Walter R. Heinz

Life Course: Innovations and Challenges for Social Research

Recent developments of life-course theory and research are discussed in a comparative framework. With accelerating social change, the life course has become a topic that centres on the interplay of personal and institutional dynamics through the life span that provides the temporal and social contexts for biographical planning and stock-taking. Modern life-course analysis asks to what extent biographies are losing their structural embeddedness in favour of negotiations among individuals, opportunities, institutions and social networks. First, a historical account about European and North American traditions of life-course research is presented, delineating the cohort/life-event and the life-history approaches. Second, three conceptual frameworks are illuminated that focus on the relationship between social change and human lives: linking mechanisms, structuration and institutional arrangements (with a focus on age and gender). Concerning methodology, longitudinal studies that use quantitative as well as qualitative methods are necessary to understand the interrelationships between social change and biography. Third, innovative themes for research are presented, relating to the issues of agency and institutions, the timing of transitions and linked lives. The article concludes with a call for more cross-cultural life-course research.

From Work Trajectories to Negotiated Careers

In the social sciences work trajectories tend to be studied as careers which link individual participation histories in labor markets, occupations, and firms. Career models conceptualize the process of passing through socially defined pathways, but they neglect the mechanisms that connect these histories to biographical time and processes of social change (see Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, this volume). In this chapter, the work life course is regarded as a career, which is embedded in labor markets and organizations, and evolves through the interaction between social institutions and biographical actors. I argue that in post-industrial society there is an increasing emphasis upon personal decisions and responsibility in the shaping of the work life course, and a corresponding decline of normative age-markers for the timing and sequencing of labor market participation.

Vocational Training and Career Development in Germany: Results from a Longitudinal Study

The present paper presents empirical results from a German panel study which collected longitudinal data regarding the job entry of young adults in six of the top training occupations in the service and technical-industrial sectors. The data clearly demonstrate the influence of gender and social origin on the access to training in particular occupations. Furthermore, the existence of gender and occupation-specific patterns of career development is demonstrated. However, the apprenticeship system also provides mobility opportunities which depend on the specific training occupation. Moving along a certain occupational pathway results in an interplay between the structural opportunities and constraints of occupational contexts, on the one hand, and the young workers’ aspirations and orientations, on the other. These orientations and aspirations were investigated with qualitative methods which helped to identify different modes of biographical action orientations of young workers.

Jugendliche vor den Hürden des Arbeitsmarktes

Im folgenden Beitrag diskutieren wir anhand ausgewahlter Ergebnisse unserer qualitativen Langsschnittstudie zum Ubergang von der Schule in die Berufsausbildung die These von der Individualisierung der Jugendbiographie.

Youth Transitions and Employment in Germany

In the 1990s, the timing and duration of youth transitions has become variable because of cultural modernisation and the declining stability of careers. In particular, the German ‘dual system’ of Vocational Education and Training (VET) has come under pressure of globalisation and labour market deregulation. Despite economic turbulence, the main features of the VET have been maintained. The apprenticeship route is still highly accepted-two-thirds of the cohort of school-leavers are passing through it. It continues to provide standardised occupational qualifications and a context for socialisation. It supplies a skilled labour force and keeps youth unemployment low-despite shortcomings in standards of social equality and a slow pace in adapting to changes in technology and work. For the future, the ‘left modernisers’ strategy of upgrading skills remains possible, by reforming the apprenticeship system and main-taining the ’high-skills‘ route for transition from education to work. In transition studies structural analysis should be combined with research on institutional regulations, transition pathways, and individual agency.

The Transition from School to Work in Crisis: Coping with Threatening Unemployment

As West German youth have confronted restricted opportunities for employment and training, some observers have predicted that they would become either rebellious or hopeless. A longitudinal interview study of 200 youth in Bremen, a city with a very depressed economy, reveals that they tend to accept personal responsibility for improving their prospects instead of turning against society or giving up. The subjects, students in the lowest-level secondary school (Hauptschule), remained optimistic as they sought apprenticeship places and asserted that they were obligated to obtain the highest educational levels possible and to be flexible in their career choices in order to maximize their chances of finding a training place and, ultimately, a job. Although this finding is encouraging from the perspective of maintaining social order, it is somewhat unexpected in view of the German tradition of state responsibility for maintaining low rates of unemployment. Moreover, it seems to require a form of self-deception on the young peoples part. They reconstruct their biographies to convince themselves that a training place they accepted simply because it was the only one available is in a field that they always wanted to enter.

