Page 243 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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214 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

party membership were favoured or disfavoured Drobnic and Blossfeld (2004) use the life-
in the mobility process. These interventions into course principle of ‘interdependent or linked
the mobility process typically created persisting lives’ to remedy failures of the traditional
differences in the subsequent life chances of the social mobility paradigm in understanding
affected cohorts. mechanisms for access to labour market posi-
● Family disruption generates downward mobility tions. In their review of the Wisconsin
both over the lifecourse and across generations.
● Marital homogamy is found in every country, but Longitudinal Study (WLS), Sewell et al.
there is considerable heterogeneity in its extent. (2004) show how interest shifted, over
40 years, from the analysis of post-secondary
These recent developments testify to a shift aspirations and educational attainment to
in paradigm, even though Hout and DiPrete long-term analysis of the lifecourse and aging.
never claim that there has been such a para- A brief examination of the activities at the
digm change. We do. With respect to socio- scientific meetings of ISA’s Research
economic position, and to the transmission of Committee 28 between 1991 and 2007 10
social privilege, individuals are now increas- confirms the impression that a new paradigm
ingly seen as navigating, in the company of is emerging. Welfare states, for instance,
their parents, children, and (successive) were featured in the meeting titles three
spouses, a complicated world, where the vari- times, in Sweden in 1996, in Germany in
ous dimensions of life interact. They are at 2001, and in Norway in 2005 (this list of
once workers (in increasingly non-standard countries is not unexpected). And the 2007
jobs), parents and carers, students or in a life- meeting, in Montreal, was entitled:
long learning trajectory, retired but not neces- ‘Comparative advantage: education, health,
sarily out of employment. To negotiate all of wealth, and institutional contexts’.
these dimensions, they enjoy disparate The examination of a few key words is
amounts of various forms of capital, they fit also telling. We have divided the period into
more or less into institutional contexts, they two sequences of almost equivalent lengths:
have differential access to social networks, and 1991–99, and 2000 to the present. Lifecourse
thus to resources, or they are socially isolated. is mentioned 6 times in paper titles in the first
This interface with groups and institutions period, and 13 times in the second one.
reflects where they live, in differentially Poverty has respective counts of 3 and 7,
endowed neighbourhoods (Bernard et al., wealth of 2 and 5, social capital and networks
2007), and in welfare regimes which organ- 2 and 11, welfare states/regimes 2 and 11,
ize differently the division of labour between and divorce and separation 2 against 5.
markets, the public sector, families, and com- Finally, social inequalities of health, which
munities in the production and distribution of are an important and productive field in
well-being (Bernard and Boucher, 2007). social epidemiology (see, for instance,
And of course, this broadening of the ambit Marmot and Wilkinson, 2003), are surpris-
of social mobility has led researchers to ingly absent from the research agenda of
devote much more of their work to gender students of social mobility; they may be on
differences and gender issues. the rise, though, with 3 papers and 13 respec-
In Research in Social Stratification and tively in the two periods.
Mobility, three recent papers explicitly refer These are modest counts, but they seem
to the lifecourse approach to show its heuris- to indicate a growing interest, among
tic interest compared to the social mobility researchers, in a new approach to social
paradigm. Palloni and Milesi (2006) show mobility. Indeed, quite a few major contem-
how social stratification theories ignore porary researchers in the field examine social
mechanisms originating in early childhood; mobility from a lifecourse point of view.
they find support for lifecourse theories, Mayer has done extensive work in this
since early childhood health affects later perspective, both conceptually (2001, 2004;
economic success and adult health status. Settersten and Mayer, 1997) and empirically