**Life Course Research and Social Policies 16**

Barbara Stauber Andreas Walther Richard A. Settersten, Jr.  *Editors*

Doing Transitions in the Life Course

Processes and Practices

# **Life Course Research and Social Policies**

Volume 16

#### **Series Editors**

Flavia Fossati, Bâtiment IDHEAP, Quartier UNIL-Mouline, Lausanne, Switzerland Andreas Ihle, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Jean-Marie Le Goff, LIVES, Batiment Geopolis, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland Núria Sánchez-Mira, Bâtiment Géopolis, Quartier UNIL-Mouline, Lausanne, Switzerland Matthias Studer, NCCR Lives, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

The book series puts the spotlight on life course research. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes presenting theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in the study of the life course, thereby elaborating on possible implications for society and social policies applications. Topics appropriate for the series include, among others, the following: *Life Course Research and Social Policies*

Books commissioned for the series aim to encourage debates on life course research in various countries and regions across the world. Volumes in this series will be of interest to researchers, professionals and policy makers in social sciences and related felds.

The series is edited by a team of scholars affliated to the Swiss LIVES Centre: Flavia Fossati (UNIL), Andreas Ihle (UNIGE), Jean-Marie Le Goff (UNIL), Núria Sánchez-Mira (UNIL) and Matthias Studer (UNIGE).

If you are interested in flling a gap in coverage, providing a focus on a certain area, or contributing a new perspective or approach, we would be delighted to receive a book proposal from you. The book proposal should include a description of the proposed book, Table of Contents, unique or special features compared to competing titles, anticipated completion date, and CV with brief biography. The book proposal can be sent to the publisher, Evelien Bakker, at evelien.bakker@ springer.com.

Barbara Stauber • Andreas Walther Richard A. Settersten, Jr. Editors

# Doing Transitions in the Life Course

Processes and Practices

*Editors* Barbara Stauber Institute of Educational Sciences University of Tübingen Tübingen, Germany

Richard A. Settersten, Jr. College of Public Health & Human Sciences Oregon State University Corvallis, OR, USA

Andreas Walther Institute of Social Pedagogy and Adult Education Goethe University Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main, Germany

ISSN 2211-7776 ISSN 2211-7784 (electronic) Life Course Research and Social Policies ISBN 978-3-031-13511-8 ISBN 978-3-031-13512-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13512-5

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# **Preface**

*Doing Transitions in the Life Course: Processes and Practices* contributes to the book series Life Course Research and Social Policies by providing a new perspective on transitions in the life course. Transitions are a central element of life course research and the object of social policies that undergird the institutionalized life course and affect the life trajectories of individuals.

This book is the culmination of a longer process of academic networking – and a document that refects the transformation from being colleagues to becoming friends: in 2014, Rick Settersten accepted the invitation of Andreas Walther and Barbara Stauber to serve as a "critical friend" in the process of developing a proposal to the German Research Foundation (DFG) to fund a research training group on how transitions in the life course are shaped, practiced, and performed.

The "Doing Transitions" program was successfully funded for a frst phase (2017–2021) and is now in its second phase (2021–2025). It is a joint partnership between Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Tübingen, and codirected by Walther and Stauber at these respective institutions. Two cohorts of early career researchers (30 thus far) have conducted their PhDs in this framework or are in the process of doing so.

Along the way, our partnership, the evolution of the framework and research, and the progress of the students have been especially facilitated by constructive exchanges and presentations at international conferences held in Frankfurt (2017) and Tübingen (2020). These encounters and discussions generated many exciting ideas expressed through student and faculty projects on how transitions are "done" from childhood through old age, and in schooling, work and careers, social policies, family, health, and other domains and contexts.

The second phase of the program has emphasized a relational perspective, which is also foundational to this book, which began to take shape during the second international conference, in Tübingen in February 2020, just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic unfurled so dramatically across the globe. We remain eternally grateful that we had the opportunity to be together in that moment before the world shut down.

Over the last few years, we and the contributors have been collaborators on an intensive journey of theoretical and conceptual development, exploring new ways of thinking and formulating ideas – a process that has been both exhilarating and liberating, if not also a little frightening at times. Our regular online editorial meetings spanned a 9-hour time difference between Oregon (US) and Frankfurt, Tübingen (Germany), and Camogli (Italy) – with Rick joining very early mornings with coffee in hand, and Barbara and Andreas in late afternoon or early evening awaiting a glass of wine.

We are grateful to all the contributors for their patience with our questions and their responsiveness to our suggestions as they brought their chapters through multiple revisions – all through the pandemic period when so much else in their lives was in fux. We extend special thanks to Laura Bernardi, who is not only involved as an author but also invited us, on behalf of her co-editors, to publish this book in the Life Course Research and Social Policies series. We also wish to thank Evelien Bakken, Nitesh Shrivastava, and Prasad Gurunadham from Springer Nature for their support and guidance in the production process, as well as Jana Gersdorff, who helped format the manuscript.

We hope that the spirit of this shared work will fnd resonance in the international community of life course and transition researchers, foster theories and research, and inform social policies concerned with life course transitions in meaningful ways.

Frankfurt am Main, Germany Andreas Walther

Tübingen, Germany Barbara Stauber

December 15, 2021

Corvallis, OR, USA Richard A. Settersten, Jr

# **Contents**

#### **Part I Introduction**

# **About the Contributors**

**Petra Bauer**, PhD in educational science, is Professor of Social Pedagogy at the Eberhard Karl University, Tübingen, Germany. Her main research themes are professionalization and professional development in social work, inter-professional teams and networks, and images of family in social work.

**Laura Bernardi** holds a PhD in demography and is Full Professor of Life Course Demography and Sociology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research interests are in the feld of life course and family demography. She has published on fertility and family behaviors, family diversity, life course transitions and their effects on well-being, migration, longitudinal research methods, as well more theoretical contributions on the life course paradigm.

**Tobias Boll**, PhD in sociology, works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany. His work focuses on the sociology of the body and knowledge, qualitative research methods, and understanding the categorization of people with respect to gender and sexuality.

**Noreen Eberle**, Master of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, is a program offcer at the Pupil Scholarship Program "Talent im Land" and doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the Department of Sciences of Education. Her main research and work focus on inequality and unequal educational opportunities as well as qualitative research methods, especially biographical research with a focus on biographical narrative interviews.

**Tabea Freutel-Funke** is a PhD candidate at Doing Transitions and researcher at Linking Ages at Goethe Universität Frankfurt. She holds a BA in cultural studies and an MA in urban studies (4CITIES). With her interdisciplinary background, she is interested in urban childhood, transitions, qualitative spatial methods, as well as a Foucauldian perspective on space.

**Eva Heinrich**, PhD in educational science, was an associated member in the frst cohort of the research training group Doing Transition and completed her doctorate with a dissertation on transitions back to work after parental leave at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her main research themes are transitions, adult learning, and organizational learning.

**Heidi Hirschfeld**, PhD in educational science, is a researcher at the Institute for Studies in Children and Youth Services, School of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, Switzerland. Her work focuses on transitions of young adults and social pedagogical support as well as qualitative research methods, especially biographical research.

**Nils Klevermann**, PhD in educational science, is research associate at the Institute for Educational Science at the University Tübingen, Germany. His main research themes are youth and young adulthood, migration and organizational research, and transitions in the life course.

**Heinz-Hermann Krüger**, PhD in educational science, was Professor of General Educational Science at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His main research themes are theories and methods of educational science, childhood and youth research, and school research. He was coordinator of the research group Mechanisms of Elite Formation in the German Education System funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

**Janne Krumbügel**, PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, is teaching and researching in the felds of sociology, gender studies, and educational sciences. Her focus lies on the transition to parenthood, discourse analysis, and queer/feminist perspectives on pregnancy and masculinities.

**Bianca Lenz** is a PhD candidate in the research training group Doing Transitions at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focuses on transitions from school to work, welfare state policies, social inequality, and biographical research.

**Jessica Lütgens**, PhD in educational science, is working as a researcher and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She worked in the Horizon 2020 project "PARTISPACE" and has been publishing a study on biographies of young people who are politicized. Her research topics are centered around youth participation, political movements and participation, transitions, and "Bildung."

**Helena Müller**, PhD in psychology, is a research assistant at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Her main research interests include personenvironment transactions, housing, aging, architectural psychology, and sustainability. In 2020, she completed her doctorate from the research training group Doing Transitions.

**Deborah Nägler**, Master of Educational Science, is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the Department of Social Pedagogy. Her research and work focus on empirical childhood and youth studies, transitions in the life course, socialization research, psychoanalysis, practice theory, as well as poverty and inequality research.

**Andrea Pohling**, PhD in educational science, is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research topics are centered around childhood and youth research, research in the context of sexuality, (sexual) violence and discourses, methods of qualitative social research (documentary method, biographical research), as well as research ethics.

**Julia Prescher**, diploma in educational science, is an alumna of the Research Training Group Doing Transitions at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her main research interests are ritual practices of transitions in the life course and in processes of aging. Her ethnographic PhD thesis focuses on the process of initiation as practices of un/doing difference.

**Kathleen Riach**, PhD, is Professor of Organization Studies at Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK, and affliate professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Australia. Her research focusses on the growing up and older age in the workplace with a particular interest in the experience of inequality at intersections between age and gender, race, or disability. She is currently undertaking research into inclusive menopause support in work and healthcare settings and writing a book on ageing at work based on 10 years of feldwork in the city of London.

**Núria Sánchez-Mira**, PhD in sociology, is a junior lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research interests are in the feld of gender inequalities in work, employment and the household, family diversity, life course transitions, and longitudinal research methods. She is co-editor of the Springer book series Life Course and Social Policies and co-coordinator of the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre.

**Theodore Schatzki** is Professor of Geography and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, USA, and Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He is widely associated with the theoretical stream known as practice theory and uses theories of practices to investigate a wide variety of topics in social thought.

**Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha**, PhD in educational science, is Professor of General Education and Educational Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. His main research themes are adult education, learning in later life, digitalization in education, informal learning, and quality in higher education. From 2017 to 2021, he was a PI of the research training group Doing Transitions.

**Richard A. Settersten, Jr**, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Human Development and vice provost for faculty affairs at Oregon State University, USA. He is a specialist in adulthood, aging, and the life course. His most recent book, *Living on the Edge: An American Generation's Journey Through the Twentieth Century* (University of Chicago Press, 2021, with Glen Elder and Lisa Pearce), illuminates one of the enduring themes of his research – how a rapidly changing world affects human lives.

**Tina Spies**, PhD, is Professor of Sociology, Gender, and Diversity at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany. Her main research interests are gender, migration, and racism, intersectional perspectives, postcolonial theory, and subjectivation. Her most recent book is *Following the Subject: Foundations and Approaches of Empirical Subjectivation Research*, ed. with Saša Bosančić, Folke Brodersen, Lisa Pfahl, Lena Schürmann, and Boris Traue.

