Male Life Course Research Articles

Modern fathers' dilemma of work-family reconciliation. Findings from the German Youth Institute Survey AID:A II

Objective: This study investigated how work and family demands and resources relate to fathers’ perceived work-family conflicts. Background: Increasing expectations for family involvement and the lingering centrality of employment in the male life course pose challenges for fathers to combine different life domains. However, most studies on work-family interface continue to focus on mothers and examine work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflicts separately. Method: First, we used cluster analysis to identify a typology of four groups, each with different manifestations of work-to-family and family-to-work conflict. We then analyzed the relationship between fathers’ group membership in this typology and a number of relevant work and family demands and resources using multinomial logistic regression on a sample of 5,226 German nuclear families with at least one child under 18. Results: Our findings revealed that the greatest proportion of fathers (38.2%) reported being primarily pressured from work (=work-to-family conflict predominates), 19.8% primarily from the family (=family-to-work conflict predominates), but another 13.4% reported feeling conflicted in both directions; only 28.6% of fathers reported being more or less free of conflicts. Results of multinominal logistic regression suggested that long work hours, intrusive work demands, and long commute associated with fathers’ work-to-family conflict or dual conflicts. The higher the fathers’ weekday time investment in childcare and the better the perceived couple and family relationship, the lower the likelihood of fathers’ experience of work-to-family and dual conflict, although the likelihood of family-to-work conflict is unaffected. In addition, a higher family income and having a non-working partner negatively associated with fathers’ perceived work-family conflicts. Conclusion: These findings have strong implications for family-supportive practices and policies that are yet to focus on fathers in their difficult position between work and family obligations.

‘He does not appear to have done much useful work since he was wounded’: Age, disability, and the history of masculinity

This article considers the ways in which the male life course in twentieth-century Britain can be reconstructed through individual personal pension files of British disabled ex-servicemen from the First World War. The files contain a range of documentation, including military enlistment and discharge forms, medical records, and correspondence from pensioners, their families, and other advocates. Close reading of five of these files explores pensioners’ changing experiences of health and disability. It examines men’s physical status as soldiers on enlistment, their ability to find work as physically or psychologically impaired ex-servicemen after the war, the significance of their status as husbands and fathers, and the effects of old age on their identity as men disabled in war. It argues that this ongoing engagement with the gendered legacies of war created a unique and important space in which the memory of the conflict was narrated.

Mirrors for Bureaucrats: Expectations of Christian Officials in the Theodosian Empire

AbstractThis article tackles a relatively under-studied aspect of the Christianisation of the Roman aristocracy. It considers the influence of Christian norms on a key stage in the elite male life course: service to the state. Drawing on the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, Augustine of Hippo and Theodoret of Cyrrhus to imperial officials, this article argues that a Christian rhetoric of office-holding had developed across the Mediterranean by the first half of the fifth century. It traces these authors’ varying expectations of how the religious identities of elite Christian men would shape their political agency. Their letters demonstrate the diffusion of Christian political ideas within the imperial state — and the terms on which Christian affiliations and traditional public careers were understood to be compatible — under the Theodosian dynasty.

From visuals to vision: using GIS to inform civic dialogue about African American males

There has been considerable attention in the sociology and public policy literatures to the relationship between spatial arrangements and opportunity structures in metropolitan America. This article attempts to address this issue in the context of Metro St. Louis, Missouri, a center of biotechnology development, where the majority population in St. Louis City is African American. More specifically, it does so by examining extant social science literature related to African American males in urban America. A focus is on highlighting developmental challenges and opportunities for intervention where spatial arrangements are a consideration. Next, it provides an argument that metropolitan regions attempting to intervene would benefit from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as part of a visual political literacy project aimed to support civic engagement and capacity related to African American male life course development. The metropolitan region of St. Louis is used as a case to illustrate the possibilities of geospatial tools as information sources. The article concludes with a recommendation for greater investment in resources to support sustained community‐based research designed to inform understandings of geospatial arrangements that are linked to social disparities.

Introduction to special issue on “Trade‐Offs in Female Life Histories: Integrating Evolutionary Frameworks”

Introduction to special issue on “Trade‐Offs in Female Life Histories: Integrating Evolutionary Frameworks”

When men are scarce, good men are even harder to find: Life history, the sex ratio, and the proportion of men married.

