Forthcoming in: Ursula M. Staudinger and Ulman Lindenberger (eds.), Understanding Human Development: Lifespan
Psychology in Exchange with Other Disciplines. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Karl Ulrich Mayer, 2002

The sociology of the life course and life span psychology - diverging or converging pathways?

1. Introduction
In the last twenty to thirty years both life span psychology and the sociology of the life course have experienced a great and long take off with regard to theory building and conceptualization, methodological advances and empirical studies. Within sociology, but also partly in demography, economics and social policy studies, a cohort and life course perspective, event history analysis and microanalytic longitudinal data have become almost predominant (Mayer 1990, 2000; Riley et al. 1994). Baltes et al. (1999: 473) note, for instance, that life span psychology became more prominent due to, among other reasons, “... a concern with life span development in neighboring social science disciplines, especially sociology. Life course sociology took hold as a powerful intellectual force.”
At the beginning of this development there were great expectations that the disciplines involved in this “life course turn” - especially life course sociology and life span psychology - would not only grow together in a parallel trajectory, but that there would be co-evolution in the direction of a truly interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary paradigm on human development. Volumes such as the one edited by Kohli (1978),
Sørensen, Weinert and Sherrod (1986) or the series on “Life-Span Development and Behavior” edited by
Baltes, Featherman and Lerner(1979-1990) bear ample witness to this view. This expectation was also not in any way ill-founded.
On the one hand, there were earlier developmentalist traditions where psychological and sociological orientations were closely tied (Bühler 1931, 1959). On the other hand, there was a reemergence of a kind of social-psychological study of the life cycle (Clausen 1986) in which the variation of external conditions and psychological characteristics were connected to their later consequences. Glen Elder’s now classic study on

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the “Children of the Great Depression” (1974) and the consequent research of his group count among the

best examples. Many of the actors not least personally knew each other, frequently interacting and sometimes cooperating. Although not that numerous, there were also at least several attempts to provide something like a common theoretical frame (Featherman 1983; Elder/Caspi 1990; Baltes 1997 and in this volume; Baltes et al. 1999; Heckhausen 1999; Diewald 1999). Even some identity blurring appears to have taken place, since some labeled as psychologists by sociologists were labeled as sociologists by psychologists. In retrospect, despite all the strong mutual recognition and reinforcement, surprisingly little convergence and integration has actually occurred. Life span psychology and life course sociology now seem to stand further apart than in the seventies. The main purpose of this comment is to reconstruct and understand this impasse as seen from the point of view of a sociologist. The major questions to be raised are whether and to what extent these divergences are necessary and legitimate or whether they should be seen as mutual and detrimental shortcomings which should be and can be overcome. I will approach these questions not so much as matters of principle and of general theory, but more from the point of view of practical empirical research. I shall proceed in the following steps. Firstly, I shall describe what life course sociologists actually do and what goals they pursue. Secondly, I will portray how life span psychology appears to a sociologist.
Thirdly, on this basis, I will discuss how the two disciplinary perspectives tend to be restrictive and shortsighted in some of the areas where they intersect. Fourthly, I will outline more systematically how psychological development should come into the sociological study of the life course and how life course sociology could enrich and broaden the psychological study of the life span. I will use examples from existing and potential research to illustrate these points.
2. The life course from the perspective of sociology
By the term “life course” sociologists denote the sequence of activities or states and events in various life domains which span from birth to death. The life course is thus seen as the embedding of individual lives into social structures primarily in the form of their partaking in social positions and roles, i.e. with regard to their membership in institutional orders. The sociological study of the life course, therefore, aims at mapping, describing and explaining the synchronic and diachronic distribution of individual persons into social positions across the lifetime. One major aspect of life courses is their internal temporal ordering, i.e. the relative duration times in given states as well as the age distributions at various events or transitions.
How do order and regularities in life courses come about? Sociologists look primarily for three mechanisms to account for the form and outcomes of life courses. The first mechanism is the degree and manner to which societies are internally differentiated into subsystems or institutional fields (Mayer/Müller 1986). It is

often taken to be the most obvious and important one. The second mechanism is seen in the internal