**Barbara Stauber**, PhD, is Professor of Educational Sciences and a specialist in social pedagogy. Her research areas are transitions in the life course, youth, gender, intersectionality, and qualitative research methodology. Her most recent book is *Refexive Übergangsforschung. Theoretische Grundlagen und methodologische Herausforderungen* (*Refexive Transition Research: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Challenges*), edited together with Andreas, Walther, Markus Rieger-Ladich, and Anna Wanka, an inter-medium outcome of the research training network "Doing Transitions," which she co-directs with Andreas Walther.

**Andreas Walther**, PhD in educational science, is Professor of Social Pedagogy and Youth Welfare at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His main research themes are youth and young adulthood, youth policy and youth welfare, transitions in the life course, and participation. Together with Barbara Stauber, he is coordinating the research training group Doing Transitions.

**Anna Wanka**, PhD in sociology, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Training Group Doing Transitions at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her research interests comprise the social practices of un/doing age, life course transitions/retirement and the re/production of social inequalities across the life course, ageing and technologies, age-friendly cities and communities, linking-ages approaches, and mixed-methods research.

# **Part I Introduction**

# **Chapter 1 "Doing Transitions": A New Research Perspective**

**Andreas Walther, Barbara Stauber, and Richard A. Settersten Jr**

Transitions between life phases have long been central to understanding the organization and experience of the whole life course in every society, capturing the attention of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. The signifcance of transitions in the life course is especially apparent in times of great social, economic, and political change and discord, as the changing environments disrupt or undermine life as it was understood, whether by individuals or whole populations.

It is common to think about transitions in relation to a larger life trajectory, or pathway, similar to that of a career. A trajectory is understood to be long in scope, charting the course of an individual's experiences in specifc life domains (e.g., work, family, education, health, housing) over time. The individual life course is composed of these multiple, interwoven trajectories. Trajectories are punctuated by a sequence of successive life events and transitions. Events and transitions refer to changes in an individual's state (cf. Elder Jr., 1985). Events are usually conceptualized as relatively abrupt changes, transitions refer to longer processes that may include discrete events, involve anticipatory and adaptive processes, and are often tied to the acquisition or relinquishment of social roles. Because trajectories are interlocked, transitions in one domain can spill over to another (e.g., transitions in work can spill over to family, and vice versa).

A. Walther (\*)

B. Stauber University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
R. A. Settersten Jr Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Goethe-University Frankfurt Main, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
B. Stauber et al. (eds.), *Doing Transitions in the Life Course*, Life Course Research and Social Policies 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13512-5\_1

Taking a long view of an individual's life, transitions that occur early in life may matter for later life (e.g., early childbearing may restrict opportunities for higher education or work; completion of a college degree may bring cumulative benefts to lifetime career advancement and income). These points reveal an often-examined dimension of transitions – age, or timing. That is, the experience of transitions, and their causes and consequences, depend on their timing – whether transitions are experienced "on-time" or "off-time" (early or late) related to social or statistical norms, or even whether individuals run out of time in making a transition (as not making a transition can itself be a sort of transition).

Transitions are understood as moments in individual lives that create or reproduce social inequalities and risks of social exclusion. Therefore, institutional actors are concerned with supporting individuals in transitions. In modern societies, institutions of the welfare state especially have been concerned with connecting individual lives with the exigencies of the societal division of labor. On one hand, we might point to what has been described as the "tripartite" model of the life course (Kohli, 1985) – with education and training in the beginnning, work in the middle, and retirement and leisure at the end. This "institutionalized" and highly predictable model of the life course emerged in full force by the middle of the last century, especially for men's lives, and rested on a complex overlay of social institutions and policies that were built around it. It also institutionalized a separation between paid and unpaid work and in this way established gendered life courses (Levy & Widmer, 2013; Saraceno, 2008). On the other hand, recent decades have led to the dissolution of the tripartite life course and, in its wake, to greater unpredictability, uncertainty, and insecurity, especially for the most disadvantaged members of societies and those with fewer provisions of welfare states (cf. Beck, 1992). Research has developed in close relation to such policies and paid less attention to theoretical refections of transitions, while social institutions and policies have treated them as quasi-natural social facts, which has also infuenced research (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

There are cultural but historically changing scripts for how lives are supposed to be lived in any given society. People in them are socialized in ways that create "mental maps" of what Neugarten (1969) called the "normal, expectable life." These maps are the backdrop for life transitions: How do people in a society see the stages of life? What transitions are supposed to occur in those stages, and what transitions mark movement out of one stage and into another? These maps affect how people perceive and evaluate themselves and others. They play important roles in decision-making processes, particularly in shaping the kinds of goals people set and pursue at various points in life and how they allocate their resources.

Obviously, life courses and the transitions that mark them are highly complex phenomena of social reproduction. Driven by institutional actors and policy makers concerned with mitigating related problems like social disadvantage and risks of exclusion, much past research has tried to reduce this complexity to better observe and measure the effects of transitions on individual life trajectories (cf. Schoon & Silbereisen, 2009; Shavit & Müller, 1998). Recently, however, several attempts have been made to readdress the complexity of life courses. For example, Bernardi et al. (2019) have presented a model, the so-called "life course cube," aimed at doing justice to the complex interdependencies involved in how life courses evolve. Schoon and Lyons-Amos (2017) have developed a socio-ecological model of agency structuring education and employment transitions.

This volume introduces a new framework for understanding life transitions – what we call Doing Transitions. We draw on a praxeological perspective, to question, reconsider, and recast some traditional ways of viewing transitions. In being socially recognized and shared, the cultural scripts that guide or prescribe transitions are accompanied by rituals, ceremonies, rights and duties, and institutional procedures. This means that transitions do not simply exist but are constantly constituted by practices – or better, bundles of practices (see Schatzki, this volume). We hope to offer a more comprehensive picture and knowledge of life course transitions, crossing or extending the boundaries of age groups, life domains, and disciplines that so often segregate inquiry. The volume emerges from the work of a German PhD program established at the Universities of Frankfurt and Tübingen. This program is concerned with understanding how various forms of transitions in the life course are constituted through the practices that shape them. Here, the program's approach and some of its fndings are for the frst time addressed for an international audience. This chapter introduces the Doing Transitions perspective and the volume.

We will start from a presentation of the concept and its foundational tenets that transitions are shaped and produced through social practices, and that transitions emerge and are constantly reproduced and transformed through the interrelation of discourses, institutional regulation (including formal and informal pedagogical intervention), as well as individual processes of learning, education, and coping. After describing what a Doing Transitions perspective entails, we provide a brief overview of the volume and its chapters, which are organized around three themes: institutions and organizations; times and normativities; and materialities, such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts.

# **"Doing Transitions": The Concept**

The widespread notion of "transition" refers to a movement or process of crossing a certain space from one defned point towards another, or "a change from one state to another" (Sackmann & Wingens, 2001, p. 42). This is consistent with the understanding of "transition" as a key concept in life course research. The life course is viewed as being punctuated by a series of normative age-related transitions, many of which are institutionalized, and individuals are expected to follow as they move across life phases (Elder Jr., 1985; Kohli, 1985).

Although there is a broad understanding of the life course as an institution, transitions simultaneously, and perhaps not surprising, tend to be interpreted as individual processes. The concept of "doing transitions," in contrast, emphasizes that transitions are constituted within and through different types of social relationships

and different modes and degrees of institutionalization. Consequently, transitions are not individual but relational. Take the transition from kindergarten to school as an example. One may be tempted to reduce this transition to the capacity of the child to take this process as self-evident – sooner or later all children go through it, at least in countries where educational systems start early. However, this interpretation neglects some critical points: First, it is only in modern societies that school has been made compulsory, and it is only in recent decades that education has been declared as the most central resource for a "successful life in a well-functioning society" (see the title of Rychen & Salganik, 2003). Second, the transition from kindergarten to school involves many actors, starting with parents (who are made accountable for this process both by society and state authorities), medical professionals and childcare or early learning providers, as well as the teachers who receive new cohorts of pupils into their schools and classrooms.  Fourth, even referring to school entry as a transition *from* kindergarten *to* school refects the fact that kindergarten attendance is an aspect and asset of modern childhood – and a consequence of growing rates of female employment when children are young and the need for childcare to make work possible alongside childrearing.

A Doing Transitions perspective, then, begs us to not see transitions as individual phenomena but instead as deeply interwoven with others, as suggested by the concept of "linked lives" (Elder Jr., 1994; Settersten Jr., 2015). Put simply, the life of one person affects and is affected by other people, especially the most central and intimate of relationships. In the spirit of this principle, transitions in the lives of one person can create transitions for others, not only in forcing adaptation, but in bringing formal changes – for example, when children become parents, parents become grandparents; when a couple divorces, the divorce creates "ex" relationships throughout the family matrix. Because family (or family-like) relationships are most central to everyday life, the family is generally the setting in which most transitions, whatever their content, are experienced and given meaning.

Moreover, life course transitions take place in multi-layered settings that affect their experience and transitions themselves may prompt a change in settings (e.g., starting university or a new job, moving to a new neighbourhood). They are intertwined with wider societal processes and embedded in specifc social contexts. Transitions cannot be separated from how they are socially constructed, especially through discourses – a topic to which we will return.

It may seem obvious that transitions are processes, and yet they are too often measured as single events. Processes are not only involved in a change from state A to B. Multiple specifc events may mark a transition, but the underlying transformative processes cover a longer arc of time starting earlier and lasting longer. This can best be illustrated through apparently "new" transitions like children's transition from parental care into daycare, which precedes the transition illustrated above: This process has been referred to as a transition that needs to be fostered because women's employment has increased and, as such, the entry of children into institutionalized daycare can be anticipated. Also, neuroscience and educational policy emphasize the importance of early childhood for lifelong learning careers, which also affects how women's work or the placement of children into daycare are interpreted or justifed. In the individual case, this transition may be envisioned or articulated from the start of pregnancy – even well before it, when individuals or couples may plan or envision family formation; or even before that, when they are seeking education or building careers and their decisions and negotiations may be related to the future timing of children – all the way up to parents' deliberations about when they (and in most cases, the mother) should return to work.

The relational and processual structure of a transition's constitution is central to a "doing" perspective. If we assume that transitions are *not* a given quasi-natural social fact (unlike the process of physical growth or maturation, which is viewed as natural), then transitions must instead be understood as being constantly (re-)produced. This conception of 'doing" has been introduced by West and Zimmerman (1987), who analyze "doing gender" as "a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment" (p. 126) "embedded in everyday interaction" (p. 125). They continue:

When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas. In one sense, of course, it is individuals who "do" gender. But it is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others who are presumed to be oriented to its production. Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society (p. 126).

This anti-essentialist view has been extended in terms of "doing difference" (Fenstermaker & West, 1995), and can be read as a version of an intersectional perspective, which had already been developed by black feminists in the 1970s. Doing difference implies understanding race, class, and other differences too as "ongoing interactional accomplishment" (p. 8). However, these accomplishments should not be misunderstood as merely situational but as:

… an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and a means of justifying [one of the most fundamental] divisions of society. We suggested that examining how [gender] is accomplished could reveal the mechanisms by which power is exercised and inequality is produced (p. 9).

