewhat stronger in mother-homemaker families than in mother-employed families. Parental Inﬂuence on Youth’s Self-Esteem Among the three transmission processes examined, by far the most important determinant of self-esteem was the strength of parent-child emotional bonds, or parental afﬁrmation, particularly that between mothers and their children. Further, the inﬂuence of mother’s afﬁrmation on children’s self-esteem strengthened over the generations. Again, parental divorce played a part. However, we found that this trend of the increasing inﬂuence of mother’s afﬁrmation on youth’s self-esteem was actually being carried by the G4s from two-parent families. In these families, the inﬂuence of mother’s afﬁrmation on the selfesteem of G4s was signiﬁcantly stronger than that observed among their G3 counterparts in two-parent families. One interpretation is that the two-parent families of the 1990s may be higher functioning than the two-parent families in prior decades, at least in terms of the socialization outcomes we investigated. Future research should explore how the roles of mothers in two-parent families have changed over time, allowing us to better understand why these mothers seem to be more important for the self-esteem of today’s youth than 187

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the mothers of earlier generations were for their children’s self-esteem. In contrast to the heightened inﬂuence of mothers’ afﬁrmation on children’s self-esteem in two-parent families, for children of divorce, maternal afﬁrmation had less inﬂuence on children’s self-esteem across generations. It is not that these children feel less close to their mothers than those from two-parent families do. Rather, in the context of divorce, closeness to mothers ends up being a weaker determinant of the self-esteem that children ultimately develop. The story of fathers’ continued ability to inﬂuence their children’s self-esteem across generations is less optimistic. Similar to the reduced inﬂuence of the father-child bond on children’s achievement aspirations, the decline in the importance of fathers’ afﬁrmation for children’s self-esteem can be explained almost entirely by G4s’ greater likelihood of experiencing parental divorce. This pattern of the declining inﬂuence of fathers compared to the inﬂuence of mothers suggests that parental inﬂuence patterns may have shifted over the generations, a shifting that can only be partly understood by rising divorce rates. Parental Inﬂuence on Youth’s Values Do parents have less inﬂuence today compared to earlier generations on their children’s value orientations? Have divorce and maternal employment weakened the processes of intergenerational transmission on children’s values. We examined the predictive power of three socialization mechanisms – parental statuses, the modeling of values, and parental afﬁrmation – for youths’ values across generations, family structures and maternal employment statuses. In general, we found that parental modeling of values and parental afﬁrmation were much more important inﬂuences on youth’s individualistic orientations than were parents’ socioeconomic statuses. Further, the strength of parental modeling inﬂuences on children’s individualism actually increased across generations. When parents divorced, however, there was a dramatic decline in the importance of parental modeling and afﬁrmation for youths’ values. When we considered maternal employment, we found that where the mother was a full-time homemaker, incremental increases in her education led to parallel increases in sons’ and daughters’ individualism. This effect did not occur when mothers were employed outside the home. Patterns were different for the transmission of materialistic values. The strength of parental statuses and parental afﬁrmation inﬂuences on children’s materialism was higher where there was parental divorce and when mothers were employed. There was a decline in mothers’ modeling inﬂuence in divorced families. Effects differed for sons and daughters. In contrast to divorced fathers’ inﬂuence on children’s career aspirations and self-esteem (which was reduced

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to nil for G4s), divorce increased the importance of fathers’ modeling and afﬁrmation inﬂuences for materialistic values in their G4 sons. These data did not reveal evidence of any truly deleterious effects of maternal employment on intergenerational transmission. Divorce does seem to weaken the family as a socialization agent in some areas. In particular, divorce weakened the inﬂuence that fathers have on their children’s educational and occupational aspirations and self-esteem.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION In the postwar years, family socialization was simply deﬁned as the training of children for their expected role responsibilities in adult society, thereby serving the needs of the social system. But historical change intervened, and the assumptions underlying Parsonian grand theory eroded. Structural functionalism fell into academic disfavor and its core mechanism, socialization, became passe. Researchers in the socialization tradition turned to the emerging life course paradigm. In this chapter we argued that a contemporary conceptualization of family socialization, more broadly deﬁned than traditional conceptualizations, has considerable theoretical and empirical utility. We suggested that the use of socialization models has become more evident in the family literature. The terms “intergenerational transmission” and “inﬂuence” are frequently used to denote socialization processes. There is greater emphasis on identifying and explicating a range of socialization mechanisms, the conditions under which they operate, and their differential effects in various content areas of socialization. Guided by the life course perspective as well as other approaches such as interpretive and interactionist perspectives, contemporary socialization researchers pay attention to the interactive effects of social structures and historical context on socialization processes, as well as their meaning, and they acknowledge individual choice. Socialization messages are often unintended. Parents convey styles of perceiving or behaving to their children who will interpret and later act upon these lessons in intergenerationally consistent ways. An example is the intergenerational transmission of marital instability. As we discussed, research points to the problematic interaction patterns learned from parents as an important underlying factor. Learned in early childhood through largely unconscious processes, such patterns may be resistant to change in adulthood. In advancing this proposal for a broader conceptualization of family socialization, we ﬁrst reviewed the history of socialization research and its theoretical bases. As social change revealed the limitations of a structural functionalist-deﬁned socialization, researchers shifted their attention to the life 189

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course perspective. There is now a renewed interest in family socialization processes. Contemporary approaches address a number of transmission mechanisms besides social learning. We showed how status inheritance and parent-child affective solidarity can operate as powerful mechanisms of family socialization whereby the attributes, values and behaviors of one generation are passed to another. We presented studies demonstrating how deﬁning inﬂuences, cognitive schemas, or a constellation of personal and family structural characteristics in childhood can all serve as mechanisms of socialization. Next, we focused on three debates in the family research literature and in public discourse that speak directly to the family’s socialization function. First, in the context of divorce and the decline of the nuclear family form, can families still perform their socialization functions? Second, are peers more important than the family in socializing youth? Third, has the employment of mothers seriously jeopardized the family’s ability to positively socialize its children? In addressing these questions, we presented research ﬁndings on the intergenerational transmission of marital instability, the inﬂuence of peers on adolescents’ problem behaviors, a major topic in the deviance literature, and the effects of maternal employment on children’s socialization outcomes. A recurring theme in this body of research concerns the impact of social change. We observed that the issue of how divorce affects children is not always approached in an impartial manner. Some family scholars seem to have taken a moral stance on divorce and non-nuclear family arrangements, notably those that see “family decline.” A central question in the family socialization literature concerns the longterm inﬂuence of childhood socialization and the relative effects of childhood versus adulthood socialization. Some researchers emphasize the powerful effects of early socialization. Others take a structuralist position, which emphasizes the inﬂuence of structural and historical conditions and the relevance of proximal experience. We suggested that some childhood socialization effects are enduring, leaving a residue of inﬂuence throughout adulthood. Personality traits or basic value orientations seem to be of this type. At the same time, the duration and potency of these inﬂuences varies by domain of socialization and seem to depend on structural and historic context as well as the pace of social change. We presented research ﬁndings to demonstrate this thesis. In the present historical period, the intergenerational inheritance of religiosity appears to have been less susceptible to recent social changes and therefore has more enduring effects. In the case of gender role attitudes and behaviors, which have been at the center of social change over recent decades, the effects of early socialization are relatively weak compared to adult experience and the effects of contemporary structural conditions.

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Finally, we presented new research based on the Longitudinal Study of Generations. This study investigated the intergenerational transmission of education and career aspirations, self-esteem and values, and how these socialization outcomes have been affected by divorce and maternal employment. In these domains, divorce seems to have diminished the inﬂuence of fathers on their children’s outcomes. Overall, maternal employment did not appear to have a negative effect. One implication of the continued high levels of divorce and maternal employment may be that grandparents will become more important as agents of socialization for their grandchildren. Results also suggest that the intact families of today’s youth may be higher functioning than the intact families of a generation ago. This intriguing ﬁnding needs additional research. The study demonstrates the continued inﬂuence and importance of families across generations, despite the effects of divorce, alternative family forms and changing gender roles on family commitments and functions. In multigenerational families, socialization constitutes a principal mechanism through which continuity across generations is created and maintained.

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8. MOVING AND STILL: NEIGHBORHOODS, HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, AND THE LIFE COURSE Richard A. Settersten, Jr., and Tanetta E. Andersson That social contexts affect human development is a fundamental proposition of developmental science. Communities and, more speciﬁcally, neighborhoods are one of several central settings of everyday life, and they undoubtedly lend life some of its shape and meaning. Neighborhoods may affect the physical, psychological, or social development of individuals, and these effects may be tied to the structural characteristics of neighborhoods, to the social processes that occur within them, or to unique combinations of neighborhood structure and process. Several aspects of neighborhoods seem especially important to consider, including neighborhood composition (e.g. race, sex, age, income), the quality of schools and other local institutions, the availability of resources and services, the degrees and types of social cohesion, order, and control, and changes in these over time. Several prominent theoretical models have also guided most of this inquiry, including models of social contagion, social comparison, institutions, and social organization and disorganization. To date, most scholarship has focused on the impact of neighborhood environments on the social outcomes of children and adolescents. Once we review these effects and models, we consider how neighborhoods might affect the development of adults and the elderly. We end by discussing the complexities of handling neighborhoods in research and social policy.

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THEORETICAL MODELS OF NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS Relative to other social contexts such as families, schools, and peer groups, theories on neighborhoods seem more explicit in postulating links between structure or process and a set of developmental outcomes. For example, researchers interested in neighborhood structure often focus on the percentage of residents who are poor or unemployed (Jargowsky, 1997; Wilson, 1987) or who work in managerial and professional occupations (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov & Sealand, 1993). Researchers interested in neighborhood processes often focus on dynamics related to local levels of social cohesion and social control (Sampson, Raudenbusch & Earls, 1997), social disorganization around drugs and crime (Wilson, 1987), satisfaction with the neighborhood and desires not to move from it (Wilson, 1987), adult involvement in local organizations (Elliott et al., 1996), and local institutions that support families and youth (Furstenberg, Cook, Elder, Eccles & Sameroff, 1999; McLaughlin, Irby & Langman, 1994). The most advanced theories of the connections between neighborhoods and human development incorporate aspects of both structure and process. For example, Wilson (1987) hypothesizes that local unemployment and poverty rates drive the creation of a drug culture, which in turn undermines both social consensus and social control and leads to the exodus of more middle-class residents. This results in a worse setting in which to raise children and puts children’s development at risk. Similarly, Brooks-Gunn and colleagues (1993) suggest that a higher percentage of local adults who work in managerial and professional occupations creates a greater density of conventional adult role models – which, in turn, affects adolescent development in positive ways. In these two examples, attributes of the social structure impact social processes that then impact the development of individuals in those settings. As noted above, several prominent theoretical models have guided most inquiry on the impact of neighborhoods on human development. Furthermore, these various models need not be viewed contradictory; indeed, they are often complementary. We now brieﬂy discuss these models. Models of Social Contagion “Contagion” or “epidemic” models of neighborhoods suggest that individuals exposed to others who engage in negative or undesirable behaviors will likely engage in similar behaviors. In short, these models reﬂect the idea that “disadvantaged neighbors are a disadvantage” (Mayer & Jencks, 1989, p. 1441;

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see also Jencks & Mayer, 1990). That is, disadvantaged neighbors negatively inﬂuence others by reinforcing behavior that reﬂects a deviant set of values, attitudes, and behaviors that become the norm, thereby creating a “subculture” of deviance. In these models, the assumption is that neighborhoods of low socioeconomic status (SES), in particular, are characterized by more problematic behavior. For example, Wilson (1987) uses the term “ghetto underclass” to represent impoverished, inner-city Black neighborhoods where such subcultures ﬂourish. Similarly, Crane (1991) views ghettos as communities with “epidemics” of social problems. As neighborhood quality declines, adolescents (of any race) are taken to be at increased risk of dropping out of school and teenage childbearing. However, some scholars ﬁnd these depictions problematic because they underemphasize the roles of larger structural forces in creating a “culture” of poverty (e.g. Hochschild, 1991). For instance, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) explore the link between a negative “evolved cultural orientation toward schooling” and Black youths’ lower academic achievement in inner-city schools. They suggest that larger social forces, such as a consciousness of the historical consequences of racism towards Blacks are partially responsible for the fact that Black youth, especially boys, often associate academic success with “acting white.” In the end, gifted Black students are often pressured by their peers to underachieve and not abandon their minority frame of reference in favor of what is perceived as a white one. (Yet it is also noteworthy that, in recent years, many white youths, especially lower-class boys, have begun to “act Black” and identify with Black American culture through music, sports, and fashion.) In addition, teachers and administrators also likely contribute to this process by “dumbing down” the curriculum and their expectations of students in inner-city schools. Social contagion models assume that those who are surrounded by disadvantaged neighbors are more or less destined towards negative outcomes. Yet we know that this is not universally true, and most of us can cite “success” stories of individuals from troubled neighborhoods. For instance, as we spoke to an African-American friend about these ideas, she quickly cited the accomplishments of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, adding: “And they’re straight outta Compton!” Though clearly not the rule, our friend’s comment was meant to highlight the fact that these two young and talented sisters emerged from one of our nation’s toughest neighborhoods, and that social contagion models do not deterministically capture the experiences of all individuals from those settings. Indeed, the work of Elliott and his colleagues (Elliott et al., 1996) suggests that most children from disadvantaged neighborhoods manage to make it 199

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through adolescence in good shape, despite the adversity they face. They achieve “adequate levels of personal competence, self-efficacy, and commitments to conventionality that enable them to make the transition into productive and responsible roles” (p. 391). Elliot and colleagues therefore urge us to begin identifying the specific conditions and processes in neighborhoods that actively interfere with or prohibit movement in positive directions, as well as those that protect individuals from the potentially negative influences of troubled neighborhoods. Social contagion models have focused on the contagion of negative phenomena, not positive phenomena. Of course, if we buy the logic underlying the contagion of negative phenomena, then the opposite must also be true: that “advantaged neighbors are an advantage.” That is, advantaged neighbors positively inﬂuence others by reinforcing behavior that reﬂects a set of mainstream values, attitudes, and behaviors, and individuals exposed to such neighbors will likely engage in similar behaviors. This is at least implicit in assumptions about “better” schools or “better” neighborhoods – they are presumably “better” because they have more positive characteristics and processes, and individuals exposed to these settings will presumably be affected in positive ways developmentally. Models of Social Comparison Models of “relative deprivation” or “social comparison” focus on individuals’ evaluations of their personal standing relative to others. Discrepancies between neighbors become problematic, and the presence of advantaged neighbors, in particular, is a problem for those who have less. When children and families view themselves to be at a disadvantage relative to their neighbors, they may not be motivated to achieve, they may be labeled negatively and they may have reduced access to resources when resources are scarce (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1997). Mayer and Jencks (1989, p. 1441) suggest that, in this scenario, “advantaged neighbors are a disadvantage.” Yet we might instead argue that advantaged neighbors are a disadvantage mainly for those who are disadvantaged, and that disadvantaged neighbors may actually be an advantage for those who are advantaged (as their social comparisons result in better evaluations of themselves). Mayer and Jencks (1989, p. 1441) suggest that “high SES neighbors provoke resentment among the poor,” yet the likelihood of high SES and poor people being found in the same neighborhood seems low, except in inner-city areas that are being gentrified. And they suggest that the “poor may feel more need to create a deviant subculture if they live near the affluent than if they live

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near each other” (p. 1441). Of course, we must question whether deviant subcultures come about as an active response to the presence of more affluent people. This line of reasoning also leads to the assumption that where the poor are concentrated together, the problems associated with a “deviant subculture” would not emerge – which is clearly not the case. Is the implication of this message, then, that attempts at integration by SES (which also means by race in the United States) are potentially negative at best, and destructive at worst? Models of social comparison may also lead to “competitive” or “cultural conﬂict” models, in which neighbors or peers are viewed as competing for precious resources. The examples above suggest that poor children may lose out more in mixed environments. But is competition for scarce resources even greater in environments where poor children ﬁnd themselves exclusively among other poor children? Institutional Models “Institutional” models suggest that it is not the kind of neighbors that matters most, but instead the resources, services, and organizations available in a neighborhood (e.g. McLaughlin et al., 1994). That is, “neighbors do not matter but neighborhoods do” (Mayer & Jencks, 1989, p. 1441). The presence of schools, policing, community services, and neighborhood organizations distinguish good from bad neighborhoods and carry signiﬁcant potential to affect the development of residents. Proponents of these models assume that higher SES neighborhoods have better institutions, services, and resources than lower SES neighborhoods. In an informal conversation we had with an African-American educator who worked in Cleveland Public Schools, that educator cited an example of a white public school Superintendent who built eight new elementary schools during school desegregation in order to prevent Black children from mixing with white children. Those buildings now stand abandoned in those communities and represent a needless waste of precious educational resources. Worse still, they symbolize to many Black Clevelanders an institutional strategy to, in her words, “keep them on the plantation.” As such, this example demonstrates the danger of downplaying the signiﬁcance of social interaction inherent within and behind neighborhood institutions rather than simply focus on the presence of institutions themselves. This example also points to the complexities of disentangling effects that may be the result of a neighborhood’s institutions and resources proper, or rather the result of the kinds of people who are situated in a neighborhood. 201

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Models of Social Organization/Disorganization Models of “social disorganization” are most prevalent in recent scholarship on neighborhood effects. These models suggest that neighborhoods with high levels of social problems become disorganized, which in turn results in deviant behavior at the individual level. Social organization is often conceptualized as the degree to which individuals have common goals, share common values, and exert social control, which reﬂects “both systems of social relationships within the community and the content and consensus of values” (Furstenberg & Hughes 1997, p. 25). Consequently, models of social disorganization reﬂect the absence of such factors within neighborhoods. Theories of social disorganization evolved out of the early work of criminologists Shaw and McKay (1942), who ﬁrst traced rates of juvenile delinquency to levels of neighborhood disorganization. Shaw and McKay concluded that juvenile delinquency must be understood more in terms of the community than in terms of the individual, and they argued that a high degree of ethnic variability and residential instability, in particular, erode social relationships and value consensus. The problems associated with residential instability remain valid in today’s world. Yet their ﬁndings on ethnic variability seem at odds with contemporary ideas about the importance of racial integration – or, for that matter, integration of any type. This highlights a critical tension that cuts across many of these models: Social organization hinges upon the presence of consensus in the values, attitudes, and behaviors of neighborhood residents. But how are we to achieve consensus in a world that rightly acknowledges diversity and the importance of being exposed to (and accepting) a wider variety of ways of living, loving, thinking, and being? Recent scholarship on “collective efﬁcacy” has been especially important in advancing models of social organization. Led by the work of Sampson and colleagues (e.g. Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997), collective efﬁcacy is the result of two factors: First, social cohesion, which is about neighbors trusting each other and sharing values. And second, informal social control, which is about neighbors jointly monitoring and supervising youth and intervening on behalf of the common good. In these models, high levels of collective efﬁcacy are necessary to achieve high levels of social organization in neighborhoods. However, the efﬁcacy of a neighborhood does not likely extend to all situations, but is probably speciﬁc to a particular task or set of tasks. Collective efﬁcacy is likely tied to several neighborhood characteristics. These include rates of residential stability and home ownership (with low levels making it difﬁcult to form social ties and promote collective efforts), and the concentration of low-income residents, minority groups, and female-headed

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households (with concentrated disadvantage decreasing collective efﬁcacy). Further, even if personal ties are strong in these areas, these ties may be “weakly tethered to collective actions” (Sampson et al., 1997, p. 919). Physical disorder also plays a prominent role in models of neighborhood disorganization. For example, in Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) “broken windows” thesis, physical disorder prompts additional social strife in disadvantaged neighborhoods because it perpetuates residents’ feelings of indifference or apathy about their neighborhoods. Similarly, Skogan (1990) focuses on the joint connections between physical decay (such as vandalism, dilapidated and abandoned buildings, litter and trash) and social disorder. Drawing upon interview data from residents of Chicago neighborhoods, Skogan notes that some residents recognize the contagious nature of physical decay, in that “the presence of debris in an area seems to stimulate yet further ‘trashing’ of the environment” (p. 44). At a deeper level, Skogan’s ﬁndings, like those of Wilson and Kelling, highlight widespread demoralization as a signiﬁcant social problem resulting from physical disorder. Models that have examined the impact of physical decay on social disorder have been criticized for not sufﬁciently anchoring or explaining decay and its effects – whether on the neighborhood itself or its residents – as a function of more distal contexts (e.g. Jakle & Wilson, 1992). Wilson’s work (1987, 1996) stands as a good example of how shifts in larger contexts have signiﬁcant implications for neighborhood disorganization. Wilson traces the roots of social disorganization in inner-city neighborhoods to the “ﬂight” of relatively advantaged Blacks from those neighborhoods, which results in poor and homogeneous neighborhoods with few resources and role models. Wilson also emphasizes the role of concentrated poverty in those areas: Shifts in the economy result in fewer needs for low or unskilled workers and increased joblessness. The ﬂight of middle-class families to the suburbs leads to a reduction in neighborhood resources and investments from local and state governments. And the marital stability of families in these neighborhoods also declines, which leads to the presence of few male role models. These and other factors have resulted in a local ethos that runs counter to more traditional values, beliefs, and behaviors – and it ultimately means that children are raised in environments far away from the mainstream, potentially harming their development in both the short and long run. The social control of children by adults in the community – in serving as good or bad role models, in teaching children and adolescents what to value, and in monitoring their behavior – is a common theme in models related to social organization (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1997). As such, these may be considered models of “collective socialization,” in that the entire community is viewed as responsible for socializing children. 203

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A recent television special on doctors at Johns Hopkins University dramatically highlights the important roles these processes play in the development of young people. In it, an African-American doctor relates his feelings of powerlessness and depression as each day he faces the mortal consequences of gun violence. The doctor spends time at a community center talking and playing basketball with young boys, an attempt to intervene in the chains of events that lead a disproportionate number of boys from these neighborhoods into his emergency room. To de-glamorize the images of ﬁrearms that these boys witness in movies and rap videos, the doctor brings the boys to his own “turf ” – the hospital. Each week, a group of young boys from Baltimore’s roughest neighborhoods accompany the doctor on his rounds and talk with his patients. The audience watches as the boys encounter an African-American man recovering from a gun shot to the stomach. They look in horror as the doctor uncovers the man’s wounds and as the man describes how he now must defecate in a bag. One boy comments, “I ain’t ever gonna end up like that.” The doctor believes that this experience, coupled with his positive presence in their lives, may help deter some of these boys from trouble. Individualistic Models Individualistic models suggest that neighbors, advantaged and disadvantaged alike, have no impact on the development of their fellow neighbors. This model, common in economics, is based on rational choice theory. This line of thinking is guided by the assumption that people make their own decisions, and that they make those decisions based on their personal interests and circumstances or the most effective means to their goals. They do not make decisions based on what their neighbors value or how they behave. Proponents of individualistic models remind us that good people can be found in bad neighborhoods, and that bad people can be found in good neighborhoods. As long as individuals can ﬁnd others who hold positive standards, then positive lives can be formed. They conclude that the relative concentration of positive values and behaviors is not as important as their mere presence. Most sociologists and anthropologists clearly do not embrace this view. While social contexts may not rigidly determine life chances, individuals make choices within a restricted range of possibilities conditioned by their position in social structure.

CONCEPTUALIZING NEIGHBORHOODS How neighborhood structure and process are approached empirically depends on how they are conceptualized. Neighborhoods and contexts in general may

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be conceived as sites, networks, cultures, or perceptions (Burton, Price-Spratlen, & Spencer, 1997; Gephart, 1997). The most common approach is to consider neighborhoods as sites and focus on the social, economic, and physical makeup of a larger geographic area. In these cases, the neighborhood unit is most often a set of block groups, Zip Codes, or Census tracts, and data are drawn from a variety of largely ofﬁcial sources (e.g. Census, crime reports, vital health statistics, social service agencies, school records). While these units are convenient, given that public data readily available on them, they are generally much larger, and more distant, than what we normally consider a “neighborhood.” As a result, these units do not permit ﬁne-grained analyses of smaller, more meaningful geographic areas (though analyses at the block or block-group level are sometimes possible to develop a closer view of neighborhoods). The kinds of data available on these units also lead researchers to focus on the composition of these larger areas, rather than on the positive or negative processes that occur within them. Critics of this approach also express doubts concerning the presence of biases in Census data, given the challenges associated with gathering data on underrepresented populations (e.g. minority groups, homeless, college students). This has prompted heated debates about the accuracy of Census data, and about proposals to adjust data accordingly by statistically up-weighting or downweighting data on various populations. In addition, a full Census is taken only every 10 years (at least in the United States), with more focused supplements on speciﬁc topics conducted between decennial points. Researchers who rely on Census data must therefore confront constraints related to time, for they can only examine sweeping shifts over the course of a decade, and, relative to their primary developmental data, the census data may have been gathered many years earlier. Recently, Sampson and Raudenbush (1999) developed innovative techniques for gathering ﬁrst-hand data via “windshield” surveys, resulting in a more personal view of neighborhoods as sites. In an effort to build more “ecometric” (rather than “psychometric”) measures of neighborhoods, these researchers use systematic social observation in conjunction with survey-based methods. They develop measures of social and physical disorder by training raters to walk through neighborhoods, and by making drive-by videotapes on systematically sampled streets in neighborhoods. Two videographers simultaneously record sampled “face blocks” (two sides of street); two observers (one for each side of the street) log their observations; and audio is activated on the videotape for verbal commentary. The resulting data relate to land use, trafﬁc, characteristics of local housing, businesses, and social interactions, and evidence of physical disorder. 205

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When neighborhoods are approached as networks, the focus is on intimate ties, social relationships, and patterns of interaction. Most often, data are gathered via survey questions aimed at knowing who individuals would turn to in times of need, who they discuss important matters with, who they feel close to, who they get together with, and the like. Researchers also study network size, composition, and other traits that distinguish the networks of individuals from different types of neighborhoods. The unit of analysis might vary, depending on whether an investigator is interested in understanding networks on a particular block, a number of block units surrounding a residence, or other public spaces such as business districts and shopping malls, local community organizations and facilities, post ofﬁces, or schools and playgrounds. When neighborhoods are approached as cultures, the focus is on the behaviors, outlooks, rituals, languages, or way of life that characterize a neighborhood. In the 1960s, research concerned with the growing social problems associated with poverty began to advance cultural theories that linked social strife in impoverished areas to a “culture” or “cycle” of poverty (Lewis, 1966; Gans, 1968). In the decades since, these ideas have themselves cycled in and out of fashion. The work of Wilson (1987), discussed above, exempliﬁes the spirit of these theories. Yet many critics of Wilson’s work argue that his association of the term “underclass” with a culture-of-poverty is misleading and obscures the role of social structure and other dynamics that contribute to the perpetuation of urban poverty. For instance, Hochschild (1991) asserts that Wilson paints a false picture by implying that signiﬁcant neighborhood decline is only evident in the most “distressed” neighborhoods inhabited by the underclass. This claim, Hochschild argues, blurs the larger truth that average neighborhoods have also worsened, and even at steeper rates of decline than so-called ghettos. “If female headship and irregular employment are ‘underclass’ characteristics,” Hochschild states, “then we are an ‘underclass’ society, not a society with an ‘underclass’” (p. 561). Finally, neighborhoods can also be approached at the level of subjective experience and understood through individuals’ perceptions of neighborhoods as sites, networks, or cultures. In approaching neighborhoods as perceptions, researchers hope to elaborate residents’ subjective views of their local environments. This conceptual approach is rooted in the belief that individuals’ perceptions of neighborhoods are just as important as “objective” indicators of those settings. Variability in perceptions seems particularly important to explore, especially across different periods of life. As will be discussed shortly, children, adolescents, adults, and older persons likely have different understandings of, attach different meanings to, and value different things in their neighborhoods. For example, what do individuals in different age groups view

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as important or unimportant, or as beneﬁts or risks, and why? How are individuals’ identities bound to the neighborhoods in which they live or those in which they once lived? How do their evaluations shift as they grow up and older, and as neighborhoods themselves change over time? Research on neighborhoods will beneﬁt from the use of innovative methods to tap the subjective experiences of individuals. These strategies might include conducting systematic observations on how individuals use neighborhood space, walking through neighborhoods, drawing maps, building models, taking videos and pictures, or working through hypothetical situations with residents. Regardless of how neighborhoods are conceptualized, individual-level data are most often gathered through survey and interview methods and then aggregated. Indicators may be “objective” or “subjective,” quantitative or qualitative, static or temporal. Of course, the relevant unit to study and data to gather will depend on the outcomes or processes of interest.

MEASURING NEIGHBORHOOD COMPOSITION AND PROCESS Most studies of neighborhood effects have relied on a handful of single indicators of neighborhood composition. These have largely been drawn from secondary public sources, and especially from the Census. Most have focused on factors related to SES (e.g. percentage of families in poverty, median family income, percentage of male joblessness, median educational attainment of adults, percentage of adults in professional or managerial positions). It has also been common to emphasize racial composition (especially percent Black) and intersections between racial composition and indicators of SES. A few characteristics have commonly served as indicators of neighborhood commitment and stability (e.g. percentage of families in same dwelling for 5+ years, percentage of residents who own their homes). Some research has built more informative measures of neighborhood structure, and even neighborhood processes. These are most often based on individual-level survey data that are then aggregated to block units or Census tracts. These studies have turned attention to dynamics around social cohesion (e.g. whether residents view the neighborhood as close-knit, in which people share views and information), social control (e.g. whether people in the neighborhood would do something if there were a fight in front of their house, if someone were trying to sell drugs to children in plain sight, or if children were getting into trouble); social support (e.g. whether there are others in the neighborhood to whom they can turn for emotional or 207

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instrumental support), social organization and disorganization (e.g. the presence of vandalism, sexual assualt, organized crime, drug use, and gangs); institutional resources (e.g. the presence of a health care center, day care, youth clubs, recreational programs), adult participation in local organizations (e.g. whether adults participate in a tenant’s council, religious services, GED program, volunteer programs, local political activities, civil rights activities, recreation programs), stability in and satisfaction with the neighborhood (e.g. to what degree residents are satisfied with the neighborhood and whether they think they will live there in five years), and collective efficacy, which, as described earlier, is generally conceived as a coupling of social control and social cohesion. For good examples of these types of measures, see Cook, Herman, Phillips and Settersten (in press), Elliott et al. (1996), Furstenberg et al. (1999), and Sampson et al. (1997).

NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS ON CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS To date, most scholarship has focused on the impact of neighborhood environments on the developmental outcomes of children and adolescents. Most studies have focused on outcomes related to achievement (e.g. school grades and attendance, performance on standardized achievement or intelligence tests), efﬁcacy (e.g. general personal efﬁcacy; efﬁcacy in speciﬁc domains, such as school), conventional attitudes and behaviors (e.g. commitment to homework and studying, good grades, school and community activities), delinquency (e.g. personal involvement with stealing, weapons, gang ﬁghts, vandalism), and drug use (e.g. personal use of marijuana, speed, crack), pro-social friends (e.g. friends who have conventional attitudes and behaviors), delinquent friends (e.g. friends who steal, break into buildings, sell or use drugs). A recent chapter by Gephart (1997) serves as a comprehensive review of neighborhood effects on young people. For this reason, and because we are interested in discussing the potential links between neighborhoods and adult development and aging, we will make only a few points here. The literature included in Gephart’s review captures some effects during early childhood on cognitive functioning, behavioral problems, child maltreatment rates, low birth weight rates, and infant death rates; during middle childhood on behavioral and social adjustment; during late childhood and early adolescence on delinquent behavior; and during late adolescence and early adulthood on drug use, school dropout, teen childbearing, social and health problems, achievement, college attendance, joblessness, poverty, and female-headed families.

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Two particular junctures early in life seem especially important: early childhood and late adolescence. At these junctures, neighborhoods may play signiﬁcant roles in either buffering or placing at risk the development of young people. As Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) also note, these junctures involve major shifts in family focus, school transition, and expectations for autonomy, and these two groups also have different exposure to inﬂuences outside of the family. Despite signiﬁcant interest in neighborhood effects on the development of young people, research has not shown consistent or sizable effects across studies. Yet the links between neighborhoods and development early in life are intuitive – based on our own experiences, we know that neighborhoods do matter. One explanation for the weak empirical links surely relates to the many challenges associated with measuring neighborhoods, and especially in adequately grasping the social processes that operate within them. Some of these complexities have already been highlighted, and others will be taken up in the conclusion.

NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS ON ADULT DEVELOPMENT Most scholarship on neighborhood effects has focused on development during childhood and, especially, adolescence. By contrast, the question of how neighborhoods impact adult development has received, on balance, very little scholarly attention. Surely, the inﬂuence of neighborhood contexts upon human development does not evaporate once people enter adulthood. It is our hope that scholarship will begin to address how neighborhoods matter for individuals in later periods of life, and how these effects and meanings might cumulate throughout life. In this section, we brieﬂy speculate about how neighborhoods might matter for development during early adulthood and during middle age and beyond. Neighborhoods and Early Adulthood As individuals move into early adulthood, they generally experience a cluster of several interrelated transitions, including leaving home, ﬁnishing school, entering the workforce, getting married, and having children. Each of these transitions is often accompanied by a shift in residence. How do young adults take neighborhoods and communities into account as they make decisions about where to attend school, take jobs, and build families? And how do neighborhoods and communities leave an imprint on them once they arrive? 209

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Upon completing high school, large numbers of young adults leave the homes and neighborhoods they have grown up in to attend college. Of course, many factors condition whether and where young adults pursue post-secondary education. Yet few studies have primarily focused on the role of the community beyond the campus boundaries as an important developmental context during the college years. Certainly, the immediate college environment has a powerful impact on young people. As a relatively circumscribed and even controlled setting, the college campus is actively constructed in ways meant to promote shared values and social cohesion. In fact, many colleges mandate that incoming students live in campus dormitories for at least one year. The Greek system of fraternity and sorority houses on many college campuses also represents a site in which the promises (and problems) of cohesion are markedly played out. Of course, the effects of the college environment are mediated to a large extent by the housing options available to students. And they are mediated by the whether students live on or off campus and whether the campus is relatively isolated from the surrounding community or actively integrated into it, among other things. Students may also experience broader neighborhood contexts through work assignments and community service. For example, over 65% of all undergraduate students do volunteer work during their college years (Light, 2001). The majority of these volunteers work with children and teens, though others work with senior citizens and with homeless, poor, or handicapped individuals. As an undergraduate, the second author tutored in Cleveland Public Schools, which taught her to view the inner-city neighborhoods that border campus not as the dangerous places that campus security warns students to stay clear of, but as places where good people work, children go to school, and families care for their loved ones. It challenged the common assumptions she made, and the messages she was used to receiving, about inner-city neighborhoods. For instance, after working with children in a community center, she was told by her supervisor that the older neighbors across the street kept an eye on her car and that her supervisor could ﬁnd her at any time by contacting one of them. This example highlights the power of neighborhood networks, and of social monitoring, which may not be immediately apparent but are nonetheless present. Apart from the military, the college environment undoubtedly represents one of the most controlled social contexts through which young adults pass. Depending on the type of college, its student body may exhibit imbalances in its composition (e.g. sexual, racial, or age imbalances). For example, female students, older students, and students of color may feel out of place on many college campuses. Many educational outcomes, especially student attrition, can be explained by a lack of “goodness of ﬁt” between student characteristics and

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needs and those of the institution (Baker & Velez, 1994). (Seen in this light, and based on informal conversations with undergraduates, our own campus is often characterized as a “chilly climate” for many female students or students of color in that our undergraduate student body is overwhelmingly white and over 60% male.) The college years seem an especially potent juncture at which perceptions, values, beliefs, and world-views are worked through – afﬁrmed, altered, and even crystallized. College settings carry great potential in this regard. Encounters during the college years can stretch students beyond their social “comfort zones,” after which they may never return to old ways of thinking. For those no longer in school and engaged more fully in work, residential choices are often tied to proximity to work, earnings, affordable housing, and social opportunities. (In some instances, city employees or public ofﬁcials are literally bound to the environments in which they work – they must live in the municipalities they serve if they are to keep their jobs.) Given the primacy of friends and dating in the lives of young adults, they often choose to live in areas characterized by high levels of social activity. And given the local ties of many educational institutions, graduates often ﬁnd entry-level positions in the city or region in which the college or university is located. Once young adults partner and form families, new concerns emerge around residence and neighborhood. Priorities often shift away from the presence of social activity to characteristics important to raising children – the presence of quality schools, green spaces, libraries, community centers, healthcare centers, grocery stores, transportation, limited trafﬁc, social order and safety. This suggests that institutional models of neighborhoods, and models of neighborhood organization and disorganization, may be particularly relevant during this period of life. Young families seem to seek out neighbors and neighborhoods in line with their world-views. The issue of value consensus therefore seems to be important, as parents hope their children will be exposed to other families and children who share similar beliefs and practices, and as they jointly monitor neighborhood children. Yet these selection processes also seem to result in a sort of restricted “half-world,” characterized by homogeneity rather than heterogeneity. At what beneﬁts and costs do these practices come, and for whom? Of course, for many “marginalized” populations – whether for reasons related to race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious convictions – a relatively insulated community offers a safe environment in which to build an identity and ﬁnd supportive others. It is important to keep in mind that the range of residential options open to young families is largely conditioned by socioeconomic status. For example, many of the children the second author tutored in the Cleveland Public Schools do not share a “level playing ﬁeld” with children who grew up in the suburbs. 211

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Few families can afford to send their children away to college, and most began working before they ﬁnished high school. And for young families from less privileged backgrounds, the option of moving to better neighborhoods to bring up children does not exist. Psychological factors also enter the nexus of factors that inﬂuence where young adults – indeed, adults of any age – reside. For many of us, it is not the physical dwelling that matters so much as it is the place we call “home.” It is about the people with whom we share that roof and those walls: “home is where the heart is,” so they say. It is a place of great security, of safety from the outside world. It is a place that holds cherished things and memories on which our identities have been built and on which our souls rely. Revelations about the importance of home can also be divined from individual and family members’ decisions around where they would like to be laid to rest or have their ashes scattered. Our notions of “home” often seem to change little, despite the fact that roofs and walls may have crumbled or disappeared, or despite the fact that the face of the neighborhood may have changed dramatically with time. An AfricanAmerican co-worker tells the story of running into someone from her old neighborhood whom she hadn’t seen in years. She exclaims that this person got her attention by hollering out her full name – ﬁrst, middle and last. This experience resonates with her because it captures a link to her past: Those who knew her during her childhood, and call her by her full name, represent a connection to a time when her parents were alive. It situates her in a time – and a place – that is symbolic to her and deeply important to her identity. Neighborhoods and Middle Age and Beyond Once children have “ﬂown the nest,” middle-aged parents may feel new freedoms around neighborhood and community, reevaluating the environments they chose for the good of their children and considering new options in light of new family circumstances. However, little attention has been paid to the meanings of neighborhood and community during midlife, or to their effects on development during this period. In contrast, the period of late life has received signiﬁcantly more attention. Many beneﬁts accompany “aging in place” (Fogel, 1993), especially where the generation and maintenance of meaning are concerned. Remaining at home preserves neighborhood-based social relationships. It facilitates continuing independence and, with it, privacy and control of one’s life. It provides a sense of familiarity. Possessions of sentimental value are retained. The environment that has long sustained the person’s identity remains present and intact.

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The continuity provided by aging in place, though, is interrupted for many older adults who uproot themselves in middle to later life, moving great distances as they migrate toward the sunbelt. For example, in their theoretical model of successful aging, Kahana and Kahana (2003) include relocation to the sunbelt as a strategy that many relatively privileged older adults use to actively modify their environments and improve aging-related experiences. In order to meet the demands of these emergent migration patterns of older Americans, Florida, for example, has witnessed a recent boom in the construction of gated communities. While the inﬂux of older individuals to gated communities has its beneﬁts for individuals and communities – especially in alleviating fear of crime, and in providing convenient and necessary amenities and resources – this trend also brings a troubling consequence: the segregation of older people from younger ones. These patterns set parameters on social relations by erecting boundaries and creating distance; in this scenario, neighborhood environments resemble gated compounds (Low, 1996). Segregation of any type clearly has ramiﬁcations not only for individuals, families, and communities, but also for society as a whole. Divorce also threatens the promise of aging in place, especially for men and women at midlife. Divorce results in the dislocation of parents and children from each other, their social networks and resources, homes, and neighborhoods. Differential life expectancy and morbidity by gender and race also affect the odds of aging in place. Many elders are required to relocate to new environments because of diminished physical or mental health, or dwindling resources. The health challenges that come with growing older are especially likely to prompt the need for access to health-care and other services, and these challenges may bring a transition from independent living, on one end of the independence/dependence continuum, to institutionalized care at the other end (Robinson & Moen, 2000). The ﬁrst half of old age is generally a period spent living independently and with a spouse, while the latter half often comes with one or more changes in residence and the loss of a spouse – at least for women, given differential life expectancy between men and women, coupled with the fact that women tend to marry men a few years older (Uhlenberg, 1980). Elders who reside independently in the community clearly live in very different worlds than those in institutional settings. Relocation in old age may involve transitions to nursing homes, subsidized housing, senior apartments, single-room occupancy hotels, or retirement communities. These examples represent the wide spectrum of residential environmental settings in which older people exist and through which they may cycle several times through the ﬁnal years of life. These factors also lead to spatial concentration of elderly (Werczberger, 1997). Given the differentials in 213

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life expectancy between women and men, residential settings for older adults – and the composition of older adults in communities and society at large – are also heavily female. Interestingly, just as older women are often the “kin-keepers” in families, they may also be “neighborhood keepers,” being “vigilant about the changing fortunes of the localities in which they have invested much of their lives” (Phillipson et al., 1999, p. 741). There is growing interest in how to build more age-integrated social settings, for the good of young and old alike, in which people of a wide variety of ages interact and hold productive roles (see a recent collection of papers edited by Uhlenberg and Riley, 2000). Older people may be simultaneously more prone to feel the absence of community and also more likely to beneﬁt from community life (Lucksinger, 1994). For this reason, many institutions for older people attempt to architect “community” by design – hoping to create involvement and attachment, foster a feeling of ownership and a sense of safety, and provide needed services and amenities. Residential change of any kind is difﬁcult for older people. True, under some circumstances, where people go from a bad situation to better one, residential change can positively affect well-being (Emmons, Colby & Kaiser, 1998; Kling, Seltzer & Ryff, 1997). Yet even when change is for the better, it generally requires a signiﬁcant period of readjustment. It also often involves separation from family and friends, and requires the establishment of new schedules and routines. It is also not uncommon for institutional settings, in particular, to restrict the type or amount of personal belongings a new resident may bring, to deﬁne appropriate styles of dress for residents, and to set rules around visiting, socializing, and even sexual activity – all of which may prohibit meaningful experiences in later life. Taking all things together, there is much to be said for providing older people with the resources they need as long as they can reasonably hope to remain in their own homes. These resources may include the support of family members, social services, and help with home modiﬁcations and repairs (see Callahan, 1993). Given the presence of these late-life challenges, there is of a long tradition of inquiry about person-environment ﬁt in gerontology (Lawton, 1999; Kahana & Kahana, 2003). It emphasizes the match between an individual’s physical, psychological, and social needs and the structure of, and resources in, the environment.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF NEIGHBORHOODS IN RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE We now turn to some of the challenges of handling neighborhoods in research. While these complexities pose signiﬁcant challenges for theory and empirical

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research, they are nonetheless critical directions for future scholarship on neighborhood effects on the development of individuals in particular life periods and the cumulative effects they bring over lifetime. We close with a brief discussion of how neighborhoods might be better addressed in policy and practice. Selection Into and Out of Neighborhoods Several complexities of analyzing neighborhood effects relate to selection, for it poses important but unknown biases in empirical estimates of neighborhood effects. For example, residents in speciﬁc neighborhoods may be highly variable in statuses before they move into a neighborhood. This dilutes the potential of ﬁnding neighborhood effects or of creating them through intervention. At the same time, individuals and families who choose to live in particular neighborhoods may be similar in signiﬁcant ways – for example, in what they value or in what they look for in a neighborhood. This seems particularly likely for those who stay in neighborhoods for long periods of time. In this case, neighborhood effects may be small because the degree of variation naturally found in a neighborhood is small rather than large (Duncan & Raudenbush, 2001; see also Brooks-Gunn et al., 1993). Similarly, some parents who may be skilled in countering the effects of bad neighborhoods may choose to live in them to capitalize on cheaper rents, shorter commuting times, and the like. In this case, neighborhood effects are minimized because parental characteristics partially suppress them. On the other hand, those parents who are not well positioned to manage bad neighborhoods may end up in bad neighborhoods because they do not have the kinds of characteristics that would allow them to get out. This would lead us to overestimate neighborhood effects. Either way, it is clear that we must begin to address the important (and thus far largely unobserved) characteristics of parents if we are to partial out effects such as these. And it is clear that we have much to learn about how to identify selection effects, understand their impact on within- and between-neighborhood variability, and take them into account in our analyses. Threshold Models and Models of “Developmental Windows” Most research on neighborhood effects has taken neighborhood effects to be linear, with residents in neighborhoods that are higher on some presumably positive characteristic or process being increasingly better off on physical, psychological, or social outcomes. Yet we must more fully explore the

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possibility of non-linear effects, particularly threshold or “tipping point” (Duncan & Raudenbush, 2001) models in which neighborhoods become especially important (or unimportant) in shaping development. Thresholds might be considered from either the standpoint of neighborhoods, individuals, or both in combination. For example, the impact of a neighborhood may be particularly strong or weak if it is below or above a particular point on a dimension of neighborhood structure or process. Wilson’s (1987, 1996) ideas about “new urban poverty” are a good illustration of this, for Wilson argues that when the proportion of residents in poverty exceeds 30%, neighborhoods take on new forms and have distinct effects on residents. Similarly, the impact of a neighborhood may have particularly strong or weak effects on individuals who are above or below a particular point where certain skills or resources are concerned. Models of developmental “windows” are a natural extension of threshold models. These models focus on the timing (age) of exposure to speciﬁc neighborhood conditions. For instance, we might ask whether the availability of role models or mentors in a neighborhood is more or less important for children at particular ages. Similarly, we might ask whether moving from better to worse neighborhoods, or from worse to better neighborhoods, has particularly positive or negative effects for children at particular ages. Are there age brackets before or after which the (presumably) negative effects of moving into worse neighborhoods are heightened or diminished? Are there age brackets before or after which the (presumably) positive effects of moving into better neighborhoods are heightened or diminished? In addition to inquiry aimed at understanding the timing of exposure to neighborhood conditions, we might also ask about the duration of exposure to those conditions. Building on the examples above, we might ask whether children must be exposed to role models or mentors in their neighborhoods for a critical period of time before its (presumably positive) effects can surface. Or we might consider whether the (presumably positive) effects offered by a move to a better neighborhood are heightened or diminished depending on the length of time a child was exposed to poorer neighborhood conditions or will spend in better neighborhood conditions. Intersections Between Characteristics of Neighborhoods and Individuals The points above also highlight the importance of considering how neighborhoods, and speciﬁc aspects of neighborhoods, may have differential effects on individuals with speciﬁc characteristics. That is, particular constellations of neighborhood structure and process may leave unique effects on individuals in those neighborhoods, and particular constellations of neighborhood factors may

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interact with particular constellations of individual characteristics to leave unique effects on those individuals. For example, neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and mobility, and low levels of collective efﬁcacy, may leave some groups of children more vulnerable than others. These characteristics and processes may more adversely affect boys than girls; preteen and teenage boys may be more vulnerable than younger boys; or Black boys may be more vulnerable than White boys. It is important to explore these kinds of combinations – intersections of individual and neighborhood characteristics – in deliberate, systematic ways. Intersections Between Characteristics of Neighborhoods and Other Contexts It remains rare to ﬁnd empirical treatments of context that simultaneously incorporate two or more contexts. Theories of contextual interdependency must address complex relationships between social contexts, and this is beginning to happen with greater frequency. Where neighborhoods are concerned, interactions with families, schools, and peer groups seem particularly important to explore (Cook et al., in press). For example, poor minority neighborhoods are routinely portrayed as “reservoirs of dysfunction” (Kelley, 1997), characterized by troubled schools, poorly functioning families, and peer groups that have given up on conventional goals or have actively resisted them (e.g. Jencks & Peterson, 1991; Wilson, 1987). Similarly, professional couples with children choose more afﬂuent places to live under the assumption that those neighborhoods have superior neighborhood processes, better schools, more conventional friends for their children, and families that are well organized (e.g. Brett, Stroh & Riley, 1993). Recent literature has also emphasized the connections between neighborhoods and the culture of local schools and social cliques (e.g. Rutter, Maugham, Mortimore, & Ouston, 1979). And it has emphasized connections between neighborhoods and the behavior of local families, especially their strategies for managing children’s interactions with neighbors, schools, and peers (e.g. Furstenberg et al., 1999). In each of these examples, the assumption is made that contexts are highly correlated. At the same time, contexts may be more variable than we assume. For example, schools receive students from multiple neighborhoods of different quality. Neighborhoods contain children who attend multiple schools that vary in quality. Peer groups are nested within both schools and neighborhoods, and both schools and neighborhoods may contain multiple peer groups that differ widely in orientation. Moreover, while a child’s school friends may come from different neighborhoods, his or her neighborhood friends may also attend different schools. Students from the same peer network have parents who vary 217

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in their effectiveness; and even within the same nuclear family, siblings close in age may attend different schools, have different friends, and even live in different neighborhoods, depending on court custody decisions. Even the poorest neighborhoods contain some families that succeed in maintaining conventional family relationships (e.g. Clark, 1983), and contain some peer groups whose members try to get ahead conventionally (e.g. MacLeod, 1995). Social contexts are so complexly interwoven that an understanding of developmental changes requires specifying how the contexts are interrelated and how these interrelationships promote or prohibit positive development. Attention to these matters also raises questions about the forms of effects that multiple contexts have on individuals – particularly whether their effects are simply additive in nature, or whether they are instead interactive, which brings signiﬁcant complexities for theory and research (for illustrations, see Cook et al., in press). At present, there are few opportunities to explore avenues such as these, largely because data are not available. Few studies contain systematic information on the characteristics and processes of the multiple contexts in which individuals exist; neighborhoods cannot therefore be examined simultaneously with family, peer, school, or work environments. However, recent advances in multi-level modeling have revolutionized our ability to analyze contextual effects (see Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992; DiPrete & Forristal, 1994), and many of these advances have been based on research on neighborhoods. These points emphasize the need to take social contexts more seriously in research designs and sampling, data collection and organization, and analytic strategies. Understanding Intra- and Inter-Neighborhood Variability The points above are also consistent with renewed interest in variability and heterogeneity in developmental science (for a discussion, see Settersten, 1999). As noted earlier, variability within neighborhoods on individual outcomes is often very high, making it difﬁcult to ascertain neighborhood effects. It is also difﬁcult to integrate empirical literature on neighborhood effects because there are wide differences in how neighborhoods are deﬁned and measured. Besides understanding variability of these types, we must also consider how individuals of different ages build and experience their communities. These experiences are affected by the status of different age groups in a culture (along with race, social class, gender, and other dimensions), the expectations about the roles and responsibilities of individuals in these groups, and the degree to which activities and experiences in particular cultures are age-integrated or agesegregated. As noted above, most scholarship on neighborhood effects has focused on childhood and, especially, adolescence. We must turn attention to

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how neighborhoods might matter for development during different periods of adult life – whether in early adulthood, middle age, or beyond – and how these effects might cumulate throughout life. Understanding Neighborhood Change We have much to learn about neighborhood change, and how this change, in turn, affects the development of individuals. That is, we must take a dynamic view of contextual change, to understand how communities come into being and shift in structure and process over time. Ultimately, much discussion about neighborhoods has concerns about change at its heart. For example, we are inherently concerned about changes (especially increases) in the spatial concentration and geographical spread of poverty, or in the clustering of poverty with other forms of disadvantage (e.g. Gephart, 1997). How might these changes in neighborhood poverty create changes in neighborhood processes, which in turn change individual outcomes? Similarly, we are often concerned about the antecedents and correlates of these changes, most of which should also be considered in temporal terms. For example, neighborhood poverty may shift as a function of changes in joblessness, segregation by race, the out-migration of non-poor families, or local welfare policies. It may also shift as a function of changes in still larger settings, such as the labor, marriage, and housing markets, or in state and federal policies (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1997). In light of our earlier commentary on the interrelatedness of contexts, it also seems important to consider how patterns of neighborhood shape, and are shaped by, changes in school, family, and peer group settings. Of course, at a practical level, incorporating neighborhoods into longitudinal frameworks is made problematic by the fact that geographic mobility of individuals exponentially increases the number of neighborhoods in a sample as it is tracked over time. The sheer number of neighborhoods becomes cumbersome to manage in analyses, and the number of individuals to represent speciﬁc neighborhoods may be too low for effective quantitative analyses. In addition, if decennial Census data are used to create neighborhood measures, the available information may well be outdated relative to the time at which data were gathered from individuals in a study. Toward a More Differentiated View of How Neighborhoods Impact Human Development It is not enough to ask whether neighborhoods matter; we must come to know how neighborhoods matter. Scholarship on neighborhoods must build a more 219

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differentiated view of how speciﬁc aspects of neighborhood structure and process, whether alone or in combination, do or do not matter for speciﬁc aspects of physical, psychological, and social development. We must consider whether neighborhood environments are more likely to affect development in some of these domains more than others, and whether speciﬁc aspects of neighborhood environments are more or less important than others in affecting development in these domains in positive or negative ways. We must consider whether neighborhood effects are likely to be uniform across all residents, or whether certain subsets of individuals are affected more than other subsets. And we must consider why those effects come about, and whether their strength and forms differ over time. Building More Reliable and Valid Measures of Neighborhood Structure and Process In neighborhood research, it is common to have only a limited set of single indicators on neighborhoods and/or combine them into a higher-order construct. If we move too quickly to a higher-order construct, we lose our ability to distinguish whether certain aspects of neighborhood environments are more or less important in shaping human development or in producing specific types of outcomes. As discussed earlier, “neighborhood” measures are often Census-tract measures, which are larger than what we consider “neighborhoods” and which focus on the social and economic composition of tracts. Other types of “official” data are also commonly used in neighborhood research, such as crime reports, vital health statistics, social service agencies, and school records. Of course, data from “official” sources may be significantly biased, and do not capture “unofficial” behavior or processes (Raudenbush & Sampson, 1999). Similarly, research on neighborhoods often begins with individual-level data on attitudes and behaviors and then aggregates those data up to the tract level, given that Census tracts are clearly deﬁned units of analysis and individuals can easily be mapped onto them. Yet neighborhoods – or any social context, for that matter – are more than the simple aggregation of individual measures. Neighborhoods transcend individuals and should be studied as entities in and of themselves. Indeed, sociologists take social contexts to be an explicitly structured and interactive set of relationships and processes. This view urges us to consider the ways in which contexts are not only systematically organized, but how they operate on their own accord, even independent from human action (Dannefer, 1992). To do so, we must take more seriously the task of better explicating and measuring aspects of the environments most

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central to human development (for recent discussions of these challenges, see Friedman & Wachs, 1999; Settersten, 1999). We must therefore think more critically about how to measure more directly the things about neighborhood structure and process we take to be important – such as neighborhood infrastructure, social institutions, or social organization (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1997). And we must think more critically about how we might measure more directly the things we hope to capture when we rely on more superﬁcial and widely available measures of neighborhood composition, as described above. Neighborhood effects are especially likely to be produced through social processes, not structure or composition per se – though it is clear that processes are clearly tied to structure and composition. Yet we rarely measure these processes. How might we develop more valid and reliable measures of social contexts? As discussed earlier, we must make “multipronged” efforts to assess environments, including systematic social observation used in conjunction with survey-based methods (Raudenbush & Sampson, 1999). Neighborhood scholarship will clearly beneﬁt from more ecologically valid research strategies. Along these lines, scholarship on neighborhoods will also beneﬁt from greater exploration of the subjective: How are local environments constructed in individuals’ minds, and with what consequences do those understandings come? And as Furstenberg and Hughes (1997) ask, to what degree do neighborhood residents live in different but overlapping psychological worlds? As a result, we must better study neighborhood interactions; the perceptions, attitudes, and feelings individuals have about their neighborhoods; and the ways in which individuals’ identities are inextricably bound to their neighborhoods and larger communities. Beyond Top-Down Effects In posing questions about the impact of neighborhoods on human development, we are naturally inclined to think about these effects as top-down. For example, in the neighborhood literature, it seems standard to assume neighborhood composition produces positive or negative social processes, which in turn affect individual development. Yet based on our earlier discussion, other feedback loops and bottom-up effects also seem important to explore. For example, neighborhood processes may dramatically alter neighborhood composition (e.g. selection dynamics into and out of neighborhoods may alter their racial or socioeconomic composition). Forces distal from neighborhoods may also significantly alter neighborhood composition and process (e.g. local, state, and federal policies around living wages, business opportunities, tax abatements, or 221

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“empowerment” zones). And the developmental states of individuals in a neighborhood may also affect neighborhood composition (e.g. the achievement scores of students in local school districts affects selection dynamics into and out of neighborhoods). Given an emerging emphasis in developmental science on human agency within social structure, we must consider these and other reciprocal effects between individuals, families, and neighborhoods. While individuals and families are clearly shaped by the neighborhoods in which they live, they also actively negotiate, and even intervene in, their neighborhoods. Building Communities, Making Social Policies We often seek to design policies and programs to counter the presumably negative effects of disadvantaged neighborhood environments, especially on young people. Many social policies aimed at children have concerns such as these at their core, as we hope to intervene early in children’s lives to promote more positive developmental pathways and discourage negative ones. Yet how might we also invest in neighborhoods to better protect and even promote the development of people of all ages? To this end, it seems imperative to design and fund interventions at the local and state level aimed at improving community organization (e.g. Rothman, 1999; Turner, 1999). How might we build communities that are safe and in good physical shape; improve the quality of schools and other local institutions; foster more cooperative and meaningful relationships; and provide individuals with more options and greater control in their lives? Of course, intensive community organizing is required for most community-level initiatives. Community organizing reﬂects a wide range of strategies to bring residents together and teach them how to plan and take action. If those efforts are to be successful, and if we are to learn from them, they must be backed with support for training and evaluation. Yet there are few well-documented evaluations of the intended and unintended successes and failures of neighborhood revitalization. For example, we do not know how often “successes” at revitalization end up pushing longtime residents out of neighborhoods because they can no longer afford to live in those areas once they have been revitalized (Brown & Richman, 1997). The history and stability of a neighborhood, vacant land, home ownership, racial composition, and other factors play important roles in determining the status of a neighborhood, and how its status may shift over time. Community-building initiatives must focus on the most pressing local issues, which often involve crime and safety, schools, race relations, housing and public infrastructures, provision of social and health services, participation and leadership, and belonging, identity, and pride (e.g. Brown & Richman, 1997).

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These initiatives must build the “social capital” of communities, which should ultimately improve the welfare of neighborhood residents. These kinds of initiatives are generally aimed at improving the conditions of those who are in “bad” neighborhoods rather than those that are simply mediocre. Yet an especially important issue is how to better organize disadvantaged neighborhoods so that their voices are stronger and heard. Strong voices are generally required to get resources and effectively monitor their implementation. This often results in a Catch-22: Those who most need the support of local and state governments do not have the resources and skills and mobilize and marshal that support. At the same time, residents in mediocre neighborhoods may also have a great deal to gain from interventions of these sorts. Often, these residents are “‘tweeners” – they are not poor enough to be eligible for other forms of support, yet they also do not have sufﬁcient resources of their own and are therefore vulnerable. Local-level community-building initiatives have been the subject of public debate across America. Cleveland, for example, has served as a test site for urban revitalization through a new paradigm of community building called the Cleveland Community Building Initiative (CCBI). Recognizing that residents’ involvement and investment is perhaps the most critical variable to the success of such initiatives, this paradigm incorporates neighborhood residents at each stage of the process – in identifying needs, planning, mobilizing resources, and implementing changes aimed at transforming the “culture” of public housing in Cleveland. Further, in Renaissance Village, one of four local sites, residents develop their own neighborhood covenant as a statement of their community’s shared values to which all neighbors are expected to adhere. Policy-makers view this example as illustrating the “village concept” in action. While such projects are largely positive, they may nonetheless be viewed as an “oasis in a desert.” Furthermore, they note that attempts to revitalize urban neighborhoods often carry the unintended consequence of displacing residents. Nevertheless, community-building projects such as these represent successful initiatives that have overcome residents’ initial distrust of large federal programs. Of course, many federal level policies do carry the potential to have effects on neighborhoods and their residents. Here, policies aimed at handling the problems of poverty, and of building stronger labor markets and diversifying the economy, seem especially important (Brown & Richman, 1997). And policies related to the employment and its correlates (e.g. job training, health insurance, childcare, public safety, drugs, education, and transportation) play important roles in promoting dignity and opportunity, and in minimizing crime and social disorder (Lehman & Smeeding, 1997). 223

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The range of possibilities offered at the local, state, and federal levels highlights a critical tension in making social policies (for further discussion of the challenges in linking human development and social policy, see Settersten, 2003). Faced with limited resources, is it best to create policies aimed at improving neighborhoods, with the hope that these policies will ultimately have positive effects on the individuals in those neighborhoods? Or is it best to instead create policies that ﬁrst address problems individuals have in other realms (e.g. policies related to work, education, family), with the hope that neighborhoods will also be improved in the process? Greater attention to the points addressed in this paper is of critical concern to the welfare and functioning of individuals, families and social institutions, and society at large.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ﬁrst author wishes to thank Tom Cook, Frank Furstenberg, Melissa Herman, and Meredith Phillips. Their collaboration on the Prince George’s County and Philadelphia projects, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Adolescent Development in High-Risk Settings, shaped many of the ideas developed here. Both authors wish to thank Janice Eatman Williams for her insightful conversations, several examples of which are included here.

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Jencks, C., & Peterson, P. (Eds) (1991). The urban underclass. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Kahana, E., & Kahana, B. (2003). Contextualizing successful aging: New directions in an age-old search. In R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 225–255). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Kelley, R. D. G. (1997). Yo’ mama’s disFUNKtional!: Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kling, K. C., Seltzer, M. M., & Ryff, C. D. (1997). Distinctive late-life challenges: Implications for coping and well-being. Psychology and Aging, 12(2), 288–295. Lawton, M. P. (1999). Environmental taxonomy: Generalizations from research with older adults. In: S. L. Friedman, & T. D. Wachs (Eds), Measuring Environment Across the Life-Span: Emerging Methods and Concepts. (pp. 91–124). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Lehman, J. S., & Smeeding, T. M. (1997). Neighborhood effects and federal policy. In: J. BrooksGunn, G. J. Duncan & J. L. Aber (Eds), Neighborhood Poverty (Vol. 1, pp. 251–278). New York: Russell Sage. Lewis, O. (1966). The culture of poverty. Scientiﬁc American, 215, 19–25. Light, R. J. (2001). Making the most of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Low, S. M. (1996). The anthropology of cities: Imagining and theorizing the city. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 383–409 Lucksinger, M. (1994). Community and the elderly. Journal of Housing for the Elderly, 11, 11–28. MacLeod, J. (1995). Ain’t no making it. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Inc. Mayer, S. E., & Jencks, C. (1989). Growing up in poor neighborhoods: How much does it matter? Science, 243, 1441–1445. McLaughlin, M. W., Irby, M. A., & Langman, J. (1994). Urban sanctuaries: Neighborhood organizations in the lives and futures of inner-city youth. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Phillipson, C. P., Bernard, M., Phillips, J., & Ogg, J. (1999). Older people’s experiences of community life: Patterns of neighboring in three urban areas. The Sociological Review, 47, 715–743. Raudenbush, S. W., & Sampson, R. J. (1999). Ecometrics: Toward a science of assessing ecological settings, with application to the systematic social observation of neighborhoods. Sociological Methodology, 29, 1–41. Robinson, J. T., & Moen, P. (2000). A life course perspective on housing expectations and shifts in late midlife. Research on Aging, 22(5), 499–532. Rothman, J. (Ed.) (1999). Reﬂections on community organization. Itasca, IL: F E Peakcock. Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P. & Ouston, J. (1979). Fifteen thousand hours: Secondary schools and their effects on children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 603–651. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efﬁcacy. Science, 277, 918–924. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1999). Lives in time and place: The problems and promises of developmental science. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2003). Rethinking social policy: Lessons of a life course perspective. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 191–222). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company.

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Shaw, C., & McKay, H. (1942). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Skogan, W. G. (1990). Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in american neighborhoods. New York: The Free Press. Turner, J. B. (1999). Neighborhood organization: How well does it work? In: J Rothman (Ed.), Reﬂections on Community Organization (pp. 91–104). Itasca, IL: F E Peakcock. Uhlenberg, P. (1980). Death and the family. Journal of Family History, 5, 313–320. Uhlenberg, P., & Riley, M. W. (Ed.) (2000). Essays on age integration. The Gerontologist, 40(3), 261–307. Werczberger, E. (1997). Aging and the demographic ecology of urban areas. Journal of Housing for the Elderly, 12, 125–145. Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. (1982). The police and neighborhood safety: Broken windows. Atlantic, 127, 29–38. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Alfred Knopf.

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9. CAREERS AND LIVES: SOCIALIZATION, STRUCTURAL LAG, AND GENDERED AMBIVALENCE Phyllis Moen and Robert M. Orrange

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In times of rapid change in roles and relationships, old norms and templates are no longer relevant, but new ones have yet to emerge. This is particularly striking in the case of the gendered life course (Linton, 1942; Moen, 1992, 2001). For example, many women have been socialized to believe: (1) they can (and should) pursue and move up career ladders, and (2) they can (and should) simultaneously have a successful marriage and family life. Similarly, many “new age” men have come to believe: (1) they can (and should) continue to be the family breadwinners, following the traditional linear, male career path, and (2) they can (and should) actively participate in the carework of child rearing and domesticity on the home front. Yet jobs remain structured around the male breadwinner template of at least full-time (but typically more) continuous employment, wage scales have failed to keep pace with the costs of living, and women as well as men are in the workforce, increasingly, without any backups for carework. Simultaneously, this traditional lock-step career path, characteristic of so many middle-class men in the middle of the 20th century, is becoming a shaky

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proposition, even for white, educated, male professionals, as the (often implicit) social contract between employer and employee is being rewritten. Workers of all ages and stages ﬁnd themselves vulnerable to restructuring and downsizing, with seniority no longer necessarily meaning security. Young, new entrants to the workforce can no longer plan to stay in the same job or with the same company for very many years. In this “half-changed world” (see Orenstein, 2000; Moen, 1992, 2001), traditional agents of socialization do not provide guideposts but, rather, socialize young people to a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty regarding their own life biographies. Not only do the media, parents, and teachers offer mixed messages, but the structure of contemporary institutions (work, family, gender, retirement, and the life course) lag behind societal and personal expectations related to them. Individuals, therefore, must actively engage in the construction of their own life course in a world characterized by structural lag and conﬂicting signals. The resulting double binds produce a sense of ambivalence among many women and men regarding their own occupational and family career paths. Thus, not only young adults, but individuals of all ages, are scrutinizing formerly takenfor-granted schemes that guide behavior (for instance, about gender and age) and assessing their relevance and “ﬁt” with emerging realities. The life course focus on human agency – that is, goal-oriented behavior aimed at strategies of adaptation to new situations (e.g. Clausen, 1986; Elder, 1998; Giele & Elder, 1998; Moen & Wethington, 1992; Settersten, 1999) – becomes especially salient in times of social change. Socialization and Behavior “Path dependence” is a term characterizing continuity in behavior, with actors tending to behave in the present and future much the same way as they have in the past. Socializing new generations to follow prescribed and predictable trajectories helps to ensure continuity in lives, organizations, and communities. But such blueprints become obsolete in the throws of a transition-in-progress, enabling (or requiring) individuals to forge their own trails, create their own scripts. In these circumstances, it is men’s and women’s actual experiences, not simply past socialization processes, that become forces of self-discovery and self-construction. A case in point is the baby boom generation of women born in the 1950s. What they learned at their mothers’ knees – at least in white middle-class homes – were the traditional gendered roles of nurturer, caregiver, homemaker. But they grew up with the women’s movement and the shift to a service economy, both of which opened educational and occupational doors closed to women of earlier generations. In the “Women’s Roles and Well Being

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Study,” Dempster-McClain, Moen and Williams followed women ﬁrst interviewed in upstate New York in the mid-1950s, reinterviewing them and their adult daughters thirty years later (Dempster-McClain & Moen, 1998; Moen, Dempster-McClain & Williams, 1989, 1992). They found that the daughters’ own experiences as students, workers, wives, and mothers became the powerful socializing force in their lives, frequently contradicting lessons from childhood and creating new patterns and possibilities. At the same time, the mothers of the adult daughters in the study also beneﬁted from the changing opportunity structure, many choosing to return to school, pursue paid or unpaid careers, and/or divorce (Bradburn, Moen & Dempster-McClain, 1995; Esterberg, Moen & Dempster-McClain, 1994; Moen & Erickson, 1995; Moen, Erickson & Dempster-McClain, 1997; Moen & Forest, 1990). Structuration “Structuration” refers to the ways institutionalized rules and routines: (1) shape (structure) behavior and social relations, and (2) allocate (structure) resources and rewards (Sewell, 1992; Settersten & Mayer, 1997; Riley, Kahn & Foner, 1994). But institutions also instill beliefs and expectations, socializing individuals as to the culture as well as structure of both occupational and family careers along with, more generally, life course paths and possibilities. The economy is the principal structuring and socializing institution in today’s global culture. What is learned at home, in the classroom, and through the media – in childhood and adulthood – typically relates directly or indirectly to either labor force participation and/or consumerism (Schor, 1991, 1998). Occupation operates like a master role – providing identity and status as well as income, and locating individuals and their families in the larger social structure of rewards and resources. While individuals and groups may turn to their communities and social networks for a sense of belonging and security, these forms of support still have implications for their relationship to the larger economic system of opportunities and rewards. But the contemporary economy is itself a transition-in-progress, transforming occupational career paths and producing structural uncertainties for today’s workers. Since waves of downsizing and restructuring began affecting the middle class during the 1980s, managers and professionals, as well as production and service workers, have been encouraged to follow a new set of career rules. Those rules relate to remaining open to changing employment situations and new opportunities, and to letting go of expectations for long-term employment security (Handy, 1990; Kanter, 1995; Kotter, 1995). The competitive economic environment is such that many ﬁrms (and not simply manufacturers) 233

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now follow lean production models (Harrison, 1994), as the markets in which many operate are increasingly global in scope, and such expanded competition often fosters winner-take-all outcomes (Frank & Cook, 1995). Given the new economic environment, ﬁrms are more likely to retain small cores of valued employees over the long-term, while striving to maintain more ﬂexible arrangements with others, either by hiring temporary contract employees or by sub-contracting portions of their operations with smaller ﬁrms. There is also a powerful ideological component to new employment relationships between workers and employers: Perhaps to a greater extent than in the past, business culture has an especially prominent position in American society, with business elites achieving celebrity status in the mass media. As a result, more recent generations of young adults are being socialized via the mass media to the excitement, glamour, and uncompromising needs of business (Frank, 1997). In this new business environment, workers are encouraged to take responsibility for and to manage their own careers. Those in professional and managerial positions commonly feel they must constantly seek out new work experiences that will help them stretch and grow, thus enhancing their capability to ﬁnd the next job or project, which may or may not be with the same employer. This new employment model is at odds with, yet operates in uneasy proximity to, the traditional lock-step path, as companies strive to retain groups of skilled workers. Moreover, the lock-step male breadwinner template continues to shape both the structure of work and the culture of career development, providing conﬂicting messages to those wanting to achieve occupational success. This is a striking example of structural lag (Moen, 1994, 2001; Riley et al., 1994; Riley & Riley, 1994), predicated on the largely obsolete “organization man” model (White, 1970) of moving up an organizational and/or seniority ladder.1 Current employees and young adults anticipating their occupational futures cannot assume that they will be given opportunities (should they desire them) to forge long-term relationships with single ﬁrms. At the same time, the male breadwinner template characterizes societal as well as employer expectations regarding work hours, work effort, and work continuity. And workers themselves, men and women, often strive to ﬁt this male breadwinner blueprint in order to move up occupational ladders. Not only is the continuous “organization man” stereotype obsolete in today’s economic environment, it also assumes someone else, a wife, is around to take care of family responsibilities. Thus, the broad changes in the economy and in the nature of career possibilities, along with the rise in women’s workforce participation and the corresponding decline in full-time homemakers, mean that even those who have been socialized to the old lock-step breadwinner career model are likely to end up reassessing it at some point in their life course.

