The past two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in life-course perspectives, with scholars being actively involved in the development of life-course approaches and contributing to the cross-fertilization of various disciplines (Elder et al. 2003). The tendency is noticeable in natural sciences as researchers seek to observe regularities and stable patterns in the creation of molecules, atoms, and beings. Behavioral and social sciences are also exposed to an ongoing process to incorporate life sequencing into the canonical explanations of social life (Alwin 2012; Wingens et al. 2011). Human beings are often described as subjects whose life courses are made of more or less patterned sequences of life events and transitions that are shaped by institutional forces and structural constraints. The whole mix confers a certain biographical stability over a lifetime. This book focuses on the uncertainties revealed by migrantsā biographies whose life journeys are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational trajectories are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled.
As Gardner (2002) contends, there is a more pressing need to address the meaning and shape of life course in migrantsā cases. Various questions immediately arise, and the chapters in this book seek to answer them. What challenges do migrants and returnees face when trying to make sense of their life courses after years of experiences in other countries with different age norms and cultural values? How can they reconcile competing cultural expectations of both origin and destination societies regarding the timing of transitions between roles to provide a meaningful account of their life courses? It is reasonable to ask such questions because migrants, more than non-migrants, must pursue life goals in increasingly uncertain times and transnational settings. Migration is, itself, a major life event for individuals, with profound implications for the pursuit of life goals, organization of family life, and personal networks, and it can affect, to a considerable degree, their subjective well-being, the sense that migrants make of their existence, and the planning of their future life stages. The discomfort, uncertainties, and troubles that migrants, both men and women, may witness after a long period of living and working abroad, sometimes with long undocumented stays, need to be thoroughly considered by researchers and policymakers.
The bookās overall objective is to produce new knowledge about migrantsā and returneesā strategies in dealing with life transitions and achieving normative milestones in major life domains (e.g., education, work, and family), while at the same time properly performing their gender roles. This book puts together two streams of research that rarely ever cross paths, that is, the increasingly appealing life-course perspective and studies on international migration. In this way, we not only place the reader close to current debates in social sciences but also bring into focus one of the major themes of the contemporary globalized worldās public agenda: international migration.
Individualsā life courses often contain a sense of predictability since people are expected to pass from one life stage to another, and their transitions between life stages are marked by the assignment and undertaking of social roles. The succession of social roles , their attached meaning, and their recurrence form certain pathways (George 2009; Macmillan 2005; Macmillan and Copher 2005). Pathways are social in the sense that they depend on structural constraints, including social norms and cultures, as well as on the broader structures of opportunity. As Elder and colleagues (2003: 4) put it: āAge-graded patterns [ā¦] are embedded in social institutions and history.ā Individual agency may intervene in this social context, but many coping strategies are actually common across various groups and individuals. Pathways become social and start to act as distinct social locations; that is, they offer a structural element, socially modeled, providing both constraints and opportunities for personal agency. Consequently, pathways act as contexts and can be studied either to understand how they are shaped by various factors or as prerequisites and/or causes for various individual or social outcomes.
āPathway ā is quite an abstract concept. One may easily understand it as a sequence of personal life events related to family. For instance, a typical familial pathway unfolds with an individualās journey through a sequence of stages, including childhood, teen years, young adulthood, getting married, having children, and becoming a grandparent. But divorce, repeated parenthood and couple formation, widowhood, and so on can elicit variations in family pathways. The order of such life milestones is not pre-set, and events can be recurrent and break from the usual patterns due to childlessness, long spells of not having a partner, or parenthood after becoming a grandparentāphenomena that are more common these days.
We already implicitly have introduced time as an intrinsic dimension of the life-course perspective. By discussing personal events and the sequencing of social roles over a lifetime, time implicitly is defined as a basic element in the approach (Allan and Jones 2003). Personal time, however, needs to be complemented by social/historical time features. Entering and exiting educational or labor markets provide supplementary specifications for personal pathways. A succession of changes in family, employment, and/or education roles can create intricate conditions usually considered, under the life-course perspective, to be essential to understanding individual traits (Levy and BĆ¼hlmann 2016). Residency adds to the story because moving from one house to another tends to reshape personal and familial pathways (Elder et al. 2003). Life courses become an essential āingredient of the notion of a socially structured space inhabited by individual actors,ā thereby necessarily defining any social analysis (Levy and BĆ¼hlmann 2016: 36). In fact, by virtue of their institutionalized character, life courses are genuine social locations in which individuals are embedded. De-standardized life courses are likely to act similarly, given the social embeddedness of every single transition within them; that is, life courses provide context, as social locations, for individual traits, values, gestures, behaviors, attitudes, and choices. Nevertheless, as active agents of their biographies, individuals permanently meld with their social locations in a way that combines agency with dependency on structures of opportunity. Their previous experience, expressed as a life pathway , is such a structure, to provide opportunities as well as a history that may be reflected in future decisions and present individual values and preferences.
Migration events, particularly international migrations, also provide relevant social locations. Successive migration decisions, including moving, staying, settling down, remigrating, returning, and so on, form sequences in which changes in social roles, their meanings, and interactions with existing contexts are salient to oneās life and can be seen either as outcomes or as causes of various phenomena and processes. Migration is never definitive (Engbersen et al. 2010), and it often builds as a sequence of migrations, remigrations, return migrations, irregular migrations, and spells of non-migration. Interpretation of the movement comes through different terms that describe particular forms and motivations, including labor migration (Kogan et al. 2011), lifestyle migration (Benson and OāReilly 2016), family reunification (Bailey and Boyle 2004), migration for care (Lutz and Palenga-Mollenbeck 2012), migration for studies (Li et al. 1996), migration of high-skilled workers (KƵu et al. 2015), and so on. It becomes obvious that a migration careerāunderstood as a sequence of events and decisions linked to migrating, staying, returning, or migrating to other destinationsāis intertwined with education, family, and work trajectories . Hence, migration trajectories cannot be adequately understood apart from major life domains that shape individualsā life outcomes. Moreover, migration can take place depending on individualsā positioning within their life courses, family situations, parental roles, economic status, and prospects for career promotions. In turn, migration also can affect the timing of family formation, transitions to parenthood, parenting practices, professional mobility, well-being, and other life events and aspects. Because of this unpredictable interaction of migration career and life trajectories, the uncertainty of oneās life course could grow even larger during migration.
Life-course perspective is not a consistent theory but a unifying framework to study social roles and changes to these roles taking place within particular structural contexts, at both the meso- and macrolevels. In doing so, this framework enables linkages with individual experiences and structural contexts, while creating room for the enactment of individual agency (Mortimer and Shanahan 2003). In other words, life-course approach urges the researcher to consider personal life sequencings (Elder et al. 2003; Thomas and Znaniecki 1996). Personal biographies are judged against historical time and social structures, affecting individual l...