If we generalize these considerations, "doing" is not understood as individual action but instead as an interactive or collective practice that not only involves individuals who are co-present but extends to institutional and discursive phenomena that affect those practices as they are enacted in specifc social situations.

The concept of "doing gender" stimulates the concept of "doing transitions" in two ways. First, doing transitions emphasizes how social inequalities are (re-)produced during and through life transitions, and transitions themselves are also signifcantly gendered in their causes and consequences. Second, "doing" emphasizes the need for a constructivist conceptualization of transitions that includes attention to their performative and interpretative aspects.

Thus, a perspective using the prefx "doing" serves as a heuristic device for analyzing mechanisms of power and social inequalities, especially with regard to *how* they are being (re)produced (cf. Hirschauer, 2019). In applying "doing" to transitions we must therefore not view transitions as "neutral" social phenomena but as components of powerful social orders and their (re)production (cf. Stauber, 2020). In fact, transitions represent processes of "doing difference": Inasmuch as transitions refer to the crossing of boundaries between social states, phases of life, ages, social positions, institutional roles, or statuses of membership, they contribute to their demarcation and reproduction. Thus, analyzing how transitions are being "done" allows us to analyze how powerful social boundaries are being reproduced – or modifed. Rather than understanding power and inequality as determined, the emphasis of accomplishment and performance inherent to a "doing" perspective is meant as the smallest but fundamental unit of the social involving human actors as well as artifacts and discourses (cf. Latour, 2005; Shove et al., 2012). These theorists conceptualize social practice not as isolated or micro practices, but as bundles of practices that can achieve considerable persistence over time and space, such as the case of institutions (cf. Nicolini, 2009). The life course, and transitions in particular, can be conceptualized as bundles of practice (see also Schatzki, this volume).

Analyzing how transitions are being done implies differentiation between various practices or modes of "doing," through which they are being shaped and formed. For reasons of operationalization, our research, conducted from a Doing Transitions perspective, thus far distinguishes three modes of constitution: discursive, institutional and individual practices.

Following Foucault (1972), *discourses* represent powerful orders of knowledge. These orders are "productive" in as much as they frame if and how social phenomena are named in a specifc way. Thus, discourses not only represent structural orders but are also practical acts of distinction, address, and evaluation. Discourses "systematically form the objects of which they speak" (p. 54). They contribute to normality as a system of self-evidence of what can and cannot be said. Regarding transitions, this starts – most banally and most dangerously – when social states, positions, memberships, and changes between them, are formally or informally judged to be indicators of "success" or "failure." In this regard, one might even problematize the increased reference to "transition" (instead of status passage) as a shift from a structural towards a more individualized perspective (cf. Walther et al., 2016).

The so-called "normal life course" is such a discursive phenomenon. It establishes situational defnitions, interpretive frameworks, and symbolic orders that contribute to the constitution of transitions. In this discursive framework, requirements of age roles and judgments of success or failure are implicitly or explicitly individualized (cf. Rieger-Ladich, 2012). If we are to analyze how transitions are "done" through powerful discursive practice, we must question (1) practices of articulation (in what circumstances which processes and situations are referred to as "transitions"; cf. Hall, 1996), (2) practices of attribution (which requirements and which consequences, such as "age-conformity," are attributed to it, especially as "success" or "failure"), (3) and practices of responsibilization (who is assigned as responsible for the outcomes of transitions; see Riach, this volume; Krumbügel, this volume).

If we take the example of school-to-work-transitions, young people are "called into" a powerful discourse (*articulation*) centered around the expectation of gainful employment as a basis of a "normal" life course. This discourse marks a process characterized by orientation, choice, decision-making, and training. Success and failure are clearly marked in terms of qualifcation, employment and unemployment, stability and precarity *(attribution)*. In recent decades, young people have been construed to be responsible for planning their professional lives and therefore have been made individually accountable for their precarious position in the labor market and, consequently, in society – despite the fact that a broad range of factors are beyond their control, such as the availability and quality of training opportunities, labor market segmentation by gender or ethnicity, or health-related issues related to specifc occupations *(responsibilization)*. In the German context, the recent shift towards individualized responsibilization and attribution is refected in the emergence of the concept "(lack of) trainability" (in fact, German "mangelnde Ausbildungsreife" means a defcit of "maturity" for training). Introduced by employers to justify reducing apprencticeships, government institutions have adopted this concept to refer to school-leavers who do not directly enter training – and whose individual defcits need to be compensated by pre-vocational education or training. This discourse has claimed goals related to trainability as the offcial objectives and measures of education, even at lower secondary school levels. As a result, professional orientation in school is now anticipated to start in seventh grade, in which students would generally not be older than age 14 (cf. Walther, 2015).

*Institutions* can be viewed as expressions of social discourses, playing roles in regulating and processing transitions. Broadly, institutions represent sets of expectations and routines, rules and requirements, markers, and procedures (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Giddens, 1984). They gain persistence through their historical development as complex bundles of practices, and at the same time they are contingent because they depend on constant re-articulation and reproduction. While this implies openness for change, the interdependence of institutionalized practices contributes to stability and path dependency (cf. North, 1990, see also Walther, this volume). Institutions regulate life transitions through three common practices: (1) *marking* the conditions, times, and duration of transitions, such as determining access to or membership in social categories like age (for compulsory schooling) or performance of knowledge and skill (for school completion, which also includes criteria like minimum duration of school attendance); (2) *processing* on the basis of pre-defned procedures for preparing, supervising, and assessing individuals during the transition (cf. Glaser & Strauss, 1971); and (3) *gate-keeping* as specifc actors are assigned and responsible for guiding and supervising transitions (Heinz, 1992).

Entering and leaving school are examples of the institutional regulation of transitions through formal organization with legally codifed markers, standardized procedures, and teachers as prototypes of professional gatekeepers. Other transitions are regulated less formally. For example, religious and secular "rites" that mark the passage between childhood and youth, or transitions like marriage, involve both legal and ritual forms of processing, even if the ritualized components of many transitions are diminished or optional. In fact, van Gennep's (1960) classical analysis of "rites de passage" and his distinction of phases of separation, liminality, and incorporation to some degree refect different institutional forms of regulating transitions (see also Wanka & Prescher, this volume). One of the demands inherent to the regulation of transitions is to ensure that individuals fulfl the expectations of the new position (Eisenstadt, 1956). Thus, transitions involve the acquisition and performance of knowledge and skills – learning – and their regulation includes formal or informal pedagogical practices that prepare, assess, and support individuals as they enter new positions. Special needs education or unemployment policies are practices of compensation where individuals do not meet transition requirements.

Practices of institutional regulation occur at different scales of aggregation. The construction of life transitions may be analyzed through the comparative analysis of labor markets, educational systems, and welfare states (cf. Heinz, 1991; Shavit & Müller, 1998; Mayer, 1997; see also Walther, this volume); through the analysis of organizational structures and practices of schools or welfare agencies (see also Riach, this volume; Heinrich, Klevermann & Schmidt-Hertha, this volume); or through professional practices aimed at preparing individuals for transitions to ensure the ft between requirements and competencies through pedagogical and social services (Walther, 2017). In addition, ritual practices involve different scales of community formation and performance – for example, a wedding may involve religious practices related to membership in a religious community but also practices limited to specifc aspects of marriage, such as throwing rice (see also Wanka & Prescher, this volume).

Transitions are processes *individuals* experience and are subject to; but they are also actively negotiated with other actors regarding if, why and how those transitions are to occur. When transitions are institutionally prescribed, they are adopted, rejected, or modifed against the backdrop of biographical patterns involving coping with everyday life, transformative learning, and practices of resistance (cf. Mezirow & Taylor, 2010; Nohl et al., 2014; Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016; see also Hirschfeld & Lenz, this volume; Eberle, Lütgens, Pohling, Spies & Bauer, this volume). Sometimes, transitions develop in a way that for individuals creates a discrepancy between one's social position and the subjective experience of it – or even alienation from it (cf. Welzer, 1993) – leading the person to distance themselves from or relinquish the position. Examples in this respect are gender transitions (cf. Stryker, 2008) or separating from a partner one no longer feels affection for without being asked by anyone else to do so.

Practices ascribed to individuals therefore involve (1) *positioning* oneself towards expectations and being addressed in a specifc way (as a child, or young person, or as being on the verge of adulthood); (2) *learning,* in acquiring skills and knowledge related to the new position as well as integrating the new position into the idea of the self; and (3) *decision-making*, as transitions in differentiated and individualized societies imply that there are choices to be made at crucial junctures that put individuals on different life trajectories.

However, transitions are often misconstrued as being individual experiences when they instead are intersubjective, co-produced, shared, dependent, conditioned, constrained or otherwise involve multiple actors (cf. Settersten Jr., 2015). Especially important are signifcant others with whom lives are intertwined and transitions are

interlinked, gatekeepers concerned with "guiding" individuals through transitions, and objects that stimulate and direct individual agency (such as when job applicants complete forms and answer questions). As we described for school-to-worktransitions, individuals are confronted with demands that are discursively embedded in hegemonic models of the life course to which they must position themselves (cf. Thomae, 1996). Therefore, practices normally ascribed to individuals, such as learning or making decisions, must instead be understood as open-ended, dialectic social processes of "doing" and "being done," of "being active" and "being subjected" (cf. Alkemeyer et al., 2013). These agentic processes represent practices of creating a "ft" between institutional and subjective modes of formation.

Modes of "doing transitions" cannot be isolated from each other. Indeed, they only can be distinguished from each other for analytical purposes. Discursive aspects cannot be reduced to "what is being said" but are inherent to any practice when they draw on, reproduce and/or transform knowledge orders. They are also inherent to spatial arrangements and artifacts (see below). These knowledge orders and their normativities are refected in institutional regulation, and especially "chrono-normativities" (Riach et al., 2014) – that is, beliefs about what should be done at a specifc age, and about the knowledge and skills that individuals need to perform new positions. "Individual" decision-making, coping, and learning must therefore be understood in the context of powerful discourses of "success" and "failure," which are represented in and reinforced by institutional regulations. Regardless of whether individuals affrm or oppose the judgments of success and failure that result from institutional regulations, individuals nonetheless refer to them (Walther et al., 2016; cf. Rieger-Ladich, 2020).

The aspects of "doing transitions" described above enable us to view and analyze transitions beyond changes in social states. From this perspective, transitions refer to movements into new social situations and positions. Transitions express classifcations (differentiating and addressing), fulfl the function of social allocation, distribute social goods (prestige, attention, access), and thus become socially momentous in having social consequences and affecting individuals' life trajectories. Transitions are performative realities that are produced in discursive, institutional, and individual practices. There is a crucial relationship to be considered between the dynamics inherent to transitions and dynamics of social reproduction; and, transitions imply a latent potential of transformation. Consequently, refexive transition research takes a processual perspective towards social realities and raises awareness for the constitution of transitions, including the research enterprise itself.