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Such reassessments often are a consequence of biographical experiences (which are also gendered) – such as mergers and downsizing, job loss, shifts in occupational status, geographical mobility associated with one’s own or one’s spouses’ job relocation, and/or scaling back on work responsibilities or aspirations in the context of family obligations.

GENDER AS SOCIALIZATION AND STRUCTURATION Reconstructing Gender While individuals are obviously socialized into particular gender role identities (in households, schools, and the workplace as well as through the media (see Bem, 1998, 1999), prevailing institutional structures serve to create and perpetuate gendered life courses. Gender as a social category – and a hierarchical one at that – is therefore constructed and reconstructed by ongoing rules and relations, even apart from socialization processes (Homans, 1958; Emerson, 1976; Linton, 1942; Moen, 2000, 2001). These rules and relations, moreover, lay the groundwork for and establish the normative templates that agents of socialization intentionally and unintentionally reproduce. The fact is that variants of traditional gender roles continue to be constructed and reconstructed (Bem, 1998; Moen & Yu, 2000; Risman, 1998; Williams, 2000), despite the fact that ever fewer numbers of households can afford or even want the traditional male breadwinner/female homemaker lifestyle. Dual-earner households now outnumber traditional ones by roughly three to one (Clarkberg & Moen, 2001). What has changed is women’s paid work role, not their carework role. And men are still expected, and expect themselves, to be full-time breadwinners. Thus, the lock-step career template persists in the organization of work and the structure of occupational careers, despite the reality of a changing workforce and changing economy. This structural lag is an impediment to the work/life effectiveness of all contemporary workers, male and female, as well as to their spouses and families (Moen, 2001; Riley & Riley, 1994). For example, this blueprint makes the prospect of reduced-hour work, even on a temporary basis in order to handle early childrearing responsibilities, highly problematic – in terms of beneﬁts, advancement, and long-term job security (Hochschild, 1997; Moen, 2001; Epstein, 1999). Workplace and career security and success remain predicated upon a highly competitive model in which workers are expected to exhibit single-minded devotion to organizational goals. As a result, at least one adult in contemporary households tends to put in the long hours that “good” jobs in white-collar and blue-collar occupations require (Clarkberg & Moen, 2001; Moen & Yu, 2000). 235

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Gendered assumptions and expectations are more than just ideas that individuals are socialized to embrace, they are embedded in the functioning of institutions, framing the parameters for social interaction. Nowhere is this more apparent in the opportunity structures of contemporary careers. As Williams (2000) and Moen (2001) argue, basic assumptions about ideal male workers having no caretaking responsibilities have deﬁned the ways in which careers/work get deﬁned both legally and in practice. Gender assumptions therefore shape and bend the passageways through which individuals must pass in order to be successful in their careers. Similarly, Risman (1998) argues that we must conceptualize gender as social structure, along the lines of West and Zimmerman’s (1987) “doing gender” approach. She points out the way genderbased assumptions shape institutional, interactional, and individual domains of life. These assumptions, in tandem with a half-changed world, make negotiating work and family dimensions of life increasingly problematic. The push toward the reconstruction of gendered roles and relationships has two important exceptions. First, employment is now required of poor women if they are to receive government support; and even middle-class women are seldom out of the labor force for long periods of time. This means that women’s typical life course now involves the integration of paid work and carework, but within an occupational structure that presumes workers are without family responsibilities. Women typically confront these double obligations without the support of kin, neighbors, and friends, the network of careworkers that historically facilitated the paid work of poor women. Today the members of such networks are themselves either in the workforce or geographically dispersed. Moreover, growing numbers of men lack the support of a homemaker, an ingredient that was a crucial (though unacknowledged) component of the lock-step career blueprint. Second, loyalty, hard work, and commitment no longer provide a formula for employment security in today’s economy, for men or for women. Instead, career experts herald the idea of employability – not employment – security. Many employees signal their commitment to and investment in their jobs by working long hours. Thus, the life paths of both men and women are increasingly problematic. Dual-earner couples and single parents seek to forge at best creative and at worst livable adaptations to a career template that is at odds with their family goals and responsibilities. The dilemmas of single parents – fulﬁlling two roles simultaneously – means for many the absence of secure, stable career paths. Many couples adopt strategies in response to the structural reality of the breadwinner career template and, in effect but not necessarily in intent, reproduce a variant of the traditional gendered division of labor. This typically involves neotraditional arrangements in which husbands pursue careers largely

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in the manner of good providers, with their wives arranging their own employment around their husbands’ careers (Moen, 2001; Moen & Yu, 2000; Quick & Moen, 2002; Schwartz, 1994). This strategy, in turn, reproduces gendered roles and relationships, with women expected, and often expecting, to manage paid work and carework while men are expected, and typically expect, to concentrate principally on paid work. The More Things Change . . . There remains deep ambivalence about child rearing, especially given the difﬁculties of negotiating both full-time work and full-time parenting. Moreover, individuals and couples negotiating contemporary occupational and family career paths are doing so in the face of outmoded institutional arrangements. Most resistant to change is the structure and culture of work and of career paths. Employers typically gauge the performance, commitment, and productivity of their employees based on input (hours worked) rather than output (the end result of their labors). Government wage and hour laws are geared to “at least” full-time employment. The perpetuation of gendered work and family responsibilities may therefore reﬂect early socialization in the form of mixed messages at home, in the media, and in school. Yet equally important is ongoing adult socialization in workplace and household climates of cultural contradictions and structural lag laden with gendered prescriptions, options, and constraints. Individuals shape and reshape their goals and expectations through observation and experience, on the job and in the family throughout adulthood, accompanied by self-socialization in the form of adaptive strategies to a world of work grounded in the traditional lock-step model of careers.

SOCIALIZATION AS A LIFE COURSE PROCESS Cohort Replacement and Adult Socialization Socially deﬁned life course and career patterns provide continuity in roles, relationships, and institutions across cohorts and over time. Processes of socialization (by example, exhortation, experience) and various agents of socialization (parents, spouses, schools, media, bosses, coworkers) serve to prepare each generation for the rules, roles, and relationships of adulthood. Socialization explanations are central to theories of social stability; what is more problematic is the role of socialization in times of fundamental transformations in the nature of the life course. 237

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“Cohort replacement” is a key explanation of social change – as young cohorts of individuals, socialized to new ways of thinking, gradually replace older cohorts. From this vantagepoint, younger adults should expect to pursue more egalitarian occupation and family career paths than was true of the generations before them. And it is certainly the case that younger cohorts hold more egalitarian gender beliefs than do older cohorts. But the outdated breadwinner/homemaker template still structuring occupational careers and the privatization of carework (to families and women) means that young people continue to confront hard choices (e.g. Gerson, 1985; Orenstein, 2000) in constructing their life course, hard choices that also contribute to their ongoing adult socialization. As Gerson (1985) found, adolescent plans and expectations tend to get overwhelmed by the structural realities that individuals (and couples) confront. A second explanation of social change assumes a “period” rather than “cohort” effect. Thus, a major shift in attitudes or behavior at a particular point in history is a result of a single event or a series of events that created discrepancies in expectations and values. The women’s movement, in tandem with the growth of a service economy and social policies aimed at erasing gendered discrimination in the workplace, transformed the ways men and women think about gender and equality at work and in society at large (Epstein, 1988; Rosen, 2000). But even in these times of unprecedented social change in beliefs about gender and in the broadening of women’s opportunity structure, contemporary norms, policies, and practices related to work and family careers continue to offer mixed messages and contradictory expectations, along with Hobson’s choices in opportunities. Both cohort replacement and period effects in the form of attitude changes through discrepant messages and experiences (in the broader culture and in personal biographies) operate to shape beliefs about work, family, and gender. But neither explanation can provide full understanding of the uneven processes of socialization, structuration, and social choice shaping work/life career paths over the life course. Life Course Themes The life course focus on the agentic self (e.g. Elder, 1998; Marshall, 2000) conforms with both traditional career development literature and the rational choice theory of decision-making (e.g. Becker, 1981). Individuals are assumed to make optimal choices in the context of constraints, once we make allowances for the fact that gender shapes those options and constraints. Men and women therefore choose career paths that best match their goals and values in light of

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the gendered realities of the world in which they live. What the life course approach emphasizes, however, are four key propositions related to the choice process. First is the issue of timing. When individuals move in or out of school or the workforce, in or out of family roles, can have tremendous implications for their life chances and life quality, with early choices shaping the biographical pacing of lives (see Bradburn, Moen & Dempster-McClain, 1995; Han & Moen, 1999a, b; Moen & Han, 2001; Hogan, 1981). Thus, women and men who enter, exit, or reenter educational or career paths at various life stages, as well as those who precipitate or postpone marriage or parenthood (or forgo one or the other altogether), experience the opening up of some options and the closing of others. Second, socialization, structuration, and choice are all relational processes, products of on-going interactions with parents, peers, spouses, employers, supervisors, coworkers, friends, neighbors. Because women are socialized to consider others’ needs and desires in shaping their own lives, their choices tend to be more constrained than those of men. A case example of this is the fact that women are more apt than are men to relocate, or to expect to do so, in favor of their spouses’ career advancement, not their own (Bielby & Bielby, 1992; Quick & Moen, 2001). Third, socialization, allocation, structuration, and choice are all ongoing, dynamic processes, occurring throughout adulthood (see George, 1993; Jacobs, 1989; O’Rand, 1995, 1996a, b; Pavalko, 1997). The biographical pacing of work and family career trajectories and transitions reﬂect not only one or two choice points, but a series of adaptive strategies over the life course. Adult socialization on the job and in the home are often neglected by investigators who focus exclusively on socialization as fundamental only to the transition into adulthood (but see Kohn & Schooler, 1983; Mortimer & Simmons, 1978; Mortimer, Finch, & Kumka, 1982; Mortimer, Lorence & Kumka, 1986; Mortimer, 1996). The fourth and ﬁnal proposition of life course analysis is its emphasis on role contexts (see Elder, 1998; Moen, Dempster-McClain & Williams, 1989; Moen, 2000; Musick, Herzog & House, 1999). Gender, as we have discussed, is a key contextual consideration shaping life choices and chances, as are race and ethnicity, age, social class, occupation, education. These serve as markers of location in the larger social structure that allocates roles and resources across individuals. Important as well is historical context, especially the changing economy and the changing workforce (see Moen, 2001; Newman, 1993), as well as both stable and changing social policies (see Mayer & Schoepﬂin, 1989). At the dawn of the 21st century, men and women are making educational, career, and 239

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family choices in the context of economic uncertainty. They also do so within the context of structural and cultural lag in the organization of work and career paths, the absence of any major work/family policies in either the public or corporate sectors, and often their own learned ambivalence regarding gender, work, and family. As a result, individuals, couples, and households often make pragmatic rather than optimal choices (c.f. Breiger, 1995; Moen & Wethington, 1992). Role and Stress Theories Both social interactionism (e.g. Stryker & Statham, 1985) and other social role theories (e.g. Goode, 1960; Merton, 1957), as well as theories of the stress process (e.g. Pearlin et al., 1981; Pearlin & Skaff, 1996) emphasize the ways conﬂicting role demands and expectations can create cognitive dissonance and emotional distress. There is a gap between: (1) the reality of rising individual and societal expectations about gender equality and expanding options for women at work and men at home, and (2) the persisting organization of work based on the outmoded male breadwinner/ female homemaker template. This is reﬂected in a socialization of ambivalence – producing expectations, values, and goals directly at variance with one another.2 As they draw upon ideal expectations in actualizing adult roles, young adults may experience role- or status-set conﬂict, a response presaged by this sense of ambivalence. Nearly half a century ago, Merton (1957) deﬁned such conﬂicts as occurring when two or more statuses occupied by a person involve expectations that clearly conﬂict with another. The obsolete breadwinner/ homemaker template – evident both in the organization of work and family career paths and in the socialization of norms and expectations – produces for all but the few who can actually follow such a blueprint precisely such conﬂicts. Consider new parents who want to be attentive to the needs of their children while struggling to move up career ladders (which themselves are less stable than in the middle of the 20th century). New mothers especially, but also new fathers, may ﬁnd themselves torn between the highly demanding and contradictory expectations of these two divergent institutions. In addition to ambivalence, young adults today also experience a good deal of ambiguity about how to perform key adult roles (Bush & Simmons, 1982; Eccles, 1987). The absence of clearly deﬁned, taken-for-granted life patterns raises questions as to what the nature and extent of their investment in each of these roles should be. Given the conﬂicting opportunity structure and potentially unrealizable cultural ideals for work and family roles (e.g. the “good mother,” the “good worker”),3 consider how individuals and couples must

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grapple with their uncertain futures. The process of anticipatory socialization (Merton, 1957) that used to ease the transition into adulthood today provides only a fuzzy roadmap. Given (1) the ambiguity of mixed messages and conﬂicting expectations, (2) the uncertainty of the future (especially in terms of occupational career ladders and job security), and (3) the ambivalence associated with wanting to participate in and succeed in both occupational and family dimensions of the life course, young adults often engage in pragmatic experimentation as they strategize to envision and forge workable life paths. This is captured in Wolfe’s (1998) in-depth study in which he found that the modal work/family pattern of his middle-class respondents was neither traditional nor modern, but, rather, one of ambivalence, a blend of both modern and traditional ideals, along with arranging their lives in a “whatever works” approach. Socialization for Uncertainty: The Mutable Self We have discussed two key transformations-in-progress that have shaped the work/family interface: changing gender roles and the changing career contract. But there is yet another, related, transformation: the trend toward individualization. With the absence of taken-for-granted scripts for the contemporary life course, what is increasingly evident is an expansion of individual choice (or, for some, the semblance of choice) in terms of whether and when role entries and exits occur (related to jobs, education, marriage, and parenthood). But such objective role shifts have a subjective component as well, as individuals struggle to develop and sustain a sense of self and to cope with change in terms of orientations and commitments to role-based identities over the life course. An understanding of contemporary socialization into work and family roles requires a view of the self as both social product and social force (Ryff, 1985; Rosenberg, 1979) and theories of self conceptualization and personal identity that are commensurate with the assumption of continuous socialization and change over the life course. In contemporary times, we witness uneven changes and pragmatic strategizing in the work/family arena emerging alongside of what has often been referred to as the postmodern predicament. This concept highlights how, given contemporary social and cultural transformations, the self has fractured, fragmented, and split into multiple and contradictory self-investments. In his thesis about the mutable self, Zurcher (1972, 1977) describes the shifting nature of self in response to institutional uncertainty and social change. During the peak of the tumultuous cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s, and coinciding with the emergence of a powerful movement for 241

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women’s liberation, Zurcher (1972) was among the ﬁrst to note a shift in the reported self-conceptions of college students. This shift involved movement away from self-conceptions based solidly in social/institutional roles to ones rooted more in styles of behavior, ambivalence, and the questioning of neatly ordered role paths. His notion of the mutable self is highly complementary with the focus on choice, reﬂexivity and risk associated with the dilemmas of the self in the late modern age by such European social theorists as Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992), along with Heinz’s thesis about self-socialization (this volume). The centrality of both work and family life highlight how, for many, the struggle for self-deﬁnition emerges at the intersection of these core life domains. In line with Zurcher’s thesis (1972), the uneven changes in gender roles and career paths within the broader society can act to create tensions surrounding the previously taken-for-granted ways in which individuals come to understand and deﬁne themselves. As research on young adults demonstrates (Orrange, 1999, 2002), individuals struggle over how to forge coherent sets of institutional commitments given perceived uncertainties in, and ambiguities related to, structural and cultural lag in gender and career options and scripts. As young adults strategize as to how to integrate the multiple aspects of their lives, and do so with signiﬁcant others, they face structural conditions and uncertainties which, in turn, force them into a reﬂective stance with respect to their own self deﬁnitions – including their own uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence about the viability of sustaining various work/family role commitments. Research (described in the next section) suggests that this process of working out the relationships between work and family roles occurs in the form of an ongoing dialog between institutional and reﬂective components of self. The individuals we interviewed desire to forge institutional commitments, while at the same time harboring feelings of uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Given uneven transformations in the institutions of gender, work, family, and the contemporary life course, the issue of deﬁning the future – the ﬂip side of ongoing socialization into adulthood – is not simply one of deciding what one wants, but also of struggling to come to terms with workable alternatives, and of having some idea of what one might realistically sacriﬁce in the process. And, given conditions of rapid social change, this shift toward a reﬂective selforientation may prove adaptive for the individual. The capacity to view one’s role involvements from a reﬂective distance permits individuals to move beyond old scripts, strategizing to creatively adapt to novel situations. In the following sections we draw upon in-depth interviews with members of middle-class couples from the Cornell Couples and Careers Study and from a sample of advanced professional school students (for more information on

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the samples and studies see Becker & Moen, 1999; Clausen, 1993; Moen, 2003; Orrange, 1999). We seek to highlight the plans and aspirations of middle-class men and women who are in the anticipatory phases of the life course, one that encompasses those in their 20s who are either single or married, but all soon to embark upon occupational careers. Most also plan to soon to begin families. As the illustrative case materials will show, their plans for the future reﬂect socialization in a half-changed world (see also Orenstein, 2000).

CASE EXAMPLES: WORK AND FAMILY “CAREERS” Men’s Expectations: Double Visions The Neotraditionals Young, educated, middle-class adults in their mid-twenties have come of age in a world in which ideas about women’s equality, with respect to participation in the public sphere of work as well as the value placed on egalitarian relationships between spouses, are commonplace. Thus, many young men have learned these values either at home (through observations of or lessons from their own parents), or, more likely, in school (through educational experiences and interaction with women, particularly in higher education). It has also become far more acceptable for men to express desires to have families and close relationships with children. However, among the privileged men soon to join the ranks of professionals, we observed some contradictory expectations about work and family roles for men and women. These reﬂect the uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence we see emanating from the structural lag in policies and practices that have failed to keep pace with the fact that most paid workers are married to other paid workers, and most workers are or will be unpaid careworkers at some point in their lives. Consider Tom, a law student who aspires to build a career in finance and corporate law, and is already engaged, planning to marry over the next five years. He envisions himself as “always being the provider,” yet he also hopes to invest a great deal of time and energy in family life. He does not claim to speak for his fiancée’s career expectations, but notes that he does not think she will want to “stay at home all the time, or even for too long after having children.” He also admits that he does not imagine himself as being a “househusband, running a legal office out of the house and staying home with the kids.” However, he also notes that, should the need arise, they would find a way to make sure that at least one of them was home with the kids. His ideal would for his wife to find some type of flexible occupation where she could work out of the house on a part-time basis, in order to be available for the 243

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children. About his own career prospects, he expects to move from firm to firm over the years, assessing that long-term careers in any one firm are possible for only about 5 to 10% of professionals nowadays. Tom therefore sees a neotraditional lifestyle, with himself as breadwinner and his wife, employed in a less demanding job, accommodating to their family and his career needs. There is ambiguity related to his wife’s role and ambivalence concerning his own role investments: he wants to work hard, engaging in career hopping to move up the occupational ladder but also wants to spend time with his family. Along similar lines, Gary, an MBA student interested in working as an independent ﬁnancial investment agent, talked about his hopes that his wife will pursue her own satisfying job in her own special area of interest. And while he feels that his wife would not to want to be a “big corporate attorney, or anything like that,” he would “love to see her work” that it would be “great.” When he discussed having children, he said he honestly feels that they would move towards more “traditional worker and homemaker roles.” But, more importantly, he would like her to have options, such that “if she wants to stay home and take care of the kids, more power to her.” But, “if she wants to work, and get some help until they are old enough to take care of themselves” that would be ﬁne too. He would support her, while at the same time “realizing that the family would be the most important consideration.” This neotraditional lifestyle Gary envisions is grounded in total acceptance of the male as provider. Ambiguity and ambivalence, for Gary, lie in what is feasible for his wife. These men seem fairly typical in that they seem to have been socialized to a good many of ideals we normally associate with women’s equality. They are not, in theory, against the progressive ideals embodied in prescriptions of equal options in the workforce, regardless of gender. However, as they begin to reﬂect upon the actual practice of egalitarianism, and how their own plans for the future might be implicated by the actualization of these ideals, these men become more vague and less speciﬁc, conveying an ambivalence about their wives’ occupational careers, especially when children enter the picture. These result in movement toward a neotraditional model. Nonetheless, they do seem to have a real degree of ﬂexibility about their views of the future, and how they might make arrangements with their spouses in order to accommodate both their separate and shared role demands for the betterment of all. On the one hand, they do not have pat or neatly deﬁned views about how their roles will be allocated. On the other hand, they remain driven by modiﬁed visions of the provider role, visions grounded in the recognition of the lock-step breadwinner career template as the measure of productivity and success.

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Dual Committed or Alternative Paths? While most of the men soon to graduate with law and MBA degrees seem to identify with “providing,” there are a few who clearly desire and grapple with the idea of forging egalitarian relationships. Mark, a student ﬁnishing up his law degree, is one of these men. While single at the time of our interview, he was seriously involved with another professional school student, and they were considering marriage at some point in the future. He discussed how he could “never marry” somebody who would want to stay at home, as he feels it is very important to marry someone who could understand the kinds of professional demands that he is bound to face. He talked about what he imagines the advantages would be of both spouses working, such as having a lot in common professionally, and also that there would be a “lot less pressure on who is going to bring in the money if you have two people bringing in two paychecks. Then, if one spouse is unemployed, it “isn’t the end of the world.” But, in wanting to be part of a dual-career couple, Mark worries about having kids “who know their nanny better” than their parents, that he might end up with “latch-key kids.” He also struggles over whether, upon having kids, he and his future spouse would be able to continue to function as professionals, and even cut back their hours, so that they could “leave at ﬁve o’clock and be home and have the family dinner and have weekends together too.” In a later discussion, he talked about how he has grave uncertainties about trying to become a partner with a large law ﬁrm, given the demands placed upon young associates. As we have discussed, operating in a world in ﬂux can generate a lot of uncertainly and ambivalence, and at the same time, demand a good deal of reﬂectivity from individuals with respect to their future roles and relationships. The people we interviewed ﬁnd they are unable or unwilling to take anything for granted! Women’s Expectations: Double Binds High Commitment – and Hedging – at Work and at Home Consider Jennifer, a law student in her mid-twenties, who is intent upon making it big – either in the ﬁeld of law or consulting. She decided not to date during law school so that relationship issues would not interfere with her career aspirations. She is one of the women who strive to have it all in terms of career, spouse, and children; yet she is particularly aware of some of the stumbling blocks she may face over time. First, she has “very deﬁnite standards” as to the kind of person she hopes to marry, in that he would have to be “successful” and be willing to “help out half ” at home. She admits that this is a very “tall order,” and should she not be able to actualize her aspirations, she notes that 245

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“if it comes down to it, [she will] sacriﬁce the career.” Such ambiguity and ambivalence in confronting the dilemmas of work and family life among the women we interviewed are fairly common. But, for now, she is prepared to move full-speed ahead. Jennifer talked about how she plans to have children, and hopes to do so without interrupting her career plans. She, like many others interviewed, does not expect a great deal of mutual loyalty between herself and the ﬁrms she will work for. And she imagines a scenario in which she develops a good deal of expertise in her ﬁeld of law over a period of about ﬁve years or so, and then takes some maternity leave, begins retooling, and makes the switch over to consulting. Clearly this is a fragile scenario; however, given the structure of the labor market and of professional careers, one cannot extract much more from an uncertain future. Alternative Arrangements Amy is another MBA student, in her mid-twenties, who wants to have a professional career and someday a family as well. Her future aspirations involve hedging between her hopes verses expectations in terms of the kinds of family involvement that she might expect from a future husband, as she already has a serious boyfriend/ﬁancé who is also in professional school. In describing the kind of relationship she would like to have with a future spouse, Amy notes that her “preference would be that both myself and my husband want to take time off [to care for children] and would want to share” family responsibilities. However she “anticipates” that a “lot of men still consider the woman to be more of a caretaker.” Like Jennifer, Amy also has imagined a scenario in which she might be able to take time off upon having children, yet maintain her professional status and not get sidetracked from her career. During her previous work experience she knew “people who have had positions that [she] would love to be able to emulate where they have worked hard, they have gained a reputation, and so now they can create their own work arrangements [such as] working from home part of the time.” Interestingly, Amy also imagines another creative alternative to starting a family with a spouse someday, and that is to live near a group of close friends whom she has known since she was a teenager. She plans to locate near to these friends upon graduating from business school, and emphasizes that they “have always been at the core of [her] life.” In fact, should she not be married by age thirty-ﬁve, she imagines herself having or adopting a child and relying upon close friends to provide social support. A small segment of students in professional schools we interviewed are interested in ﬁnding ways to invest large amounts of time in their families when their children are young, yet simultaneously worry about whether they will be able

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to do so, either for ﬁnancial reasons or because fear they will be marginalized professionally. Liz, a young law student, represents a good illustration of this orientation. She envisions allocating work and family roles with a future spouse in such a way that “they’re the same.” He works, [she] works, they “help each other.” Except, upon having kids, she envisions things will “shift a little,” but always within the context of “a lot of give and take, a partnership really.” But in describing her views about what she would like to arrange once she begins having children, Liz notes that she “would probably get chastised by everybody on the planet, because it is no longer PC,” but if she “were in the position not to work, she would like not to work until [the kids] are big.” Her main concerns revolved around ﬁnding a way to maintain a hand in her professional career; hoping that, after having worked with a law ﬁrm for a number of years, they might want to hire her back on a part-time basis as a consultant. However, she has also learned from her limited work experience that this is not always possible, and mentions a female lawyer she came to know who has a small child and works a long day. She “does not take a lunch, and she goes full out those twelve hours that she is there, and then she goes home and that is her time with her baby.” Liz commented how that would be something she would be “willing to do,” but her ambivalence and general ambiguity around how to manage it all is clearly evident. Couples’ Strategies: Double Divisions Gendered Biographies, Uncertain Futures While the study of law and MBA students provides insights as to how individual young men and women aiming for professional careers go about anticipating their own futures, in-depth interviews with both members of dual-earner couples from the Cornell Couples and Careers study allow us to capture a process of mutual strategizing and socialization, as each member of a couple modiﬁes or adjusts his or her own aspirations for the future in light of the needs and goals of their spouse and their gender. What is of greatest interest here is the process by which wives have historically modiﬁed their own career plans and aspirations to protect or accommodate their husbands’ careers. We ﬁnd, in effect, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Consider the case of Molly and John, both of whom have advanced degrees and are in their late twenties. They do not as of yet have children, but we can see how Molly’s career decision-making process has already undergone a shift toward greater uncertainty and ambivalence, given her husband’s more deﬁnite plans. Molly speaks of her husband John’s career plans as having been “totally constant ever since he was three.” She reports becoming more uncertain about her own career plans, noting that she is not really sure “sometimes whether I am 247

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making a decision purely because of myself, or because of [their relationship] and how it might work out, which is frustrating.” She also notes that part of the problem lies in the fact that they have come together during a time in which she is “ still indecisive” about career and hasn’t “known what I wanted as much, and he has known all along what he’s wanted.” Therefore, she feels that “for him there’s no question of compromise because he’s not making any decisions,” yet for her, “there’s always a question of compromise, because I am constantly revising what I want to be doing ten years from now.” As she notes, “It’s hard to make those decisions without taking into account where I know my husband will be, or what he will be wanting to do in any case.” In effect, Molly’s spouse John is an agent of socialization, creating a framework out of which Molly believes she will have to develop and ﬁt her own career aspirations. But the reverse is not the case. In a separate interview, John discusses how, despite Molly’s traditional upbringing, he has always encouraged her to pursue a career. However, in describing his own career plans, it seems as though his more egalitarian ideals get squeezed out. He notes that while he “wants her to have one, sometimes she’s ambivalent about whether she even wants a career – she goes through stages where she would like to be a housewife. Her mom is a housewife, and so, she ﬁghts that instinct.” Ideally, he would “want her to have a career, and then take care of the kids, and then have a career again.” And he notes “being happy in my mind is to have a career. And in some ways, I’m really not your sensitive 90s guy. I think I really should want her to have a career and us to like ﬂip a coin to see who stays home with the kids. But I would die, I would just shrivel up and die if I had to do that.” Perhaps it would be possible for both of them to pursue careers; however, John claims “we are not making enough to have a nanny, but neither of us wants a nanny, and neither of us likes day care either. So I don’t know that we’ve really ﬁgured it out what we’re going to do, but I’m assuming that she’s going to give up what she’s doing when we have kids.” These two interviews (occurring separately and privately) reﬂect what was common in the Cornell Couples and Careers Study: the dilemmas of young (and older) couples confronting a world of mixed messages and lagging possibilities. During times of rapid social change, socialization and, hence, expectations about the future, can create contradictory, ambivalent expectations between both members of a couple, as well as within each person. Gendered Transitions While the case materials just presented provide some indication of socialization for uncertainty and ambiguity in the plans and aspirations of young adults, other

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in-depth interviews (also from the Cornell Couples and Career Study) with individuals and couples at various stages of the life course offer key insights into how socialization processes interact with important life transitions, eliciting a variety of responses. Recall how John and Molly, only in their 20s, appear to have conﬂicts looming on the horizon as they contemplate parenthood. These conﬂicts tap into deeply ingrained beliefs about gender in the areas of family and occupational career, along with beliefs about gender equity. Brenda and Jeff The case of Brenda, a woman in her mid-thirties, and her husband Jeff, who is in his late-thirties, illustrates how contradictory, submerged, or unrealized expectations early in a marriage can create problems once children are no longer hypothetical. They have two children, both preschoolers nearing school age. Brenda talks about how when she was an undergraduate minoring in women’s studies, she was determined not to let the “second shift” (Hochschild, 1989) happen to her. However, after their ﬁrst child was born, Brenda took ﬁfteen months off from work, while Jeff did not make any such change – “a sore subject” between them. Brenda notes that she feels as though much of her life “has been dictated by his academic and employment plans,” noting that she does “not think he would agree with that” but that is what she thinks. From Brenda’s point of view, “she is the cog that makes everything turn” in their family life. However, she is not sure that this is a good thing because the children demand more from her as a result of it, as she has become even more the central focus of their attention. Furthermore, Brenda feels that Jeff has invested even more in his work in recent times. Brenda’s ambivalence is manifest; she is torn between work and family goals and responsibilities, while her husband’s growing commitment to work seems to exacerbate her problems. Still, as she points out, someone must take care of the family, and she feels left holding the bag. Jeff, on the other hand, reports much more satisfaction with the way in which they have negotiated their work and family responsibilities. He, too, admits that having children “locked them into more traditional gender-stereotyped roles,” even though “philosophically” they did not plan life that way. He currently is pursuing a second advanced degree, in addition to working about 60 hours each week as a departmental director. But Jeff views the heavy workload as no problem as he “loves” his job and “can’t wait to get to work in the morning” and would “stay forever” if he did not have family responsibilities. His career provides him with a real source of “meaning and identity.” In effect, while Jeff and Brenda have similar ideals about gender roles in the abstract, in practice they have gravitated towards rather different standards, which 249

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seems to reﬂect the pragmatic constraints of a work world still geared toward the lock-step career template of workers unencumbered by family responsibilities (see also Moen, 2001; Williams, 1999). In the face of these constraints, the couple strategizes in terms of cultural models of carework and paid work, deeper gendered processes of socialization to different sets of rewards and commitments. Jeff’s experiences also speak to the fact that, in a world in which socialization messages are multiple and contradictory, there is greater opportunity to self-socialize (Heinz this volume) through experience. However, one person’s unrestrained pursuit of what they come to realize as their life’s fulﬁllment can actually place quite a burden upon their partner, should their life plans diverge. Brenda had hoped that both she and Jeff would be able to make a balanced commitment to both family and career upon having children; she resists the neotraditional arrangement he is so comfortable with. Given their discrepant expectations about how to allocate work and family roles, it is not surprising that parenthood has left Brenda and Jeff in a conﬂictual arrangement. But, even for couples whose expectations are more in alignment, the transition into parenthood typically results in wives increasing their investment in the family while husbands increase their commitment to work (see also Becker & Moen, 1999). This shift toward more traditional gender roles often generates feelings of ambivalence on the part of wives more than husbands in dual-earner couples. Gina and Gregg A case in point is Gina, a woman in her late twenties expecting twins at the time of our interview. She was experiencing a good deal of ambivalence about her situation, which she describes in terms of the contradictory messages and experiences internalized over the years pertaining to both the importance of occupational careers and the importance of commitment to one’s family. Gina is grappling with the dilemma over whether to continue with her career or to take an extended leave in order to stay home to be with the twins. She mentions how her mother worked outside of the home the entire time she was growing up, commenting, “I have always known that I would be in somewhat of a dilemma when it came time [to have children] because I love children and because I didn’t have that [someone waiting at home]. I felt I had missed out on something.” Like the respondents in Gerson’s (1985) study, Gina is reacting (not conforming) to early socialization by her mother, contributing to her current feelings of ambivalence. Gina describes her husband as being “open minded” about whatever she decides to do. The depth of her ambivalence became especially apparent when

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the interviewer asked whether she views herself as being more work-centered or family-centered. She replied, “I must say that right now I am more familycentered because I am expecting twins in three months. Maybe about six months ago I might have answered differently. I was still getting my master’s and working to improve myself. I love my job, and I love working with people. I would have probably said work then, but now my life has taken a twist.” By contrast, her husband Gregg, a man in his early thirties, does not allude to any type of dilemma with respect to their plans for allocating work and family roles. He notes, “First and foremost, my work will hopefully be the means for us to survive and raise a family. I hope that my wife can stay home and raise our children as a housewife. That’s going to be an integral part of our succeeding as a family. I don’t expect to spend more time at my job than I have to. I look forward to being at home with her and the babies.” However, he does note how difﬁcult it is in this day and age for a family to survive on one income. That doing so can create a lot of “pressure.” As with Gina and Gregg, we ﬁnd the lock-step (male) breadwinner template, along with a variant of the associated (female) careworker template enabling breadwinners to be, in fact, unencumbered workers, continues to drive the views of many contemporary middle-class, professional dual-earner couples (Moen, 2003). Beth and James While one theme of this chapter involves the persistence of traditional genderbased socialization processes and outcomes, there has also been a good measure of change in the way in which gender roles are allocated among spouses. One source of this change involves socialization of both males and females to more androgynous roles; another important source of change is experience. Given the uncertainties associated with contemporary career trajectories and the demise of lifetime employment contracts between ﬁrms and employees, we can expect to see more cases in which couples give some initial priorities to the occupational careers of husbands, but over time that priority shifts to wives’ occupational prospects. Consider Beth and James. While both have been employed since the time they were married, they began their marriage in a rather conventional mold. James struggled to get his career on track and, due to the highly specialized nature of his work, the couple made several moves in the hopes that James would ultimately ﬁnd a good position. James never found that perfect niche. However, Beth’s career as a manager did eventually take off. And, while James’ career had entailed making numerous moves, the position in which he has ultimately settled, while not ideal in terms of prestige and success, does allow for a good measure of ﬂexibility. Beth’s high-level, demanding managerial 251

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position allows for little ﬂexibility. In fact, she often must work long hours in order to get the job done. But James has the ﬂexibility in his workplace to be able to do a lot of the pick-ups and drop-offs with child-care providers, school and social activities, and has also been able to spend a great deal of time with their ten-year old son, something James has come to greatly value. As Beth notes, “My husband spent a lot of time with our son and that made it easier for me to pursue my work. Between our wonderful nanny and my husband I felt very supported in my career. If my husband had had a job like mine, it would have bothered me terribly.” In effect, this couple had been socialized to one set of complimentary roles and priorities, but the nature of the job market was such that they had to shift into a new set of roles and priorities, which, upon enactment, has proved to be satisfying for both.

CONCLUSIONS These case examples underscore the complexity of socialization processes in times of social change. Work and family no longer represent taken-for-granted roles that are learned through anticipatory socialization and played out according to conventional scripts, even though the heavy hand of these scripts continues to shape institutions and behavior. We have described three key processes we believe perpetuate the gendered life course: socialization, structuration, and the unevenness (structural lag) of social change. Our case materials demonstrate that old road maps to the work/family nexus may be obsolete but still permeate the culture and structure of paid work and carework, limiting individuals’ and families’ ad hoc strategies in a world in which both egalitarianism and gendered lock-step career templates coexist in individuals’ motivations and opportunities. Socially learned cultural norms and scripts as well as practical experience continue to inﬂuence the choices individuals and couples make in the face of these outmoded blueprints of carework and paid work. Our thesis is that the shifting nature of gender, families and occupational careers, along with the structural and cultural lag in all three, are generating a good measure of uncertainty, ambiguity and ambivalence in individuals and couples of all ages, but especially those in their 20s and 30s, anticipating or launching both occupational and family life paths. A life course model leads to a dynamic, contextual, and relational focus on work and family careers. From this vantagepoint, the work/family nexus has become both the progeny of outmoded career blueprints and the lightening rod of gender negotiations and strategies. It can also be the harbinger of innovative structural leads – less gendered blueprints for the life course (Moen, 2001, 2003). We conclude by discussing connotations of the contemporary work/family career conundrum for both scholarship and society.

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Implications for Socialization Theory and Research Sociologists remind us that individuals live in society, but also that society exists within the hearts and minds of individuals, in the taken-for-granted expectations and rules for living absorbed directly and indirectly through the rich and varied formal and informal socialization processes that operate to make human beings human. Thus, as Riley (1987) points out, individuals are both allocated into certain social categories and positions and socialized to choose them. Some of the most fundamental allocation processes and deeply ingrained lessons learned are the rules, roles, relationships, expectations and identities related to age and gender, paid work and carework, and their multiple intersections. This is dramatically illustrated in Settersten and Hagestad’s research on people’s subjective timetables for work and family events (Settersten & Hagestad, 1996a, b; Settersten, 1997). But in times of major social upheaval – such as those we are currently experiencing in gender, work, and family roles – the society within (socialization), and the society without (structuration) each signal multiple and contradictory messages, making what might have been men’s and women’s taken-for-granted work and family career paths in more stable conditions now more confusing, complicated and controversial. Gendered occupational and family careers as they intersect over the life course thus provide a strategic site for the study of both socialization and social change. The socialization to – and structuration of – the fundamental role-identities and life paths associated with gender, paid work, and carework are in ﬂux, offering a vivid illustration of the intricate interplay between biography and history, as well as the negotiated life courses of individual men and women. The complexity and constructed nature of gendered life course patterns through socialization and structuration processes are easier to discern at times when there are ambiguous, even conﬂicting, rules of the game. The life course theme of human agency points to the strategic adaptations of individuals and families confronting social institutions and cultural templates geared for the middle of the 20th century, not the dawn of the 21st. Thus, men and women strategize to construct their own life courses, their own career paths, taking from the mixed messages of multiple agents of childhood and adult socialization what best ﬁts their own goals and circumstances. In doing so they are struggling to create new realities in a world of less gendered options and distinctions (Epstein, 1988), but a half-changed world nevertheless, where wives still tend to make occupational career sacriﬁces in order to do the families’ – and societies’ – carework. Scholars can fruitfully reexamine their own takenfor-granted assumptions about linear, individual, and lock-step (typically male) 253

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occupation career paths and about the work/family nexus itself, which is too often couched as a “women’s” issue (see also Moen & Han, 2001). Implications for Policy and Practice Social and organizational policies and practices structure the contemporary life course to follow the traditional breadwinner/homemaker template: from schooling as preparation for occupational careers, through the absence of supports for workers with family responsibilities, to the long hours expected for advancement and security, and to Social Security beneﬁts ﬁgured around a scenario of uninterrupted full-time employment (Kim & Moen, 2001; Moen, 2001). Women’s typically more intermittent pathways are a consequence of both white middle-class men’s and women’s socialization to breadwinner/homemaker scripts (assigning to women the brunt of domestic responsibilities even when they are in the workforce), and a strategy to deal with the contradictions and work/family conﬂicts this blueprint engenders. We have seen that individuals and couples strategize ways in which to live and to make a living on an ad hoc basis, taking the structure of work and occupational career paths as given. Thus, workers (typically women) may “scale back” on their career goals and obligations in order to better meet family goals and obligations, and/or couples may invest in one spouse’s (typically his) career (Becker & Moen, 1999; Clausen, 1993; Pavalko & Elder, 1993; Sorensen, 1983; Moen & Yu, 2000) or else relocate to accommodate to their spouse’s jobs (Lichter, 1982; Markham & Pleck, 1986). What is less readily acknowledged – by governments, corporations, and workers themselves – is the degree to which the male breadwinner/female homemaker script is embedded in social and corporate policy and the degree to which this no longer ﬁts the experiences of the contemporary workforce (Moen, 2001; Moen & Forest, 1999). Even the landmark Family and Medical Leave Act (passed by President Clinton in 1993) is predicated on the traditional template – offering a brief, unpaid reprieve from the demands of what are typically highly demanding and draining jobs. The nature of the jobs themselves, and the career paths they constitute, remain unchanged. And, because leaves are unpaid, the spouse with the lower income (typically the wife) is most apt to take such leave, thus reinforcing gendered divisions and inequalities. Family strategies are often private solutions to what are really public issues related to the outmoded breadwinner/homemaker career templates. What is required is a reassessment of the organization of work and of occupational careers, restructuring both to better recognize the domestic realities of contemporary workers’ lives. Most workers are married to other

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workers, and few – married or single, male or female – have the luxury of someone else to take on full time the carework associated with children, aging relatives, daily living. But most policies around work hours and occupational career paths still presume the lock-step breadwinner template of the unencumbered worker. For example, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established the 5-day, 40-hour work week as the norm. It, along with ways ERISA, and pension policies more generally, makes it more costly for employers to hire two part-time workers than one full-time one. Greater ﬂexibility and multiple pathways to success in the occupational sphere would socialize young men and women to the true possibilities of integrating their occupational and personal lives and relationships in less gendered ways. This is something to which many aspire but are unable to implement given the gap between the organization of occupational careers and the absence of community supports for working families on the one hand, and the reality of their lives on the other. The workplace still operates upon implicit assumptions and cultural norms built up around the male breadwinner ideal. Removing the constraints of lagging policies and practices, and inventing structural leads geared specifically to greater coherence of paid work and carework, will enable individuals and couples to create social change through devising effective strategies, but with no single pattern dominating men’s or women’s contemporary life course.

NOTES 1. Considerable research remains to be done before the debate can be settled as to how extensively this new employment model prevails (Sullivan, 1999). It seems reasonable to assume that ﬁrms will likely continue to need groups of organization men and women to ensure their smooth operation. 2. For further discussion of the concept of ambivalence, see Lüscher and Pillemer (1998). 3. See the discussion of these ideals in Hays (1996) and Moen (1992).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan FDN #96-6-9 and #99-6-23, Phyllis Moen, principal investigator).

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10. INDIVIDUAL RISK FOR CRIME IS EXACERBATED IN POOR FAMILIAL AND NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXTS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF LOW BIRTH WEIGHT, FAMILY ADVERSITY, AND NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE TO LIFE COURSE-PERSISTENT OFFENDING Alex R. Piquero and Brian Lawton INTRODUCTION The life course typically refers to a sequence of socially deﬁned events and rules that individuals enact over time (Giele & Elder, 1998, p. 22), and across many social science disciplines, the study of the life course has been inﬂuential to matters of theory, research, and policy. Distinctive themes arising from this line of research include the relation between human lives and a changing society, the timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, and human agency (Elder, 1994). This emerging paradigm has led to a concerted effort among researchers to study the unique pathways and trajectories of human development over the life course (Shanahan, 2000).

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Within criminology, the application of the life course to the development of criminal offending has gained widespread attention (Piquero & Mazerolle, 2001). Prominent scholars from diverse backgrounds have contributed important knowledge regarding the onset, persistence, and cessation of antisocial behavior in varying samples and time periods (Blumstein et al., 1986; Wolfgang et al., 1972; Cairns & Cairns, 1994; Farrington, 1995; Patterson & Yoerger, 1993; Mofﬁtt, 1993; Sampson & Laub, 1993; Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1998; Thornberry, 1987; Elliott, 1994). For the most part, the study of crime and the life course has typically been informed by two strands of literatures. The ﬁrst of these focuses on the individual as the unit of analysis. Drawing upon themes from developmental psychology, the study of individuals over the life course has tended to concentrate on characteristics or properties of individuals. For example, scholars have attributed causes of crime and antisocial behavior to the experience of strainful events (Agnew, 1992), deﬁcient self-control (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990), failure of social bonds (Hirschi, 1969; Sampson & Laub, 1993), neuropsychological impairments (Mofﬁtt, 1993), peer inﬂuences (Akers, 1998; Warr, 1993), biological and biosocial factors (Raine et al., 1994; Raine et al., 1997), and situational thrills (Katz, 1988). Because not all delinquents go on to become adult offenders, life course theorists explicitly acknowledge and account for patterns of stability and change in criminal offending (Nagin & Paternoster, 1991; Paternoster et al., 1997). The second strand of literature pays particular attention to the social, community and familial contextual characteristics that produce differential rates of crime. Beginning with the work of Shaw and McKay (1942) and their contemporary associates (Sampson, 1992; Bursik, 1988) the essence of this argument is that certain communities experience social ills that result in high levels of criminal and antisocial behavior. Various forms of community and family-level variations include high population density, low socioeconomic status, high housing density, family disruption, etc. (Sampson & Lauritsen, 1994). From the life course perspective, it is important to bear in mind that much of this literature has shown disorganized and/or dysfunctional communities to remain stable in rates of criminal behavior over time with little hope of dramatic change (see review in Bursik & Grasmick, 1993). Moreover, much of this literature reports evidence of an interactional relationship between social disorganization and criminal behavior such that the two are intimately related in a continuous pattern of cause and effect. Unfortunately, individual-level theories have tended to ignore social, community and familial contexts, and that social, community and familial context

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explanations have tended to ignore individual-level theories. In fact, only two theoretical models that attempt to integrate these two strands of literature have been put forth. In the ﬁrst model, sociologist Robert Sampson (1992) sketches a theory of family management and child development that pays important attention to the empirical connection between the health-related problems of children and rates of crime and delinquency. Speciﬁcally, Sampson argues that community structure and the mediating processes of community social organization are important determinants of variations in the accessibility and quality of prenatal care, child health services, and general childcare. An important aspect of his theory is the role that family disruption plays in limiting the development of social capital between and among persons. In the second model, psychologist Terrie Mofﬁtt (1997) argues that individuals born at high-risk (i.e. low birth weight, poor cognitive deﬁcits, birth complications, etc.) exert negative effects on their caretakers such that effective socialization is compromised. These individuals are typically born into environments that are deﬁcient in the kinds of parenting and economic resources that can assist parents in overcoming their children’s deﬁcits. This personenvironment interaction sets the stage for a life course persistent trajectory that includes various manifestations of antisocial and criminal behavior as well as failed employment, education, and interpersonal relationships. To date however, little theoretical and empirical work has been undertaken to explicate the manner in which individual-level risk factors are exacerbated in adverse familial and social contexts (Wikstrom & Loeber, 2000). A detailed assessment of this question is important in light of sociologist’s Matilda White Riley’s (1998, p. 29) observation that: (a) individual lives, and (b) changes in society and its structures cannot be understood conceptually without each other. This paper advances the notion that an understanding of criminal behavior over the life course cannot be understood independent of the social (i.e. familial and neighborhood) contexts in which development occurs and criminal behavior takes place. Importantly, these contexts inﬂuence the degree to which individual-level risk factors are exacerbated and ultimately shape criminal behavior at different periods of the life course. The key theoretical notion advanced herein stresses the importance of studying the embeddedness of families and children in community context. We test this preliminary individual-contextual life course model using data from the Baltimore portion of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. Our analytic techniques make use of the multi-level nature of the data. We conclude with directions for future theoretical and empirical research. 265

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CONTEXTUAL MODELS One of the earliest and most important contextual models was developed 75 years ago by Shaw and McKay (1942). According to these scholars, three structural factors, low socioeconomic status, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility led to the disruption of local community social organization which in turn accounted for variations in crime and delinquency rates within and across neighborhoods. The basic thrust of their community social disorganization argument identiﬁes the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls (Kornhauser, 1978). This inability ultimately culminates in a pattern of criminal and antisocial behavior. Although much work has been devoted to studying (Sampson & Groves, 1989) and extending (Bursik & Grasmick, 1993) Shaw and McKay’s original theoretical model, little work has been devoted toward explicating how behavior at the individual-level may vary as a function of these neighborhood characteristics.

SOCIAL CONTEXTS AS AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION As do others (National Research Council, 1993), we believe that there are a number of different types of socialization agents that individuals come into contact with, two of which we believe are central to understanding the development of criminal behavior over the life course: neighborhoods and families. Below, we outline how each of these contexts socialize (or fail to socialize) individuals. Neighborhoods How do neighborhoods socialize individuals? The central thesis we advance is that the socialization process in neighborhoods operates through collective parenting generally (i.e. “it takes a village to raise a child”), and through informal social control processes in particular (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Both of these are centered around the idea that social ties among neighbors and social order within and between neighborhoods are among the “most important proximate factors affecting the subjective quality of life” (Ross et al., 2000, p. 583). The idea behind collective parenting is straightforward: encourage social networks of support that go beyond the immediate parent(s) (Laub et al., 1995, p. 100). This dimension of neighborhood socialization, what Bursik and

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Grasmick (1995, pp. 114–115) refer to as the parochial level of control, in part represents the supervisory capacities of a local community. But why should informal social controls, independent of collective parenting, matter? At least two answers are possible. First, the evidence in the deterrence and neoclassical literatures suggest that although formal sanctions and controls exert some inﬂuence on an individual’s perceptions of risk and ultimate behavior, informal social controls serve as stronger inhibitors to criminal behavior (Williams & Hawkins, 1986). Since (informal) social control refers to the enforcement of norms governing social behavior (Ross et al., 2000), a lack of informal social control, then, would transmit a message that criminal behavior can be committed with relative impunity. Thus, the lack of informal social control may serve as an opportunity variable (Lynam et al., 2000). Second, to the extent that residents are not integrated into the intimate informal primary groups of a neighborhood, then information concerning expectations of appropriate behavior may not be transmitted. If this occurs, and expectations are violated, then the informal social control networks will not be utilized to impose informal sanctions on the offender (Bursik & Grasmick, 1995, p. 114). In relatively stable, non-disadvantaged neighborhoods, informal social control structures operate to contribute to the socialization process of individuals, particularly children. Thus, the socialization process occurs not only in the child’s home, but in the streets of their neighborhood as well as the homes of their friends. In these neighborhoods, individuals develop a stake in the community and its residents, and the risk of crime, especially violent crime, is low (Sampson et al., 1997). On the other hand, various dimensions of neighborhood disadvantage combine over time to disrupt the social organization processes in the neighborhood (Shaw & McKay, 1942), thereby leaving disadvantaged neighborhoods to be characterized by lower levels of informal social control. When an area (i.e. neighborhood) is characterized by high levels of residential instability, the development of informal social control networks becomes difﬁcult and therefore local institutions become difﬁcult to maintain (Bursik & Grasmick, 1995; Kasarda & Janowitz, 1974). In such neighborhoods there tends to be an attenuation of social and cultural neighborhood and familial organization (Crutchﬁeld et al., 1982; Smith & Jarjoura, 1988) which is likely to lead to an increase in the likelihood of illegitimate opportunity structures (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960). In disadvantaged neighborhoods, this is exhibited by lower levels of normative consensus and weaker institutional and informal support for family socialization processes (Elliott et al., 1996, p. 393). Adults and young people become socially isolated, thereby losing the kind of networks and self- or group-identiﬁcations that support customary behavior and prevent antisocial behavior (NRC, 1993, p. 71; Wilson 1987; Crane 1991).1 267

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Within urban centers, this is realized in particular enclaves that are typically inhabited by different racial and ethnic groups which leads to the generation of diversity in cultural values and norms (Shaw & McKay, 1942). According to this perspective, the presence of multiple cultures in a neighborhood, each with its own value structure and reward system, undermines communication between neighbors and what goals and standards of behavior are acceptable within the neighborhood. These areas also tend to have high population turnover which impedes the development of informal social support networks that are central for effective socialization and in turn, crime prevention (see Cullen, 1994; Sampson et al., 1997).2 As such, the social resources and political clout of individuals residing in such areas is limited resulting in low levels of institutional investment of resources in the neighborhood (Elliott et al., 1996, p. 393), and as their economic/social systems break down, the most disadvantaged of all neighborhoods become unable to restrain criminal behavior (Anderson, 1990; Reiss & Roth, 1993). As individuals acquire enough economic capital, they typically move from such neighborhoods (Morenoff & Sampson, 1997), and an isolated group of residents who are unable or unwilling to move into accepted adult roles is left behind (Wilson, 1987; Rainwater, 1970). Because there is little institutional integration at the neighborhood level, there are few intermediate structures, and hence deﬁcient socialization is likely to ensue. This deﬁcient socialization is likely to manifest in a wide variety of behaviors and disorders including depression, anxiety, fear, powerlessness, criminal behavior, etc. Families Families are the primary setting for nurturing and socializing children (NRC, 1993). In particular, perhaps the most central job of the family is the socialization of children into the values, goals, and beliefs of the dominant culture (Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994, p. 73). The process of socializing children into adult roles is seen to occur through three mechanisms: (1) monitoring/supervision of a child’s behavior, (2) recognition of deviant/antisocial behavior, and (3) appropriate punishment of deviant/antisocial behavior. These three familial processes are important for effective socialization and the development of self-control in children (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Patterson, 1980; Tremblay et al., 1992). Research shows that when these three processes are unsuccessfully executed, the probability of delinquent and antisocial behavior increases. In fact, some of the most powerful predictors of delinquency include socialization variables such as the lack of parental supervision (Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986). This socialization task is complicated in families with only one parent (NRC, 1993, p. 41). In families characterized by an unmarried parent, especially a

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teenage unmarried parent, the three processes involved in socialization (monitoring, recognition, and punishment) and the development of self-control become extraordinarily difﬁcult (Hirschi, 1995). Toward this end, research consistently reports that children born to adolescent, unmarried mothers face the highest risk of poor developmental outcomes that include health, antisocial and academic problems (Spivak & Weitzman, 1987; Furstenberg et al., 1992). In fact, children from single parent households are more likely to experience school failure and dropout (Hirschi, 1995, p. 134; McLanahan, 1991, p. 12). The socialization task is made more difﬁcult when adolescents live under stressful economic and social conditions which make it difﬁcult to sustain effective processes of parent-child interaction and socialization (NRC, 1993, pp. 49–50). When ﬁnancial hardship is met with single-parenting, a wide range of negative sequale ensue for children, including diminished educational and occupational realities (Kriesberg, 1970; Hirschi, 1995), as well as delinquent behavior, which is much more prevalent in single parent families who live in or near poverty when compared to two parent families who do not face similar economic hardships (NRC, 1993, p. 44; Dornbusch et al., 1985). McCord (1990) has observed that economic hardship signiﬁcantly diminishes the emotional well being of parents. Furthermore, single-parents experiencing economic hardship are less likely to use “good” parenting practices that promote effective socialization (Dubow & Luster, 1990). The Interaction Between Neighborhoods and Families It is important to bear in mind that these socialization agents do not operate in isolation. Most social interactions of families and adolescents are embedded within neighborhood settings such that the neighborhood is a key setting for adolescent development (NRC, 1993, p. 63). Although few theoretical expositions delineate or incorporate family and neighborhood links in the developmental chain linking individual differences and antisocial outcomes, we are not the ﬁrst to call attention to this possibility. Below, we brieﬂy review two of these models. The embeddedness of families and children in a community context is a central feature of Sampson’s (1992) extended social disorganization theory. He argues that parenting styles are an adaptation to considerations outside the household (such as the neighborhood), especially the social organization of the community (e.g. Furstenberg, 1990). The foil for his argument is Coleman’s (1990) notion of social capital. According to Coleman (1988), social capital is one of the mechanisms through which informal social control operates, and can be thought of as “the pattern 269

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of afﬁliations with well-placed and inﬂuential people in the community whose resources and inﬂuences could be tapped for help in getting ahead” (Laub et al., 1995, p. 99). Social capital then, is embodied in the relations among persons and according to Sampson (p.78), social capital is a central factor in facilitating effective family management. Communities that are characterized by an extensive set of social networks connecting adults are better able to facilitate the control and supervision of children. Since the quantity of social capital available to families depends in large part on the stability of local communities, communities marked by social disorganization tend not to rank high on social capital, and therefore family functioning and socialization processes will be detrimentally affected. Thus, various dimensions of neighborhood disadvantage and family adversity will tend to disrupt family socialization processes (Shaw & McKay, 1942; Sampson & Laub, 1993). It follows then, that it will become difﬁcult to support family socialization of conventional values and norms and exert effective control over the behavior of other residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods. As Hirschi (1995, p. 133) suggests, single parenthood also “weakens the general community by depriving it of the interlocking alliances of families automatically produced by marriage.” Thus, single parenting not only exerts a detrimental effect on the offspring, it also weakens the general community by depriving it of the interlocking alliances of families that are automatically produced by marriage. When taken in context with Sampson’s notion of social capital, it can be seen that the importance of the ebeddedness of neighborhoods and families is central to the co-production of public safety and effective child socialization. Though she does not develop the informal socialization notion to the extent that Sampson does, Terrie Mofﬁtt makes a similar argument with regard to the importance of studying person-environment linkages. For example, she (Mofﬁtt, 1994) contends that individuals born with cognitive and nervous system problems that have been shown to interfere with prosocial child development tend to be born into familial environments that are ill-equipped to help them overcome these deﬁciencies. This person-environment interaction is expected to relate to speciﬁc manifestations of life course persistent activity, and research has shown this to be the case (Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999; Piquero & Tibbetts, 1999). Moreover, Mofﬁtt (1994, 1997) points out that the covariation of cognitive impairments and deﬁcient familial environments is observed at a higher rate in inner cities, particularly in the most impoverished of inner-city neighborhoods. When these two observations are taken in concert it leads to the expectation that “family and neighborhood adversity mediate the relation between individual differences and antisocial outcomes” Mofﬁtt (1997, p. 155).

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Therefore, “in disadvantaged homes . . . and neighborhoods, individual risk is exacerbated” (Mofﬁtt, 1993, p. 684).

HYPOTHESES AND RESEARCH RELATED TO PERSON-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS IN PREDICTING ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR According to Lynam and his colleagues (2000), two different types of person-neighborhood effects are hypothesized in the literature. One focuses on the distinction between weak and strong situations. According to this argument, the push to criminal behavior is so strong in criminogenic neighborhoods that person level variables are expected to make little contribution to the prediction of antisocial behavior, but they are expected to make strong contributions in the better-off neighborhoods which are unlikely to exert a strong press for antisocial behavior. The other argues that person-level factors modify children’s vulnerability to risky environments thereby suggesting that only children with certain attributes in particular contexts will be at risk for antisocial behavior. To the extent that this hypothesis is correct, we would expect to observe interaction effects in which person characteristics would be more strongly related to offending in criminogenic neighborhoods. The basic thrust of this argument, then, suggests that individual characteristics are exacerbated in disadvantaged situations (Peeples & Loeber, 1994; Wikstrom & Loeber, 2000). Though both positions hypothesize that neighborhood and person-level effects will interact, the nature of the interaction is different in each account (Lynam et al., 2000). In the former, person-level variables should exert little effect in poor neighborhoods because the push to antisocial behavior is so strong but it is expected to do so in better-off neighborhoods. In the latter however, personlevel variables should have a larger effect in the poor neighborhoods than in the better-off neighborhoods. Only a handful of studies have examined the relation between neighborhood context and offending and most suggest that, at the individual level of analysis, neighborhood characteristics are signiﬁcantly but weakly correlated with juvenile delinquency (Gottfredson et al., 1991; Lizotte et al., 1994; Peeples & Loeber, 1994; Simcha-Fagan & Schwartz, 1986). Moreover, many of these studies have utilized narrow conceptions of neighborhood disadvantage (i.e. poverty measures only) (e.g. Gottfredson et al., 1991; Peeples & Loeber, 1994). This is unfortunate since neighborhood disadvantage involves a multidimensional cluster of traits including: poverty, unemployment, cultural heterogeneity, mobility, structure of markets, family composition (i.e. single-parent families especially those with children), and housing policies (Elliott et al., 1996, p. 392). 271

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Below, we review the three studies which, to the best of our knowledge, have rigorously examined how individual characteristics and offending vary as a function of community/neighborhood contexts. Elliott and his colleagues (1996) used cross-sectional data from Chicago and Denver to examine how organizational and cultural features of neighborhoods mediated the effects of ecological disadvantage on adolescent development and behavior. Their analyses revealed that the effects of ecological disadvantage were mediated by specific organizational and cultural features of the neighborhood. Though the unique influence of neighborhood effects was relatively small, the effects accounted for a substantial part of the variance explained by their hierarchical model. Specifically, the higher the level of neighborhood disadvantage, the lower the level of informal control at the neighborhood level which was then the most proximate and strongest effect of prosocial competence, conventional friends, and problem behavior. In sum, they found that the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on both aggregated rates and individual developmental outcomes was largely mediated by the level and form of neighborhood organization, primarily informal social control. In a more recent study, Lynam and his colleagues (2000) used data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study to examine the relations among impulsivity, neighborhood context, and juvenile offending. Their analysis revealed that the effect of impulsivity on juvenile offending was stronger in poorer neighborhoods. In further analysis, they found that non-impulsive boys in poor neighborhoods were at no greater risk for delinquency than non-impulsive boys in better-off neighborhoods indicating that it is the interaction between impulsivity and neighborhood context that is driving the probability of antisocial behavior. The research by Lynam and his colleagues is important because it is one of the ﬁrst pieces of evidence to suggest that variations in neighborhood conditions produce different effects on different types of adolescents. Wikstrom and Loeber (2000) also used data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study to examine how risk and protective factors were related to serious offending in different neighborhood contexts. Although they did not explicate the multi-level nature of their data (p. 1116), three findings emanate from their effort. First, boys with the highest risk scores were more likely to be serious offenders regardless of neighborhood context. Second, neighborhood context had the greatest effect on crime among those with the most protective characteristics. Third, neighborhood context effects were observed for late onset, but not early onset suggesting that the latter is more a function of individual risk factors while the former is more a function of neighborhood context.

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CURRENT FOCUS As does Mofﬁtt (1997, p. 154), we believe that a more complete understanding of crime over the life course can be attained by studying the combined effect of neighborhood disadvantage, family adversity, and individual risk in predicting antisocial behavior. In so doing, we call attention to the importance of studying the embeddedness of families and children in a neighborhood context and how these associations relate to antisocial behavior. We believe that such an investigation can help understand the conditions and processes that interfere or mitigate effective socialization. The framework we operate under explicitly embodies a multi-level explanation for how neighborhood disadvantage supports or undermines family socialization and facilitates or impedes individual development. Toward this end, we examine the conjoint inﬂuences of individual risk, family adversity, and neighborhood context on life course-persistent offending. To study this question, we use longitudinal data from the Baltimore portion of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. The data we employ are prospective in nature thus allowing for correct temporal ordering of key theoretical variables. Importantly, the framework within which we operate brings together what has been two competing and oftentimes independent strands of literature: individual and neighborhood effects. As Tonry and his colleagues (1990, p. 42) have noted: “most individual-level research is inadequate because it neglects variation in community characteristics, while community-level research fails to take account of individual differences.” Therefore, we remain faithful to Rutter and Rutter’s (1993, pp. 34–37) suggestion that research not ignore the effects of larger social contexts (such as social structure and living conditions) on development in general (Furstenberg et al., 1999), and criminal offending in particular (Mofﬁtt, 1997). Our research agenda and empirical analysis follow closely statements made by the National Research Council (1993, pp. 247–248) in delineating a new framework to guide research that would: (1) Give primary attention to achieving an understanding of the various settings in which adolescent development takes places in the course of everyday life – including families, neighborhoods, . . . ; (2) Stress the interactive effects of multiple settings in order to capture the full complexity of the social environment; (3) Encourage research protocols that capture individual differences simultaneously with assessments of social contexts and daily settings; 273

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(4) Support long-term, longitudinal studies which can illuminate processes of individual development and change, and (5) Give special attention to those youth who have hitherto been largely ignored in research on adolescent development – those from families with low incomes, those who are members of racial and ethnic minorities.

DATA Data for this project come from the Johns Hopkins/Baltimore site of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP), a survey of pregnant women seeking prenatal care and delivery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Located at ten university-afﬁliated hospitals throughout the United States, the NCPP was a large-scale, multidisciplinary health and development study initiated by the National Institute of Neurologic and Communicative Disease and Stroke between 1959 and 1965 in which data were collected from 50,000 to 60,000 pregnant women (Niswander & Gordon, 1972). The women and their children were followed until the children reached seven or eight years of age (depending on the participating institution, eight years at Johns Hopkins). The study population enrolled at each participating institution included either all available prenatal patients living within a deﬁned geographic area or women randomly selected from those available in each prenatal clinic. The women were selected at random at the time of their ﬁrst prenatal visit to the hospital’s public obstetric clinic. Most of the women lived within a 10-block, lower socioeconomic enclave radius of the hospital (Hardy et al., 1997). They were selected on the basis of the last digit of their hospital history number. This number was assigned from a central hospital ﬁle at point of ﬁrst patient contact. The proportion of prenatal clinic registrants enrolled was increased by adding to the number of terminal digits selected from approximately 30% in 1960 until it reached about 70% in 1963 and 100% in 1964, the last year of NCPP enrollment. There were virtually no refusals of participation. In Baltimore, data have been organized for over 2,300 women who gave birth to children participating in the study. Detailed results from the NCPP appear in Nichols and Chen (1981) and Broman et al. (1975), and empirical investigations of the criminal activity of cohort members have been conducted with data from both Philadelphia (Denno, 1990; Piquero & Chung, 2001; Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999; Piquero & Tibbetts, 1999; Gibson, Piquero, and Tibbetts, 2000; Piquero, 2000a, b, c) and Providence (Lipsitt, Buka & Lipsitt, 1990; Piquero & Buka, 2002). Between 1992–1994, a research team from Johns Hopkins engaged in a retrospective follow-up study of both the mothers and children participating in the Baltimore NCPP. To qualify for the follow-up study, the children had to have

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been born between 1960 and 1965 and completed the age 7/8 assessments. Of the 2,694 eligible children, 66% (N = 1,758) completed interviews (Hardy & Shapiro, 1999). It is these 1,758 individuals who form the basis for the current study. It is important to verify that the subjects who participated in the follow-up survey did not differ signiﬁcantly from those not participating in the follow-up survey. Hardy and her colleagues (1997, p. 82) report that: Bias due to sample attrition [whether subjects who could not be interviewed at 27 to 33 years may have differed signiﬁcantly from those who were interviewed] was considered by comparing the distributions of several JHCPS variables. Few differences were noted. [Subjects] not interviewed were born to mothers who were somewhat younger, had less educational attainment, and were more likely to be at or below the poverty level (47.9% vs. 43.1%) at the time of the [subjects] birth than the mothers of the [subjects] interviewed. The proportion of [subjects] who were low birth weight did not differ between groups. At 7 to 8 years, differences in Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children verbal IQ scores were not statistically signiﬁcant, but those interviewed had somewhat greater skill in reading (46.3% vs. 36.9%) and fewer were neurologically suspect or abnormal (17.5% vs. 23.4%) than those not interviewed. Because of the relatively high proportions who were interviewed, the characteristics of the total sample (interviewed and not interviewed combined) were similar to those from whom interviews were obtained.

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In an effort to determine if response rates differed across low SES families compared to other SES families, we examined measures of the mother’s SES at birth with response rates for the subject at ages 27/33 in two ways. First, we calculated an ANOVA where we compared mother’s income at birth, her poverty index at birth, and whether she was receiving public assistance at birth across eight potential categories of subject follow-up at ages 27/33: (1) full subject interview (N = 1,758, 65.3%), (2) absent subject interview (2.6%), (3) deceased with data (2.6%), (4) refused (5.0%), (5) still in process at end of funding (5.8%), (6) not located (17.6%), (7) deceased with no data (0.6%), and (8) unavailable (0.4%) (Total N = 2,694). All ANOVAs failed to uncover any signiﬁcant differences on the three mother SES variables across the eight groups. Further, we undertook a difference of means test where we compared subjects with full follow-up interviews (group 1) and the not-located subjects (group 6) across all three low SES mother variables. Once again, we failed to detect signiﬁcant mother SES differences across subjects who completed the interview against subjects who could not be located.

