SOCY699M Institutions and the Life Course

This graduate seminar will introduce students to the life course paradigm, with a particular focus on some of the institutional forces shaping the life course.  Life course research is interdisciplinary, encompassing ideas and scholarship from sociology, psychology, demography, history, criminology and others interested in change and stability in people’s lives. The life course paradigm is a research framework orienting scholars to the study of individual lives in context. Elder et al. (2003) describe 5 essential principles of the life course paradigm: Life span development; agency; time and place; timing; and linked lives.  These 5 pillars make up the core of what life course scholars examine in connecting human lives to the social and historical context in which they are lived.  Institutions play a key role in all this. We will only briefly touch on theories of institutional and organizational change for some intellectual context, and will spend several weeks examining institutional “cases” that play an important role in the life course.


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