Choice Biographies Research Articles

Unequal opportunities in becoming cosmopolitan: Korean students’ gendered and classed acquirement of transnational mobility through studying abroad

ABSTRACT Using interviews with 74 Korean undergraduate students at ten elite U.S. colleges, I explore how intersections of gender and class decide who pursues transnational mobility and cosmopolitan life more successfully. Men from highly-transnational families tried to exert ‘agency for becoming’ while mapping out their ‘choice biographies’, aspiring and expected to be high-achieving and influential worldwide, often thanks to their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency. By contrast, women across class and legal statuses tended to accommodate ‘normal biographies’, prioritising their (future) responsibilities as mothers, wives, and daughters. Regarding class limitations, both women and men from less-transnational families tended to expect to return to Korea upon graduation, feeling culturally and legally limited to utilising their degrees across national borders. Yet, across class lines, men were more ambitious and career-oriented than women, implying gender-based constraints among the skilled diaspora. These findings shed light on multiple forms of inequalities among high-achieving Asian student migrants.

Theorising fatherhood: challenges and suggestions

During the 1990s, the sociology of the family was vitalised by new and groundbreaking theories of modernity, identity, and the family. At this time the family was put forward as an example of how modern institutions and identities were transforming and changing. Concepts such as individualisation, choice biographies, and reflexivity brought new perspectives to family research. Parallel to this Raewyn Connell’s book Masculinities raised important questions about men’s lives and generated a renewed interest in theories of masculinities. Overall, these parallel theoretical tracks also brought new life to issues on fatherhood. Specifically, a collaborative approach gradually developed between critical studies on men and masculinities and research on fatherhood and fathering. Following a development from functionalist to contemporary theories on fatherhood, possibilities to theorise and redefine fatherhood will be explored. Using a multidimensional theoretical approach to fatherhood will facilitate making connections between the phenomenological (the body, subjectivity), and the sociocultural (welfare regimes, hegemonic structures) aspects of fatherhood. The article also argues that we might have to develop a new theoretical language that does not define acts, performativity and attitudes in terms of fathering/mothering.

AGENCY AS IDEOLOGY: PRECARITY AND DISEMBEDDEDNESS IN THE 21ST CENTURY LIFE COURSE

The “individualization” thesis has gradually merged into the discussion of increasing heterogeneity of the life course as well as growing inequality over historical time. As individuals are “disembedded” from both cultural traditions and more recently social institutions, individual agency has drawn revived interest in outlining “choice biography” that is seen as paramount to personal outcomes and even containing overcoming force against structure. This practice mutes the consideration of the ongoing forces of social structure that by their very nature continue to constitute individual selves and possibilities. The uncritical treatment of individual agency makes it problematic for the study of precarity, mystifying and obscuring the analysis of inequality-generating mechanisms, reducing them to the individual-level. We analyze current uses of the concept of agency in the life course research, and particularly in the areas of transition research, e.g., transition to adulthood/retirement, where individual agency is assumed to be most active.

Futurelessness, migration, or a lucky break: narrative tropes of the ‘blocked future’ among Serbian high school students

ABSTRACTThis article uses ethnographic discourse analysis to understand how Serbian high school students at ‘Belgrade Professional’ (BP) respond to coursework and discussions about their individual futures. Contextualizing the conversations at BP within broader local and international social forces, the paper shows how students’ perceptions of their future chances are mediated by both the school’s outdated promises of secure skilled employment and a broad understanding of Western liberal democracies as ‘meritocratic’. In short, I argue that BP students recognize the elective ‘choice biography’ as a real pathway to adulthood. However, they primarily imagine the choice biography as existing outside of Serbia, while feeling constrained by – even hostile to – such an idea within the country. To counter choice biography framings of futures in Serbia, students mobilize a discourse I call the ‘blocked future’, comprised of three related narrative tropes informed by the decades-long recession: domestic futurelessness, meritocracy abroad, and local chance. These narrative tropes illuminate the emerging cultural structures in Serbia which reflect how people cope with and processes the conflicting structural demands and unfulfilled promises of the post-socialist transition in everyday life.