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VARIABLES Two different data sources were used. The ﬁrst consisted of variables from the original Baltimore NCPP study that included information related to the birth, 275

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the ﬁrst eight years of the child’s life, and census-tract information. The second consisted of variables from the follow-up interviews with the children in the 1990s that included information related to peers and criminal behavior. Dependent Variable Two dependent variables are employed in the present study including prevalence and frequency of arrest. At the follow-up interview, subjects were asked whether they had been arrested (prevalence), and if arrested, the number of times they had been arrested (frequency). Following Mofﬁtt’s suggestion that life course-persistent styles of offending are statistically unusual and that the rate of life course-persisters would comprise about 5% of the entire sample, we identiﬁed those individuals from the follow-up interviews who ranked in the top 5% (84/1,758) of the arrest frequency distribution as “life-coursepersistent” chronic offenders. The cut-off point (i.e. the top 5%) turned out to be seven arrests; as such, the arrest frequency variable was recoded to 0 (1 to 6 offenses) and 1 (7 or more offenses). Two other points concerning the self-reported arrest information are necessary. First, researchers have shown that race differences exist for prevalence but not frequency (Blumstein et al., 1986, p. 41). Second, and most importantly, Mofﬁtt’s theory hypothesizes that the biosocial interaction would not predict prevalence of offending; instead it would predict a ‘special sort of delinquency”, and therefore be signiﬁcantly related to the frequency of arrest (i.e. chronic offending) which is one marker for life course-persistent offending (Mofﬁtt, 1994). Independent Variables Independent variables include individual risk, family adversity, peer delinquency, sex, race, and neighborhood disadvantage. Peer Delinquency. We employ a two-item scale that asked respondents whether their teenaged friends were: (1) involved with crime, and (2) used drugs frequently. Originally, both items were scored on a three-point scale ranging from none to some to most. For purposes of the present study, each item was dichotomized as (0) none and (1) some/most and then summed. Family Adversity. Designed to measure family adversity during the ﬁrst few years of the child’s life, the four items that comprise this index come from data collected about the mother during and after the pregnancy and closely resemble

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family adversity measures employed by other researchers (Rutter, 1978; Stanton et al., 1989; Kolvin et al., 1988; Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999; Piquero & Tibbetts, 1999; Pryor & Woodward, 1996). The items include: (1) age of mother at childbirth (0 = 18 or greater, 1 = less than 18), (2) whether the mother was receiving public assistance at the time of childbirth (0 = no, 1 = yes), (3) mother’s educational attainment at childbirth (0 = at least high school graduate, 1=less than high school), and (4) mother’s marital status at childbirth (0 = married, 1 = not married). Following Rutter’s (1978) suggestion that the number of risk factors rather than the nature of the risk factors provides an appropriate measure of family adversity, the items were summed to form the family adversity index.3 Individual Risk. Mofﬁtt’s developmental taxonomy identiﬁes several different examples of compromised neuropsychological health. One of these is low birth weight (see Mofﬁtt, 1993, 1997). Low birth weight is a strong and consistent indicator indicating increased risk for neuropsychological problems (McCormick, 1985) and it has been linked to several adverse sequele including cognition, attention, poor academic achievement, low intelligence, behavior problems, visual defects, cerebral palsy, and criminal behavior (see review in Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999). Birth weight was measured at delivery by hospital staff and is coded 1 for low birth weight (< 2500g) and 0 for normal birth weight (> 2500g). This cutoff was originally adopted by the World Health Organization (1950) and has been consistently used in prior research (Coren, 1993; Denno, 1990; Paneth, 1995; Shiono & Behrman, 1995). Biosocial Interaction. Mofﬁtt’s theory stresses the importance of a biosocial interaction between low birth weight and adverse familial environments. To compute this interaction, the raw scores of the component factors were mean-centered in order to rid the measures of nonessential ill-conditioning (the multicollinearity between the component variables produced by noncenteredness), which would inevitably cause multicollinearity between the component variables and their product terms (Aiken & West, 1991; Jaccard et al., 1990). When we examined the zero-order correlations, multicollinearity did not appear to be a problem. High scores on the interaction are indicative of higher risk. Neighborhood Disadvantage. Our measure of neighborhood disadvantage is modeled after those used in extant research (Elliott et al., 1996; Lynam et al., 2000; Mofﬁtt, 1997; Ross et al., 2000; Wikstrom & Loeber, 2000) and most of the variables included in our scale have been found to be directly related to criminal behavior (NRC, 1993, p. 156). To create the neighborhood 277

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disadvantage scale, we use census tracts as the unit of analysis and employ data drawn from the 1970 census when subjects were between ages 5/10. The measurement of neighborhood disadvantage during early childhood is particularly important because it has been shown that neighborhoods seem to inﬂuence individual development most powerfully in early childhood (Massey, 2001). For the tracts in 1970, addresses provided by the mother and the subject as part of their follow-up interviews were hand coded using the Baltimore City Health Department’s Census Tract Manual (1973) and the 1970 Stewart CrissCross Directories for all other counties within the state of Maryland. Any partial, unknown, or non-existent addresses were coded as missing, and data for subjects living outside of Maryland were coded as missing. We used principal components factor analysis to create a measure of neighborhood disadvantage with data from the 1970 census. The eleven variables (and their principal components loading) that form our measure included: percent young adult dropout (0.966), percent black (0.987), percent female-headed household (0.974), females 16 and older with kids, no husband and poverty status (0.949), mean family income (0.965), percent households with public assistance income (0.994), percent persons below the poverty line (0.971), percent families with public assistance income (0.990), adult unemployment rate (0.988), male unemployment rate (0.987), and persons aged 18 to 24 (0.977). All eleven items loaded onto a single-item factor. Two points regarding the neighborhood disadvantage scale are in order. First, we recognize that the social science community has not come to agreement regarding the most appropriate measure of a neighborhood. Although local community areas, census tracts, and block groups are imperfect operational deﬁnitions of neighborhoods or local community in empirical research, such areas generally posses more ecological integrity (e.g. natural boundaries and social homogeneity) than cities or metropolitan areas, and they are more closely linked to the mechanisms assumed by social disorganization theory to underlie the etiology of crime (Bursik & Grasmick, 1993; Sampson, 1997, pp. 35–36). Second, although we do not observe the mediating dimensions of social (dis)organization such as social participation and supervision of teenage peer groups, our measure does contain items that have been shown to be related to such mediating dimensions which in turn predict variations in crime and delinquency (Sampson & Groves, 1989). In effect, the majority of items in our measure are believed to index the attenuation of social and cultural neighborhood organization which is effective for socialization within the neighborhood (Sampson, 1997, p. 55). In sum, there is no reason we should not think that the link between community structural characteristics and community social processes established in other studies holds here (see also Wikstrom & Loeber, 2000, p. 1119).

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Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics.

Variable

Mean

Std Dev.

Minimum

Maximum

Level-1 Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Biosocial Interaction Peer Delinquency Sex Race Arrest Chronic Offending

0.14 1.95 0.00 1.00 1.53 1.83 0.31 0.16

0.35 0.75 0.28 0.87 0.50 0.38 0.46 0.37

0 0 –1.66 0 1 1 0 0

1 4 1.76 2 2 2 1 1

⫺0.50

0.27

⫺1.00

0.48

Level-2 Neighborhood Disadvantage

Sex. Sex was coded 1 for males and 2 for females. Race. Race is coded 1 for white and 2 for nonwhites. Eighty-one percent of the sample was comprised of nonwhites, primarily African-American. A Note on Retrospective Data The outcome variables and several independent variables are based on retrospective data and some may question the ability of sample members to recall events that occurred in the past. Use of such data collection techniques have fared well in methodological studies of the concordance between prospective and retrospective measures of similar variables. For example, Henry et al. (1994, p. 98) found that agreement between prospective and retrospective measures of criminal behavior was moderately good. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for all of the variables in our analysis. Analysis Plan The framework within which we operate leads us to believe that both family and neighborhood socialization contexts shape the manner in which individual risk is related to antisocial behavior. Thus, to the extent that individual-level characteristics modify children’s vulnerability to disadvantaged environments, interaction effects should be observed such that individual risk factors would be more strongly related to offending in disadvantaged familial and neighborhood contexts. 279

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We begin our analysis by exploring bivariate patterns in the data. Then, we explicate the multi-level nature of our data and estimate a series of hierarchical linear models that model additive and interactive effects for predicting both arrest and our measure of life course-persistent offending (chronicity).

RESULTS Bivariate Correlations among the variables are produced in Table 2. As can be observed, all of the correlations are in the expected direction. The pattern of bivariate associations are as expected. For example, race, sex, peer delinquency and familial risk are all related to whether an individual was arrested while sex, peer delinquency, and familial risk, were related to chronic offending. Hierarchical Models Before discussing the results of the multi-level estimations, two methodological points are in order. First, due to the fact that the census tract ID had been stripped from the individual cases in the publicly available data, it was impossible to determine the initial census tract ID. However, using a number of census speciﬁc variables, we were able to identify the separate census tracts. We separated on such variables as total population or racial composition of the census tract; then we examined the standard deviation on other census variables within that group. If this standard deviation equaled 0, then it Table 2. Arrest

Arrest

Race

–0.08**

1.00

Sex

–0.37**

0.01

Low Birth Weight

–0.03

0.03

Chronicity Family Adversity ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

Sex

Low Birth Weight

Peer Del.

Chronicity Family Adversity

1.00

Race

Peer Delinquency

Correlation Matrix.

0.35** –0.01 —-

0.03

1.00 0.02

1.00

–0.36**

–0.03

–0.16**

0.01

0.18**

1.00

0.02

0.07*

0.16**

0.13** –0.07** –0.01

1.00 1.00

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indicated that these individuals came from the same census tract. Since we are unable to identify the speciﬁc census tract, we are conﬁdent that this analysis did not compromise the conﬁdentiality of the participants. Second, recall that the initial data consisted of 1,758 individuals distributed over 137 census tracts. Forty-three census tracts were eliminated from our analysis due to missing data. This also eliminated 198 respondents from the study. (Note: A t-test showed that these 198 individuals did not vary signiﬁcantly from the remaining sample on any of the key variables). The total sample for the hierarchical models consisted of 1,560 respondents spread out across 94 census tracts. The minimum number of respondents in a census tract was one with a maximum of 25, and an average of approximately ﬁve (5.1). The procedures we employed to ﬁnalize the number of respondents in census tracts, as well as the averages we observed in the Baltimore data, are comparable to those in extant research (Peeples & Loeber, 1994; Lynam et al., 2000). Preliminary analysis consisted of two separate HLM Analysis of Variance models to measure the amount of variance between census tracts (at level 2), one for each outcome (arrest and chronicity). We found that there was still a signiﬁcant (p < 0.001) amount of variance left to be explained at the betweencensus tracts level. In other words, there was enough variation between census tracts to suggest that further exploration as to what (level-1) characteristics may distinguish the level of both outcome variables across census tracts. Initially, we examined model estimates relating individual, familial, and neighborhood risk to whether some respondents reported an arrest at the followup interview. Across all of these estimations (not shown), the biosocial interaction between individual risk (measured by low birth-weight) and family adversity (measured by adverse familial environments) did not signiﬁcantly distinguish those who were arrested from those who were not arrested. Moreover, the interaction did not exhibit a signiﬁcant effect across distinct neighborhood disadvantage contexts. These results are consistent with Mofﬁtt’s expectation that such interactions will not be able to distinguish between offenders and non-offenders but will instead predict a “special sort of delinquency”. As such, the full set of results will be presented herein for predicting life course-persistent offending, measured by the frequency of arrest. Initially, we use a two-level hierarchical model to nest individual respondents within their respective neighborhoods. In the ﬁrst step, we tested whether the relations between each level-one predictor (i.e. sex, race, peer delinquency, family adversity, and low birth weight) and chronic offending varied across neighborhoods. In the second step, we included the neighborhood disadvantage scale as a level-two predictor to explain how the neighborhood effect moderates the relation between individual and family variables and chronic offending. 281

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Table 3.

ALEX R. PIQUERO AND BRIAN LAWTON

Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Continuous Neighborhood Disadvantage).

Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Level-2 Neighborhood Disadvantage

Coefﬁcient

Standard Error

–1.263** –0.163 0.548** –0.026 0.532*

0.370 0.610 0.183 0.363 0.229

0.228

0.720

*** p < 0.001, ** p< 0.01, * p < 0.05.

Table 3 presents the ﬁrst hierarchical analysis. As can be observed, three of the ﬁve level-one variables exert a signiﬁcant effect on chronic offending. In particular, males (coeff. = –1.263), those with delinquent peers (coeff. = 0.548), and those residing in adverse familial environments (coeff. = 0.532) were signiﬁcantly likely to exhibit chronic offending patterns. Neither race nor low birth weight signiﬁcantly predicted chronic offending. The level-two coefﬁcient for neighborhood disadvantage (coeff. = 0.228) failed to signiﬁcantly predict chronic offending. Because the continuous neighborhood disadvantage indicator may be obscuring important differences, we recoded it into two separate variables: (1) lowest 25% (relatively little disadvantage, n = 120), and (2) highest 25% (relatively high disadvantage, n = 157). The middle 50% served as the comparison group. These percentile cutoffs have been shown in previous research to be appropriate (Lynam et al., 2000; Peeples & Loeber, 1994; Wikstrom & Loeber, 2000), and research suggests that dichotomization of key variables serves a useful purpose in criminological research generally (Farrington & Loeber, 2000) and when assessing risk in particular (Tibbetts & Piquero, 1999). The results for this estimation are shown in Table 4. Since the pattern of results for the level-one variables is the same as what was found in the previous model, we do not repeat their interpretation here. Sufﬁce it to say, what is of most interest in Table 4 are the effects for the two neighborhood disadvantage variables. Although both coefﬁcient effects appear to approach signiﬁcance, neither is signiﬁcant at conventional levels. Given the earlier discussion that individual and familial risk may be exacerbated in disadvantaged neighborhoods, we decided to estimate two

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Table 4.

283

Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Low 25% and High 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage).

Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Level-2 Neighborhood Disadvantage Lowest 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage Highest 25%

Coefﬁcient

Standard Error

–1.288** –0.128 0.555** –0.022 0.561*

0.407 0.617 0.203 0.390 0.251

0.915

0.505

0.597

0.322

*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

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“level-one-effects-only” models, one for the low disadvantage neighborhoods and one for the high disadvantage neighborhoods. These results may be found under columns A and B in Table 5, respectively. Of the ﬁve level-one effects, only one shows a discrepant effect across the two types of neighborhoods; namely, an adverse familial environment signiﬁcantly predicts chronic offending only in disadvantaged neighborhoods (coeff. = 0.968). Males are more likely than females to be chronic offenders regardless of the level of neighborhood disadvantage. In an effort to explore the individual risk X family adversity interaction effect (i.e. Mofﬁtt’s biosocial interaction), Table 6 presents the results of a two-level estimation that includes the interaction term created earlier. Although the level2 continuous neighborhood disadvantage indicator did not signiﬁcantly relate to chronic offending, males (coeff. = –1.306), individuals with knowledge of delinquent peer activity (coeff. = 0.562), adverse familial environments (coeff. = 0.528), and the interaction term (coeff. = 1.557) all signiﬁcantly related to chronic offending. Consistent with Mofﬁtt, the signiﬁcant effect of the biosocial interaction suggests that low birth weight met with adverse familial environments relates to life course-persistent styles of offending. To probe the nature of this interaction further, we follow Neter et al. (1989) and calculate the effect of low birth weight at the minimum and maximum values of adverse familial environments. This procedure follows as: 283

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ALEX R. PIQUERO AND BRIAN LAWTON

Table 5. Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Estimates Presented for Low 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage, Column A, and High 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage, Column B). Low 25% Coefﬁcient Standard Error

Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity

–2.187* 1.711 0.131 –0.625 0.374

0.975 3.312 0.701 1.245 0.512

Coefﬁcient

High 25% Standard Error

–1.461* –1.055 0.209 0.302 0.968*

0.552 1.202 0.469 0.774 0.452

*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

B1 + B3 X2 where B1 is the unstandardized coefﬁcient for low birth weight (–0.914), B3 is the product term between low birth weight and family adversity (1.557), and X2 is the minimum (0) and maximum (4) value of family adversity. Speciﬁcally, the effect of low birth weight was found to be –0.914 at the minimum value of familial risk and 5.314 at the maximum value of familial risk. Table 7 retains the same level-one variables but then introduces the two dichotomous neighborhood disadvantage variables at level two. As can be seen, the pattern of effects is consistent with those results just presented (in Table 6.

Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Interaction and Continuous Neighborhood Disadvantage Indicator).

Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Biosocial Interaction Level-2 Neighborhood Disadvantage * p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

Coefﬁcient

–1.306** –0.226 0.562** –0.914 0.528* 1.557***

0.211

Standard Error

0.379 0.615 0.180 0.483 0.227 0.426

0.732

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Table 6). Signiﬁcant predictors of chronic offending included sex, peer delinquency, adverse familial environments, and the biosocial interaction, while neither race, low birth weight, nor the two neighborhood disadvantage variables were related to chronic offending. The ﬁnal hierarchical model presented in Table 8 may be of most interest. Recall that the framework within which we operate predicts an interaction between individual risk, family adversity, and neighborhood disadvantage. The results in Table 8 report the coefﬁcient effects for the biosocial interaction stratiﬁed by neighborhood disadvantage. In the low disadvantage neighborhoods (column A), it can be seen that only one of the six coefﬁcients signiﬁcantly predicts chronic offending; namely, males (coeff. = –2.249) are signiﬁcantly more likely than females to incur a higher frequency of arrest. In the most disadvantaged neighborhoods (column B), it can be seen that three coefﬁcients exert a signiﬁcant effect on chronic offending. As opposed to females, males (coeff. = –1.355), and individuals residing in adverse familial environments (coeff. = 0.848) were signiﬁcantly likely to incur a high frequency of arrest. Most importantly however, Table 8 shows that the biosocial interaction (coeff. = 1.731, p < 0.10) is positively and signiﬁcantly related to chronic offending. This result suggests that the biosocial interaction between individual and familial risk appears to be related to chronic offending only in the most Table 7. Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Low 25% and High 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage, and Interaction Included). Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Biosocial Interaction Level-2 Neighborhood Disadvantage Lowest 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage Highest 25%

Coefﬁcient

Standard Error

–1.322** –0.194 0.567** –0.970 0.553* 1.614**

0.420 0.624 0.200 0.536 0.251 0.467

0.947

0.519

0.602

0.331

* p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.

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Table 8. Hierarchical Linear Model Predicting Chronicity (Estimates Presented for Low 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage, Column A, and High 25% Neighborhood Disadvantage, Column B, with Interaction Included). Variable Level-1 Sex Race Peer Delinquency Low Birth Weight Family Adversity Biosocial Interaction

Low 25% Coefﬁcient Standard Error

–2.249* 1.707 0.171 –1.004 0.337 1.306

0.974 3.174 0.701 1.262 0.428 0.928

High 25% Coefﬁcient Standard Error

–1.355* –1.393 0.268 –0.638 0.848+ 1.731+

0.557 1.266 0.501 1.074 0.444 1.061

*** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05, + p < 0.10.

disadvantaged of neighborhoods, a result consistent with Mofﬁtt’s (1994, 1997) expectation.

DISCUSSION We set out in this paper to explore the extent to which individual risk was exacerbated in adverse familial and neighborhood contexts. Operating under a differential socialization framework, we expected a pattern of results that would support such an interaction. That is, we hypothesized that the effect of individual risk on life course-persistent offending (measured as chronicity) would be exacerbated under adverse familial environments because such environments would encounter difﬁculty in carrying out successful socialization practices. Moreover, we expected that an individual risk X family adversity interaction would be related to chronicity only in the most disadvantaged as opposed to non-disadvantaged, neighborhoods because it is precisely those neighborhoods that are most ill equipped to perform effective socialization. Using data from the Baltimore portion of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, multi-level analysis provided support for the hypothesis that individual risk is exacerbated in adverse familial contexts and that the individual risk X family adversity interaction was magniﬁed in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. These ﬁndings are important because they show that individual risk (low birth weight) by itself does not relate to life course-persistent offending, but does so only under adverse familial environments. Recalling the two hypotheses put forth by Lynam et al., the pattern of results in this study supports the person X environment interaction hypothesis as opposed to the strong situation hypothesis.

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Several limitations to the present study must be noted. The ﬁrst concerns measurement. Although we employed a measurement protocol that closely followed those used in extant research, we did not have direct indicators of (failed) socialization in either the family or neighborhood. Nevertheless, our pattern of results was consistent with theoretical expectations. Second, we employed one measure of life course-persistent offending. Although we would expect that the pattern of results would remain consistent (or become stronger) for different outcome variables (i.e. violent offending), this remains an empirical question. Third, the data in the present study were from the Baltimore site of the NCPP. Like other large cities on the east coast (i.e. Philadelphia, Washington, Newark), Baltimore is racially (and socioeconomically) segregated; thus the extent to which the interaction effects observed in the present study would be found in other cities which have different racial/socioeconomic experiences is unknown. Fourth, in a similar vein, the Baltimore sample is somewhat race- and class-speciﬁc and as such, generalizability of the current results should be guarded. Fifth, we concentrated on two socialization entities, the family and the neighborhood. There exist other socialization agents that deserve recognition and empirical scrutiny, one of which is the school, an issue we return to later in the discussion. Sixth, we did not disaggregate the empirical models by race. Given that blacks and whites live in different ecological contexts (Sampson & Wilson, 1995) and that blacks are anticipated to be over-represented in the life course-persistent group (Mofﬁtt, 1994), it would be interesting to examine how the biosocial interaction varies across race and race by neighborhood disadvantage. Our results speak to both extant theoretical research and offer important public policy proscriptions. In the theoretical realm, our results underscore the important role of individual risk, family adversity, and neighborhood disadvantage in theoretical models of antisocial behavior and thus suggest that theoretical models relying on either a sole-trait or sole-situational explanation are incomplete (Lynam et al., 2000). More important, our results support the continued examination of interactions across levels of analyses. That is, theoreticians and empirical researchers should continue to collect the requisite data to study how individual and familial factors covary across different neighborhood contexts. As our results show, much is to be gained by such a focus (see also Rutter, 1978). Although we follow a cautious path when proscribing policy implications, our analyses do suggest that socialization processes in both families and neighborhoods inﬂuence the extent to which individual risk relates to antisocial behavior. Therefore, prevention and intervention components aimed at these socialization agents may go a long way toward preventing antisocial behavior, 287

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especially if they are administered early in the child’s life (Yoshikawa, 1994). Importantly, difﬁculties produced by individual risk and adverse familial environments may be compensated for by proper attention to internal processes and individual functioning. As Hirschi (1995, p. 127) reminds us, “families can rise above their circumstances and save their children from crime and delinquency.” As Furstenberg et al. (1999) have shown, families do rise up and beyond difﬁcult circumstances to afford their children both opportunities and experiences to form prosocial bonds and lead successful lives. Another important socialization agent that was alluded too earlier was the school. In all communities, schools supplement the socialization process by providing essential socialization, support and supervision for children (Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994, p. 36). Just how do schools aid in the socialization task? According to Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990, p. 163), the school, as a socializing agent, restrains and rewards certain conduct. For example, when acting under the condition of restraint, the school requires children to be at a certain place at a certain time (i.e. homeroom, study hall, etc.); it requires them to do things when they are not under its direct surveillance; and it requires young people to be quiet, physically inactive, and attentive, often for long periods of time. When acting under the condition of rewards, the school rewards punctuality, the completion of homework, and proper deportment; it also rewards demonstrations of academic competence. Since the school offers a fairly restrictive environment, it follows that those individuals engaged in antisocial behavior will likely tend to avoid and eventually leave school in favor of less restricted environments. Although the school, by itself, is an important stand alone socialization agent, its ability to effectively socialize children is hampered in disadvantaged familial and neighborhood contexts. For example, students from low-income families are far more likely to receive bad grades or be held back, and they are as much as three times more likely to drop out before completing high school, than the children of more afﬂuent families (NRC, 1993, p. 103). Schools in disadvantaged or low income neighborhoods face special challenges – these schools are also likely to have students who are more likely to have signiﬁcant academic deﬁcits and face increased problems in educational attainment (Rutter & Giller, 1983, p. 107). Moreover, these schools have fewer ﬁnancial and material resources and they are often unable to retain the most skilled administrators and teachers, and student achievement levels in these schools are lower on “virtually all measures than for students in suburban schools.” Since poor students typically attend schools in poor neighborhoods, many of these students whose lives are rooted in family or neighborhood poverty simply do not have the kind of day-to-day experiences that would stimulate their intellectual

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development and complement the mission of schools (NRC, 1993, p. 106). In sum, it is clear that “nothing derails an adolescent’s future more certainly than disconnecting from school” (NRC, 1993, p. 250). Understanding how this disconnect originates, and how it leads to antisocial behavior remains an important theoretical and policy question. We hope that the present effort supports the continued study of individuals operating across different social contexts. As our results suggest, such an interactive, multi-level approach has much to offer the social science and policyoriented community as they strive toward a more complete understanding of the development of antisocial behavior across the life course.

NOTES 1. This is not to suggest that all poor neighborhoods encounter insurmountable difﬁculties for establishing informal social control networks. For example, residents in poor yet stable neighborhoods have more informal network ties than their counterparts in poor neighborhoods with high residential turnover (Ross et al., 2000). 2. Although not detailed in this paper, Ross and her colleagues (2000) have found that residents in poor, stable neighborhoods have more informal network ties than their counterparts in neighborhoods with high levels of turnover. This suggests that the stability of a neighborhood is important for the development of informal social controls as residents become invested into the safety of their surroundings. 3. We recognize that our measure of family adversity does not directly index family processes and socialization; yet we believe that it does operate within the spirit of how negative socialization would occur in adverse familial contexts. In essence, we claim that adverse home environments incur the most serious of challenges in: (1) monitoring children’s behavior, (2) recognizing antisocial/deviant behavior, and (3) punishing such behavior, which are all necessary for effective socialization (Patterson, 1980). Toward this end, Hirschi (1995, p. 127) claims that indices of family structure that include elements such as single parenthood, early age at childbirth, etc., exert their effects on delinquency through their effects on the ability (or willingness) of parents to monitor their children’s behavior and to recognize and correct misbehavior when it occurs (see also Hirschi, 1991). Support for this hypothesis may be found in Sampson and Laub (1993).

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Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1986). Family factors as correlates and predictors of juvenile conduct problems and delinquency. In: M. H. Tonry & N. Morris (Eds), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1998). Development of juvenile aggression and violence. American Psychologist, 53, 242–259. Lynam, D. R., Caspi, A., Mofﬁtt, T. E., Wikstrom, P. O. H., Loeber, R., & Novak, S. (2000). The interaction between impulsivity and neighborhood context on offending: The effects of impulsivity are stronger in poorer neighborhoods. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109, 563–574. Maguin, E., & Loeber, R. (1996). Academic performance and delinquency. In: M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (Vol. 20). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Massey, D. (2001). Residential segregation and neighborhood conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas. In: N. J. Smelser, W. J. Wilson & F. Mitchell (Eds), America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences (Vol. 1). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Mayer, S. E., & Jencks, C. (1989). Growing up in poor neighborhoods: how much does it matter? Science, 243, 1441–1446. McCord, J. (1990). Problem behaviors. In: S. S. Feldman & G. R. Elliott (Eds), At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCormick, M. C. (1985). The contribution of low birth weight to infant mortality and childhood mortality. New England Journal of Medicine, 312, 82–90. McLanahan, S. S. (1991). The long-term economic effects of family dissolution. In: B. J. Christensen (Ed.), When Families Fail. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Messner, S., & Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American Dream. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Mofﬁtt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life course persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100, 674–701. Mofﬁtt, T. E. (1994). Natural histories of delinquency. In: E. G. M. Weitekamp & H. J. Kerner (Eds), Cross-National Longitudinal Research on Human Development and Criminal Behavior. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Mofﬁtt, T. E. (1997). Neuropsychology, antisocial behavior, and neighborhood context. In: J. McCord (Ed.), Violence and Childhood in the Inner City. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morenoff, J. D., & Sampson, R. J. (1997). Violent crime and the spatial dynamics of neighborhood transitions: Chicago, 1970–1990. Social Forces, 76, 31–64. National Research Council (1993). Losing Generations. Washington: National Academy Press. Nagin, D. S., & Paternoster, R. (1991). On the relationship of past and future participation in delinquency. Criminology, 29, 163–190. Neter, J., Wasserman, W., & Kutner, M. K. (1989). Applied Linear Regression Models. Second Edition. Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin. Nichols, P. L., & Chen, T. (1981). Minimal Brain Dysfunction: A Prospective Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Niswander, K., & Gordon, M. (1972). The Women and their Pregnancies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Paneth, N. S. (1995). The problem of low birth weight. The Future of Children: Low Birth Weight (Center for the Future of Children), 5, 19–34. Paternoster, R., Dean, C., Piquero, A., Mazerolle, P., & Brame, R. (1997). Continuity and change in offending careers. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 13, 231–266. Patterson, G. R. (1980). Children who steal. In: T. Hirschi & M. Gottfredson (Eds), Understanding Crime. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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11. THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN LATER LIFE Brian de Vries and Colleen Johnson The death of close friends in later life is a ubiquitous yet rarely studied loss, a surprising limitation of current research given the pivotal role of friends in the lives of older individuals. This chapter draws upon data from a primarily qualitative longitudinal study of community-dwelling individuals divided into two broad age groups: the younger old (i.e. individuals between the ages of 70 and 85 on whom data are reported for 46 females with a mean age of 75.91 years and 19 males with a mean age of 77.26 years) and the old old (i.e. individuals aged 85 and older on whom data are reported for 60 females with a mean age of 91.13 years and 20 males with a mean age of 90.05 years). In the verbatim responses to probes on the recent death of a close friend, seven broad themes about loss emerged: an accounting of the number of friends that have been lost; the quality of the lost relationship, the context of the loss; the emotional reactions generated by the loss; temporal or life course accounts; the philosophical dimensions of loss; and an accounting of the lost activities. In contrast to the younger old, the oldest old were more likely: (1) to mention their advanced age and the concomitant normative nature of the death; (2) to comment that they are now the “sole survivors” of a long life; and (3) to question their continued existence and the lessons of having lived through loss. Gender differences were rare; men were more likely to mention the normative nature of the loss than were women. These data provide a unique vantage point for observing and elucidating the experience of friendship, bereavement, and life in the later years.

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THE DEATH OF FRIENDS IN LATER LIFE Each year, an estimated one third of those over the age of 65 (Health and Welfare Canada, 1993) and almost half over the age 85 (Johnson & Troll, 1994) lose a close friend through death. The magnitude of these numbers and this loss takes on a particular importance against the backdrop of population aging and the impressive credentials accrued by friends in their salutogenic effects on the wellbeing, life satisfaction, and morale of individuals in later life (e.g. Crohan & Antonucci, 1989). It is surprising, then, the modest attention given this loss. An examination of the Index of the well-regarded Handbook of Bereavement (Stroebe, Stroebe & Hansson, 1993) reveals that the death of a friend is not even identiﬁed as a loss, and friendship is only mentioned in the context of support during familial bereavement. This chapter addresses the topic of friendship grief and provides a window onto the understanding of friendship, the understanding of grief, and the role of socialization in both of these instances. Following a brief review of the predominant theories of bereavement, the scant literature on friendship bereavement is summarized. These studies suggest a special facet of friendship bereavement, perhaps rooted in the meaning of friendship for participants in this most voluntary relationship. Particularly in the lives of the oldest old such meanings evolve from the frequent experience of death of friends and family. The empirical study exploring this issue is then described and discussed; this chapter concludes with suggestions for future directions of research into the area of friendship grief. A Note on Socialization Socialization theory is one model that can be engaged in the interpretation of the processes of adapting to the death of friends in later life. Socialization is deﬁned here as a process that equips the individual with the relevant skills in a timely manner. From a sociological perspective, George (1990) describes adult socialization as a sequence of social roles enacted over the life course. These social roles comprise the rights, duties, and expectations associated with deﬁned social positions in the social structure. Understandably, the aging process eventually entails a shrinking social world because of the deaths of family and friends, and the risk of loneliness and isolation. Older people may be pressured by dominant cultural values in our society mandating continued activity and social involvement, not detachment and disengagement. Consequently, a socialization process for older members may be incorporated into the activities of social networks.

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In this chapter, the context in which socialization conceptions are used is the environment of loss and the grieving process upon the death of friends. Empirically, many oldest old respondents complained about the death of friends: “I’m the only one left” or “I’ve outlived everyone.” These comments are common complaints given that almost half of the respondents in the study reported below had lost a friend over a 15-month interval. Yet 53% still had a close friend and many more (78%) were in weekly contact with at least one friend; moreover, over one half had recently formed a new friendship. Hence, these adaptive behaviors are engaged to stave off isolation and loneliness and suggest an active socialization process is occurring. Theories of Bereavement The study of grief and bereavement has its roots in psychoanalytic thought (Freud, 1917/1957) and the subsequent elaborations in an attachment perspective (Bowlby, 1980; Parkes, 1993; Weiss, 1993). As Stroebe, Stroebe and Hansson (1988) have noted, the bereavement literature has shifted from an intrapersonal to an interpersonal perspective. That is, Freud described bereavement reactions in terms of working through the loss, ultimately relinquishing attachment to the deceased to free emotional energy so that new relationships may be established. Bowlby (e.g. 1980) characterized bereavement as the undesired separation from an attachment ﬁgure and the concomitant feelings of anxiety, anger, and depression. He views bereavement as having four phases (numbness, yearning/protest, depressive withdrawal, and reorganization/ recovery) on the route to new relationships and renewed interests. Parkes (1993) interpreted Bowlby’s attachment perspective from a cognitive framework. He believes that losses (not limited to the death of another) precipitate psychosocial transitions and the subsequent readjustment of assumptive worlds. Spousal loss, for example, “invalidates assumptions that penetrate many aspects of life. Habits of action (setting the table for two) and thought (“I must ask my husband about that”) must be revised if the survivor is to live as a widow” (Parkes, 1993, p. 94). The course of bereavement is dictated, in part, by the nature of the loss and recovery takes place when new world assumptions are put into place. Weiss (1993) similarly describes bereavement as relationship-sensitive. For Weiss, there are two categories of relationships. The more intimate category describes “relationships of attachment” including those between romantic partners, parent-child relationships, and transference relationships that characterize the bonds between a patient and therapist. A second category characterizes “relationships of community” and includes friendships, co-workers 301

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and colleagues, adult sibling relationships and other non-household familial relationships. Weiss contends that only relationships of attachment evoke grief responses owing to the belief that feelings of security inherent in the attachment are not replaceable; in contrast, relationships of community are replaceable, according to Weiss, and therefore limit the distress at their loss. Friendship Grief: A Review of Empirical Research Weiss’s (1993) account lays the foundation for studying and interpreting the effects of loss of friends on surviving individuals with the expectation that such a loss should not elicit prototypic grief responses. Although surprisingly few studies have examined this most frequent of middle and later life losses, those that have explored the experience of “friend-grievers” (e.g. Deck & Folta, 1989) or “survivor-friends” (Sklar, 1992) among mid-life and older adults have reported reactions mostly comparable to those found in familial bereavement. Sklar and Hartley (1990), for example, reported substantial unresolved feelings of despair and guilt (particularly for those words unspoken and deeds undone), a fear of one’s own mortality, and a profound sense of emptiness in the 48 individuals they studied whose friend(s) had died (up to ﬁve years prior to the interviews). Respondents also reported anger at both their deceased friends and themselves. Roberto and Stanis (1994) studied older women who reported on the death of a friend within the preceding 12 years and found that, even still, just over two-thirds of the 38 participants in their sample reported feelings of deep loss, and over one-third reported a sense of aloneness, similar to those ﬁndings reported by Sklar and Hartley. Almost half of the women reported feeling closer to other friends following the death and identiﬁed a greater appreciation of life. Similar percentages indicated that the deaths had increased their awareness of their own aging processes and mortality. A few studies have attempted to make comparisons across losses, including friendship loss. In an interesting naturalistic study, Murphy (1986) examined the stress and coping and mental health outcomes of 69 individuals who had lost a friend or family member in the Mount St. Helen’s volcano eruption. Initially, family members suffered from higher levels of depression and distress than did friends; over time however, stress decreased for both bereft groups. Unlike family members, friends were more likely to identify some salutogenic effects following the loss including increased present-time orientation and a greater preparation for one’s own death. Hays, Gold and Pieper (1997) examined the bereavement experiences of over 3,000 men and women aged 65 and older, part of the Duke site of a larger

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epidemiologic study. Although the focus of this study was on siblings in particular, the authors were able to compare those bereft of a friend with those bereft of a sibling or another family member. The characteristics of bereaved siblings were similar to the other groups in most respects, although the sibling group reported greater physical limitations and poorer perceived-health. Interestingly, bereaved siblings were more likely than friends and spouses to report that the death had a positive effect on them; concomitantly, bereaved friends were more likely to report that the death produced more emotionally mixed results (i.e. both positive and negative). In a comprehensive study of almost 9,000 Canadian women and men aged 65 and older, Lehman (1996) found support for Weiss’s hypothesis that relative to those bereft of a spouse and those having experienced multiple losses (a sorely understudied group, with some exception in the AIDS-bereavement literature), the friend-bereft had lower negative affect. The friend bereaved also had greater positive affect and social involvement than did those bereft of a spouse. The friend bereaved were comparable to the other bereaved groups on measures of perceived health, friend and family satisfaction measures, and a measure of emotional investment in the present. Surprisingly, however, in contrast the non-bereaved, and unlike comparisons between the non-bereaved and other bereaved groups, the friend bereaved evidenced better perceived health, more positive affect, greater social involvement, greater emotional investment, and friendship satisfaction. Although these reports suggest that friendship grief is comparable to the grief experienced following the death of a family member, these unanticipated ﬁndings on friendship grief merit further attention. The death of a close friend, someone of similar age, gender, and socioeconomic standing, confronts an individual with his or her own mortality, evoking tensions between the experiences of fear that “it could have been me” and relief that “it wasn’t me” (Deck & Folta, 1989). The exclusiveness of these effects to friendship grief remain to be seen; that is, perhaps researchers are prone to uncovering such unique effects while studying non-family relationships. At the very least, the grief occasioned by the death of a friend offers a unique vantage point from which to begin to consider the meaning of friendship for in the ﬁnal analysis, grief “is the study of people and their most intimate relationships” (Deck & Folta, 1989, p. 80). The Meaning of Friendship The understanding of friendship bereavement, like the understanding of friendship itself, is contingent upon an appreciation of what friendship is not 303

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(de Vries, 1996). Friends serve as a complement, contrast and sometimes substitute for family (e.g. Shanas, 1979). They are not family by most social and legal deﬁnitions, and hence they are free of most formal role prescriptions which govern family relations. In fact, friendships are notable for their nonascribed and socially unregulated quality (Aries & Johnson, 1983). In many ways, they represent the free expression of affect; many of the things that “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be said in families may be discussed with friends. Friends represent yardsticks against which self-development may be assessed, addressing tasks of socialization, maintaining role continuity, and assisting in the management of life’s challenges (de Vries, 1996). As Sullivan (1953) has articulated, friends serve to clarify, correct, and conﬁrm one’s self-perceptions, and provide “consensual validation of all components of personal worth” (Aries & Johnson, 1983, p. 1184). Friendships arise through the choices and unique voluntary commitments of participants (Adams & Blieszner, 1994), further enhancing self-esteem and self-awareness. Friendships as voluntary relationships are based upon compatibility or shared values and similar activities, interests, and experiences (e.g. Adams, Blieszner & de Vries, 2000). Through interactions with friends, individuals report increased self-respect, self-awareness and the freedom to act in authentic ways. These relationships are unencumbered by roles, expectations and prescribed boundaries inherent in family interactions. As such, friendship interactions are a source of satisfaction, and belongingness and even empowerment. Friends also function signiﬁcantly in the affective domain (Johnson, 1983) in which members receive and offer affection, appreciation and empathy or assist in other ways, enjoy themselves in recreation, and exchange conﬁdences (Allan & Adams, 1989). Friends and Family and Grief Just as “our knowledge of friendship relations in the later stages of life is incomplete unless these ties are studied in relationship to the kinship system” (Johnson, 1983, p. 120), so too is our understanding of friendship grief. Conceptually, the death of friends is both similar to experiences of family deaths and importantly different. Structurally, for example, homosociality reigns in the friendships of women and men of all ages (Lipman-Bluman, 1976); friendships tend to be formed with individuals who are similar to each other on a host of dimensions, including age, socio-economic status, and gender (de Vries, 1996). Similar age and SES parallels exist in spouse and sibling relationships. There is frequently reciprocal interaction and shared values and goals. Age peers, siblings, and partners are bases of comparisons (yardsticks) that foretell one’s own future. The loss of such a relationship, therefore, is the loss of an important self-referent.

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Affectively, friendships exist on a continuum, similar to sibling relationships in this respect (Gold, 1989). Friendships may be described as “best” or “close” or modiﬁed by adjectives such as “just” or even “more than.” These distinctions parallel some of those proposed by Gold in the characterization of sibling relations; for example, she identiﬁed intimate siblings (often described as “best friends”) and congenial siblings (referred to as “good friends”). Loyal siblings based their bond upon shared family backgrounds rather than personal involvement and based their allegiance on the norms of brotherhood and sisterhood that have no friendship parallel. Similarly without parallel are the apathetic and hostile siblings whose ties are based on indifference in the former case and rejection and disapproval in the latter. Although friendships may span a range of emotions, the continued existence of friendship is largely predicated upon continuing positive affective ties and reciprocal interaction (Johnson, 1983). Thus, the loss of a friend may be affectively comparable to the loss of a sibling and characterized by a loss of intimacy and congeniality. Unlike many family relationships, however, there are no terms to describe the loss of a friend (in contrast to the widow role or orphan role accompanying the loss of a spouse or parents, respectively); there are no titles to give rise to an identity and normative structures and prescriptions of role behavior (Deck & Folta, 1989). Sklar (1991) has commented that grief “is an emotional role whose rights, privileges, restrictions, obligations, and entry requirements tend to be conﬁned to family members” (p. 110). Friends are disenfranchised grievers (Doka, 1989). In studies of bereavement, friends are most often identiﬁed as support givers, not receivers; they are not perceived as legitimate grievers according to society. In fact, “society often considers interest in the deceased by non-kin as an infringement upon family rights and prerogatives, and any say in funeral or burial arrangements in considered an intrusion on the sanctity of the family” (Deck & Folta, 1989, p. 82). Friends are left to ﬁnd their own way in the world of grief; health care facilities often exclude friends during the dying process and family rights predominate. Special precautions are often engaged to prevent friends from the knowledge that a death has occurred (Deck & Folta, 1989). Airlines, employers, and other social institutions offer little to those who are grieving the death of a friend. These issues stand in contrast to those of widows, in particular, whose experiences form a sort of template for the understanding of grief. As Martin-Matthews (1986) has commented, widowhood may be described as one of the relatively scheduled and anticipated life events, similar to those other events linked to the family life cycle such as marriage, having children, the emptying of the nest and retirement from the paid labor force. Although widowhood has not yet made it into the nursery rhymes of children, it has 305

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become part of the league of materials for such rhymes and chants to which children skip, such as “ﬁrst comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage” (White, 1991). Most texts on aging will point out that among groups of older women and men, particularly over the age of 75, almost two-thirds of women have lost their spouse compared with under one-quarter of men, owing in part to women’s longer life expectancies and propensities to marry men older than themselves. This creates, in later life, a society of widows (e.g. Lopata, 1996a); a cohort of women who are linked by their common experience, social roles, and identity. The content of the widow role includes “not only public acknowledgment of the death and organization of and participation in the funeral or other rituals, but also deeply felt grief and involvement in the mourning process” (Lopata, 1996b, p. 150). Members of the widow’s social network support this role and provide positive feedback to the widow. Over time, members of this circle begin withdrawing and allowing the widow to develop her new life and identity. Problems develop when this withdrawal occurs before the widow is prepared for the departure of these members or if the members insist that the widow remain in the role for longer than she desires (Lopata, 1999). To varying and primarily lesser degrees, a comparable process exists in the bereavement trajectories associated with other family losses. The support offered the bereaved is inﬂuenced by the perceived societal value of the relationship lost. Friends ﬁgure lowly in this regard. Society has yet to recognize the extent to which its smooth and orderly functioning is contingent upon, in large measure, friend relationships. The “hidden population” (Sklar & Hartley, 1990) of bereaved friends, whom others might describe as abandoned, offers a unique opportunity to explore the course and consequence of loss in the absence of the scripts and roles that support familial bereavement. Later Life These and other unwritten scripts may be observed in the lives of the oldest old. These individuals are self-described survivors: of a long life, of huge social changes, of many deaths in their convoys of support (Kahn & Antonucci, 1980). Their numbers are unparalleled in historical time; they are fulﬁlling their life span potential with unprecedented frequency. They are, in fact, the scriptwriters for subsequent cohorts and for those attempting to understand the issues of aging. We have looked to their experience to uncover how life is managed and, most relevant to this chapter, how relationships with friends are maintained.

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The common refrain of the sample of the oldest interviewed by Johnson and Troll (1994) was “I’ve outlived everyone” (p. 82). Poor health and restricted access to friends (and hence asymmetry in the relationship) formed additional constraints on their friendships. Respondents reacted to such constraints with changing the criteria for friendship to no longer require propinquity or faceto-face contact, or to extend the friendship label to acquaintances or “hired help” or even to minimize the expressive content of friendship (Johnson & Troll, 1994). Johnson and Troll (1996) categorized 250 respondents into ﬁve-year segments ranging from 70 to 90 and older. While still in their seventies, most respondents, but particularly women, must adapt to changes in their household structure as they adjust to living alone rather than with others. This change usually coincides with widowhood and the loss of the intimate and supportive relationship a spouse usually fulﬁlls. The onset of disability and the need for greater support, however, is likely to occur around ten years later as they reach their mid-eighties. Consequently, their support resources have steadily diminished by the time they are in need of greater help from others. Their age and the frequency of their encounters with death of friends, make this group most suitable in attempts to understand the meaning and experience of such a loss. We look to their experiences in this chapter to illuminate the process of response to the death of a friend and, by inference, the meaning of friends for women and men in their later year. We adopt a range of ages that facilitates comparison among those in very late life and their relatively younger cohorts.

METHOD The Sample The data reported in this study stem from responses to the question about the death of friends within the 12-months preceding the interview. Additional materials were also accessed in response to general questions about losses and life during the previous year. In total, the interviews of 145 respondents were included in analyses: 65 young-old (i.e. those aged 70 to 85 with a mean age of 76.31 years) and 80 old-old (i.e. those over 85 years with a mean age of 90.86 years). Of the young-old, 46 were females (mean age, 75.91) and 19 were male (mean age, 77.26); of the old-old, 60 were female (mean age, 91.13) and 20 were male (mean age, 90.05). Twelve respondents (11 young-old and 1 old-old) reported no friend death during the interview and a further 22 respondents, equally divided among the young-old and the old-old, did not mention friend death at any point during the interview. 307

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This sample was initially drawn from public voting records in San Francisco and Oakland, California. Participants over the age of 70 were recruited. The voting records include date of birth and usually current addresses to facilitate locating respondents. Since those 85 and older comprise a small proportion of the local population, it was also necessary to secure additional names through snowballing techniques. In total, 20% came from referrals from participants in the study or community associations. Letters were sent to prospective respondents, followed by a telephone call to schedule an interview. Of those contacted who were judged competent enough to be interviewed, 24% refused. Competency to participate in an interview was established by asking potential respondents to confirm their age, current date, address, and telephone number. Data Collection Interviews lasting two to three hours were held in the respondents’ home and conducted in either one or two sittings. A focussed interview technique was used, one that combined both open-ended and structured questioning, and some standard instruments. This technique, developed by Merton, Fishe and Kendall (1956), permits hypotheses and research questions to be generated from speciﬁc situations. Interviews elicit data on the respondents’ reported behaviors, their interpretations of their own behaviors and those of family members, and their evaluation and expectations of family relations. Such a technique under skilled interviewers can produce in-depth understanding of the social and cultural contexts of lives in later life. This technique is not as open-ended as ethnographic approaches or by those that elicit reminiscences, because interviewers play a more active and informed role in guiding the discussion. Interviewers follow the conventions of ordinary social interactions, so respondents, if they so choose, can determine the course of the discussion. For example, if a respondent, in answering questions on one family relationship, switches to a related topic, the interviewer turns to those questions. Consequently, the ﬂow of the discussion is not interrupted. If a respondent digresses too lengthily, however, he or she is redirected back to the interview questions. Verbatim notes were taken and later transcribed. In the initial interview, questions were asked about the frequency of contact with friends and the instrumental and expressive supports that were exchanged. Upon analyzing data from this ﬁrst round of interviewing, we found that friendship was an important component of networks, although frequent death of friends made those resources vulnerable. At the second round of interviewing, additional questions were added about the nature of friendships, such as their

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shared activities, the presence of a close friend, and experiences with the death of a friend. These questions were included in the analyses that follow. Data Coding The responses were extracted, verbatim, from the interview transcripts. These responses were then transcribed and arrayed by participant number only; that is, no age and gender identiﬁers were included. Responses ranged from simple descriptors (“all dead” or “time heals)” to somewhat lengthy, complex accounts of up to several sentences in length. An example of the latter follows: I ask, ‘why not me?’ I’ve been thinking about it. I see in the paper that this one died. It makes you stop and think. I’ve had many friends die. I worry about the future and when friends won’t be about to do things with (age 89, female).

The ﬁrst author reviewed each of the responses and identiﬁed codable units and preliminary codes. This process was repeated at which time the data were assigned codes. A codable unit was any phrase or sentence that conveyed a unique idea (see Baker-Brown et al., 1996); multiple codable units were possible in a single response or even a single sentence. For example, in the quote provided above, several codes are evident: the number of friends who have died (or a time when they will die), reﬂections on the self, and the shared activities that will be lost with the death. The preliminary coding efforts yielded 24 categories as represented in Table 1. To assist in the ease of presentation and interpretation of these data and in an effort to minimize redundancy, a second level analysis was undertaken of the categories. This analysis combined those categories that are naturally associated into seven broad themes (as represented in Table 1): Number of Friends Lost; Relationship Quality; Emotional Reactions; Context of the Loss; Life Course Accounts; Philosophical Accounts; and Activities Lost. These broader themes are the data on which the subsequent analyses are reported. (Those who reported no loss or no mention of loss were thus excluded from the analyses.) Interrater Reliability Several levels of interrater reliability were included in the management and coding of these data. At the most basic level, and to ensure that all relevant data were culled from the interview transcripts, another person familiar with the data reviewed a subsample of the transcripts (approximately one half of the available transcripts, including both the young-old and the old-old) and extracted data that were deemed appropriate for coding. This effort revealed substantial 309

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Table 1.

Composition and Frequency of Themes of Friendship Loss.

Theme

Categories Young-Old

Frequencies Old-Old

5 16 2 3

4 30 25 3

Number of Friends Lost

Few Several/Many All Vague Reference

Relationship Quality

Casual/Good Friend Best/Close Friend Friend-Family Reference Length of Relationship Roots/Connections to Other Places

6 9 5 8

5 15 5 7

2

4

Sense of Loss/Sadness Missing Friend Difﬁcult/Hard to Cope Other Grief Reactions (e.g., depression, turning point, indifference)

4 4 4

9 7 6

9

11

Context of the Loss

Circumstances of Death Loss of Health/Well-being Interpersonal Loss Other Reference

11 4 1 2

14 7 4 2

Life Course Accounts

Reference to Age Expectedness/Normative Reference to Time

1 6 4

20 9 7

Philosophical Accounts

Life Philosophies Self-Reference

3 4

22 8

8

15

No Loss

11

1

No Loss Mentioned

11

11

Total1

78

58 Emotional Reactions

54

43

42

35 Activities Lost

23 12 22 1

Theme totals are less than the sum of the category totals given that multiple exemplars of a single category were counted as one.

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agreement; in fact, in only two cases were additional data identiﬁed that had not already been selected for analyses. A second level of interrater reliability was undertaken by a second reader of the extracted materials. At this level, both readers of the transcripts assigned categories to the materials read, which comprised approximately 15% of the total material extracted. There was less than 10% disagreement and discrepancies in categorical codes were resolved through discussion so that the ﬁnal codes represented consensus. These were the codes subsequently used on the remainder of the material by the primary author. A ﬁnal level of reliability occurred as the two authors of this chapter together created the superordinate themes reported above. These themes were then provided to a third person who independently populated them with the same categories as those identiﬁed by the two authors.

RESULTS As introduced above, seven broad themes emerged from the coding of the data. These themes are arrayed below in descending order of frequency of identiﬁcation. Within each of the themes, representative quotes are offered identiﬁed by respondent age and gender. For each of the themes, chi-square analyses were conducted to examine differences by age group and gender. Only those for which signiﬁcant differences were uncovered are reported below. Number of Friends The predominant theme in the narratives of friend loss was an accounting of the number of friends who had died; this theme was reported by 78 respondents (54% of the sample) with 29% of the coded responses derived from the young-old and 71% of the responses from the old old, ␹2(1) = 12.025, p < 0.0005. Given the correlation between mortality and longevity, it is perhaps not surprising that this theme was over-represented in the narratives of the oldest-old in comparison with those of the younger old. Implicit in their advanced years was an ever increasing number of deceased friends. This theme assumed several forms, the greatest proportion (52%) of which were framed in the context of having lost many friends. We used to have 8-person poker games; there are 3 of us left now (age 88, male). All those people who are close to me are dying or dead (age 87, female). I look at the class roster and 55 in my class have died already (age 73, male).

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A sizable subset of these respondents (31%) reported that all of their friends had predeceased them, leaving them as the sole survivors of a cohort, a circle of friends: All of them, gone. I am the sole survivor. I am the only one left of the old gang (age 89, male). All my friends passes away. I’m the only one left of my friends. Isn’t that awful when you get to live that long and all your friends are gone? (age 88, female).

Quality of the Lost Relationship The second theme to which respondents referred was the quality of the lost relationship; 58 respondents (41% of the sample) identified this theme with 40% of the coded responses derived from the young-old and 60% derived from the old-old. Interestingly, the two age groups, and the two genders, did not differ in their usage of this theme; that is, reference to the affective nature of the lost relationship (i.e. one of the realms most frequently targeted as the domain of friends) was a uniform characteristic of later life friendgrievers. There were, however, several coded categories embedded in this theme. For example, respondents made unsolicited reference to the emotional closeness of the relationship lost through death, ranging from the casual: The man across the street died; he was an acquaintance (age 75, male).

to the most emotionally intimate: My best friend died; I have no best friend anymore (age 83, female). I have lost my very dear friend. I don’t let myself become too attached because I don’t want to go through that heartache again (age 95, female).

Twenty-eight percent of the respondents mentioned a casual or good friend; 32% mentioned a best or close friend. Another, related dimension accommodated by this theme and identiﬁed by 13% of the respondents referred to the clouded distinction between friends and family: My husband was my best friend. We did everything together. I never had a lot of close friends (age 89, female). She was almost like a sister – she picked out my husband (age 84, female). I lost a good friend when my sister-in-law died. A very dear friend; she lived around the corner from me (age 87, male).

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Respondents (19%) also made explicit reference to the length of the relationship that had been severed by death: One friend was only 93; I knew her as a little girl (age 94, female). I had known him ever since he was little boy (age 87, male). Two weeks ago a schoolmate friend died – a friend for 60 years (age 79, female). A lady I knew since the fourth grade died (age 93, female).

Finally, 8% of the respondents reported a severing of their connections to other times and places with the death of their friend: No one is alive who grew up with us (age 73, female). You feel lonely in that no one that you really have roots tied to – you’re left alone by yourself (age 98, female). My friends in Leningrad have died (age 82, male).

Emotional Reactions to the Loss The third most common theme identiﬁed by 54 respondents or 38% of the sample characterized the response most often associated with death: the expression of grief, sadness, or some other emotional reaction. Just under 40% of the responses were derived from the young-old whereas just over 60% came from the old-old. As revealed in Table 1, 24% of the responses were coded as loss/sad; examples of this category include: I feel sad about my friends who have died. Very sad. I feel that a lot (age 88, female). I’m a little sad when I see so many of the men I know are dead (age 73, male).

A companion category to loss and sadness mentioned with almost the same percentages (20%) was missing the deceased. Examples of this category include: I miss my friend. I wish I had friends like I used to, but they are gone (age 85, female). I miss my friend very much (age 91, female).

Other respondents (19%) represented their responses to the death in terms of the difﬁculty they had dealing with the loss. I’ve taken it extremely hard. It is a tremendous loss (age 74, female). Even my close friends are gone. It’s all been hard (age 98, female).

Finally, another 37% of the respondents identiﬁed some other emotional element, such as “turning points,” a more guarded emotional explanation, or in terms of disengagement or immunization as in the following: It was a turning point when all the people who depended on me passed away (age 82, female).

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All my friends are dead – I have dry eyes. I never cry anymore (age 95, female). I have detached myself from everyone and everything (age 92, male). I don’t feel badly about it. It’s not good to get old. I don’t feel death very much (age 92, female).

Context of the Loss The fourth most frequently mentioned theme made reference to the context of the loss. This theme was mentioned by 43 respondents or 26% of the sample. No gender or age group differences were noted in its usage; 40% of the coded responses derived from the young-old and 60% from the old-old. As above, this accounting took several forms. Primary among these was reference to the circumstances of the death (56% of the coded values), perhaps attesting to the self-reﬂective nature of friends and friendship (i.e. there but for the grace of who or whatever go I): One committed suicide. She jumped out of the window. That’s an awful thing to do (age 94, female). The old lady that we visited passed away. All of a sudden, they found cancer throughout her body and she died in 2 weeks time (age 89, male). I had a friend who ate her lunch and thought that she had a little indigestion and then died (age 78, female).

Several respondents (11%) also addressed the loss of their friend in the context of their ever-expanded “personal pool of grief” (e.g. Moss & Moss, 1989) – their personal history of deaths: I don’t feel death very much. I’m used to it. After losing my only child, that takes care of that pretty much (age 92, female). My husband’s gone, my daughter’s gone, my friends are gone. I’m the only one left. I’m lonely (89, female).

Finally, individuals also spoke of a death in reference to other losses, including dementia and relocation: It’s sad to see your friends go through death and loss of faculties. I have one friend who can’t remember who I am anymore (age 93, female). I’ve lost one friend by moving. Her home was just across the street from the one that fell down after the earthquake (age 92, female). My friends have either died or moved to Carmel (age 87, female).

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Life Course Accounts Temporal or life course accounts formed the ﬁfth theme endorsed by 42 respondents or 30% of the sample. Related to the previous theme of accounting for the numbers of those lost through death and perhaps implicit in the normative nature of the loss, this theme was also over-represented in the narratives of the oldest-old (77%) in comparison with those of the younger old (23%), ␹2(1) = 6.519, p < 0.01. Somewhat surprisingly, the genders also differed in their use of this theme, the only gender difference in the analyses. Men were almost twice as likely to mention the normative nature of the loss than were women, ␹2(1) = 4.585, p < 0.05; that is, 42% of men offered a life course accounting of the death in contrast to 22% of women. As reﬂected in Table 1, the life course accounts subsumed three related categories, the most pronounced of which was a reference to age (endorsed by 45% of respondents in this theme). Examples of this category include: It’s a lonesome life when you get up to our age (age 89, female). I don’t have any friends left, I’m so old (age 92, male).

Perhaps a natural extension of reference to age in accounting for death is an awareness of the normative nature of later life losses. Almost one-third (32%) of the respondents in this theme made this connection, with comments such as the following: People our age die out. God forgot me (age 92, male). It is just part of life. You have to expect it. I didn’t expect to lose my younger sister last year. We had been going in order and I didn’t expect her to die before I did (age 91, male).

A subtle variation of this sort of reporting identiﬁed time and stage factors (23% of the responses comprising this theme). This includes: I just noticed that I’m at the stage in my life where in one page of obituaries, among the decedents, one half are below my age and one half are above. Up to now, they were always older than me. Now, I’ve found as many who are younger (age 76, male). I ﬁgure I passed my years – that I should have gone long ago. I’ve lived too long (age 89, female).

Philosophical Accounts

111 A surprising theme, the sixth most frequently mentioned endorsed by 35 respondents (or 24% of the sample), made reference to philosophical accounts in characterizing the loss. These issues assumed a couple of forms: philosophies 315

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of life (68%) and reﬂections on the self including a sort of downward social comparison (32%) in response to the death of a friend. This was also a theme identiﬁed in differing proportions by the two age groups, comparatively overrepresented in the narratives of the oldest-old in comparison with those of the younger old, ␹2(1) = 11.190, p < 0.005, with respective percentages of 80 and 20. The more philosophical forms include comments such as the following: I ask, “why not me?” I’ve been thinking about it. I see in the paper that this one died. It makes you stop and think (age 73, male). I’ve lost a lot of friends. I’m just losing interest in life. Being a survivor is tough. You don’t make friends like you do in your youth. When you lose them, you lose them. It’s another feeling that surviving is not easy. Your peers die and you’re still living. I consider surviving the worst part of life. You hear of people your age who have died and you wish it could be you. You’re existing, not really living (age 89, female).

Although an admittedly subtle distinction, other forms of this theme made more explicit self-reference, including thinking about one’s own age and health. You become conscious of your age when your friends die (age 98, female). I’ve had a good life compared to what others go through (age 93, female). I am pretty much reconciled to know that I am an older woman. You take it day by day (age 89, female). I’m so thankful. There is always someone less fortunate than you (age 87, female).

Lost Activities The ﬁnal theme distilled from these accounts concerned the activities lost or now inaccessible to participants given the death of their friend. Similar to the quality of the lost relationship above, this theme targets one of the areas held to come under the purview of friendship. These included both instrumental and expressive activities as revealed in the examples that follow. I lost one gentleman friend from the church. He always drove me to church (age 88, female). I like intelligent conversation. I don’t get it very often. Friends are all dead that I could discuss those things with (age 92, male). When I talked to her, we would have a good cry together. I don’t have that privilege anymore (age 90, female). She was ﬂattering to me in her comments, and not artiﬁcially ﬂattering. I could tell her anything. She comes to mind frequently. I used to turn to her when down and discouraged. She would turn to me. Now, without her, they aren’t going to turn to an old lady for help (age 75, female). I miss not having anyone to share memories with. I miss not being necessary to anyone (age 76, female).

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DISCUSSION

111

The above analyses reveal several patterns of responses detailing signiﬁcant issues about life in the later years, including the experience of grief and the meaning of friendship as well as the pervasive experience of survivorship. In all of these, the role of socialization is at least implicitly addressed; it is more explicitly illuminated and discussed below. In addition, avenues for future research and theory are presented. Perhaps not surprisingly, age did not ﬁgure prominently in the analyses, except in those few instances in which the link between age and mortality protruded. Similarly, gender was not a signiﬁcant factor. Johnson and Troll (1994) reported that the gender differences common in samples of younger adults are noticeably absent when disability increases; in general, “the differences in life style between younger men and women that contribute to gender differences in friendships are much less apparent in the life styles of the oldest old” (p. 85).

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Survivorship

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Perhaps the overarching issue raised about the experience of aging from the foregoing accounts is one previously identiﬁed by Johnson and others (e.g. Johnson & Troll, 1994): survivorship. The survivor-friends (Sklar, 1992) in these analyses identify the many costs attached to their long existence. These costs may include a pervasive loneliness and sadness and a sense of living an untethered, aimless existence, bereft of connections to previous times and places through the people with whom they shared these parts of their lives. Not surprisingly, these responses were most prominent in the accounts of the oldest-old; a substantial correlate of age is mortality (of self and others). Older individuals, however, also adopted a more philosophical orientation toward these deaths and living with grief. It is also noteworthy that in addition to the many costs are modest beneﬁts of survivorship, most often framed in terms of hardiness and resilience. Deﬁning this sense of survivorship is an acute awareness of their position in the life course and a certain “out-of-timeliness” of their ongoing lives. In responding to the deaths of friends, the survivors (and men in particular) ask how they could have been passed over by death and why they continue. This is an interesting contrast to often-reported experience of individuals who are grieving the death of someone “too soon;” for some of the oldest men and women in this study, their death, yet to come, was “too late.” They build upon their long histories in providing accounts of responses to recent deaths, adding 317

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to their “pool of grief ” (Moss & Moss, 1989). Not infrequently, the behavioral response to these interpretations and experiences with loss result in a sort of disengagement and detachment from social life – almost an emotional immunization. There was signiﬁcant discussion reﬂecting the appraisal of ongoing existence in the place of living. All of these participant-provided explanations point to the scripts that are being written as the experiences are being lived. With few models to follow and modest social support, these individuals are socializing themselves into their later years. These survivors are also pioneers whose experiences describe later life in current time. The Experience of Grief Reactions comparable to those expressed by bereft family members were evident in these accounts of friend grief and similar to those reported in the few previous investigations. These include expressions of sadness and depression and a profound sense of missing the deceased. Evidence of the “grief work” being conducted, participants spoke of their coping struggles and their attempts at coming to terms with the loss. Several respondents viewed the loss and their responses as a turning point in their lives and as a renewed recognition of the difﬁculties of advanced old age. Grief is more than that, however. A clear message from the foregoing responses is that grief is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, a point infrequently articulated in bereavement research (Weiss, 1993). This multidimensionality includes some measure of positive affect (e.g. assuming the form of what has been gained in the relationship, personal growth) and signiﬁcant self-reﬂection. This self-reﬂection is revealed in the social comparison processes described in philosophical and contextual accounts as well as the stated salience of life course position. As such, grief is represented as a process through which the self is revealed and understood. Grief is further revealed as a process that signiﬁcantly favors family. Society offers no formal roles and rituals for the appreciation of friendship and the grieving of friend loss. At least one of the quotes identiﬁed above comments on the family exclusiveness of grief. In such a light, the foregoing accounts may be interpreted as evidence of individuals engaging in efforts to socialize themselves into the role of “survivor-friend.” The glimpses offered into these sense-making practices are unique and instructive. An interesting difference in the grief reactions of these bereaved friends and recent accounts of the other loss responses is the absence of a continuing bond (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996). This ongoing tie to the deceased has

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been identiﬁed among groups of widows (e.g. Lopata, 1999), parents (e.g. Klass, 1996), and adult children (e.g. Moss, Resch & Moss, 1997). In contrast to these bonds, the notion of replaceability could be found closely beneath the surface of the grief of the bereaved friends in this sample. This difference merits further attention, but, as above, may be attributable to the strength and social regulation of family bonds pervading time and even life, as evidenced in the ongoing attachment found between some older individuals and their long-deceased ancestors (Troll, in press). Unencumbered by the role of griever, in its traditional family sense, individuals identify a range of thoughts and emotions in response to the death of a close friend. Individuals place this loss in the context of their history of loss, in their life course contexts, and in their social networks in general; individuals remind themselves of the nature of the ties that have been severed and what was important to them; individuals consider the context of the loss, perhaps as a way of attempting to foreshadow their imminent death, and the meaning of life more generally. Accounting for the death of a close friend, then, ultimately may be accounting of the self in relationships – a window onto who we are in an interpersonal world when the interpersonal nature can no longer be taken for granted. Individuals miss the “selves” that were a part of their friendships and the experience of feeling needed and the experience of mattering, as Pearlin and LeBlanc (1997) have said. Together, these issues highlight the context within which bereavement takes place. It takes place in a societal context that frequently discounts the signiﬁcance of the loss; it takes place in the context of other losses, both personal and social, and in the context of the life course. The “pool of grief ” offers a vehicle by which to characterize this accumulation of life experiences of loss and the experience of surviving. The Meaning of Friendship Implicit in these accounts is evidence of how “friendship” is constructed and deﬁned by these older individuals. The area of friendship meaning and deﬁnition has only recently been addressed in the empirical efforts of gerontologists (e.g. Adams et al., 2000; Matthews, 1986). The potential of grief and loss to add to this literature is signiﬁcant (Deck & Folta, 1989). Furthermore, in contrast to the more ritualized, structured, socially and legally deﬁned family relationships, friendships are subjectively deﬁned with criteria that vary from individual to individual. The responses to the loss of a friend speak to the more social-cognitive organization of individuals and its manifestation in the psychological reactions to death. 319

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It is also worth noting the variable and clouded boundaries that surround friends. Several individuals responded to the question of friend death with comments about their neighbors and other individuals who may work and/or provide care for them (see Johnson & Troll, 1994). Such comments reveal the nature of the social network surrounding the individual and allude to both the availability of others and the desire to be connected in some social space. Individuals view their friends in both instrumental and expressive ways. Older individuals rely on their friends for a variety of functions often left unfulﬁlled by kin. Friendships represent connections to previous times and places for individuals – part of the shared nature of this social relationship. One salient function of friendship is that of self-evaluation: friends provide for individuals a type of yardstick to help construct who they are and measure how they are doing. The death of such a referent may well initiate the fears, previously identiﬁed, that “it could have been me” in conjunction with some relief “that it wasn’t” (Deck & Folta, 1989). These dueling fears help deﬁne the complex experience of survivorship. Future Directions Friendship, much like grief, is a multidimensional experience. Although few would dispute this statement, there have been only modest attempts to systemize this multidimensional complexity. As de Vries (1996) has commented, the research approaches thus far have been either inductive, using standardized questionnaires characterizing friendship dimensions derived from theory and previous research (e.g. Davis & Todd, 1985; Parker & de Vries, 1993), or deductive, using more open-ended, guided interviews in which respondents described their friends (e.g. Goldman, Cooper, Ahern & Corsini, 1981; Weiss & Lowenthal, 1975). This latter venue offers great potential for the uncovering of friendship meaning. Friendship has emerged as a problematic construct for researchers, often evading precise deﬁnition and operationalization (de Vries, 1996). The vexing problem (and richness) of the construct has to do with its inherent relational constituency. Although substantial research has tended toward the more “commodity” view of friendship, treating as dependent variables the numbers of friends that individuals report and their frequency of contact, friendship derives from the varying inﬂuences and perspectives of the self and the other in social relations (e.g. Parker & de Vries, 1994). Not only do individuals have friends, they are friends, as Davis and Todd (1985) have suggested. This is an interesting and often neglected aspect of friendships; not only do individuals surround themselves with a convoy of individuals of their choosing (e.g.

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Antonucci & Akiyama, 1987), they also serve as members of convoys chosen by other individuals – convoys that may or may not overlap! The self-other/having-being dimension reﬂecting this ongoing negotiation provides a more holistic image of the relationship (de Vries & Blando, 2001). Future friendship research and theory could attend to the pronounced role of the self in relationships. This is a point that has been forcefully made by Gilligan (1982) and others, and which continues to beg discourse. Similarly, future considerations might entertain the dimensions uncovered in this report in both analyses of grief and friendship. For example, the roles friends fulﬁll in each other’s lives vary considerably, as suggested by the foregoing analyses. Understanding these roles may facilitate an understanding of how best to work with those who have lost a friend and how best to assist in the formation of subsequent friendships. Friendships also develop and are nurtured in contexts, an important one of which is the life course. Matthews (1986) has made this point and it is reinforced in the quotes and analyses above. Just as each loss is interpreted in the context of life’s losses (e.g. Moss & Moss, 1989), so too is each friendship understood as part of a more complete whole. Research efforts have thus far centered on more elemental and singular approaches to the study of loss and relationships, obfuscating the complexity of the constructs. Friendship research has been overshadowed by the voluminous literature on caregiving and the family as a system of social support. With the recent extension of the life span of those 85 years of age and older, some face the risk of outliving their families. Demographic projections describe a verticalized family structure with more generations present by fewer members in each generation. Consequently, there will be fewer family members to assist the oldest old. In the absence or diminished capacity of family members to provide support, friendships of the oldest cohort may become increasingly important as support resource. Their potential role may be even more critical, for the oldest old are members of the fastest growing segment of the North American population. From the perspective of socialization theory, moreover, just as the oldest old have to adapt to widowhood and living alone, they also may need to be socialized into a friendship role so as to develop the motivation and the capacity to sustain old friends and make new friends who can augment their social networks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research reported herein was funded by a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging (R37-AG06559) to Colleen Johnson. Address correspondence concerning this chapter to Brian de Vries, Ph.D. , Gerontology Programs, 1600 321

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Holloway Ave., HSS 242, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132; email: ([email protected]).