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dynamic of individual lives (in group contexts). Here, one searches for conditions of behavioral outcomes in the prior life history or in norm-guided or rationally purposive action. The third mechanism derives from the basic fact that it is not simply society on the one hand and the individual on the other which are related to each other, but aggregates of individuals in the form of populations such as birth cohorts or marriage cohorts (Mayer/Huinink 1990).
Let me illustrate each of these three life course mechanisms in turn. How do institutions shape life courses?
The educational system defines and regulates educational careers by its age-graded and time-scheduled sequences of classes, its school types and streams, its institutions of vocational and professional training and higher learning with their hierarchical and time-related sequence of courses and certificates. Labor law defines who is gainfully employed and who is unemployed or out of the labor force and thus employment trajectories. The occupational structure defines careers by conventional or institutionalized occupational activities, employment statuses and qualification groups. The supply of labor determines the opportunity structure and thus the likelihood of gaining entry into an occupational group or of change between occupations and industrial sectors. Firms provide by their internal functional and hierarchical division of labor career ladders and the boundaries for job shifts between firms and enterprises. In a similar manner the institutions of social insurance and public welfare define the status of being ill, the duration of maternity leave, the age or employment duration until retirement, and so on. Family norms and law constitute the boundaries between being single or in non-marital unions, married, and divorced. Finally, the spatial structure of societies as well as forms of property define the interaction with family roles and forms of household trajectories of residential mobility, household changes, and migration.
The second mechanism for shaping life courses focuses on life trajectories and their precedents. Research tends, when being descriptive, to concentrate on transition or hazard rates, i.e. the instantaneous rates at which a well-defined population at risk makes certain transitions, e.g. into first employment, first motherhood, retirement, etc., within a given time interval such as a month or a year but across larger spans of a lifetime. The explanatory question for life course research then is whether not only situational, personal or contextual conditions shape a certain outcome, but also experiences and resources which are acquired at earlier stages of the biography, such as incomplete families in childhood (Grundmann 1992), prior job shifts
(Mayer/Diewald/Solga 1999) or prior episodes of unemployment (Bender/Sopp/Konietzka 2000), educational careers (Henz 1996), or vocational training and early career patterns (Konietzka 1999; Hillmert 2001). There is one important additional point to be made in this context. Looking for “causal” mechanisms on the microlevel of the individual biography does not resolve the issue as to whether the individual is more an active agent or more a passive object in the processes which shape the life course or - to put it in different terms - whether

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selection or adaptation by choice is of primary importance (Diewald 1999, ch. 2). Sociologists tend to be

split on this issue. Some would emphasize cultural scripts, some would stress social norms and others would bet on rational choice. But on the whole sociologists tend to believe more in selection than in choice. First of all, the institutional contexts as described above already narrow down to a large extent which life avenues are open and which are closed. Secondly, within given institutional contexts individuals are probably more frequently being selected than doing the selecting themselves. This is related to another sociological axiom:
If material resources, power and authority as well as information and symbolic goods are distributed very unequally within given societies, then it follows that more people have to accommodate than have the opportunity to exert control.
The third mechanism which one can look for when unraveling patterns in life courses has to do with the fact that it is not single individuals but populations which are allocated to and are streamlined through the institutional fabric of society across the lifetime. One example of this is cohort size of one’s own as well as the preceding and succeeding cohorts who influence individual opportunities way beyond individual or situational conditions (Ryder 1965, 1980; Macunevic 1999). Another example is the dynamics of union formation and marriage where one’s own chances of finding a partner change over time depending on the behavior of others searching at the same time (Hernes 1972, 1976).
From the perspective of sociology then, life courses are not considered as life histories of persons as individuals, but as patterned dynamic expressions of social structure. These apply to populations or subsets of populations, are governed intentionally or unintentionally by institutions and are the intentional or nonintentional outcomes of the behavior of actors. Patterns of life courses are, however, not only products of societies and a part and parcel of social structure ; they are at the same time also important mechanisms for generating social structures as the aggregate outcome of individual steps throughout the life course. One example of this that is intuitively easy to grasp is that the age and cohort structure of a population is the highly consequential result of a multitude of fertility behaviors and decisions. Likewise the employment structure is the outcome of a multitude of individual employment trajectories.
Finally, the relationship to historical time is crucial for the sociological study of life courses. They are embedded in definite strands of historical periods, but also in the collective life history of families and birth cohorts. They are subject to historical circumstances at any time but are also subject to the cumulative or delayed effects of earlier historical times on the individual life history or the collective life history of birth cohorts (or marriage cohorts or employment entry cohorts).
Our heuristics for the study of life courses are thus guided by four sign posts (Mayer/Huinink 1990; Huinink