La reincorporación formativa de jóvenes que abandonan tempranamente la educación: relevancia de su trayectoria previa

The lack of education and training resulting from leaving education early might contribute significantly to high rates of unemployment and inactivity among young people. Education is also seen as a decisive means of tackling these problems. Therefore, acquiring knowledge about the conditions in which re-engagement with education occurs after it is prematurely interrupted deserves special attention. The study presented here explores the opinions of students attending a second-chance educational centre in Ceuta (where the aforementioned benchmarks have quite high levels) concerning their life courses prior to returning to education there and the impact they attribute to the centre. Data from in-depth, individual interviews were used to do this. These were performed with 39 unemployed young people at risk of social exclusion aged between 18 and 24 (29 had left school early and 10 had not), as part of a broader case study relating to a centre selected for its relative success and its reputation in Ceuta. The information provided by the participants in the form of stories was subjected to narrative analysis, using two processes: summary biographical tables, which represent relevant events from their lives longside their views of them, and thematic analysis of the information contained in them. In broad terms, results indicate that the life courses the participants follow are shaped by decisions they take from options shaped by personal, institutional, and social circumstances. They are, therefore, something like choice biographies. In this context, early school leaving and re-engagement in training are recurrent, transitory, and reversible, precisely because of the important role played by the people who experience these situations, even if they do so constrained by their institutional and social setting.

Youth transitions: mobility and the travel intentions of 12–20 year olds, Reading, UK

ABSTRACTWhilst Western societies may have reached ‘peak car’, young people are arguably the most significant group whose levels of car ownership, use and driving licence acquisition have declined. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses qualitative research conducted in Reading, UK, considering young people’s (aged 12–20) views about bus travel. Whilst current pricing structures (both in Reading and across the UK) often offer under 18s discounted travel, the paper explores young people’s intentions about future travel as young adults. Drawing upon theorisations around youth transitions, we discuss how young people expect their mobility patterns to change as young adults in complex, shifting, fluid ways, and to involve multi-modal travel. Young people construct complex choice biographies through which they plan pathways to navigate these mobility transitions. Although a small-scale study, this paper also offers some insights into the challenges, complexities and limitations of researching mobility intention.

Writing in a role for structure: low-income young people's dual understanding of agency, choice and the welfare state

ABSTRACTYoung people, it is often argued, are more individualised and more free of older, class constraints than ever before. This has led some thinkers to debate the (positive) possibilities of ‘choice biographies’ and self-making among the young, alongside the (more sinister) possibilities of ‘epistemological fallacies’ blinding them to the limits of these self-making capacities. This article interrogates the idea of ‘epistemological fallacies’ for five groups of young people from low-income backgrounds in England. Comparing focus group discussions they had about their lives, with policies they wrote to address the problems of their lives, this article suggests that these young people were less blind to the limits of their own agency than individualisation theorists may predict, and were in fact acutely aware of the difficulties behind finding personal solutions to social problems.

Working-Class Career as Choice Biography

The article aims to examine Russian workers’ career strategies in situations of biographical choices. Based on class and intersectional analyses, the authors define different types of working-class career strategies, understood here as professional choices corresponding to their social mobility. Young workers’ upward mobility is possible in the hierarchy of large industrial enterprises on the condition that they upgrade their skills and improve their professional knowledge. The factory hierarchy allows them to convert educational capital into symbolic and economic capitals. For instance, getting a higher education can help a worker to become a shop supervisor. Downward mobility is typical mostly for workers of the older generations who could not adjust to the new socio-economic conditions in the transition period, failing professionally and then being downgraded. The article supports the idea that the strategy of class reproduction is typical for the working-class environment in modern Russia. Workers’ career strategies are gender-specific. In spite of the fact that female workers have career ambitions, they aim to become more successful in the private sphere (e.g., in marriage and family life), while “success” for male workers is manifested either in building a professional career, or in improving their living conditions. The authors conclude that Russian workers today generally do not problematize their social status strongly.

Hope as a form of agency in the future thinking of disenfranchised young people

This paper examines future thinking in a group of disenfranchised young Australians. We draw on literature about individualisation and choice biographies to understand participants’ narratives. Participants that managed to narrate a future expressed strong desires to be ‘normal’, articulating futures marked by traditional indicators: a job, home and family. Yet, their narratives of future were specific to the minimal opportunity structures available to them – a prioritising of paid employment with little concern about the type of work done, a home that was secure but not owned and, often, a wish to regain custody of children. Significantly, many participants could not articulate a future beyond their present circumstances. The uncertainties of their lives shaped their future thinking, through their lack of capital but also through deficit views of themselves as possessing few choices. But, while there was no ‘choice-making’, there was agency: they hoped for something better such as to live securely and to be happier. We suggest that sociological thought pursue a closer understanding of how hope operates in young lives and how it shapes future practice and trajectories. We propose that one way forward is to consider hope as a form of agency conceptualised through relational theories of practice.