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Goldman, J. A., Cooper, P. E., Ahern, K., & Corsini, D. (1981). Continuities and discontinuities in the friendship descriptions of women at six stages in the life cycle. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 103, 153–167. Hays, J. C., Gold, D. T., & Pieper, C. F. (1997). Sibling bereavement in later life. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 42, 25–42. Johnson, C. L. (1983). Fairweather friends and rainy day kin: An anthropological analysis of old age friendships in the United States. Urban Anthropology, 12, 103–123. Johnson, C. L. & Barer, B M. (1997). Life beyond 85 years: The aura of survivorship. New York: Springer. Johnson, C. L., & Troll, L. E. (1994). Constraints and facilitators to friendship in late late life. The Gerontologist, 34, 79–87. Johnson, C. L., & Troll, L. E. (1996). Family transitions from 70 to 103 years of age. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58, 178–187. Kahn, R. L., & Antonucci, T. C. (1980). Convoys over the life course: Attachments, roles and social supports. In: P. Baltes & O. G. Brim (Eds), Lifespan Development and Behavior (pp. 253–286). New York: Academic Press. Kastenbaum, R. (1992). The psychology of death (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. Klass, D. (1996). The deceased child in the psychic and social worlds of bereaved parents during the resolution of grief. In: D. Klass, P. R. Silverman & S. L. Nickman (Eds), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (pp. 199–215). Washington: Taylor & Francis Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds) (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Washington: Taylor & Francis. Lehman, A. J. (1996). Short-term reactions to the death of a spouse and/or close friend in later life. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Lipman-Bluman, J. (1976). Toward a homosocial theory of sex roles: An Explanation of the sex segregation of social institutions. In: M. Blaxall & B. Reagan (Eds), Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation (pp. 15–31). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lopata, H. Z. (1996a). Current widowhood: Myths and realities. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lopata, H. Z. (1996b). Widowhood and husband sanctiﬁcation. In: D. Klass, P. R. Silverman & S. L. Nickman (Eds), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (pp. 149–162). Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis. Lopata, H. Z. (1999). Grief and the self-concept. In: B. de Vries (Ed.), End of Life Issues: Interdisciplinary and Multidimensional Perspectives (pp. 37–55). New York: Springer. Martin-Matthews, A. (1986). Widowhood as an expected life event. In: V. Marshall (Ed.), Aging in Canada: Social Perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 343–366). Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. Matthews, S. H. (1986). Friendships through the life course. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ministry of National Health and Welfare (1993). Aging and independence: Overview of a national survey. Ottawa, ON: Minister of Supply and Services Canada. Merton, R. K., Fiske, M., & Kendall, P. L. (1956). The focused interview: A manual of problems and procedures. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Moss, M., & Moss, S. Z. (1989). The death of a parent. In R. Kalish (Ed.), Midlife Loss: Coping Strategies (pp. 89–114). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Moss, M., Resch, N., & Moss, S. Z. (1997). The role of gender in middle-aged children’s responses to parent death. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 35, 43–65. Murphy, S. A. (1986). Stress, coping, and mental health outcomes following a natural disaster: Bereaved family members and friends compared. Death Studies, 10, 411–429.

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Parker, S., & de Vries, B. (1993). Patterns of friendship for women and men in same and crosssex friendships. Journal of Social and Personal Relations, 10, 617–626. Parkes, C. M. (1993). Bereavement as a psychosocial transition: Process of adaptation to change. In: M. S. Stroebe, W. Stroebe & R. O. Hansson (Eds), Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention (pp. 91–101). New York: Cambridge University Press. Pearlin, L. I., & LeBlanc, A. J. (1997). Bereavement and the loss of mattering among Alzheimer’s caregivers. Paper presented at the 50th annual scientiﬁc meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Cincinnati, OH. Roberto, K. A., & Stanis, P. I. (1994). Reactions of older women to the death of their close friends. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 28, 9–19. Shanas, E. (1979). The family as a social support system in old age. The Gerontologist, 19, 169–174. Sklar, F. (1992). Grief as a family affair: Property rights, grief rights, and the exclusion of close friends as survivors. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 24, 109–121. Sklar, F., & Hartley, S. F. (1990). Close friends as survivors: Bereavement patterns in a “hidden” population. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 21, 103–112. Stroebe, M. S., Stroebe, W., & Hansson, R. O. (1988). Bereavement research: An historical introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 44, 1–18. Stroebe, M. S., Stroebe, W., & Hansson, R. O. (Eds) (1993). Handbook of bereavement: Theory, research, and intervention. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: Norton. Troll, L. E. (in press). When the world narrows: Intimacy with the dead? Generations. White, J. M. (1991). Dynamics of family development: A theoretical perspective. New York: Guildford. Weiss, R. S. (1993). Loss and recovery. In: M. S. Stroebe, W. Stroebe & R. O. Hansson (Eds), Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention (pp. 271–284). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, L., & Lowenthal, M. F. (1975). Life course perspectives on friendship. In: M. F. Lowenthal, M. Thurnher, D. Chiriboga & Associates (Eds), Four Stages of Life (pp. 48–61). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Aaron M. Pallas

INTRODUCTION The story is as old as the hills: the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It dates back at least to the Book of Matthew, where it surfaces as a parable in which a master gives each of his three servants a quantity of gold according to their respective abilities, and tells them to invest the gold while he is away. The servant who was given ﬁve “talents” of gold labored to produce an additional ﬁve. The master praised him, and promised him additional responsibility. The servant who was given two talents also doubled his stake through hard work. He too was rewarded with praise and new responsibilities. But the third servant, who was given but one talent, buried it, and thus did not increase his capital. He then rationalized this by blaming his behavior on the master’s dishonesty. Outraged, the master took the gold talent from this servant, and gave it to the servant who had the most, saying, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29). Robert K. Merton (1968) coined the term the “Matthew effect” to show how the logic of “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” applies to the system by which scientists allocate recognition to one another. Merton describes a system of misallocation, in which highly-regarded scientists are given all of the

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credit for the merit of their collaborative work with junior colleagues, whereas the contributions of the novices rarely receive the recognition that they are due. A very prominent example of this phenomenon within the sociology of education is the work of James Coleman, whose co-director of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey (and co-author of the landmark Equality of Educational Opportunity report) Ernest Q. Campbell rarely received any recognition for his efforts.1 This logic has been extended to the study of stratiﬁcation within a variety of social systems, including the role of education in contemporary Western society. Kerckhoff (1993) showed that, in a cohort of children in Great Britain, a great many individuals were deﬂected during the educational and early occupational career (i.e. at age 23) from the trajectories deﬁned by their hierarchical positions in the social structure at a given point in time. Some positions at a particular career stage deﬂected their incumbents upward, whereas others deﬂected their incumbents downward. Over the course of the early career, these deﬂections cumulated, such that those that started on the “high road” gradually moved up, and those that started on the “low road” moved downward with increasing velocity. Kerckhoff did not term this pattern a “Matthew effect,” but he followed this study with a parallel examination of stratiﬁcation in the American educational system that explicitly sought evidence of a Matthew effect in the form of cumulative effects of ability grouping and tracking from secondary school through postsecondary schooling (Kerckhoff & Glennie, 1999).2 Over the dozen years beyond tenth-grade enrollment, substantial numbers of individuals were deﬂected upward and downward, and these deﬂections cumulated so that the variation in relative positioning in the stratiﬁcation system increased over time. In spite of the relative openness of the U.S. system, the divergence of the pathways that U.S. youth travel parallel the divergent pathways that Kerckhoff identiﬁed in his earlier study. From this, Kerckhoff and Glennie (1999) claimed the presence of a Matthew effect in American schooling. Although Kerckhoff and Glennie do not credit him, Dannefer (1988) introduced the Matthew effect explicitly into the literature on aging and the life course. Dannefer expressed concern that the study of cohort differences was overshadowing heterogeneity within cohorts that might be due to the interaction of age and social structure, including variations across individuals in their structural positions in one or more stratiﬁcation systems. By positing that initial inequalities are magniﬁed over the life course, the Matthew effect, which is sometimes referred to as the cumulative dis/advantage hypothesis (O’Rand & Henretta, 1999), offers one account of how intracohort inequality is produced.

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An alternative account, termed the “status maintenance” hypothesis, assumes that initial inequalities are carried along as individuals move through the life course, such that the within-cohort inequality present at any particular moment can be mapped onto similar levels of inequality both before and after that moment. A third explanation points to the possibility of a narrowing of the gap in the latter stages of the life course, as upon retirement, individuals are subject to the inﬂuence of state institutions that offset the inequalities produced by private markets.3 This account is termed the “status leveling or redistribution” hypothesis (O’Rand & Henretta, 1999).

THE MATTHEW EFFECT AND THE “GOLD STANDARD” These hypotheses were developed primarily in response to evidence that socioeconomic inequality among the aged often differs from socioeconomic inequality among the nonaged. But somewhere along the way, the meaning of the Matthew effect has been distorted. In the parable, a particular form of capital, gold, either accumulates or recedes over time. And in Merton’s (1968) appropriation of the parable, high levels of scholarly recognition – a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1999) – at a particular point in time lead to even higher levels of scholarly recognition at a subsequent time, and low levels of scholarly recognition lead to even lower levels over time. In both cases, the form of capital is constant over time.4 Thus, a Matthew effect in education would seem to demand that those “rich” in human capital – that is, the knowledge, skills and dispositions that enable individuals to develop and be productive – accumulate more schooling over time, whereas those “poor” in human capital lose, over time, even the capital that they have accrued. A major analytic challenge to studying such a Matthew effect in education is the difﬁculty of measuring human capital directly. Although the most common measure of human capital is educational attainment, operationalized either as years of schooling completed or educational credentials, it does not have all of the properties of human capital. Knowledge, skills and dispositions can decay, as individuals forget what they have learned, or as individuals are situated in contexts in which their knowledge, skills and dispositions do not promote development or productivity. Unlike physical and economic capital – and, for that matter, social, cultural and symbolic forms of capital – educational attainment cannot decay. To be sure, the markets or ﬁelds in which human capital has exchange value may shift over time, so that a given level of human capital may have less value – compare the terminal high school graduate of 1950 with the terminal high school 329

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graduate of today – but a degree once awarded is rescinded only in the rarest of circumstances. In light of this, the closest that we might approach a Matthew effect in education is something like “the rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.” There are, in my view, two faces to human capital, although one captures the lion’s share of attention. The origins of human capital theory in economics have led to an emphasis on the consequences of human capital for workplace productivity and labor market rewards, particularly earnings. This is the conventional way of thinking about human capital, and it spotlights human capital’s contribution to productivity. But there is another way of thinking about human capital that draws attention to the role of human capital in personal growth and development. Not all investments in human capital are intended to increase workplace productivity, a point recognized even by Becker (1964) in the introduction to the ﬁrst edition of Human Capital. Some investments are motivated solely by a desire to grow and develop. Such investments in human capital are properly viewed as an expression of the self, and are more consonant with lifespan developmental psychology or the sociology of the life course as a conceptual frame than with the discipline of economics. Nevertheless, the economic formulation of human capital has dominated the sociological literature. A few studies have explored the economic form of the Matthew effect in education, primarily in terms of return to school in midlife. Bradburn, Moen and Dempster-McClain (1995) drew on a panel study of 296 white women born between 1905 and 1933 who were initially interviewed in 1956 and followed up 30 years later, in 1986. All of the women in this sample were married and had children at the time of the initial interviews. By exploring subsequent participation in schooling, Bradburn et al. were in effect examining women’s return to school following the transition to marriage and motherhood. Bradburn et al. (1995) hypothesized that women with higher initial levels of educational attainment would be more likely to return to school than women with lower initial levels. They found some evidence that women who had attended some college or graduated from college were more likely to return to school following a ﬁrst birth, but there are serious questions about the stability (and plausibility) of these estimates. Perhaps the biggest limitation to this work as a test of the Matthew effect is that participation in adult education has expanded dramatically since this study. When returning to school was a rare (and perhaps non-normative) event, the women who elected to return may have had unusual personal strengths and/or opportunities that enabled them to do overcome barriers to participation.

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One recent study makes use of data that pertain to contemporary contexts for adult participation in education. Elman and O’Rand (1998) drew on two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the impact of various work pathways on educational reentry between the ages of 42 and 62. They contrasted three theoretical approaches: status maintenance, cumulative dis/advantage, and status attainment (the role of social origins on adult attainments, and the ways in which educational and early occupational experiences mediate those effects). Elman and O’Rand conceptualize adult education participation primarily in terms of retraining to maintain occupational status or enhance occupational mobility in the face of changing labor market conditions. They argue that the status maintenance and cumulative dis/advantage models predict that middle-aged workers with few educational and social resources will be less likely to retrain than those with higher levels of resources. But individuals with high resources who have stable jobs may not elect to retrain, because individuals in stable careers have less incentive to change jobs, and hence a weaker motive for retraining. Therefore, they hypothesize that non-white and female workers will be less likely to return to school in midlife, because they are likely to have had longer spells of unemployment than white and male workers. Elman and O’Rand (1998) summarize their hypotheses by stating that “those at midlife whose resources do not closely match their work experience are more likely to pursue educational activities at midlife” (p. 480). Obviously, testing these hypotheses requires detailed information on job histories and current job conditions. Although the National Survey of Families and Households has an array of data on work histories, the data on adult participation in education are not as extensive. School attendance of more than two courses or enrollment for more than six weeks is coded as educational reentry, but no data are gathered for individuals who have not completed a high school diploma or its equivalent, who represent a substantial share of the midlife individuals examined in the study. The survey thus is picking up relatively intense participation among those with relatively high levels of initial education. Elman and O’Rand (1998) found that regardless of an individual’s work pathway, educational attainment and family conﬁgurations inﬂuence the likelihood of educational reentry. In general, those with college or advanced degrees were more likely to reenter school at midlife than high school graduates. This is supportive of a cumulative dis/advantage account of education across the life course, and might properly be termed a Matthew effect. Age, and life course position more generally, are important determinants of educational transitions; beyond this, more educated women are more likely to 331

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return to school than their less-educated peers, evidence that the rich are getting richer. Elman and O’Rand (1998), like many other scholars, emphasize the role that schooling plays in preparing individuals for work. Formal educational institutions exist primarily to prepare the young to become adults, particularly productive adult workers. At least, this is the existing theory, both in society at large and within the sociology of education (Meyer, 1985). But viewing schooling as the primary source of human capital seems to ignore those forms of education that lie outside of formal K-12 and postsecondary educational institutions and their credential programs. For adults, a great deal of education takes place outside of formal educational institutions. To cite the examples that are most salient to me, my retired, 72-year-old father teaches a “55 Alive” defensive driving course to senior citizens in the vicinity of his Las Vegas retirement community. He also takes workshops on computer photo-imaging, and teaches an introductory “boot camp” course for new members of his 1500-member computer club. I have academic colleagues who take classes in weaving, or ballroom dancing. Several of my colleagues teach week-long, non-credit seminars on applied social statistics at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Most of these examples are strictly leisure-time activities, but the last is work-related – few people I know sign up for statistics seminars as a leisure activity! These forms of education are largely missing from the existing literature, which stresses enrollment in formal educational institutions – and, sometimes, just full-time enrollment (Felmlee, 1988).5 Relatively few participants in adult education describe schooling as their primary activity. The range of adult education opportunities has expanded well beyond the scope of activities available in earlier periods. This prompts the question of whether a Matthew effect will be observed when a broader array of educational experiences than enrollment in programs that lead to educational credentials is examined. In particular, is a Matthew effect in education limited to those forms of education that contribute to workplace productivity? Or is there also a Matthew effect for education undertaken for personal growth and development? There is a second issue at stake with regard to the Matthew effect. The original text of the parable of the talents obscures the process by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the actors involved. This lack of clarity is perpetuated in the Merton’s account of the allocation of scientiﬁc recognition, and in many accounts of the cumulative dis/advantage hypothesis. Suppose, for example, that instead of the Book of Matthew, Merton had relied upon the legend of Robin Hood to inspire his analysis. In Nottingham, where the legend is situated, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; but

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the mechanism driving this process was clear. The Sheriff of Nottingham taxed or robbed the poor and gave the proceeds to other rich noblemen, prompting Robin Hood to take from the rich and give to the poor. Had Merton been so inclined, we might today be discussing a “Sheriff of Nottingham effect” rather than a Matthew effect. One plausible mechanism for a Matthew effect in education is socioeconomic achievement. Individuals who have obtained more schooling earn more than those with less schooling, and this socioeconomic advantage may make further education more affordable for the more-educated than for those with less schooling. An alternative view, drawn from evidence on the capacity of education to transform individuals (Pallas, 2000), is that the key mediating mechanism is social-psychological rather than socioeconomic. In this view, education inspires a thirst for lifelong learning or a desire for self-expression that in turn leads to increased participation in education during adulthood. Although it is difﬁcult to test this hypothesis with available data, documenting the extent to which socioeconomic attainment mediates the effect of educational attainment on adult participation in education should prove informative. Hence, in this paper I explore whether a Matthew effect will be observed when a broader array of educational experiences than enrollment in programs that lead to educational credentials is examined. I also ask, if there is a Matthew effect, how can it be accounted for analytically? To what extent might the socioeconomic advantages associated with educational attainment account for a Matthew effect in education?

DATA AND METHODS To examine these two questions, I analyze data from the Adult Education Component of the 1995 wave of the National Household Education Study (NHES). NHES is a household-based survey conducted periodically by the National Center for Education Statistics. The study collects data using computer-assisted telephone interviewing from a stratiﬁed random sample of households with telephones in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey rotates topical components of particular policy interest. Typically approximately 50,000 households complete a screener questionnaire gathering basic demographic data on household composition, and a sample of 10,000 to 15,000 households are selected for extended interviews on the topical components. The Adult Education Component of NHES:95 includes 19,700 completed interviews. For this paper, I analyze the probability of participating in three distinct forms of adult education: (a) programs leading to a postsecondary educational 333

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credential; (b) work-related education that is not embedded in a credential program; and (c) other structured activities or courses, which I refer to as “personal development” courses, since they are not primarily for the instrumental purpose of enhancing one’s stock of human capital and/or improving one’s labor-market standing. I also analyze the probability of participating in any form of adult education, which includes these three forms, as well as the relatively rare forms of English as a Second Language courses and adult basic education.6 The questions eliciting data on the three forms of adult education participation are presented in Fig. 1. Each asks about the twelve months preceding the interview date. The data thus pertain to the incidence of adult education during this one-year period, and not lifetime levels of participation, which presumably would be somewhat higher. The questions were asked in the order shown, which does have important consequences for the meaning of the results. Even if an individual participated in a program leading to an academic or vocational credential primarily to enhance his or her career, this form of participation would be classified as participation in a postsecondary credential program, and not as participation in work-related education. Moreover, by definition, participation in postsecondary credential programs or work-related education is not primarily for one’s personal development. D1. (not including the classes you told us about earlier), During the past 12 months, did you take any courses that are part of a program, or a series of courses associated with a program leading toward (a) A college or university degree, such as an associate’s, bachelor’s, or graduate degree? (b) A diploma or certiﬁcate from a vocational or technical school after high school or a formal vocational training program? F1. Now I’d like to ask about courses related to a job or career, whether or not you had a job when you took the courses. (Please don’t include courses you already told me about). Some examples are courses taken at your job, courses taken somewhere else that relate to your job or a new career, or courses for a license or certiﬁcation you need for your job. Have you taken any of these in the past 12 months? G1. Now I am going to ask about any other courses where there was an instructor. (Please don’t repeat any courses [and programs] you have already told us about). These might inlude things like arts and crafts, sports or recreation, ﬁrst aid or childbirth, Bible study, or any other types of courses we haven’t talked about yet. Did you take any of these or other courses in the past 12 months?

Fig. 1.

Item Wording for Adult Education Participation Interview.

111

111

111

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

335

For each form of adult education, I estimate a logistic regression model predicting participation as a function of region of the country; sex; race/ethnicity; age; educational attainment; and family configuration. I then add a vector of socioeconomic measures, including household income, home ownership, and labor force position. Standard errors are estimated with WesvarPC, which takes account of the complex sampling design. Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations of the independent and dependent variables. In the logistic regressions, region, sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment and age are represented by a series of dummy variables. The omitted categories are West, male, white non-Hispanic, less than 12 years of schooling, and age 16–25. The regression intercept thus represents the predicted logit for a white, non-Hispanic male aged 16–25 living in the West who did not complete high school. The second step of the logistic regressions adds household income (measured in thousands of dollars), a dummy variable coded 1 for home ownership and 0 for non-ownership, and a series of four dummy variables representing professional/managerial occupations; service, sales or support occupations; skilled trades; and unskilled workers, with the omitted category of unemployed or out of the labor force.

RESULTS Participation in postsecondary credential programs. Equation 1 of Table 2 reports the determinants of adult participation in postsecondary credential programs. The most salient features of this equation are the powerful effects of age and education in determining participation in credential programs. There are no regional differences to speak of, and although females have a higher net probability of participation than males, and males of other races a higher net probability of participation than white males, racial/ethnic group status is otherwise unrelated to the probability of participation in credential programs. Family status has a modest impact on the likelihood of program participation, as never married individuals have higher rates of participation than those who have been or are currently married, and individuals in a household with at least one child under six years of age are less likely to participate than those with no children in the home. Equation 1 shows that the odds of participating in postsecondary credential programs7 during the preceding 12 months are substantially higher for individuals who have completed some postsecondary education than those who have not. The most extreme contrast is between individuals with some college but less than a two-year degree, whose odds of participation are 15 times greater 335

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

336

AARON M. PALLAS

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics for Variables in the Analysis. Mean

Standard Deviation

Northwest South Midwest

0.20 0.34 0.24

0.40 0.48 0.43

Sex (1 = female)

0.52

0.50

Black, non-Hispanic Hispanic Other races, non-Hispanic

0.11 0.08 0.04

0.31 0.28 0.21

Age Age Age Age Age

26–35 36–45 46–55 56–65 66 and older

0.22 0.22 0.16 0.11 0.15

0.41 0.41 0.37 0.32 0.36

12 years of schooling Some college Two-year degree Four-year degree Graduate school

0.29 0.21 0.05 0.14 0.10

0.46 0.41 0.22 0.35 0.30

Married Separated or divorced Widowed Children 6–18 only At least one child under 6

0.60 0.11 0.08 0.22 0.18

0.49 0.32 0.26 0.42 0.39

37.95 0.62 0.16 0.36 0.07 0.10

26.19 0.49 0.37 0.48 0.25 0.30

0.13 0.21 0.20 0.44

0.34 0.41 0.40 0.50

Household income ($1,000s) Own Home (1 = yes) Professional/managerial Service, sales or support Skilled trades Unskilled work Crredential program participation Work-related education participation Personal development classes Participation in any adult education

than the odds of a high school non-graduate participating in a postsecondary credential program. In turn, the odds of high school graduates participating in credential programs are about three times greater than the odds of nongraduates participating. But among those who have completed at least some college, the effects of educational attainment are not monotonic, as the participation probabilities for individuals with a four-year college degree but

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

Table 2.

337

Determinants of Participation in Postsecondary Credential Programs. (1)

(2)

b

Exp(b)

Intercept

⫺2.050***

Northeast South Midwest

⫺0.101

Sex (1 = female) Black, non-Hispanic Hispanic Other races, non-Hispanic Age Age Age Age Age

26⫺35 36⫺45 46⫺55 56⫺65 66 and older

12 years of schooling Some college Two⫺year degree Four⫺year degree Graduate school Married Separated or divorced Widowed Children 6⫺18 only At least one child under 6

Exp(b)

Proportional Reduction in Oddsa

1.00 0.98 0.98

⫺1.825***

0.90 0.94 0.96

⫺0.103 ⫺0.022

0.90 0.96 0.98

0.158**

1.17

0.089

1.09

1.07

0.168

1.18 0.83 1.23

0.107 ⫺0.242*

1.11 0.79 1.17

1.06 1.06 1.04

0.26 0.17 0.10 0.02 0.00

0.97 0.91 0.89 0.88 0.90

*** *** *** *** ***

3.20 15.22 13.74 7.49 14.48

0.97 1.00 0.99 1.00 1.01

*** * ⫺0.650 ** 0.066 ⫺0.354 ***

0.64 0.81 0.52 1.07 0.70

0.89 1.00 0.98 0.97 0.97

⫺0.002

1.00 0.75 1.05 1.04 0.77 0.74

⫺0.064 ⫺0.038

⫺0.186

0.205* ⫺1.369

⫺0.041

0.161

0.25 0.15 0.09 0.02 0.00

⫺1.336

*** *** *** *** ***

3.11 15.16 13.63 7.46 14.59

1.164 2.722 2.620 2.013 2.672

*** * ⫺0.674 ** 0.031 ⫺0.384 ***

0.57 0.81 0.51 1.03 0.68

⫺0.451

*** *** ⫺2.452 *** ⫺3.913 *** ⫺5.889 *** ⫺1.872

1.134 2.719 2.613 2.010 2.680 ⫺0.565 ⫺0.215

Household income ($1,000s) Own home (1 = yes) Professional/managerial Service, sales or support Skilled trades Unskilled work Cox-Snell Pseudo-R2

b

*** *** ⫺2.330 *** ⫺3.788 *** ⫺5.783 *** ⫺1.776

⫺0.211

⫺0.291

* ***

0.044 0.037 ⫺0.268 * ⫺0.298 0.204

0.206

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. a Proportional reduction in odds = exp(b1 ⫺ b2).

337

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

338

AARON M. PALLAS

no additional schooling are lower than for those with some college or a two-year degree.8 All of this points to some evidence for a Matthew effect with regard to participation in postsecondary credential programs. Those with more schooling do get richer, and especially so if they have already attended some college. Age-grading in participation in postsecondary credential programs is even more pronounced. Equation 1 of Table 2 shows that net of educational attainment, there is a steep decline in participation in credential programs as individuals age. The highest rates of participation are observed among those age 16 to 25, a group that captures the traditional college-going population. The odds of participation among 26- to 35-year-olds are only one-quarter the odds of participation in the youngest group, and they continue to fall precipitously among the older age groups. The odds of individuals age 56 to 65 participating in credential programs are only one-ﬁftieth as large as the odds of 16- to 25-year-olds, and they fall still further for those age 66 and older. Having found evidence of a Matthew effect, we are led to ask whether this effect can be explained by the socioeconomic advantages of those with more schooling. This question is addressed in Eq. 2 of Table 2, which adds household income, home ownership, and work status to the logistic regression equation predicting postsecondary credential program participation. These indicators add only slightly to the predictive power of the equation, as the Cox-Snell pseudo-R2 increases only from 0.204 to 0.206. More important for our purposes, the effects of schooling on participation in postsecondary credential programs are not attenuated when socioeconomic status is taken into account. The magnitude of the Matthew effect, as well as the effects of age, is displayed in Fig. 2. This ﬁgure shows the estimated probability of participation in a postsecondary credential program for individuals with various levels of age and educational attainment, both with and without controls for adult socioeconomic status. Because the estimated effects on the probability are not linear in a logistic regression, I report the observed probabilities for the reference categories (i.e. age 16 to 25 and less than 12 years of schooling), and calculate the implied probabilities from this baseline.9 Figure 2 conﬁrms what I have already described. The effects of educational attainment on the probability of participation in credential programs are most evident in the contrast between individuals with 12 years of schooling or fewer and individuals with at least some college. At the extremes, individuals with more than a four-year degree are about 11 times more likely than those who have not completed high school to be enrolled in a credential program, net of age and other background characteristics. This is consistent with a Matthew effect. The estimated probabilities of participation in credential programs are

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

339 Fig. 2.

339

Total and Net Effects of Age and Educational Attainment on Participation in Postsecondary Credential Programs.

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

340

AARON M. PALLAS

virtually identical once socioeconomic status is taken into account. This suggests that the Matthew effect observed for participation in credential programs cannot be explained by the fact that more educated individuals are better off economically than less educated individuals. In fact, Eq. 2 in Table 2 shows that individuals with higher household incomes, and those who own their homes, are less likely to be enrolled in postsecondary credential programs, net of age, schooling and family status. Figure 2 also shows that participation in credential programs is highly stratiﬁed by age. As individuals age, the probabilities of participation decline sharply, approaching zero among those over the age of 65. These probabilities are essentially unchanged when adult socioeconomic status is taken into account. Participation in work-related education. Although most studies of the determinants of educational participation and attainment focus on the acquisition of educational credentials, work-related education is another route to the accrual of human capital. It is therefore worth examining whether similar patterns of educational and age stratiﬁcation are observed in participation in work-related education as in participation in credential programs. Equation 1 of Table 3 shows the determinants of participation in work-related education. Racial/ethnic inequality is quite evident, as blacks, Hispanics and members of other races all are less likely to participate in work-related education than whites. As with participation in credential programs, there is evidence of a Matthew effect, as those with more education are considerably more likely to participate in work-related education than those with less education. The relationship is monotonic, such that the odds of someone who had attended graduate school participating in work-related education are approximately nine times greater than the odds of an individual with less than a high school diploma doing so. Further, there is a curvilinear relationship between age and participation in work-related education, with higher rates of participation in the prime work years of 26 to 55 than in the earliest stage of the work lifecycle, and rapidly declining rates thereafter. This latter ﬁnding comes as no surprise, as many individuals over the age of 65 are out of the labor force, and hence unlikely to be pursuing work-related education. The odds of members of this age group participating in work-related education are only one-tenth of the odds of 16- to 25-year-olds participating. Since work status is one of the indicators of SES, and workplace conditions are likely to inﬂuence the odds of participating in work-related education, we might expect these patterns to change somewhat when socioeconomic factors are taken into account. Equation 2 of Table 3 adds the socioeconomic factors to the logistic regression equation. These indicators have a strong independent effect on the likelihood of participating in work-related education,

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

Table 3.

341

Determinants of Participation in Work-Related Education. (1) b

Intercept

⫺2.891

Northeast South Midwest

⫺0.107

Sex (1 = female) Black, non-Hispanic Hispanic Other races, non-Hispanic Age Age Age Age Age

26⫺35 36⫺45 46⫺55 56⫺65 66 and older

12 years of schooling Some college Two-year degree Four-year degree Graduate school Married Separated or divorced Widowed Children 6⫺18 only At least one child under 6

Exp(b)

⫺5.159

***

0.047 ⫺0.049 0.037

1.04

⫺0.246

** *** ⫺0.529 ***

0.78 0.58 0.59

⫺0.075

0.445 0.522 0.411 ⫺0.422 ⫺2.315

*** *** *** *** ***

0.845 1.364 1.757 1.978 2.195

*** *** *** *** ***

0.222 ** 0.196 * ⫺0.291 0.086 ⫺0.049

0.89 1.04 0.93

1.01 1.01 1.02

1.21

0.86

*** ⫺0.365 ***

0.93 0.71 0.69

0.84 0.82 0.85

1.56 1.69 1.51 0.66 0.10

0.435 0.411 0.337 ⫺0.133 ⫺1.101

*** *** *** ***

1.55 1.51 1.40 0.88 0.33

1.01 1.12 1.08 0.75 0.30

2.33 3.91 5.80 7.23 8.98

0.483 0.874 1.123 1.160 1.263

*** *** *** *** ***

1.62 2.40 3.07 3.19 3.54

1.44 1.63 1.88 2.27 2.54

1.25 1.22 0.75 1.09 0.95

0.087 0.243 * ⫺0.212 0.068 0.059

1.09 1.28 0.81 1.07 1.06

1.14 0.95 0.92 1.02 0.90

Household income ($1,000s) Own home (1 = yes) Professional/managerial Service, sales or support Skilled trades Unskilled work Cox-Snell Pseudo-R2

Proportional Reduction in Oddsa

***

⫺0.113

0.90 1.05 0.95

⫺0.544

(2) Exp(b)

b

0.038 ⫺0.070 0.193 *** ⫺0.349

0.010 0.179 2.646 2.271 2.249 1.799 0.140

0.196

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. a Proportional reduction in odds = exp(b1 ⫺ b2).

111

341

*** 1.01 * * 1.20 *** 14.09 *** 9.69 *** 9.48 *** 6.05

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

342

AARON M. PALLAS

as the Cox-Snell pseudo-R2 rises from 0.140 to 0.196 when they are entered into the equation. Individuals with higher household incomes, and those who own their homes, are more likely to participate in work-related education. The effects of labor force status are substantially larger. Individuals who are working or have worked are substantially more likely to participate in work-related education than those who are not in the labor force. Beyond this, there are sizeable variations by type of work, with those in the professional/managerial ranks considerably more likely to participate in work-related education than those engaged in unskilled work. Our primary interest in Eq. 2 of Table 3 is the extent to which the effects of educational attainment on participation in work-related education are explained by the socioeconomic advantages that follow from obtaining more schooling. Individuals with more schooling are more likely to have higher incomes, own their homes, be in the labor force, and work in professional or managerial positions. Do the effects of educational attainment persist when socioeconomic status is controlled? Equation 2 shows that these effects are still substantial even when socioeconomic status is controlled, but they are considerably smaller than the educational attainment effects observed in Eq. 1. Interestingly, the proportional reduction in the magnitude of the effects is greater for the higher levels of educational attainment than for the lower levels. The relative odds of a terminal high school graduate participating in work-related education are reduced by 44% when SES is controlled, whereas the relative odds of an individual with more than four years of college participating fall by 154%. Including socioeconomic advantages in the prediction equation has a lesser impact on the pattern of age effects on participation in work-related education. There is a small reduction in the estimated effects of being in the prime work years on the likelihood of participation, but the main story is at the older ages. Once socioeconomic advantages are taken into account, individuals aged 56 to 65 are just as likely as those 16 to 25 to participate in work-related education. This is not the case for those over the age of 65. Controlling for socioeconomic status and work variables substantially reduces the age gap in participation rates. But it is still the case that those over the age of 65 are less likely to participate in work-related education whether or not they are in the labor force, and whether or not they are afﬂuent. The controls here are too primitive to be conﬁdent, but there is at least a suggestion of discrimination against the aged in these ﬁndings. The effects of educational attainment and age on participation in work-related education are depicted in Fig. 3. This ﬁgure clearly illustrates the patterns I have just described. The probability of participating in work-related education is strongly associated with educational attainment, as those

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

343 Fig. 3.

Total and Net Effects of Age and Educational Attainment on Participation in Work-Related Education. 343

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

344

AARON M. PALLAS

individuals who have not completed high school have a 5% chance of participation, whereas the probability of participation among individuals with a two-year degree but no further education is approximately 23%, and among those who have more than a four-year degree about 32%. The net effects of educational attainment are sharply reduced, although there still is a reliable gradient from less than high school through more than a four-year degree. The ﬁgure also shows the curvilinear relationship between age and participation in work-related education. The youngest respondents, aged 16 to 25, have a 16% probability of participation, whereas the peak level of 24% is observed for those aged 36 to 45. The estimated probability of participation falls rapidly to about 2% for individuals over the age of 65. Although adjusting for SES boosts the participation rates slightly for individuals in the two oldest age groups, the overall pattern remains unchanged. Participation in personal development classes. Both postsecondary credential programs and work-related education are likely directed toward instrumental ends, frequently the enhancement of one’s labor market standing. The same cannot be claimed for participation in personal development classes, which I argue are more expressive than instrumental. The lack of longitudinal data precludes examining the hypothesis that participation in such courses is associated with the increasing institutionalization of the self in U.S. society (see, e.g. Meyer, 1986), but it is certainly possible. Table 4 shows the determinants of participation in personal development courses. For the ﬁrst time, Eq. 1 displays signiﬁcant variations in participation across regions of the country, with higher rates of participation in the West than in other regions. Women are substantially more likely than men to participate in personal development classes, and whites and Blacks have higher rates of participation than Hispanics and members of other races. Overall, participation in personal development classes is much less predictable than participation in postsecondary credential programs or work-related education. The Cox-Snell pseudo-R2 for Eq. 1 is just 0.055, and it rises only slightly to 0.059 when socioeconomic achievements are added in Eq. 2. Equation 1 shows evidence of a Matthew effect on participation in personal development classes. The primary contrast is between those who have attended some college and those who have not, although the trend is monotonic across the ordinal categories. The odds of participation are 81% higher for high school graduates than for non-graduates, and they are three to four times greater among those who have attended college than among individuals with less than 12 years of schooling. Participation in personal development classes is not as age-graded as participation in postsecondary credential programs or work-related education.

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Educational Participation Across the Life Course

Table 4.

345

Determinants of Participation in Personal Development Classes. (1)

(2)

b

Intercept

⫺2.885

Northeast South Midwest

⫺0.403

Sex (1 = female) Black, non-Hispanic Hispanic Other races, non-Hispanic Age Age Age Age Age

26⫺35 36⫺45 46⫺55 56⫺65 66 and older

Exp(b)

*** *** ⫺0.230 ***

0.67 0.78 0.80

0.573 ***

1.77

0.034

1.04 0.71 0.73

⫺0.254

⫺0.340

*** ⫺0.312 ** ⫺0.214

** ** ⫺0.327 *** ⫺0.469 *** ⫺0.593 *** ⫺0.239

0.595 1.112 1.267 1.305 1.463

Married Separated or divorced Widowed Children 6⫺18 only At least one child under 6

0.282 *** 0.130 0.073 0.067 0.133 *

*** *** ⫺0.222 ***

0.66 0.78 0.80

1.01 1.00 0.99

0.575 ***

1.78

1.00

0.078

1.08 0.75 0.76

0.96 0.95 0.97

0.80 0.77 0.70 0.65 0.62

1.00 1.03 1.03 0.96 0.88

*** *** *** *** ***

1.68 2.70 3.08 3.09 3.62

1.08 1.13 1.15 1.19 1.19

1.28 1.17 1.10 1.06 1.16

1.04 0.97 0.98 1.01 0.98

***

⫺0.408 ⫺0.250

⫺0.290

*** ⫺0.280 **

0.81 0.79 0.72 0.63 0.55

⫺0.217

1.81 3.04 3.55 3.69 4.32

0.519 0.992 1.125 1.130 1.286

1.33 1.14 1.076 1.069 1.143

0.246 ** 0.155 * 0.096 0.060 0.152 *

Household income ($1,000s) Own home (1 = yes) Professional/managerial Service, sales or support Skilled trades Unskilled work Cox-Snell Pseudo-R2

Proportional Reduction in Oddsa

⫺3.069

***

12 years of schooling Some college Two-year degree Four-year degree Graduate school

Exp(b)

b

** ** ⫺0.352 *** ⫺0.430 *** ⫺0.470 *** ⫺0.268

0.004 0.012 0.153 0.217 0.270 ⫺0.187 0.055

0.059

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Proportional reduction in odds = exp(b1 ⫺ b2).

a

345

*** *** *** *** ***

*** * *** * *

1.00 1.01 1.17 1.24 1.31 0.83

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

346

AARON M. PALLAS

The participation rates are highest among the youngest age group, ages 16 to 25, and are progressively lower among older age groups. But the differences across age groups are not nearly as dramatic as those observed for credential programs or work-related education. The most extreme contrast, pitting the odds of those over the age of 65 participating against the odds of those aged 16 to 25, shows that the odds of participation among the oldest group are about onehalf of the odds of participation among the youngest group. Adding socioeconomic achievements to the equation does not change the picture appreciably. The effects of schooling are attenuated slightly, but there is still a sharp contrast between college-goers and those with 12 years of schooling or less. From this we conclude that the Matthew effect on participation in personal development classes cannot be explained by the socioeconomic advantages of the more-educated. These advantages persist net of income, home ownership, and work status. Nor is the age effect on participation in personal development classes disrupted by the addition of socioeconomic controls. Figure 4 represents these relationships graphically. There are two inﬂection points for the effects of educational attainment on the probability of participating in personal development courses. First, individuals who have not completed high school have an estimated 9% probability of participating in personal development classes, which is substantially less than the probability of participation among those who have obtained more schooling. Second, terminal high school graduates have an estimated probability of participation in personal development courses of 14%, less than those who have attended some college or obtained a college degree. But there is little difference in the estimated probability of participation among those with some college (22%) to more than a four-year degree (29%). Thus, education matters, but beyond the threshold of attending some college, obtaining more formal education does not typically result in a much higher likelihood of participation in personal development courses. Moreover, as noted above, the effect of educational attainment on the probability of participation is not substantially mediated by socioeconomic status, as the estimated probabilities of participation fall only slightly when SES is controlled. The variations in personal development course participation among age groups shown in Fig. 4 also are notable. With the exception of the low participation rates of individuals over the age of 65, there is little consistent evidence of variation in personal development course participation attributable to age. Individuals age 16 to 25 have an estimated probability of participation of 22%, whereas those in the oldest have an estimated 13% probability of participation. This is a surprisingly high rate of participation, particularly when

111

111

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111

Educational Participation Across the Life Course

347 Fig. 4.

Total and Net Effects of Age and Educational Attainment on Participation in Personal Development Classes. 347

0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0111

348

AARON M. PALLAS

Table 5.

Determinants of Participation in Any Adult Education. (1) b

Intercept

⫺0.661

Northeast South Midwest

⫺0.212

Sex (1 = female) Black, non-Hispanic Hispanic Other races, non-Hispanic Age Age Age Age Age

26⫺35 36⫺45 46⫺55 56⫺65 66 and older

12 years of schooling Some college Two-year degree Four-year degree Graduate school Married Separated or divorced Widowed Children 6⫺18 only At least one child under 6

*** ⫺0.123 * ⫺0.129 *

0.81 0.88 0.88

0.355 ***

1.43

⫺0.051 ⫺0.280

*** ⫺0.239 * ⫺0.751

*** 0.80 0.89 ⫺0.122 0.89

1.01 0.99 0.99

0.411 *** 1.51

0.95

0.055

1.06 0.86 0.86

0.90 0.88 0.91

0.47 0.39 0.32 0.20 0.15

1.00 1.05 1.03 0.84 0.60

1.46 3.44 3.87 3.53 4.58

1.20 1.30 1.43 1.63 1.72

0.97 0.99 0.81 1.10 0.94

1.06 0.96 0.95 1.00 0.94

⫺0.155

1.76 4.48 5.52 5.75 7.86

0.378 1.234 1.353 1.262 1.521 ⫺0.035

*

1.02 0.95 0.77 1.11 0.88

0.101 ⫺0.125

*

⫺0.149

*** *** *** *** ***

0.020

Proportional Reduction in Oddsa

***

⫺0.115

⫺0.755

⫺0.048 ⫺0.260

0.95 0.76 0.79

Exp(b)

⫺0.224

0.47 0.41 0.33 0.17 0.09

*** *** ⫺1.122 *** ⫺1.769 *** ⫺2.392 *** ⫺0.884

0.563 1.499 1.708 1.750 2.062

b

⫺1.355

***

Household income ($1,000s) Own home (1 = yes) Professional/managerial Service, sales or support Skilled trades Unskilled work Cox-Snell Pseudo-R2

(2) Exp(b)

*** *** ⫺1.150 *** ⫺1.594 *** ⫺1.877 *** ⫺0.937

⫺0.009 ⫺0.211

0.098 ⫺0.058

*** *** *** *** ***

0.008 *** 1.01 0.96 0.935 *** 2.55 0.760 *** 2.14 0.702 *** 2.02 0.196 ** 1.22

⫺0.046

0.199

0.222

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Proportional reduction in odds = exp(b1 ⫺ b2).

a

compared to the participation rates in credential programs or work-related education of those over 65. The pattern is essentially unchanged when SES is taken into account.

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Participation in any form of adult education. The logistic regressions predicting participation in any form of adult education are shown in Table 5. One might expect the results to resemble some kind of weighted average of the preceding results, and indeed this seems to be the case. Equation 1 shows that participation rates are higher among women and in the West region of the country than among men and those in other regions. Moreover, whites and Blacks have higher rates of participation than Hispanics and members of other races. Overall, there is strong evidence of a Matthew effect, with the odds of participating in any form of adult education nearly eight times greater for those who have completed more than a four-year college degree than for those who did not complete high school. This equation also documents a sharp decline in the probability of participation in any form of adult education among older age groups. When socioeconomic success is added to the equation, the Matthew effect is reduced somewhat, especially at the higher levels of education. Comparing Eq. 2 of Table 5 with Eq. 1, we see that the differences among education categories are reduced, such that the odds of participating in any form of adult education are now 4.5 times greater, rather than eight times greater, for those who have completed more than a four-year college degree than for those who did not complete high school. These are still substantial effects, however, and I conclude that only about one-quarter of the Matthew effect on participation in any form of adult education can be explained by the socioeconomic advantages of the more-educated. Equation 2 of Table 5 also indicates that the age effects on participation in any form of adult education remain sizeable even when socioeconomic success is taken into account. The gap between the youngest and the oldest age groups narrows somewhat, but it is still the case that individuals aged 16 to 25 are much more likely to participate in some form of adult education than those over the age of 55. This ﬁnding is driven primarily by age differences in participation in postsecondary credential programs, as the age differences in work-related education and especially in participation in personal development classes are not terribly large. Figure 5 displays the estimated net probability of participation in any form of adult education by educational attainment and age. These estimated probabilities are, of course, higher than those in any of the preceding ﬁgures. Even high school noncompleters have an estimated probability of participation of 18%. This probability climbs to 64% among the most highly educated (i.e. those with more than four years of college). Although the participation rate for terminal high school graduates is estimated at 28%, attending some college is the apparent catapult for participation in adult education, as the estimated participation rates for those with some college climb to 50% and higher. 349

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Total and Net Effects of Age and Educational Attainment on Participation in any Adult Education.

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Fig. 5.

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Figure 5 also displays the variation in net participation in any form of adult education across age groups. Participation rates are highest among the young, with approximately two-thirds of 16- to 25-year-olds participating in some form of adult education. The rates fall with increasing age, but they remain surprisingly high in the oldest age group. The estimated probability of participation in some form of adult education among those over the age of 65 is 15%, and controlling for socioeconomic success, this estimated probability rises to 23%. If the deﬁnitions of adult education on which I rely are reasonable, there is far more education occurring throughout the life course than is typically acknowledged.

CONCLUSIONS The basic ﬁndings of the paper can be summarized succinctly. First, there is substantial evidence for a Matthew effect in education. For each of the forms of adult education I consider, those with the least schooling have the lowest probability of participation, and those with the most schooling have the highest participation probability. Put differently, those who are already “rich” by virtue of attending college do get richer. The differences among those who have some college education are, however, generally much smaller than the differences between the college-educated and non-college-educated. Second, the extent to which this Matthew effect can be explained by the socioeconomic advantages of the more-educated depends on the form of adult education. Educational attainment effects on participation in postsecondary credential programs are not mediated by socioeconomic status, and the effects on participation in personal development courses remain large even when socioeconomic status is controlled. In contrast, educational attainment effects on participation in work-related education are substantially mediated by socioeconomic success. The effects of educational attainment on participation in any form of adult education are partially mediated by the socioeconomic advantages accruing to those with more schooling. How might we explain these different patterns? The answer may lie in the lack of continuity in forms of capital. Earlier I suggested that some of the previous attempts to explore the Matthew effect did not adhere to the terms of the original parable, in which a servant with a large quantity of gold, a form of economic capital, received even more gold, and the servant with a very small quantity of gold had even that small amount taken away from him. I have operationalized the Matthew effect in terms of the likelihood of participation in adult education, a form of human capital, among individuals with varying levels of formal schooling, also a form of human capital. 351

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But, as I have already suggested, these forms of human capital may not be equivalent. Human capital for economic productivity is not the same as human capital for human development. In the U.S. education system, the number of years of schooling completed corresponds roughly to an individual’s knowledge and cognitive skills. Knowledge and cognitive skills, whether general or speciﬁc, are valuable to employers because they can increase a ﬁrm’s productivity. Thus participation in formal postsecondary credential programs and in work-related education might represent a kind of continuity, because they are likely to cultivate knowledge and skills that have some value in the labor market. This is usually not true of personal development classes, particularly when formal credential programs and work-related education are excluded from consideration, as the design of NHES:95 dictates. Most personal development classes do not inﬂuence the development of knowledge and skills that have a market value. For this reason, many social scientists would not construe enrolling in such classes as a human capital investment.10 But a focus on learning as the purpose of education, rather than on the economic value of that learning, leads to a different conclusion. There is some danger in misinterpreting the import of these ﬁndings, owing both to the crudeness of the measures of educational participation and to the difﬁculty of disentangling age effects from cohort effects. Only more sensitive measurement and additional waves of data some years apart can provide the appropriate purchase. Certainly the prevalence, and salience, of adult education, especially personal development classes, has risen substantially over the past 50 years. Yet there is so little historical data on nonformal adult education that we cannot assess the magnitude of these trends. Will the expansion of adult education, and the further institutionalization of the self in modern society, transform the meaning of formal educational programs and credentials to incorporate both economic productivity and human development? If so, will the Matthew effect persist into the future?

NOTES 1. Although Coleman had primary responsibility for writing the report, my understanding is that he took pains to refer to the product as the Coleman-Campbell report. 2. Note the evidence of a Matthew effect in the way that I refer to this co-authored work as Kerckhoff’s. 3. Crystal and Shea (1990) suggest that this shift may actually exacerbate income differences, and thus reﬂect a cumulative dis/advantage process. 4. A watchful reader might point out that in the parable, the middle servant obtained only additional responsibility for his efforts, not additional gold.

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5. In the Elman and O’Rand (1998) study, school attendance of more than two courses or enrollment for more than six weeks is coded as educational reentry, but no data are gathered for individuals who have not completed a high school diploma or its equivalent, who represent a substantial share of the midlife individuals examined in the study. The survey thus picks up relatively intense participation among those with relatively high levels of initial education. 6. The estimates of participation in English as a Second Language and adult basic education are probably too low, due to the exclusion criteria in the interview protocol. 7. Note that this excludes adult basic education. 8. I speculate that this pattern reﬂects the desire of individuals with some college to reach a natural termination point in their schooling by obtaining a two- or four-year degree. In contrast, individuals with a four-year degree have already attained a natural termination point. 9. For example, the observed proportion of individuals aged 16 to 25 enrolled in a credential program is 0.45, which corresponds to a logit of ⫺0.201. Without SES controls, the estimated effect of being age 26 to 35 is ⫺1.369, which when added to the baseline logit yields a logit of ⫺1.570. Using the formula, p = (expX␤)/(1 + expX␤), the implied probability of participation in a credential program for individuals aged 26 to 35 is 0.17. Note that by deﬁnition, the estimated participation probabilities for the reference category are the same whether or not SES is controlled. 10. There also are differences in the social relations of credential programs and the social relations of both work-related education and personal development classes. Although attending college is not compulsory, many who attend experience it as compulsory; whereas work-related education may or may not be compulsory, and personal development classes rarely are. Moreover, credential programs have different evaluation systems than work-related education and personal development classes, which may not assign grades, or otherwise sort and select individuals for future opportunities, positions, and rewards. As someone said recently at a conference I attended, “Nobody fails a bar mitzvah class.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A previous version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., August 2000. My thanks to Giovanni Arrighi, Mel Kohn, and Anna Neumann for their helpful advice. This research was supported by the National Center for Education Statistics. The conclusions herein are the author’s, and no ofﬁcial endorsement should be inferred.

REFERENCES Becker, G. 1964. Human capital. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1999). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bradburn, E. M., Moen, P., & Dempster-McClain, D. (1995). Women’s return to school following the transition to motherhood. Social Forces, 73, 1517–1551.

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Dannefer, D. (1987). Aging as intracohort differentiation: Accentuation, the Matthew effect, and the life course. Sociological Forum, 2, 211–236. Elman, C., & O’Rand, A. M. (1998). Midlife work pathways and educational entry. Research on Aging, 20, 475–505. Felmlee, D. (1988). Returning to school and women’s occupational attainment. Sociology of Education, 61, 29–41. Kerckhoff, A. C. (1993). Diverging pathways: Social structure and career deﬂections. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kerckhoff, A. C., & Glennie, E. (1999). The Matthew effect in American education. Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization, 12, 35–66. Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew effect in science. Science, 159, 56–63. Meyer, J. W. (1986). The self and the life course: Institutionalization and its effects. In: A. B. Sørensen, F. Weinert & L. R. Sherrod (Eds), Human development and the life course: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 199–216). New York: Hillsdale. O’Rand, A. M., & Henretta, J. C. (1999). Age and inequality: Diverse pathways through later life. Boulder, CO: Westview. Schultz, T. W. (1961). Investment in human capital. American Economic Review, 51, 1–17.

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13. THE LIFE COURSE AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND A SOCIALIZING RESOURCE IN MODERN MEDICINE Dana Rosenfeld and Eugene B. Gallagher

INTRODUCTION A central and early sociological ﬁnding (i.e. Durkheim’s pre-contractual solidarity) is that social control is best achieved not through physical force but through normative suasion.1 Thus, the most effective way of producing compliant and regulated bodies (see Turner, 1996, p. 38)2, a project essential to the social order in general and to the medical enterprise in particular, is by naturalizing the social order – persuasively presenting the current social system as natural and thus equally beneﬁcial to all its members. Civil institutions as well as state ones undertake this project. Even medicine, whose dedication to the welfare of the patient is widely assumed, legitimates and strengthens the social order. Waitzkin (1989) argued that, far from being apolitical, medical interactions are contexts for the transmission of capitalist ideologies (e.g. the premise that productivity and the ability to work are the essential criteria for health), and are thus resources for social control. Others (see Foster, 1989; Porter, 1990; Todd, 1989) have shown how stereotypical images of women structure medical interactions. Indeed, in Turner’s (1996, p. 212) words, “Medical advice to women is . . . typically based upon taken-for-granted

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assumptions about normal life-styles for women and these assumptions are ultimately grounded in notions related to the normality of the nuclear family and the domestic role of women.” Naturalizing medicine’s practices and policies is, of course, central to its claims to political neutrality, scientiﬁc objectivity, and effectiveness. Medicine goes to some length to convince people that their maladies are due to personal and/or biological circumstances, not to social context or the conduct of the medical agents who diagnose and treat them.3 This leads to the claim that it is in the interests of their health and in accordance with “nature” for them to become compliant patients, embracing the practices and hierarchies embedded in the medical encounter. The tools used to produce compliance with the latter are situated and complex. They include locating the failure of medical regimens in the patient’s own “health behaviors”; giving primacy to the medical “voice” over the voice of the lifeworld (Mishler, 1984; Todd, 1993, p. 275); privileging technological ﬁndings over patients’ claims, which are, by deﬁnition, devalued (Anspach, 1988); and the differential use of conversational structures that marginalizes the patient in interactions between the patient on the one hand and various medical agents and technologies on the other (Todd, 1993). Medicine is thus suffused by ideological and practical concerns that reproduce overarching social structures and its own institutional needs. In addition to the individualistic and conservative programs listed above, it is evident that the life course – in the West, a recent construction composed of lives beginning at birth, proceeding through fixed stages, and ending at death (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000) – is a central interpretive and organizing resource for the production and naturalization of both the current social system and the patient compliance upon which it heavily depends. As Habermas (1984) has noted, modern medicine has colonized the life course, as medical specialties have increasingly come to be divided along life course lines: prenatal, obstetrics, neonatal, pediatrics, adolescent medicine, “general medicine” (for the middle-aged, who constitute the mean, in the biological as well as the social sciences) and geriatrics. Within “general medicine” and OB/GYN, of course, the life course functions as a central organizing premise, as women’s health is reduced to the waxing and waning of their reproductive potentials. (See Jordonova, 1999; Martin, 1992.) Indeed, the very criteria for health are age-stratified, with child health measured by energy and playfulness, the equation of productivity with health applied to the middle-aged, and the health of elders measured by mental acuity and self-sufficiency, but not by productivity. As Illich (pp. 44–45) wrote in 1976,

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The medicalization of life . . . also takes form in iatrogenic labeling of the ages of man. This labeling becomes part of a culture when laymen accept it as a trivial verity that people require medical ministrations for the simple fact that they are unborn, newborn, infants, in their climacteric, or old. When this happens, life turns from a succession of different stages of health into a series of periods each requiring different therapies . . .. [T]he environment comes to be seen as a mechanical womb and the health professional as a bureaucrat who assigns each to his proper corner.

In this chapter, we seek to redress life course research’s general neglect of two overlapping projects of modern medicine. The ﬁrst is its socialization of the actor into the life course (composed, in the medical gaze, of discrete and unique stages and states, beginning with a burst of growth and development, peaking at midlife, and sliding towards an old age deﬁned, in Estes’ (1989, p. 102) words, “in terms of the relatively inevitable decline, disability, degeneration, and death.”4) The second is its use of the life course as a resource for socializing actors into dependent and compliant patients. In keeping with post-structuralist approaches to regulation and social control, we regard medicine as a people-processing institution whose goal is, inter alia, to produce a person who accepts the logic and practices of modern medicine. Our basic approach is social constructionist; that is, we view what is taken by everyday as well as scientiﬁc thinking to be ‘objective facts’ – for example, the effectiveness and superiority of modern medicine, and most relevant here, the differential distribution of competence across the life course – as the product of interpretive activity in speciﬁc contexts. (See Holstein & Gubrium, pp. 31–34.) Viewed in this way, interactions between medical agents (which include parents and other people in relative authority imposing medical regimens on others) and patients are not neutral arenas for the application of objective truth. Rather, they are contexts in which the relative incompetence of children and elders is produced – relative, that is, to middle-aged adults on the one hand and the medical enterprise on the other. Recent research has demonstrated that, during the years that modern medicine established its hegemony, children and elders have been constructed as – and socialized into – dependence.5 We offer recent work on the social construction (tied to constructions of the life course) of childhood and old age as dependent states as a fruitful way to understand the context in which patients are socialized to adopt the quiescent position that medicine has constructed for them. We then introduce the concept of “life coursing,” which we deﬁne as using the typiﬁed life course as an interpretive resource for human actions and states, and apply it to existing research to show how the equation of childhood and old age with dependence is used in medical interactions to achieve the two projects outlined above. Speciﬁcally, we examine how the life course is invoked 359

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and elaborated in medical interactions, ﬁrst with children, then with elders. Finally, after summarizing our key ﬁndings, we suggest a course of future research to test and expand the concept of life coursing. It is important to emphasize that, while life coursing is a distinctive resource for interpreting human behavior, it is only one of a series of techniques used in medical encounters to marginalize patients and ensure their compliance. Life coursing thus has much in common with the devices and resources that sociologists in the interactionist tradition have shown to structure interactions and intersubjectivity. An example is Maynard’s (1991) well-cited article “Interaction and asymmetry in clinical discourse.” In seeking to explain “the apparent suppression of patient or client experience in favor of a clinical perspective” (p. 450), Maynard approaches the asymmetry typical of medical encounters as an interactive achievement rather than an imposition (p. 449). Maynard writes that “conventional explanations of the asymmetry phenomenon” (p. 454) (professional authority, socio-political structures and communicational structures) fail to capture the complex dynamics that produce it. The ﬁrst two (macro-level) explanations fail to consider the fact that “Parties to the interview constitute and enact the asymmetry in clinical discourse and thereby produce and reproduce the features of social structure” (p. 457). Micro-analytic research that examines communicational structures constructs an artiﬁcial opposition between the asymmetrical nature of medical encounters on the one hand and the seamless, artful accomplishment of symmetry in ordinary conversation on the other. Maynard suggests that “asymmetry and other features of clinical discourse, rather than ﬂowing solely from the imposition of institutional authority, derive partly from participants’ indigenous resolution of interactive problems that transcend the doctor-patient dialogue” (p. 449). In other words, techniques used in ordinary interaction are adopted and adapted in medical encounters in such a way as to achieve a smooth interaction while reproducing the hierarchical doctor-patient relationship. Our argument is both similar to and different from Maynard’s. While the conversational device he describes (“the perspective-display series”) can variously be used to produce symmetry or asymmetry, life-coursing is inherently asymmetrical in its content and in its consequences, because the version of the life course it invokes is, in the West, a hierarchical one, with certain positions privileged over others. In its invocation, then, the Western life course produces asymmetry, in everyday as well as in institutional encounters. Life coursing is not, however, the only way that asymmetrical relations are produced in medical encounters, just as the device Maynard describes is not the only one used to produce symmetry or asymmetry in interactions. Life coursing informs, grounds and legitimates the situated objectiﬁcation and marginalization of

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children and elders embedded in the medical encounter, but in no way monopolizes them. As we have noted (see above), many other tools are used to produce asymmetry and hierarchy in medical interactions.

THE STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL DEPENDENCE OF CHILDREN AND ELDERS The Western treatment of children and elders as inherently dependent is by no means universal, nor has it existed throughout history. It has its roots in Enlightenment philosophy, the industrialization and urbanization of the early modern period, and the modern medical system that emerged from them. Put simply, these two groups have been constructed as dependent and medically at risk because they became, through the exigencies of industrialization, problematic populations – problematic because, having been effectively banished from the public world of work, they constituted a threat to the dominant Western tenet of productivity and work. In this section, we summarize recent work on the historical roots of this construction by way of background for subsequent sections on the medicalization of childhood and old age and the life coursing that occurs in medical interactions. In the interests of brevity, we limit ourselves to Hockey and James’ (1993) path-breaking work, which builds on synopses of key historical work on childhood and old age, personhood, and individualism, and direct the reader to Aries (1962), James and Prout (1990) and Cole (1992) for more background on the history of childhood and old age, respectively. Childhood and Old Age as Dependent States In Growing Up and Growing Old: Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course, Hockey and James (1993) tackle the question of why the equation of childhood and old age with dependency is exclusive to the West. They conclude that this construction emerged from a combination of unique historical circumstances and extant Western cultural metaphors that we use to make sense of the life course. In the West, the recent social categories of old age and childhood emerged from the shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrialized one: by the end of the 19th century, children and elders were no longer seen as workers. The reason, the authors argue, lies in industrialization’s creation of a middle class that, lacking the social status of the aristocracy and the landed gentry, appropriated conspicuous upper-class symbols such as the family mansion, a house-bound wife, and domestic servants to distinguish themselves from the poor. Middle class women were conﬁned to the home as mothers and 361

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house managers to symbolize the fact that the middle-class husband could afford to support a wife on his own, and took over the philanthropic commitment of the rising middle class to encourage working class women and children to withdraw from work as well (a process completed by making the primary education of children compulsory). Women were thus both product and agents of the move to make the workplace the exclusive domain of men. The ‘family wage’ made men capable of supporting a home in which women could look after ‘frail’ individuals (children and the sick), and new labor laws forced elders out of the work force. Thus, by the mid to late 19th century, women, children, and elders were cast as unproductive (pp. 53–54). Childhood, meanwhile, was being constructed as a unique phase of life characterized by innocence and vulnerable dependency. The philosopher John Locke rejected Protestantism’s conception of the child as innately sinful and requiring strict discipline in favor of the child as a tabula rasa best molded by discipline and training. Rousseau, in turn, rejected this depiction in favor of the child as an innocent best served by an uninterrupted movement through natural and distinct developmental stages. Childhood thus emerged as a state of innocence akin to the habitus of the “noble savage” whose harmony with nature was pre-reﬂective (Hockey & James, pp. 65–68); in Aries’ (1965, p. 119) words, Rousseau’s work associated “childhood with primitivism and irrationalism or prelogicism.” When elders were forced into economic dependence, the association of dependency with childhood provided the metaphoric grounding for understanding and treating elders as child-like with unique characteristics and needs. As a result of the increasing age and work segregation of the time, elders resumed children’s status as dependent, one they had gradually relinquished as they became adults. The implications of this construction for the social worth of children and elders are far-reaching. In the West, childhood has increasingly come to signify differences between children and adults, rather than their similarities. The child is idealized, set apart as “other,” has a special nature, and is associated with nature; the child is innocent, and is therefore vulnerable and dependent. As a result, Western childhood has become a period of culturally legitimated dependency, which has created a separation between childhood and adulthood6 and which naturalizes childhood dependency through the “scientiﬁc” discourse of developmental psychology (p. 140). Most signiﬁcant for our argument, the authors cite Holt’s (1975) statement that Western childhood is seen as a period of lack of responsibility, with rights to protection and training but not to autonomy. It is this cultural legitimization that the new social order required of the newly-dependent elderly, and which it provided by equating them with children; as we will show, this equation can be, and often is, used by medical

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agents to structure the lives of elders, who are still tacitly viewed as illegitimately dependent. Constructing old people as child-like makes their dependency acceptable, and conceals the fact that it has less to do with innate aspects of the aging process than with their continued banishment from the work force. The ideological crisis arising from excluding elders from the work force is a continuous challenge to Western norms. Indeed, according to Kohli (1988), the need to justify the existence of a non-working adult population has continued throughout the late twentieth century. Writing that work in capitalist society is not only an economic and life-world phenomenon but a symbolic status deﬁning the “cultural unity of modern western societies as well as identity of its members”, the author (p. 381) asks how “a society uphold[s] its guiding moral orientation in the face of a group which by structural reasons is excluded from it.” Kohli notes that gerontology’s suggested solutions have variously centered on disengagement and activity (the latter including a form of the “busy ethic” as formulated by Ekerdt in 1986) and on depicting the transition to retirement as one to “a new but positively valued state” (p. 385).

LIFE COURSING In Constructing the Life Course (2000, p. 1), Holstein and Gubrium explain that “the constructionist approach is unconventional in that it frames the life course as an interactional accomplishment, a social form that people themselves interpretively produce and use as they make sense of their everyday lives.” In everyday as well as institutional encounters, “the typical course of life . . . provides the standard against which the ups and downs of daily living are represented” (p. 52). Thus, Whether it is medical or psychiatric professionals determining the onset of senile dementia or ordinary parents deciding if their children are old enough to view a particular movie, individuals are constantly conjuring up images for understanding or as standards for comparison . . .. While age is certainly an important feature of most life course constructions, chronological age alone doesn’t determine where one meaningfully stands in relation to the passage of time. The same man can be called a “young Turk” in the corporate boardroom, yet be “over the hill” on the tennis court. Each description conveys a sense of where the man stands in a developmental sequence relative to others (Holstein & Gubrium, p. 3, emphasis added).

For the purposes of our analysis, we coin the term “life coursing” to describe the practice of interpreting actors’ qualities, actions, and states by reference to their location in the life course. Thus the psychiatrist who uses “age or life course location [as] the basis for interpreting a person’s behavior as seriously 363

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‘inappropriate’ and hence psychologically unhealthy” (p. 80) is engaged in life coursing, as is the teacher who tags a student as deﬁcient because she lags behind the standards set for children her age. Indeed, the person who declares a teenager’s extreme political position to be a function of her immaturity, or the extra-marital sexual activities of a middle-aged man to constitute a “mid-life crisis”, or the dress and demeanor of a twelve-year old to be “promiscuous” while deeming acceptable the same dress and demeanor on the part of a college student, is engaging in life coursing, because each characterization relies on a sense of where each actor, in Holstein and Gubrium’s words, “stands in a developmental sequence relative to others.” (Other examples are the belief that teenage marriages are doomed to failure while long-term relationships among the middle-aged should be formalized in marriage, and condemning teenage and elderly sexuality while celebrating that of middle-aged adults.) Life coursing is a sense-making activity which categorizes others’ actions by comparing them to the idealized and practical actions of others in the same “point” in the life course, and by interpreting them by reference to the typiﬁed future their life course location indicates. Thus, the child who becomes increasingly independent and active is, while perhaps a bit “off time”, at least headed in the right direction, while an elderly person increasing her activity may be seen as ﬂying in the face of the “natural” tendency of elders to “slow down.” While life coursing can be observed in a countless number of settings, we are most concerned with documenting life coursing in medical interactions.7 Life Coursing in Medical Interactions The Medicalization of Childhood The construction of children as innocent, dependent, and in need of supervision and protective control was concomitant with the rise of the medical model. The result was the increasing deﬁnition of children as delicate in nature and/or best understood and overseen by medical agents. While the roots of the medical model predated the industrial era, the 19th century provided new opportunities for this model to extend its control into the domestic sphere. Turner (1996, pp. 162–163) points to Jacques Donzelot’s (1979) The Policing of Families, which sought to “show that, faced by the crisis of an unregulated urban working class, new alliances were formed in nineteenth-century France between medicine and the household, and thus between the doctor and the wife.” That able-bodied peasants became pauperized as they moved to the city “converted them into a political threat and undermined their natural healthiness,” problems whose solution involved

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the location of medical knowledge within the family and the reorganization of the family along lines suggested by the domestic sciences. This involved a medicalization of society through the agency of the reconstituted family, namely the weakening of traditional patriarchy by an alliance between mothers and doctors (p. 163).8

In addition, Conrad and Schneider (1992) note that children’s decreasing power, and their new reality as a “special class of people: innocent, dependent, and not fully responsible for their actions” (Conrad, p. 169), were both the products and the focus of the 19th century child welfare movement, which undermined parental authority and replaced it with state and church control of children. As the latter waned in relation to the increasingly powerful medical enterprise, “[m]edicine, in the form of the family physician, pediatrician, or medical clinic, [became] a signiﬁcant family resource and a source of ‘authority’ ” (ibid., p. 169). To a great extent, medicine owes its growing deﬁnitional and actual control of child welfare to the fact that children’s constructed dependence inspires “a protective response from society” (ibid., p. 170), in the context of which medicine, with its preventive mandate, resonates as a protective institution as well. In the authors’ words (p. 170), “the child-protective response of society aligns with the protective-preventive response of medicine.” Through this enduring alliance, parental and medical control seek to compensate for children’s presumed inability to handle their own health and development. The family has, however, gradually lost its equal footing with medicine. While medicine now “works with” the family to regulate child health, medical agents can, with the help of the state, supersede parental decisions, as can be seen in recent court decisions to force medical measures on children over the protest of their parents9 (although, admittedly, not necessarily without resistance.) Indeed, the history of Western medicine and public health is, in part, the history of compulsory immunization, medication, and sterilization (see Lupton, 1995). The result is a complex ﬁeld in which parents and caretakers, having been ‘deputized’ as medical agents subject to state and medical control, negotiate between children’s needs on the one hand and medical regimens on the other. Yet parents-as-medical-agents do not act as neutral arbiters between these two ﬁelds. Rather, in the course of tending to their children’s health, they reproduce the logic, mandate, and hierarchies of biomedicine and the constructed, binary opposition between adult competence and childhood incompetence. (The latter opposition clearly reproduces hierarchical relations within the family and between the family and institution of medicine.) This delicate alliance is not only historically evident, but is observable in medical encounters in which doctors, parents, and, to a far lesser extent, children, negotiate the child’s health. 365

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Medical Interactions with Children In their recent review of research into doctor-parent-child communication in medical encounters, Tates and Meeuwesen (2001) note the long-standing concern with the asymmetrical nature of doctor-patient interactions, and state that “In the case of the child patient, the issue of asymmetry is expected to play a crucial part, because of the child’s position of double asymmetry, with the physician embodying both institutional and adult authority” (p. 840). Their review uncovers three overlapping phenomena centering on children’s systematic marginalization in these encounters. First, despite some variation in “the reported contribution of the parent and the child (parent: 26–39%; child: 2–14%) . . . the conversational contribution of the child is very small or even absent” (p. 840). Second, the research found “remarkable differences in the doctor’s role depending on who was addressed” (p. 844). The doctor showed “the commonly described physician role proﬁle, characterized by a good deal of instrumental behavior” when interacting with the parent, while limiting his or her “interaction with the child . . . to affective behavior, such as social behavior and joking” (p. 844). Thus, “Whereas, in interaction with the parent the doctor mainly shows instrumental behaviour [sic], the communication between doctor and child seems to be restricted to the affective domain” (p. 848). Finally, the parent’s role in marginalizing the child is key. The studies the authors reviewed “reported the physician’s contribution to the consultation at about 60%,” a ﬁnding “consistent with general studies on doctor-patient communication, with patients contributing 40% to the conversation” (p. 847). The variation in children’s contributions to the encounter (see above) “obviously seems to occur at the expense of parental contribution to the conversation” (p. 847). This can be seen in the fact that “The three studies that paid attention to the structural aspects of doctor-parent-child communication revealed that in terms of turn-taking, it was mainly the parent who was responsible for excluding the child from medical conversation by interfering in 52% of the turns the doctor directed to the child” (p. 846). Because these practices are central instances of life coursing in medical interaction, we offer a fuller explication of two ethnographic studies of medical encounters with children, in which these practices variously appear. The ﬁrst is an ethnography of these encounters in a clinic, the second one of child-parent medical interactions in the home. Although different, both are settings in which medical life coursing occurs. In his 1982 book Children in Clinics: A Sociological Analysis of Medical Work with Children, Davis notes that medical encounters with children are problematic because, from the perspective of medical agents, children “made

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poor patients.” They weren’t just “poor versions of adults,” lacking the interactional skills and stock of knowledge essential to optimal behavior from the perspective of the doctors, but “inhabited a world of their own with its own logic and rules which the worker sought to grasp to make that child’s actions sensible” (p. 21). As a result, the normal form of medical encounters did not obtain, i.e. encounters where the patient turns up, competently presents symptoms, answers questions, and helps provide the necessary information for a diagnosis, however tentative. This assumes a background, normal, adult level of competence (p. 22).