We used a life history framework to clarify the relationship between the operational sex ratio (OSR) and the proportion of men who are married across adulthood. Previous studies have found a direct relationship between the OSR and the likelihood of male marriage, although these analyses did not distinguish among age groups. We predicted that more women than men would be married at younger ages, but women would be less likely to be married than men in later adulthood, reflecting age related trends in male and female reproductive values. We predicted that men would use scarcity in a low sex ratio population to their advantage differentially by age, being less likely to marry while young but having higher marital rates than women in older age. This would be consistent with the shift from mating effort to parental investment across the male life course which is apparent in modern societies. Census data from the ten largest metropolitan areas in the United States supported these hypotheses.

Canine tooth size and fitness in male mandrills ( Mandrillus sphinx)

Sexual selection theory explains the evolution of exaggerated male morphologies and weaponry, but the fitness consequences of developmental and age-related changes in these features remain poorly understood. This long-term study of mandrill monkeys ( Mandrillus sphinx) demonstrates how age-related changes in canine tooth weaponry and adult canine size correlate closely with male lifetime reproductive success. Combining long-term demographic and morphometric data reveals that male fitness covaries simply and directly with canine ontogeny, adult maximum size, and wear. However, fitness is largely independent of other somatometrics. Male mandrills sire offspring almost exclusively when their canines exceed approximately 30 mm, or two-thirds of average adult value (45 mm). Moreover, sires have larger canines than nonsires. The tooth diminishes through wear as animals age, corresponding with, and perhaps influencing, reproductive senescence. These factors combine to constrain male reproductive opportunities to a brief timespan, defined by the period of maximum canine length. Sexually-selected weaponry, especially when it is nonrenewable like the primate canine tooth, is intimately tied to the male life course. Our analyses of this extremely dimorphic species indicate that sexual selection is closely intertwined with growth, development, and aging, pointing to new directions for sexual selection theory. Moreover, the primate canine tooth has potential as a simple mammalian system for testing genetically-based models of aging. Finally, the tooth may record details of life histories in fossil primates, especially when sexual selection has played a role in the evolution of dimorphism.

Androgens in the demography of male life course ‐ A review

While the basics of testosterone production, effects and metabolism have been known for decades, there has been a flow of novel insights in the genomics of testosterone action on a molecular and cellular level, as well as in the clinical effects from modern clinical trials, improving the understanding of the role of testosterone in male life course. Androgens are produced under the control of an endocrine cascade from GnRH via gonadotropins to the testicular Leydig cells. In some organs, testosterone is reduced to 5alpha-dihydrotestosterone prior to the receptor binding by the 5alpha reductase. The androgen receptor gene is located on the X chromosome in the q11-12 region, each mutation in the gene will induce phenotypic manisfestations. In the first stage of the male life course, testosterone moderates the male embryonic development under the control of a complex molecular genetic network. The next important phase of male maturation is the puberty, in which testosterone levels increase and induce the development of somatic and psychological characteristics of male sexuality. In the adult male, testosterone maintains sexual functions and fertility. In aging men, testosterone levels decrease slowly. Testosterone supplementation in the aging male is able to restore the function of androgen target organs only in part.