1995: 154/155). First, individual life courses are to be viewed as part and product of a societal and

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historical multi-level process. They are closely tied to the life courses of other persons (parents, partners, children, work colleagues, etc.) and the dynamics of the social groups of which they are a member. They are highly structured by social institutions and organizations and their temporal dynamics. Second, the life course is multi-dimensional. It develops in different mutually related and mutually influencing life domains such as work and the family. It also unfolds in the context of biological and psychological maturation and decline. Third, the life course is a self-referential process. The person acts or behaves on the basis of, among others, prior experiences and resources. We must, therefore, expect endogenous causation already on the individual level. This then becomes via aggregation also true for the collective life course of birth cohorts or generations. Their past facilitates and constrains their future. This is the meaning of the phrase “die
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” characterizing the interdependency of generations. The various age groups live together in a common present, but each brings to it its own particular past. Fourth, through the manner in which persons live and construct their own individual lives, they reproduce and change social structures. This can either happen via “simple” aggregation processes or via immediate or intermediate institution formation. An example of the latter would be that a growing proportion of fully employed mothers exert electoral pressure to change schools into institutions which take care of children for most of the day.
One might also ask in which sources sociologists of the life course expect the greatest share of variance in life course outcomes to be explained. The largest part of variation will usually be expected to reside in those external structures within society which are closely tied to the division of labor, i.e. the occupational structure, the structure of employment in various industrial sectors and the educational systems. The reason for this is that both the distribution of initial resources, of resulting income rewards and the distribution of positions which form the basic opportunity structure and into which people are sorted are intimately tied to these institutional fields. Thus, life course patterns are expected to vary greatly across social classes or status groups (Carroll/ Mayer 1986). The second largest source of variation sociologists would tend to locate would be in the division of labor within households, i.e. the way women and men in families and other unions allocate their lifetime for economic and family roles (Sørensen 1990; Ben Porath 1980). The third important source of variation life course sociologists would look for relates to the differential intervention of the state in the form of the modern welfare state (Mayer/Müller 1986; Huinink/Mayer et al. 1995; Mayer 2001b). It is, therefore, the so-called welfare mix, i.e. the relative importance and manner of the interconnection of economic markets, the family and the state across historical time and across contemporary societies which sociologists would see as the major determinant of life course patterns. (Esping-Andersen 1999)
Now we have come to the stage where we can formulate the major research questions for sociological life

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course research: What are the patterns of life courses and how do they differ between women and men,

social classes and groups, nation states, birth cohorts, and historical periods? What are the determinants of and influences on life courses resulting either from the past individual or collective life history or from socioeconomic contexts and conditions and institutional constraints? What are the consequences of changing life course patterns for social structure and institutions?
Thus one direction of research is descriptive and exploratory. A second direction runs from the macro level down to the micro level and asks how macro conditions of an institutional or structural kind affect individual lives. A third direction moves horizontally on the individual level and asks how earlier conditions have an impact on later outcomes, and a fourth direction focuses on the way micro outcomes affect macro configurations from the bottom upwards.
3. Life span psychology as seen from sociology
At first glance the psychology of the life span and the sociology of the life course share the same object of scientific inquiry: the lives of women and men from birth to death. If they happen to tell different stories it may seem as if they are just behaving like the blind men describing an elephant. One touches the snout, one touches the foot and a third touches an ivory tusk. In contrast to this analogy I would like to argue in this section how divergent their respective fields of study really are. Life span psychology “deals with the study of individual development (ontogenesis) ... as lifelong adaptive processes of acquisition, maintenance, transformation and attrition in psychological structures and functions,” (Baltes et al. 1999: 472). At the center of interest stand changes in highly biologically-based functional capacities and personality, such as cognitive abilities, memory, emotion, perception, information processing, attachment or resilience. Many of these functional capacities and their overall changes across the lifetime can be fruitfully thought of as being the fairly universal results of evolutionary selection. Therefore, life span psychology can - at least on a general theoretical level - make a close and productive connection between phylogenesis as the evolution of the species and ontogenesis as individual development. Accordingly, often a relatively large share of the inter-individual variability in functional trajectories and behavioral outcomes is generally attributed to genetically founded constraints. These biological and genetic constraints vary across the lifetime (Baltes
1997). They are likely to be highest, on the one hand, in infancy and early childhood and, on the other hand, in late age, and, as the testing-the-limits research on cognitive functioning impressively demonstrates age differences between young adults and old persons can rarely be offset even by intensive learning and intervention. Life-span psychology views development as based both on biology and culture and therefore as a “nature” as well as as a “nurture” discipline, while from its perspective the sociology of the life course appears as a

somewhat narrow “nurture” discipline which would need to expand its horizon to acknowledge genetic