To produce these encounters as normal, doctors could separate the children from their parents and observe them under “skilled total surveillance,” or get them to collaborate in the medical project, which was unlikely. Doctors therefore dispensed with this cooperation: “although in a formal sense the child was the ‘patient,’ most encounters proceeded by excluding children as far as possible, relegating them to minor players in a drama whose main characters were staff and parents or surrogates.” Children were still present, however, and because “they were not oriented to the encounter in the same way as the other participants” (p. 22), were a tacit threat to the other actors and to the goals of the encounter. Davis emphasizes the importance of this differential orientation, because a key criteria for “competent patient-hood” is the recognition “that some encounters are primarily concerned with medical matters and others are not,” a distinction children appeared incapable of making. This made the encounters difﬁcult, because children injected concerns that, from the point of view of the medical agents, were irrelevant. “Children lacked the skill to identify that there was a patient ‘role’ and that they were supposed to enact it” (p. 22), recognized neither the doctor’s role nor the interactional guidelines speciﬁc to doctor-patient interaction, and lacked the general interactional and conversational skills upon which all adult – and medical – interactions depend to run smoothly. Medical agents’ assumptions precluded children’s participation in the medical encounter as well, speciﬁcally the belief that children would not be able to know when they were sick: this, Davis explains (p. 24), “was a matter for legislation by others.” Parents were expected to apply their own stock of knowledge10 to determine their children’s health status. Thus the very structure and logic of medicine - and the common stock of knowledge that becomes available over time - produce children as incompetent. So do the structure and norms of the medical encounter, in the context of which children appear unfocused and, while the object of the encounter, a potential obstacle to the task at hand. Consequently, in the interactions Davis observed, 367

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Children were treated as actors rather like tourists, the mentally ill, or the old, considered to show some human characteristics but to be incompetent in certain key respects . . . they were treated as incapable of ‘patient-hood’, ‘the sick role’, and ‘doctor-patient interaction’, at least as sociologists have depicted them (p. 26).

Given the discord between children’s orientations to the medical encounter and that of the adult participants, the latter were required to manage the children in such a way as to achieve specific instrumental goals and maintain the logic and rituals of the encounter itself. Doctors used a number of techniques to do this. One was “the routine exclusion of children” (p. 30), most easily accomplished when parents were absent and “children could be treated as purely clinical material without any overt recognition of the child’s human status” (p. 30). When the parent was present, “doctors and parents proceeded by unspoken agreement to relegate them to non-participant status” (p. 30), which called on parents to speak for the children as “‘surrogate’ patients.” (This surrogacy was so key that, in the two cases the author observed of children arriving at the clinic alone, “the encounter was quickly terminated.”) Children were spoken to only at the start and end of the encounter, when the child was asked to perform a specific act, or to encourage the child to permit the doctor to examine her. In the rare instances when doctors spoke with children, “it was never about medical matters,” but centered on topics the doctors assumed the child was interested in; similarly, procedures were never explained, only described (as cold, painless, and the like). Another technique for exclusion was parents’ open discussion of the child’s private experiences and actions in the child’s presence, a practice that would resonate as rude and insulting in the case of an adult, publicly and formally demonstrates the child’s “exclusion from interaction,” and locates the child “firmly in a separate class of actors in front of whom normal civilities would be suspended” (p. 35). Parents cooperated in this exclusion as well, describing the child’s actions, symptoms, and projected responses to the doctors’ ministrations. “Children were rarely if ever directly consulted on these matters” (p. 34). Similarly, “the doctor’s summary diagnosis and prognosis was pitched at the parents, not the child. For if a child were to be made to understand, then explanation might take hours. Given a child’s limited understanding of the future, the prognosis was irrelevant to them” (p. 35). Davis’ work makes it evident that medical interactions between children, parents, and doctors reproduce the age-stratiﬁed standards of competence alluded to above. They also, of course, reproduce the superiority of medical knowledge over that of the parents, whose knowledge was seen as relevant only in its usefulness to present and future medical encounters.

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These messages inhere in medical encounters in the home as well. In “Difference and similarity: How children’s competence is constituted in illness and its treatment,” Pia Christensen (1998) expands on the growing literature on children and/in medicine to show that childhood incompetence is constructed by, and elaborated in, instances of childhood illness. While recent research has shown that children are indeed active participants in their health care when allowed,11 Christensen’s analysis of Danish ethnographic data demonstrates that “the hierarchical relationships of biomedicine” extend into the family, where children’s incompetence is “socially constructed and negotiated” in illness interactions, speciﬁcally therapeutic practices and the distribution of pharmaceuticals (p. 189). In a statement of particular relevance to this volume, the author asserts: “Through these practices children learn not only the instrumental and other contingencies of how to perform sickness in a particular, Danish, context but also how to enter into broad social relations concerned with age hierarchies” (Ibid., emphasis added). By declaring children unable to gauge their own health and illness by deﬁnition, these age hierarchies resonate with medicine’s refusal to grant patients’ own assessments equal ground with those of medical agents. Parents’ right to determine if a child is ill constructs the child in question as incompetent “as well as dependent, passive and subordinate” and the adult as “competent, active and in charge. These typiﬁcations are embodied and encoded in practices of surveillance and regulation” (p. 193). Parents observed by Christensen, assuming that the child was either “faking it” to gain attention or relief from daily demands, incapable of distinguishing between novel and pathological physical and emotional states, or both, would only accept a child’s account of being ill if rational knowledge or “mediating devices (such as a thermometer)” showed evidence of illness. As Christensen writes (p. 190), “This simultaneously entails that children’s competence becomes suspended; their subjective experiences of their own bodies does not qualify them as ‘speakers of fact’.”12 Moreover, adults would state that children could have a high temperature for a short period of time, then become well - as a result, they would use the duration of the symptoms as criteria for the child’s health13. In a classic example of the documentary method of interpretation,14 if the symptoms disappeared, the child was labeled well and deemed to have been so all along. (This logic was strengthened by adults’ assertion that while children may fake illness to get attention or avoid a request, they couldn’t sustain the project for very long – a belief in full accord with the Western construction of the child as innocent and incapable of deceit). Thus, “from adults’ perspectives the child’s claim signiﬁed the unreliable and contestable aspect of children’s illnesses and ultimately of children themselves” (p. 191). While the children the author 369

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observed exhibited no doubt that they knew when they were ill and when they were well, they knew that their assessments were subject to doubt and disbelief by adults, who believed that “a child cannot make this judgement on their own and their claim does not constitute a priori evidence. As evidence, it is neither necessary nor sufﬁcient” (p. 192). (This was the case in primary schools as well, which act in loco parentis.) The same actions that produced children as deﬁcient produced adults as competent, as therapies involved the application of “adult” skills. Examples of these skills are “keeping time, taking the temperature and reading the thermometer, opening the bottle of medicine (indeed the specially secured screwcap lids for ‘child protection’ mean that they cannot be opened by a child), determining the dose of medicine and making the child comply with taking the medicine (even when it tastes disgusting)” (p. 193).15 Parents and other agents who want to medicate, test or treat children often have to do this against the child’s will. Treatment thus constitutes a context in which adults demonstrate their capacity for “keeping control and order and taking calm strategic action” – capacities reproduced in children’s illness episodes as exclusive to adults.16 Just as doctors conﬁrm their competence in relation to patients by accessing technical knowledge and using technical talk, adults “express and conﬁrm their competence in relation to children” by laying claim to age-stratiﬁed expertise, responsibilities, and control. That this is a means of reproducing existing hierarchies is evident in the following account quoted by a school nurse: “When I help them (the children) they know I’m a nurse . . . I like children to know that they can come to me for help. Because if they can come to me with a minor problem they’ll also know to come back when they’ve got a bigger problem.” This statement underscores the need for institutions to “protect their own competence through their everyday routine advice to children, [which] was: If you need help remember to go and ﬁnd an adult” (p. 194). This message was universally delivered despite the fact that children often solved their problems on their own, “a fact which was easily dismissed as incidental by adults.” This dismissal, and the routine advice to seek adult help in any and all situations of conﬂict, reproduced children as incompetent and incapable of navigating their everyday worlds without the help of adults, and undermined children’s sense of independence from adults (p. 194). Christensen concludes that the construction of children as passive, incompetent, emotional and irrational informed a differential distribution of responsibility for and rights to use pharmaceuticals, which is embedded in a “biomedical hierarchy”. This hierarchy is ‘imported into the family” as parents are used as medical agents authorized to dispense drugs to children, and children are

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produced as passive recipients of medical therapies. The gate keeping structure of the pharmaceutical industry, in which the doctor delegates authority to the pharmacist to deliver medicine to adults, is extended into the home, where parents medicate their children. The distribution of medicine thus represents “relations of power and hierarchy in children’s everyday life” (p. 198), not only to the analyst, but also to children themselves, who view the ability to medicate, in adherence to medical hierarchies and medical logic, as an achievement of adult competence and status. Thus, biomedical practices and hierarchies permeate adult-child interaction, both at home and at school: Parents and teachers are delegated responsibility, competence and intervention rights; ‘rational’ methods are employed in preference to children’s subjective experiences; children’s ability in giving and receiving affection (as part of health care) is both valued as part of the reciprocity of human relationships but remains subordinate to other competencies; and children’s actual contribution to practical care is often rendered invisible to adults (p. 199).

Both of these works uncover more than the presence of the marginalization and devaluation of patients in general. They also uncover more than the mere invocation of age categories: to quote Holstein and Gubrium (2000, p. 3) again, “chronological age alone doesn’t determine where one meaningfully stands in relation to the passage of time.” Rather, they point to the fact that these encounters are suffused by the developmental logic of the modern life course. Davis, for example, notes that the degree to which children were excluded varied according to age (a ﬁnding also reported by Pantell et al., 1982; Van Dulmen, 1998). Those under ﬁve were given more freedom, and their exclusion centered on distracting them from the adult actors. Toys were provided, and children were allowed to explore the clinic, as long as they did not interrupt the encounter itself. Those over ﬁve, however, were “expected to be aware of the primacy of encounter rules” (p. 32); “breaches of order” were sanctioned and apologized for by parents, who instigated these sanctions independently, never asking the doctors to do so. He also notes that children’s presumed incompetence was seen as a positive and essential aspect of childhood, in that it constituted a contrast to the adult capabilities children would eventually acquire. Childhood incompetence thus had a “prospective” meaning, representing a lack that, while inconvenient to the encounter itself, was age-appropriate and thus indicative of developmental health. An inability to appreciate or adopt the patient role meant that the child was “on time” – a concept that was a concern to parents and doctors, but not to the child herself. By positing children’s relative incompetence as an immanent adult competence, these encounters also reproduced the life course as a steady improvement in ability, symbolized in the relative competence of adults. 371

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This developmental logic is also evident in Christensen’s discovery that “children getting access to medicine or using medicines independently could . . . contribute to their sense of an improvement of social status.” She cites a subject’s account of the latter’s two children, the eldest of whom (David) had asthma and used an inhaler on a daily basis. When the youngest child (age nine) was given a nasal inhaler to relieve his cold symptoms, he told his mother that he was “as big as David now” because he used an inhaler just as David did. The messages embedded in these interactions – and in the medical hierarchies that inform them – seem to be as follows: young children cannot understand/care for their own health, but will one day be old enough to do so. This incompetence is not only normal, but also a positive indicator of future competence and current developmental health. The ability to understand and negotiate one’s own health depends in great part upon social competencies that are learned with age, and whose incremental possession can be seen in children as young as ﬁve. Being an adult means being able to distinguish between health and illness by using medical technology, distributing medication to self and others, and making decisions; however, no matter how old the individual is, the doctor has the greater authority, whatever her age. The Medicalization of Old Age The medicalization of aging and its effects on the lives of elders has been amply documented. According to Andrea Sankar (1984), in 19th century medical diagnosis, old age was synonymous with disease: doctors used the diagnosis “old and inﬁrm” to describe older people who were terminally ill (as opposed to healthy elders, who were “advanced in years.”) The causal link between old age and disease was irrelevant, since the two were seen as equivalent. As the 20th century drew near, however, the doctrine of speciﬁc etiology (that a speciﬁc causal agent could be found for every disease) demanded that the cause of old age be found.17 As a result, more and more conditions originally thought of as ‘just old age’ came to be classiﬁed into disease categories. This affects both the treatment elders receive and their identities. According to Estes and Binney (1989), because the “reversible, remediable, and socially constructed aspects of aging” (p. 594) are disregarded by the rapidly expanding biomedical model, elders begin to accept this diseased conception of themselves. Instead of looking to social solutions to social causes of isolation and depression (i.e. forced retirement), elders seek “treatment” for their “aging problems” by purchasing and consuming high-cost medical services and technology. (Indeed, Arluke & Peterson (1981) cite the taken-for-granted assumption that the old are the living sick, and declare that the role elders are

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expected to adopt is the same as the sick role.18) Estes and Binney further stress that, while these assumptions legitimate medical intervention into the lives of elders, this legitimacy ultimately rests on the emergence of a professional treatment ideology towards them. They note that medicine is now well into the process of attaching the label of illness to old age by constructing special medical problems around elders and by advancing special treatment for them. Rather than seeing pathology and disease processes as phenomena striking people of all ages with essentially similar physiological dynamics, elders are portrayed as having special problems and disorders. Geriatricians insist that elders react to disease differently, or are susceptible to diseases to which young people are relatively immune. Moreover, these doctors see elders’ problems as less speciﬁc than problems that beset younger adults: rather than isolating distinct problems or complications in elders, they say they encounter massive physical and psychological deterioration. This expands the role of medical agents in the lives of elders, as doctors come to have a major role in decisions (i.e. institutionalization) that used to be left to families, and as psychotropic medications are increasingly prescribed to – and used by – elders (often to reduce the burden of caregivers rather than to improve the quality of life of elders themselves). The case of dementia The most obvious example of this construction is the glossing of the disorientation and distress that many elders experience as a result of their structural dislocation and cultural stigmatization into age-speciﬁc mental illness, speciﬁcally dementia. The construction of Alzheimer’s disease has strong correlates to the construction of learning disabilities in children: both are essentialist and individualistic, assuming that actors’ difﬁculties are due to physical disruptions or decline, not to social circumstances.19 According to Karen Lyman (1989), while the clinical “symptoms” of Alzheimer’s are associated with other, reversible conditions, the current tendency is to see these conditions, when observed among elders, as “evidence” of Alzheimer’s, despite the fact that this disease can only be unequivocally diagnosed through autopsies. Given that autopsies have shown evidence of Alzheimer’s in people whose behavior had been seen as normal, and that autopsies have shown no evidence of Alzheimer’s when conducted on people who had been diagnosed with and treated for it, it is clear that diagnoses of and treatment for this disease are based on extra-physical factors, speciﬁcally age. Alzheimer’s became a major concern in the early 1980s, when the National Institutes of Aging, in the course of medicalizing its focus, began to heavily fund research into it (see Estes, 1989). The construction of Alzheimer’s as a 373

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progressive disease is a useful tool for controlling a distressed and dislocated population, allowing those in power to interpret an older person’s troublesome behavior (which could be a response to their social position and/or current context) as evidence of degenerative disease. This makes their future easier to predict and organize, and provides a convenient order to a difﬁcult situation. Lyman suggests that, instead of seeing Alzheimer’s as an innate pathological process, we should consider it as a socially caused phenomenon, looking at how cultural deﬁnitions and assumptions play out in care settings and in the often tense and troublesome caregiving relationships that occur within them. This requires that we consider Alzheimer’s as a shared cultural resource that we use to make sense of elders’ behavior, much as we use the assumptions inhering in our conceptions of gender to make sense of male and female deviance. We need, the author writes, to examine the relationships and settings in which people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and to consider whether they contribute to the disorientation that is diagnosed as dementia rather than merely respond to it. Similarly, Lyman suggests that the difﬁculties that arise in caring for an increasingly large number of dementia patients are themselves constructed as evidence of the progression of dementia. Within elder care facilities (composed of medical agents exercising social control on the one hand and allegedly ‘dependent’ and actually or immanently incompetent elders on the other), nurses “know” that a decline in functioning is inevitable, and expect very little from patients. If patients withdraw from this minimal interaction to save face, their non-responsiveness is taken as conﬁrmation of the negative dementia expectations. In short, once a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is applied, behavior that would be seen as normal in someone without that diagnosis is seen as evidence of degenerative disease. The author cites two studies20 demonstrating that nursing home residents engaged in “wandering” (deﬁned by Dawson and Reid as “frequent and/or unpredictable pacing, with no discernible goal”) “are viewed as deviant because they behave more normally than other impaired elderly persons” (p. 600, emphasis in the original). Although nursing home residents who paced the halls were among the highest-functioning (indeed, were often taken to be visitors instead of patients, leading the staff, in one facility, to mark wandering residents’ clothing with a red dot), their activity, most likely undertaken out of boredom and the need for exercise, was seen as a “symptom” of dementia. Here, as elsewhere, interpretation shapes behavior: residents and patients who are treated as though they have Alzheimer’s (i.e. through medication and increased isolation) may come to deteriorate, becoming depressed, angry, and disoriented.21

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Medical Interactions with Elders The centrality of ill health and dependence to medical definitions of old age appear in the beliefs of medical agents. Fineman (1994) explicitly asked doctors “How do you know that someone is old?” and found that most believed chronological age was necessary but not sufficient to define old age, unless the patient is over 80. In keeping with the biomedical equation of old age with disease, all doctors and most nurses “defined poor health status” (for doctors, consisting of poor medical status, and, for nurses, of poor functional status) as a “salient marker of old age.” Respondents understood the behavior of elders in terms of myths and stereotypes about them, which they took to constitute uniquely old behaviors. These myths included an “inability to adapt to new situations or environments,” “a loss of interest in living,” “helplessness,” and “being dependent” – “a moral judgement that referred to patients who were seen as being intentionally weak and needy, especially for the purpose of gaining undeserved attention or help” (p. 263). The author concludes that the medicalization of old age “reinforced the perception that the appropriate behavioral model for older adults was that of the patient role. As a consequence, older patients were expected to be compliant, passive and submissive” (p. 268). The equation of old age with illness and dependence play out in doctorpatient interactions as well. Gay Becker’s (1994) study of the ways in which elderly stroke victims are treated by physical therapists conﬁrms Fineman’s ﬁnding that medical agents’ view of elders as inﬂexible, unproductive, and increasingly disengaged from others undermines elders’ autonomy in medical interactions. Because Americans equate adult status with productivity, and because the goal of rehabilitation is to return impaired individuals to productive lives in the community, those in the medical profession view rehabilitation as most appropriate to the young. Rehabilitation’s “fundamental cultural belief, that individuals can exert the force of their will over the natural environment” (p. 275), in tandem with the profession’s awareness that rehabilitation is itself proof that an individual will not recover without professional help, makes rehabilitation an ambiguous context. In this context, therapists’ insistence that patients be motivated and enthusiastic about the rehabilitation itself transfers responsibility for the therapy’s failure from the therapist to the patient. The rehabilitation staff ’s assumption that the older the stroke patient, the less “recovery potential” s/he was likely to have made it more difﬁcult for elderly clients to improve. Because the hospital was always full of very ill elderly patients, the rehabilitation staff was frustrated over their perceived lack 375

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of patients with recovery potential, and saw themselves as attempting to rehabilitate people who were incapable of recovery. Patients were treated differently, depending on whether the staff thought they were good candidates for rehabilitation or not. Because the criteria for candidacy were based on age, the staff classified patients as rehab candidates or geriatric patients, the latter “devalued and seen as neither productive nor ‘worth’ the expertise and resources rehabilitation represents” (p. 285). In addition, the staff ’s “biomedical approach to patient care” led them to believe that patients’ actions and efforts at recovery should be dominated by values of self-reliance, perseverance and responsibility for self – a successful motivation toward productivity essential to adult status. Unsuccessful rehabilitation therapy was seen by the staff as evidence of a failure of adulthood, and the end result, predictably, was that clients seen as failing to adhere to these values “were treated as children who could not make decisions and who were not given choices or explanations” (p. 286). Not surprisingly, staff ’s understanding of their elderly clients as childlike and unworthy of adult treatment became a self-fulﬁlling prophecy, since staff ’s differential treatment22 of clients based on age encouraged or discouraged success. For example, while all patients disliked performing tasks whose therapeutic value was unexplained, this expressed dislike on the part of “geriatric patients” was seen by staff as evidence of poor response to rehabilitation (despite the fact that rehab candidates were usually given explanations for rehab tasks, while geriatric patients were not). Finally, doctors often treat elders in much the same way that doctors treat children, relegating them to “non-participant status.” Betty Hasselkus (1994) tape-recorded medical visits between doctor, older patient, and family members and observed that the presence of the latter, combined with “authoritarian traditions of medical care, assumptions about frailty and aging, and true impairment appears to trigger behaviors that marginalize the patient” (p. 291) and treat her as dependent. Family members disclosed information about the patient despite the patient’s objections, told the patient what to say or do, and/or acted paternalistically toward the patient; doctor and caregiver also excluded the patient from conversations about her own care. This took place regardless of the patient’s actual physical and/or mental impairment. There were, of course, exceptions – caregivers and patients often took steps to affirm the autonomy of the patient, insisting she be included in the conversation – but the mere presence of the family member was often assumed by the doctor to represent dependency on the part of the patient. This finding is resonant with Greene et al.’s 1994 discovery that, in Putnam’s (1996,

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p. 276) words, “patients seen with a companion in the room raised fewer topics . . . [and] were often totally excluded from the conversation” (for an insightful analysis of a similar marginalization in nursing home admissions, see Nussbaum, 1993). As in the case with medical interactions with children, age acts as an interpretive frame for behavior: while children are assumed to be well despite their claims to the contrary, elders are assumed to be ill despite theirs. The “learned helplessness” that results from treating elders as incompetent – and interpreting resistance to this treatment as evidence of that incompetence – is one way that the medical enterprise can produce dependent patients. The emergence of Alzheimer’s disease as a gloss for a range of conflicts and difficulties arising from caregiving relations and settings potentiates an iatrogenic passivity and disorientation that constitutes structural dependence in two ways. First, medical decisions are made by agents who are predisposed to seeing any and all troubles elders may experience as caused by the degenerative aspects of aging, and this leads these agents to suggest further medical care, including institutionalization. Elders are thus vulnerable to assumptions of incompetence and the erosion of control over their own lives that results from them, and may actually become structurally dependent upon formal caregiving institutions and arrangements. Secondly, the structure and procedures of nursing homes (including isolation, the mortiﬁcation of the self (Goffman, 1962), psychotropic medication, and depersonalization) themselves cause behaviors and moods (i.e. depression, anger, resentment, disorientation, “wandering”) that are interpreted as evidence of a pre-existing degeneration. This leads to the imposition of further strictures that further disorient and anger the patient, and these states are again seen as evidence of inevitable decline. The message embedded in these interactions is reminiscent of the message children receive in similar contexts: being old means being outside the acceptable parameters for competence and health. Yet while children’s location in the life course is one of development, that of elders is one of decline. Elders are in a state of irreversible physical and mental degeneration that makes intervention other than care taking increasingly futile; because elders are (or soon will be) reverting to a child-like state, this care taking is best structured around simple activities suitable for the very young. The incompetence of elders is due to intrinsic qualities, not to the context in which they are assessed, as is any regression in capacity or mood. Adult competence has a limited shelf life, but those who still have it are best suited for making medical decisions about elders. 377

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CONCLUSION Summary of Key Findings The stages, norms, and developmental logic of the Western life course are central to modern medical knowledge and to the structure and presumptions of medical encounters with children and elders (these are summarized in Table 1). These use the life course to socialize children and elders into compliant and dependent patienthood. In the case of children, this work takes the form of the following set of maxims. Because childhood is an inherently healthy state, children’s inability to negotiate medical interactions on their own, and their resistance to the medical encounter or treatment, are evidence of developmental health. Moreover, problems children face are due to childhood itself, not to the structure or assumptions of the medical encounter, and the incompetence that becomes evident in medical encounters or treatment is due to the child’s health, not to the encounter or treatment themselves. Therefore, childhood is grounds for marginalization in medical interaction. A similar set of maxims informs the production of elderly patients: because old age is an inherently unhealthy state, elders’ inability to negotiate medical interactions on their own, and their resistance to the medical encounter or treatment, are evidence of developmental decline. Problems elders face are due to old age itself, not to social or structural context; similarly, the incompetence that becomes evident in medical encounters or treatment is due to elders’ ill health, not to the encounter or treatment themselves. Therefore, old age is also grounds for marginalization in medical interaction. Medical knowledge, applied in medical encounters, is also used to socialize children and elders into a normativized life course with typiﬁed stages and a typiﬁed future. Children’s claims to illness cannot be accepted as fact unless proven by medical technology used by adults. Children cannot solve their troubles on their own; these troubles are solved by adults, who are ideal surrogates for children in medical interactions. The ability to understand and negotiate one’s own health depends upon technical and social competencies that are learned with age; however, children’s incompetence and dependence represent immanent adult competence and independence and thus health. Children are in an upward trajectory, adulthood is the ideal standard, and growing older promises a steady improvement in ability. Finally, children are passive recipients of medical therapies, but will become more active in their own treatment as they age. Similarly, medical encounters with elders demonstrate the belief that their claims to health cannot be accepted as fact unless proven by medical

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Table 1.

379

Development Logic of Western Life Course Invoked in and Elaborated by Medical Encounters. Children

Elders

Ideal standard is

adulthood

middle-aged adulthood

Stage of life is

healthy state

unhealthy state

Position in life course represents

an upward trajectory

a downward trajectory

Incompetence represents

immanent adult competence and thus health

declining adult competence and thus ill health

Immediate future promises

a steady improvement in ability

a steady decline in ability

Trouble-solving

cannot solve their troubles on their own; these troubles are solved by adults, who are ideal surrogates for children

cannot solve their troubles on their own; these troubles are solved by middle-aged adults, who are ideal surrogates for elders

Capacity to understand and negotiate own health

depends upon social and technical competencies that increase with age

depends upon social and technical competencies that decline with age

Health claims

claims to illness cannot be accepted as fact unless proven by medical technology used by adults

claims to illness cannot be accepted as fact unless proven by medical technology used by middle-aged adults

Resistance to/inability to negotiate medical encounters and/or treatment is evidence of

developmental health

developmental decline

Problems encountered /incompetence evident in medical encounters are due to

childhood itself

old age itself

In medical encounter, stage of life is

grounds for marginalization

grounds for marginalization

Role in medical encounters

passive recipients of medical therapies, but will become more active in their own treatment with age; will take on more responsibilities and become more active

passive recipients of medical therapies, but will become less active in their own treatment with age; will take on fewer responsibilities and become more passive

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technology used by middle-aged adults. Elders cannot solve their troubles on their own; these troubles are solved by middle-aged adults, who are ideal surrogates for elders in medical interactions. The ability to understand and negotiate one’s own health depends upon social and technical competencies that decline after middle age; moreover, current incompetence and dependence represent declining adulthood and thus ill health. Elders are in a downward trajectory, middle-aged adulthood is the ideal standard, and growing older is a steady improvement in ability followed by a decline in ability. Elders are passive recipients of medical therapies, and will become more passive in their own treatment as they age. Challenges The concept of life coursing ﬁlls a much-needed gap in medical sociology. While the latter has uncovered and theorized the use of “non-medical” categories and ideologies in medical work, its focus on demographic categories such as race, class, sex, and age has elided the comparative location of actors in and across the life course as a key method of predicting, interpreting and responding to their physical and mental states. Our review of research into medical encounters with children and elders – constructed in the hegemonic and medical discourses as distinctive yet homologous groups whose innate incompetence creates distinctive social and medical needs – has highlighted the prospective and retrospective logic that informs the medical model on the one hand and medical encounters on the other. Through the application of this logic, medical agents: (a) socialize actors into the life course by organizing treatment and predicting futures based on discrete developmental life course stages and (b) use these stages to legitimate particular medical treatments and the compliant roles these treatments demand and to socialize actors into these roles. The tacit presumptions of growth and deterioration that undergird medical work point to a more complex interpretive ﬁeld at work in medical interactions than the literature has recognized, and as such merit further exploration. A number of medical diagnoses and concerns are particularly rich areas for such an investigation. Some are fairly obvious: pathologizing male impotence among the middle-aged but not elders, urinary incontinence among the middle aged and elderly but not among children and adolescents, and “vaginal dryness” among young and middle aged women but not, again, elders. All point to the tacit invocation of productive development and decline as phases in the life course by the medical (and, need we say, the pharmaceutical) enterprises. Others are less obvious, but no less appropriate. We are thinking here of the last half-century’s seemingly exponential growth of diagnostic categories

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surrounding behaviors, mental states, and moods. The differential application of Attention Deﬁcit Disorder one the one hand and Alzheimer’s disease on the other is one such instance. Another is the application of the term hyperactivity to structurally inconvenient levels of activity on the part of children, and of wandering and dementia to similar activity on the part of elders. (That activity is considered “too high” based on the needs and routines of host institutions – schools in the case of children, nursing homes in the case of elders – need hardly be mentioned.) Yet another example is the reductionistic interpretation of female emotions and moods to hormonal dysfunction, with Premenstrual Syndrome and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder diagnosed among young women undergoing distress (of possible, even probable, social origin23) and menopause diagnosed among older women experiencing similar suffering (also of possible, even probable, social origin). (See Lorber, 1997; Friedan, 1992.)24 Finally, medical sociologists concerned with life coursing would do well to tackle its presence in medical encounters with the middle-aged – a vocal and powerful age stratum whose sheer size has inspired a wave of concern in the press over its present and future medical needs. The middle-aged are not only the standard against which other groups are medically assessed, but rather constitute an increasingly problematic population in its own right, as the explosion of sports medicine, diagnoses of “pre-menopausal syndrome,” and concern with “premature aging” and “premature impotence” show. Indeed, according to Margaret Gullette (1998), the “belief in midlife decline” began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (pp. 17–18); gradually medicalized and problematized, it led to the current belief “that the body fails unless it can be maintained at its peak or ideal moment” (p. 14). The pronounced increase in longevity over the last century has evoked both a public concern over the specter of a lengthy old age and attempts to “delay the inevitable,” and the resultant ambiguity over what constitutes “normal” versus “premature” aging will, no doubt, inform more and more medical encounters – and diagnostic categories – in the future. Given the changing age composition of the Western world, and the concomitant reformulation of the life course itself, standards for health are bound to change. The medical invocation of the life course in the process of determining and applying these standards thus offers insight into the intersection of dominant conceptions of the actor across time with the medical enterprise’s deﬁnition and regulation of human action. Caveats Any reader of the above can easily ready a number of obvious critiques. The ﬁrst is of our failure to build into our work a consideration of the unique, yet 381

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currently unknown, interactional dynamics that inhere in medical encounters between a doctor and a single patient on the one hand (or dyadic encounters) and those between a doctor, a patient, and a third party (or triadic interactions). The stark fact is that while elders may engage in dyadic or triadic medical encounters (Adelman (1987) cites Greene et al’s (1982) study, in which “almost 20% of the elderly patients included in the sample were accompanied to the outpatient medical encounter by a third person” (p. 729), children’s medical encounters are almost always triadic (except those at home). The difference is itself a product of the differential distribution of competence across the life course: while children are presumed to be socially incompetent relative to the interactional demands of medical encounters, elders are seen not as having failed to achieve adult competence, but as having failed to fully retain it. (Again, children are seen as immanently competent, while elders are seen as immanently incompetent. For the elders, then, the issue is diminishing, rather than emergent, competence.) The questions that arise are crucial ones. Which encounters with elders are dyadic and which are triadic, and why? How central is the family to the structure of medical encounters with elders, and to what extent are the exclusion and marginalization of children and the elders in medical encounters a function of life coursing on the part of doctors, and how much are they a function of the presence of a surrogate? Clearly, any person who arrives on any scene with a surrogate who speaks and acts for him is more likely to be seen as inherently incompetent, especially in institutional settings, which are less likely to question the social arrangements of their clients. This, in turn, raises a series of questions centering on the family’s own agendas and needs. It is important to remember that the family has itself been medicalized (as can be seen in the explosion of terms such as the “dysfunctional,” the “multi-problem” and the “enabling” family), and is itself subject to critique and control by medical and state agencies. Indeed, for medicine, the continuation of the family has always been a central concern, as the reproduction of bodies (from the very decision to have a child – genetic counseling – through conception and parturition), and the reproduction and shaping of family relationships (i.e. child rearing and sexuality) have increasingly come under medical control. Equally important is the reality of the family as the central arena for the institutionalized life course, which, in tandem with the intersecting realms of work and education, it reproduces in its family members and the relations between them. While this makes it analytically difﬁcult to fully separate the agendas of medicine and the family, it is clear that families have their own needs and dynamics, and undoubtedly bring their own agendas into the medical encounter, particularly when caregiving becomes

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a central concern. It is important to avoid depicting family members as, in the words of one anonymous reviewer, “the witting or unwitting dupes of the medical profession,” and to consider the strong possibility that the structured dependence of children and elders is beneﬁcial to the family itself (for example, strengthening existing family hierarchies). In the absence of research explicitly focussed on these issues, the best that can be posited is that life coursing serves many functions, and that, given the family’s auxiliary role in children’s health, life coursing in medical encounters reproduces that role, as well as the age hierarchies that structure family relations. Another concern centers on the changing nature of the medical encounter, as the self-care (Segall & Goldstein, 1989) movement has both expressed and bolstered patients’ desire for a more active role in medical interactions and in their own treatment regimens. Although the ideal types of the authoritarian doctor and the passive and compliant patient are by no means absent from the medical terrain, their primacy has been eroding, and a more activist-consumer model of patient care (Haug & Lavin, 1983; Fox, 1977; Reeder, 1972) has complicated the types and dynamics of medical interaction. While this questions our perhaps oversimpliﬁed depictions of life coursing in medical encounters, it does not wholly negate them. Again, our goal in this chapter has been to uncover how the life course is used in medical interaction to make sense of and control patients, not to claim that this project meets with no resistance. More importantly, while patients have begun to demand a more equal footing with doctors regarding diagnosis and treatment, not all actors have taken up this resistance equally. Children and elders are marginalized in contexts other than medical ones (indeed, Hockey & James argue that it was the initial exclusion of these age groups from the labor force that was the keystone for further cultural and institutional marginalization) and these two groups have not yet organized resistance to their treatment by the medical, or any, enterprise. On the contrary, elders have proved to be a willing market for medical goods and services, for example, driving to Canada and Mexico to get cheaper medications and lobbying for cheaper and better funded medications in the United States. (Of course, we must be mindful that the drive for treatment and medication on the part of the elderly may be a cohort effect, and won’t necessarily continue. The middle-aged asserting their rights through the self-care movement will one day be old too, and this will undoubtedly affect how they approach and negotiate doctor-patient interactions. See Coe & Prendergast, 1985, p. 239.) Opportunities for any kind of resistance on the part of children and elders are few, and any resistance that does occur tends to be seen as evidence of their relative incompetence (see Hockey & James). Finally, political work on the part of (and/or in the name of) children and elders tends 383

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to embrace their marginalization rather than resist it (i.e. lobbying to resist raising the retirement age and to keep children out of the labor force), a stance roundly applauded in the media as best serving the distinctive needs and character of the two age groups. That said, it is important to note that changes in the family on the one hand and the medical terrain on the other do appear to be affecting medical encounters with children, although the overall impact of these changes appear to be slight. Meeuwesen et al. (1998) analyzed doctor-parent-child interactions over ﬁfteen years, and found that children initiated more conversations, thus contributing more to the interactions, as time went on; moreover, the doctors in these encounters addressed the child more frequently. Yet, as Tates and Meeuwesen (2001, p. 849) conclude, the “negation of the child as an active participant” in medical encounters “does not seem to be consistent with the development of the patient-centered approach and the increased demand for shared decision-making and informed consent.” The question of whether the rising tide of patient-centered medicine will lift all boats is of central importance for future research. In conclusion, this chapter raises several questions that can only be answered by further research into how the changing hierarchical demands of medical encounters are met. It is our suggestion that the invocation of the typiﬁed life course is one resource for meeting these demands, being applicable across gender, age, and other axes of social differentiation. Indeed, the theoretical framework we offer here provides an opportunity to correct the tendency of medical sociology to examine the medical experiences of children, middle-aged adults and elders separately, a practice that, while often providing rich detail, just as often elides the historical and societal contexts in which these experiences occur, and thus the social structures and agendas that connect and inform them. It has been our contention that recognizing the larger contexts in which the life course was constructed sheds light on the asymmetry produced in modern medical encounters, particularly in physician/child and physician/ elder encounters. Whether future research also uncovers life coursing as an organizing and socializing resource in medical and other institutional encounters will be the ultimate test of the framework we have developed here.

NOTES 1. This is not to say that the ideological and cultural work through which categories of people are created is not backed up by force, as in the forcible quarantine, isolation, and treatment of those declining to comply with “public health” measures to control, for example, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted and childhood diseases.

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2. “Every society is confronted by four tasks: the reproduction of populations in time, the regulation of bodies in space, the restraint of the ‘interior’ body through disciplines, and the representation of the ‘exterior’ body in social space” (Turner, 1996, p. 38). 3. The standardization of behavior to produce compliant patients and to reproduce and legitimate medical institutions is most clearly and adequately documented by Goffman in Asylums and by Foucault in Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic. 4. She continues: “The construction of aging as a medical problem focuses on the diseases of elders – their etiology, treatment and management from the perspective of the practice of medicine as deﬁned by practitioners. This means that the medical model – with its emphasis on clinical phenomena – takes precedence over, and in many cases deﬁnes, the basic biological, social, and behavioral processes and problems of aging” (ibid., p. 588). 5. Indeed, it can be easily suggested that the very basis of medicine’s power is the construction of categories of people who are most in ‘need’ of medicine’s curative and regulatory powers. 6. The authors cite Firestone’s statement that dominant Western images of childhood are sentimental or nostalgic, and Ennew’s note that childhood in contemporary Western society is deﬁned by both a rigid age hierarchy which separates children from adults and a myth of childhood as a golden age whereby children are obliged to be happy. 7. This does not only apply to doctors, but to adults in the setting who collude with doctors’ life coursing of their own or others’ health. So, for example, a parent who cooperates in the doctor’s production of her child as incompetent based on her life course position is engaged in life coursing as well, although she is not the “lead actor” in the project. 8. Foucault’s inﬂuence on Donzelot, who was his student, can be seen in the former’s statement that “the organization of the ‘conventional’ family came to be regarded, sometime around the eighteen-thirties, as an indispensable instrument of political control and economic regulation for the subjugation of the urban proletariat: there was a great campaign for the ‘moralization of the poorer classes’ ” (Foucault, 1990, p. 122). 9. A recent, if extreme case being the November 2000 British government’s successful legal battle to separate a pair of Siamese twins (an operation doctors said was essential to the survival of both but which would result in the weaker twin’s death) over the objection of the girls’ Maltese parents, who said the survival of twins should be “God’s decision.” According to Reuters, “The Maltese Paediatric Association issued a last-minute appeal to their British colleagues, saying the surgery violated common practice that parents of severely disabled babies were given the ﬁnal say over treatment.” 10. This knowledge, the author continues, “enables us to abstract and describe verbally physical and mental sensations in a manner which enables us to act as advisers if the issue is to seek ‘expert’ treatment or not, or how to obtain that treatment from the appropriate expert” (p. 24). 11. Myra Bluebond-Langner (cited in Christensen, p. 188) showed that children with leukemia “involved each other in conceptualizing their illness” – they “read clues off pharmaceuticals, adults’ behavior and treatments in order to make sense of their illness,” and “exchanged and discussed this information with their peers in the hospital ward.” 385

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12. It also “mirrors what Kirmayer (1988) identiﬁed as important values of biomedical practice, that is, to keep rational control over and distance to bodily and emotional experiences” (p. 191). 13. A technique that Zola (1996) found adults use to assess their own health. 14. “The method consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document of,’ as ‘pointing to,’ as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’ about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other” (Garﬁnkel 1973, p. 78). 15. Accounts of medicine taking differed as regards the last of these: while children would describe their own active participation, parents would not include their cooperation in their accounts of the same episode, concentrating instead on occasions of resistance. 16. Similarly, children’s ability for practical, instrumental action in the context of illness was unrecognized by parents, who, when asked to recount what children did when a family member was ill, hesitated before answering, then commented on the child’s “affectionate personality or character” (p. 196). In contrast, children described speciﬁc activities in which they engaged to comfort or help the ill person (e.g. fetching items, making tea, picking ﬂowers, reading aloud or playing, and helping with household chores). As parents reproduced an age hierarchy that placed children “at the passive and receiving end” (p. 196), children’s affective competence overshadowed their therapeutic and practical abilities. 17. In 1908 Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff was awarded a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, mostly for his theory of the old age/disease connection. He claimed that disabilities associated with old age were caused by syphilis, alcoholism, or poison caused by bacteria of the large intestine, all of which caused arteriosclerosis, which in turn caused disabilities of old age. The only possible cure was removal of the large intestine; otherwise, old age was basically a chronic malady with no cure. 18. Both the sick and elders are expected to separate themselves from social world, to reduce normal social and occupational responsibilities, and to become dependent on others in a relationship of unequals. They are not held responsible for their problems (since old age is beyond their control), and are thought to lose the sense of personal invulnerability and control that accompanies adulthood. 19. To quote from Conrad and Schneider: “. . . the diverse diagnoses that fall under this umbrella term work in the predictable ways to deﬂect attention from the central place that context and convention play in the very creation of diagnostic categories. Using a critical sociology of knowledge approach, Carrier (1983, p. 952) argues that learning disability theory “misrecognizes and thus masks the effects of social practices and hierarchy’ and focuses narrowly on the troublesome or troubled individual. This decontextualization is typical of the medicalization process” (p. 285). 20. Dawson and Reid 1987 and Rader 1987 (cited in Lyman, 1989). 21. Lyman (1988) found a similar process in a day care center for people with Alzheimer’s. Because staff “knew” that people with Alzheimer’s were slowly but surely retreating into a child-like state, they felt compelled to infantilize them, both verbally and by insisting that they engage in activities designed for children. The clients’ failure to improve was interpreted by the staff as evidence of the Alzheimer’s degenerative properties; Lyman, however, suggests that the lack of improvement was

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due to their retreat into isolation and silence as a way to resist their insulting and infantilizing treatment. Non-responsiveness is taken as confirmation of the Alzheimer’s disease label, as workers have “proof ” that patients can’t learn anything new. 22. Another example of differential treatment is the fact that, when working with “good candidates for rehab,” staff would substitute old goals (such as the ability to enjoy full use of a limb) with new ones (such as that limb being free of pain), thus giving the patient direction and hope, but would not do so when working with a geriatric patient. Younger clients were given a “positive future” to look forward to and strive for, while elderly patients were not. 23. In Judith Lorber’s (1997, pp. 65–66) words: through “a medical diagnosis of PMS and menopause . . . women’s anger and protest over the conditions of their lives are safely defused by a diagnosis that can be contained within the medical system.” 24. That these diagnoses emerged only after the discovery of ways to mass-produce artiﬁcial hormones has been cited by many as a driving force for the medical and capitalist subjugation and regulation of women. Conrad and Schneider (p. 161) make a similar argument regarding the emergence of hyperactivity: “the discovery of hyperkinesis brings up most clearly the question of whether the development of new medical mechanisms of social control (stimulant drugs) leads to the emergence of new categories or designations of deviance and the expansion of medical jurisdiction. From the example of hyperkinesis . . . the answer appears to be a tentative ‘yes’.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This investigation was supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Research Service Award MH15730 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by the University of Kentucky Department of Behavioral Science.

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James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood. Basingstoke: Falmer Press. Jordonova, L. J. (1999). Natural facts: A historical perspective on science and sexuality. In: C. Samson, (Ed.), Health Studies: A Critical and Cross-Cultural Reader (pp. 36–49). Oxford: Blackwell. Kohli, M. (1988). Aging as a Challenge to Sociological Theory. Ageing and Society, 8, 367–395. Lorber, J. (1997). If a situation is deﬁned as real . . . premenstrual syndrome and menopause. In: Gender and the Social Construction of Illness (pp. 55–69). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lupton, D. (1995). The imperative of health: Public health and the regulated body. London: Sage. Lyman, K. A. (1989). Bringing the Social Back in: A Critique of the Biomedicalization of Dementia. The Gerontologist, 29(5), 597–605. Lyman, K. A. (1988). Infantilization of Elders: Day Care for Alzheimer’s Disease Victims. Research in the Sociology of Health Care, 7, 71–103. Martin, E. (1992). The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press. Maynard, D. W. (1991). Interaction and Asymmetry in Clinical Discourse. American Journal of Sociology, 97(2), 448–495. Mishler, E. (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Nussbaum, J. F. (1993). The Communicative Impact of Institutionalization for the Elderly: The Admissions Process. Journal of Aging Studies, 7(3), 237–246. Pantell, R. H., Stewart, T. J., Dias, J. K., Wells, P., & Ross, A. W. (1982). Physician Communication with Children and Parents. Pediatrics, 70, 396–402. Porter, M. (1990). Professional-client relationships and women’s reproductive health care. In: S. Cunningham-Burley & N. P. McKeganey (Eds), Readings in Medical Sociology (pp. 182–210). London: Routledge. Putnam, S. (1996). Nature of the Medical Encounter. Research on Aging, 18(1), 70–83. Reeder, L. G. (1972). The Patient as Consumer: Some Observations on the Changing Professionalclient Relationship. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 13, 406–412. Sankar, A. (1984). ‘It’s just old age’: Old age as a diagnosis in American and Chinese medicine. In: D. I. Kertzer & J. Keith (Eds), Age and Anthropological Theory (pp. 250–280). Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press. Segall, A., & Goldstein, J. (1989). Exploring the Correlates of Self-Provided Health Care Behavior. Social Science and Medicine, 29, 153–161. Tates, K., & Meeuwesen, L. (2001). Doctor-patient-child Communication: A (Re)view of the Literature. Social Science and Medicine, 52, 839–851. Todd, A. D.(1993). A diagnosis of doctor-patient discourse in the prescription of contraception. In: A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds), The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication (2nd ed., pp. 183–209). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Todd, A. D.(1993). Exploring women’s experiences: Power and resistance in medical discourse. In: A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds), The Social Organization of Doctor-Patient Communication, (2nd ed., pp. 267–286). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Todd, A. D. (1989). Intimate adversaries: Cultural conﬂict between doctors and women patients. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Turner, B. S. (1996). The body and society: Explanations in social theory (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Van Dulmen, A. M. (1998). Children’s Contribution to Pediatric Outpatient Consultations. Pediatrics, 3, 563-568.

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Waitzkin, H. (1989). A Critical Theory of Medical Discourse: Ideology, Social Control, and the Processing of Social Context in Medical Encounters. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 30(June), 220–239. Zola, I. K. (1996). Pathways to the doctor: From person to patient. In: P. Brown (Ed.), Perspectives in Medical Sociology (pp. 227–244). Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.

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DIE BILDUNG OF THE WARRIOR CLASS: SOCIALIZATION AND THE ACQUISITION OF CULTURAL RESOURCES

James J. Dowd

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. . . one of the big characteristics they talk about concerning promotion to general is being broad-gauged, being able to do those sorts of things that you do as a leader or a killer, as the case may be. All the way across to being a little bit of a social scientist and being presentable in public (Interview #14). The accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state, i.e. in the form of what is called culture, cultivation, Bildung, presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which . . . implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation . . . .” (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 244).

INTRODUCTION In the ﬁlm, Small Time Crooks1, Frenchie Winkler – an erstwhile exotic dancer who is now married to the inept bank robber, Ray – achieves overnight success with an apparently irresistible formula for chocolate chip cookies. With the success of her cookie store, Frenchie is now able to live the good life. But the material trappings of success are not enough: Frenchie also wants acceptance. She wants to live the cultured life of those who discuss art, read

111 Advances in Life Course Research, Volume 7, pages 393–431. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0863-X

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books, and know big words. So, with Ray in tow, Frenchie embarks upon a program of self-improvement that includes learning all of the words in the dictionary, or at least those beginning with the letter, “A.” Complications, needless to add, ensue and Frenchie learns valuable lessons about life in the process. The story of Frenchie Winkler repeats the familiar theme of wealth, happiness, and the dangers of confusing the two. Also embedded within it, however, is another theme that readers of Bourdieu would recognize as the problem of cultural capital. Bourdieu’s argument focuses attention on the various forms in which capital might present itself, and not simply on “the one form recognized by economic theory” (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 242). Besides money and the commodities that money might acquire, there is also the disposition of mind and body, a habitus that manifests itself in demeanor, tastes, and knowledge. Bourdieu’s emphasis here is on the ways in which early socialization serves to transmit cultural capital and, in so doing, serves the ends of social reproduction and the continued differentiation of social classes in terms not only of wealth but also of what Weber described as “status-honor.” Frenchie’s problem, or so the ﬁlm claimed, was in putting on airs, in attempting to cross this status divide without the proper credentials. If we were to approach the story of Frenchie Winkler from a more sociological angle than that allowed by Woody Allen’s camera, we might see that the source of her troubles was not inauthenticity or a putting on of “airs.” Such interpretations only serve to buttress the status divide between rich and poor and to keep hidden the social bases of distinction. Her problem, instead, was the lack of a dedicated tutor. Frenchie’s goal of acquiring “culture” could only be achieved with guidance provided from others yet the tutors she chose abused her trust and sought to proﬁt from her naïveté. She might have chosen a more conventional path to self-improvement, which would involve registering for university classes or attending museum exhibits and the like, yet to do so successfully requires time, motivation, and the freedom from the many, ordinary responsibilities associated with making a living in the real world. Even for those with Frenchie’s assets and autonomy, it is not a simple matter (indeed, it is extraordinarily difﬁcult) to chart a developmental course through the complexities of an entire civilization. This cannot be achieved through a single, discrete effort of learning but can only be developed over many years and only after acquiring the conﬁdent understanding, or habitus, that allows for the continual assimilation of cultural knowledge. As educational psychologists have long maintained, crystallized intelligence – which is closely aligned with Bourdieu’s idea of habitus – is a matter of lifelong learning. Yet, the traditional life course pattern of school-work-retirement works to the disadvantage of those who, like Frenchie, wish begin this journey relatively late in life (Featherstone

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& Hepworth, 1989). Ideally, societies would support such projects of human development through structural mechanisms that would enable individuals (and their employers) to construct careers characterized by alternating periods of work and study. The system of sabbaticals that has been institutionalized at many colleges and universities, although certainly not at all, is an example of such an institutional support. Just as land would remain fallow every seventh year, a sabbatical year (or part thereof) serves as that respite from normal teaching duties during which the college teacher might engage in full-time study, travel or, according to the dictionary, simply “rest.” For most workers today, however, such educational timeouts are unavailable, even to those who labor in the upper echelons of prestigious professions. There are some exceptions to this general pattern, however. A few organizations take a more active approach to the development of those they employ by not only allowing but even requiring employees to take leaves periodically throughout their careers for periods extending up to one year at a time. The express purpose of such policies is to develop both personal and work-related skills. No organization is more dedicated to this work-study ideal than the modern military. Although most would have no difﬁculty in imagining a group of corporate executives conversing about vintage wines, ﬁne foods, or a recent business cum pleasure excursion to Europe, many more would likely ﬁnd it difﬁcult to imagine a similar conversation among a group of career military ofﬁcers. Professional military ofﬁcers, after all, spend considerable time in the ﬁeld, leading soldiers, planning operations, maintaining efﬁciency in the many technical aspects of their profession, including the operation and repair of sophisticated weapons systems, and – when diplomacy fails – of deploying to the world’s dangerous neighborhoods where the basic necessities of life are typically in short supply. This characterization of military ofﬁcers, although accurate, is obviously incomplete. In addition to tours of duty in remote locales, a military career also includes periodic assignments to the Pentagon, located of course inside the beltway in Washington, D.C., and to other stateside posts and headquarters, few if any of which lack amenities such as shopping complexes, ofﬁcers’ clubs, and recreational facilities including, of course, tennis courts and golf courses. Military personnel also attend a series of professional development courses and many also further their civilian education, occasionally at government expense, while serving on active duty. There are, in fact, few if any institutions or professions that endorse and facilitate the continued education of its members at the level that is routinely found within the military.2 Based on in-depth interviews with 62 U.S. Army general ofﬁcers, my analysis will demonstrate that Army ofﬁcers develop over the course of their careers a 395

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form of cultural capital that – for all intents and purposes – is interchangeable with that possessed by civilians in other upper-middle class professions.3 This is particularly true of the group that I have studied, army generals, that segment of the “warrior class” that has reached the highest ranks of the military profession. I explain this perhaps unexpected ﬁnding as the result of three factors: (1) professional socialization processes that are structured within the profession; (2) a conscious program of self-realization (Elster, 1986) or human development (Dowd, 1990); and (3) the indirect result of continual exposure to civilian professionals in government, the defense industry, and in the local communities in which military posts are located. As in other socialization arenas, the development of military professionals is an amalgam of experiences, only some of which are intentionally structured into the institutionalized career paths of military personnel. The broadening, maturing and enhanced sophistication of these men and women is also a matter of self-realization that is not taught but achieved, and not limited to formal training in the details of gunnery, tactics, or logistics but includes a familiarization with the arts, humanities and social sciences as well. The military requires, for obvious reasons, that its members maintain a high level of physical ﬁtness. The expectation that military ofﬁcers also embody savoir vivre and the comfortable demeanor of one at home in the world applies differentially within the profession and is, therefore, not the subject of formal regulations. Yet the fact that almost every member of my sample has striven to develop an awareness of world events and appreciation of literature and classical music indicates their understanding that such an expectation, however informal or unstated, does exist. Although the earlier phases of their careers may have left almost no time for the development of cultural capital, the second half of their military lives has not only allowed for this development but has actually encouraged it. These senior-level Army leaders have proven to be adept co-architects of their own projects of human development.

METHODS The analysis I will develop in this paper of the cultural capital of senior-level military leaders is based upon interviews I conducted between April 1993 and April 1999 with a total of sixty-two Army generals then serving on active duty. These interviews were all open-ended and semi-structured. Initially, the interviews focused on the mechanics of the military promotion process, ofﬁcers’ perceptions of the promotion system, and the characteristics of successful ofﬁcers. Over time, the scope of the interviews broadened to include values, sentiments, career highlights, favorite jobs, mistakes, combat

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experiences, sponsors, hobbies, family background, personal philosophy of life, cultural capital, retirement plans, and positions on contemporary political and social issues. The sample includes 27 Brigadier Generals, 24 Major Generals, eight Lieutenant Generals, and three Generals. This was the distribution of respondents by grade at the time of the interview; since the interviews were conducted, a number of generals have retired and many have been promoted to the next higher grade. The sample also includes two women, three African Americans, and one Asian American. Table 1 summarizes the distribution of respondents in my sample by grade and source of commission. At the time of the interview, the generals were serving either in the Washington, D.C. area or with a unit, school, or headquarters on posts or bases in the southeastern United States. As part of my conversations with these ofﬁcers, I routinely asked them questions concerning their reading habits, musical tastes, leisure pursuits, hobbies, preferences in food and drink, and so on. Their answers to these questions will form the principal data for this analysis.4 I recruited my sample through letters, followed up by phone calls. The General Ofﬁcer Management Ofﬁce, or GOMO, at the Pentagon provided me with ofﬁcial biographies of the general ofﬁcers serving on active duty, Table 1.

Rank of Ofﬁcer by Source of Commission.

Source of Commission

West Point Other Mil. Scha R.O.T.C. O.C.S. Other Totals

Rank Brig. Gen

Maj. Gen

Lieut. Gen

General

TOTAL

8 (29.6%) 3 (11.1%) 7 (25.9%) 6 (22.2%) 3 (11.1%)

4 (16.7%) 2 (8.3%) 13 (54.1%) 4 (16.7%) 1 (4.2%)

4 (50.0%) 0 (0.0%) 3 (37.5%) 1 (12.5%) 0 (0.0%)

2 (66.7%) 1 (33.3%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%)

18 (29.0%) 6 (9.7%) 23 (37.1%) 11 (17.7%) 4 (6.5%)

27 (43.6%)

24 (38.7%)

8 (12.9%)

3 (4.8%)

62

111 Note: a “Other Military Schools” includes the Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, Norwich College, and Pennsylvania Military College (now Widener University), and the U.S. Naval Academy. Other abbreviations used in this table include R.O.T.C., referring to the Reserve Ofﬁcers Training Corps, and O.C.S., the shortened form of Ofﬁcer Candidate School.

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and provided continual updates every year or so as I requested them. These biographies listed the ofﬁcers’ current duty stations. My strategy in developing my sample was to write a lengthy letter to prospective participants, the addresses for whom would be obtained either from their biographies or from directory assistance at the Pentagon or army post where they served. I would follow-up this letter a week or so later with a phone call to the general’s ofﬁce during which, in most cases, an appointment time for the interview would be arranged. When this project began in 1993, there were over 400 general ofﬁcers serving on active duty in the U.S. Army; by the end of 1999, due to the post-Cold War drawdown, the number was 302. It is difﬁcult to know exactly how many generals served on active duty during the period of my research, although given that approximately 32 to 35 colonels are promoted each year to the rank of Brigadier General, it is likely that the total number of ofﬁcers who have served in the rank for any length of time during the course of the data collection phase of this project to be approximately 575 (the 400 or so generals on active duty in 1993 plus the 175 who have attained the rank since 1993 – 35 in each year since 1993 or a total of 175 ofﬁcers who became generals during the time of the research). The participation rate for this research was 76% (or 62 participants of a total of 81 generals who were sent the initial request letter).

THE SOCIALIZATION OF REFINEMENT The concept of socialization is generally understood to refer to the learning of cultural norms, values, and other cultural elements, the outcome of which is a supply of social actors prepared to assume the social roles that social systems allocate (Parsons, 1951; Riley, 1985). Socialization continues throughout the course of life although its content and locus shifts from the primary socialization of children in families, to the secondary socialization of youth in schools, and ﬁnally to adult socialization that occurs primarily in the workplace. This conceptualization, which is grounded in the functionalist thought that predominated within sociology during the middle decades of the twentieth century, is seen by some critics as being insufﬁciently attentive to biological processes (Wrong, 1961) or as overemphasizing structure at the expense of human agency (Giddens, 1984). Although few would argue that human beings acquire culture through their continual exposure to other human beings, there is far less certainty and precision in our conceptualization of adult socialization than there is when the focus is on children. The social spaces in which adults operate are far broader, deeper, and more complex than those of childhood. Children exist in social worlds dominated by adults and, while they may escape or disengage from those worlds through fantasy and other

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imaginative acts, it is the actually existing social worlds that are regulated by their parents and other adult caretakers that become the child’s “worldtaken-for-granted” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). With adults, however, social relationships increase in complexity as social actors act strategically in situations characterized by ﬂuidity, relative openness, role distance, and economic necessity. Adults are capable of growth and learning, yet such growth is not solely the outcome of structured socialization processes but also occurs by chance, as the individual confronts unusual or unanticipated situations, as well as by the individual’s own purposive design, as when Frenchie decides the time has come to improve her vocabulary. Socialization in adulthood is, in other words, uncertain and highly variable across individuals and social groups. We all know of people who seem never to stop growing and whose lives teem with new projects and experiences. Such individuals are remarkable, however, precisely because they are so unusual. We also know of individuals whose life circumstances are impoverished, even dangerous, and whose biographies are, as a result, seemingly chaotic, lacking a coherent narrative, trajectory, and sense of agency. For most of us in the developed regions of the world, however, the more common experience is one of continuity, the sense that one’s life has settled and that the future will likely be a living out of the basic structure that has been established through countless previous decisions and actions. Aging processes continue, of course, but the experience of developmental change, growth, or self-realization, becomes far less intense and oftentimes less frequent. The routines and habits of midlife become so well established as to form a sort of conventional wisdom favoring in most cases the tried and true over novelty and the unfamiliar. When our favored routines begin to weigh more heavily than usual, we might decide to do something different – to buy new clothes, to try something new for once with our hair, or to travel to some exotic locale. We maneuver as best we can, in other words, within the same paradigm, the same of way of life. Alternation of identity continues as the changes associated with aging, turning points (Strauss, 1959), and the simple ﬂux and ﬂow of relationships and projects make themselves felt. What midlife disallows in most cases is the possibility of starting over as a different type of person. This is the challenge we face as aging adults. Our routines, our past, our memories, and our body work to preserve our identity, to make us knowable both to ourselves and to others. That the reports of gerontologists, sociologists, and others argue persuasively for a more ﬂuid model of aging and human developmental only makes the reality of the stability and continuity in mid- and late-adulthood all the more interesting (and, admittedly, more vexing 399

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as well). Before turning our attention to the general ofﬁcers whom I have interviewed and who, as a group, are among the most developed or selfrealized of any I have encountered, I would like to present a framework within which the twin ideas of socialization opportunity and developmental project might be situated in order to see more clearly how the growth and maturation of army generals constitutes a speciﬁc – and, in some ways, ideal – instance of a more general process. It is important, ﬁrst, to establish that socialization is a general process yet one that is differential. Socialization during adolescence and throughout the course of adult life, while structurally similar for all groups, is experienced differently by gender and social class. Much of adult socialization is the acquisition of class-related and gendered behaviors, mannerisms, ideas, understandings, and other signs (or collective representations) that indicate one’s membership in a particular class or category. Adult socialization in this context proceeds largely through one’s membership in afﬁliative groups, both primary, secondary, and in the looser networks such as classes, social movements, and publics. The focus of my analysis is a group whose adult socialization involves a dual tracking into both the generic world of the upper-middle class and the speciﬁc, professional, largely masculine world of military ofﬁcers. There is more than a little tension between these two tracks and, of the two, it is the professional socialization as military ofﬁcers that is most manifest in their lives. Yet, as these career ofﬁcers move through the ranks, and particularly as they shift away from life in battalions and move into higher-level units and larger headquarters, the focus of the socialization shifts from speciﬁcally military concerns to more broadly-gauged, or generic, class concerns. These ofﬁcers, many of whose origins are in the lower-middle class and the working class (a signiﬁcant shift from earlier in the 20th century when the class origins of military ofﬁcers were largely in the upper-middle class5), must provide evidence of a certain familiarity with larger political and social issues affecting the U.S. and its relations with states in other regions of the world. The particular content of their views on political and social issues is not the critical concern but, rather, the manner in which they are able to express these viewpoints.6 To be promoted to general ofﬁcer, one need have acquired sufﬁcient cultural capital to meet this tacit requirement that he or she be an able spokesperson and representative of the institution. Although it might be argued that this layer of sophistication is the result of individual effort and rational choice, which indeed it is, it is also the outcome of organizational processes designed speciﬁcally to encourage and reward a spirit of growth and learning. Those who share the same culture all come to know a good deal in common concerning the culture’s essential components – its thinking, doing, and

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having. The actual thoughts, behaviors, and material objects that individuals incorporate into their own repertoire, or toolkit, of strategies, motives, and accounts vary considerably, however, across social groups. In this variance originates not only difference but also ranking. We are socialized both to know our place and, through the acquisition of a certain type of cultural capital, to justify (or accept) the place we occupy in the social order as being the way things should be (or, at least, the way things are). Socialization is differential in part because it operates in different venues, or arenas. Four primary venues for the acquisition of cultural knowledge are: (1) local social worlds; (2) the culture industry; (3) ofﬁcial culture; and (4) worldly culture, or the social worlds of others. Figure 1 traces the connections among these socialization venues. All of us are profoundly, and completely, creatures of culture. Yet, as we develop from children to adults (and cross the divide that separates primary Local Social Worlds • Families • Friendship Groups • Folk cultures • Organizational cultures • Idiocultures • Subcultures

The Culture Industry • Hollywood ﬁlms • Televisio, cable, and satellite broadcasts • Advertising • Popular music • Newspapers • Magazines and book publishing • Sports and Entertainment Industries

Ofﬁcial Culture • School curricula • Scientiﬁc ﬁndings • Museum exhibits • Western Civilization • Art, philosophy, etc • Libraries • Historical archives • Scholarly text and artistic works

The Social Worlds of Others • Fluency in foreign languages • Places visited • Familiarity with world cuisines • Tourism (opinion about where to go, what to see and what to avoid) • A sense of practical geography • Cultural familiarity gained from tourism.travel (practical anthropolgy)

Fig. 1.

Socialization Venues. 401

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from secondary socialization and, later, from adult socialization as well), the sameness of the learning that marks the social world of children gives way to diversity, inequalities, and numberless other gradations in the many ways in which adolescents and adults develop a feel for their culture. To describe the socialization of adults, it is necessary to theorize in the ﬁrst instance about such diversity and inequality. The cultural venues that differing groups of adults know best are not the same and even within particular venues there exist variations, alternatives, and nuance. Although all French citizens head for the Mediterranean beaches in August (or so it must seem if you are stuck on the A7 between Lyon and Avignon on the day the exodus from Paris, Lille, and other points North begins), not everyone is blessed with a cottage overlooking the sea near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat (Bernstein, 1990). As both a direct and indirect consequence of such differing life circumstances, there develops across social groups differences in the size, complexity, and density of their cultural toolkits. The essential channel through which the primary socialization experience of all human beings ﬂows is the local social world in which we encounter everyday life. Through our encounters with neighbors, schoolmates, friends, family relations, and the many other recognizable individuals and types who populate our local social world, we experience culture. These local social worlds brim with cultural products that we come to recognize, take for granted, and eventually reproduce and reshape as part of ordinary, everyday life. Every social group produces its own idiocultural variations upon the dominant culture and it is these variations in expression, dialect, knowledge, understandings, demeanor, and general way of life that identify us most completely and which we use to distinguish people in our own neighborhood, profession, generation, and social class from those either literally or symbolically outside the boundary.7 It is within these local worlds in which we are most actively producers of culture. Exerting an opposing pressure to the more active, differentiating force of local social worlds is a second socialization venue that is known variously as mass culture, popular culture, or – following Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1944) usage – simply as the “culture industry.” Regardless of age, gender, race, social class, regional location, or religious and political ties, we are all exposed daily to the sounds and images that are manufactured and distributed by one of the powerful media giants, such as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, or Bertelsmann. Because of the costs of producing a book, musical recording, television program, theme park, or feature-length ﬁlm, the culture industry strives to reach as wide an audience as possible. Although cable and satellite technology permits a wider range of programming – the cultural democracy envisioned by Gans (1999) and

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others – the vast majority of cultural product emanating from Hollywood, Nashville, and New York is easily categorized into one of a few dominant types, or genre. The quest for a broad audience leads to formulaic scripts, easily recognized character types, and an emphasis on entertainment, all of which limits the value as cultural capital of much of this material. The images, sounds, and text that reach us from their source in one of the culture industries are clearly commodities intended to create wealth for their producers; they serve nonetheless as an enormously powerful vehicle for socialization. A movie such as Sabrina or Wall Street, for example, infuses into the culture an understanding of the style of life and behavior of rich corporate executives. Other ﬁlms, such as Saving Private Ryan, or novels like Once an Eagle, offer similar insights into the behavior and traits ideally associated with American military ofﬁcers generally.8 That such ﬁlms and novels might exaggerate or distort the actual reality that they dramatize is beyond debate; the point is, however, that such depictions will often exploit idealized cultural understandings or myths and, by recirculating these myths in the form of popular cultural products, exercise a considerable inﬂuence on the audience regardless of the distortions or exaggerations they might contain. Unlike the products of the culture industry, which are available in some form to most, if not all, members of American society, the products of Ofﬁcial Culture have a more limited circulation. Ofﬁcial culture includes but is not limited to what is often referred to as “high” or “elite” culture, by which is meant works of ﬁne art, such as sculptures, paintings, and certain crafts, and the performing arts, such as opera, ballet, theater, and classical music. Ofﬁcial culture more speciﬁcally refers to those ideas, products, ﬁndings, warnings, discoveries, and procedures that are taught in schools and universities, housed in museums and libraries, tested in laboratories, published in specialized journals, and certiﬁed by government agencies or professional panels as reliable, objective, artistic, or true. Unlike the commodities produced by the culture industry, the work that is certiﬁed by the scientists, artists, critics, professors, or cultural authorities as good, true, or beautiful is almost always recognized as the most desirable to possess, to know, or to otherwise be able to access. In the opinion of some, ofﬁcial culture also serves the important role as a symbolic ﬁrewall that repels or at least impedes the incoming tide of lesser ideas, expressions, and rhythms contained in popular ﬁlms, television, advertising, and songs. Even the most staunch defender of elitist cultural traditions must recognize, however, that ofﬁcial culture commingles with the ideas and products that originate in other socialization venues, including both local culture and the culture industry. An understanding of existentialist philosophy or an appreciation of Italian opera, for example, requires 403

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specialized training and thus is inaccessible for those who lack the training. Even so, however, there are many outside this specialized circle who recognize names, melodies, images, and themes from the canon of ofﬁcial art and science. This larger zone of familiarization that encircles the specialized zone of experts allows then for a far wider exploitation of ofﬁcial culture for purposes of cultural capital than would be the case otherwise. As the ﬁlms of Woody Allen continually demonstrate, it is common for those in the middle class to exploit their familiarity with names like Nietszche, Van Gogh, and Marx, or with tunes like Schubert’s Death and the Maiden or The Ride of the Valkyries from Wagner’s Die Walküre. The power of the culture industry is deep and, as such, it will probably not surprise anyone that the wide recognition of a musical piece such as Ride of the Valkyries is probably due less to having attended a performance of Die Walküre than it is to having seen Francis Ford Coppola’s ﬁlm, Apocalypse Now, or one of a number of television commercials that exploit the Wagner music. Indeed, if this were not so, it is difﬁcult to imagine how one would make sense of the cover of the audio compact disc, Twilight of the Gods - The Essential Wagner Collection which shows ﬁve HU-1M helicopter gunships ﬂying in attack formation.9 To be socialized to contemporary American culture is to recognize at least the popular appropriations of these pieces of ofﬁcial culture. Finally, Fig. One lists a fourth venue of cultural resources, labeled “The Social Worlds of Others.” To be a citizen of the world today exposes one increasingly to the experience of travel. We are a world of immigrants, tourists, vacationers, business travelers, and pilgrims (MacCannell, 1999; Rojek & Urry, 1997). The worlds of other cultures and peoples are no longer as hidden from us as once they were. We see them on television, as on programs like Rick Steves’ Travels in Europe series on PBS, or in museum exhibits or other outlets of Ofﬁcial Culture. More directly, one might also develop a familiarity with worldly culture simply through one’s own travels and vacations. Indeed, this is the most desirable path because the information gained in such a way is considered more authentic inasmuch as it is directly experienced. To be able to offer advice on the best place for Mexican food in Los Angeles, for example (even if one lives in a location far removed from Los Angeles), or to pass judgment on the relative merits of the Prado vis-à-vis the Louvre, or debate which Caribbean island offers the best beach for scuba diving, or whether the rugs of India or Iran are the more beautiful, or to converse on any number of other such topics is to offer evidence of one’s taste, reﬁnement, knowledge and, of course, wealth. The formation of such a thick catalog of opinions and preferences constitutes another way in which socialization experiences are intrinsically cultural, and always differential.

