Economic Transformation and Life Chances: A Life-Course Perspective

Abstract

In the previous chapters, we have followed a sample of the urban residents and their life experiences over stages of their life course. They grew and aged and, as we have shown, their life chances have changed over time, along with drastic political and economic events in the history of the People's Republic of China. Implicitly, and at times explicitly as in Chapter 4, we have adopted a life-course perspective to trace changes in life chances not only over historical time but also over one's life course. Now it is time to explicitly address this question: Do stages in the life course matter in one's life chances, especially in the era of large-scale social changes and economic transformation? This is the central issue for this chapter. Large-scale societal transformations inevitably have fundamental impacts on individuals' life chances. These are often caused by drastic changes in the processes and mechanisms of resource allocation and social stratification, including the reallocation of opportunities and risks among social groups. What is less apparent, however, is that these impacts are often shaped by important contextual considerations that are not an integral part of sociologists' traditional theoretical explanations. In this chapter, we propose and demonstrate that life-course timing is such a contextual construct, and that the life-course location of particular cohorts at the time of major socioeconomic upheavals plays a critical role in mediating the impacts of opportunities and risks.