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Young People and the Future

Young people’s temporal orientation is now a major focus of youth studies. A central research question in this area is whether or not young people treat their futures as ‘choice biographies’ to be planned as a personal project. In this article I suggest that this focus has emerged in part from a misreading of contemporary sociological theory and I attempt to widen the focus of inquiry. Drawing on a qualitative interview with 50 young people in Australia aged 18 to 20, I highlight two significant elements of temporal orientation obscured by a focus on planning versus not planning. First, that young people mix multiple temporal orientations and strategies, of varying degrees of discursive explicitness, concurrently and as such can be present and future oriented at the same time. Second, that thinking about and shaping the future and enjoying, and coping in, the present are not individual pursuits but shaped collectively with significant others.

Class, individualisation and tracing processes of inequality in a changing world: a reply to Steven Roberts

This article replies to Steven Roberts' recent critique of my article on the concept of choice biography and how youth studies have engaged with the work of Ulrich Beck. I use this rejoinder to extend my argument about why Beck's ideas matter for youth studies. I suggest that both those who find the concept of choice biography useful and those who critique Beck need to rethink their position. I argue that the model of individualisation built by Beck describes not a reduction of structural constraint but an increase in rules and guidelines shaping young people's lives. However, as these guidelines are partial and contradictory young people must actively manage their biography in a new way. It is not those with the most resources who face the greatest demand to actively shape their biographies but those with the least as they most face the consequences of a proliferation of contradictory and changing rules and guidelines. Beck provides new ways to think about contemporary inequality, but has been under-utilised because he is misread as a continuation of long-running debates in youth sociology.

Individualized Housing Careers in Early Adulthood: Conditions and Constraints in a Familistic Society

This article discusses the unsteady and uncertain conditions in which a potentially individualized life course co-exists with and survives in a so-called institutionalized, standardized, familistic and sub-protective society. For the purpose, non-family living in early adulthood in a southern European country (Portugal) is taken as the example. On one hand, data from the 2006 European Social Survey (23 countries, N=43000) is used to contextualize the Portuguese transition to adulthood and the preconceptions about the so-called familistic societies in general. On the other hand, data on events and values from a small sample of young adults living alone in Portugal (aged 24-30, N=120, approximately 1% of the universe considered), along with official statistics on a housing programme for these young adults (Rental Incentive for Young People), allows us to analytically deconstruct preconceptions about the relation between intergenerational support and welfare policies in familistic societies. This data demonstrates most of all how a mismatch between the still-prevailing institutionalization of life courses in some societies and the reflexivity characterizing contemporary biographies produces critical points in young people's lives. It also demonstrates the adaptability of family cultures to these ‘choice biographies’ in comparison to the lack of adaptability of some youth policies, in particular those involving housing. These processes of mismatching and misunderstanding reflect and promote the inadequacy and inefficiency of communication between youth research and policy-making.

Misrepresenting ‘choice biographies’?: a reply to Woodman

This paper provides a reply to Woodman's (2009) recent argument that youth studies often incorrectly attribute the concept of ‘choice biographies’ to the work of Ulrich Beck. Drawing heavily on Beck's own words, this paper contends that youth researchers might not be making this association unduly. Consideration is paid to some conceptual issues outlined by Will Atkinson, which Woodman has not appeared to consider, that challenge Beck's rejection of the relevance of structural analysis. Further, a review of some empirical evidence countering Beck's theory of ‘individualization’ suggests that ‘middle-ground’ positions in youth sociology can arguably be justified. Finally, it is proposed that Woodman's defence of Beck is partly a reflection of an alignment of focus between Beck's theoretical repertoire and Woodman's preferred method for understanding the youth period – the concept of generation.

The mysterious case of the pervasive choice biography: Ulrich Beck, structure/agency, and the middling state of theory in the sociology of youth

This paper explores the emergence of the concept of choice biography, as it is linked to the work of Ulrich Beck, in youth research. The concept has been called a current pervasive theoretical orthodoxy. However, this article argues that the concept is most often taken up to critique, and Beck used mostly as a foil, through arguing that he overemphasizes agency and neglects structural constraints, in establishing or occupying a middle-ground theoretical position between structure and agency. I propose that the relationship and balance between structure and agency is of little interest to Beck and aim to discourage forcing his work into this frame. Instead of focusing on a shift towards agency, and proposing the concept of choice biographies to understand the shift, Beck is making the more complicated claim that at the very moment, and through the same processes, that some of the constraints placed on people are breaking down, the predictability and security that would allow these new options to function as deliberate choices also weaken. More importantly, Beck asks the question of whether the concepts developed by twentieth-century sociology are up to the task of theorizing the contemporary world.