# **Cross-Cutting Themes in the Constitution of Transitions and Structure of the Book**

The concept "doing transitions" relies on an understanding of transitions as *relational –* done through the interrelation of discursive articulation, institutional regulation, and agentic processes. How this interrelation looks with respect to a specifc transition cannot be determined in advance, which is a primary reason why a Doing Transitions perspective represents a heuristic approach for empirical research. This perspective also demands that researchers be conscious of how research itself contributes to the social construction of transitions through its theories and methods.

The studies presented in this book analyse these interrelations and the "bridging points" between them. In bringing these practices and interrelations into focus, we are also able to better see other kinds of interdependencies – of domains, levels, and time – in the life course (Bernardi et al., 2019) and how transitions are integrated with processes of social structuration (cf. Giddens, 1984).

*Theodore Schatzki* (Chap. 2, this volume) introduces a practice-theoretical perspective with which the "doing transitions" concept is aligned. A phenomenological account of life trajectories provides the foundation for conceptualizing life trajectories not only as series of events but also as bundles of social practices bound to particular social contexts. Schatzki identifes three cross-cutting dimensions of lifetrajectories: space-time paths, chains of actions, and past-future arcs. Schatzki also refects on the advantages of using theories of practices in this context.

The subsequent chapters are organized by cross-cutting themes that have emerged as relevant in linking "doing transitions" with processes of social structuration: (1) institutions and organizations; (2) times and normativities; and (3) materialities, such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts. Below, we outline these dimensions and introduce the chapters.

We have introduced institutional regulation as one mode of "doing transitions." In fact, *institutions* play a central role in understanding transitions because they contribute to the persistence of transitions as "social facts." Anthropological studies have analyzed how rites of passage structure social reproduction (van Gennep, 1960), just as institutions such as labor markets, educational systems, or the policies and programs of welfare states often serve as causes or predictors of the effects that transitions have on individuals' life trajectories (cf. Mayer, 1997). The latter have contributed to promoting paid work as the organizing feature of what Kohli (1985) called the "tripartite" life course, consisting of preparation for work in childhood and youth, productive (economic) and reproductive functions in adulthood, and retirement from work and continued consumption in old age.

The frst part of the book starts with the chapter by *Andreas Walther* (Chap. 3, this volume), which argues that welfare and education must be viewed as key elements of transition "regimes," as these offer quite different packages and therefore different conceptions of which transitions, and transition patterns are "normal" across countries. He emphasises that life courses and transitions are increasingly structured by access to, change between, and exit from education and welfare institutions – serving to reproduce and mitigate unequal social status positions. In practice, these processes of reproduction occur in organizations as an interactive negotiation between professional gatekeepers and individual "users" of these organizations, whether students, recipients of benefts, or clients of counselling. *Heidi Hirschfeld and Bianca Lenz* (Chap. 4, this volume) then focus on transitions to work and how institutional support measures are articulated in the ways young people make use of them. The chapter draws on fndings from biographical analyses of two cases from two different German studies of school-to-work transitions, one on socio-pedagogical support for disadvantaged students in lower secondary school, the other on the combination of benefts and counselling in so-called youth job centers. The analyses reveal that how youth use support refects their prior biographical experiences and affects how they make meaning and negotiate support during this juncture. At the opposite end of the educational opportunity continuum, *Heinz-Hermann Krüger* (Chap. 5, this volume) analyses the educational pathways of students in specialized and international elite high schools, which in the German context are rather exceptional. His fndings from a longitudinal qualitative study show that privileged family backgrounds and mechanisms of institutional selectivity are not alone suffcient to reproduce higher social status and secure respective destinations but need to be complemented by individual biographical orientations.

Research on education and employment transitions often highlights high-level institutional regulations that affect access to and progression through the education system, the labor market or welfare entitlements. However, in modern societies many institutions are enacted by social *organizations*, which in turn must be understood as bundles of *organizational practices*. For example, local practice of educational systems is found in specifc schools and the public authorities that oversee them, and local practice of labor markets is found in particular workplaces. It is good to remember that the companies in which many employment transitions take place have ultimate objectives to produce goods and services – they only implicitly act as gatekeepers in taking on individuals as employees or turning people into customers to meet these objectives. In fact, an "institutionalized" life course relies heavily on a network of organizations regulating individual life trajectories and gate-keeping opportunities. An organizational perspective reveals that "doing transitions" in and through organizations is not the simple result of top-down forces imposed on the individual but is instead negotiated and therefore potentially subject to constant modifcation by organizational routines and cultures, and by individual actors in interaction with other actors.

*Eva Heinrich, Nils Klevermann and Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha* (Chap. 6, this volume) analyze how organizations shape the transitions and subjective experience of collective actors. They are comparing the different cases of companies that organize female employees' return to work after maternity leave and of migrant organizations expected to offer pathways to (active) citizenship of their members. They show how these processes contribute directly to how transitions are done for whole groups of workers or migrants. At the same time, their analysis reveals that organizations not only contribute to transitions of individual human actors but also undergo transitions themselves through which they are subjectivized as collective actors in the transition regime. This is where *Kathleen Riach* (Chap. 7, this volume) comes in, as she addresses transitions into "older workerhood" for aging employees in their workplaces. Workplaces are institutionalized by labor market dynamics, professional cultures, welfare regulations and organized by private companies or public services. Workplaces involve expectations and identifcation, as well as bodily performance refecting norms of competitiveness. Ageing bodies, coupled with age-based ways of understanding transitions, lead workers to negotiate the lived experience of being in categories such as "fresh blood," "prime worker," and "older worker."

The second part of the book is devoted to *temporality and normativities*. Most obviously, the lifespan represents a timeline in which transitions are emerging, are made necessary, and are institutionally regulated. Consequently, frst, if transitions are understood as processes, they inherently involve time; timing is crucial to understand, as well as duration – how long a transition takes. But transitions can also be understood in bundles of practices, bringing questions about the signifcance of sequencing (the order in which they happen, such as partnership, marriage, and childbearing), spacing (how much time exists between transitions, such as those just mentioned or between multiple births), or density (how many changes occur within a bounded period, such as a year or two). Second, transitions are therefore expressed in a framework of time-related norms: expectations about when or in what order they are supposed to happen, how fast or slow they should be, or where they should lead and what will be judged a successful or failed outcome. In fact, the whole idea of the life course can be regarded as a normative ideal, with schedules that privilege some over others. These norms permeate the recognition of transitions through rituals and celebrations, and they also penalize those who cannot, for whatever reason, meet these expectations. And third, transitions emerge differently according to historical developments – they are historically situated. As a result, transitions must always be seen (although not fully or deterministically) as being the consequence to earlier transitions and as being the precursor of future transitions. In all these temporal aspects, normativity is implied: there are (historically shifting) normalities related to how to cope with and how to shape these life course transitions. With its notions of linearity and directedness, dominant conceptions of time itself also imply a kind of normativity.

This is the starting point of *Núria Sánchez-Mira and Laura Bernardi* (Chap. 8, this volume), who suggest a more comprehensive conceptualization of time – one that goes beyond an absolute (linear, chronological, uniform) understanding and instead emphasizes its relative nature. Drawing on insights from narrative and biographical research, relative time is revealed as multidirectional, elastic, and telescopic. However, even if this approach to time may be appropriate to transitions, it is nonetheless undermined by powerful practices that instead reinforce linearity and strict normalities. People are called into powerful discourses – and at the same time get the opportunity to depict their agency. This is then the focus of *Noreen Eberle, Jessica Lütgens, Andrea Pohling, Tina Spies, and Petra Bauer* (Chap. 9, this volume), who draw upon biographical narratives to examine discourses related to "normalities" (or "deviance") in three different felds: in education, in political orientation, and in coping with experiences of sexual violence. They apply Stuart Hall's concept of articulation (Hall, 1996) to identify three distinct modes of articulation in relation to their empirical material, and to discuss the possibilities of distancing oneself from or complying with societal expectations in these felds.

The next two chapters turn to the tension between normality and extraordinariness that characterizes some, but not all, "transitional events" in the life course. *Anna Wanka and Julia Prescher* (Chap. 10, this volume) propose that, whereas everyday mundane practices might be viewed as sites of repetition and routines that tend to reproduce social positions, transitional practices are marked by extraordinariness. The authors use empirical studies on transitions in youth and older age to explore the dynamic interplay between the mundane and the extraordinary in transition experiences. *Tobias Boll* (Chap. 11, this volume) systematically examines how life transitions are situated in terms of their "normality" or "deviance." Even more, his chapter explores the idea of "doing transitions between categories," bringing insights into the construction of what is regarded as normal or abnormal, for instance in the direction, timing, or mode of transitions.

The third part of the book focuses on *materialities* – such as space, bodies, and artifacts – in the constitution of transitions. Transitions are always situated in and cannot be separated from specifc social spaces (see Schatzki, 2019). Even less can they be separated from the body – and may even go directly *through* the body, such as transitions in gender, health, pregnancy, and childbirth, or approaching death. Additionally, both spaces and bodies involve artifacts. The latter also become relevant in institutionalized contexts – for example, in the forms through which access is regulated and documented or how places are arranged to process transitions in particular ways. Spaces become stages or sets for transitions with thresholds, doors, walls, furnishings and decorations, public and private areas, and the like. Bodies are adorned with clothes and jewelry, work with instruments, swallow medicine; and even bodies themselves represent living materiality, most obvious in gender transitions, extreme body work (Ferreira, 2006), anti-ageing treatments, cosmetic surgeries, or other body modifcations.

This trifecta of spaces, bodies, and artifacts is explored by *Deborah Nägler and Anna Wanka* (Chap. 12, this volume) in their treatment of materiality in social practice and its relevance for transitions. They illustrate these processes in two different phases of life, childhood and old age, opening a comprehensive and multi-layered view of the meaning of materiality and its relevance in the discussion of transitions. Their insights partly reinforce approaches of new materialism/post humanism, where artifacts become as important to creating social situations as human beings themselves. As with Bruno Latour, such artifacts are to be seen as actants with a certain potential of "doing transitions." *Janne Krumbügel* (Chap. 13, this volume) picks up this issue, at frst sight focusing on only one of these material dimensions: the body and, more specifcally, the *pregnant* body. She analyzes pregnant bodies through the lens of the German pregnancy advice literature, thus bringing the dimension of artifacts back into the play. Such advice books, as artifacts, represent discursive practices through which processes of "re-naturalizing" the body can be made visible as a social process. While pregnancy is dealt with as a biological transition, these discourses give socially and historically contingent meaning to the pregnant body and its changes. Not surprisingly, these discourses are highly gendered, including concepts of medical risk, which form a specifc normative notion of doing pregnancy the "right" way. *Tabea Freutel-Funke and Helena Müller* (Chap. 14, this volume) turn attention to the signifcance of spaces as contexts for transitions. However, they do not reduce space to the qualities of an outer environment but instead conceptualize it as a relational arrangement of people and spatial features. Based on two empirical studies grounded in dispositive analysis and environmental psychology, they examine the roles of space in two transitions: to independent mobility within neighborhoods in childhood and to multigenerational cohousing in older age. They ask: How and by whom is space made relevant in these transitions? How do spatial practices change with a change of environments? And how do spaces contribute to people's everyday lives?