The ecology of the male life course

The ecology of the male life course

Work, Gender and the Life Course: Social Construction and Individual Experience

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of family and labour market on male and female life course patterns. For women in particular, aggregate survey data have often suggested orderly, phased transitions between family and work. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods reveals not only a much greater discontinuity in women's life courses, but sheds light on the hidden normality assumptions that affect women's self-perceptions and shape their work histories. Data come from two German research projects. One followed the life sequences of women -- now in their 60s -- between the years 1949 and 1991. The other examined the life course data of their husbands. Resume: Cet article examine l'impact que la famille et le marche du travail ont sur les modalites de la vie des femmes et celles des hommes. Les donnees cumulees d'etudes precedentes avaient souvent suggere que ces modalites etaient organisees selon des transitions periodiques et ordonnees, en particulier dans le cas des femmes. Notre etude qui combine methodes quantitatives et qualitatives, revele deux elements contredisant cette affirmation. Scion nos resultats, les modalites de la vie des femmes connaissent une plus grande discontinuite que celles des hommes. Cette etude met aussi en lumiere l'existence de suppositions cachees de normalite; ces suppositions affectent la perception qu'ont les femmes d'elles-memes et modelent l'historique de leur vie professionelle. Nos donnees proviennent de deux projets de recherche allemands. L'un de ces projets a suivi de la vie des femmes sur une periode qui debute en 1949 et se termine en 1991. Ces femmes sont maintenant dans leur soixantaine. L'autre projet se concentrait sur les donnees de la vie de leur mari. IntroductionparAlthough a relative newcomer to sociology, life course research with its ability to follow a variety of social and personal dynamics through a person's life span has created a number of theoretical and methodological challenges for sociology (Elder, 1992; George, 1993; Kohli, 1986; Hagestad, 1991; Rosenfeld and Birkelund, 1995; Hakim, 1993). One of its most productive areas has been the intersection of personal life courses with social institutions such as education, family, labour market, or the welfare system (Heinz, 1991; Kohli, Meyer, 1986; Mayer, 1986; Mayer, Muller, 1986; Levy, 1977, 1991). These institutions order the life course by creating formal entry and exit points, but also through informal norms which influence people's ambitions, stock-taking, and self-image at various times during their lives. This perspective is of theoretical relevance for the structure-agency debate in sociology because tracking multiple dimensions of life course development over an extended period of time makes it very clear that structure and personal action determine the life course. But life course research has also revealed new policy challenges stemming from discontinuities between schooling and labour market entry (Blossfeld, 1987; Heinz, 1991; Heinz et al., 1985; Krahn, Lowe, 1993; Lowe, Krahn, 1992), labour market changes and loss of employment, or gender- or age-dependent labour market exits and resources for retirement. Such discontinuities disrupt individual life plans and may require profound changes in personal as well as institutional strategies designed to cope with the resulting stress and insecurity (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Leibfried and Pierson, 1995; Beck, 1986; Weymann, 1989). This study looks at the structural and normative impact of the family and the labour market on male and female life courses. We examine how their institutional characteristics translate into gender-specific differences in female and male life course patterns and their personal interpretation. Data and MethodsparAn examination of the interaction between organizational contexts and subjective meanings requires both quantitative and qualitative data analyses. Such a combined methodology has never before been used in life course research. …

The Transition to Adulthood in Comparative Perspective: Professional Males in Germany and the United States at the Turn of the Century

Youth, characterized as a period of extended formal education, career moratorium and thus protracted economic dependency on the family, emerged as a distinct phase of the life course for professional males in Western Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.1 Prior to this time, observes Robert Wohl, this protracted period of dependency a luxury restricted to the aristocracy and those with land and incomes.2 For the vast majority of young in the nineteenth century the teenage years signaled the beginning ofa lifetime of labor. Whether as a servant, farm hand or apprentice entrance into the labor force marked the beginnings of an extended period of semi-dependency in which the individual often lived away from home and earned his own keep yet was not considered an adult until marriage.3 Work provided boys with all the training they would need in their future lives. Formal schooling was extremely rare, commonly restricted to rudimentary reading, writing and religious instruction offered during the lax periods in the yearly work cycle.4 But as industrialization took hold and government bureaucracies swelled the need for civil servants, the ranks of whitecollar employees and professionals of all sorts escalated dramatically. In turn these careers demanded more extensive formal education at both the secondary and university level. Schooling and career preparation became a full-time endeavor; work was delayed until the completion of this training. As the amount of time that one had to spend in school preparing for a profession rose, so did the age of entrance into the career. Marriage and the establishment ofa separate household, because they were contingent on financial independence, were delayed as well. Youth became a lengthy and rigidly segmented period of passage into a profes? sional vocation, While this protracted period of youth emerged as a distinct phase of the professional male life course in both Europe and North America in the later part of the nineteenth century, the experience of youth in different regions of the industrial world varied dramatically. To date these differences have not been fully explored. The essays in Tamara Hareven's Transitions: the Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective explore a multitude of issues concerning the transition to adulthood and its timing in the late 19th century the impact of family economy, demography and societal and cultural norms but the focus is primarily on these processes in the United States. John Gillis' Youth and History offers a useful introduction to changing patterns of transition to adulthood in modern Europe but only generally notes the impact of school structures, govern? ment regulations and economic trends on their timing. Moreover while Gillis'