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In the remainder of this paper, I will analyze each of these venues in turn in order to explore their contribution to the formation of senior military leaders who are both technically proﬁcient and possessed of the cultural capital that the rank of general ofﬁcer requires. To analyze the ways in which socialization operates in adulthood, it is crucial that we consider how each of these four venues serves as an arena, or conduit, for the acquisition of cultural resources. There is obvious variation, of course, in the amount and type of cultural resources that military ofﬁcers possess. There is enough commonality as well, however, to indicate that the process is far from random. An essential, if tacit, requirement for promotion to the senior leadership ranks within the military institution is that ofﬁcers demonstrate that they have indeed become the “sophisticated . . . men and women” that George Herbert Mead (1964) believed to be the outcome of socialization processes.10

VENUE A: THE LOCAL SOCIAL WORLDS OF ARMY OFFICERS

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Leader development . . . came to be embedded in a three-level approach: formal Army schooling, each level featuring standards that ofﬁcers had to pass before they could move along to the next stage in their career; practical experience serving in units at various levels of responsibility, including the rigorous experiences of the NTC, JRTC, and BCTP; and self-development through private study, reading, and learning from others (Clancy & Franks, 1997, p. 122).11

For Army ofﬁcers, a typical career begins with early career branch schooling which lasts typically 12 weeks, followed by duty assignments lasting approximately 5–6 years. The ofﬁcer returns to school for the 12–15 week specialty course known as Advanced Branch Training, which is followed by another six year period of duty assignments. At this point, the future of the ofﬁcer hinges upon whether he or she is selected to attend the thirteen month “mid-career” course, known formally as the Command and General Staff Course (or, most often, simply as C&GS), offered at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. For many ofﬁcers, the Leavenworth course is the moment in their careers when they begin the long transition from immediate, tactical concerns to broader, strategic responsibilities. Unlike the relative leisure they will experience later at the War College, the schooling at Leavenworth is intense. The experience of one brigadier general is typical of most generals: #45: From there I went to Leavenworth. Leavenworth was the best year of my military developmental life, outside of my commands. It’s a wonderful educational institution. The

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best in the world. Nothing compares to Ft. Leavenworth. A learning opportunity . . . I really worked hard there.

Those ofﬁcers not selected to attend this course in residence at Ft. Leavenworth may take it by correspondence. The failure to be selected for the in-residence course, however, is a strong indicator that the ofﬁcer will not be selected for battalion command and, hence, will never be promoted beyond the grade of Lieutenant Colonel. Selection for this course, in contrast, is an almost certain guarantee of promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and a promising sign of a future battalion command. For those who do command battalions, the typical career pattern next places them in residence as a student in one of the yearlong senior-service courses, of which the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, is the oldest and most esteemed. The remaining steps in this model career trajectory would include promotion to Colonel, selection for brigade command, a viable staff position following brigade command, and then – ﬁnally – selection as one of the thirty or so new Brigadier Generals chosen annually among the hundreds of eligible colonels considered. It is the Army War College and, to a lesser extent, the Command and General Staff College, that is particularly interesting in the present context in that its curriculum is less on the technical aspects of the operation of weapons systems, or the organization of military units or other similar basic, practical issues and more on what are clearly the more intellectual subjects of military history, international relations, the nature of war in the next century, civilmilitary relations, comparative politics and culture, and so on. The philosophy of the school emphasizes “theory, concepts, systems, and the national security decision-making process” so as to produce “graduates who can deal effectively with complex, unstructured problems involving national security . . .. (U.S. Army War College, 2000). The officers are being pushed, in other words, to develop some cultural capital and to become aware of the more public role they will soon be playing as representatives of American military policy in sites throughout the world. One general remembered his days at the War College this way: #34: For the senior service college I went to the Navy War College. That was kind of a disappointment initially because most Army people want to go to the Army War College, meet your peers who have been spread around the world, some of whom you didn’t know. Meet old friends . . .. The Army War College . . . it’s kind of a gentleman’s course. You play a lot of golf and all that. Navy War College you study; you get a grade every day . . .. And so we had to work hard. But . . . at the same time I learned a lot of stuff. They forced me to read books. . . . Mahan, Jomani, and others, especially on naval strategy, but which has a linkage to our military strategy and where we are in the world that I would never have read before.

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One of the latent functions of the military’s emphasis on schooling is the social cohesion and network development that these periods of relative isolation at posts such as Ft. Leavenworth (Kansas) or Carlisle Barracks (Pennsylvania) encourage. Besides the way in which the school system enhances the maturation of these rising ofﬁcers, it also forges the development of a form of social capital.12 Inasmuch as military organizations are oriented towards missions and to the successful accomplishment of these missions, they constitute environments in which teamwork and sociability are essential, enduring, and valued aspects. Consequently it would be misleading to characterize the success of highly-ranked military ofﬁcers (and highly-ranked enlisted personnel as well) as being due to the existence of “old boy networks” or to the intervention of well-regarded sponsors. Senior ofﬁcers do serve an absolutely essential function in the military promotion process yet all career military personnel will, over the course of a twenty or thirty year career, develop social networks that include both peers as well as more senior ofﬁcers. The relevance of socialization processes to the creation of such social networks is minimal and will not be developed to any extent in this chapter. Work environments do, to be sure, form the crucible in which much of the informal learning that makes up such a signiﬁcant part of occupational socialization takes place. For more extensive examination of work-related socialization processes, the reader might turn to the chapters in this volume by Hyson and Mortimer, and by Wethington. Through its emphasis on what amounts to life-long learning, the military socializes its members to the values of continual self-improvement and an openness to experience. In the course of my interviews for this research, the generals identiﬁed three different ways in which military culture aided their personal growth and development. The generals emphasized, ﬁrst, that army schools are places where the army with a “big A” is located, suggesting that the schools serve as the repository of Army tradition and collective memory.13 Second, almost everyone spoke at length of how their various assignments challenged them and served as a certain catalyst for growth. Finally, several of the generals mentioned the social life one takes part in while in the military as another aspect of military culture that prodded their development. The following excerpts will highlight each of these aspects of army culture that are seen as having been a positive force in the maturation and growth of these military leaders. The importance of both the army schools and the military’s system of linking promotions with jobs of increased responsibility and importance is highlighted in the following segment of an interview with a two-star general whose career has been marked by an almost unbroken series of jobs with combat units in Germany and Korea. 407

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#58: I think that the thing that you’ve got to work hard on is acquiring and honing tactical competencies and technical proﬁciencies. You got to understand that you need to acquire a new set of technical proﬁciencies with each assignment. And that requires work. And of course we have this wonderful commitment to the American ofﬁcer in the form of this institutional commitment to professional development. So when you get these professional development opportunities – whether or not it’s the advance course or CAS3, which didn’t exist when I was going through, or Command & General Staff College, Senior Service College – you’ve got to take full advantage. You’ve got to really leverage those opportunities to broaden yourself so that you’re broadening your competencies. Because the environment you operate in becomes exponentially more difﬁcult and more complex. It’s not arithmetic. Brigades are exponentially more difﬁcult than battalions. Battalions are exponentially more difﬁcult than companies. And divisions are exponentially more difﬁcult than brigades. And so if you think you’re going to bring the same skill set that served you in battalion command to brigade command, then you’re going to be – you’re going to fall short of the mark.

This understanding of the necessity that the rising ofﬁcer must continue to develop – and the appreciation that the army itself provides the necessary training to facilitate this growth – is echoed by another ofﬁcer who, at the time of our interview, served as the commanding general of one of the Army’s ten active divisions. What do you think, then, are your major strengths that, if they don’t distinguish you, at least might help to understand your success. #61: Well, probably ﬁrst and foremost, the Army has given me opportunities to be prepared for the jobs that I’ve gone into. For instance, commanding two companies. For instance, having ample opportunities to be a staff ofﬁcer in battalions. To be an S-4, a BMO14, an S-3, an XO. To be a brigade S-3. In my 33 years in the Army, I’ve never worked above the division level, with the exception of my tour on the Joint Staff. I’ve always been at the division level or below. And all of those experiences have been highly developmental experiences. G-3. Chief of Staff. Commander at the various levels. And always in an organization that looks just like this one in terms of organization equipment, doctrine, capabilities. So, through many, many years of wonderful opportunities, I’ve been prepared for the jobs I’ve gone into.

This interpretation of military assignments as a sequence of challenging opportunities to develop new skills or to hone those already acquired is not unique but was voiced in one form or another by almost every ofﬁcer in the sample. Almost every ofﬁcer, following an initial period of branch training, begins his or her career with command of a platoon of soldiers. Most will also, without much delay, move on to command a company.15 The best of these will also, in time, command a battalion in one of the Army’s divisions, separate brigades, or training organizations. Fewer still will be selected by a board of general ofﬁcers to lead a brigade and only a favored few combat arms ofﬁcers

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will ever taste the most prized plum of all, command of a division. All army ofﬁcers who remain in the service for twenty years will be promoted to the rank of Major and, most likely, to Lieutenant Colonel. They, along with those who remain longer and who achieve greater success, will also – in between their command assignments – experience a range of other duty positions, examples of which include service as an ROTC instructor; a military attaché in an embassy overseas; a recruiter; an action ofﬁcer in the Pentagon or other large headquarters; or a project ofﬁcer tasked with the design, testing, and manufacture of a new weapons system. These moves may involve a quantitative shift in level, as when a ofﬁcer who previously commanded a battalion is named to command a brigade. But the move may just as often involve a qualitative shift in the nature of the position itself, as when an ofﬁcer whose previous experience has been with ﬁeld units is tapped for an assignment to a department on the Army staff in the Pentagon. Furthermore, the fact that the typical military position is held for only three years, after which the individual gains experience in a different job, oftentimes at a different post with different supervisors, colleagues, and requirements, induces in the individual military member an accommodative understanding of change and a degree of ﬂexibility unmatched by civilian professionals whose lives are more stable and whose occupational trajectories are marked by only a few key decision points (such as, for example, a university’s decision to promote and award tenure to an assistant professor, or a law ﬁrm’s decision to invite an associate into the ﬁrm as a partner). The division commander whose comments on assignments were just quoted (#61) has since my interview with him been promoted to a three-star position and serves as the commanding general of a corps. In the interview, he discussed further his appreciation of the learning curve that is built into military careers: How about the Washington job? Was that OK as far as you were concerned? #61: Yeah. I had never been there. Went after brigade command. So I was a relatively senior colonel when I went to Washington. I went as a division chief in the Joint Staff. The one job I’ve had in the Army where I was not prepared for what I was going to do. I was the Chief of the European Division of J-5, which at that time was the largest division on the Joint Staff. At a time when the Soviet Union was coming apart, the Wall had just come down. We were looking at expanding NATO. The Balkans were coming apart. Europe was happening in a big, big way. So I went in there and I learned a tremendous amount. Well, within arrival, within 60 days I had been selected for Brigadier General. I was frocked [assigned to a higher-ranked position in anticipation of a pending promotion to the requisite rank] and made the Joint Staff rep for European Security matters with duty in both Washington and Vienna, Austria. So I was back and forth, 90 days in Vienna, 30 days in

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Washington; 90 days in Vienna, 30 days in Washington. I worked for – who at that time was the Special Ambassador for the Republics of the former Soviet Union. I was his military representative. So for about a year, we traveled throughout the former Soviet Republics, meeting with their military and their heads of state and trying to establish relationships, basically, over there. Military-to-military relationships mostly. And so it was a learning, growing period for me.

As a group so accomplished, senior military leaders comport themselves with an unusal degree of modesty (Dowd, 2000). An aspect of the culture in which they operate is a strong emphasis on selﬂessness and a clear renunciation of careerism. To express too great an interest in one’s own productivity or to signal in any way that one is more concerned with one’s own well-being than with that of one’s subordinates would be considered unbecoming or, even, deserving of punishment. The personal growth that these ofﬁcers describe must be treated carefully, then, lest it be taken as an indicator of excessive self-absorption. This tension is resolved through the ofﬁcers’ attribution of their success through a combination of hard work, particularly the hard work of the soldiers under their command, and the opportunities the Army provided them. The excerpt that appears below is presented at some length in order to provide a good account of the way in which the ofﬁcers speak of their success, but modestly. When I look at your record, once you go over to Europe, it seems as if everything begins to take off. Everything begins to click. Obviously you were doing great in these other jobs but, once you get back in the Army . . .. #58: I never got out of the operational Army once I returned, which is – and you’ve looked at a bunch of ﬁles, but I would say to you that that is as distinctive about this ﬁle as anything you’ll ever see. I spent almost three years as the S-3 of a tank battalion. The same tank battalion. I was clearly, by the third year, I was clearly the most conspicuously performing S-3 in the division. I mean that was – I think that was a commonly held perception across the division. But part of it was – and I certainly wasn’t in the ﬁrst year and perhaps wasn’t in the second year. But by the third year I had mastered the craft. This becomes important because it becomes the basis that in time will differentiate my performance from others. And it is this grounding in the rudiments of the craft. Having spent three years as the S-3 of a tank battalion in Europe, as opposed to one year, and then being an aide-de-camp or something similar. I had three years learning the craft, learning the battalion, and honing those skills. And then I went from there and I was the G-3 exercises ofﬁcer on the Marne Division staff for a year and a half. That was a wonderfully broadening experience. Because I was the exercise ofﬁcer, I had to understand the division base. I had to understand the signal air piece of it; I had to understand the sustainment piece of it; I had to understand how the division functioned across the battleﬁeld operating systems. So, and I was – at that point – in a series of performances, I began at that time to be recognized as one of the top two or three majors in the division.

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Following this experience in Germany, and an interlude at the School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) back in the U.S., this same ofﬁcer was reassigned to Korea. His story picks up there: #58: So I went to Korea. I just been selected for lieutenant colonel. They frocked me to lieutenant colonel and he made me the logistics plans and operations ofﬁcer for the Combined Field Army because we were completely deﬁcient in that area. So when you become the logistics plans and operations ofﬁcer for a combined ﬁeld army, U.S. and ROK [Republic of Korea], all of a sudden – again you’re just broadening your understanding of military operations and now you’re examining the linkage between the supporting community and the operational community. And you’re doing it in a combined environment.

Many times during the interviews, the respondents – unprompted by me – would bring the conversation back to the issue of the Army’s role in their development. During a conversation with a brigadier general who had been promoted fairly late to general, for example, I asked him whether he had ever seriously considered leaving the Army. He replied, #45: I wasn’t so wedded to the Army, but as you progress through your career what happens is, and I think it’s the same for most people, you kind of get comfortable with the challenges and the continuing progression of challenge. You can’t rest on your laurels; it’s a prove yourself every day thing. There’s no rest for the good. You have to keep getting better. So I never had that dilemma. Never really seriously considered getting out until I was a colonel.16

In addition to the developmental opportunities of challenging courses and more responsible job assignments, military ofﬁcers experience a social life that is full, rich, and complex. The complexity enters largely due to the different worlds associated with ﬁeld and garrison. Informality dominates the social life in the ﬁeld and at remote locales while garrison duty is a zone of formality at the center of which stands the Ofﬁcers’ Club. The Ofﬁcers’ Club at most army posts is an attractive building usually adjoining a golf course and tennis courts. It resembles for all practical purposes a country club that well-off civilians might join. The socialization that is associated with the Ofﬁcers’ Club, despite its obvious similarities with civilian country clubs, is rooted more deeply in the culture of the military profession and military life than it is in the broader, civilian culture of the upper-middle class. The military has a long tradition, rooted in aristocratic social customs, of military balls, formal dinner parties, regimental dining-ins, and the like. Such formal social functions are important mechanisms in the socialization process of military ofﬁcers. As a rule, major social functions on post (such as June 14th, the Army’s birthday) take place at the Ofﬁcers Club. Such occasions require the wearing of the Army’s dress blue uniform. Ofﬁcers may also exploit the cultural opportunities that exist in the civilian community surrounding the post, although given the remote location 411

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of many Army posts, such events are rare. Assignments to urban areas such as Washington, D.C., provide what for many ofﬁcers (and their spouses) is a longawaited opportunity to see not only a professional football game perhaps but also the latest exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery or in one of the Smithsonian museums. Within the Ofﬁcers’ Club, there is usually a room with an informal bar where younger, company grade ofﬁcers might gather on Friday evenings, for example, to relax and socialize. Given the proximity of the informal bar to the more sedate milieu of the larger club, the younger, company-grade ofﬁcers can hardly fail to recognize how the partitioning of the club mirrors in a way the different behavioral norms guiding the demeanor of younger and more senior ofﬁcers. With promotion will come a more formal, genteel style. The life structure of those in mid-life (the senior ﬁeld-grade ofﬁcers) is not the same as that which serves as the foundation for more youthful company-grade ofﬁcers (Levinson, 1978). The informal gatherings in private homes and, in particular, the moments of socializing among soldiers stationed abroad in remote posts are especially enjoyable, even memorable. It is in the ﬁeld where collective sentiments and the bonds of solidarity are at their most effervescent (Durkheim, 1915). A three-star commander told me the following story: #59: On Christmas Day, 1990, we were all out in the [Saudi] desert and a couple of kids out of our command post [somehow found] a little, scrawny looking tree and brought it back and they set it up in the command post and made Christmas ornaments and so we hung Christmas ornaments on this little tree. On Christmas Day, 1990. Here we are sitting in the desert drinking 7-Ups and Coca-Cola and near beer and decorating this Christmas tree and having food out of a mess hall. Very small group of people, probably 50 of us. Well, I noticed the whole time we were decorating this Christmas tree and eating popcorn and we were getting gifts and things from home – what we did was, everybody took something that we received from home and we wrapped it up as a Christmas present. Then at some certain point we exchanged presents among this small group of people around this little Christmas tree. And I noticed the whole day this young kid was sitting by me all the time. Wherever I’d go, he would just kind of come around and he was sitting by me all day. It was my – I guess on that day more than any other day I ﬁgured out why I like being in the Army and I never knew it before. I was worried about, “Boy, the war is going start, probably Saddam Hussein is going to chemicalize us and we’re all going to die,” and all that stuff. But I kept noticing this kid. At the end of the festivities, he looked at me and he had the biggest smile on his face and it was just incredible. None of us had ever seen this kid smile. And he said – he was probably about nineteen years old – we ﬁnished this thing and he looked at me with this big smile and he said, “Sir, I just have to say, thanks to you and thanks to everybody here, this is the best Christmas I’ve ever had!” I get a little emotional about that story. We got inside the Army an awful lot of kids who for whatever reason the institution, the opportunity, the closeness of an organization – the

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9th Infantry Division or the 1st Cav or anyplace else – where it presents for so many of these kids the ﬁrst real family that they ever had. So I looked up this kid a little bit more later and so forth and it was one of these broken homes, barely dodged disaster a whole bunch of times as a young person and all of that. Well, shoot, he never had anything in his life that represented anything like a family. To sit in the damn desert and to have this kid look around and say, “the best Christmas I ever had,” wow!

VENUE B: THE CULTURE INDUSTRY In The Professional Soldier, the classic sociological study of military life, Janowitz (1960) devoted considerable space to an analysis of the training of military ofﬁcers. He concluded that military men “are not thinkers” although they do respect “the educated man, especially for his expertise” (1960, p. 135). In the military order of things, far more important than intellectuality are the leadership skills of decisiveness and the ability to connect with ordinary human beings. Although the main lines of Janowitz’s argument on this point remain true today (particularly the point that intelligence is not intellectuality and military people tend to be practical doers rather than thinkers), much has changed in the intervening years that needs to be taken into account. The military today requires of both its ofﬁcers and enlisted personnel far more vocational skills and general education than ever before. The external political environment has certainly changed as soldiers today are required to possess the tact and patience of peacekeepers as well as the warrior skills required on the battleﬁeld. Equally transforming, although far less understood within the military, has been the growth of the culture industry during the past half-century. There are far more conduits of information and entertainment today than ever before, each of which transmits into the culture and our consciousness an unimaginable range and quantity of images. Television, even before the cable revolution, had become a ﬁxture in American homes. Now, with cable, satellite, and internet access, the products of the culture industry have long since surpassed both in number and inﬂuence those distributed by “ofﬁcial” cultural institutions such as schools, museums, and libraries. Interestingly, however, the culture industry has also served as a mechanism for the dissemination not only of the popular culture of television sit-coms or Hollywood summer blockbusters but also what once was described as “middlebrow” culture and what, for most, would be described as “high-brow” entertainment and commentary. Independent ﬁlms are produced far more often now than ever before and have found their way into mainstream circulation outlets. Public television continues to exist, if not thrive, with a steady provision of intelligent historical dramas and other similar cultural products. It 413

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is true that the standardization of the book publishing industry has driven small bookstores out of business but one can still ﬁnd “good” literature and out-of-print books through the many new internet companies, like Amazon.com, that have sprung up since the mid-1990s. This pattern also holds true when one considers the performing arts such as opera, symphonic orchestras, ballet, and the like. Although there are obvious differences between such performing arts as ballet or opera and those that, like clogging or blue grass music, emerged from Amer-European folk culture, all such artistic endeavors are likely to enter our lives through a recording, ﬁlm, or a televised concert performance. The exposure most Americans have to a performance of any type of music, whether it be rock, rap, country, opera, klezmer, or new age is in the form of a recording of one type or another. There may well be forms of music produced by local musicians in college towns like Athens, Georgia, or mountain hollows in Appalachian hamlets, that are much loved by resident aﬁcionados but such pockets of resistance to (or isolation from) the standardizing reach of the culture industry are increasingly rare. The result of these developments has been to make available to more middleclass consumers that ever before what once was the private reserve of a smaller public made up almost entirely of the leisured rich and those in academia. With this availability has come a heightened social expectation that one has at least a passing familiarity with the latest bestselling novels, popular movies, or other popular culture phenomena. Cultural literacy, in other words, is as likely today to include a familiarity with Sammy Sosa, Julia Roberts, and Harry Potter as it is a recognition of Brahms, Titus Andronicus, or Huckleberry Finn. The rising expectations concerning levels of cultural literacy clearly have entered into the military profession. Military ofﬁcers, today as in Janowitz’s time, would not be described collectively as intellectual. In my research, I routinely asked my respondents about their reading habits, and other leisure time activities. Today’s army generals do a considerable amount of technical reading on the job and many have little time in their off-hours for anything but light ﬁction, if any reading at all. The novels of Tom Clancy were more likely to be cited than any other work of ﬁction. A large number of ofﬁcers, however, emphasized that they love to read, with military history and biographies of World War II or Civil War leaders most often mentioned. Reading in these areas are encouraged by the Army’s Chief of Staff as well as by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both of whom distribute recommended professional lists, organized into sections by rank (Michael Shaara’s novel, Killer Angels, for example, is recommended by the Chief of Staff, General Erik Shinseki, for junior enlisted people while Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers made his list of suggestions for colonels and generals).17

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Space will permit only a summary of these data on the leisure pursuits and cultural tastes of the general ofﬁcers in my sample. The principle ﬁnding concerns the middle-class nature of their tastes and habits. They do not smoke, for the most part, although did so as youth. They have reduced their intake of red meat in favor of more ﬁsh and chicken. Inasmuch as they are in bed early when possible, they tend to watch little television. The news, some sports on the weekend, and perhaps a favorite show here and there constitutes the main pattern of viewing. They listen to music, oftentimes popular classical music, such as recordings by Pavarotti, the Three Tenors, or other similar music, but primarily for relaxation. They also enjoy golf and, like all military personnel, exercise their cardiovascular systems through running or other similar activity. The following excerpts from several interviews provide an overview of the dominant trends in the data concerning the cultural tastes of these military leaders. Do you read any ﬁction? #60: Yeah, I do. But not a lot. I like the Civil War. The Civil War and World War II I’ve read more about that than any other single area but I go back – I’ll go out and get a book on Greek campaigns and Roman campaigns and so I sort of bounce around the eras of history. I also read biography.

What kind of music do you listen to? #45: My wife is excellent at musicals. When we were at West Point for three years, she went every single week to every matinee, musical, play; she’s very well read and I like them too . . . not as much as she does. But over the years, I’ve really developed an appreciation for classical music because it’s much less stressful to me. It’s much more relaxing. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the three tenors and their performance out in LA, I love that. I listen to that a lot. I also like country/western music. I like all kinds of music but, over the years, I like to go to a symphony.

Do you do much reading? #45: Yes. I like mostly biography now. History and biography. Over the years, it’s progressed. It used to be literature really, really heavily. Then I progressed more to history and then I was almost exclusively biography. The last couple of books I’ve read have been Brinkley’s book and Powell’s book, and right now I’m reading one on Joshua Chamberlain that’s recently been written.

When you do retire, when that time comes, do you see yourself as needing to go to a big city with a lot of stuff around or could you go to a smaller town? 415

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#57: We both grew up in cities in the Northeast and still consider ourselves urbanites. When it comes time to leave the service, I don’t think I’m going to retire. I think I need to continue to do something. In order for me to continue to do something in the business that I enjoy, it’s probably going to have to be in a larger city. We like the D.C. area – hate the trafﬁc but love the environment. The Smithsonian, operas, just lots of stuff to do.

VENUE C: OFFICIAL CULTURE I mentioned earlier that it is increasingly possible for someone to acquire a measure of ofﬁcial culture through popular ﬁlm or television shows. The most reliable (though far from ﬂawless) indicator of the depth of one’s immersion into ofﬁcial culture is, however, an undergraduate degree – and particularly one from an elite school – or an advanced educational degree. The noted political economist, Andrew Hacker (1997, p. 217) has written that it is widely expected that, compared to degrees from state universities, the “time invested in pursuing a degree from an Ivy League college, or counterparts such as Duke and Stanford, should yield an even smoother polish and hence lead to more impressive careers.” He further explains (p, 231): The years at college and graduate school pay off because they burnish students’ personalities. The time spent on a campus imparts cues and clues on how to conduct oneself in corporate cultures and professional settings. This demeanor makes for successful interviews and enables a person to sense what is expected of him during the initial months on a job.

Although few general ofﬁcers spent their undergraduate days at a prestigious liberal arts college or university like Stanford or Princeton, many, indeed most, general ofﬁcers list a Master’s degree on their resumes. This fact, while not insigniﬁcant, is not necessarily indicative of elite cultural preferences. The emphasis within the army on graduate degrees came about during the post-Vietnam RIF, or reduction in force. Although many career ofﬁcers remained in the army following the Vietnam War, there were fewer career-enhancing jobs to be allocated as the army reduced in size from the 24 active divisions during the height of the Vietnam War to the 18 divisions of the immediate post-draft period. It was at this time that Chief of Staff William Westmoreland encouraged ofﬁcers to take a leave from military duty to pursue a civilian degree. He recognized that such a diversion of military personnel into institutions of higher education would not only serve to enhance their value, potentially, to the Army but would also solve the problem of the excess of experienced and retainable military ofﬁcers still in the service after the RIF had taken effect. The post-Vietnam RIF was very severe and hit especially hard those who, like many OCS ofﬁcers, did not have an undergraduate degree.

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Those with some college who survived RIF were sent back to school to ﬁnish their degrees. Many college graduates were also given 1–2 years of temporary duty (TDY) to a civilian school (usually very high-ranking schools such as Duke, Rice, or UNC-Chapel Hill) to earn a Master’s degree. Some who were slotted for instructor assignments at West Point were encouraged to a Ph.D. With graduate school, C&GS, and follow-on tours as a West Point instructor, it was not uncommon among members of my sample to have spent up to six years out of the “regular” Army during the period from 1972 to 1980. They commonly refer to this break in their career as their “academic phase.” Since the 1970s, however, the nature of this educational process has changed considerably. It is much less common for ofﬁcers to be allowed time away from their military jobs to obtain a degree. Most ofﬁcers still ﬁnd time for an advanced degree but do so typically in the evenings while serving on campuses as ROTC instructors or assigned to the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (Shippensburg University is located in the vicinity and is the source of many of the M. A. degrees held by members of my sample). Furthermore, the degrees earned today are usually in the technical ﬁelds, such as in Operations Research/Systems Analysis (ORSA), or in an applied ﬁeld such as Public Administration or Management. Although the nature of the ofﬁcial culture acquired through such programs is more technical than artistic, the larger point is that almost every member of my sample, because of the institutional policies in place within the army at the time, was permitted (indeed, in most cases, encouraged) to take an extended leave from the military to deepen his or her knowledge of a particular academic ﬁeld. This opportunity allowed many of the West Point ofﬁcers especially to experience the “civilizing” inﬂuence of a civilian university for the ﬁrst time and it exposed all of the ofﬁcers to the ofﬁcial culture that is part of the curriculum of every college and university in the country.

VENUE D: THE WORLDS OF OTHERS Although they share many characteristics in common, there is also within any group of military ofﬁcers, considerable variation in skills, both military and cultural. All military organizations comprise a complex variety of occupational specialties, which typically develop their own, unique career patterns. Some of these specialties, such as infantry and armor, are directly involved in combat operations while those who follow career paths in one of combat service support branches, such as ﬁnance and personnel, are unlikely ever to ﬁre a weapon in combat. The ofﬁcers in non-combat specialties are almost indistinguishable in their education and habits from their counterparts who labor in civilian 417

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organizations. But even those ofﬁcers whose entire careers are spent in one of the combat arms branches (armor, infantry, artillery, and special operations) will develop cultural capital since they, too, build careers that will continually expose them to formal military and civilian schools. Later in their careers, even the combat arms ofﬁcers will rotate into assignments in the Pentagon, during which they will encounter on a regular basis political staffers, civilian lobbyists, and other representatives of the Washington military-industrial complex. For ofﬁcers in the recently instituted Acquisition Corps, contact with defense industry agents will almost certainly occur early in their careers, just as contact with diplomatic personnel of other countries will occur early for ofﬁcers in the Foreign Area specialty. But for those ofﬁcers in the combat arms, that is, for those ofﬁcers most likely to become generals, contact with either group will occur later in their careers when a Pentagon assignment is almost certain and when attendance at one of the senior-service colleges will expose the ofﬁcer to new understandings of political and cultural affairs. For all military ofﬁcers, an assignment to Washington, or to NATO headquarters in Europe, or to an embassy overseas serves as a conduit, or arena, through which cultural capital may be accessed. Most military people dislike Pentagon duty and would prefer duty almost anywhere else; almost all career military ofﬁcers, however, recognize that the Pentagon is a uniquely intense environment that will challenge them, and stress them, as no other place will. Others mentioned the intensity of working at NATO as having accelerated their development beyond their expectations. A few excerpts from the interviews will serve to demonstrate this. When you became a one-star, you didn’t go back to Washington, you went to Europe [to serve as the XO for a four-star commander]. Was that a good job? #45: Ah, that was the toughest job I ever had in the Army. Really hard, demanding job. It was a very good job . . . the beneﬁt of that kind of job is that you are exposed to an international headquarters, German four-star chief-of-staff, Brit four-star deputy SACEUR,18 American SACEUR, a mix of all NATO countries at SHAPE Headquarters there at Moens, Belgium. You see the interaction of the military translation headquarters of the strategic pol-mil guidance from NATO and the North Atlantic council, down through the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe, in Moens to the different NATO commands througout Europe. So, it’s a tremendous education but it’s a seven-day a week job. It’s the only executive ofﬁcer in the United States Army that is a Brigadier, and it needs to be.

Has there ever been a job that you’ve had that you did not like? #61: No. Even my last job before coming here – being Chief of the Military Training Mission in Saudi Arabia, and we had two bombings there – the Khobar bombing and the

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OPM-SANG bombing and I was responsible for evacuating all the U.S. family members while there. And my wife was part of all that and a very, very tough environment for an American woman in Saudi Arabia. You can’t drive. You got to cover yourself whenever you go downtown. You’re targeted; it’s a high-threat environment. Very tough for her. Even that was _ the job side of it was fascinating. Advising the Saudis, being part of the national security strategy apparatus as the Joint Staff rep to Saudi Arabia. Being General‘s rep in Saudi Arabia at a dynamic time was a fascinating experience for me.

To be posted to an embassy in Islamabad or to a caserme in Italy or to any post outside of the continental United States provides the additional opportunity to travel throughout the region and to learn something of the culture of the indigenous populations who live there. Military personnel, during the course of their careers, do indeed “see the world” to a degree far surpassing that of most other occupations. Even in a war zone such as in Vietnam during the late 1960s, or as part of a peacekeeping mission such as in Bosnia or Korea today, the mere exposure to different cultural practices will add to the soldier’s supply of cultural information, and material culture as well. It is commonplace, for example, for ofﬁcers stationed anywhere in southwest Asia to return home with at least one Persian rug. Most who spend any time at all in Germany learn to ski, to drive fast, and to develop a familiarity with regional cuisine. This type of appreciation for the cultural practices of others can be noticed in the following excerpt from an interview with a three-star general who, although a man who lacks pretension, has spent years in Korea and Germany and, as a result, has come to enjoy the food and drink of other cultures. As patriotic as he is cosmopolitan, he personiﬁes the concept of the cultural omnivore. #25: I’m also very interested in food, because my wife is a very, very good cook. She’s gone to school to learn to cook at hotels in Europe. And we’re interested in food, and we like to entertain, and we like to. . . you know, we’ve got all of the accouterments. Until I got married, I didn’t know there was a difference between a tea cup and coffee cup, but there is. My wife is very skilled in cooking, very skilled upholsterer, and very skilled in drapery, which are good skills for an Army wife to have. To spend time with her, I’m a very good helper in the kitchen. And I help out by setting the table, with all the forks and things in their proper place. I can do that. And I can peel vegetables, and I can . . . I’m not very good with sauces, but I’m a vegetable person.

Could you give an idea of some of the kind of foods that you like to eat. Some of the things . . . ?

111 #25: I don’t think you can put food in front of me that I wouldn’t eat. Now I am not big on sheep guts, and things like eyeballs, things like that. But . . . we love oriental food, you know, we like German food, we like French food, we like plain old American food. I’m not real big on kidney pie, but I can eat it. I like roast beef, I like chicken, I like ﬁsh, I

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like shellﬁsh. We eat lots of vegetables. And all . . . not just peas, carrots, and corn, we eat all kinds of different things. Bok choy, swiss chard, arugala. You know, like, we eat lots of spinach, we eat greens, black-eyed peas because wife’s from Alabama.

For general ofﬁcers, even a stateside assignment will often bring with it the requirement of mixing with local elites. This is especially the case on military posts in small towns, such as Ft. Stewart in Hinesville, Georgia, Ft. Campbell in Clarkesville, Tennessee, or Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. The general ofﬁcers on these posts carry equivalent cultural rank, so to speak, as the leading political and commercial leaders of the surrounding community. Through such contact, the general ofﬁcer adds still another facet to his armamentarium of cultural resources. Two examples follow. On the day during the weekend that you and your wife do things, do you ever socialize with other people? #36: Oh yeah. That’s part of my job. Like yesterday I went to lunch downtown. Tonight I go downtown to a French home. Just some people in Augusta that we’ve gotten to know but there will be a bunch of people there from Augusta. Tomorrow night I’m having some other people into my home but that’s all an extension of my work. So while I may not do something workwise, I may not be on my computer, I may not be calling somebody somewhere in the world, I’m doing a social thing.

When I called up to ﬁrm up the date for this interview, I was told that you couldn’t do it around St. Patrick’s Day because you had to go into Savannah. Do you take part of some of the activities in the Savannah area as well as here in Hinesville? #33: Yes. [In addition to the troops here], we have four thousand soldiers at Hunter Army air ﬁeld, which is contiguous to Savannah. Being the closest major unit to Savannah, I go to several functions there to have a relatively high ranking person there for some things. So I go in. We’ve got a little reciprocal arrangement where . . . the community around here is just wonderful to us. So I do whatever I can to help them.

CONCLUSIONS During the Gulf War of 1990–1991, as military generals appeared daily in press rooms in Riyadh, Dhahran, and Washington, they achieved levels of public recognition not known since the Vietnam War. Unlike the difﬁculty with the press and public experienced by General Westmoreland during that earlier conﬂict, the generals of Desert Storm encountered mostly praise. Typical of these accolades is the following commentary from Time magazine (March 11, 1991, p. 56):

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remarkable professionalism . . . exempliﬁed most visibly by the smooth TV performances of top military ofﬁcers . . . Intelligent, frank, sometimes eloquent, these men seemed to personify a new class of American military leaders who not only have a thorough grasp of their trade but also demonstrate broad political and worldly sophistication – not to mention PR savvy.

Ofﬁcers traditionally were encouraged to be “ofﬁcers and gentlemen,” an exhortation necessary because young ofﬁcers were not naturally inclined towards the civilized and gentle manners associated with the elite classes. For junior ofﬁcers, in the past as now, the primary focus of socialization efforts is upon transmitting the skills necessary to be a good ofﬁcer, that is, a leader and warrior, than on those that might transform one into that vagary, “gentleman.” The incoming cohorts of young army ofﬁcers entering active duty during the years from 1963 to 1970, which is the period during which almost all of the ofﬁcers in my sample began their military careers, were not particularly different from other college-aged young adults at that time. Most were either recent college graduates or had spent at least a year or two in college. During the 1960s, the principal sources of young ofﬁcers were R.O.T.C. and O.C.S., or Ofﬁcer Candidate School. Many of the soldiers chosen to attend O.C.S. were those who were drafted into the military after graduating from college or after leaving college early. New ofﬁcers during those years were not, in other words, young people with strong military backgrounds or those who were planning to make the military a career. If the socialization task was to render them into “ofﬁcers and gentlemen,” it would almost certainly be the gentlemanly skills that would prove far simpler to impart. The war in southeast Asia was escalating as many of these generals began their careers and, for this reason alone, it was their military training that was the overriding concern of the Infantry Ofﬁcer Basic course at Ft. Benning, or the Armor Ofﬁcer Basic course at Ft. Knox. Deﬁciencies in manners were, after all, not life-threatening. After several years in the military, considering among other experiences the time spent in the free-ﬁre zone known as Vietnam, or the lookout posts on the DMZ in Korea, or on the gunnery ranges in West Germany, these same cohorts of young ofﬁcers would indeed be quite different socially from their civilian age-peers. Those who chose to remain in the military were now part of that social world, a world in which the central discussion topics included the new M-16 riﬂe and whether it was intrinsically ﬂawed or just poorly maintained by the Marines; or whether helicopters would replace tanks; or should the airborne units’ M-551 light armored vehicle be referred to as a tank or something else. It would have been a very rare artillery captain who could also discourse on the reasons for the French withdrawal from NATO or whether the wine growers in Napa Valley will ever produce grapes comparable to those of Bordeaux. At 421

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some unspeciﬁed point in mid-career, this changes. The focus of socialization efforts shift gradually but perceptibly away from primary military skills and toward the more broadly-gauged skills of the generic professional/manager. For an ofﬁcer to remain focused primarily on speciﬁc military concerns at the expense of developing these more “gentlemanly” traits would be to fail to understand the nature of the job of the senior ofﬁcer. As warriors age, they must also show signs of their growth, their civilized temperament, their Bildung. For senior officers, and especially for general officers, the requirement for gentlemanly behavior is not only more insistent but also more complete. The career of the army officer develops on a trajectory from small units to large, from close combat to distant, from the immediate to the abstract and, to the point of relevance here, from the taste culture of the lower-middle class to that of the upper-middle class, from an unsophisticated cultural style to one that is polished and cosmopolitan. Due to their higher incomes and more culturally enriched ways of life, civilian professionals have always been found to possess different cultural tastes, preferences, and knowledge than others. Such class-related differences in probability of attending balletic or operatic performances, of drinking vintage wines with dinner, and of discussing the latest Martin Scorsese or Jane Campion film all suggest that social class strongly influences not only economic capital but also the type of cultural capital one is likely to possess. I do not wish to argue that all army generals possess an avant-garde cultural sensibility but only that, in contrast to widely-held cultural stereotypes of general officers as hyper-militant, cigar-chewing cultural cretins, they are basically indistinguishable in their tastes and habitus from other members of the professional class. Unlike other criteria for promotion, however, the importance of cultural capital is never made explicit and remains – for many senior field-grade officers – something of a mystery. This issue of style certainly works it way into the promotion process, although in ways concerning which the Army’s senior leadership itself may not be fully aware. What they are aware of, however, is the necessity to demonstrate a capacity and willingness to learn. The young infantry ofﬁcer, for example, must learn not only basic soldier skills and the intricacies of leading an infantry unit both in garrison and in the ﬁeld, but he also almost certainly need to acquire the skills required of a Pentagon action ofﬁcer, a personnel specialist, a recruiter, an R.O.T.C. instructor and, for those assigned as military liaisons within one of our embassies abroad, even a diplomat. In order to advance in rank throughout their military careers, these ofﬁcers confront the necessity of adaptation to changes in jobs and locations, the acquisition of new skills, and the adjustment to a continually changing series of supervisors and subordinates. The brash and

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bold young ofﬁcer must eventually become the judicious, experienced, even-tempered, and broad-gauged senior leader. Those ofﬁcers who are unwilling or unable to acknowledge and correct the ﬂaws of their youth (a lack of tact, a quick temper, or even a tendency towards difﬁdence, to cite several common examples) will almost certainly place their careers in jeopardy by this inattention. Successful military leaders are not, in other words, the unreﬂective organization men and women projected in many stereotypes of career military ofﬁcers. They are encouraged to recognize their shortcomings and to appreciate the necessity of taking corrective action to remedy them. A central theme that I have tried to demonstrate in this analysis derives from the idea of structuration (Giddens, 1984). The military creates opportunities for the acquisition of cultural capital but this cohort of generals came along at a time when the boundaries between the military and other professions grew less distant. They perceived of themselves as military professionals but also, simply, as professionals. For most of them, each assignment is not only another step in the fashioning of a successful career, but a means of acquiring new skills that will make them ever more valuable to the organization. The typical assignment lasts from 2–3 years. A thirty-year career, then, will string together about ﬁfteen assignments, each one of which provides an opportunity that must be exploited to the full. What is sometimes interpreted as a careerist mentality is, in most cases, better understood as the rational concern of a committed ofﬁcer who wants both to grow and to contribute. For most general ofﬁcers, their favorite job of all was their time as a battalion commander. Although most generals look back at that enviable assignment with great fondness, for some the battalion commander job was particularly signiﬁcant because of what they were able to learn in it: #36: . . . I was a battalion commanders then . . . there are six of us [of the battalion commanders in that division] who are now two-stars. So there was a coming together of some team out there that was very special. While the 9th ID is no longer here and we were poohpoohed by the Army because we were that high-tech “toys ‘r’ us” bunch, we learned a tremendous amount of things out there and from that I learned what this digitization thing is and can do. So there are a few of us who have seen it; we got a glimpse of it. So that job because of the way [the division commander] allowed you to command, because of the time we got to be there and literally design our own division, it was wonderful. It was almost self-actualization, it was that good!

Understanding the importance of each assignment, it is not difﬁcult to understand why ofﬁcers will occasionally actively attempt to wriggle free of jobs that are deemed to be dead-ends, or “out-of-the-mainstream.” Most, however, subscribe to the view that everyone gets at least one bad assignment during a career; rather than complain, their reaction, or so they claim, is simply 423

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to salute and go where the Army chooses to send them. One respondent, eager to return to the ﬁeld army after an extended academic detour, was initially excited about his assignment in Korea. #45: After [the West Point job], I went to Korea. I wound up in a lousy job over there. It wasn’t very developmental. It was down in Seoul; I thought I was going to the 2nd Infantry Division in a very good job, to be an operations ofﬁcer and wound up getting siphoned off down there. Worked out alright because I brought my wife over at my own expense and we had a pretty good year but I didn’t learn anything.

I have attempted in this to describe the socialization processes that are part of military life and which produce a class of professional soldiers that is similar in many ways to the professional-managerial class in the civilian world. It is important to acknowledge as well the differences that unquestionably separate military from civilian professionals. Many commentators have noted the cynicism that is rampant in American culture and the irony that is so characteristic of our age (Purdy, 1999; Goldfarb, 1991). Although military ofﬁcers share an appreciation for irony, particularly a kind of self-effacing ironic humor that accompanies every difﬁcult assignment or deployment, they are – as a group – extraordinarily idealistic. They are relentlessly pragmatic in the planning and conduct of their missions but willing to undertake almost any hardship to redress an injustice or to protect powerless people from danger.19 So, despite their continual development of cultural resources, many of these generals think of themselves as naïfs or, as one ofﬁcer put it, “My generation is the one with Forrest Gump and can identify with every minute of it” (#61). There is one ﬁnal issue that needs to be addressed before we conclude. This has to do with the perception of cultural capital within the masculine world of the military profession. Although the acquisition of polish or sophistication by advancing ofﬁcers is institutionally sanctioned, there is a suspicion within the ranks that such an emphasis is misplaced. It is held by some that, because of this on sophistication and polish, the army is in danger of losing its warrior spirit. There is some basis for this concern if only because of the civilizing moderation that is the certain byproduct of advanced study. Rather than to hold onto the traits of physicality that are admired in youth, the mature person – even the mature Army ofﬁcer – is looked to for wisdom rather than hotheadedness. But, to some, there is a danger in becoming too worldly and too sophisticated. It is important to be able to deal effectively with the many types of people that one will encounter in Washington and other world capitals, yet it would be ruinous if this worldliness were in some way connected with a loss of spirit or any compromise with the fundamental, enduring values of “duty, honor, country.” This apprehension manifests itself in any number of

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ways. Consider the following vignette described by then-Colonel David Hackworth, a highly decorated veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam conﬂicts, in an interview with the journalist, Ward Just (1970, p. 214): ‘You can be difﬁcult as hell until you are a full colonel. Until then, you can exist, within limits, on sheer talent. But you had better be damn sure you have got the talent. To go beyond bird [the rank of colonel, O-6], you need other things. Education and polish are two of them.’ Hackworth is adamantly opposed to the system of the efﬁciency report, which he sees as central to a system which produces yes-men. Given its priorities, it can produce little else, Hackworth argues, and mentioned a two-star general by way of illustration: ‘He wanted his star, which is all right, and he admitted to me once that he decided early in his career that he would have to yield to compromise to achieve his end. He said to me that once he had three stars he would straighten it out, ﬁx the system. And that’s the irony, because you’re a different man then. You become the guy who you started out to impersonate. And that’s what’s happened to him.’

Some in and out of the military conﬂate a reasonable aversion of careerism with a tacit suspicion of cultural reﬁnement. One, presumably, is a sign of the other (and either an indication that the ofﬁcer has lost his way and has chosen the path of the ﬁctional Courtney Massingale over the truer course of the humble Sam Damon.20 Through the acquisition of cultural resources, military leaders become complicit in the ofﬁcer corps’ ill-fated transformation from a class of warriors to a pampered clique of “perfumed princes” who arrive via chauffeured limousine to their spacious ofﬁces overlooking the Potomac (Hackworth, 1996).21 This criticism echoes the conventional wisdom and, without question, Hackworth’s considerable experience lends weight to his polemics. It would be obviously shortsighted, however, to consider evidence of sophistication as a sign that the ofﬁcer lacks the warrior spirit. Rather than to presume that an enjoyment of good ﬁction is inconsistent with strong leadership skills, it makes more sense to appreciate the way in which military organizations instill in their career ofﬁcers a desire for self-improvement and growth. This growth is manifest in many different ways, including a willingness to accept the challenge of a new position with levels of responsibility far greater than one previously has been required to manage. It is also manifest in a commitment to the development of one’s cognitive skills as well. It is the argument of my paper that, in either case, military organizations provide both the opportunity – and the requirement – for their members to continue to grow both professionally and personally throughout the course of their careers. This fact is not a ﬂaw of military organization but its most enviable accomplishment. I end this paper with an excerpt from an interview with a two-star General whose career was spent in the Infantry branch and who is one of the Army’s 425

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most esteemed ofﬁcers. Toward the end of our interview, I asked the general whether he was known as a hard grader. #60: No! Well, it depends on how you mean hard. In the sense that – well I’m not a zero-defects guy. I am not! Because if anybody held me to zero defects, then I’d have been capped off at the lieutenant level. I believe that everybody grows. And you never walk into a job in the Army that you’ve done before. So everybody grows. I don’t care what you got on your collar. And in the growing, most of us make mistakes. So I am pretty tolerant of growth.

NOTES 1. Small Time Crooks (DreamWorks, 2000) was written and directed by Woody Allen. 2. Our inability to imagine a group of military ofﬁcers who possess a degree of cultural capital comparable to their civilian peers may also be due to a certain myopia that academicians as a group share concerning the type of individual who would spend twenty or thirty years inside the military. It is my hope that this research might add not only to our understanding of the social world of the professional soldier but also that sociological interest in the military as an institution, organization, and profession might increase. 3. Within the upper-middle class, there exists a range of cultural capital both across professional ﬁelds and within individual professions as well. University professors in the humanities are obviously far more knowledgeable of philosophical and literary themes than are military ofﬁcers. Yet, the research of both Erickson (1996) and Halle (1993) supports the idea that the cultural capital of the American upper-middle class is neither especially reﬁned or esoteric nor signiﬁcantly different in many ways from that of the lower-middle class. The same is not true in other societies, such as France, as the research of Bourdieu (1984, 1990) and Lamont (1992) demonstrates. 4. My knowledge of the military comes largely from my service in the early 1970s as a Lieutenant (Armor branch) with the U.S. Army. While this background was invaluable in interviewing the generals, it was never a factor in gaining access to any of the generals for interviews. During the introductions prior to turning on my tape recorder and beginning the formal interviews, however, the generals would invariably ask how I became interested in this project. My stock answer usually included mention of my service as a Lieutenant during the Vietnam era and the increased public awareness of general ofﬁcers as a result of the Gulf War of 1991. While my own military experience provided the background and “feel” necessary to conduct these interviews, I also gleaned much additional information from informal conversations with other military people, such as those I spoke with while waiting for interviews to begin, or while being escorted through the halls of the Pentagon, or while speaking with the staffs of the General Ofﬁcer Management Ofﬁce and the Personnel Command, both located in the Washington area. 5. According to Janowitz (1960), the senior leadership of the Army in the early twentieth century was almost exclusively from an upper or upper-middle class background. In the period of the First World War, for example, only 8% of the Army’s senior leadership came from outside this elite circle. Even by 1950, fully 50% of the

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senior leaders came from this privileged background. With the end of the era of mandatory military service in the early 1970s, the shift in the class composition of the ofﬁcer corps away from those privileged by birth was further reinforced. 6. Military ofﬁcers, like members of other occupational groups, tend to share in common a certain Weltanschaaung that is perhaps best characterized hopeful in concept but realistic in application. Their preference for pragmatic solutions usually – but not always – manifests itself as a generally conservative political philosophy (Dowd, 2001). 7. The boundary may seem arbitrary and vague to some but to those within the social world, the boundary is very precise, real, and consequential. Growing up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick (1994) learned at a very young age that Ocean Parkway divided her own working-class Italian neighborhood from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she eventually married. 8. Sabrina, 1995, was directed by Sidney Pollock and produced by Paramount; Wall Street, 1987, was directed by Oliver Stone and produced by Twentieth Century Fox; Saving Private Ryan, 1998, was directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by DreamWorks; and Once An Eagle, 1968, was written by Anton Myrer and published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 9. Antal Doráti, Herbert von Karajan et al., conducting the Washington, D.C., National Symphony and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra et al., Uni/Deutsche Grammophon – #459141, recorded on August 11, 1998. 10. The relationship between cultural capital and success in the military cannot be empirically established. There are obviously cases of sophisticated ofﬁcers who fail to achieve promotion beyond ﬁeld-grade rank and also some, but fewer, who reach the general ofﬁcer ranks without exhibiting the kinds of characteristics that I employ in this chapter as indicators of cultural capital. It may well be that cultural capital operates in a manner similar to physical capital. Attractive people, including physically attractive or dominant military people, have been found to do better in many occupational pursuits than less attractive people. Some researchers have claimed a link between physical features and the success of military people (see, for example, Hamermesh & Biddle 1994; Mazur, Mazur & Keating 1984; Mueller & Mazur 1996; Mulford, et al., 1998). The focus on my paper is not, however, on promotion but, rather, on the way in which military organizations provide opportunities to their members to develop their talents. 11. The last few decades of the twentieth century was a period of very signiﬁcant change in the Army’s approach to military training. The centerpiece of the new training regime is a series of four training centers at which commanders at various echelons confront realistic battleﬁeld conditions. In the above quote, the authors refer to several of these training centers by their acronyms. Besides the Combat Maneuver Training Center (CMTC) in Germany, the Army has developed three other training cites: the National Training Center (NTC) in the California desert; the Joint Readiness Training Center in the Louisiana woods; and the Battle Command Training program (BCTP), located at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. 12. For more on the conceptualization and testing of this idea, see Coleman (1988); Frank and Yasumoto (1998); Paxton (1999); and Portes (1998). 13. The army “schoolhouse,” as students at each of the many different branch and service colleges refer to their particular school, is said to be the center of gravity, or home, for the basic military values. The army with a “small a” refers to the everyday army in the many divisions, battalions, and companies that make up the backbone of the army’s structure. When I ﬁrst heard this distinction between the “big” and “small” 427

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army, I was surprised at the elevation of the schools over the units in this comparison since, for most ofﬁcers, it is their duty in the units, not their time spent in the schools, that deﬁnes what it means to be in the Army. 14. Like all professions, the military has developed a unique jargon and an ever-expanding set of acronyms. Job titles are frequently shortened in some form or another. A Battalion Maintenance Officer is, naturally, the BMO. The unit’s executive officer is the XO. The essential staff positions include the S-1 or G-1 (personnel officer); the S-2 or G-2 (intelligence officer); the S-3 or G-3 (operations officer); and the S-4 or G-4 (supply or logistics officer). The S designation refers to staff positions at brigade-level or lower while the G designation refers to staff positions at division-level or higher (since those units are commanded by a General Officer – or GO). 15. Some ofﬁcers will actually be selected for company command twice, particularly if the ﬁrst company was a training company or a headquarters company. In order to accommodate the well-known interest of ofﬁcers in commanding tactical, or warﬁghting, companies, the army will occasionally assign an ofﬁcer who previously commanded a nontactical company a second company command but this being a tactical, or warﬁghting, company. 16. Because he had been passed over twice for promotion to brigadier general, this ofﬁcer reasonably concluded that his career was in its ﬁnal phase. For colonels and even for brigadier generals, the timing of retirement is a crucial decision. Should they stay until the next promotion board meets, hoping for a better outcome, or should they submit their retirement paperwork now while they are still young enough to be attractive job candidates on the outside? The ofﬁcer quoted above decided to stay and, for him, the decision proved to be the right one. Following his delayed promotion to brigadier general, he was quickly promoted to major general and, as of this writing, he is serving as a three-star commander of a war-ﬁghting unit. 17. I can only speculate whether their enjoyment of Clancy and Grisham distinguishes military leaders markedly from other professional groups, such as college professors, that presumably have more intellectual tastes. Halle’s study, Inside Culture (1993), which scrutinized the manner in which urban Americans decorate their homes, would suggest not. He found that – regardless of social class – most people eschewed abstract art in favor of traditional landscape paintings or prints. So too most Americans – regardless of class – prefer popular novelists such as Stephen King and John Grisham over more “serious” writers such as Don DeLillo, A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, or Nadine Gordimer. It is not that upper-middle class readers avoid DeLillo; it is only that they also read Grisham, King, or LeCarre and do so with greater frequency. The same is true of musical tastes (Peterson & Simkus, 1992). 18. The SACEUR is an acronym referring to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. By treaty agreement, the SACEUR is always an American general and, until recently, always an Army general. Because of the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the SACEUR at the time, General Wesley Clark, became well-known; most of his predecessors, however, worked in relative anonymity. 19. This generalization has its limits and exceptions. High-ranking military ofﬁcials, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is one such exception. Occupying a position that must consider all of the risks, both short- and long-term, of any possible troop deployment, the Chairman bears a very heavy burden of responsibility for both the success of the mission and also for the safety of soldiers. For this reason, the Chairman’s advice to the President is almost always cautious in nature. Former Chairman

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Colin Powell’s strong resistance to any plan that would commit U.S. soldiers to Bosnia in the mid-1990s is an example. 20. Massingale and Damon are the two principal, and opposed characters, in Anton Myrer’s popular novel, Once An Eagle. Although Massingale achieves the brass ring of success, it is the humble Sam Damon who personiﬁes the ideal character traits of the true warrior. 21. Among the Army generals that Hackworth labels as “perfumed princes” are three of the Army’s most senior leaders at the time, Gen. John Shalikashvili, Gen. George Joulwan, and Gen. Wesley Clark. Common to these three distinguished officers are: (1) a successful tour as the commander of NATO forces, headquartered in Brussels; and (2) the fact that none was involved in combat operations during the most recent of America’s wars, the 1991 conflict with Iraq (although Shalikashvili headed up the post-war relief operation designed to aid and protect Kurds in southern Iraq). Stationed in Europe, and having considerable familiarity with the social and political problems facing Europe both before and after the demise of the Soviet Union, these “perfumed princes,” who are indeed excellent examples of army leaders with considerable cultural capital, lack the field time that seems central to Hackworth’s definition of a warrior “stud.”

REFERENCES

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Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor. Bernstein, R. (1990). Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Bourdieu, P. (1983). Forms of capital. In: J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. (R. Nice, trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Artistic taste and cultural capital. In: J. Alexander & S. Seidman (Eds), Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (pp. 205–215). New York: Cambridge University Press. Bryson, B. (1996). ‘Anything but heavy metal’: Symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes. American Sociological Review, 61, 884–899. Clancy, T., & Franks, F. (1997). Into the Storm. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120. Dowd, J. J. (1990). Ever since Durkheim: The socialization of human development. Human Development, 33, 138–159. Dowd, J. J. (2000). Hard jobs and good ambition: U.S. Army generals and the rhetoric of modesty. Symbolic Interaction, 23, 183–205. Dowd, J. J. (2001). Connected to society: The political views of Army generals. Armed Forces and Society (in press). Durkheim, E. (2001) [1915]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (C. Cosman, trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Elster, J. (1986). Self-realization in work and politics: The Marxist conception of the good life. Social Philosophy & Policy, 3, 97–126. Erickson, B. H. (1996). Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology, 102, 217–251.

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Featherstone, M., & Hepworth, M. (1989). Ageing and old age: Reﬂections on the postmodern life course. In: B. Bytheway et al. (Eds), Becoming and Being Old: Sociological Approaches to Later Life (pp. 143–157). London: Sage. Frank, K. A., & Yasumoto, J. Y. (1998). Linking action to social structure within a system: Social capital within and between subgroups. American Sociological Review, 104, 642–686. Gans, H. J. (1999). Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. (Rev. ed). New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldfarb, J. C. (1991). The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hacker, A. (1997). Money: Who Has How Much and Why. New York: Scribner. Hackworth, D. (1996). Hazardous Duty. New York: William Morrow. Halle, D. (1993). Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hamermesh, D. S., & Biddle, J. E. (1994). Beauty and the labor market. American Economic Review, 84, 1174–1194. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1989[1944]). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In: The Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 120–167). New York: Continuum. Janowitz, M. (1960). The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe. Just, W. (1970). Military Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Levinson, D. (1978). Seasons of a Man’s Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mazur, A., Mazur, J., & Keating, C. (1984). Military rank attainment of a West Point class: Effects of cadets’ physical features. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 125–150. MacCannell, D. (1999). The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mead, G. H. (1964). On Social Psychology: Selected Papers. (Rev. ed.) A. Strauss (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, D., & Trout, B. (1978). Military achievement: The visibility theory and promotion. American Political Science Review, 72, 452–468. Mueller, U., & Mazur, A. (1996). Facial dominance of West Point cadets as a predictor of military rank. Social Forces, 74, 823–850. Mulford, M., Orbell,J., Shatto, C., & Stockard, J. (1998). Physical attractiveness, opportunity, and success in everyday exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 103, 1565–1592. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Paxton, P. (1999). Is social capital declining in the United States? A Multiple indicator Assessment. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 88–127. Peterson, R. A., & Simkus, A. (1992). How musical tastes mark occupational status groups. In: M. Lamont (Ed.), Cultivating Differences (pp. 152–186). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 1–24. Purdy, J. (1999). For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Riley, M. W. (1985). Age strata in social systems. In: R. H. Binstock & E. Shanas (Eds), Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (pp. 369–411). New York: Van Nostrand Rinehold.

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Rojek, C., & Urry, J. (Eds). (1997). Touring Cultures: Transformations of travel and theory. New York: Routledge. Strauss, A. L. (1959). Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Torgovnick, M. (1994). Crossing Ocean Parkway. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wrong, D. H. (1961). The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology. American Sociological Review, 26, 183–193.

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15. RACIAL AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF PHILADELPHIA YOUTH Julie A. Kmec and Frank F. Fustenberg, Jr.

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INTRODUCTION At least as far back as the 1965 Moynihan Report, social scientists have pondered over the sources of racial disparities in the development and well-being of youth (Rainwater & Yancey, 1967). In his study of poverty associated with black communities in America, Moynihan stressed that characteristics of the black family, rather than characteristics of the system of oppression, required changing. The opinion among most liberal social scientists, a view held by many of the original critics of Moynihan’s analysis of the plight of children in black families, was that economic forces, rather than the sub-cultural differences cited by Moynihan accounted for the widening gaps in employment, marriage, and non-marital fertility. Now almost three decades later, most social scientists have come to accept the idea that a racial divergence did indeed take place in the decades following the 1960s (Hill, 1981; Sowell, 1981; Farley, 1984). Most researchers have also concluded that while these demographic changes may be economically linked, they are more than

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that: at the very least, they also express deep divisions in the experiences of whites and blacks in American society. Evidence from the 1990 Census suggests that labor market returns are substantially different for white and minority men; men in each minority group earn signiﬁcantly less than white men at every level of education (Harrison & Bennett, 1995). Among women, Hispanic and black women’s wages and labor force participation rates lag behind white women’s (Misra, 1999). Minority and white women and men continue to be occupationally segregated (Bielby & Baron, 1984; Reskin, 1999) and the labor force participation rates of minority men remain lower than white men’s rates. Unfortunately, evidence indicates continuing trends in labor market divergence between the races. At the same time, residential segregation and interracial marriage keeps whites and minorities socially distanced. Whether these differences indicate distinctive differences in cultural standards, what William Julius Wilson (1987) referred to as “ghetto-speciﬁc” norms and practices, is still an open and much-debated question. The attempt to identify community-level differences in norms or behavior or “neighborhood effects” associated with the geographical concentration represents one important line of research aimed at resolving this issue. As Wilson, among others, has observed, neighborhood-level differences might point to the existence of variant life styles that shape the course of growing up in disadvantaged communities blighted by limited opportunities and resources as well as distinctively different family patterns or social expectations (see also Anderson, 1990). According to Wilson, these neighborhood features in high poverty areas both reﬂect and help to reproduce social disadvantage. Wilson’s theory that the growth of areas of concentrated poverty has generated high-risk settings for youth appeared at about the same time as a seminal article by Christopher Jencks and Susan Meyer (1990) calling for better and theoretically driven research on neighborhood and school effects. Together, these writings stimulated social scientists in a variety of disciplines to produce a veritable tidal wave of studies during the past two decades exploring neighborhood effects, race differences, and youth outcomes (e.g. Lynn & McGeary, 1990; Harrison & Bennett, 1995; Brooks-Gunn et al., 1997, 1998; Jargowsky, 1997; Danziger & Lin, 2000). Thus, it is probably fair to say that on the matter of neighborhood effects and their contribution to race differences in successful development, there is not yet consensus. The reason why is no mystery: there are formidable obstacles to carrying out convincing studies on neighborhood effects (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1997). Some obstacles concern the host of conceptual problems having to do with deﬁning neighborhoods and identifying mediating social processes while others involve methodological issues that go to the very heart of establishing

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compelling causal links between attributes of neighborhoods and outcomes for children and youth. As researchers have begun to investigate these effects, the evidence mounts that in many (though certainly not all) areas of performance the gap between black youth and white youth continues to be large, if not to be widening over time (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Whether widening or not, the persistence of huge racial disparities in the status of black and white youth is a glaring and ugly reminder that American society has not adequately addressed the problem of racial and social inequality. This paper grows out of an effort during the past decade to come to a better understanding of the sources of these racial differences and their link to economic, social, and perhaps cultural differences in the circumstances of minorities and whites. Our study describes the experiences of inner-city youth in Philadelphia, where we have followed a cohort of nearly 500 families living in mostly poor to moderate income communities. The analysis in this chapter is the ﬁrst to make use of the longitudinal data on the experiences of the youth in the study as they moved from early adolescence to early adulthood. This chapter focuses on both racial and gender differences in the socioeconomic trajectories of the young adults. The data we use are well suited to explore the social contexts that may contribute to the divergent patterns of success among minorities and whites. While studying how changing circumstances may affect outcomes is important, this paper focuses mainly on how a youth’s experiences in early adolescence affect early adulthood outcomes. Subsequent research will build on this analysis by considering how changing social contexts over time affect the transition into adulthood. The Philadelphia Neighborhood Study

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Just over a decade ago, the MacArthur Foundation established a Research Network devoted to understanding successful development during adolescence among youth in high-risk communities. This particular study was one of a series of related projects that looked jointly at neighborhood, school, peer, and family inﬂuences during the formative period when youth were entering adolescence. All of these studies were designed to be longitudinal and all possessed a qualitative as well as a quantitative component (Cook et al., 1999; Elder & Conger, 2000; Elliot et al., forthcoming). The common aim of this research program was to parse out particularly salient experiences that accounted for successful negotiation of the adolescent period, a time that is known to be especially important for establishing long-term prospects of doing well in later life. 437

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While the studies employed similar research designs and shared measures, each had a different emphasis. The research in Philadelphia was especially interested in identifying parent adaptations to neighborhood conditions that might be associated with successful outcomes for the adolescents whom we followed over time. Accordingly, we drew a sample of families with children between the ages of 11 and 15 who were living in poor, working-class, and lower-middle class communities in inner-city areas of Philadelphia. As much as possible, we tried to sample areas of the city that would give us a range of communities for both the white and non-white families in the study. As it turns out, it is not possible to ﬁnd equivalently bad conditions in white neighborhoods though we did manage to include the poorest white areas of Philadelphia. Even so, none of these completely matched the poorest black and Puerto Rican areas in the study. Details of the research designed are discussed in Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success (1999), which reports on the results of the ﬁrst wave of the study. After the initial wave of the survey was completed, we continued to talk to a sub-set of 34 families residing in four different communities: a moderateand low-income black neighborhood and a moderate- and low-income white neighborhood. In each of these communities we examined families whose children were doing both well and poorly to explore similarities and differences across families and communities that might not show up in the survey. While the survey results from the ﬁrst wave of the study show only small racial and ethnic differences in the well-being of children (largely in academic performance), the qualitative study that followed a subset of families reveal an ominous, though hardly surprising, result. More minority youth, especially males, were beginning to struggle and fall behind as they entered later adolescence. The authors of Managing to Make It conjectured primarily from the interviews with minority men that beneath their early stability lay a ﬂattening slope of success and an increasing slope of failure and risk in the transition to adulthood. This pattern of widening racial differences is strongly conﬁrmed by other research conducted in Philadelphia over the past ﬁve years on the transition to and through high school. Rates of school failure and drop out are strongly linked to attendance of neighborhood schools which themselves reﬂect patterns of racial segregation (Neild, 1999). Philadelphia has a system of “choice” within the neighborhood schools but the fact is that race still operates to selectively disadvantage black students, both because of where they live and the attempt of the Philadelphia School District to retain racial balance within a largely black public school population. The second wave of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study provides an opportunity to study in greater detail how and why minority youth, especially

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males, are encountering serious problems during middle and later adolescence. In 1991, interviewers collected a wealth of data during in-home interviews from 489 parents and children living in 65 census tracts concentrated in broader communities of the city. Information was gathered on perceptions of the neighborhood, schools, and reports from parents and children about parental practices. Child behaviors were assessed by parents, youth, and, in some instances, by interviewers. The same families were re-interviewed in 1999–2000 by telephone. Many of the key measures were repeated although obviously the phone interviews had to be briefer and updated to take account of the older age of the target youth who were between the ages of 18 and 22. Response rates to the second wave of phone interviews were 80% among parents and 76% among the adolescents. Predictably, it was somewhat more difﬁcult to locate and re-interview youth who were at greater risk of not doing well based on the data from the ﬁrst wave. In order not to drop this critically important component of the sample, we devised a technique for dealing with the missing cases by using reports on the youth’s outcomes supplied from parent interviews and/or administrative records. Augmenting the data in this fashion permitted us to have outcome data on 86% of the youth on the key measure we examine in this analysis: the socioeconomic level of young adults in 1999.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW This chapter begins by describing the association between youth performance in 1991 and 1999 for different race and gender sub-groups. As will be shown, the premonition of a growing racial divergence for minority men is strongly supported by the information collected in the second wave of the survey. We then turn to information collected in the initial wave to see if we can identify key factors during adolescence that may have contributed to the social mobility of the youth in general and the decline in the mobility of the minority males in particular.1 In this chapter, we pay particular attention to how race and gender shape an adolescent’s transition to adulthood and how, in addition, families, peers, and schools play a role in the transition of the inner city youth. Two research questions frame our analysis. To address the earlier prediction about the differing slopes of success in the transition to adulthood, we ﬁrst ask: How do race and gender shape the transition to adulthood for our inner-city sample? Second, in order to explain the success trajectories of each race-gender group we ask: How do the associations between 1991 performance and 1999 socioeconomic status vary by race-gender group? Answering these questions will help us understand the importance of context in the socialization of adolescents 439

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into adults and enable us to see how personal and social resources work together, as well as how they accumulate or cancel out over time, for our inner-city sample.

THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD Adolescence is widely recognized as an important stage of development in the process of status attainment (Willits, 1988). Despite its importance, a number of reasons prevent greater understanding of the complex link between adolescent behavior and early adult attainment. In their review of literature on the transition to adulthood, Hogan and Astone (1986) identiﬁed some of these limitations. They explained that researchers often ignored between-group differences in the transition process and that longitudinal data studying adolescent behavior, as opposed to attitudes or aspirations, was lacking (see Coleman et al., 1974; Howell & Frese, 1982). Likewise, research examining long-term effects of speciﬁc adolescent behaviors such as adolescent relationships with peers on early adult attainment is scarce (Willits et al., 1988). What is more, most of the existing research on the link between adolescence and adult attainment does not simultaneously examine gender and racial/ethnic differences. Few studies address the consistency across time of ascription and achievement for women or nonwhites. Longitudinal studies of gender and race-speciﬁc transitions into adulthood are even harder to ﬁnd. There has been little systematic research assessing multi-contextual effects on the transition into adulthood. Our study addresses some of the shortcomings in the existing literature by considering how both one’s race and gender operate together and by studying the social structural contexts in which the transition occurs. We know that the socialization of adolescents into adults is not only an individual process but is also shaped by social forces that exert inﬂuence on the process through norms, values, and sanctions. Likewise, the transition into adulthood occurs in a variety of dimensions (Hogan & Astone, 1986; Frønes, 1995). For many of the youth in our sample, the transition occurs in a social context characterized by disadvantaged inner city neighborhoods and social conditions that require families and youth to manage risk and opportunity on a daily basis.

