Martin Kohli

Private and public transfers between generations: linking the family and the state

AbstractIn the conventional story of modernization, the emergence of the nuclear family and of public old age security have been seen as parallel and mutually reinforcing processes. According to this view, the traditional intergenerational transfers in the family have been crowded out and replaced by those in the public sphere. In recent years, a growing body of research has demonstrated that substantial transfers between adult generations in the family beyond the nuclear households still exist. Their direction has been reversed, however. The new evidence shows that there is a net downward flow of private resources from the older generations to their adult offspring, i.e. counter to the public transfers. Two questions then arise: How are private and public transfers linked, i.e. to what extent do the private transfers from the older to the younger generations in the family depend on public transfers through old age pensions? And what are the effects of channelling public resources to younger family genera...

Die Institutionalisierung des Lebenslaufs

Die Anregung oder die Last, die eine Soziologie des Lebenslaufs fur die Sozialforschung bedeutet, last sich leicht benennen: sie weist nach, das das Leben eine zusatzliche Dimension aufweist, namlich die zeitliche. Wer sich mit anderen Fragen beschaftigt, steht einmal mehr vor der Aufgabe, das Erhebungs- und Analyseprogramm entsprechend auszuweiten. Das Lebensalter (bzw. die Stellung im Lebenslauf) drangt sich als eine zusatzliche Varianzdimension auf; sie mus kontrolliert werden, um die eigentlich interessierenden Effekte reiner zu erhalten. Eine direktere Form der Thematisierung von Alter und Lebenslauf besteht darin, Alternsverlaufe selbst als Gegenstand zu behandeln (ahnlich wie in der Entwicklungspsychologie).

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

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

Time for Retirement: Comparative Studies of Early Exit from the Labor Force.

1. The changing balance of work and retirement Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 2. The evolution of early exit: a comparative analysis of labor force participation patterns Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 3. Testing the industry-mix hypothesis of early exit Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 4. The Netherlands: an extreme case Bert de Vroom and Martin Blomsma 5. France: massive exit through unemployment compensation Anne-Marie Guillemard 6. Germany: The diversity of pathways Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 7. Great Britain: The contradictions of early exit Frank Laczko and Chris Phillipson 8. The United States: The privatization of exit Harold L. Sheppard 9. Sweden: partial exit Eskil Wadensjo 10. Hungary: exit from the state economy Julia Szalai 11. Pathways and their prospects: a comparative interpretation of the meaning of early exit Anne-Marie Guillemard and Herman van Gunsteren Index.

Social Structure and Social Construction of Life Stages

The articles in this symposium discuss how the life course has changed in the Western modernization process, how the social construction of the life course and of life stages can be theoretically conc

Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration

Family-related migration is moving to the centre of political debates on migration, integration and multiculturalism in Europe. It is also more and more leading to lively academic interest in the family dimensions of international migration. At the same time, strands of research on family migrations and migrant families remain separate from -and sometimes ignorant of- each other. This volume seeks to bridge the disciplinary divides. Fifteen chapters come up with a number of common themes. Collectively, the authors address the need to better understand the diversity of family-related migration and its resulting family forms and practices, to question, if not counter, simplistic assumptions about migrant families in public discourses, to study family migration from a mix of disciplinary perspectives at various levels and via different methodological approaches and to acknowledge the states role in shaping family-related migration, practices and lives.

The social connectedness of older Europeans: patterns, dynamics and contexts

Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), our article shows that the population aged 50 or older is socially connected in several ways. The various dimensions of social connectedness turn out to be complementary rather than substitutive, except for the relationship between informal social relations and family relations, which tends to be characterized by substitution. Our longitudinal analysis reveals that the dynamics of formal and informal social relations as well as family relations tend to be driven by individuals’ resources and needs. While the associations between elders’ social connectedness and individual characteristics are very similar across countries, we find significant regional variation regarding the levels and the dynamics of social connectedness.

Ageing as a Challenge for Sociological Theory

The sociology of ageing has often turned to general sociology in search of useful theoretical approaches, but there has been little cognitive influx back into general theory. By this one-sided relation, the sociology of ageing has typically constituted itself as an applied field. It can be argued, however, that the problems of an ageing society bring forth not only a new topical area but also a challenge for some of the foundations of sociological theory, which were largely laid before these problems became visible. The paper deals with some of the systematic issues that arise in this respect. It takes as its point of departure that modern society has been theoretically conceived as a ‘work society’. If social life is structured around work and its organisation, how can we theoretically cope with a situation in which a large (and still growing) part of the population has left the domain of formally organised work? This question is discussed on three levels: (I) the structure of social inequality (e.g. welfare classes instead of production-based classes); (2) cultural meaning structures (e.g. leisure instead of productivity and achievement); and (3) socialisation (e.g. biographical anticipation and reminiscence instead of a ‘situational’ orientation).

Aging and Justice

Publisher Summary Aging is relevant to justice concerns not so much in terms of the process of individual aging as in terms of the aggregation of individuals into age groups and generations or cohorts as socially delimited entities. Justice beliefs and attitudes are critical because at the collective level, they condition the public acceptance of welfare state reforms. Moreover, they are critical because at the individual level, they affect compliance with the taxes and contributions imposed by the welfare state. The discourse of generational equity has clearly been one of the more effective ones in shaping the public agenda of welfare retrenchment over past several years. The political consequences drawn by the proponents of generational equity go in the direction of reducing public spending for the elderly. Other demands include age-based rationing for some types of medical care and age tests for a range of issues such as driving or even voting. The demands are often grouped under the term “sustainability,” which links the long-term survival of social security schemes to issues in the domain of ecology.

The Social Construction of Ageing through Work: Economic Structure and Life-world

The analysis of modern-age stratification systems must be based on the social organisation of work. This requires a theoretical approach that takes into account the structure of economic production, but also the fact that work is a meaningful activity of human beings within their life-world. The task therefore consists of integrating ‘materialist’ and ‘interpretive’ approaches to social reality. This integration is attempted in an examination of the special problems encountered by workers in the second half of their work life, as created by the ‘construction of ageing’ in the industrial firm. Existing approaches drawn from industrial sociology, stress structural features of the production process, whilst labelling theory stresses culturally induced age labels. Both are one-sided. A more comprehensive approach has to conceptualise the industrial firm as an actor with strategies based on economic rationality and as a life-world constituted by what is taken for granted by its members. The final section applies this framework to an empirical case study.