The Making of Life-course Histories

Abstract

Institutions such as ‘the family’, ‘work’ or ‘social policy’ have been adopted as broad schema within which we might make sense of social change and the ways in which social identities are produced and reproduced over time. Such structural representations of the life course tell us little, however, about people’s experience of the identities through which the life course is constructed. As noted in previous chapters, awareness of this omission within many accounts of ageing has led social scientists to take a quite different theoretical direction. They have adopted either micro-level, ‘actor-oriented’ sociological perspectives such as symbolic interactionism or ethnomethodology; or have had recourse to more literary or autobiographical sources.