In the concluding chapter (Settersten, Stauber, & Walther, Chap. 15, this volume), we as editors integrate key theoretical, methodological, substantive themes that emerge in the chapters – not only identifying bridging and connecting points, but also building a set of overall lessons and contributions of a "doing transitions" perspective. We hope to bolster the relational framing of "doing transitions" by identifying, distinguishing, and outlining different patterns of relationships involved in the constitution of transitions in the life course. We show how a relational perspective is important to enlarge the understanding of life course transitions.

With this volume, we hope to stimulate debate and contribute to the development of refexivity in research on life course transitions. Analyzing transitions in terms of doing includes refecting how research itself is involved in the social practice through which transitions are being constituted.

# **References**

van Gennep, A. (1960). *The rites of passage*. Chicago University Press.

West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. *Gender & Society, 1*(2), 125–151.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **Chapter 2 The Trajectories of a Life**

**Theodore R. Schatzki**

Lives and their trajectories are an important topic. To begin with, each of us has one. This is possibly the greatest commonality that exists among people. Not only, moreover, does each of us have one, but the one each of us has—regardless of how socially structured or constituted it might be—is inescapably one's own. Awareness of this situation can lend bitter poignancy to what someone does, experiences, and suffers—all this acting, undergoing, and suffering, it's *his*, *hers*, or *theirs* and no one else's, even if some of it is shared. This bite is well known to anyone conversant with existentialist literature.

Not surprisingly, accordingly, life and its trajectories have been deeply plumbed, by poets, novelists, philosophers, theologians, gurus, journalists, therapists of various stripes, an occasional statesperson, and others. Words of sobering, somber signifcance capture important aspects. In English, words like "fate," "destiny," "potential," "achievement," "dignity," "choice," "free will," and "necessity" pick out notable features or possibilities of life that command or portend some portion of hope or despair, splendor or destitution. Life not just joins but means a lot to us humans.

Lives and their trajectories are also important for the social disciplines in toto. Regardless of what one thinks social life is ontologically, accounts of sociality must take account of, and at some point encompass, individual lives. Even if lives are not the objects, or even the chief constituents of the objects, that these disciplines study, these objects would have no substance, duration, or even existence absent human lives. The relationship between lives and social entities is one of the principal theoretical issues faced in these disciplines.

T. R. Schatzki (\*)

University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022 B. Stauber et al. (eds.), *Doing Transitions in the Life Course*, Life Course Research and Social Policies 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13512-5\_2

The current essay will not directly address this relationship. Instead, my discussion will focus on life, its trajectories, and the relationship between life trajectories and social practices. My aim is to help illuminate the phenomena that life course research in general, and the Doing Transitions approach in particular, study. More specifcally, I will link a phenomenological account of human life and its trajectories to a practice theoretical approach to the social contexts in which lives proceed (on this combination, see Schatzki, 2017). In doing so, the essay will help show what it is for lives, and their phases and transitions, to be "constituted by practices."

# **What Is a Life?**

The word "life" points toward a tangled conceptual feld. Life used to be a, if not the, premier concept in biology: for decades, biology was defned as the study of living organisms. In this discipline, life entails such properties as reproduction, metabolism, growth, and self-organization. Life, however, is too important to be left to the biologists. Although the concept of life must retain its biological dimensions, it must also offer something to the fights of poetry and philosophy.

Distinguishing the notion of "a life" from the notion of life full stop points in a salutary direction. *A* life is something that stretches from beginning to death (cf. the ancient Greek *zoe*, which designates something opposed to death). The notion applies to creatures more diverse than humans, thus ensuring some continuity with the biological phenomenon. But the notion assumes special meaning in relation to humans, or better, people, in part because we seem to bear an unusually complex relationship to death. Human lives are biological and, like lives generally, stretch from beginning to death. But a human life is a *refned* version of something that is biological and shared with members of other species. The ancient Greek *bios*, which is a human affair embracing, among other things, biography and way of being, captures the idea.

I begin with a feature of a life that emphasizes commonality with other species. A life embraces a continuing series of sensory—or just detectional—events in, and movements carried out by, a functioning organism. This characterization brackets the properties typically treated as defnitive of biological life. It does not apply, for instance, to an utterly comatose person, who is alive biologically. It instead picks out something stretching from beginning to death that is common to many living beings.

This sensory-movement continuum assumes a richer form with a more complex trajectory in the vast majority of human lives. There, it becomes a life of selfconscious action, where to be self-conscious is to be aware that one is alive. Such a life might be unique to humans; it might also be shared with higher mammals such as dolphins, bonobos, and elephants (not to mention aliens). The more complex sort of trajectory it possesses in comparison to a basic life of continual sensory mobility lies less in a person's directed passage through a cognized world—a sort of existence shared with other organisms—than in, among other things, a life always embracing a signifcative arc stretching from past to future (see section "The Trajectories of a Life"). When a person understands that she is alive, the questions that make up the title of Gauguin's famous 1897–1898 painting—e.g., Where do we Come From? Where are we Going?—become and remain meaningful, at least until death or the loss of one's faculties. Life thus understood is familiar to all of us. It poses the types of issues, and brooks the sort of considerations, that the social disciplines raise about life trajectories. These issues and considerations presume that lives are self-conscious.

A life as we live it embraces a procession of activities performed and "psychological" conditions expressed by an active body (see Schatzki, 1996). The "psychological" conditions involved include states of consciousness, emotions, and conative as well as cognitive conditions (such as self-consciousness). Incidentally, to say that psychological conditions are "expressed" by the active body is to say that psychological conditions are present and encounterable in public space by way of bodily activity; other people can also interpretively infer the existence of such conditions. An important feature of the activities and conditions that make up a life is that they belong to a specifc person, namely, the person living. They belong to this person because it has been a feature of human practices for many millennia now to *attribute* the performance of actions and the possession or undergoing of mental and cognitive conditions to the person whose body expresses them. This makes the relationship of a person to her body central to a life. It also provides a frst glimpse in this essay of the profound social constitution of lives.

Another feature of a life is that it incorporates the world. Important events are part of our lives. They are, among other things, incorporated into the narratives we tell about our pasts. I remember, for instance, when the Red Sox lost the 1976 baseball World Series; it is a notable reference point in my life. This incorporation of the world into a life can be accommodated by treating select, or in principle all, objects of a person's activities or mental and conative/cognitive conditions as part of her life. Lives are open to the world in a second important way. Which "psychological" condition is expressed by any given piece of bodily activity, just like which action is performed through the performance of a particular bodily action (see below), often depends on the context in which it occurs. Crying, for instance, expresses joy or distress depending on, for example, whether it is preceded by a great victory or by a scathing insult. Relevant contexts include states of the world and past and future actions (see Schatzki, 1996). In this way, the identities of many components of a life depend on how things are in the world.

Finally, the actions and "psychological" conditions that make up a life overlap. Life is a mosaic of processes and conditions that differentially start, connect, and cease.

The following discussion highlights actions and de-emphasizes "psychological" conditions. It does so because activity is what centrally gives a life its trajectories, in part because activity is processual in character and in part because many "psychological" conditions accompany activity. Biological development from beginning through youth and adulthood to old age and death also grounds trajectories. In emphasizing activity, I do not deny that passivity, or being, is an important dimension of a life. Many life conditions, including sensations, emotions, and beliefs, happen to or hold of people. Biological processes and developments likewise happen to them, as does the impingement of the world (including other people). Through it all, however, a person, even if she "withdraws," forges ahead in action. Nor, moreover, do I deny that experience, or as Tim Ingold (2015, 126) puts it, "undergoing," is important to life. Indeed, in the past I have often conceptualized activity as experiential activity to emphasize that activity transpires within the ken of experience. If the topic of this paper were life and not life trajectories greater attention would have to be paid to both being and experience.

In the following, consequently, a life will be treated as a procession—in Bernardi et al.'s, 2019 words, as an "individual behavioral process" composed—of overlapping activities that are constituted in bodily doings and sayings performed by a self-conscious living person and whose identities as particular activities depend on states of the world in the context of which they happen.

This phenomenological conception of a life treats it as a process. This process includes bodily doings and the actions they constitute; it also incorporates and is partly defned by the world through which it proceeds. It is not, however, a process in the sense of (1) a Bergsonian (1999) dureé (an ongoing unfolding advancing), (2) a pragmatist passage through or in relation to present experience, or (3) a mere series of events. For example, I do not, as is common, treat a life as a moving stream or as constant becoming (see, for example, Ingold, 2015, whose phenomenological accounts of wayfaring and navigating I affrm). Rather, life is a process in a Rescherian (1996) sense of a continuous integrated nexus of events, in this case, activities (and "psychological" conditions). What integrates the events composing a life are the body that expresses them and the person to whom they are ascribed. Interesting life possibilities arise when the one-to-one relationship of body to person shifts, as when multiple people (personalities) occupy the same body.

# **The Trajectories of a Life**

Sociological life course research construes the life course as the progression of events—above all, activities—that make up a life over its entire history (cf. Featherman, 1981). This total series is composed of multiple trajectories, each embracing the events and transitions that make up the progress of that life in specifc life domains, or institutional spheres, such as work, family, and education (cf. Elder, 1985). In this essay, by contrast, the trajectories of a life are construed as certain key dimensions of a life qua continually forward-unfolding entity. The plurality of trajectories refects, not the diversity of life domains, but the fact that the character of life as continually unfolding exhibits several key dimensions. A trajectory, as the life course literature construes it, in my sense is, or corresponds to, a series of discontinuous episodes in a life. These episodes are socially constituted in ways that will be touched on below.

Three sorts of trajectories will be distinguished in this essay.

# *Space-Time Paths*

A life trajectory is, frst, the space-time path of a life, that is, the path through space and time that it traces as it proceeds. In this context, space means three-dimensional space, and the specifc spaces involved are material ones, that is, occupied or defned by collections of material objects. Lives trace a path through these material spaces (in a sense explained below). Time, furthermore, means before-and-after time: the ordering of events and processes into successions by virtue of before and after relations between them. Lives take up their places in such successions, the various bodily doings and activities (as well as psychological conditions) that compose them occurring before or after other events and processes in the world. The same holds of entire lives, which likewise transpire before and after other events and processes.

Strictly speaking, the only thing that can trace a path through material space is a material entity. Lives, however, are not material entities. Nor are activities. It is the body at and through which a life unfolds that is a material entity. However, activities (and psychological conditions) are always intimately connected to material entities. In particular, as indicated, they are constituted by bodily movements. It also seems eminently plausible that they are connected, in various ways, to the neural, endocrinal, and muscular-skeletal bodily systems among others. And they clearly presuppose particular bodily processes. Given this rich relationship, it makes sense to defne the spatial-temporal paths of lives as the spatial-temporal paths traced by actors' bodies as they move about in the world.

