Incitations for Interdisciplinarity in Life Course Research

René Levy, Paolo Ghisletta, Jean-Marie Le Goff, Dario Spini, Eric Widmer
2005 Advances in Life Course Research  
Housing the Harvest Having gone through this volume, a critical reader might come to the conclusion that interdisciplinarity can be found more easily between the contributions than within them (even though several of them address it directly, e.g., Settersten; Mortimer et al.). 1 However, the contributors share the common belief that studying humans' unfolding lives in a web of complicated interactions within their changing contexts requires the adoption of an interdisciplinary research
more » ... . To be sure, the life-span / life-course research traditions stemming from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, social psychology and demography certainly have allowed scholars to answer some key questions germane to this field (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, in press; Elder, 1998) . The empirical evidence accumulated over the years contributed heavily to the validity of the enterprise represented by life-course research (Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1977). The development towards interdisciplinarity needs, however, not only solid disciplinary foundations and the shared wish to cooperate, but also hard and timeconsuming work in interdisciplinary groups to progress concretely in this direction, possibly along the three lines sketched out in our introduction: constructing theoretical bridges between disciplinary approaches, building on common concepts that help describe and analyze life courses, and working on transversal substantive themes. In this final chapter, the editors take up the four thematic groups of contributions, Agency and structure, Transitions, Biographical re-construction, and Methodological innovations, in order 1 Throughout this final chapter, all references to contributing authors concern their contributions to this volume. to scan them for elements that seem instrumental for further building up interdisciplinarity in life-course research. Individual agency within social structure, and structural agency Defining agency as the capacity to act intentionally, planfully and reflexively in a temporal and biographical mode (Marshall, Settersten) points to the fact that the enactment of agency is, among other things, a cognitive and emotional process, informed by the social environment, and unfolding through time. 2 Following Marshall's argument, agency should be distinguished from various related concepts, such as useful resources for action, social action itself, intentions that motivate behavior, the social and physical structuring of choices, and unexplained variance. Structure, on the other hand, is usually defined as the set of social constraints and opportunities within which individual agency plays out. Contributions to this volume show that structures and agency form a system of interrelated elements rather than a chain of distinct factors with a clear causal ordering, for instance from the macrosocial down to psychobiological levels, or inversely, from cognitive skills upward to social structures. We conclude from these contributions that social structures have agency of their own, that agency has structures of its own, and that both should be jointly looked at when studying life course issues.
doi:10.1016/s1040-2608(05)10013-6 fatcat:gt7mxnhfh5bxhffvrzurj3g65q