Beyond the trailing spouse: the commuter partnership as an alternative to family migration

Combining commitments in the domains of work, family, and residence has become a complex puzzle for the contemporary (dual-earner) family, especially when these choices concern family migration. For some families, non-standard alternatives to family migration, such as a commuter partnership in which one partner lives near work part of the time, might provide the best solution in matching both individual and family commitments. Through in-depth interviews with both partners in commuter partnerships, this paper explores the commitments that form the basis underlying the choice for a commuter partnership as an alternative to family migration or not migrating. It further describes how the balance in partners' individual and their common interests, as well as the gender ideologies the couple holds, influence the choice for a commuter partnership. Our findings suggest that the commuter partnership is regarded as a suitable compromise between several commitments not only for partners who are both oriented towards their employ- ment careers, but also for couples who have distinct commitments in their private lives. Partners in egalitarian partnerships were found to view the commuter partnership as a household arrangement that fitted their approach of reinforcing each other's interests and commitments. For couples with non-symmetrical gender beliefs we found that in order for one (usually male) partner to pursue a choice biography through the commuter partnership, substantial sacrifices were demanded from the (usually female) spouse.

Mid-life ‘transitions’ to higher education: Developing a multi-level explanation of increasing participation

In the UK in recent years, there have been substantial increases in the take-up of higher education (HE) by adults over thirty years old. This paper argues that a comprehensive explanation of the increase in mid-life transitions to HE requires a multi-level approach, which draws on: a) credentialist perspectives and labour market change; b) the changing relationship between individual and society; and c) insights from lifecourse literature. This argument is illustrated through discussion of a small-scale qualitative study of adults in their thirties and forties who have pursued first degrees. Interview evidence from life history interviews revealed a connection between participants' perceptions of expanding choice, opportunities for personal decision making and labour market change, and their take-up of HE in mid-life: social change appeared to be providing some individuals with more opportunities to develop ‘choice biographies’. Whilst the focus of this paper is on explaining why more adults in mid-life are participating in HE, it should not be forgotten that patterns of higher level participation remain highly uneven amongst those aged thirty plus and that this reality is weakly addressed and supported by government policy and publicly funded provision.

Becoming One Self: A Critical Retrieval of 'Choice Biography'

AbstractThe modern life course is described as a 'choice biography.' Rationality and control, and life planning and self-management are central notions. Instead of rejecting the notion categorically, this article opts for a more balanced approach. The Protestant tradition shares central characteristics with choice biography, as Calvin, Edwards, and Bunyan show. However, there are dissimilarities as well. Fundamental in 'choice biography' is its lack of transcendence. Modern individualism threatens to collapse into one-dimensional secularism and egoism. In retrieving Kierkegaard's legacy, the notion 'choice biography' might undergo a critical re-appraisal. In his philosophy, we find both the absolute value of the individual's choices, and a plea for transcendence.

Choice biographies and transitional linearity: Re-conceptualising modern youth transitions

En aquest article s’apunta que les transicions juvenils cada vegada són més llargues i complexes i que els camins entre l’escola i el treball, que abans es consideraven lineals i previsibles, actualment han estat substituïts per un conjunt de moviments que estan més fragmentats. L’objectiu d’aquest article és contextualitzar aquests canvis per tal de captar el grau de complexitat característic de les transicions modernes i explorar les implicacions que tenen en els models d’integració en el mercat laboral. Defensem que s’ha tendit a exagerar els processos de desalineació i que la tendència moderna de veure la complexitat de les transicions com un fet simptomàtic de les «biografies d’elecció» pot contribuir a ocultar estructures de desavantatges.

Informal Networks in Youth Transitions in West Germany: Biographical Resource or Reproduction of Social Inequality?

This article deals with informal networks and their role in young people's strategies of coping with the uncertainties of transitions to work. The underlying hypothesis is that informal networks have a high potential in this regard that, however, is strongly differentiated according to class and education. Drawing on West German data from the framework of a European research project, the transitions of young people with ‘choice biographies’ are compared with those of young people with low resources and at risk of disengaging with the transition system. The question extends to asking whether or not policy interventions for so-called ‘disadvantaged youth’ can compensate for these disadvantages by building and reinforcing network structures that bridge the gap between peer relationships and the more formal world of education, training and the labour market.