Flexibility, learning and risk: work, training and early careers in England and Germany

The transitions of early adulthood and early careers are becoming increasingly disorderly and less predictable than in the past. These changes can be seen as manifestations of the “risk society”. Based on surveys and biographical interviews of the life and early career experiences of young adults in Germany and England, generates some insights into the relationships between “transition behaviour” and career outcomes, with reference to contrasting labour markets and the interfaces between personal lives, work and learning. While focusing on comparisons between the labour markets in the former West Germany, reference is also made to the emerging situation in the eastern part of Germany. Concludes that policies are required which develop active transition behaviours in young adults, while providing social and economic support to finance studies, reduce risk for the most vulnerable and promote active and autonomous modes of learning trajectories in adult life.

Learning and Work Transition Policies in a Comparative Perspective: Canada and Germany

It is complicated to compare education and training policies in different countries because their institutional structures are quite different. Comparing participation rates and durations in various transition paths from education to work and the outcomes in North America1 and Europe directs our attention to multiple causes and different social institutions. Main differences concern the duration of primary and secondary education, and the access to and duration of secondary and postsecondary pathways. Differences also concern the age of entry into postsecondary education, the duration of academic studies, and last but not least, the degree to which linkages between the education system, the labor market and careers are regulated by institutions of the welfare state. Concerning transition policies, for example, in Canada, provincial and territorial governments have jurisdiction over education although the federal government does play a role in youth unemployment programs. Transition issues therefore “lie at the crossroads of several policy jurisdictions” (OECD, 1999, p. 33). As in Germany, Canadian policy-makers share a concern about the need to enhance the skills of workers in a more competitive labor market. The German system has to be analysed at additional levels: There are the policy frameworks developed by the European Union, the training and education-to-work legislation of the Federal Government, the education responsibilities of the state (provincial) governments, and the regional and local education administrations

Redefining the Status of Occupations

In the past thirty years we have seen waves of re-assessments carried out on the world of work in the wake of the declining industrial society: the degradation of work (Braverman, 1974) was prominent in the 1970s; the end of the division of labour and the upgrading of work (Kern & Schumann, 1984) in the 1980s; the end of work (Rifkin, 1995) in the 1990s; and the end of the career (Moen & Roehling, 2005) at the turn of the century. Will we witness the end of the term ‘occupation’ in the years to come? While Rifkin (1995) propagated the decline of the labour force on a global scale in the post-market era, as the consequence of massive job cuts in production and marketing of goods and services, Moen & Roehling (2005) argue that the lock-step pattern of career is dissolving, that it never existed for women and is becoming less and less the employment pattern of men. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is rising job insecurity, discontinuous employment and the requirement to upgrade one’s skills, a structural shift of the relationship between education, training and employment that has generated the ‘contingent work-life course’ (Heinz, 2003). In this chapter, I shall argue that it is not the end of the term occupation, but a transformation towards a new constellation of training, competence, work and company organization, due to a complex combination of economic, cultural and social changes. The following discussion focuses on Germany, because it is a prototype for an occupation-centred society with its standardized system of vocational education and training (VET) and a close fit between certified skill qualifications and employment status and careers (e.g. Schwarze, Buttler & Wagner, 1994; Solga & Konietzka, 1999). The extent to which the status of occupations has to be redefined in post-industrial service societies can be demonstrated by looking at the effects of structural and cultural changes on Germany’s well-organized system of occupations.

Brücken bauen zwischen Bildung und Arbeit

Es ist schon einige Zeit her. Als wir daruber nachdachten, ob es nicht sinnvoll sei, angesichts der Widerspruche zwischen Modernisierungseuphorie und bildungspolitischem Stillstand ein Diskussionsforum zu etablieren, das diesen Widerspruchen auf den Grund gehen konnte, waren die grosen Systemzusammenbruche im Osten noch gar nicht in Sicht. Vielmehr hatte nach der konservativen und technokratischen Wende der Schwenk zur Reproduktion von Ungleichheit im Bereich von Bildung und Arbeit gerade erst wieder eingesetzt; die dazugehorenden bildungspolitischen Kurzel lauteten „Elitebildung“, „Aufhebung der Begabtenbenachteiligung“, numerus clausus, „Bildung als Burgerpflicht“ und so weiter. Es war klar, das mit der Umkehrung des Reformprinzips „Fordern statt Auslesen“ im Grunde nur auf bildungspolitischem Gebiet nachvollzogen werden sollte, was im Bereich der gesellschaftlichen Guterdistribution schon seit Jahren im Gange war: die Sparpolitik zu einer Ruckverteilung der Lebenschancen von unten nach oben zu nutzen.