THE PREVALENCE OF RACIAL SEGREGATION AND GENDER SOCIALIZATION DURING THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD There is a possibility that youth from different racial and gender subgroups have distinctively different experiences in the course of growing up. Astone and Hogan observed that in the U.S., “. . . major differences in the transition

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to adulthood exist between males and females, [and] racial and ethnic groups . . .” (1986, p. 119). They remarked that these difference were a result of selection due to economic differences or discrimination and socialization. For example, labor market discrimination can prevent minority youth from successfully gaining employment after school just as gender role socialization constrains the patterns of transitions of women and men. No matter what the source of racial and gender differences in the transition to adulthood, they are still prevalent. In his recent review of literature on the transition to adulthood, Shanahan concluded that racial and ethnic minorities were more likely than whites to experience a transition into adulthood that: “cast a long shadow over their adult lives, including diminished prospects for socioeconomic achievement” (Shanahan, 2000, p. 686). To be sure, adolescent experiences translate into adult success in different ways for male and female minority and white youth. In the next two sections, we discuss how race segregation and gender socialization might differently affect the social mobility of minority and white men and women. These differences may even be sharpened by school and neighborhood contexts where race and ethnicity matter in determining one’s ability to take advantage of schooling opportunities and where black and Puerto Rican men are likely to encounter discrimination as they interact with people for employment (Kirschenmann & Neckerman, 1991; Wilson, 1996; Brint, 1998). We consider differences in a number of areas suggested by previous research to forecast the successful transition into adulthood: academics, participation in organized activities, mental health adjustment, and risk behaviors. Some of these early indicators have a positive effect on early adult attainment for nonwhites and whites and women and men alike and some affect gender and racial subgroups differently (Simmon & Zhou, 1994). Gender Socialization and the Transition to Adulthood Gender is a powerful ideological device that produces and legitimates the choices of individuals (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Understandably then, the structure and experiences of women’s and men’s lives differ. Traditional gender role socialization assigns women to the private sphere where they continue to perform the lion’s share of family work while men are primarily responsible for labor market activity outside the home (Hartman, 1981; Berk, 1985; Demo & Acock, 1993; Settersten, 1999). Early in life, children learn “appropriate” gender role behavior from adults and use gender categorization in social interactions (West & Zimmerman, 1987). During early adolescence, gender remains a salient source of differentiation that one undoubtedly carries with them 441

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throughout the transition to adulthood (Maccoby, 1998). At the same time, social structures shape the gendered behaviors, outcomes, and successes of individuals. Institutions such as families, schools, and the labor market perpetuate gender segregated tasks, behaviors, and outcomes and socialize women to accept as natural or desirable the roles that may adversely inﬂuence their position in the family and labor market (Christoplos & Borden, 1978; Marini & Brinton, 1984; Alwin, 1991). Consequently, women’s and men’s experiences in these settings may lead to differences in certain later-life outcomes (Ruble & Martin, 1998). What is more, previous research indicates that young, inner-city women are less likely than men to expect to achieve high educational attainment and work in competitive, traditionally male occupations (O’Connor, 2000). Education is a widely valued goal as well as a means for attaining success in later life (Featherman & Hauser, 1987; Willits, 1988). However, academic proﬁciency in high school may provide greater access to educational, occupation, and income opportunities for men than for women. Willits (1988), for example, found that high school grades had a positive association with later educational attainment but that the association was stronger for men than for women; at all GPA levels, women had lower levels of educational attainment than men and the difference increased as GPA increased. Marini (1978) also concluded that the mechanisms through which education affect the social standing of women and men differs because the routes to status attainment differ by gender. Participation in extracurricular and community activities provides both a reference group and a set of values one can carry through the transition into adulthood (Larson, 1994). Involvement in organized activities also does much to foster success and social integration in later life, and involvement in after-school activities can protect students from adverse inﬂuences and cultivate social competencies, leadership skills, and self-esteem (Willits, 1988; Carnegie Corporation, 1992; Larson, 1994; Furstenberg et al., 1999). Gender inﬂuences the returns to participation in organized activities. Researchers have found that for men, participation in extra-curricular activities in high school was associated with higher levels of educational attainment and occupational prestige at midlife (Glancy et al., 1986). Wilits (1988) found that while participation in formal organizations had a positive association with educational attainment, the association was stronger for men than for women. Men do not always gain disproportionately to women in all areas of success. Because of traditional gender role assumptions that women should maintain personal and family relationships, women may be rewarded more than men for positive peer and parent relations in adolescence. Delinquency and risk behavior remains a focus of research on adolescent and researchers have found an association between adolescent delinquency, substance abuse, and sexually risky

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behaviors and lower prospects of economic and emotional adjustment in later life (Elliot et al., 1989). Previous research indicates that delinquency is higher for men than for women, and adolescent boys in our sample were more likely then girls to engage in problem behavior (Furstenberg et al., 1999). As a result of this difference in adolescent engagement in risk behavior, the stigma of “deviant” may follow men into adulthood and lead to lower achievement or mobility compared to women. Race Segregation and the Transition to Adulthood Race may be the most potent source of stratiﬁcation in the United States. Previous research strongly points to the likelihood that minorities, especially minority males, encounter different responses inside and outside the home in the transition to adulthood. Race dictates where people live (Massey & Denton, 1993), where they work, what they do at work, and how much they are compensated for their work (Spain & Bianchi, 1996; Browne, 1999; Morris & Western, 1999), one’s social networks (Braddock & McPartland, 1987, Green et al., 1999), and the quality and location of where one is educated. Nonetheless, ﬁndings regarding the effects of race on success trajectories and social mobility are inconclusive because the effects of race are often confounded with economic differences in resources, opportunities, and patterns of family formation. It is extremely difﬁcult to make racial comparisons that take full account of poverty experiences because so few whites encounter the same history of poverty in family, school, and neighborhood contexts (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Given the high levels of residential race segregation in neighborhoods, black youth are chronically exposed to a higher level of material depravation than whites. This may have consequences for experiences both inside and outside the household. For example, parents in primarily black communities were more restrictive in monitoring their children; black and Puerto Rican youth were exposed to higher levels of control and scrutiny than their white counterparts (Furstenberg et al., 1999; Young, 1999). This family strategy possibly could have long-reaching and different effects on the transition to adulthood among minorities and whites. Others have found race differences in the effect of youth participation in extra-curricular activities on later life outcomes. In a study of the effect of participation in school sports on the college attendance of white, black, and Hispanic men, Snyder and Spreitzer (1992) found that the effect of athletic participation was greater for black men as compared to white men when the students were of higher social status and cognitive ability. This suggests that 443

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athletic participation provides a source of mobility that differs along racial/ethnic lines. Peer group inﬂuence is especially important for understanding the later life achievement of minority youth. Even though studies of adolescent achievement generally point to the family as the single most important inﬂuence in the domain of socialization, racial differences in achievement are not fully explained as a result of within-family factors (Steinberg & Darling, 1994). In fact, Steinberg and Darling found that peers are stronger sources of inﬂuence than parents, and that peers are relatively less potent sources of inﬂuence on black compared to white youth. They also reported that the peers of black students seem to not encourage academic achievement and therefore counterbalance parent encouragement of school success. Frønes (1995) explained that peers are an integral part of youth socialization because of the amount of time they spend together and because they share the same social positions. Finally in their review of the social consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood, Jencks and Mayer (1990) brought to our attention “epidemic” models that focus on the way in which peers inﬂuence each other. Proponents of these models assume that the likelihood of antisocial or problem behavior increases with exposure to others who exhibit similar behavior. Again, there is reason to suspect from existing research that different inﬂuences could be operating through peer mediation for minority and white youth. A number of leads from earlier research, then, suggest that the trajectory of successful development might differ across gender and race as youth move from adolescence to early adulthood. Identifying and understanding the patterns of continuity and discontinuity is an important part of seeing how racial and gender stratiﬁcation operate in American society, an issue that we will return to in the conclusion of this chapter.

DATA AND METHODS To explore these issues, we draw on original data from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study. The neighborhood sample was drawn from 65 census tracts in Philadelphia. From each census tract, one to three-block groups were randomly selected and within each selected block group, listed phone numbers were then selected by use of reverse phone directory. The 1991 wave yielded a sample of 489 parents and target children between the ages of 11 and 15. In 1998–1999, we recontacted the original youth and parent participants and conducted a second round of telephone interviews with a different set of questions. One difﬁculty with studying an at-risk sample over a nine-year time span is keeping track of respondents who have moved, been incarcerated, have no

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telephones, or who are simply unwilling to disclose information about themselves. As a result, a reduction in the number of matched pairs occurred in the second wave and in 1999, 372 of the original 489 teenagers completed the 1999 wave of the survey (a response rate of 76%).2 As a way of dealing with attrition of the sample, we constructed missing data on a number of young adults using parent reports in 1999. Of the 117 young adults who dropped out of the sample between 1991 and 1999, we interviewed 44 of their parents. Of the 44 parents we reached, 36 provided us with sufﬁcient information to construct a score for the youth’s level of achievement, the dependent variable in this analysis.3 In addition to data gathered from parents, we traced eleven difﬁcult-to-reach youth through neighborhood friends and relative contacts and administered a shortened version of the survey to them in the ﬁrst months of 2000. Including these respondents and those whose 1999 data we reconstructed from Time 2 parent reports, we managed to increase our sample of youth respondents to 415 (71 white men, 63 white women, 104 black men, 135 black women, 17 Puerto Rican men, and 25 Puerto Rican women). Adding Time 2 imputed information for 43 youth respondents who dropped out of the sample signiﬁcantly changed the composition of the sample. Prior to imputing scores for respondents who dropped out, the entire sample’s average household SES score in 1991 was 3.11 but after imputation, it fell to 3.02 (p < 0.05). Differences in the change in average 1991 household SES were not signiﬁcant among minority men. Minority women’s 1991 household SES score actually rose signiﬁcantly from 2.97 to 3.07 after imputation and white women and men’s score dropped signiﬁcantly from 3.29 to 3.09 (p < 0.05).

DEPENDENT VARIABLE In 1999, respondents identiﬁed their current academic standing and their employment status which we combined to create a measure of socioeconomic standing.4 It is difﬁcult to gauge socioeconomic status of youth in their late teens and early twenties since many are either still in school or have just entered the labor force. Consequently, in this analysis we focus on the youth who clearly are not “on track” to attain economic independence in their later twenties.5 Table 1 indicates how we coded respondents on the outcome variable and identiﬁed the category of “off track” youth. To test the validity of the outcome, we tested its correlation with other indicators of socioeconomic success and found that being off track had a signiﬁcant, negative correlation with respondent report of having a driver’s license, having a credit card, and having a checking account. We also found that being off track had a signiﬁcant, negative relationship with respondent report of having full responsibility for 445

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Table 1.

Coding of the 1999 Socioeconomic Standing.a

HS Dropout Still in GED/not HS/GED enrolled preparation

HS graduate not enrolled

HS graduate Attend 2-year enrolled in college tech program

Attend 4-year College college graduate

Attend graduate or prof. school

Low

Low

Low

Low

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Temp. Laid Off/ Not Looking

Low

Low

Low

Low

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Looking for Job, in school, housekeeper

Low

Low

Low

Low

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Part Time or on medical leave from part time job

Low

Low

Low

Low

Middle

High

High

High

High

Full Time or on medical leave from full time job

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

Middle

High

High

High

High

Source: 1991 & 1999 Philidelphia Neighborhood Study. Note: a For multiple regression analyses, we dichotomize the dependent variable so 1 = Low, 0 = middle and high.

JULIE A. KMEC AND FRANK F. FURSTENBERG, JR.

Idle/Disabled/ Jail

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paying bills and expenses.6 Because our outcome variable is dichotomous, we use logistic regression in SAS to analyze the models. In preliminary analyses, we estimated a series of cumulative logistic models regressing a three-level (low, middle, and high) measure of socioeconomic standing on predictor variables. When trichotomizing the dependent variable, we found no signiﬁcant differences in achieving middle versus high-level achievement but observed signiﬁcant differences between achieving low versus high and lower versus middle level achievement. Because interpretation of a dichotomous variable is intuitively easier to understand, we decided to combine the middle and high-level categories and use the dichotomous measure of the outcome.

1991 INDEPENDENT VARIABLES Adolescent Household SES In 1991, nearly all of the youth were living at home. On the whole, adolescents derived their socioeconomic standing from their household. We measure early adolescent household SES with a scale that combines a measure of household education, household occupational prestige, and household income (␣ = 0.68). We code 1991 household SES on a six point scale where “1” indicates low SES and “6” indicates high SES. Individual Behaviors 7 We examine four multi-item scales, or grand scales, constructed from the ﬁrst wave of the data. Academic competence is a six-item scale composed of aggregate measures of youth, parent, and interviewer reports. In 1991, parents and youth reported on a youth’s grades, school problem behavior, and grade failure before the ninth and tenth grades. Generally, self-report and parent report correlate well with school records (usually a correlation of 0.70 or higher) suggesting that a combination of youth and parent reports provides a reasonably good gauge of school success. In the 1991 sample, parent and youth report of school performance were highly correlated with one other (a correlation of 0.62 or higher). The interviewer rated the adolescent’s cognitive ability and from these ratings, Furstenberg et al. (1999) computed the academic competence scale that correlated well with parent and youth measures of academic competence. The second scale captures activity involvement and includes parent and self-report of adolescent participation in after-school activities (athletics, 447

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extracurricular activities at school, organized community sports, church-related activities, and summer recreational programs). The parent and youth reports were combined into a single indicator of activity involvement. Our measure of problem behavior consists of youth self-report of problem behavior and parent report of aggressive behavior (parents rarely knew of their children’s risky behaviors so the scale does not include parent assessment of youth risk). Youth reported on their delinquent behavior (theft, prostitution, drug dealing, vandalism), risky behavior (going to court, running away, engaging in sex), and substance abuse (drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using street drugs), their aggressive behavior (hitting or pushing someone) and school truancy. We measure self-competence and psychological adjustment with both parent and youth reports. We used both informants because parents often provide an important source of information about their children as well as an alternate perspective on the child’s well-being (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Factor analysis suggested that the parent and youth reports be treated as individual constructs. Youth reported on self-esteem, self-efﬁcacy, depression, and resourcefulness (or what we call self-competence) and the parent reported mainly on youth resourcefulness, the ability of their child to get along with peers and emotional problems such as youth depression, anger, anxiety, and the ability to concentrate on tasks (psychological adjustment). Family Process and Parent Management Strategies We measure three aspects of family process and two aspects of family management strategies. Support for autonomy is a scale composed of the level of involvement of decision-making, constructive and destructive problem solving, and family disagreement (␣ = 0.74). A four-item scale measures discipline effectiveness. The items used were: “How often (often, sometimes, almost never) do you [parent] . . . feel that it is more trouble than it is worth to ask your child to help you?. . . feel child’s behavior gets worse if you punish him/her?. . . have difﬁculty controlling your child?” The items were coded so that high scores indicate more effective discipline (␣ = 0.64). Positive family climate operated as its own indicator and is measured by parent report of the quality of family environment. We include two measures of parent management strategies. The ﬁrst, institutional connections, is a composite measure indicating parent involvement in community organizations, school, and religious organizations (␣ = 0.68). The second, parent investment is a combination of scales measuring parental verbal

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449

encouragement of child, enrollment of child in programs, working with child, praise of child, proactive prevention, and shared activities with child (␣ = 0.78). We include a dichotomous variable indicating whether or not a respondent’s parents were in their ﬁrst marriage in 1991 (1 = married in ﬁrst marriage, this excludes individuals who were married but once divorced, 0 = else). Finally, earlier waves of the data revealed that parents use religious participation as a mechanism to integrate their children into the community and expose children to a wide social network. Consequently, our model includes a measure of frequency of parental religious service attendance as an indicator of family management. We code this variable as follows: 1 = never, 2 = less than once a month, 3 = 1–3 times a month, 4 = about once a week, and 5 = more than once a week. We include a dichotomous measure of school type in the model to indicate whether the respondent attended a public school (coded 1) or a private/magnet school (coded 0) in 1991 because previous research (Neild, 1999) identiﬁes different school affects across race. Peer Inﬂuence

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In 1991, adolescent respondents were asked how many of the friends they spent most of their time with during the last year . . . “suggested that the respondent do something that was against the law?”, “damaged or destroyed property that did not belong to them?”, “broke into a vehicle of building to steal something?”, “put pressure of respondent to use drugs/have sex/to drink?”, “cheated on school tests?”, “stole something worth more than $50/more than $5?”, “skipped school without an excuse?”, “hit or threatened to hit someone without a reason?”, “used alcohol/marijuana?”, or “sold hard drugs like heroin, crack, LSD?” (1 = “none of them”, 2 = “a few of them”, 3 = “about half of them,” 4 = “most of them,” 5 = “all of them”). The sum of these items is our measure of negative peer inﬂuence in adolescence (␣ = 0.85). Respondents were also asked how many of the friends they spent the most of their time with during the last year. . . “did well in school?”, “participated in religious activities?”, “did community or volunteer work?”, “plan to go to college?”, and “have been involved in school activities or school sports?” (1 = “none of them”, 2 = “a few of them”, 3 = “about half of them,” 4 = “most of them,” 5 = “all of them”). The sum of these items is our measure of positive peer inﬂuence in adolescence (␣ = 0.74). Because the sample had an attrition rate of 15% even after the construction of values for missing cases, we assessed whether or not the non-respondents in wave two were systematically different from those who 449

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remained in both waves. Following a standard procedure for testing for sample retention bias, we used logistic regression to compute the likelihood of being in the second wave. We found that respondents from households with low resources in 1991 were more likely to drop out then those from households with high resources. Those who were academically less competent compared to those with higher academic competence were more likely to drop out of the sample by 1999. Minorities were more likely than whites to drop out. Female respondents were slightly more likely than male respondents to respond in the second wave. We found no evidence of response differences on the basis of early adolescent activity level, mental adjustment, and problem behavior. It is especially important to keep this in mind when we interpret our findings. Because those who are doing well at time one are more likely to remain in our sample in 1999, we may overestimate the degree of social mobility in our sample.There are obvious limits to the generalizability of our findings. First, the fact that our sample is drawn from relatively low-income tracts in a single city means that our findings may not generalize to youth in extremely poor or well-off neighborhoods. Second, there is evidence in our data that the youth in the sample may have been too young for the effects of their early adolescent achievement on adult achievement to be fully felt (Sewell & Hauser, 1975). For example, it is at this time in the lifecycle when people are usually beginning the transition from secondary to primary labor market positions (Wial, 1991). Finally, we have deliberately limited our analyses to the variables we feel are most relevant in predicting early adult socioeconomic levels. At the same time, we do not intend to sell our efforts short. We have a unique data set of high quality on detailed behaviors of youth and their parents that cover a crucial nine-year time span of the adolescent lifecycle. Our data improve upon existing data in a number ways because they contain time-varying measures of youth socioeconomic status. Dense sampling in several neighborhoods provide enough cases for quantitative analysis, study investigators collected information from both parents and youth, and the data include information about both nonwhite and white youth. Furthermore, while existing studies of this sort often confound race effects with socioeconomic status and produce ambiguous race effects, our data was designed to minimize the association between race and class because the sampling frame included a disproportionate share of low-income whites and middle-income black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

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RESULTS Characteristics of the Sample in Early Adolescence To examine the effects of race and gender simultaneously in all stages of the analysis, we separated our sample into white and minority men and women. Table 2 reports the means and standard deviations of the variables in the model by race and gender. As is shown in Table 2, the sample was performing relatively well during early adolescence despite the risks associated with living in an inner-city neighborhood. Reports of academic performance in 1991 showed that one third of the respondents were doing remedial work, and a third were enrolled in advanced course work. Grades were distributed evenly among students getting mostly As, mostly Bs, and mostly Cs or below. One third of the boys and one fourth of the girls had been held back a grade in school and nearly all were attending school on a regular basis. In 1991, both white boys and girls outperformed nonwhite boys and girls academically. In 1991, 36% of youth were not involved in any after-school or summer programs while 40% were involved in two or more activities. It is important to note that on average, overall grand scale measures indicate no race differences within gender groups. In early adolescence most youth expressed moderate to high levels of self-competence and psychological adjustment indicating that nonwhite and white women and men felt good about themselves and could cope with difﬁcult situations. Only a small number of adolescents (8%) reported they had depressive symptoms often or almost always and only 10% of parents indicated that their child had serious psychological problems. The risk behavior scale suggests that in 1991, most of the teens in the study were not yet engaged in serious problem behavior; no more than 5% of the youth could be classiﬁed as having serious trouble (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Characteristics of Social Context in Early Adolescence The neighborhood conditions in which minorities and whites lived differed in early adolescence. On average, white women lived in neighborhoods that were 74% white, had 20% of individuals living below poverty, where 11% of tract residents had college degrees, and where 12% of the households were headed by women. Minority women, on the other hand, lived in neighborhoods that were only 10% white, where 27% of individuals lived below poverty, where only 9% of tract residents had college degrees, and where 21% of the households were headed by women. Among men, a strong pattern of residential race segregation also exists. Like white women, white men were signiﬁcantly more likely than 451

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minority men to live in predominantly white neighborhoods (82% for whites, 17% for minorities), to live in neighborhoods with lower individual levels of poverty (20% for whites compared to 26% for minorities), and to live in tracts with fewer female heads of household (11% compared to 20%). In early adolescence, white girls and boys lived in neighborhoods with higher average levels of cohesion, more social control, and fewer problems than minority girls and boys.8 The households both race groups lived in during adolescence also differed. On average, white men lived in households with signiﬁcantly higher socioeconomic levels, higher household assets, in households with intact marriages, and in households that relied less on welfare than their minority male counterparts. Among women, whites come from households with higher average assets, intact marriages, and households with less reliance on welfare than minority women.

Table 2.

Means and Standard Deviations (In Parentheses) of Independent and Dependent Variables in Model, By Race and Gender. Men

Women Minority

White

Minority

White

0.23* (0.42)

0.50* (0.50)

0.33 (0.48)

0.33 (0.47)

2.05* (0.52)

1.80 (0.60)

2.01b (0.62)

1.79 (0.57)

1991 Parental Marital Status (1 = married once, 0 = else)

0.64* (0.48)

0.36 (0.48)

0.52b (0.50)

0.29 (0.46)

1991 Parent Church Attendance

2.88 (1.26)

3.18 (1.32)

2.72 (1.31)

2.92 (1.29)

0.09c (0.63)

0.08c (0.65)

⫺0.10 (0.77)

⫺0.07 (0.67)

0.0003c (0.84)

⫺0.18a

(0.86)

0.25 (0.74)

0.06 (0.74)

Problem Behavior

0.16c (0.91)

0.09a (0.71)

⫺0.12 (0.70)

⫺0.11 (0.51)

Self-Competency and Psychological Adjustment

⫺0.04 (0.79)

0.006 (0.89)

0.03 (0.83)

⫺0.007

1999 Dependent Variable 1999 Socioeconomic Standing (1 = low, 0 = else) 1991 Independent Variables Socioeconomic Background 1991 Household Socioeconomic Status

Individual Behaviors Activity Involvement Academic Competence

(0.80)

Racial and Gender Differences in the Transition to Adulthood

Table 2.

Men

Women Minority

Minority

White

0.14* (0.70)

⫺0.06 (0.78)

⫺0.03 (0.70)

0.005 (0.78)

⫺0.16 (0.67)

0.08 (0.67)

⫺0.12b

0.06 (0.63)

0.008 (0.63)

0.01 (0.84)

⫺0.04 (0.74)

⫺0.007

2.84 (2.32)

3.16 (2.23)

2.81 (2.43)

3.05 (2.23)

0.29* (0.69)

⫺0.18a

(0.60)

0.03 (0.48)

0.01 (0.65)

14.24 (3.84)

15.01 (3.93)

15.07 (4.28)

15.24 (4.06)

Negative Peer Inﬂuence (%)

18.40a (4.62)

18.78 (5.98)

16.58ba (3.27)

17.35 (4.81)

191 School Type (1 = attended public school, 0 = private/magnet school)

0.43* (0.50)

0.75 (0.43)

0.42b (0.50)

0.77 (0.42)

71

121

63

160

Parent Management Strategy Parental Support for Autonomy Discipline Effectiveness Positive Family Climate Family Process Institutional Connections Parental Investment Peer Inﬂuences Positive Peer Inﬂuence (%)

111

111

Continued.

White

111

111

453

N

(0.68)

(0.75)

Source: 1991 & 1999 Philidelphia Neighborhood Study. Note: * denotes a statistically signiﬁcant difference between whites and minorities among men; a denotes a statstically signiﬁcant difference between minority women and men; b denotes a statistically signiﬁcant difference between whites and minorities among women; c denotes a statistically signiﬁcant difference between white women and men.

In early adolescence, we found that there were no signiﬁcant race differences in peer inﬂuence; minority and white men and women had roughly similar levels of positive peer inﬂuence and negative peer inﬂuence. However, men of both races had slightly higher negative peer inﬂuence than all women. Parent management strategies were similar across race but with nonwhites more likely than their white counterparts to have higher average scores on effective parental discipline and lower average parental autonomy. Parental investment was, on average, signiﬁcantly higher for white men as compared with the other race and gender groups. 453

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Fig. 1.

1991 Cluster Analysis by Race-Gender Group.

In the book Managing to Make It, the authors developed a cluster analysis approach in which they divided young adolescents into four groups with similar behavior proﬁles: “academically competent,” “organizationally involved,” “delinquent,” and “at-risk” (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Forty-eight percent of the sample fell into the “at-risk” cluster, the largest clusters, followed by the “academically competent” cluster (30%). Seventeen percent of the sample fell into the “organizationally involved” cluster while only 5% of the sample was in the “delinquent” cluster. Figure 1 illustrates the race-gender composition of each early adolescent cluster. Looking at cluster composition by race-gender group in early adolescence, we see that no race-gender group dominates the “at-risk” or the “delinquent” clusters nor does one race-gender group dominate the “academically competent” or “organizationally involved” clusters. We also notice few signiﬁcant race differences in the cluster location of minority men and the other race-gender groups in early adolescence. More speciﬁcally, 50% of nonwhite men in our sample, 50% of nonwhite women, 43% of white men, and 48% of white women were considered “at-risk” meaning they were on the verge of serious problems in school, at home, or in their communities (Furstenberg et al., 1999).

Racial and Gender Differences in the Transition to Adulthood

455

111

111

111

111

Source: 1991 & 1999 Philadelphia Neighborhood Study. Differences signiﬁcant at p < 0.10.

Fig. 2.

Odds of Being Off Track in 1999 Relative to Minority Men.

Where Are They Now? A Description of the Sample in Early Adulthood By early adulthood, sizeable race-gender differences had emerged in academic and employment attainment. Putting education attainment and employment experience together, we ﬁnd a distinctly different pattern of early adult achievement across race-gender groups. In 1999, only 23% of the white men and 33% of the white women were in the lowest SES category as compared to 50% of minority men and 33% of minority women (See Fig. 2). The race-gender gap in attainment in 1999 is due more to a gap in employment than to a gap in education levels. A high proportion of the sample had graduated from high school and we ﬁnd no signiﬁcant race differences in this pattern.9 Eighty-ﬁve percent of white men, 73% of minority men, 74% of white women, and 73% of minority women have received either a high school degree or a GED (minorities were signiﬁcantly more likely than whites to have received a GED). However, by 1999 white men had higher employment achievement than nonwhite men as 50% of white men, compared to only 33% of minority men, were employed full time. Among women, there were no signiﬁcant race differences in employment status. The descriptive data show a pronounced decline in the status of minority men from early to later adolescence: many of the black and Puerto Rican males are having difﬁculty in sustaining their status or translating their early educational attainment into further schooling or labor market experiences. Indeed, when we examine the odds ratio of being off track for the different race-gender subgroups, this observation is conﬁrmed. The graph in Fig. 3 shows this sharp drop-off in the status of minority men. 455

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Fig. 3.

1999 Socioeconomic Standing by Race-Gender Group.

Compared to minority men, all other race-gender groups have signiﬁcantly lower odds of being in the lowest socioeconomic category in early adulthood; the odds a minority woman will be in the lowest category are 54% less than those of minority men. White women are 52% less likely to be off track than minority men, while white men are 72% less likely. (When we change our outcome to being in the highest SES category compared to everything else, we found that minority men were signiﬁcantly less likely than whites and minority women to be in the highest category). In short, in early adulthood minority men are doing worse than might have been expected from their status in early adolescence. Compared to white men, white women in the sample do not have signiﬁcantly different odds of begin off track in 1999. In analyses not shown here, we estimated models that included interaction terms to test whether or not the slope differences between race-gender groups were signiﬁcant. We found that in most cases, the gender differences among whites were only marginally significant or not significant. Because of the smaller number of whites and the absence of profound gender differences, we combined white women and men into one category (called “whites”) and compared them to nonwhite women and men in the multiple regression analyses that we discuss in the next section.

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We now turn to the question of why minority men are falling off track in the transition to adulthood. We can explore two general explanations with the data at hand. The ﬁrst is that different conditions in the circumstances of minority men’s family, peer group, or schools create problems in making the transition into adulthood; the second explanation is that special problems arise later in adolescence that create disparities. If the ﬁrst explanation is correct, we should ﬁnd either that conditions in the family, relations with peers, or school experiences were different for the minority men and others at the time of the ﬁrst survey. Alternatively, similar conditions may be producing a greater (or lesser) impact on the status trajectory of minority men than for minority women or whites. If neither of these scenarios proves to be true, it becomes more likely that experiences during later adolescence, such as different responses to high schools or experiences in the community, account for the disjunction in status we have detected.

MULTIVARIATE ANALYSES Our strategy in the multivariate analysis was to examine blocks of conceptually related variables, ﬁrst separately and then in a full model, to see if we could reduce the size of the difference in 1999 SES between the minority males compared to minority women and whites of both genders.10 We ﬁrst looked at the individual and joint impact of the four measures of success at time one (pro-social involvement, academic competency, psychological adjustment, and problem behavior). Next, we entered into the model the block of scales designed to measure parent management and family process. Following this we considered the scales tapping the quality of school and peer inﬂuences; and ﬁnally, we included a set of measures of the household resources including parent marital status and household socioeconomic status. We reasoned that if the odds of being off track declined as a result of adding these potential sources of mediation, we might understand why minority men did not fare as well as expected in early adulthood. Table 3 provides only the summary results of this detailed analytic procedure. We do not show the analysis that leads up to this summary table but the results of the bivariate and multivariate procedures are very similar in that the direction and signiﬁcance of differences in coefﬁcients were not signiﬁcantly different. The full model in Column 1 of Table 3 shows that a number of the conditions at time one are indeed linked to the youths’ socioeconomic status in 1999. Not surprisingly, minority men have the greatest odds of being off track and how the youth fared academically in 1991 was an important marker of later success. Similarly, whether the youth was attending a public neighborhood school or a 457

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Table 3.

JULIE A. KMEC AND FRANK F. FURSTENBERG, JR.

Odds Ratios from Logistic Regression of 1999 Socioeconomic Standing on Early Adolescent Predictors. Full Model

Minority Men

Minority Women

Whites

Minority Women Whites

0.44** 0.48**

–– ––

–– ––

–– ––

1991 SES 1991 Parental Marital Status (1 = married, 0 = else)

0.64**** 0.73

0.49

1.08

0.65

1991 Parental Church Attendance

0.81**

0.65**

0.91

0.73*

Activity Involvement Academic Competence Problem Behavior Self-Competency and Psychological Adjustment

1.06 0.64*** 0.95

1.48 0.46** 0.74

0.97 0.94 1.02

0.96 0.80 1.39

1.25

0.72

2.97***

1.66

Parental Support for Autonomy Discipline Effectiveness Positive Family Climate

0.87 0.89 1.00

0.52 0.77 0.76

1.08 1.06 0.93

1.15 0.76 1.38

Institutional Connections Parental Investment

0.98 0.65**

0.96 0.41*

1.06 0.75

0.95 0.54

Positive Peer Inﬂuence Negative Peer Inﬂuence

0.99 1.00

1.02 1.09

0.96 1.01

0.93 0.86*

1.35 454.65a 26.09%

5.96*** 121.52a 42.33%

0.90 165.89a 25.78%

0.61 130.18a 27.01%

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134

1991 Public School (1 = public, 0 = private/magnet) ⫺2 Log likelihood Adjusted R-squared N

415

0.77

121

0.48***

0.61*

Source: 1991 & 1999 Philidelphia Neighborhood Study. Note:* p < 0.10; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.001; bold indicates statistically signiﬁcant difference from non-white men; a Signiﬁcant model ﬁt.

private or magnet school was related to socioeconomic attainment in early adulthood. As also might be expected, the economic status of the adolescent’s household in 1991 and parental involvement in religious activities were linked to their socioeconomic standing in 1999. Family processes, however, were not associated with socioeconomic success nor were peer relationships. However, the

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skill of parents in managing the child’s activities and connections outside the household during early adolescence were related to the youth’s success at Time 2. An interesting ﬁnding was that the strength of these relationships often differed markedly for the different race-gender subgroups. None of the potential predictors of socioeconomic attainment diminishes the odds that we reported earlier showing that minority men fare substantially worse than minority females or whites in general. This means that we cannot explain the fact that minority men are worse off in 1999 because of their circumstances in 1991. Therefore, we examined each of the three sub-groups separately to explore whether different predictors were implicated in the patterns of mobility. Minority Men The second column of Table 3 presents results for minority men. We ﬁnd that for this group, early household SES does not signiﬁcantly predict early adult SES. Family, peer, and school effects diminish the effect of earlier household SES for minority men but analyses reveal that increased frequency of parent religious service attendance reduces the odds of minority men being off track in early adulthood by 35%.11 The size of this effect implies that parent involvement in religious activity has a profound effect on early adult attainment for minority men perhaps because parent church attendance exposed minority men to mentors and provided them with the same guidance and grounding to build a moral sensibility that Young (1999) observed in his sample of inner-city black high school students. As suggested by results in the full model, the effect of academic proficiency in adolescence remains significant for minority men in a model controlling for individual, family, school type, and peer predictors. Each unit increase in academic proficiency reduces the odds of being off track for minority men by 54%, net of other controls. Clearly, doing well in school benefits minority men possibly because academic proficiency in early adolescence makes them more likely to receive the positive attention and support from teachers necessary for future academic success. The diverse processes parents use to manage their children relate to success in minority men’s outcomes. The analyses for minority men suggest different types of parent behavior matter differently for the outcome. Parental management strategies do not effectively influence early adult success yet the out-of-home management strategies parents use are effective in reducing minority’s men’s odds of being off track. More specifically, increased parental investment yields a decrease of 59% in the odds of minority men falling off track. Analyses of earlier waves of the sample also indicated that 459

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parent management strategies were strongest in affecting the extent to which youth themselves become involved in institutional settings (Furstenberg et al., 1999). Finally, we were astounded to see how great an influence attending a public school has on minority men’s success in early adulthood. For minority men, going to a public versus a private or magnet school yields a devastating effect on their early adult SES. Net of controls, the odds of being off track in early adulthood are nearly six times greater for minority men who attended public school as opposed to a private/magnet school. Attending a public school in early adolescence actually makes minority men more susceptible to risk of later-life socioeconomic failure. What makes this even more startling is the fact that going to a public school has no significant affect on the early adult socioeconomic standing of minority women and whites. Previous research confirms that a disproportionate share of minority men who attend public schools attend the lower quality public comprehensive high schools as opposed to the higher-quality public vocational high schools (Neild, 1999). In summary, of the significant predictors for minority men, parental church attendance, academic competence, parental investment, and public school attendance matter in determining a minority man’s early adult socioeconomic level. Minority Women A noteworthy finding is that the strength and pattern of effects are different and not as numerous for minority women compared to their male counterparts. Unlike minority men, the adolescent household SES of minority women significantly predicts early adult socioeconomic status. Net of controls, a unit increase in 1991 household SES reduces a minority woman’s odds of being in the lowest SES category in early adulthood by 52%. Household resources continue to play an important role in the success patterns of minority women, even when we take into account school-type. Given that minority women and men had similar (not statistically different) household SES levels in 1991, this gender difference is somewhat puzzling. For minority women, a one unit increase in the self-competence/psychological adjustment scale increases her odds of being off track by nearly three times. This control variable has an interesting effect for minority women as we would assume that higher self-competence and psychological adjustment would lead to lower odds of being off track. However, O’Connor (1999) found that high achieving black high school students were well aware of structural barriers to opportunity and that this knowledge dampened their view of the world and their future success. Thus, one explanation for

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the unpredicted influence of self-competence and adjustment may be that well-adjusted minority women have recognized structural inequalities and developed a negative view of their future which contributes to a decrease in their early adult achievement. White Women and Men We now turn to column 4 of Table 3 which presents results for our white sample. As we noted earlier, the gender differences among whites were minimal so we combined white women and men into one group. One explanation for the lack of gender differences among whites may be that for white females, race is a more powerful predictor of outcomes than is gender. That is, being white helps female youth overcome disadvantage more than being a female “hurts” them. Analyses of the white sub-sample reveal that 1991 household SES signiﬁcantly predicts white women and men’s early adult SES. Among whites, a one unit increase in 1991 household SES level decreases the odds of being in the lowest SES category by 39%. Interestingly, the effect of early adolescent household socioeconomic standing has a stronger effect for nonwhite women than for whites. This ﬁnding contradicts what we would have expected given the previously identiﬁed notion that whites face less discrimination, lower poverty rates, and more positive neighborhood conditions than minorities. Increased frequency in parent religious service attendance reduces the odds of being off track in early adulthood for whites. This effect suggests that parental involvement in religious services may act as a method of providing structure and social support for their children. Oddly, having negative peer inﬂuence in early adolescence signiﬁcantly decreases the odds whites will be in the lowest SES category in early adulthood. For every percent increase in negative peer inﬂuence, whites experience a 14% reduction in the odds of being in the lowest SES category in early adulthood. Given that the conditions in early adolescence were not overwhelmingly different for minority men and others or that time one predictors do little to mediate the effect of race on early adult success, it is plausible that experiences during late adolescence (when our sample was between the ages of 11–15 and 18–22) affect socioeconomic standing in early adulthood. To determine whether or not late-adolescent interventions mediate race effects and are important predictors of early adulthood success, we estimated a second set of logistic regression models in which we add a variable measuring arrest rate (a dichotomous variable coded 1 for ever been arrested by 1999 and 0 if not) and a dichotomous variable indicating whether or not a respondent had given birth to/fathered a child (1 = ever had/fathered a child by 1999, 0 = otherwise). 461

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Table 4. Odds Ratios from Logistic Regression of 1999 Socioeconomic Standing on Early Adolescent Predictors and 1999 Predictors. Full Model

Minority Men

Minority Women

Whites

Minority Women Whites

0.46*** 0.50*

Arrested (1 = arrested by 1999) Had Child (1 = ever had child by 1999)

1.72

1.20

5.10**

1.92

1.71

0.03***

3.31**

0.73

0.64****

0.67

0.45***

0.62*

0.75 0.81**

0.53 0.57***

1.05 1.02

0.66 0.74

Activity Involvement Academic Competence Problem Behavior Self-Competency and Psychological Adjustment

1.04 0.64*** 0.84

2.08 0.42*** 0.57

0.94 1.05 0.82

1.00 0.80 1.19

1.25

0.71

3.44***

1.67

Parental Support for Autonomy Discipline Effectiveness Positive Family Climate

0.87 0.87 1.00

0.48* 0.66 0.87

1.16 1.03 0.91

1.04 0.80 1.37

Institutional Connections Parental Investment

0.98 0.64**

0.89 0.37**

1.05 0.65

0.95 0.52

Positive Peer Inﬂuence Negative Peer Inﬂuence

0.99 1.01

1.05 1.11*

0.95 0.99

0.92 0.86*

1991 School Type (1 = public, 0 = private/magnet)

1.32

7.35***

0.78

0.60

1991 SES 1991 Parent Marital Status (1 = married, 0 = else) 1991 Parent Church Attendance

⫺2 Log Likelihood Adjusted R-squared

452.25 a 26.73%

111.65 a 49.46%

144.83 a 32.84%

129.30 a 27.78%

N

415

121

160

134

Source: 1991 & 1999 Philadelphia Neighborhood Study. Note: *p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01; ****p < 0.001; bold indicates statistically signiﬁcantly different from non-white men; a signiﬁcant model ﬁt.

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By early adulthood, relatively few of the sample was involved with the criminal justice system. Minority men were signiﬁcantly more likely than white men to have been arrested by 1999. For women, involvement in the criminal justice system is signiﬁcantly lower then men’s. Compared to white women, minority women were signiﬁcantly more likely to have been arrested. It is important to keep in mind that those involved in the criminal justice system were probably more likely than others to drop out of the sample between time one and time two so we are likely to underestimate involvement in the criminal justice system. Minority women were more likely than white women to be a mother by 1999 and among men, minorities were more likely to be fathers than white men. Table 4 reports results from the regression in which we add late adolescent intervening variables. When we add late-adolescent variables controlling for ever having been arrested and ever having been a parent by early adulthood to the full model, we see that these interventions do not change the strong race effects; minority men remain signiﬁcantly more likely than minority women and whites to be off track. Thus, while introducing the potentially adverse events that occurred in late adolescence increases our ability to predict being off track, they do not help us explain the precarious plight of minority males in early adulthood. In sum, despite the rich array of social contextual data that we examined, we are still unable to account for the failure of many black and Puerto Rican men to make a successful transition to early adulthood. We revisit this result in the conclusion.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Our study focused on the race and gender differences in the success trajectories of nearly 500 inner-city youth living in mostly poor to moderate income communities in Philadelphia. We began by describing the association between the youth’s performance in 1991 and their socioeconomic standing in 1999 for different race and gender sub-groups. By early adulthood, of those considered “at risk” or “delinquent” in early adolescence, 32% of minority men, 22% of minority women, 14% of white men, and 24% of white women ended up in the lowest level of socioeconomic standing. As we have shown, there is strong support for earlier predictions of a growing racial divergence for minority men because this group was more likely than any other group to be off track in early adulthood. This effect that works against minority males remains robust and signiﬁcant even when controls for late adolescent attributes enter the model and attending a public school was the strongest predictor of their poor performance. Keeping in mind that the youth on the most downward slope were more 463

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likely to drop out of the sample between early adolescence and early adulthood, we likely overestimate the amount of mobility in the sample – especially for minority men who were the group most likely to drop out of the sample between waves.12

CONSEQUENCES OF DIFFERENCES IN THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD The analyses we present in this chapter suggest that race and gender contexts shape the transition to adulthood for our inner city sample. Unquestionably, in our urban sample, “. . . the experience of becoming an adult is different for individuals in different race and class groups as well as different for those of the two sexes” (Hogan & Astone, 1986, p. 110). Whites appear to avoid the negative consequences of growing up in disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods but minority youth, especially men, are not as lucky. Our study conﬁrms the uniqueness of the minority male experience in growing up and that minority men experience unique pressures that limit their life chances in ways that differ markedly from minority women and whites (O’Connor, 1999). The stories of O’Connor’s inner-city high school students in Chicago echo the gender differences among minorities while growing up. Their accounts reveal that African American female students have greater free will than male youth in determining their participation in illegal activities and that stigmas are more harmful for African American males. Some students in O’Connor’s study also felt that in school, teachers gave black girls more help because of the stereotype of African American boys as “ ‘convicts,’ ‘gang bangers,’ and ‘perpetrators’ ” who could end up in jail and have no need for their education (O’Connor, 1999, p. 153). Unfortunately, the consequences of these differences in the transition to adulthood do not shed a promising light on the future of minority men. The roles individuals assume in early adulthood are the stepping stones for future family life, careers, and social status. The transition to adulthood inﬂuences one’s life course because it “represents a critical juncture in personal life histories and connects social origins with subsequent adult attainments and life satisfaction” (Hogan & Astone, 1986, p. 125). For the minority men in our sample, than, their rocky start – being off track in early adulthood – could mean a life course fraught with low adult attainment and lower later adult status. Quite possibly, the racial inequalities we identiﬁed in the introduction to this chapter (lower labor market returns and labor force participation rates as well as restricted access to good neighborhoods and schools for minority women and men) will continue for the minority youth in our inner city sample unless interventions in public schools and inner city communities are effectively put into place.

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In this chapter we have illustrated rather effectively that the social status outcomes of minorities are not the product of inherent racial differences. To be sure, minority women who share similar neighborhood, family, peer, and school situations as minority men do not experience their same downward trajectory. For example, for minority men but no other race-gender group, public school attendance limits their future success. Young (1999) pointed out that for a sample of African American high school males, school was a “site for various kinds of social engagements, many of which crippled the men’s prospects for upward mobility . . . school usually was anything but a site for education. Instead, it was an institutional sphere for managing conflict and anxiety . . .” (Young, 1999, p. 218). Perhaps minority men in the Philadelphia sample shared these experiences at public schools. Our findings also lead us to conclude, as did Young (1999), that the techniques minority men use to get along in their immediate environment impede their advancement prospects in the larger social context. At the same time, our analyses reveal that positive psychological adjustment and self-competency in early adolescence does not benefit minority women’s early adult socioeconomic standing. This finding is somewhat puzzling and we suggest future research focus on how and why minority women’s self-competency shapes these women’s lives. Future research on the transition to adulthood and early adult social status must consider how both race and gender operate in the lives of youth. It is entirely likely that minority men have less success in the job market because employers do not treat their assets and achievements fairly in the labor market. Certainly, such a conclusion would be consistent with the findings of employers’ responses to the prospect of hiring minority males (see Neckerman & Kirschenman, 1991; Wilson, 1996). If the high ratio of being off track among this vulnerable group cannot be explained by their experiences during adolescence, this explanation will become less easy to refute by skeptics dismissing the role of racial discrimination in shaping the life experiences of minority men. To that end, one of the most significant contributions of this research is the recognition of the inability of minority men to convert their early-life disadvantage into later life success. Our data allow us compare a group of inner-city youth with roughly equal footing in early adolescence and brings to light the troubling finding that only minority women and white women and men are able to overcome disadvantage originating in early life. We encourage others to pursue research that addresses what occurs in other stages of the life course that might differently affect minority men and how and why minority men’s experiences in late adolescence affect their later life success. 465

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NOTES 1. The nonwhite sample consists of both blacks and Puerto Ricans (104 black men, 135 black women, 17 Puerto Rican men, and 25 Puerto Rican women). We felt it was appropriate to analyze blacks and Puerto Ricans together because they were sampled to be similar on individual, socioeconomic, and neighborhood characteristics. Given that structural processes differ for both racial minorities, we keep this in mind when drawing conclusions. Throughout the paper, we refer to our black and Puerto Rican respondents as minority. 2. Ten people refused to be interviewed; 95 people could not be traced, either because they moved, were out of the country, or had non-published telephone numbers; 10 were incarcerated; and 2 young adults had died. 3. We constructed data about the teenagers mainly on their 1999 education status, marital status, child-bearing information, residency status, and employment situation. We felt it was valid to gather data about the young adults from their parent because in a crosscheck in cases where both parent and youth were interviewed there were only two discrepancies of parent-youth report of high school graduate status. 4. This variable is coded “1” for high school dropout, “2” for those still in high school or GED preparation, “3” for GED recipient not currently enrolled in school, “4” for high school graduate not elsewhere enrolled, “5” for high school graduate enrolled in technical, craft, or trade school, “6” for attending a 2-year college, “7” for attending a 4-year college, “8” for college graduate, and “9” for graduate/professional degree. In 1999 young adults identified their current employment situation. We coded this variable “1” for idle, disabled, or in jail, “2” if temporarily laid off and not actively looking for work, “3” for currently going to school or keeping house or looking for employment, “4” for employed part time or on medical leave from a part time job, and “5” for employed full time or on medical leave from a full time job. 5. Because the coding of these groups is somewhat arbitrary, one could argue that those in part time jobs (or on medical leave from a part time job) who are high school graduates not enrolled elsewhere (n = 42) are not “off track,” we recoded the outcome so that these respondents were included in the “on track” category. Doing this yielded no signiﬁcant changes in the direction or sizes of regression coefﬁcients. As such, we left these respondents in the “off track” category. Possibly, respondents in this category may be “catching up” and moving toward higher socioeconomic standing but because our data are right-censored and we cannot determine where members of any category progress to in later adulthood, we felt it necessary to make this cut-off given the age range of the respondents (ages 18–22). 6. It is informative to look at the distribution of respondents in the forty-ﬁve categories of the outcome variable, we brieﬂy describe some of the cells in Table 1. The largest cell (n = 75) includes those who are high school graduates not enrolled elsewhere with a full time job (or on medical leave with a full time job). There is roughly an even distribution of whites (n = 52) and nonwhite women (n = 44) attending a 2 or 4-year college across all levels of employment status but only 26 nonwhite men fall into these categories. No respondents reported that they are attending a 2-year college or higher and idle/disabled/in jail. The next fewest respondents fall in the cells of “still in high school or preparing for their GED” in all levels of economic status (4 nonwhite men, 5 whites, and 6 nonwhite women).

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7. To test if the predictability of the sub-scales was greater than the predictability of the grand scales, we performed correlation tests between the single components of each of the ﬁve success outcomes. We found that the components of the scales were no better or worse at predicting the outcome variables so we used the grand scales computed in 1991. Furstenberg et al. (1999) found that using the multi-item scales yielded substantial reliability (0.70 or greater in most cases). 8. Measures of neighborhood cohesion, social control, and problems are based on the respondent’s self-assessment of their neighborhood. 9. In 1991, the nationwide high school graduation rate among whites was 86.7% and among blacks it was 81.9% (Bennett, 1992). One reason we find no significant difference between black and white high school graduate rates is that we over-sampled whites from low socioeconomic neighborhoods. 10. Although some of the predictor variables are moderately correlated, we tested for multicollinearity and found it was not a problem. 11. (0.65 ⫺1)*100 = 35%. 12. This analysis has not fully taken account of all the information that we will eventually be able to bring to bear in accounting for the sharp decline of status attainment of minority males compared to their female and white (male and female) counterparts. In future analysis, we should also examine the role of one possible culprit that we did not consider here, the role of neighborhood context. Possibly the risk of living in poor neighborhoods takes a higher toll on minority men who are less likely to find employment, more likely to hang out on the streets, and more likely to suffer discrimination. We also intend to use administrative records from the schools and criminal justice system to verify the self-reported data described in this paper. Possibly, the minority men are under-reporting their negative experiences in high school and encounters with the law. If this were the case, we may be underestimating the effects of these sources of downward mobility in early adulthood. The additional school data will also allow us to take account of test scores, reading levels, and curriculum tracks in high school, factors that might help us understand their lower rates of employment and matriculation into college.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Adolescent Development Among Youth in High-Risk Settings and The Zellerbach Family Fund Training Program for Research Training in the Study of Distressed Neighborhoods, Grant No. HC090. We also gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Mary Fischer, Sheela Kennedy, David Kinney, Jennifer McKnight, Amanda Nothaft, and two anonymous reviewers.

REFERENCES Alwin, D. (1991). Changes in Family Roles and Gender Differences in Parental Socialization Values. In: P. A. Adler & P. Adler (Eds), Sociological Studies of Child Development (pp. 201–224). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

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Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, C. E. (1992). Current Population Reports: Population Characteristics P20-464. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Berk, S. F. (1985). The Gender Factory. NY: Plenum Press. Bielby, W. T., & Baron, J. N. (1984). A Woman’s Place is with Other Women: Sex Segregation in Organizations. In: B. Reskin (Ed.), Sex Segregation in the Workplace: Trends, Explanations, Remedies (pp. 27–55). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Braddock, J. H., & McPartland, J. M. (1987). How Minorities Continue to be Excluded from Equal Employment Opportunities: Research on Labor Market and Institutional Barriers. Journal of Social Issues, 43, 5–39. Brint, S. (1998). Schools and Societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Browne, I. (1999). Latinas and African American Women at Work. NY: Russell Sage. Brooks-Gunn, J., Duncan, G. J., & Aber, J. L. (1997). Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children. Volume I. NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Brooks-Gunn, J., Duncan G. J., & Aber, J. L. (1998). Neighborhood Poverty: Policy Implications in Studying Neighborhoods. Volume II. NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Carnegie Corporation. (1992). A Matter of Time. NY: Carnegie Corporation. Christoplos, F., & Borden, J. (1978). Sexism in Elementary School Mathematics. The Elementary School Journal, 78, 275–277. Coleman, J., & The Panel on Youth of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. (1974). Youth: Transition To Adulthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cook, T. D., Herman, M. R., Phillips, M., & Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1999). How Neighborhoods, Families, Peer Groups and Schools Jointly Affect Changes in Early Adolescent Development. Working Paper of the Institute of Policy Research at Northwestern University. Danziger, S., & Lin A. C. (2000). Coping with Poverty: The Social Contexts of Neighborhood, Work, and Family in the African-American Community. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Demo, D. H., & Acock, A. C. (1993). Family Diversity and the Division of Domestic Labor: How Much Have Things Really Changed? Family Relations, 42, 323–331. Elder, G. H., Jr., & Conger, R. (2000). Children of the Land: Adversity and Success in Rural America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elliot, D. S., Huizinga, D., & Menard, S. (1989). Multiple Problem Youth: Delinquency, Substance Use, and Mental Health Problems. NY: Sringer-Verlag. Elliot, D. S., Menard, S., Eliot, A., Rankin, B., Huizinga, D., & Wilson, W. J. (Forthcoming). Disadvantage: Successful Youth Development in High-Risk Neighborhoods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farley, R. (1984). Blacks and Whites: Narrowing the Gap? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Featherman, D. L., & Hauser, R. M. (1976). Changes in the Socioeconomic Stratiﬁcation of the Races, 1962-1973. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 621–651. Frønes, I. (1995). Among Peers: On the Meaning of Peers in the Process of Socialization. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Furstenberg, F. F., Jr., & Hughes, M. E. (1997). The Inﬂuence of Neighborhoods on Children’s Development: A Theoretical Perspective and a Research Agenda. In: J. Brooks-Gunn, G. J. Duncan & J. L. Aber (Eds), Neighborhood Poverty: Policy Implications in Studying Neighborhoods (Vol. 2, pp. 23–47). NY: Russell Sage.

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O’Connor, C. (2000). Dreamkeeping in the Inner City: Diminishing the Divide Between Aspirations and Expectations. In: S. Danziger & A. C. Lin (Eds), Coping with Poverty: The Social Contexts of Neighborhood, Work, and Family in the African-American Community (pp. 105–140). Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Rainwater, L., & Yancey, W. L. (1967). The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reskin, B. F. (1999). Occupational Segregation by Race and Ethnicity Among Women Workers. In: I. Browne (Ed.), Latinas and African American Women at Work (pp. 183–204). NY: Russell Sage. Ruble, D. N., & Martin, C. L. (1998). Gender Development. In: N. Eisenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology (Vol. 3, 5th ed., pp. 933–1016). NY: Wiley. Settersten, R. (1999). Lives in Time and Place: The Problems and Promises of Developmental Science. Amityville, NY: Baywood. Sewell, W. H., & Hauser, R. M. (1975). Education, Occupation, and Earnings: Achievement in the Early Career. NY: Academic Press. Shanahan, M. J. (2000). Pathways to Adulthood in Changing Societies: Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 667–692. Simmons, R. G., & Zhou, Y. (1994). Racial, School, and Family Context Among Adolescents. In: R. K. Silbereisen & E. Todt (Eds), Adolescence in Context: The Interplay of Family, School, Peers, and Work in Adjustment (pp. 149–173). NY: Springer-Verlag. Snyder, E. E., & Spreitzer, E. (1992). Social Psychological Concomitants of Adolescents’ Role Identities as Scholars and Athletes: A Longitudinal Analysis. Youth & Society, 23, 507–522. Sowell, T. (1981). Ethnic America. NY: Basic. Spain, D., & Bianchi, S. (1996). Balancing Act: Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American Women. NY: Russell Sage. Steinberg, L., & Darling, N. (1994). The Broader Context of Social Inﬂuence in Adolescence. In: R. K. Silbereisen & E. Todt (Eds), Adolescence in Context: The Interplay of Family, School, Peers, and Work in Adjustment. (pp. 25–43). NY: Springer-Verlag. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing Gender. Gender and Society, 2, 125–151. Wial, H. (1991). Getting a Good Job: Mobility in a Segmented Labor Market. Industrial Relations, 30, 396–416. Willits, F. W. (1988). Adolescent Behavior and Adult Success and Well-Being: A 37-Year Panel. Youth and Society, 20, 68–87. Willits, F. K., Crider, D. M., & Bealer, R. C. (1988). Observations on Opportunity and Change: Data from a Two-Panel Study. Rural Sociology, 53, 321–333. Wilson, W. J. (1987). Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1996). When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. NY: Vintage Books. Young, A. A., Jr. (1999). The (Non) Accumulation of Capital: Explicating the Relationship of Structure and Agency in the Lives of Poor Black Men. Sociological Theory, 17, 201–227.

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16. THE IMPRINT OF TIME: HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES IN THE LIVES OF MATURE ADULTS Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Lisa Martin

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Developmental scientists, especially those interested in adulthood and aging, must confront Prospero’s “dark backward and the abysm of time.” This great dark backward relates to the fact that individuals’ pasts play critical roles in determining who they are and what their lives are like in any particular life period. A central proposition of life course scholarship is that development is lifelong and cumulative. Yet the past is seldom taken seriously in developmental theories and research. Tending to the past is simultaneously more necessary and problematic for those interested in the second half of life and beyond, in that ﬁve to as many as 10 decades of life must be accommodated, and the possible connections between earlier and later developmental experiences seem inﬁnite. Understanding the imprint of time becomes even more complicated by the fact that personal histories are not purely personal: They are embedded in larger social and cultural history. The intersection of life time with historical time poses another layer of temporal complexity for developmental science, as the historical location of individuals and cohorts shapes and sets parameters on

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their opportunities, expectations, and world-views. To paraphrase Hughes (1950), we are born, live, and die in historical time. As we grow up and older, our lives are joined with events and changes1 in the world around us. The events and changes of the 20th century seem particularly remarkable: the turmoil of two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf; international acts of terrorism; the threat of nuclear war and biological warfare; the AIDS epidemic; enormous gains in sexual equality and civil rights; immense technological strides in space, medicine, communication, and other spheres. These things, big and small, leave their marks on us. At the same time, we may seldom be aware of the intricate connections between the course of our own lives and that of our nation and the world. We may rarely be conscious of the fact that many of our “personal problems” are instead “public issues” shared by many others, to use Mills’ (1959) phrases. Historical matters have largely been neglected in developmental research.2 To fully understand aging and the life course, we must better grasp history, biography, and the relations between the two in society. This means that we must more fully explore how life experiences vary by cohort. If we assume that successive cohorts of people grow older in identical ways, we are mislead by the “fallacy of cohort-centrism” (Riley, Foner & Waring, 1988). Indeed, because the ﬁeld of adult development is relatively “young,” most of what is known about aging and the life course has been based on cohorts born early in the 20th century. The lives of members of these cohorts have been signiﬁcantly different from those of later cohorts. This raises a critical question concerning generalizability: To what degree have we mistaken the effects of speciﬁc historical conditions on development for general developmental patterns and processes? This is what Caspi (1998) calls the problem of historical speciﬁcity, and it must be handled in more dedicated and deliberate ways. Because most developmental research remains cross-sectional, and because even the longest-standing longitudinal studies are typically composed of members of a single birth cohort, little is known about the extent to which developmental knowledge is historically speciﬁc. Cohort cannot be dismissed, as it often is, as a “nuisance” variable or as “noise” in the search for larger developmental laws. Cohort, like age, is an “empty” variable that must be made more meaningful. How and why does cohort matter to adult development? The concept of cohort is based on the assumption that individuals born at about the same point in history share a set of unique experiences (for a classic critique of the measurement and uses of cohort, see Rosow, 1978). For example, contemporary cohorts of older Americans have witnessed both rapid and dramatic social change in the course of their lives. These elders have

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experienced the Great Depression, World War II, postwar economic growth, the Korean War and McCarthy era, dramatic changes in transportation and technology, the overthrow of political regimes, new recognition of civil rights, and fundamental transformations in sexual mores. The very oldest have lived through World War I and knew a time when women had no legal right to vote. In contrast, cohorts now positioned at midlife – elders of the near future – missed these events completely and instead faced turbulence around civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement during their formative years. Nonetheless, these individuals had parents who were affected by these earlier events and periods, which in turn likely affected what they were socialized to value and believe and how they were socialized to behave. Speciﬁc cohorts should therefore not only share a common set of historical experiences, but their experiences should be distinctly different from adjacent cohorts. For example, among elders in contemporary society, there is likely signiﬁcant variability across ﬁner cohort divisions. Of course, relative to other age groups, the “old,” as they are normally deﬁned, are a much larger group, spanning the years from 65 and beyond. The youngest were infants or toddlers at the onset of the Great Depression, while the oldest were in their late 20s or early 30s. Similarly, the youngest were too young to have served in the armed forces during World War II, while those just slightly older had signiﬁcant military experience. The characteristics and resources of individuals and families (e.g. personality traits, belief systems, sex, race, or social class) condition the impact of an event or change. The age at which individuals or cohorts experience an event or change seems especially important. As a speciﬁc birth cohort grows up and older, its members encounter an historical event or period of social change at roughly the same point in their lives; and as successive birth cohorts encounter those same events or changes, they experience them at different points in life. As a result, the impact of a speciﬁc historical event or period of social change is likely contingent on the position of a cohort when the event or change occurs. This is an extension of what Elder and Johnson (2003) describe as the “principle of timing.” Social theorists have long suggested that the historical circumstances that exist when a cohort reaches adolescence and early adulthood are especially important in bringing about generational mentalités (e.g. Mannheim, 1928/1952). Yet it would also seem plausible to hypothesize that changing historical conditions may most strongly affect older adults. When change occurs during old age, it may shatter lifelong assumptions, beliefs, and values on which identities have been built. Of course, one could also argue that changing historical conditions may bring few or weak effects on older people because their lives are (presumably) more restricted and sheltered (e.g. Ryder, 1965). 473

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This last point highlights the fact that it may not only be the timing of an experience, but its pace that creates cohort distinctions. On the one hand, when the pace of social change is rapid, life experiences may become more variable both within and between cohorts. On the other hand, rapid social change may “crystallize” (or create solidarity within) a cohort, serving to create or strengthen chasms between cohorts. Technological change, in particular, may be an important part of this process, as it often drives social change and has an age-differentiated impact on the population, as Ryder (1965) proposed long ago. Technological change distances cohorts from one another by making the present and future more relevant than the past, and the young more valued than the old. Of course, it is also possible that under some circumstances, technological change may actually foster rather than fragment ties between cohorts. These concerns are also tied to several other central propositions that are not sufﬁciently handled in developmental theories and research. First, scholarship must better address how development is shaped by the many social spaces and inter-related systems in which human lives are embedded (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998; Magnusson & Stattin, 1998; Settersten, 2003). When developmental scholarship has been contextual, it has largely focused on proximal environments such as families, peer and friendship groups, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. To date, these proximal environments have been examined most systematically in scholarship on childhood, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood. Far less is known about how proximal environments leave their imprints on the lives of mature adults. Developmental scholarship has also neglected more distal environments, such as the state and its policies, culture, and history. Of course, successively more distal environments are also increasingly difﬁcult to theorize and research (for a discussion of these challenges, see Settersten, 1999). Second, scholarship must better explicate variability in human development and examine its shape, sources, and consequences over time. Recent research in the ﬁeld of gerontology has led this movement, as heterogeneity may be especially signiﬁcant among older people (e.g. Calasanti, 1996; Dannefer, 2003). As members of a cohort grow older, they may become increasingly different from one another, and historical experiences become part of that accumulated past.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS In light of the concerns introduced above, the following questions are examined in this paper. First, as cohorts of mature adults reﬂect on historical events and changes that have occurred in the past century, which things stand out as

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being especially important? Second, and more importantly, do individuals see the connection between the course of their own lives and that of history? That is, do individuals view historical events and changes as having had important personal effects on themselves and members of their families? Third, which events and changes have most often come with personal effects? Fourth, how do these events and changes carry signiﬁcant personal meanings? And ﬁnally, for each of these issues, do important differences exist across speciﬁc cohorts based on the speciﬁc historical conditions that existed when they made the transition to adulthood? To shed empirical light on these questions, data are drawn from the Intersection of Personal and National History (Schuman & Converse, 1985; see Appendix for further information). While these questions require largely descriptive and bivariate analyses, they facilitate our understanding of the link between lives and history, and between aging and the life course. These analyses inform central but under-explored propositions in life course scholarship. They turn our attention to history and historical time as distal but critical contexts for human development. And they turn our attention to cohort as an important source of variability in how individuals are socialized and in their life chances, expectations, and experiences.

METHOD Sample The Intersection of Personal and National History (IPNH) contains data from random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone interviews with a national sample of 1410 Americans, 18 years of age or older. Data were collected in 1985, and the response rate was 71%, which is characteristic of most national RDD surveys (Lavrakas, 1987). The full IPNH sample exhibits good variability across sex, marital, educational, and income statuses. However, minority groups are not well represented (comprising only 16% of the sample), nor are individuals in advanced old age (only 1% of the sample is over age 85). Our analyses are restricted to a sub-sample of 1069 mature adults. This sub-sample is based on four separate “coming-of-age” cohorts that are the focal point of inquiry in this paper (described below): those who entered adulthood between (1) 1920–1934 (N = 153), (2) 1935–1945 (N = 203), (3) 1946–1959 (N = 274), and (4) 1960–1973 (N = 439). Table 1 shows each coming-of-age cohort, the birth years into which each translates, and their corresponding age strata in 1985 (the year data were collected) and 2002. The age range of respondents at the time of the study is therefore 30 to 83, in the 2002 475

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Table 1.

RICHARD A. SETTERSTEN, JR. AND LISA MARTIN

Coming-of-Age Cohorts and their Corresponding Birthyears and Age Strata in 1985 and 2002.

Coming-of-Age Cohort

Birth Year

Age in 1985

Age Strata in 2002 Population

N

1920–1934 1935–1945 1946–1959 1960–1973

1902–1916 1917–1927 1928–1941 1942–1955

69–83 58–68 44–57 30–43

86–100 75–85 61–74 47–60

153 203 274 439

Note: See text for an explanation of the cohort categories.

population it is 47 to 100 years old. The race limitation noted in the larger sample is accentuated in the sub-sample (only 12% are of minority status), and the age limitation noted in the larger sample also slightly limits analyses of cohort differences. These limitations will be discussed below.

DEPENDENT VARIABLES Important Historical Events and Changes Respondents were asked the following question: “There have been a lot of national and world events and changes over the past 50 years – say, from about 1930 right up until today. Would you mention one or two such events or changes that seem to you to have been especially important?” Up to two events or changes were then noted. Reasons why particular events or changes were mentioned. For each event or change that was mentioned, respondents were asked, “What was it about [that event or change] that makes it seem especially important to you?” Up to three reasons per event were then noted and categorized. Personal Effects of Historical Events and Changes If any personal effects were mentioned as part of an individual’s response to the “reasons” question just described, those reasons were noted as being personal. If no clear personal effects emerged in response to that question, respondents were asked, “Would you say that [the event or change] had any important effect on your own life or that of your family – I mean on how you have lived or how you have looked at things?” Between these two questions, responses that tapped “personal effects” were then coded to indicate whether the effects were tangible,

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psychological, or both. Tangible effects included physical or material impacts, or changes related to residence, lifestyle, family, or job (e.g. “a friend was injured there,” “it created hardship for the family,” “I couldn’t get a job because of it”). Psychological effects included changes in attitudes, feelings, values, or emotions (e.g. “Kennedy’s death depressed me,” “I broke down and wept”). Some responses contained Both Psychological and Tangible elements (e.g. “I lost my brother there, so I distrust the government,” “I lost all of my money and that changed my attitude toward banks”). If a response had any clear element of personal connection, it was coded into one of these three categories, even if the remainder of the response was relatively impersonal. In addition, the use of the words “we” or “us” were not counted as “personal” if they referred to the nation as a whole or to a large group of which the respondent is part, unless the respondent personalized such a reference. Military Service and its Effects As will be seen shortly, times of war stand out as being most signiﬁcant in the minds of many respondents. World War II and Vietnam, in particular, are viewed as critically important for the nation and world, and for these individuals and their families. Because of this, we will also consider available data related to military service and its effects. Whether respondent ever served in the military. Respondents answered “yes” or “no” to the question, “Have you ever served in the armed forces?” Timing of military service. The timing of military service is based on the age at which the respondent entered the military. Timing was classiﬁed as “early” if the respondent entered the military at age 18 or younger (high school age), “midrange” if the respondent entered between 19 and 21 (a few years beyond high school), and “late” if the respondent entered at 22 or older (several years beyond high school). Duration of military service. Those who served in the armed forces were asked, “What years were those? (from __, to __).” The duration of military service was then calculated in years.

111 Whether the respondent ever served in combat. Those who served in the armed forces answered “yes” or “no” to the question, “Have you ever served in combat?” 477

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Whether military service affected later life. Those who served in the armed forces answered “yes” or “no” to the question “Did military service affect your later life in any way?” Type of effect military service had on later life. Those who answered “yes” to the prior question were then asked, “How did it affect your later life?” Up to two responses were then recorded and coded. In the analyses reported here, each response was categorized in terms of whether the effect was positive or negative. Positive effects included making new relationships (e.g. met wife or friends), developing personally (e.g. learning to “be a man” or to work in teams and build leadership), broadening experiences (e.g. learning about other cultures or life, traveling), learning technical or work-related skills, receiving veteran’s beneﬁts (e.g. drawing on the GI Bill for schooling, using medical services provided by the Veteran’s Administration), and feeling an increased sense of patriotism. Negative effects included disrupting life (e.g. feeling as if the best years of one’s life were taken away; being separated from family or friends; interrupting school or work), suffering injuries or disabilities due to military service, or becoming disillusioned with the military, the government, the country, or its leaders.

INDEPENDENT VARIABLES Cohort For the many reasons discussed in the introduction, especially the call to make cohort and cohort analyses more meaningful in developmental scholarship, we are particularly interested in exploring the distinctive or differential historical experiences of separate cohorts of mature adults. Building on previous work by Elder and Caspi (1990) and Settersten (1997), we build four meaningfully (not arbitrarily) deﬁned cohort groups based on the period of history in which members of each cohort entered young adulthood. As a result, our empirical definitions of cohort are also explicitly grounded in social theory on cohort phenomena, given that these theories have long suggested that the historical conditions associated with early adulthood are likely to play an especially important role in shaping individual world-views and larger generational mentalités. Individuals were classiﬁed into one of four cohorts depending on the year in which the respondent made the transition to adulthood or “came of age” (turned age 18): 1920–1934 (N = 153); 1935–1945 (N = 203); 1946–1959 (N = 274); 1960–1973 (N = 439). Individuals entering adulthood between 1920–1934 came of age during a time of both changing sexual mores and swings in economic stability (a general economic boom from 1923–1929, the onset of the Great

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Depression during 1929 and 1930, and the depth of the Great Depression during 1932–1933). Those entering adulthood between 1935–1945 came of age during partial recovery from the depression, an economic slump, the incipient stage of wartime mobilization, and World War II; men who returned home after the war had new opportunities (particularly educational) provided by the GI bill. Those entering adulthood between 1946–1959 came of age during post-war economic growth, the Korean War, the McCarthy Era, the onset of the civil rights movement, and the new family patterns of the 1950s. And those entering adulthood between 1960–1973 came of age during the mobilization of civil rights, civil strife, the Vietnam War, and changing patterns of labor force participation for women. As expected, the four cohorts differ signiﬁcantly with respect to several personal characteristics. Members of each successive cohort have signiﬁcantly higher levels of education. In addition, several other signiﬁcant differences are surely a function of life stage. Members of the two younger cohorts are more likely to be working; and members of the two older cohorts, and especially the eldest group, are more likely to be fully retired. This difference in work status likely produces an income differential between the four groups, with members of the two older cohorts found more often in the lower half of the income distribution, and members of the eldest cohort particularly likely found in the lowest segment. As expected, the statuses of marriage, separation, and divorce are signiﬁcantly more prevalent in the two younger cohorts, and the status of widowhood is most prevalent in the two older cohorts. Other Personal Characteristics In examining the effects of cohort, some statistical analyses will also include other personal characteristics as control variables. These characteristics include sex, race (a dichotomous white/black variable), a six-level educational variable (no high school; some high school; high school diploma; some college; college degree; post-college training), and a four-level individual income variable (less than $10,000; $10,000–$19,000; $20,000–$29,000; and greater than $30,000). The distributions for these characteristics exhibit good variability.