Performances of action, too, are located in material space and positioned in before-and-after time. This is because any action a person performs is performed through the carrying out of one or more bodily doings (voluntary bodily movements), which in the situation of performance constitute the performance of the action in question. For instance, one can greet a friend from afar by waving one's hand back and forth because, in the context of encountering friends, such a bodily doing amounts to a greeting. All performances of action, including mental actions such as thinking, involve performances of bodily doings, in the case of thinking, such doings as furrowing one's brow, pacing back and forth, drawing on a chalkboard, and gesticulating in the air. (Omissions, moreover, involve omissions of bodily doings that constitute actions that are expected, appropriate, or sensible in particular circumstances.) It follows that the performance of an action is located at all the locations in material space where the bodily doings that compose it are located.

A person is always doing something, at least while they are awake. The movement, moreover, of that person's body through space describes a continuous line: as Ingold (2015, 118) writes, to lead a life is to lay down a line. This lifeline is broken into overlapping segments that are where the person performs particular actions (it is also broken into longer episodes—or "durations"—that make up her trajectories through particular life domains). The path that her body takes through before-and-after time and material space thus defnes the path taken by her bodily performances of actions (and bodily expressions of "psychological" conditions), which is at once the space-time path taken by her life.

# *Sequences of Action*

A life trajectory is not just the space-time path traced via the movement and movements of a living person's body. It is also the sequence of actions performed in a life, the sequence of actions performed by a living person. Unlike passage through space-time, this trajectory is irreversible (a fact that makes life transitions possible). This is because an action always occurs in a context that includes the actor's earlier actions and that itself helps form the context in which her subsequent actions take place. As, consequently, her life progresses, the context in which it proceeds includes ever more actions and sequences of action that the person herself performed. Future actions can double back and help create situations that resemble situations in which earlier actions of hers were performed. But a life cannot literally repeat actions in reverse order since each further action—not to mention other events and processes—only makes the situations of subsequent actions increasingly unlike those of predecessors.

Trajectories as sequences boast a type of direction, namely, steering toward yet another activity, that is, toward the next activity performed. This phenomenon can be called "progression." Life trajectories progress so long as they exist, and it is due to their progressive nature that they accumulate, or leave behind, ever longer successions of activities. This sort of directionality is inherent to an active being. Note that the frst sort of trajectory, spatial-temporal passage, possesses a parallel type of direction: a perpetual moving forward in time.

Performances of actions are events. Accordingly, a succession of action performances is, ontologically, a sequence of events. Obviously diachronic in character, any such succession also has a synchronic structure, in which performances help compose broader activities that can be called "projects." Looking for a job, for instance, is a project embracing multiple narrower actions: consulting web sites, talking to friends, designing a resumé, going to interviews, and so on. In turn, looking for a job can be part of a wider project, for instance, getting one's life in order. The synchronic structure of a life trajectory as a sequence of actions is a stack (cf. Caliskan, 2020) of overlapping, progressively wider actions. While the upper reaches of the stack usually metamorphose slowly, its base layer comprises the more frequent and rapid bodily actions whose performance constitutes intentional actions. I mention this structure because it provides a medium for sociality. It thereby helps fll out the idea of "linked lives" (see Elder et al., 2003; Settersten, 2015; cf. Ingold's, 2015 notion of "knotted" lives) that the Doing Transitions project draws on to mark the fact that transitions depend on other people. For example, talking to friends about job opportunities involves (1) performing actions that causally interlock with and are otherwise directed toward friends' performances (i.e., interactions; more generally, chains of activity—see section "Life Trajectories and Chains of Action"); (2) the intersection and coordination of, as well as the presence of references to others' lives in, the synchronic structures of the various players' life trajectories; and (3) the practices within whose scope the causally interlocking actions are performed and the intersection, coordination, and mutual referring are established. As this suggests, sociality, and thus the social constitution of individual lives including their phases and transitions, depends on such phenomena as interactions with others, the intertwined stacked character of different people's activities and life trajectories, and the common practices people carry on.

Closely connected to life trajectories as sequences of actions is the idea of life phases. A life trajectory, like most any process, can be broken into phases of many different sorts. These include numerous, possibly feeting segments of lesser signifcance such as those that make up a typical start of the day: enjoying a caffein beverage, consuming food, personal hygiene, dressing, walking the dogs, and going to work. Likewise possible are fewer, usually longer stages of greater signifcance such as the durations that compose the trajectories of a person's participation in particular life domains and the very long phases included in the once dominant tripartite model of the life-course (Kohli, 1985). Life trajectories can be broken into multiple series of phases because different conditions and discursive criteria can be marshalled to demarcate (and name) segments or stages of activity sequences. These criteria include those that defne "normal" life courses, which discursively circulate among practices with institutional backing. Divisions of normal or normativized lives—or generations—into major phases (i.e., segments of social clocks; Neugarten & Datan, 1973), vary across "cultures": the above examples pertain to lives in North Atlantic countries, though they share many elements with lives in other parts of the world.

Phases are sequential and linked by transitions. As suggested, many sorts of things exist between which people transition. Over the course of a day, for instance, a person proceeds from situation to situation, from one life domain to another, and from one physical station to another (see Hägerstrand, 1975), each switch a "transition." Over time, many other transitions occur in signifcant aspects of particular lives or collections thereof, for instance, in the divvying up of work required to maintain a home, in jobs, in family situations, in friendships, and so on. There are also important, typically age-related status transitions of sorts that members of particular collectivities mark, for instance, in membership status (e.g., initiation, baptism), marital status, education achievement, retirement, puberty and majority, and so forth. Transitions of these sorts are fanked by important life phases, for example, childhood and adolescence, high school and university, minor and adult. At the base of all these phases and transitions lie the sequences of actions that compose the trajectories of lives day in, day out. These sequences provide the raw material for phases and transitions, which incorporate segments and stretches of the sequences. Incidentally, life trajectories are structured, not just by discourses and institutions, but also by, among other things, phases and transitions themselves. For, as a general matter, action sequences are shaped by the social practices they pass through (see section "Trajectories, Bundles of Practices, and Material Arrangements"), and social practices often explicitly mark, and what people do in them is sometimes organized by reference to, phases and transitions.

# *Pasts and Futures*

A third sort of trajectory that characterizes most human lives is an omnipresent structuring arc from past to future (see Schatzki, 2010). A life not only inexorably proceeds to the next thing done. It also always heads somewhere, toward something to be realized. This heading toward concerns the future. It is captured in more familiar terms by the notions of purpose and end. Purposes and ends are the states of affair a person aims at, or comes toward, in acting. Whereas purposes are more immediate and often tied to particular intentional actions, ends are more distant and often require the performance of multiple actions. Practically all human activities display a multidimensional future of this sort. In typing on a keyboard, for instance, someone might be searching an online job site, which she pursues in order to check out hot leads about jobs, which is part of the project of looking for a job, which she seeks for the sake of bringing order to her life. Human action is practically always teleological (which does not imply that people are conscious of their ends as they act).

At the same time, life always comes from somewhere. A person reacts to or proceeds in the light of particular states of affair. These state of affairs are where she comes from in heading toward what she seeks to realize, that because of which it makes sense to her to do such and such in pursuit of this and that purpose and end.

Life always displays this structure of coming from-heading toward and, as a result, contains an arc from what one comes from to what one is headed toward. Signifcative trajectories of this sort omnipresently structure activity.

I should add that each activity in a life trajectory infects that trajectory. What I mean is that, merely by occurring, each addition to the sequence of actions a person performs ipso facto alters what the trajectory of that person's life has been. This alteration can be trivial and inconsequential as when the job seeker accesses a job advert through an online job site instead of clicking a link to the advert sent to her by a friend. Or it can be more momentous as when the person says to herself that she has had enough and abruptly abandons the search. (Of course, even assessing the site directly can have great consequences, as when job seeker picks up malware at the site's portal that could have been avoided by following the link.) The next action in a sequence thereof can also send the sequence in a direction different from the direction the life had been taking before then. In fact, what a person does at *any* moment can in principle send the trajectory in a signifcantly new direction. This mutability derives from the character of activity as an event, according to which human activity is indeterminate until it happens (see Schatzki, 2010). As things are, life trajectories only infrequently head suddenly towards something different.

Due to the action stack that structures a life trajectory, actions that pursue purposes different from those pursued by immediate predecessors often continue to pursue distal ends that the latter sought. A job seeker who suddenly stops searching the web in order to talk to a friend about the friend's new employer is pursing the same more distant end as before—fnding a job—even though the immediate purposes of searching online and consulting differ. A life trajectory is continually changing, not just in embracing additional activities and thereby both describing a longer spacetime path and being composed of a different activity sequence, but also in incorporating different signifcative arcs.

All told, the trajectory of a life is made up of a phases-forming, transitionsembracing sequence of actions (and other life conditions) that describes a spatialtemporal path through the world and is omnipresently coming from somewhere in heading toward something.

 It is the courses of the stories or narratives that we tell about ourselves and our pasts. I do not include this sort of trajectory because, as I see things, narratives articulate how people should or do *understand* their lives. Narratives do not inherently structure either actions (see Schatzki, 2005) or lives; that is, actions and lives do not intrinsically have narratival structures. To be sure, the narratives people tell about their lives can affect how they act and inform the signifcative past-future arcs that structure their activities. This is especially true in societies with strong oral traditions. Such shaping also exemplifes the discursive molding of life trajectories, a topic of interest to the present book. But many phenomena affect people's activities. The courses of people's narratives are never their life trajectories but only help shape the latter.

# **Trajectories, Bundles of Practices, and Material Arrangements**

According to theories of practices (see Schatzki, 2002), practices and constellations thereof make up the social contexts in which lives proceed and the phases and transitions of life occur: all transitions are experientially performed by people in constitutive social contexts composed of practices. As a result, practices bear responsibility for lives, phases, and transitions being social phenomena.

A practice is an open set of organized doings and sayings. Examples are cooking practices, wedding practices, day trading practices, teaching practices, university freshman orientation practices, and job searching practices. Practices are closely intertwined with—in some practice theories, they include—arrangements of material entities. Practices and material arrangements thereby form bundles; cooking in a kitchen or working in an offce are examples. Particular practices can bundle with multiple arrangements; freshman orientation practices, for instance, can be pursued in different settings. Conversely, particular arrangements can link to multiple practices; consumer, job searching, entertainment, and information gathering practices, for instance, can be carried out at arrangements at home centered around a computer. Bundles, in turn, can connect—through relations pertaining to practices or arrangements—as constellations, which are just larger, more complicated bundles of practices and material arrangements. I use the expression "practice plenum" to denote the entirety of bundles and constellations.

Practices are composed of organized doings and sayings. This implies that any bundle of practices and material arrangements exhibits a dimension of activity that embraces the organized doings and sayings that compose its practices. This dimension is key to the relationship between life trajectories and bundles. For life trajectories, too, are made up of activities.