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factors to overcome a simple environment-based conception of social forces. Conversely, the sociology of the life course sees itself as an endeavor combining both “nurture” and “institutions” and views life span psychology in need to include the complexities of institutions for more precise accounts of contexts.
Thus, life span psychology and life course sociology do not only diverge with regard to the level of the unit of analysis, the major life dimensions and dependent variables at stake; they also diverge with regard to the broad causal forces which can be seen at work. Clearly, life course sociology is much more agnostic in regard to main areas of interest of psychology, since it almost dogmatically abhors thinking beyond the last one or two centuries back to evolution and - equally dogmatically - tends to exclude evolutionary, biological and genetic factors from its explanatory toolbox (see in contrast Runciman 1998). The same applies to a large extent to concurrent psychological traits and functional capacities. Durkheim’s formula according to which sociology is to explain the social by the social still reigns the realm (Lukes 1972, forthcoming).
In contrast, life span psychology commands within its conceptual apparatus a good number of open doors to the variability brought about by history, society and culture such as “plasticity”, “malleability”, “interindividual variation”, “environment”, “co-evolution” and “culture”. However, as seen from sociology, if we go beyond the social-psychological level of interpersonal relationships, these categories tend to be something of undifferentiated residuals which display little explanatory power. The same charge very much applies to the distinction within life span psychology between “age-graded”, “history graded” and “non-normative” changes across life (Baltes 1987). Whereas “historical” denotes non-systematic ideographic circumstances and “non-normative” tends to be residually defined as non-regularities, “age graded” changes are primarily seen by developmental psychologists as the outcome of either biological changes or the outcome of age norms as rules of convention like the proper age for marriage, motherhood and fatherhood. The latter view is forcefully argued by Heckhausen (1999: 35): “...life-course patterns would be expected to have become increasingly regulated by internalized norms about age-appropriate behavior ... as societal regulation became more lenient. Thus, age-normative conceptions about the life course internalized by individuals may gradually have replaced external regulations based on objectified institutions. ... Age-normative conceptions may have committing power as internalized, naturalized, and thus unquestionable ways of thinking about human lives.”
In contrast, sociologists will always search for external, institutional constraints first and will tend to view age norms as epiphenomenal cognitions deriving from them. Thus, instead of, for instance, asking survey respondents about the proper ages for starting gainful work, they would set out to determine how educational, vocational and professional tracks of various duration allow persons to enter labor markets at varying ages and how these medians add up in a given population. This debate does not play out on an ontological level. The issue is, therefore, not whether age norms exist or do not exist and whether

institutional regulation exists or does not exist. The issue is rather what ought the importance of

