Extending the interrogation: Life span, life course, and the constitution of human aging

Abstract

Life span development and the life course perspective deal with disparate explananda (outcomes), but share common explanantia (explanatory strategies). Both approaches originated by introducing into the subject matter of age an innovative and sometimes courageous emphasis on context, inspired by discoveries of cohort differences and historical variations in patterns of aging. Despite these promising beginnings four decades ago, key aspects of the relation between lifespan/life course and context remain largely undeveloped, because of an undue reliance on traditional paradigmatic assumptions in both traditions, which we here call the positivist–functionalist (in the following called PF) model. What remains yet underdeveloped and in need of extended interrogation are the fundamental bases of human development and human social relations. These bases include two dialectically interrelated dynamics that are elements of a social-constitutive (SC) model, which recognizes that (1) individual development and agency are not just influenced, but constituted by lived experience in a specific social context, and (2) social systems are constituted only through agentic human action. This paper identifies theoretical resources that can be used to further this inquiry, and illustrates the value of such resources by showing how they can be used to illuminate the problems of agency, linked lives, and questions of the relationship between lifespan/life course and evolutionary thought.