RESULTS Important Historical Events and Changes Table 2 presents the historical events and changes that were most often cited as important by adults as a whole and for the four cohorts. To control the 479

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number of events and changes compiled in this table, we included only those that were cited by at least 3% of all mature adults or 3% of adults within a cohort. While up to three events or changes were coded, most respondents cite only one or two events. As a result, the proportions noted in the table are based on those who cite a given event or change as either a ﬁrst or second response. In addition to indicating the signiﬁcance of the Pearson Chi-Square values that result from bivariate analyses, Table 2 also indicates the signiﬁcance of cohort after taking into account several other personal characteristics. The last column shows the signiﬁcance of the cohort coefﬁcient in a multivariate logistic regression model that controlled for sex, race (restricted to white/black), education, and income. For each instance in which cohort is signiﬁcant in bivariate analyses, its signiﬁcance remains equally strong once the other variables are taken into account. What is most striking is the extent to which World War II stands out as the most salient event or change for mature adults as a whole and for three of the four cohorts, especially the group that came of age during wartime.3 However, those who came of age in 1960–1973 reported Vietnam as the most salient event, with World War II closely behind. Vietnam and the assassination of John F. Kennedy are mentioned more often for each successive cohort. In contrast, the Great Depression is mentioned signiﬁcantly less often by each successive cohort, and is most salient for the eldest cohort, which came of age during the Depression years. Members of the youngest cohort mention changes in Transportation and Communication signiﬁcantly less often, given that landmark progress in transportation occurred well before they were born. There are no signiﬁcant differences across the four cohorts in the degree to which other events or changes are mentioned. Surprisingly, then, apart from World War II and Vietnam there are no other events or changes around which mature adults as a whole or speciﬁc cohorts uniformly coalesce. Even when they are combined, World War II and Vietnam are cited by only 52% of mature adults as a whole, and by between 45% and 58% of adults in speciﬁc cohorts. Why does World War II stand out as such an important event in the minds of these mature adults? Table 3 presents the reasons why World War II is cited as signiﬁcant, again for mature adults as a group and for the four cohort groups. These proportions are based on those who gave either one or two responses to the question, “What was it about World War II that makes it seem especially important to you?” To control the number of reasons compiled in this table, only those reasons that were cited by at least 3% of mature adults or 3% of adults within a cohort are included. For mature adults as a whole, the most prevalent reasons for citing World War II pertain to the individual having some sort of War Experience (32%),

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Proportion Citing Selected Historical Events and Changes, for Mature Adults and by Cohort. Mature Adults (N = 955)

WWII Vietnam Space JFK’s Assassination Civil Rights Transportation/Communication Threat of Nuclear War Great Depression Computers Moral Decline Women’s Movement Terrorism

32.3 20.1 12.9 9.5 8.6 7.0 6.8 5.9 3.9 3.2 2.6 1.9

Came of Age 1920–1934 (N = 128)

Came of Age 1935–1945 (N = 181)

Came of Age 1946–1959 (N = 243)

Came of Age 1960–1973 (N = 403)

Cohort Difference ␹2 p-value

Cohort Coefﬁcient (p-value) Logistic Regressiona

38.3 6.3 11.7 0.8 4.7 10.2 3.1 13.3 3.1 3.1 0.8 0.8

41.4 7.2 11.0 4.4 11.6 10.5 5.0 7.2 3.9 5.0 2.8 1.1

35.8 13.6 16.0 9.9 6.6 8.2 8.2 4.9 6.6 2.1 1.2 1.2

24.1 34.2 12.2 14.4 9.7 3.7 7.9 3.5 2.5 3.2 4.0 3.0

0.000 0.000 0.383 0.000 0.093 0.006 0.152 0.000 0.069 0.421 0.093 0.204

0.000 0.000 0.886 0.000 0.366 0.006 0.024 0.000 0.260 0.645 0.294 0.550

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% % % % % % % % % % % %

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Event/Change

111

111 Table 2.

Note: See text for question wording and further explanation of the categories included here. This column indicates the signiﬁcance of cohort after controlling for sex, education, race, and income (see text for an explanation of the model).

a

481

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Table 3.

% % % % % % % %

Mature Adults (N = 308)

War Experience Economic/Technical Progress Winning the “Good War” Created World Struggle Large Impact Lives Lost Shortages, Hardships Patriotism Improved

31.5 17.9 17.5 13.6 13.3 7.8 6.2 6.2

Came of Age 1920–1934 (N = 49) 53.1 10.2 12.2 0.0 2.0 8.2 6.1 2.0

Came of Age 1935–1945 (N = 75)

Came of Age 1946–1959 (N = 87)

46.7 10.7 13.3 9.3 6.7 12.0 5.3 6.7

Note: See text for question wording and further explanation of the categories included here.

28.7 20.7 11.5 11.5 16.1 6.9 11.5 4.6

Came of Age 1960–1973 (N = 97) 11.3 24.7 28.9 25.8 21.6 5.2 2.1 9.3

Cohort Difference ␹2 p-value 0.000 0.042 0.005 0.000 0.002 0.408 0.066 0.325

RICHARD A. SETTERSTEN, JR. AND LISA MARTIN

Reason Mentioned and Proportion Citing It

Why World War II Stands Out as an Important Event, for Mature Adults and by Cohort.

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whether direct (respondent was involved in the war), indirect (members of respondent’s family or respondent’s friends were involved in the war), or both. The other category in which personal experiences related to World War II may surface relates to the Shortages and Hardships that were suffered by the nation at large or within one’s own family, though this is one of the least cited categories (6%). Other common reasons for citing World War II include (in order of importance): the Economic and Technical Progress initiated by the war (18%), the importance of Winning the “Good War” (18%; e.g. that there was “just cause” for the war, especially in return for the killing of Jews), the World Struggle it created (14%; e.g. the realignment of nations; divisions between East and West; the spread of Communism and, later, the Cold War; the stage it set for our present world), the Large Impact the war generally had on the world and the American nation (13%), the many Lives Lost during the war (8%; e.g. casualties of soldiers), and the degree to which Patriotism Improved after the war (5%). However, the reasons for citing World War II as important vary across the cohorts. For example, the proportion citing reasons related to direct or indirect involvement in the war decreases signiﬁcantly across cohorts. Of course, the two older cohorts did, in fact, have more direct experiences with the war, as we will later see. The two younger cohorts are instead more likely to note the signiﬁcant impact World War II had on the nation or world, the role it played in creating lasting world struggle, or how important it was to win the “good war.” Economic and technical progress, too, are cited more often by the two younger cohorts than the two older cohorts. As shown in Table 3, the youngest cohort mentions Vietnam most often (34%), and for them Vietnam is even more salient than World War II. Other cohorts cite Vietnam signiﬁcantly less often, though these proportions increase across successive cohorts. However, the three older cohorts cite advances in Space with greater frequency than Vietnam; the cohort that came of age between 1920–1934 cites the Depression and Transportation more often than Vietnam; and the cohort that came of age between 1935–1945 cites Transportation and Civil Rights more often than Vietnam. What reasons do members of the 1960–1973 cohort give for citing Vietnam as especially important? Up to three reasons were coded. These most often related to feeling as if American participation in the Vietnam War was Divisive and created Distrust and Suspicion of the government and politicians (33%). They also related to having their own Personal Experience (17%) or Knowing Others in Vietnam (24%), expressing upset over the Costs to Soldiers and Veterans (23%), or feeling as if Vietnam veterans were Ill-Treated (16%). And they related to feeling as if there was No Purpose to the war (23%) or that we 483

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Didn’t or Couldn’t Win the war (10%). Surprisingly, while Vietnam is cited differentially across the four cohorts, the reasons for which it is viewed as important do not vary across the four cohort groups. Personal Effects of Historical Events and Changes Several of the ﬁndings above begin to uncover some of the ways in which large scale historical events or periods of social change become meaningful for individuals and their families. We now turn to a more systematic look at this issue. Regardless of the event or change at hand, how often do individuals cite personal effects in relation to it, what events or changes are most often cited, and what types of effects do they generally cite? These analyses are presented in Table 4. Again, in addition to indicating the signiﬁcance of the Pearson Chi-Square values that result from bivariate analyses, Table 4 also indicates, for the proportion citing a personal effect and for the types of effects cited, the signiﬁcance of cohort after factoring in several other personal characteristics. The last column shows the signiﬁcance of the cohort coefﬁcient in a multivariate logistic regression model that controlled for sex, race (restricted to white/black), education, and income. For each instance in which cohort is signiﬁcant in bivariate analyses, its signiﬁcance remains equally strong once the other variables are taken into account. Surprisingly, among those who cite a ﬁrst or a second event or change that has been important for society, nearly three-quarters of mature adults also mention that at least one of those events or changes had important effects on them personally. Across the four cohorts, personal effects are cited by 69% to 80% of adults, though these cohort differences are not signiﬁcant. Which events or changes are most often cited as having personal effects? To control the number of events or changes compiled here, Table 4 includes only those events or changes (as a ﬁrst or second mention) that were cited by at least 3% of all mature adults or 3% of those within a cohort as carrying important personal meanings. Overall, personal effects are mentioned most often in relation to World War II (32%), followed by Vietnam (20%). Members of the three older cohorts are signiﬁcantly more likely to mention World War II as having personal effects, whereas members of the youngest cohort are significantly more likely to mention Vietnam. The two younger cohorts are also signiﬁcantly more likely to mention John F. Kennedy’s Assassination, and slightly more likely to mention Space, than the two older cohorts. Signiﬁcant cohort differences also exist with respect to the Great Depression, Personal Computers, Social Security, and Roosevelt’s Term, for which personal effects are cited less often across successive cohorts.

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Personal Effects of Historical Events and Changes, for Mature Adults and by Cohort. Mature Adults %/Base N

Came of Age 1920–1934 %/Base N

Came of Age 1935–1945 %/Base N

Came of Age 1946–1959 %/Base N

Came of Age 1960–1973 %/Base N

Cohort Difference ␹2 p-value

Cohort Coefﬁcient (p-value) Logistic Regression

73.2/906

75.0/116

79.8/173

73.9/234

69.2/383

0.066

0.110

Events/Changes Most Often Cited World War II 31.8/663 Vietnam 20.4 JFK’s Assassination 7.5 Personal Computers 7.2 Civil Rights 6.9 Great Depression 6.6 Space 6.2 Threat of Nuclear War 5.7 Moral Decline 3.0 Social Security 2.7 Roosevelt’s Term 1.5

48.3/87 6.9 0.0 11.5 2.3 14.9 1.1 2.3 2.3 4.6 5.7

42.0/138 3.6 3.6 11.6 10.1 8.7 4.3 4.3 5.1 5.8 2.2

36.4/173 12.7 8.1 8.1 5.2 6.4 9.2 5.8 0.6 1.7 1.2

18.1/265 38.5 11.7 3.0 7.9 3.0 6.8 7.5 3.8 1.1 0.0

0.000 0.000 0.001 0.004 0.098 0.001 0.056 0.261 0.103 0.026 0.002

Type of Effect Cited b Tangible 59.9/663 Psychological 36.3 Both Tangible and Psychological 21.6

82.8/87 14.9 17.2

68.8/138 21.7 24.6

58.4/173 38.7 19.1

48.7/265 49.4 23.0

0.000 0.000 0.441

% Citing a Personal Effect a First or Second Event/Change

The Imprint of Time

Table 4.

485

0.000 0.000 0.679

Notes: See text for question wording and further explanation of the categories compiled here. Percentage of respondents who cited a personal effect in relation to either the ﬁrst or second historical event or change cited; b Restricted to those who cited a personal effect in relation to either the ﬁrst or second historical event or change cited; c This column indicates the signiﬁcance of cohort after controlling sex, education, race, and income (see text for an explanation of the model). a

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What types of effects are generally cited in response to these events and changes? We examine whether effects are tangible, psychological, or both, and again for either the ﬁrst or second event or change cited. For mature adults as a whole, the personal effects mentioned are largely tangible in nature (60%). However, the two older cohorts (particularly the eldest cohort) are signiﬁcantly more likely to cite the tangible effects of events and changes, whereas the two younger cohorts are signiﬁcantly more likely to cite psychological effects. Military Service and its Effects Of the many and often dramatic events and changes that occurred during the 20th century, war-related experiences are clearly perceived as most important, both for the course of the American nation and the world, and for the lives of individuals, families, and the cohorts to which they belong. This warrants a closer look at personal experiences related to military service during wartime. As noted earlier, IPNH data provide the opportunity to examine several aspects of military service, not only whether individuals served the nation’s call, but also the timing and duration of service, whether they saw combat, and whether and how service affected their later lives. These analyses are presented in Table 5. Among the mature adults in this sample, only eleven women have served in the military. Because of this, we restrict our analyses of military service and its effects to men. Fifty-four percent of mature men served in the military, and the proportion of men from the 1935–1945 and 1946–1959 cohorts is especially large (71% and 66% respectively).4 The years of military service for most men in the 1920–1934 cohort, and for every man in the 1935–1945 cohort, overlap with World War II. In contrast, the military service of most men in the 1946–1959 and 1960–1973 cohorts span the years of the Korean or Vietnam wars. While men in the 1946–1959 cohort served slightly longer terms, men in the 1920–1934 and 1935–1945 cohorts were signiﬁcantly more likely to see combat. When asked whether military service affected their later lives, the majority of men say yes, especially men in the three cohorts that served heavily in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Surprisingly, these men give overwhelmingly positive, not negative, reports about their military experience and its effects on their later lives. Of the men who say that military service affected their later lives, 80% indicate that it brought positive effects, though this proportion varies (insigniﬁcantly) by cohort (ranging from 50% of men from the 1920–1934 cohort to 87% of men from the 1946–1959 cohort).

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Military Service and its Effects, for Mature Adults and by Cohort. Mature Adults

Came of Age 1920–1934

Came of Age 1935–1945

Came of Age 1946–1959

Came of Age 1960–1973

Cohort Difference ␹2 p-value

25.8 (267/1034) 54.1 (256/473)

15.5 (23/148) 35.5 (22/62)

34.2 (67/196) 70.8 (63/89)

31.1 (82/264) 65.8 (79/120)

22.3 (95/426) 45.5 (92/202)

0.000 0.000

Timing of Service a Early ( ≤ 18) Midrange (19–21) Late (22+)

37.7 33.6 28.7

0.0 5.6 94.4

48.4 21.0 30.6

32.4 39.2 28.4

42.2 43.3 24.4

Mean No. of Years

5.14 (5.7)

4.33 (3.5)

4.67 (4.7)

6.87 (7.8)

4.16 (4.1)

Ever Served in Combat?a % Yes

44.8

69.2

67.3

29.8

34.4

0.000

Did Military Service Affect Later Life?a % Yes

61.7

33.3

63.5

62.0

66.7

0.043

Type of Effect b Negative Positive

18.0 82.0

50.0 50.0

21.1 78.9

13.3 86.7

16.0 84.0

0.157

Ever Served in Military? % Yes (Men and Women) % Yes (Men)

The Imprint of Time

Table 5.

0.012 (F)

487

Notes: See text for question wording and further explanation of categories. Restricted to men who served in the military. b Restricted to men who both served in the military and responded positively to the question “Did military service affect your later life in any way?” a

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Prior literature on military service and the life course has suggested that the effects of service during wartime depend on when (the age at which) individuals began their service terms (e.g. Elder, Shanahan & Clipp, 1994; Maas & Settersten, 1999). As a result, the timing of military service is also examined here. Most men entered military service “early” (38% began at age 18 or younger), followed by “midrange” entrants (34% began between 19 and 21) and “late” entrants (28% began at 22 or older). Men in the eldest cohort entered the service at signiﬁcantly later ages; 94% of these men entered late and 6% entered midrange. In contrast, those who came of age between 1935–1945 were signiﬁcantly more likely to be called upon at earlier ages (48% entered at age 18 or younger and 21% entered between 19 and 21). Men from the 1960–1973 cohort were also signiﬁcantly more likely to be called upon for service in early in life (42% entered at age 18 or younger and 43% entered between 19 and 21). The likelihood of serving in combat did not vary by the timing of military service, nor did the likelihood of serving abroad. Men who entered early or midrange were signiﬁcantly more likely to indicate that military service affected later life (69% versus 65% versus 49%; ␹2 (2, N = 242) = 7.25, p < 0.05), though they were no less likely to say that military service affected them in positive rather than negative ways. Indeed, all three timing groups overwhelming stress the positive effects of military service (90%, 74%, and 79%, respectively). Interestingly, those who served in combat and those who were stationed abroad were also no less likely to emphasize the positive aspects of military service.

DISCUSSION Contemporary cohorts of mature adults have experienced dramatic historical events and rapid social change in their lifetimes. We ﬁrst asked which events and changes stand out as being especially important, and we found that times of war, especially World War II and Vietnam, are most salient in the minds of these adults. Members of all four cohorts deemed World War II or Vietnam as most important. However, members of the three older cohorts mentioned World War II signiﬁcantly more often (especially the group that came of age precisely during the war years). And members of the youngest cohort were signiﬁcantly more likely to mention Vietnam, along with John F. Kennedy’s assassination, both of which framed their early adult years. Members of the eldest cohort, who came of age precisely during the Depression years, also mentioned the Great Depression signiﬁcantly more often. Perhaps what is most striking about these ﬁndings is both the degree of patterning and the degree of variability. On

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the one hand, these ﬁndings illustrate that the historical conditions that existed during the early adult years were particularly likely to leave their imprint on individuals’ lives, or at least were most salient in their minds. On the other hand, one might be equally struck by fact that, other than World War II and Vietnam, there were no other events or changes around which mature adults as a group or speciﬁc cohorts uniformly coalesced. Even World War II and Vietnam, when combined, were mentioned by only about half of respondents. When we explored why World War II was viewed as being so important, we found that relatively up-close-and-personal experiences with the war underlie its significance, whether these experiences were one’s own or those of a spouse, relative, or close friend. These responses began to shed light on some of the more personal connections between lives and history. The reasons provided by members of the two oldest cohorts, in particular, were more often couched in personal terms. Of course, members of the eldest cohort (1920–1934), who were already well into adulthood when the war began, and members of the 1935–1945 cohort, who were coming of age at precisely that time, were more directly and heavily affected by World War II. In contrast, the reasons the younger cohorts gave for citing World War II seemed more impersonal. Of course, members of the cohort that came of age between 1946–1949 were between the ages of 0 and 11 when the war began, and, at best, the eldest members of the cohort that came of age between 1960–1973 were born three years into the war. As a result, they were instead more likely to note the large impact World War II had on the nation or world, the role it played in creating lasting world struggle, or how important it was to win the “good war.” The two younger cohorts more often cited economic and technical progress. So while the lives of the parents, adult relatives, and family friends of members of the two younger cohorts may have been directly and dramatically affected by the war, the younger cohorts spoke in more distanced ways about the significance of World War II. However, for the cohort that came of age during 1960–1973, in particular, World War II likely stands in direct contrast to the strife and stigma surrounding Vietnam, which occurred during their formative years. When we examined why Vietnam was deemed important, we again found responses that began to shed light on the more intimate connections between lives and history. Most often, these reasons related to individuals having personal experiences or knowing others in Vietnam, or to feeling upset about the toll it took on those who served, especially those who were poorly treated when they returned home. Other common reasons were more impersonal, tapping the sense that that war was divisive and created distrust and suspicion of the government and its leaders, or that there was simply no real purpose to 489

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“our boys” being in Vietnam. A surprising proportion of responses to questions about why World War II and Vietnam were important to the nation or world contained personal elements. Expanding our inquiry beyond World War II and Vietnam, we then posed a set of research questions aimed at more fully exploring the intersection between lives and history. Regardless of the speciﬁc events or changes individuals gave, we asked how often individuals referenced personal effects, which events or changes they most often referenced as such, and what types of effects these were. As our evidence unfolded, we found that it ran directly counter to Mills’ (1959) classic speculation that individuals generally fail to see the connection between “biography and society.” That is, Mills felt that individuals are so focused on what they take to be private concerns that they often cannot see how the course of their own lives is shaped and even determined by the times in which they live. However, the explanations given here by fully threequarters of mature adults as a whole demonstrate that at least one of the events or changes they mentioned came with important personal effects, and this proportion was typical of all four cohorts. Of the wide range of events and changes that carried important personal effects and meanings, World War II and Vietnam were mentioned most often. The cohort differences noted above again emerged, with members of the three older cohorts being signiﬁcantly more likely to mention World War II as having personal effects, and members of the youngest cohort being signiﬁcantly more likely to mention Vietnam. Several other cohort differences existed with respect to the personal effects and meanings of John F. Kennedy’s Assassination, Advances in Space, the Great Depression, Personal Computers, Social Security, and Roosevelt’s Term. Once again, this picture can be interpreted in two opposing ways. On the one hand, we might choose to emphasize the fact that the conditions that existed during individuals’ early adult years were the most likely to be viewed as having a personal impact on individuals and their families. On the other hand, we might be equally struck by the degree of variability. Apart from World War II and Vietnam, there were no other events or changes around which mature adults as a group or speciﬁc cohorts uniformly gathered. Even when World War II and Vietnam were combined, they were only mentioned by just over half of respondents. We then explored whether the personal effects that were cited in response to these events and changes were tangible or psychological in nature (or both). Overall, tangible effects were cited most often. Yet the two younger cohorts were signiﬁcantly more likely to cite psychological effects, while the two older cohorts (especially the eldest one) were signiﬁcantly more likely to cite the tangible effects. Of course, the eldest cohort experienced both the

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Great Depression and World War II as early adults; the 1935–1945 cohort experienced World War II as adolescents and early adults, and the Great Depression as children; and even the 1946–1959 cohort experienced the Great Depression and World War II as children. For many individuals, these two events created serious material deprivation, prompted a change in residence or jobs, and caused family strain. In contrast, the early adult lives of the two younger cohorts were anchored in far more optimistic economic conditions, given the opportunities associated with the post-war years. We repeatedly found that times of war were clearly viewed as most important for the course of the American nation and world, and for the lives of individuals, families, and cohorts. This led us to more carefully examine personal experiences related to military service during wartime. We examined several aspects of military service, not only whether individuals answered the nation’s call, but also the timing and duration of service, whether they were sent to combat, and perceptions of whether and how service affected their later lives. These data were also striking. A large proportion of men from these cohorts served in the military, and the proportion is especially high for men in the 1935–1945 and 1946–1959 cohorts. While men in the 1946–1959 cohort served slightly longer terms, men in the 1920–1934 and 1935–1945 cohorts were signiﬁcantly more likely to see combat. When asked whether military service affected their later lives, the majority of men said yes, especially men in the three cohorts that served heavily in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. What is most interesting, however, is that while many of these men experienced signiﬁcant hardship, and even weathered grueling conditions of combat, they gave overwhelmingly positive, not negative, reports about their military experience and its effects on their later lives. Of course, these reports were made in retrospect. In this case, these men reﬂected back on military experiences that had occurred decades earlier. Perhaps time, as the adage goes, heals all wounds. Thus, it is important to note that they are possibly a special group of veterans in that they survived combat and decades of life afterwards, and also possess a willingness to participate in the study. These men emphasized the fact that military service provided the opportunity to make new relationships, broaden their experiences, learn technical or work-related skills, receive Veteran’s beneﬁts (whether educational, medical, or ﬁnancial), and boost their sense of patriotism. Positive reports were especially likely among men in the younger cohorts, though it is important to remember that far fewer of these men were sent into combat. Negative reports emerged more often (but in equal proportion to positive reports) among the men in eldest cohort, who, along with men from the 1935–1945 cohort, served disproportionately in combat. These 491

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men emphasized the disruptions, injuries and disabilities, and disillusionment that military service brought to their lives. When we examined the timing of military service, we found that men in the eldest cohort entered the service at signiﬁcantly later ages. These men were, after all, somewhere between the ages of 23 and 38 when World War II began. In contrast, those who came of age between 1935–1945, which overlaps with the heaviest years of conscription, were signiﬁcantly more likely to be called upon at earlier ages. Like many of the men in the two middle cohorts, who were called upon for service in World War II or Korea early in life, many of the men from the 1960-1973 cohort were called upon for service in Vietnam early in life. However, the likelihood of serving in combat did not vary by the timing of military service, nor did the likelihood of serving abroad. Men who entered early or midrange were signiﬁcantly more likely to indicate that military service had affected their later lives, but they were no less likely to say that military service had affected them in positive rather than negative ways. All three timing groups overwhelming stressed the positive effects of military service. Interestingly, those who served in combat and those who were stationed abroad were also no less likely to emphasize the positive aspects of military service. Taken together, our ﬁndings reiterate those of others who have suggested that while military service during wartime was stressful for many soldiers, especially for those who served in combat, positive outcomes also resulted. These positive effects included the possibility that military service may have prompted new coping strategies, expanded personal boundaries (through experiences with death, different kinds of people, and other values), promoted social independence, and provided new skills and training. There is also evidence that some of the immediate disadvantages that veterans may have experienced, such as losing important opportunities for work promotions or to build occupational skills, quickly dissipated over time (e.g. Maas & Settersten, 1999). Several hypotheses on the positive and negative effects of early versus late timing of military service also exist in the literature (e.g. Elder, Shanahan & Clipp, 1994; Maas & Settersten, 1999; Sampson & Laub, 1996; Teachman & Call, 1996). On the positive side, one hypothesis is that men who entered at younger ages beneﬁted most from military service because they developed social independence, received a “time-out” to solidify career decisions, and acquired new skills and training just as they were embarking on their careers. On the negative side, one hypothesis is that military service took its greatest toll when it occurred during formative years of development – at points when men were completing their occupational training, launching their careers, and making important decisions about their family lives. In contrast, another hypothesis is

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that men who were called upon for military service later in their careers were forced to leave well-established work and family roles, making their departure from and return to those roles more difﬁcult. In the IPNH sample, all three timing groups gave exceptionally positive reports about the effects military service, though the IPNH data do not permit an examination of whether and how military service actually affected the life course patterns and outcomes of these cohort and timing groups. Given the degree to which cohorts from the 20th century have had direct experience with and exposure to war, we must wonder whether it is a “hidden variable” in research on adult development and aging, and especially in research on aging men (Spiro, Schnurr & Aldwin, 1994). As we noted in the introduction, developmental scientists must be conscious of the degree to which current knowledge may be historically speciﬁc. To what degree have the events and changes referenced in these analyses posed special opportunities or constraints for the development of cohorts born in the 20th century? To what degree might the developmental patterns and outcomes of cohorts born in the 21st century take novel forms? Contemporary and future cohorts of young people may be fortunate enough to see neither the economic swings nor the times of war that cohorts born in the ﬁrst half of the 20th century have seen – or perhaps their hardships will simply be of a different kind. Or perhaps the type and pace of technological change will instead leave the deepest marks on their lives and create cohort distinctions. This seems especially likely with respect to changes in communication and medical technology, which are certain to advance dramatically in decades to come. The interviews on which these analyses are based only begin to scratch the surface of the intersection between lives and history. Interviewers were able to ask only a limited set of structured questions; they could not follow up responses with extensive probes; and, because the interviews were conducted by telephone, the recorded responses do not fully capture the depth of the original responses. In addition, both its questions and its method seem more difﬁcult for older adults given their long histories. They not only have more things to recall as they look back upon the past, but they stand at great distance from many of them as they do. Finally, because the age distribution of the original sample included few respondents in advanced old age, we were unable to explore reports from members of the cohort that entered adulthood before 1920. Nonetheless, these analyses have turned our attention to historical time as a distal but critical context for human development, and to cohort as an important source of variability in socialization and in life chances, expectations, and experiences. They have also emphasized the importance of measuring and analyzing cohort in ways that are more meaningful and less arbitrary. 493

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Developmental scientists have much to learn about precisely how, and through what mechanisms, historical events and changes play themselves out in lives: How they serve as distal and proximal precursors of developmental outcomes, and as proximal and distal outcomes of earlier developmental experiences. How they carry both unique and differential effects within and between cohorts. How their effects are moderated by personal and familial characteristics, circumstances, and resources. And what they mean from a subjective, phenomenological standpoint. It is one thing to acknowledge that cohort and cohort differences are critical for understanding aging and the life course. It is another thing to demonstrate their effects, and to know how, why, and for whom they come about. The time has come for us to take these challenges seriously. We can no longer portray human development as if it exists in isolation of historical time. To the contrary, history sets important parameters on the life course, lending it much of its shape and instilling it with revised sets of meanings, expectations, and aspirations as new cohorts are born and others die. These challenges bring us full circle to where we began: facing Prospero’s dark backward and the abysm of time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Professors Howard Schuman and Philip Converse, of the University of Michigan, for use of the Intersection of Personal and National History, 1985: United States (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, #9257), and Ms. Joan Holup for assistance in preparing the data set. The ﬁrst author would like to acknowledge Professor Glen Elder, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for his support, guidance, and pioneering work on the link between lives and history.

NOTES 1. Following Schuman and Scott (1989), we use the term “historical event” to mean discrete events that are of relatively short duration and easy to mark in time, such as a World War II. We use the terms “historical changes” or “periods of social change” to designate larger changes for which precise years are more difﬁcult to determine, such as the civil rights or women’s movements. 2. A notable exception here is Elder’s pioneering work, which has demonstrated the powerful effects of the Great Depression on the lives of children and adolescents (e.g. Elder, 1974), of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s on farm families in Iowa (e.g. Conger & Elder, 1994), and of World War II on men who served in the military (e.g. Elder, Shanahan & Clipp, 1994). 3. It is important to note that the wording of the question asks respondents to consider events “from about 1930 right up until today [1985].” Had the question not imposed

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this restriction, members of the eldest cohort, born between 1902–1916, might also have mentioned World War I. 4. Our ﬁgure of 71% for the cohort that came of age during 1935–1945 nearly matches estimates by Modell and Steffey (1988). Modell and Steffey demonstrate that 15 million American men were called to arms during World War II, with 60% of these men born between 1917 and 1927. And of men born during these years, three out of four American men were called upon for service, with the distribution being quite equitable across socioeconomic strata. In our analyses, the birth years of men who came of age between 1935–1945 are precisely those years (1917 to 1927).

REFERENCES Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (1998). The ecology of developmental process. In: R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical Models of Human Development (5th ed., pp. 993–1028). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Calasanti, T. M. (1996). Incorporating diversity: Meaning, levels of research, and implications for theory. The Gerontologist, 36(2), 147–156. Caspi, A. (1998). Personality development across the life course. In: N. Eisenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 3. Social, Emotional, and Personality Development (5th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Conger, R., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (1994). Families in troubled times: Adaptation to change in rural America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Dannefer, D. (2003). Whose life course is it, anyway? Diversity and “linked lives” in global perspective. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 259–268). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Elder, G. H., Jr. (1974). Children of the Great Depression: Social change and life experience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Elder, G. H., Jr., & Caspi, A. (1990). Studying lives in a changing society: Sociological and personological explorations. In: A. I. Rabin (Ed.), Studying Persons and Lives: The Henry A. Murray Lectures in Personality (pp. 201–247). New York: Springer. Elder, G. H., Jr., & Johnson, M. K. (2003). The life course and aging: Challenges, lessons, and new directions. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 49–81). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Elder, G. H., Jr., Shanahan, M. J., & Clipp, E. C. (1994). When war comes to men’s lives: Life course patterns in family, work, and health. Psychology and Aging, 9, 5–16. Hughes, C. E. (1984 [1950]). Cycles, turning points, and careers. In: C. E. Hughes, The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (pp. 124–131). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, Inc. Lavrakas, P. (1987). Telephone survey methods: Sampling, selection, and supervision. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Maas, I., & Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1999). Military service during wartime: Its effects on men’s occupational trajectories and later economic well-being. European Sociological Review, 15(2), 81–100. Magnusson, D., & Stattin, H. (1998). Person-context interaction theories. In: R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical Models of Human Development (5th ed., pp. 685–759). New York: John Wiley & Sons Mannheim, K. (1952 [1928]). The problem of generations. In: K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 276–322). London: Routledge & Kaegan Paul.

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Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Modell, J., & Steffey, D. (1988). Waging war and marriage: Military service and family formation, 1940–1950. Journal of Family History, 13, 195–218. Riley, M. W., Foner, A., & Waring, J. (1988). Sociology of age. In: N. Smelser (Ed.), Handbook of Sociology (pp. 243–290). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Rosow, I. (1978). What is a cohort and why? Human Development, 21, 65–75. Ryder, N. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 30, 843–861. Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1996). Socioeconomic achievement in the life course of disadvantaged men: Military service as a turning point, circa 1940–1965. American Sociological Review, 61, 347–367. Schuman, H., & Converse, P. (1985). The Intersection of Personal and National History, 1985: United States. Conducted by the University of Michigan, Survey Research Center. ICPSR 9257, (2nd ed.), Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Producer and Distributor, 1991. Schuman, H., & Scott, J. (1989). Generations and collective memories. American Sociological Review, 54, 359–381. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1997). The salience of age in the life course. Human Development, 40(5), 257–281. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (1999). Lives in time and place: The problems and promises of developmental science. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2003). Propositions and controversies in life course research. In: R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the Life Course: Toward New Understandings of Later Life (pp. 15–48). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Spiro, A., Schnurr, P., & Aldwin, C. M. (1994). Combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in older men. Psychology and Aging, 9, 17–26. Teachman, J. D., & Call, V. R. (1996). The effect of military service on educational, occupational, and income attainment. Social Science Research, 25, 1–31.

APPENDIX The analyses presented in this manuscript signiﬁcantly expand the scope of issues and data covered in Schuman and Scott’s (1989) initial paper based on this data set. First, Schuman and Scott restricted their analyses to the historical events and periods of social change that are cited as being important for the nation and world. Second, they generally compared either 6 or 12 age groups based on arbitrary age bands. In most analyses, they compared 6 age groups, which are obtained by splitting the age distribution into simple 10-year age bands, and leaving the eldest group open-ended: 18–29; 30–39; 40–49; 50–59; 60–69; 70+. To generate 12 groups, they instead split the age distribution into simple 5-year age bands, and again leave the eldest group open-ended: 18–23; 24–29; 30–34; 35–39; 40–44; 45–49; 50–54; 55–59; 60–64; 65–69; 70–74; 75+. For select analyses, Schuman and Scott also examined the degree to which

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gender, education (collapsed), and race (black/white) are related to the events or periods that were cited as important for the nation or world. In contrast, we turn our attention to mature adults in the sample and especially to differences between four meaningfully deﬁned cohorts, with each cohort based on the period of history in which its members entered young adulthood (see section on methods). Our empirical deﬁnitions of cohort are therefore explicitly grounded in classical sociological thought on cohort phenomena, and they provide a stronger test of these theories. Like Schuman and Scott, we are interested in understanding the historical events and changes that are cited as being important for society. This is where our paper begins, as we ﬁrst take a systematic look at cohort differences in the events and changes cited, and why World War II and Vietnam, in particular, are cited so often. But given the theoretical and methodological concerns we raise in the introduction, the most important part of our inquiry is what follows this: as we explore whether and how these historical events and changes bring important personal effects for individuals and their families. As we conduct our analyses, we ﬁnd that of the wide range of events cited, war-related experiences stand out most often. This leads us to also take a closer look at personal experiences related to military service during wartime. As noted in the main text, IPNH data provide the opportunity to not only examine cohort differences in whether individuals served the nation’s call, but also differences in the timing and duration of service, whether individuals saw combat, and whether and how service affected veterans’ later lives.

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17. SOCIAL CHANGE, THE LIFE COURSE, AND SOCIALIZATION: BIOGRAPHIES OF LABOR MARKET ENTRANTS AFTER UNIFICATION Susanne Falk and Ansgar Weymann

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INTRODUCTION In the German Democratic Republic educational, employment and welfare institutions strongly inﬂuenced life course transitions from cradle to grave. Individual choices concerning life course direction were politically restricted. With uniﬁcation the strong institutional guidance has vanished. A prime example of this rapid change is the loss of the state-regulated linkage between education and employment. Employment after graduation is no longer guaranteed. The hitherto unknown problem of unemployment emerged, as did pressures for higher occupational mobility. Further, the labor market and the occupational structure have experienced a profound reorganization, and educational qualiﬁcations and vocational skills have been partly de- or revalued. The post-1989 structural upheavals and radical institutional changes have affected millions of life courses and given rise to new inequalities. The introduction of the West German educational, labor market and employment systems on the one hand offers individuals far more opportunities for a self-determined

111 Advances in Life Course Research, Volume 7, pages 501–526. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0863-X

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life course, but on the other hand supplies much weaker institutional guidance than did the centralized, socialist GDR. Ten years later, this article addresses two questions: (1) have the life courses of adolescents in East and West Germany converged, and (2) is socialization in the GDR still of crucial importance?

SOCIETY AND BIOGRAPHIES WITHIN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION The theoretical framework for this study is provided by a concept of socialization that focuses on rational individual action within the institutional framework of society. Biography is the reﬂection and conceptualization of the construction of lives within institutional settings. In cases of rapid and profound social transformation in history, the institutional framework is deeply reorganized or substituted completely by new institutions. This alters the opportunity structure and the structure of restraints on rational lie conduct, and it has an impact on biographical self-conceptions. Three Theoretical Perspectives on the Life Course Modern society is characterized by a high degree of complexity due to the division of labor, social differentiation, functional specialization resulting in individualized life courses, and by the continuing rationalization of an increasing number of life sectors. The routine, unquestioned interweaving of life courses and social structures by “Gemeinschaft” and “solidarity” is no longer taken for granted, but is an objective of individual and institutional agency.1 A particular role is played by the rise of numerous specialized social systems and institutions geared toward certain life phases from kindergarten to retirement. Social theory explains the interrelation of modern society and biographies by using three arguments (Weymann, 1996a, 1996b; Weymann & Heinz, 1996): (1) The interrelation of society and biographies is based on individual choices. The theory of rational decision making places the utilitarian individual at the center of analysis (Blossfeld & Prein, 1998). Biographical decisions are acts of choice under given as well as already self-created conditions of options and resources. Society and biography are bound together through the allocation of scarce resources in the pursuit of competing goals. This includes the allocation of time across the life course. Time is a good that can be distributed among consumption, occupation, or investment in human capital. This distribution is governed by the current value of future returns

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and by opportunity costs. That time utilization is a decision about human capital is evidenced, for example, in daily conﬂicts over educational, occupational, and familial biographies (Becker, 1976, 1981). Coleman extends the individual human capital perspective within institutional constraints to include a generational aspect. He attributes historical changes in parents’ and children’s investment in human capital during the 19th and 20th century to modiﬁed expectations of cohorts regarding the return on education (Coleman, 1990). According to the rational decision concept, society and biography are linked by individual choices made within opportunity structures that are supplied by institutions. The most significant of such institutions are the market and the welfare state. Life course research has to seek to elucidate the changing opportunity structures framing the options for individual life conduct. (2) The life course is conducted within the constraints of institutional opportunity structures. Institutionalism analyzes the social structure of resources and constraints available to individual action (Brinton & Nee, 1998; Knight & Sened, 1995). In modern societies it is the life course policy of the welfare state on which life chances become increasingly dependent. As Coleman (1996, p. 188) put it: There is, however, one actor with strong interests in having a child’s value to society maximized, or its cost to society minimized. This is the state. The costs of undeveloped human capital (and conversely the beneﬁts of its development) accrue to governments: cost of schooling; cost of crime . . . ; cost of welfare payment; medical costs induced by style of life; . . . and ﬁnally, on the other side of the ledger, beneﬁts from income taxes.

Developed social rights are utilized as resources during the life course just as other commodities. Over the course of the modern era, three elements of civil rights have unfolded: the civil right of personal and contractual freedom, the political right of participation, and the social right to welfare, security and culture (Marshall, 1981a, 1981b; see also Dahrendorf, 1988). In the case of Germany, the late 19th century foundation of the welfare state was strengthened in the Weimar period, and in the 1960s reforms, and again as a consequence of the process of reuniﬁcation and transformation. But there are also counter tendencies today. The state monopoly in education has never been absolute, and the debate over privatization has extended to the health care system, social security, labor, work, and occupation. European uniﬁcation, the world markets of capital and labor, and the crisis of public budgets also challenge the state’s hegemony 503

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regarding life course policies.2 The “steering capacity” of the state is in question. In many respects, there is a general tendency towards less institutional guidance of the life course. The transition from education to work and the structure of the occupational life course, the objects of analysis in this article, are important examples of de-institutionalization. (3) Finally, the social constructivist perspective on the interrelation of society and biography views social reality on the micro and macro level as emerging from social interaction and discourse. When we are faced with situations in which we do not know how to (re)act, we become conscious of the subjectivity of action as reflection and decision. The goal orientation of action is a result of the reflection on resistance in the solution of problems (Mead, 1969). In addition to the reflexive attention given to the environment, biographical analysis investigates interpersonal action in which the actor reflects on his or her own actions because these actions structure the continuation of interaction with others (Mead, 1987). This perspective likens society and biography to a theater performance (Goffman, 1969). Identity and biography are seen as interactively constituted, and institutions and organizations themselves are performances, which have become routine and ritualized. Modern societies’ institutional foundations and reﬂexive identities are fragile. They must constantly be reafﬁrmed and renewed. This constitutes a permanent state of uncertainty for societal structures and biographies. Reality is a social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), is the result of a structuration process (Giddens, 1984). Generally, social order is the result of individual and collective processes of negotiation (Strauss, 1978). As long as the actor can act successfully on the basis of unquestioned everyday life experiences a conﬁdence in autonomous life conduct is generated. But if purposive action fails, because things have changed fundamentally, the horizon of everyday life becomes an object of revision. Revision occurs as individuals move through life. But typically revision is done via generational exchange because the horizon inherited by the younger generation from the older generation turns out to be (partly) inadequate (Schütz, 1971; Mannheim, 1997). It is presumed that from generation to generation the younger generation’s horizon is more adequately adapted to the permanently changing social reality. Therefore “[t]he new cohorts provide the opportunity for social change to occur. They do not cause change; they permit it” (Ryder, 1965, p. 844).

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The GDR Transformation and Cohort Socialization The decay and collapse of the German Democratic Republic were caused mainly by the failure to solve economic problems of productivity, innovation, and adaptation to the world market. The decision to join the Federal Republic became the preferred means of problem solving and the declaration of accession to the West German constitution ﬁnally established legal integration. Whereas the transformation of the legal and economic system – achieved by applying the Western model to the East – happened within just a few months, it took much more time to assimilate cultural patterns, milieus and social characters. One can use the classic sociological term of “cultural lag” to describe the delay between system integration and social integration (Lockwood, 1964). In the GDR, limited life course options and strong institutional guidance restricted the individual’s construction of biography.3 The GDR has been described as a “working society” (Kohli, 1994). This was so, not only because of the long period of time within the life course during which people worked, but also because alternative, non-work related lifestyles either did not exist or were treated as illegitimate. And ﬁrms not only served as places of production, but also played an important role in social policy and in social life in general. Full-time employment was generally the norm for men as well as for women. For example, to ensure the continuous employment of women, only short-term employment interruptions in case of maternity were permitted. At the same time, the employment of women was institutionally supported by a fully developed day care system. In view of the fact that beneﬁts in case of widowhood or divorce were rescinded in the ﬁfties, the “right” to work in the GDR was a duty. The transition from a socialist system to a market economy profoundly changed the institutional settings and the opportunity structures in which life course agency is embedded. With the introduction of the West German political, legal and economic institutions, life course options proliferated but at the same time became more uncertain and risky. The imported market rationality enforced rationalization of many sectors of society as well as of individual life conduct. Rationalization of life conduct means, for example, to frame biographical expectations, decision-making and especially human capital investment much more than before in a context of management of scarce resources under conditions of strong competition. Human capital has now to be acquired and invested according to market rules that penetrate many spheres of the personal life. At the same time, support from the state has waned and institutional direction in the transition from status to status has largely disappeared. 505

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After reuniﬁcation, social, political and civil rights were re-balanced in favor of liberty at the expense of social rights and state providence. The state’s hegemony in life course policy was abandoned or attenuated. East Germans’ application of their former everyday life horizon to purposive action now unexpectedly created problems and failures. A new horizon of life conduct had to emerge step by step through the biographical reﬂections of trials and errors in every day life. This transition was harder for older cohorts, which had been socialized and gained human capital under socialist social and cultural conditions. On the other hand, the younger cohorts’ formative period of socialization already occurred in Western society in the years after 1989. One can therefore expect the younger generation to be able to address problems more successfully after having acquired a new horizon of everyday life suited to the new opportunity structure’s resources and restrictions.4 As Parsons put it, socialization of the “barbarian invasion” of infants is a critical process in any society: “. . . the conspicuous fact about the child is that he has yet to learn the patterns of behavior expected of persons in his statuses in his society” (Parsons, 1951, p. 208).

THE STUDY In a longitudinal study, three cohorts of East German labor market entrants, who graduated in 1985, 1990 and 1995 either from universities or from vocational schools, are analyzed.5 The study focuses on their transitions from education to employment, and on their subsequent occupational careers and family building. As stated at the outset, life courses can be viewed as the product of individual rational decisions within the context of institutional regulations, resources, and constraints. In the case of the GDR transformation the institutional context varies dramatically from cohort to cohort: Whereas the oldest cohort completed their education, ﬁrst job entry and ﬁve years of employment under socialist conditions, the youngest cohort had graduated under West German conditions. The middle cohort completed their schooling in the GDR, but their ﬁrst job entries fell within the turmoil of its collapse and the chaotic and complicated situation of the year of uniﬁcation. This analysis concentrates on two dimensions of historical change: alterations of the educational system’s capacity for giving institutional guidance into employment, and alterations of life course options for women associated with parental leave regulations and public child care. Occupational entry, occupational careers, and occupational status of women after childbirth will be

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examined below in some detail. Comparative analysis is done for East and West Germany to better understand the Eastern peculiarities. The reference group for comparing the particularities of East German life course events after uniﬁcation is a West-Sample of the German Socio-Economic-Panel (GSOEP).6 At the time of the study, the observation window of the East sample encompassed twelve years for the 1985, seven years for the 1990 and two years for the 1995 cohorts.7 The observation window of the West sample comprised thirteen years to one year, respectively. The quantitative longitudinal analysis is supplemented by a qualitative analysis of East German biographies. The empirical basis of the qualitative analyses consists of sixty-seven semi-structured interviews of young persons who graduated from vocational and higher educational programs in 1985 and 1990.8 The analyses will focus on the following questions: Table 1.

Description of the East and West German Samples.

East sample (Study of East German Occupational Trajectories, 1985–1997)

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West sample (GSOEP 1983–1996)

Cohort 1985

Cohort 1990

Cohort 1995

Cohort 1983–1987

408 (43%) 551 (57%)

505 (43%) 666 (57%)

591 (36%) 1,055 (64%)

461 (82%) 98 (18%)

451 (82%) 98 (18%)

179 (71%) 73 (29%)

Column Total

959 (100%)

1,171 (100%)

1,646 (100%)

559 (100%)

549 (100%)

252 (100%)

Men

461 (48%) 498 (52%)

513 (44%) 658 (56%)

805 (49%) 840 (51%)

306 (55%) 253 (45%)

312 (57%) 237 (43%)

130 (52%) 122 (48%)

959 (100%)

1,171 (100%)

1,645 (100%)

559 (100%)

549 (100%)

252 (100%)

Vocational school Higher Education

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Women Column Total

Cohort Cohort 1988–1992 1993–1995

Source: Study of East German Occupational Trajectories during 1985–1997 and West sample GSOEP during 1983–1996. Note: As is evident upon examination of the description of the sample in Table 1, the East and West samples differ in terms of their educational composition. Higher educational graduates are over-represented in the East sample compared to the West sample. For this reason, the trajectories of vocational school and higher educational graduates are examined seperately below, allowing us to avoid having to weight various educational degrees differently.

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First, how have changing opportunity structures affected the three cohort’s transitions from education to work, and have occupational entries of vocational school and university graduates in East and West Germany converged? Second, have occupational career decisions been revisited under the impact of the new opportunity structures on the longer term of 2 to 5 years after job entry? Third, are maternal leave and the housewife’s role, after birth of the ﬁrst child, likewise assumed in East and West? And ﬁnally, can socialization explain peculiarities of East German life courses?

LIFE COURSES OF LABOR MARKET ENTRANTS The development of the unemployment rates in East and West Germany sheds light on dramatic changes in opportunity structures since 1985 (Krueger & Pischke, 1995). Examination of the unemployment rate on the aggregate level in East and West Germany clearly shows that East Germany’s occupational entrants were confronted with a far more difﬁcult labor market situation after uniﬁcation than were their West German counterparts. The average

Fig. 1.

Age-Speciﬁc and Average Unemployment Rates in East and West Germany.

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unemployment rate in East Germany during the years 1992–1998 was more than double the rate in West Germany (see Fig. 1). The particularly steep rise in the unemployment rate occurred in East Germany during the immediate post-uniﬁcation period 1990–1992, when the unemployment rate climbed from 0 to 17%. Changing Opportunities and Cohort Transitions from Education to Work Changing opportunities on the labor market can be best observed from the cohort’s transitions from education to work. In analyzing comparatively occupational entries of the three cohorts 85, 90, and 95 one must consider, in addition to the effects of gross economic opportunity structures such as unemployment, the impact of institutionally regulated paths of occupational entry. The GDR has had a system of state displacement of jobs for both groups of graduates, i.e. apprentices and academics. In West Germany and in uniﬁed Germany a comparative state guidance of the transition from education to work does not exist. However, there is traditionally considerable institutional guidance for vocational school graduates. Germany’s time-honored Dual System, which combines school and work-based training for three years, helps the majority of apprentices achieve direct occupational entry (often into their trainee ﬁrm) upon completion of their vocational training.9 The Dual System is responsible for the relatively low rate of youth unemployment in Germany compared to other countries. It is interesting, that the GDR did not abolish the Dual System. For this reason, there is institutional continuity in the guidance of vocational school graduates in their transition from education to work. For higher education graduates, on the other hand, no such links between the educational and employment worlds exists in the West, whereas in the GDR state placement of higher education graduates was mandatory. Because of the profound differences in the level of institutional cushioning of the occupational entry of apprenticeship and higher education graduates, we will analyze either group separately. (1) Between East and West German apprenticeship graduates, differences in the transition from vocational training to employment are relatively small. The three West German cohorts show only smaller changes from 1985 to 1995 (see Fig. 2a). The East German cohorts also do differ only on a small scale (see Fig. 2b). The graduates of the classes of 1985 and 1990 evince the most rapid occupational entry of all cohorts. The Eastern class of 1990 is an interesting case. Since these graduates ﬁnished their 509

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Fig. 2a. Survival Functions (Kaplan-Meier Estimators) for the Transition from Education to Work of West German Vocational School Graduates.

Fig. 2b. Survival Functions (Kaplan-Meier Estimators) for the Transition from Education to Work of East German Vocational School Graduates.

educational programs between April and July, i.e. before uniﬁcation in October 1990, they still beneﬁted from state control of the allocation of labor. But the occupational entries of East German apprenticeship

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graduates of the class of 1995, too, differ only marginally from those of West German graduates and from earlier East German cohorts. One month after the end of their training more than 75% of them had found employment, thus doing a little better than the Western cohort of 1995. This is surprising in light of the labor market situation in East Germany after uniﬁcation, described above. It seems, then, that the guidance provided by the institutional structuring of the school-to-work transition by the Dual System strongly lowers the hurdles of occupational entry for East German apprenticeship graduates even in the transformation labor market. (2) The occupational entries of East and West German higher education graduates evince large differences. While the three West German cohorts again do not show much change in their transitions from education to work (see Fig. 3a), the East cohorts do (see Fig. 3b). The differences do not appear, however, until the graduating class of 1995. State placement of university graduates, too, was still intact in 1990, the year the GDR collapsed. It helped nearly all graduates of the graduating class of 1990 ﬁnd immediate occupational entry. East German higher education graduates of the class of 1995, by contrast, were characterized by a noticeably delayed occupational entry in comparison with their West German counterparts – and in comparisons with the

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Fig. 3b. Survival Functions (Kaplan-Meier Estimators) for the Transition from Education to Work of East German Higher Educational Graduates.

95 graduates from vocational schools in the East. Among higher education graduates of the class of 1995, whereas 70% of the West Germans found employment within one month after graduation, only 50% of the East Germans did. The latter were faced with a considerably longer employment search than were the former. In examining occupational entries in East and West Germany it becomes clear that institutional structures like the Dual System, in shaping the transition from school to work, can considerably reduce the risks associated with occupational entry even in extraordinary circumstances of social change. Rational Choices Revisited: Occupational Careers of Women In the following section, the careers of East and West German occupational entrants will be traced over the ﬁrst 2–5 years after graduation (see Figs 4 and 5).10 The question is, whether life course decisions on a longer run have been revisited due to the changing opportunities. Some preliminary remarks: As we have seen, the Western cohorts differ only marginally in their transitions into work. For this reason and for convenience of readability the following ﬁgures contain the pooled Western cohort data. For the same reason, ﬁgures will not show the 1985 Eastern cohort, which

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coincides with the 1990 Eastern cohort.11 Finally, we will concentrate in this paragraph on the employment trajectories of female graduates, since the employment trajectories of women in the GDR reveal some peculiarities. In the GDR the model of the working woman and mother predominated, and for women full-time employment was the rule. The compatibility of family and occupation was also strongly facilitated by a range of social and family policy measures. Both of these features of GDR society largely vanished after uniﬁcation. (Some comments on male careers are given in the footnotes). (1) Main characteristics in the occupational trajectories of Eastern female graduates of the Dual System can be seen in three areas: participation in further educational programs, high afﬂiction by unemployment and assumption of the housewife role (see Fig. 4). (a) Female East German Dual System graduates of the class of 1990 frequently entered a second training program, in the form of an apprenticeship or higher educational degree program.12 There are three reasons for this phenomenon. First, the great interest in education can be understood as an adaptation to the educationally meritocratic Western society. In the GDR, income distribution was far more equal than in West Germany (Kohli, 1994), and educational degrees had only minor social differentiating effects. Since uniﬁcation, however, higher education has opened the door to occupational advancement and higher income. Second, the high education rate can be seen as a product of pent-up demand. The supply of apprenticeship positions was centrally managed in the GDR. In collaboration with ﬁrms, the government developed so-called “apprenticeship registries.” In many cases, then, the palette of available apprenticeship positions did not match individual preferences (Hille, 1990). Third, the interest in educational improvement can be attributed to the fact that certain training and education programs in the GDR lost some or most of their value in the new social order. This applied to persons who had been trained in occupations closely related to the political-economic system, and also to persons who had received their occupational training in sectors and branches in which labor demand declined after uniﬁcation as a consequence of postponed tertiarization of the economy (i.e. the very late shift to a more service-oriented economy). (b) Differences can be seen between East and West also with regard to the extent to which they are afﬂicted by unemployment.13 Thus, even though the transition from training into the ﬁrst occupational position for apprenticeship graduates in the East and the West occurs equally fast, 513

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Employment Status of Female East and West German Vocational School Graduates through the Fifth Year after Graduation.

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thanks to the Dual System, the occupational trajectories thereafter diverge considerably. The rapid occupational entry does not protect the East German graduates of the Dual System from the risk of later unemployment. (c) The comparison of female occupational paths is interesting as well with regard to the extent to which housewife activity is to be found in East and West. While among West German female apprenticeship graduates the share of housewives rises two years after graduation and at ﬁve years after graduation reaches 15%, among East German female apprenticeship graduates of the class of 1990 the share of housewives lies well under 5%. Among the East German female apprenticeship graduates of the class of 1995, the share of housewives during the two years observed also amounts to less than 5%. (2) Main characteristics in the occupational trajectories of Eastern female university graduates can be found in the following areas: employment trajectories and the utilization of maternal leave converge with the West whereas their is fewer assumption of the role of the housewife (see Fig. 5). (a) The analysis of ﬁrst occupational entry has shown that the East German university class of 1995 experienced a much slower transition into employment than did the Western class. This poorer standing does not obtain during the ﬁrst year after graduation. Six months after graduation the share of unemployed shrinks considerably, and after 12 months approaches the Western level. Over the longer term, then, i.e. after a year, the employment trajectories of 1995 university graduates in East and West Germany converge. The same can be said of the class of 1990. Even under highly unfavorably labor market conditions, considerable human capital investments reduces the risk of unemployment in the further occupational career.14 (b) Among the East German female graduates of higher education evinced, just as those of apprenticeship programs, a much smaller share of housewives. In West Germany the share of housewives among female higher education graduates rises markedly three years after graduation, while in East Germany it remains low. (c) A different picture can be seen with regard to the take-up of maternal leave. The origin of this might well be that for employed women in the GDR, too, since 1986 a one-year, paid “baby year” was available. Thus the West German form of parental leave adopted after uniﬁcation was not unfamiliar. 515

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Employment Status of Female East and West German Higher Educational Graduates through the Fifth Year after Graduation.

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In summary, despite the greater problems of occupational ﬁrst job entry among East German higher education graduates, the East and West employment trajectories converge on the longer run. No convergence can be seen, however, with regard to the employment trajectories of apprenticeship graduates. Further, whereas maternal leave is widely appreciated and accepted in East and West, the assumption of the housewife’s role is signiﬁcantly smaller in the East. Re-balancing Work, Maternal Leave, and the Housewife Role

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The speciﬁc institutional arrangements supporting the compatibility of work and family in the GDR and FRG have differed as mentioned above. In the GDR, a “baby break” after the birth of the ﬁrst child was introduced in 1986; the maximal length of this employment interruption was twelve months. A comprehensive state system of child care consisting of crèches, nursery schools and after-school day care made it possible for mothers with small children to pursue occupational and family work simultaneously after the “baby break.” In West Germany, too, parental leave was introduced in 1986, at ﬁrst for up to ten months. In the ensuing years, the maximal allowable leave was gradually increased. Since 1992, parental leave can be taken for up to three years. In contrast to the GDR, however, West Germany considers the family to be responsible for raising children. This has consequences for state institutional support. The state supply of crèches places for children under three-years of age is insufﬁcient, and nursery and elementary schools often supervise children only half the day. The lack of places in childcare institutions makes employment and family difﬁcult to reconcile. For this reason they are often not pursued simultaneously, but sequentially. Periods of maternal leave are often followed at ﬁrst by a housewife phase. The reentry into the occupation usually does not happen until the children have reached school age (age six). In the following section, we will investigate whether the signiﬁcant reduction in state life course direction and in institutional support for the reconciliation of family and work has led East German women after uniﬁcation to become more like West German women in their employment behavior (see Figs 6 and 7).15 In East Germany the share of housewives among mothers with a small child is signiﬁcantly smaller than in West Germany, despite the less supportive institutional environment for reconciling work and family in uniﬁed Germany. And maternity leave is claimed for shorter periods of time.16 An explanation for the lesser assumption of housewife status lies in the internalized GDR life course model, which in family phases foresaw continuous employment. The 517

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Fig. 6.

Employment Status of East German Women after the Birth of their First Child.

Fig. 7.

Employment Status of West German Women after the Birth of their First Child.

high divorce rate and the high number of single parent families can also explain the rejection of the housewife role. Beside the socialization and life experience, a further factor is the tense labor market situation, in which the chances of a woman reentering her occupation after leaving it rapidly declined (e.g. Granovetter, 1974).

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SOCIALIZATION AND PERSISTENT BIOGRAPHICAL CONCEPTIONS Finally, let us consider the role East Germans’ socialization in a socialist life-world has played in shaping the peculiarities of their post-uniﬁcation present life course. Are there speciﬁc socialization effects of life in the GDR that continue to exert inﬂuence? The following ﬁndings are based on the second wave of biographical interviews, which were conducted in 1995. The uniﬁcation process now lay ﬁve years in the past, which allowed the interview partners to reﬂect on uniﬁcation with greater distance and to begin to make their ﬁrst assessments. (1) Life courses in the GDR were highly institutionalized. A well-developed system of institutions guaranteed secure and predictable paths, stages, and transitions. This meant that there were no life course risks occasioned by the labor market: “Everybody was given a job. So you didn’t have to make a big effort, you could just let your life trickle along” (male higher education graduate of the class of 1990). With this experiential background of everyday life, many were surprised by and unprepared for the consequences of uniﬁcation: “. . . two completely different worlds collided . . . , that is, the one overran the other without any preparation.” This “hard water landing after living in protected and smooth-running conditions” (female higher education graduate, class of 1990) allowed no time to study and prepare oneself for the new conditions. Standardization and overregulation of life courses in the GDR guaranteed a high degree of security and continuity. (2) In retrospect, however, this state life course policy, with its strong institutional steering, is judged ambivalently by the interview partners, for it is thought to have led to problems in the present: “What I still consider to be a disadvantage is that everything really proceeded in controlled paths, and everything was organized for you . . . And it takes a while to get used to the fact that everything doesn’t just fall into your lap, but that you yourself are responsible for what happens” (female apprenticeship graduate, class of 1990). Again and again the interview partners say that the paralyzing of individual initiative in the GDR unleashed adaptation difﬁculties after uniﬁcation: “It was hindersome that we were treated in a patronizing fashion, that we were never allowed to solve our problems by ourselves, but instead were always provided with a complete solution . . .. the GDR 519

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citizen did not have to make an effort, . . . he was patronized in every respect. And that is simply hindersome, since one never learned to ﬁnd solutions for oneself” (male higher education graduate, class of 1990). (3) Accordingly, the interview partners point out that in the aftermath of different life-worlds in the East and the West, differences in mentality will persist over the medium term: “I don’t believe that anyone can deny that we were somehow . . . raised to a certain extent by this socialist system . . . the ofﬁcial line was always that in socialism, everyone can express his opinion, but really one could not express his opinion, because this would have led to disadvantages. And somehow, when that happens over the course of years, I think, that doesn’t just roll off your back without affecting you. . . So if you were now to put your average East German and your average West German side-by-side, then I think you would indeed see certain differences between them” (male higher education graduate, class of 1985). (4) However, as we have seen, the young adults interviewed in this study could nearly all come to terms with the new situation. Many conceived of it as a challenge: “. . . actually it was more like one somehow could maybe not exactly learn to like the new societal laws, but at least had to learn to accept them, . . . that now everything is somewhat different, and to let go of one’s own conceptions of the pre-planned life and simply say: o.k., each day is different, and you can never be sure that everything will be the same tomorrow as you left it the night before, but you’ve been given a real chance to make something out of it” (female higher education graduate, class of 1990). Or, as another interview partner put it: “We have somehow managed to quickly make sense of and orient ourselves in the new system” (female higher education graduate, class of 1990). (5) Comparing East and West, it should be kept in mind, that generalized mentality differences described should not cause to underestimate the internal life-world differences within the GDR. Biographical retrospection makes it clear that one must distinguish among the life-worlds within the country, for not all experiences stem from one uniform GDR. Intra-GDR life-world differences can be more far-reaching than East-West disparities: “GDR, what is GDR socialization? . . . Today I am of the opinion that the difference between someone who has spent a certain number of years of his occupational career – e.g. the relatively short period from 1985–1990 – in a sensibly run [enterprise],17 and the bulk of the East German work

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force, is far greater than between East and West Germany” (male higher education graduate, class of 1985). (6) Finally, one difference between the life-worlds of East and West has maintained considerable signiﬁcance through the present day. This is the stronger employment orientation of East German women: “I actually would like to work all the time . . . , maybe not always full-time but half-time, but I would like to continue to practice my occupation despite having a family. Here in the West it has struck me that many women then stay at home and take care of the children and the household. I think that after three years one would be crawling up the walls . . . yeah, one is more involved in life when one continues to work in one’s occupation” (female higher education graduate, class of 1990). In the following excerpt, too, one can see that employment is ﬁrmly anchored in the biographical designs of East German women: “Yes, I really do think, particularly for women . . . that the societal feeling is indeed different here. And I can’t imagine this . . . not being the case. I don’t know if it [the model of the working mother experienced in the GDR era] could again be so radically . . . eliminated, this . . . youngest generation is much too molded by it. And I believe that many people can no longer imagine it being any different, both for themselves personally, that they say as a woman, they want to go to work, and also because from the generation of their mothers they are familiar with the working woman or the working mother, that that is simply so integrated into the societal understanding, . . . I don’t believe it, that suddenly all of them or most of them would then give it up again or something like that. It is, I think, so integrated, that it is simply normal” (female higher education graduate, class of 1990).

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION The GDR’s joining of the Federal Republic of Germany brought with it an abrupt transfer of a complete system of institutions. Herewith the institutional pillars of individual life course paths in East Germany were transformed from one day to the next. The restructuring processes which had accompanied the process of uniﬁcation generated new opportunities, new chances and new risks, and has lead to revisions of rational life conduct. As in a great experiment, in the case of this rapid societal transformation one can observe the interrelations between individual agency and institutional settings. A particular role in the interaction of society and biography is played by the institutional guidance 521

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provided by life course policy. In every society, life course policy inﬂuences the way individuals lead their lives (Leisering & Leibfried, 1999). In the GDR, institutional steering through life course policy was especially developed. State providence provided for the management of occupational needs and for meeting these needs through educational and training programs. Life courses are the product of the interactions between individual decisions and given institutional settings. However, institutional bridges, like those offered by the Dual System, help overcome labor market impediments. But this only works at the point of ﬁrst occupational entry. Over the longer term, the better human capital investment of individuals proves its worth. University graduates’ occupational trajectories converge in the East and the West after one year, whereas the apprenticeship’s life courses do not, even though the East German higher education graduates experienced a more difﬁcult or delayed start. A further particularity of East German life paths can be seen in the continuing differences between female employment trajectories. Even after ten years there has been no convergence. Upon giving birth to their ﬁrst child, fewer women in the East than in the West become housewives. Maternity leave, on the other hand, which was an available and widely claimed state beneﬁt in the GDR, ﬁnds broad acceptance. Biographical self-conceptions change slowly; they survive changes in institutions. The biographical interviews attest to the fact that the biographical model of the working woman and mother, internalized in the GDR period, still guides women’s behavior.18 And, the value-rational behavior to which East German women became accustomed in the GDR era has been reinforced since uniﬁcation by an instrumentally rational motivation. Because employment prospects in the transformation labor market worsen after long phases of non-employment and, because the housewife role is no longer an alternative to earning a living through employment (given the divorce rate), value-rational socialization in the old life-world and instrumentally rational decision-making in the new life-world go hand-in-hand. Moral, normative socialization and self-interest do not conﬂict in this case. Retrospective biographical reﬂections showed a mixed biographical identity. On the one hand, the life-world of young East Germans was already signiﬁcantly shaped by life in the GDR. On the other hand, the interview partners were able to reﬂect upon their life-world experiences with perspective and ambivalence; that is, they were able to “reinterpret their horizon” (Schütz, 1971).

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Finally, comparing our young cohorts examined in this study with older cohorts being in their middle ages at the time of uniﬁcation one has to point to the fact that for the latter the adaptation was more difﬁcult and involved more losses.19 “Their earlier life planning had presumed that the GDR would continue. This tacit assumption had been a mental constant in their earlier lives” (Kupferberg, 1998, p. 262). Younger cohorts more easily manage to adapt to a new environment and to shake off the weight of the past as Mannheim observed already: “That . . . youth lacks experience means a lightening of the ballast for the young; it facilitates their living on in a changing world” (Mannheim, [1952] 1997, p. 296).

NOTES 1. Durkheim’s concept of anomie, Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and Simmel’s Philosophy of Money are classic studies of the peculiar interrelations between individuals and society in individualized, liberal, and market societies. 2. For further discussion on life course policy, see Leisering and Leibfried (1999). The classical conceptualization of this modern conﬂict goes back to Adam Smith and David Hume. The ideal-type fair social contract balancing liberty, equality, and fraternity has been proposed by Rawls (1971). 3. The youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend, the trade union Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund and the socialist party Sozialistische Deutsche Einheitspartei played an important role for strategic life course milestones like university enrolment, job allocation and career advancement (Krüger & Pischke, 1995). 4. A classic study of generations and generational relations in the midst of rapid social change is Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America ([1918–1920]1984) (cf. Weymann, 1996b). See also Elder’s (1974) The Children of the Great Depression and recent comparative research on the “myth of generational conﬂict” (Arber & Attias-Donfut, 2000). 5. An overview of the basic ﬁndings of this study is given in Weymann et al. (1999), a more comprehensive report of the study is printed by Sackmann et al. (2000). 6. The GSOEP is a retrospective longitudinal dataset which is representative for persons and households in the Federal Republic of Germany. To guarantee the comparability of the two datasets a sub-sample was selected which includes only skilled workers and academics who ﬁnished their training during the same historical period. Due to the small number of persons in GSOEP who in the years 1985, 1990 and 1995 graduated from vocational school or a higher education programme, we have also included graduates who have ﬁnished their training immediately before or after these graduation dates. Unskilled workers have not been included in the comparison because this group did not exist in the GDR and still is very small in East Germany. 7. A third survey wave in 2000 will extend the observation window for all cohorts for three years. 8. The interviews of the 85 and 90 cohorts were conducted in two waves, in 1992 and 1995. Interviews of the 1995 cohort members haven’t been carried out because of a shortage of funding. 523

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9. As a rule, the Dual System’s occupational training in Germany (and in a few other European countries) takes three years and proceeds simultaneously in a ﬁrm and in a vocational school; that is, each week a certain number of hours are spent in each setting. This Dual System thus builds an institutional bridge between the educational and employment systems: “The German system of vocational training is rather efﬁcient in preventing youth from becoming unemployed” (Franz et al., 1997). 10. Contrary to Figs 2 and 3, which portray the transition from education/training into the ﬁrst employment in a longitudinal perspective, Figs 4 and 5 represent a cross-sectional observation of monthly employment status after graduation. This allows statements about the percentage of persons in a certain employment status at a given point in time. 11. Given the different conditions at occupational entry, the occupational trajectories of East German graduates of the graduation years 1990 and 1995 were observed separately. Whereas for the 1990 graduates we have at our disposal data on the full ﬁrst 60 months following graduation, the observation window for the 1995 graduates lies momentarily at a mere 20 months. For West Germany the graduates of the years 1983–1995 were combined. Occupational trajectories which, due to right censoring, could not be observed for the entirety of the 60-month period (cohorts, 1992–1995) are observed only until the point when the right censoring occurred. 12. A higher education participation rate than in the West can also be found among male East German apprenticeship graduates of the class of 1990. 13. This difference can also be found among male apprenticeship graduates. 14. The same is true of male graduates. 15. Because of maternity protection, which prohibits all women in Germany from working the eight weeks after birth, we begin depicting the employment status from the third month after the birth of the ﬁrst child. 16. Moreover, fewer East German women claim maternity leave; and those who do claim it tend to do so for shorter periods of time. 17. The interview partner here notes an agricultural production cooperative (LPG) as an example of a well-run enterprise. 18. The persistent impact of socialist socialization is also analyzed by Lewin-Epstein et al. (1999). 19. On the “myth of generational conﬂict” in international comparison Arber and Attias-Donfut (2000).

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Strauss, A. (1978). Negotiations: Varieties, contexts, processes and social order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. (1984[1918–1920]). The Polish peasant in Europe and America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Weymann, A. (1996a). Interrelating society and biography: Discourse, markets and the welfare state’s life course policy. In: A. Weymann & W. Heinz (Eds), Society and Biography (pp. 241–258). Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Weymann, A. (1996b). Modernization, generational relations and the economy of life time. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 16, 37–57. Weymann, A., & Heinz, W. (1996). Society and biography: Interrelations between social structure, institutions and the life course. Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag. Weymann, A., Sackmann, R., & Wingens, M. (1999). Social change and the life course in East Germany: A cohort approach to inequalities. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 19, 90–114.