Academic literature on the topic 'Life course destandardization'

A central problem of life course analysis concerns the changes brought about by the pluralization and differentiation of biographies in western societies. Lives would be increasingly dissimilar from each other and marked by a broader range of transitions and stages. Under the lens of life course theorization, the heterogenization of biographies is typically understood as destandardization. However, if the destandardization hypothesis gained momentum, there is still little information about its explanatory power outside the wealthiest centres of Europe and North America. Following recent trends in research, the article critically examines the applicability of the destandardization hypothesis to the Portuguese case. Through an analysis of the lives of three generations of Portuguese men and women, we reconstruct the life trajectories of each generation starting from the 1930s until the early 2000s. Through the reconstitution of both family and work trajectories, we see if there is a standard biography from which to derive subsequent patterns of heterogenization. From this perspective, we reassess the extent to which the destandardization model is suitable for explaining life course transformations in the Portuguese society.

The life course of Chilean women has experienced profound transformations in the past decades. It has been argued that transitions to marriage and motherhood are being postponed as they are experienced by women at an older age and are becoming events that characterize an increasingly smaller part of the female population. These changes have been often interpreted as part of a process of individualization that would have reconfigured the cultural norms and social practices regarding gender roles and family formation in Chilean society. Nevertheless, the prevalence and diversification of the practices and norms that shape the transitions to marriage and motherhood at an empirical level remain unexplored. This article aims to assess the individualization of the life course of women in Chile by empirically analysing the destandardization of the practices and norms that shape the transitions to marriage and motherhood. By analysing data from the Encuesta Nacional Bicentenario Universidad Católica – Adimark (2009), it demonstrates that changes in the prevalence of the transitions to marriage and motherhood and the diversification of the practices and norms that shape their timing are ambivalent regarding destandardization. These results suggest that the life course of women in Chile is becoming individualized to some extent, but that this trend of cultural and social change is not consistent and uniform, but rather partial and fragmented, non-linear, and significantly conditioned by the social structure.

Abstract Purpose of the Study A destandardization of labor-force patterns revolving around retirement has been observed in recent literature. It is unclear, however, to which degree and of which kind. This study looked at sequences rather than individual statuses or transitions and argued that differentiating older Americans’ retirement sequences by type, order, and timing and considering gender, class, and race differences yields a less destandardized picture. Design and Methods Sequence analysis was employed to analyze panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for 7,881 individuals observed 6 consecutive times between ages 60–61 and 70–71. Results As expected, types of retirement sequences were identified that cannot be subsumed under the conventional model of complete retirement from full-time employment around age 65. However, these retirement sequences were not entirely destandardized, as some irreversibility and age-grading persisted. Further, the degree of destandardization varied along gender, class, and race. Unconventional sequences were archetypal for middle-level educated individuals and Blacks. Also, sequences for women and individuals with lower education showed more unemployment and part-time jobs, and less age-grading. Implications A sequence-analytic approach that models group differences uncovers misjudgments about the degree of destandardization of retirement sequences. When a continuous process is represented as individual transitions, the overall pattern of retirement sequences gets lost and appears destandardized. These patterns get further complicated by differences in social structures by gender, class, and race in ways that seem to reproduce advantages that men, more highly educated individuals, and Whites enjoy in numerous areas over the life course.

We explore the relations between the notion of distance and a feature set–based concept of similarity and show that this concept of similarity has a spatial interpretation that is complementary to distance: it is interpreted as “direction.” Furthermore, we show how proper normalization leads to distances that can be directly interpreted as dissimilarity: Closeness in normalized space implies and is implied by similarity of the same objects, while remoteness implies and is implied by dissimilarity. Finally, we show how, in research into destandardization of the life course, properly normalizing may drastically and unequivocally change our interpretation of intercohortal distances.

In recent years, two main reforms have occurred in Italy, changing the general context where youth transition processes take place. First of all, there has been a deep labour market deregulation. This has increased the amount of unstable job positions, especially among cohorts looking for their first job after 1997. Secondly, but no less importantly, there has been an increase in the enrolment rate to tertiary education and the Bologna process introduced relevant innovation to the Italian University system. The graduate population is then, not only an increasing part of the overall youth population of the country, but also the subgroup which has been doubly affected by the reforms. For this reason, I decided to investigate this subgroup of young people more deeply, analysing how the transition from university to work has changed over time. I used the last five waves of the ISTAT Survey on the transition to work of University graduates (1995 to 2007) and an AlmaLaurea database to investigate the graduates labour market condition five years after the degree. I use mainly multinomial logistic regression models and I adopted the marginal effects approach to compare models over time and between groups. I also used propensity score matching. I observed that there has been a de-standardization process: the typical “from university to work” description is no longer a good representation of the concrete processes taking place after the graduation. In fact there has been an increase in participation in the labour market before graduation (anticipation in the transition process) and to post-tertiary enrolment (delay). Moreover, there has been in recent years an increase in the unstable job position of graduates three years after graduation. This de-standardization process does not imply individualization: social origins and gender continue to shape the graduates transition into labour market. It seems that two main pathways are emerging: the first, more frequent for children coming from higher social origins, is based on fast transition through University with a high performance that leads to post-tertiary enrolment; the second, more frequent among lower origins students is, instead a mix of work and study during university which leads more frequently to a stable occupation after the degree, but paying the price of higher over-education. This suggests that, in a context of expansion of higher education, the returns to it could differ among social classes.