As a person goes through her day, she performs one action after another. Each of these activities is part of some practice and bundle, sometimes more than one practice and bundle. After getting up in the morning, for instance, a person might cook and then eat before turning to personal hygiene and getting dressed. While cooking and eating, the person carries out, that is, her activities are part of, cooking and eating practices. As a result, her life, for these stretches, *coincides* with these practices. If, the whole time, she also, in her head, plans a business meeting scheduled for later in the day, her life, for that stretch, also coincides with business practices. When, subsequently, she gets herself ready, her life coincides with personal hygiene practices, having left behind those of cooking and eating. And when she gets dressed, her activities are moments of dressing practices, having left behind those of cooking and eating and *passed through* those of personal hygiene. In this way, as a person goes through her day, her life episodically coincides with various practices and has passed through these practices once she moves on to further ones. (A similar analysis applies to the life trajectory of someone learning these practices since learning them involves either carrying on tentative, incomplete versions, for which room is made in the practices, or participating in distinct "learning" practices that are carried on as preludes to the practices themselves.) These coincidences can be considered phases, between which she transitions as her day develops.

Coinciding and passing through, like life phases and transitions, are temporal phenomena. They also involve space. To pass through a bundle, episodically coincide with its practices, is at once to proceed, and to trace a spatial path, amid the bundle's material arrangement(s). To coincide with a practice, for example, the practice of job seeking, is to perform job seeking actions—navigating, talking, answering questions etc.—while proceeding, and moving amid, material arrangements set up or usable for job seeking.

A second type of space is also involved. Humans generally proceed through the world sensitive to arrays of places and paths distributed through their circumjacent environments. By "places" I mean places to perform specifc actions (e.g., a place to sleep), whereas by "paths" I mean avenues for getting between places. Places and paths of these sorts are anchored in the material entities and arrangements thereof amid which people proceed. Which places and paths, moreover, are distributed through circumjacent environments is tied to people's ends; a kitchen table, for example, can be a place to eat given the end of consuming a meal or a place to search for a job given the end of being employed. Which places and paths are anchored where is also tied to social norms that determine what is prescribed or allowed to be done at or in relation to particular material entities (e.g., it is a social norm that a bed is a place to sleep). As people pass through a bundle, they are sensitive to arrays of places and paths that are tied both to the ends permitted and prescribed in the bundle's practices and to actions that are acceptable or prescribed to perform there at or toward the components of its material arrangements. Passing through a bundle thus entails that a segment of the sequence of actions that composes a life coincides with practices that are entwined with the material arrangements through which the trajectory cuts a spatial-temporal path and across which places and paths are distributed to which the course of that segment is sensitive. All of this, fnally, might transpire in a particular encompassing place: a meaningful localized region through which people proceed related to it as a whole. This encompassing place could be one's room, one's home or neighborhood, a work institution, a community, a country etc.

Before and after a life trajectory passes through a bundle of practices it lies outside the bundle. Even though, moreover, a life trajectory, during any stretch of time, lies outside many bundles, it always also coincides with some bundle(s) or other. This implies that, even though the trajectory, like any trajectory, lies outside many bundles in the practice plenum, it never lies outside the plenum. Over the course of a day, month, or lifetime, a life trajectory passes through a multitude of bundles, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes doubling back, sometimes in a regular sequence, and sometimes in unique combinations or sequences. Trajectories can even, usually jointly, extend the practice plenum by adding to or annexing further stretches of the material world to its material arrangements or sending chosen material entities into new material environments (e.g., the Voyager satellites).

Coinciding with and passing through are not the only relations that life trajectories bear to bundles. Trajectories also proceed dependent on bundles and on the background of bundles. These are two modalities of a wider phenomenon, namely, the sensitivity of human activity to states of the world.

All sorts of elements of a life, including its trajectories, phases, and transitions, depend on bundles, both those the life involved passes through and ones it proceeds outside of. This dependence can take different forms. For instance, the normative organizations of practices shape how participants in them proceed; this is an important vehicle by which discursive or institutional norms shape trajectories and the durations they exhibit (whether trajectories are construed à la life course research or the present essay). Via memory, moreover, bundles and what goes on in them can affect subsequent moments and phases of the lives that coincide with and pass through them. Similarly, learning, which involves the acquisition of knowledge, know-how, tastes, virtues, and the like, occurs as and as a result of people carrying on certain practices. Like the ability to recall past perceptual experiences, what is learned accumulates (and modulates as well as dissipates) and can affect later moments of life trajectories. Memory and learning are key mediators through which practices and constellations thereof shape trajectories, phases, and transitions.

Life trajectories likewise proceed on the background of bundles. The background comprises everything, given which a person acts as he does. An important component of the background encompasses everything a person experiences, knows, or is familiar with that (1) helps determine what makes sense to him to do, including in

reaction to something, or (2) makes him the sort of person who reacts as he did to that thing. A teacher who awards a student for repeated good work reacts to that student's history of good work. In the background of this action lie items, experience of or familiarity with which makes him the sort of person who welcomes and is inclined to award good work, for example, having received similar treatment himself when younger, admonishments from administrators to profle good students, a teaching workshop that emphasized the benefts to all students of recognizing good work, and so on. An important subtype of this component of the background comprises practices. For people often perpetuate practices with which they are familiar—especially those that they have "lived into" (*einleben in*)— without giving much thought to what they are doing. The teacher, for instance, might have grown up in a school system in which rewarding excellence was a widespread practice and then unrefexively rewarded the student after realizing that she had long been doing good work.

More expansively, bundles, and the practices and material arrangements that compose them, lie in the background of many actions and thus in the background of a life's trajectories, phases, and transitions. They contain matters, familiarity with or knowledge of which either helps shape what makes sense to people to do or makes people inclined to react in particular ways. Bundles also provide patterns of action, which people fall in line with. All these matters help fll out the situatedness of human activity.

In the introduction to the present volume, the editors explicate how a transition involves a bundle of practices. As explained, this means that any transition embraces segments of life trajectories in my sense that coincide with and move among the varied practices that make up the bundle involved. A transition, accordingly, embraces movement among practices. As I have explained, what moves between them are lives. A transition, as a result, involves one or more life trajectories in my sense passing through a variegated constellation of practices. Of course, it is not just this. As the editors argue, transitions also involve a variety of social processes that bear on life trajectories, above all, relations among individuals, institutional regulation, and discursive information. The bundle of practices that is involved in a transition thus embraces not only the practices that the transitioning life or lives coincide with but also those through which other actors, institutions, and discourses shape, regulate, and co-constitute these lives. Because of this, transitions can be described as "relational." Still, the peregrinations of lives (through bundles) are fundamental: without individual lives, there are no transitions. Indeed, life trajectories other than that of a person undergoing a transition are part of the transition.

# **Life Trajectories and Chains of Action**

The fnal topic for this essay is the apparent parallel, but in reality deep divergence, between life trajectories and chains of action. In a recent book (Schatzki, 2019), I argue that chains of activity are one of the two chief dynamos of social change, the

other being material events and processes. Social change, I argue there, is the product of nexuses of such chains, events, and processes. The reason I presently address the divergence of life trajectories from activity chains is to locate lives and what the life courses literature calls "agency"—a person's construction through activity of her own life course, e.g., Elder et al., 2003; Schoon & Lyons-Amos, 2017, Bernardi et al., 2019—in the causal order of society.

A chain of activity is a series of actions, each of which responds to the prior member in the chain or to a change in the world that that earlier member brought about. A conversation, for example, is a chain of actions that goes back and forth among the interlocuters; a supply chain, meanwhile, is a nexus of chains involving many people and material intermediaries. Chains of action are ubiquitous in society. Whenever an action responds to a previous action or to a state of the world for which a previous action is responsible, a chain is extended. People respond to others' actions and their effects all the time (think of being with your family, in traffc, at work, playing a sport, or doing political work). They also sometimes respond to states of affairs without being aware of who is responsible for them or that others are responsible for them at all: they pick up litter, swerve to miss objects on the highway, make investment decisions on the basis of price swings, and undermine august traditions. In all these cases, people extend chains of action.

One way a life trajectory differs from a chain of actions is that a trajectory—as a key dimension of a life—embraces the actions of one person whereas a chain contains actions performed by different people. Chains in effect cross—pass through trajectories, linking them. Conversely, trajectories contain actions that extend chains. It is the multiplicity of trajectories that makes it possible for chains to continue via different people's actions.

Another difference between trajectories and chains lies in their relationships to causality. Chains of activity house causality. One type of causality involved is prior actions and states of affairs leading to subsequent actions, that is, subsequent actions reacting to them. (Discourses and institutions mold transactions, and thus phases and transitions, by shaping *how* people react to prior actions and states of affairs.) A second type of causality is activity directly effecting changes in the world. It follows that each link in a chain of activity is causal: chains of activity are lines of causality that snake through the practice plenum, passing through practices and crossing life trajectories. As lines of causality, such chains, as stated, are responsible for social changes, including changes in trajectories, phases, and transitions. Life trajectories do not house causal relations in this way. Activities that succeed one another as part of a life trajectory do not, for the most part, bear causal relations to one another (one can, of course, react to one's own past actions). They are, instead, different performances by one person at different moments or periods of time. The relations between them are largely noncausal, for example, temporal succession, being parts of the same larger actions (action stacks) and being performed by the same person. It follows that lives and their trajectories are not, generally speaking, causally responsible for the state of social affairs, including lives and their trajectories: they are instead crossing points of the causal strings responsible for these matters.

One fnal point. Activity chains are composed of activities, among other things. Life trajectories, too, are composed of activities, among other things. And practices, of course, are likewise composed of activities. In fact, one and the same activity can in principle be part of an action chain, an element of a life trajectory, and a component of a practice. One and the same activity is all three simultaneously whenever someone extends a chain in doing something that continues a given practice. This is not an infrequent event. Quite the contrary: it is the normal state of things.

This centrality of activity to chains, trajectories, and practices makes concrete how transitions are done: both the practices as part of which and the life trajectories through which transitions occur, like the chains of action that bear on these practices and trajectories, are composed centrally by actions.

# **Conclusion**

Life trajectories are central to understanding a variety of human and social phenomena. They supply the actions that help constitute social states of affairs, including life phases and transitions, while themselves being molded by these affairs. They form a particular interest of biographers, historians, and poets. Contrary to the tenets of individualism, however, they are responsible for few social changes. Instead, causal determination in the form of chains of activity fows through lives en route to leaving changed social phenomena in their wake; it follows, incidentally, that activity chains are central to analyzing how social change affects life courses (cf. Elder, 1985). Yet, life trajectories also provide the activities that compose these chains. In thus providing much of the matter of social life, they are an indispensable presupposition, object, and point of intervention for the social disciplines.

The present essay has combined a phenomenologically-based account of life trajectories with a practice theoretical account of the constitutive social context through which they propagate. It thus sheds some light on what it means for lives to be "constituted" by practices. The advantage of a practice theoretical account in this context is that it provides a unifed account of the variety of social contexts involved (including what Bernardi et al., 2019 call the "supra-individual level" of variables), for example, interactions with others, others' activities, organizations, institutions, social changes, and longer-term processes. It thereby spares the analyst the error of hypostatizing, or setting on a distinct "level," social entities such as organizations, institutions, and social changes and misconstruing how they govern. As a result, it offers to life course analysis a way of seamlessly integrating analysis of the phases and transitions of life with analyses of other social phenomena.

# **References**

Hägerstrand, T. (1975). Space, time, and human conditions. In A. Karlqvist, L. Lundqvist, & F. Snickars (Eds.), *Dynamic allocation of space* (pp. 3–14). Lexington Books.

