Abstract
Looked upon from a societal viewpoint, childhood shows up as a configuration of social processes, discourses and structures which relate to ways of living as a child at a particular time in a particular society, and which gain a certain permanency by being reproduced in social life.1 Focusing on the configuration as a whole, childhood may be regarded as a societal institution, and the term institutionalization then means the totality of processes of establishing and further developing childhood as a societal institution. The secular process of the emergence of childhood as a social institution may be seen as part of the trend of institutionalization of the life course, which was conceptualized by sociologists in the 1980s in order to analyse the historical emergence and transformations of age-related societal regimes in people’s lives in modernity (Kohli, 1985; Mayer and Müller, 1985; Hareven, 1986).
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© 2009 Helga Zeiher
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Zeiher, H. (2009). Institutionalization as a Secular Trend. In: Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W.A., Honig, MS. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27468-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27468-6_9
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