Neugarten, B. L., & Datan, N. L. (1973). Sociological perspectives on the life cycle. In P. B. Baltes & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), *Life-span developmental psychology: Personality and socialization* (pp. 53–71). Academic.

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# **Part II Institutions and Organisations**

# **Chapter 3 Welfare States as Transition Regimes: Reconstruction from International Comparisons of Young People's Transitions to Work**

#### **Andreas Walther**

There is consensus that the institutionalization of the life course is related to the organization of modern societies as welfare states. In labor societies, the differentiation of age-specifc roles centered around paid work resulted in standardization of what Kohli (1985) called the "tripartite" life course consisting of phases of preemployment, employment and/or family work, and post-employment. The introduction of public education resulted in the creation of the "youth" phase as an educational moratorium to prepare the following generation for employment and life careers (cf. Zinnecker, 2000). With the development of modern welfare states and the introduction of pension schemes, "retirement" emerged as another distinct life phase, while social security secures employment careers and social services of people-processing and people-changing (Hasenfeld, 1983) make sure that individuals are willing and able to live "normal" lives (Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016).

If national welfare states are largely involved in the institutionalization of the life course and the transitions it includes, international comparisons of welfare states offer a way for the analysis aimed at understanding how welfare states have contributed to the constitution of life course transitions and the different ways in which they are being shaped (and still do). The chapter introduces the concept of "transition regimes," a comparative model developed for analyzing school-to-worktransitions. The aim is to question if and to what extent this model can contribute to the objectives of refexive transition research that extends the research of how individual transitions progress to how they are constantly re-constituted. In detail, this implies relating the analysis of comprehensive constellations with the discursive, institutional, and individual practices involved in doing transitions (see Chap. 1 by Walther, Stauber, and Settersten, this volume).

A. Walther (\*)

Goethe-University Frankfurt Main, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022

B. Stauber et al. (eds.), *Doing Transitions in the Life Course*, Life Course Research and Social Policies 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13512-5\_3

The chapter starts with a brief overview of the development of international studies of school-to-work-transitions. This is followed by a review of comparative welfare research and the introduction of the concept of transition regimes, which is then related to the concept of doing transitions. The conclusion explores the contribution of comparative analysis of transition regimes for refexive transition research.

# **International (and) Comparative Research on Transitions into Training and Work**

Young people's transitions from school to work have been a focus of social research since the mid-1980s. The Fordist program of economic growth, progress and full employment of the postwar period was replaced by a partial decoupling of education and employment and structural unemployment resulting from globalization and greater fexibility in production and work (Mayer, 2004). Youth unemployment especially turned into a challenge for the "integration promise" of the welfare state (Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016, p. 4). This structural crisis was referred to in terms of a potential "end of work," the "limits of welfare," or the declining sovereignty of nation-states and the growing infuence of international political actors like OECD and EU. "Transition research" (used as a term in Germany for the frst time by Brock, 1991) developed both nationally and internationally with international comparisons serving as an evidence base for the competition between national economies (cf. Walther, 2017).

Due to their orientation towards social and labor market policies, many studies were oriented towards institutional and normative criteria of "success" versus "failure" (like work versus unemployment), which has contributed to a "methodological institutionalism" of transition research (Schröer, 2015, p. 934). Success and failure were explained by categories such as social background, ethnicity, and gender and interpreted partly as individual or structural factors of disadvantage, the performance of regional labor markets, and the ways transitions are shaped by social, educational and employment policies. Comparative studies addressed organizational versus occupational labor markets (Shavit & Müller, 1998) or more versus less stratifed and standardized education and training (Allmendinger, 1989) as independent variables of (youth) unemployment. However, structures and logics of welfare affect the social composition and the duration of unemployment, whereas they have less infuence on how many people become unemployed (cf. Blossfeld et al., 2005; Pohl & Walther, 2007).

Gradually, also qualitative research designs focusing on the subjective aspects of transitions to work were introduced. Biographical analysis, especially, permitted researchers to reconstruct the subjective meanings that young people ascribe to institutional and economic aspects of work, their interpretations of discontinuous transitions, their experiences of labor market policies as well as their individual coping strategies. This contributed to weakening methodological institutionalism, but it often implied a dualistic and oppositional conception of structure and agency suggesting that individual subjectivities are separated from rather than interactively related with institutional structures (e.g., Evans & Heinz, 1994; Heinz, 2000; Schoon & Silbereisen, 2009).

The studies of the European Group for Regional and International Social Research (EGRIS), which followed the political agenda of EU funding programs, aimed to reconstruct the interactions between institutional actors and young people. In country-based case studies, different actors' perspectives were comparatively analysed through secondary analyses, document analyses, surveys, and expert and biographical interviews. Main themes were risks of exclusion as side effects of labor market policies through stigmatisation and the "cooling out" of occupational aspirations (Walther et al., 2002). Other studies dealt with the divergence and convergence of such measures towards the activating welfare state within the EU, characterized by a shift towards expecting more self-responsibility of individuals even in precarious situations and thus emphasizing the relationship of disadvantage, participation, and subjective motivation (Pohl & Walther, 2007; Walther et al., 2006) or the role of the family in coping with uncertain transitions (Biggart & Kovacheva, 2006). This perspective was also applied to transitions into parenthood, into political, social, and civic participation, and in the context of migration (Pohl et al., 2011). An international comparative perspective allowed researchers to distinguish between general (European) and context-specifc (national) aspects and to deconstruct apparently self-evident assumptions of normality through "pendulating" between internal and external views.

The critique of the dominance of institutional indicators of success and failure implied questioning an isolated and individualized view of discontinuous transitions. Rather than attributing them to social or individual problems, they were interpreted in relation to the context of late modern societies: the interplay of economic fexibilization, the individualization and pluralization of life conditions – and the de-standardization of the life course (cf. Beck, 1992; Heinz, 1991; Mayer, 2004). Consequently, models limited to explaining transitions as depending on the organization of education and labor markets deemed no longer suffcient. Instead, it seemed more and more necessary to subject these entities used as independent variables in studying transitions to a comprehensive analysis of how different ways of shaping transitions in the life course have evolved historically.

# **From Welfare Regimes to Transition Regimes**

One concept that fulfls the criterion of a comprehensive analysis of how individual lives are coordinated through labor market and state institutions is the concept of *welfare regimes* (Esping-Andersen, 1990). This model compares levels of social security, access regulations, responsibilities between state, market and family, and the role of different actors, especially aristocracy, citizens, farmers, workers' movement, the church and the state, in the historical development of welfare states. Esping-Andersen distinguished three types of welfare states: (1) a *social democratic* welfare regime in the Nordic countries with broad access on the basis of citizenship and a high level of benefts, (2) a *liberal* welfare regime in the Anglo-Saxon countries with a similar regulation of access but lower level of benefts (residual), and (3) a *conservative* welfare regime in continental Europe, where access to social security depends on employment and family status and level of benefts varies. This model has been criticized for its limitations and further developed, for example, with the addition of a familistic or sub-protective regime type for Southern Europe, the identifcation of mechanisms of doing gender and doing ethnicity (Ferrera, 2005; Gallie & Paugam, 2000; Pohl, 2015; Sainsbury, 1999, 2006), and the inclusion of social services (Lorenz, 2006). Nevertheless, this model still anchors comparative welfare studies because it conceptualizes welfare states as "modes of integration" (Schefold, 1996) or "programs of socialization" (Lessenich, 2013: 895). This applies even more if, following Anglo-Saxon or Nordic traditions, education is interpreted as an integral element of welfare due its role in allocating occupational and social positions (cf. Allmendinger & Leibfried, 2003).

Such a comprehensive understanding of welfare justifes reference to the notion of a "regime" (Walther, 2017). In political science, the concept of regime refers to constellations of principles, norms, rules, and procedures operating without sanctions, such as the notion of "governance without government" in international relations (Mayer et al., 1993, p. 391). A similar understanding of interdependencies of labor market, welfare and education that transgress regulation through the state can be found in Mayer's (1997) "political economy of the life course." A second strand of perspectives connected to the regime concept are theories of power derived from Gramsci's (1971) concept of "hegemony." The relationship between a life course institutionalized through welfare and shared representations of "normal life" contributes to a powerful complex of values, norms, and practices (cf. Lessenich, 2013). According to Link (2006), "normality" is constituted by the relationship of power and knowledge of how "most others" live and thus informs social control and the coordination of social action. Normalization consequently results from the interplay between discourse, welfare state regulation and individuals' everyday life practices. These refections may explain why Esping-Andersen (1990) compared welfare *regimes* rather than "states" and why Kohli (1985) referred to a *life course regime*.

The concept of regime opens the view for the question *how* processes of social reproduction are being shaped – for example, how different welfare states or different institutional ways of regulating transitions refect specifc representations of family, individual, work, youth, or disadvantage (cf. Pfau-Effnger, 2005; Walther, 2017). The regime model implies an idea of social reproduction as the interplay between various actors and dimensions from which different normalities of the life course and transitions emerge (see Fig. 3.1).

Comparative research is concerned with "relating relations" (Schriewer, 2000, p. 495). In transition research, this does not only apply to the relations between institutional structures and individual trajectories but also to the ways that transition structures and their underlying rationalities have changed. Thus, the regime concept can be applied to distinguish different "ideal types" of shaping transitions. While

**Fig. 3.1** Dimensions of welfare regimes. (Source: Walther, 2017, p. 289)

Esping-Andersen (1990) focused on access and levels of social security, the studies carried out by the EGRIS group (see above) aimed to elaborate regimes of schoolto-work-transitions. This implied to include also other dimensions such as levels of public expenditure for education, labor market policies, and family, children and youth, degrees of selectivity and standardization of education and training (Allmendinger, 1989) as well as the aims and contents of schemes for disadvantaged and unemployed young people. In a next step, analyzing the differences between schemes for adults and for young people, especially by document analysis and expert interviews, allowed to reconstruct inherent cultural meanings and interpretations of "disadvantage" (individual versus structural) and representations of and expectations towards "youth." Figure 3.2 shows the development from welfare regimes to life course and transition regimes suggesting that also the ways in which other transitions in the life course are shaped and constructed may be referred to in terms of transition regimes. While there are analogies between life course regimes as developed by other authors (see for example Mayer, 2004) regarding the relevance of welfare, education and labor market structures, the transition regime concepts pay more attention to cultural patterns and to biographical agency.

In the research undertaken in the studies of the EGRIS network cited above four clusters of ideal-typical constellations of shaping transitions involving institutional, cultural-discursive, and biographical dimension were elaborated. In the following, these *transition regimes* will be briefy presented focusing on dominant representations and normalities of transitions from youth to adulthood (Walther, 2006, 2017):

• The *liberal* transition regime (e.g., UK, Ireland) is characterized by active labor market policies exerting control and sanction and refecting the traditional expectation towards youth to become economically independent as soon as possible. However, the fexibilization of education and training has contributed to protracting and diversifying transition routes.

**Fig. 3.2** Dimensions of transition regimes. (Source: Walther, 2017, p. 294)