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institutional and other kinds of socio-economic regulation assumed to be relative to the rise, persistence and change of normative orientations. Marriage behavior may again serve as our example. If we are to believe the life span psychologist, changes in the median age at marriage should be primarily the consequence of changes in age norms. In contrast, the sociologist of the life course would look first at changes in the duration of education and training, the relative affluence in given historical periods, the incentives provided by family assistance policies, and so on.
If we review the evidence of the recent German changes in the median age at marriage there is some consolation for both sides. On the one hand, the lowest median cohort ages at marriage in the last century occurred for the 1945 birth cohort of men and the 1947 cohort of women (Mayer 2001a). There is little doubt that this outcome was the result of two forces. One force was the relatively high economic affluence and high economic growth rates of the late sixties and thus the income development and the opportunities on the labor market. The other force was indeed a norm, but not an age norm: the still binding norm at that time that sexual unions should take place within marriage. The later rapid increase in the ages at marriages from the early seventies onward was again not an outcome of changes in age norms, but the outcome of increasing ages of leaving education and employment as well as of the effectiveness and accessibility of birth control and the tolerance of non-marital unions. Similarly the dramatic changes of the very low ages at marriage in East Germany after German unification were not an effect of normative changes, but changes in economic circumstances, in housing scarcity and in family assistance pay (Huinink 1995). Although there is little doubt that the differential opportunities for early marriage and early fertility in East Germany did in fact give rise to corresponding age norms, the persistence of these norms under the new conditions after unification is doubtful. If age norms are primary and constitutive rather than derivative and epiphenomenal, then one should expect that East German couples will return to and persist in lower ages at marriage and first birth in comparison to couples in West Germany. So far the demographic data does not support this hypothesis (Sackmann 1999). This is not to deny the importance of social norms in guiding behavior relative to rational action based on the calculation of personal interest. For instance, in a recent study on the differences in the rates of non-marital fertility in East and West Germany, Huinink (1998) concludes that differential incentives cannot fully account for the fact that East German couples have many more children out of wedlock and therefore different norms must be assumed. The consequence of norms on non-marital fertility is not least their impact on age at marriage and age at first birth. The important point in the context of our present discussion, however, is that these are not age norms, but rather observed age profiles that are the outcome of both other kinds of behavioral norms and institutional incentives.
Jutta Heckhausen, in her recent book on “Developmental Regulation in Adulthood” (1999), has probably gone

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furthest as a life span psychologist to meet life course sociologists halfway. It is, therefore, useful to take

up where she sees the closest connections. What she terms sociostructural constraints falls into three areas: lifetime-related, chronological age-based, and age-sequential. At this point, sociologists would already ask for conceptual clarification, since what is called sociostructural here throws together structural and institutional constraints. For a sociologist, structural constraints arise from the distribution of resources, positions and opportunities, whereas institutional constraints arise from explicit and relatively permanent social rules which are often tied to specific organizational settings.
Lifetime constraints relate to the overall life span and thus the impressive fact that both institutions and individual persons have to achieve their goals and tasks within a finite time. This is reflected in what Kohli
(1985) and others have called the tripartite structure of the life course - 1) socialization, education and training, 2) gainful employment and reproductive roles, and 3) retirement and old age. The length of the lifetime puts limits on the amount of time available for achieving life goals. The lengthening of the life span or at least the years without severe functional impairment, therefore, make it plausible, for instance, to see why the duration spent in initial schooling and training is lengthening and why many - especially gerontopsychologists - call for an extended and more flexible age of transition to retirement. It is also plausible that longer lives would lead to a sequence of occupations or a sequence of marital or non-marital unions. The sociologically more interesting fact is, however, that the institutional partitioning of the life course often runs counter to the lengthening of the lifetime. The concentration of education and training in the years until early adulthood is persisting despite many campaigns of lifelong learning (Mayer 1996).
Likewise modern society still concentrates the formative years of occupational careers and the crucial years of family formation within a very short (and ever shorter) time span in young adulthood. And in most advanced societies the median age at retirement drops rather than increases (Kohli et al. 1991, but see also
Burckhauser/Quinn 1997). This may reflect what Matilda Riley (Riley et al. 1994) has called a structural lag between demographic and institutional development which will be adjusted in the foreseeable future. It is as likely, however, that institutional mechanisms shape the age at retirement quite independently from overall trends in length of the life span and in the opposite direction. While the need to finance pensions individually or collectively will provide a push for later retirement ages, the inclination of employers and employees to look for exits well before the legal retirement age is powerfully influenced by the high rate of occupational and sectoral restructuring. In addition to the lifetime as such, Heckhausen explicitly acknowledges that deadlines are also frequently imposed by institutions formally and informally, such as restrictions in the length of university studies, the length of time it takes to reach the grade of major in the military, or age deadlines until one has to have made it to full professor in the German university system.
The second kind of sociostructural constraint Heckhausen (1999: 30) introduces, she calls chronological age-

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based: “In most human societies, the life course is composed of an age-graded structure, which stratifies

the society into age strata and involves age norms for important life events and role transitions.” There is little dissension about the fact that both formally and informally age and age groups form an important basis of differentiation within societies and that age is often used in legal or quasi-legal norms to regulate entry into and exit from social positions. As already argued above, however, life span psychology tends to overemphasize , from a sociological point of view, social distinctions based on age - at least if they are taken to be directly explanatory as a consequence of age norms rather than descriptive regularities. Behind many apparent age regularities, they would argue, are regularities brought about by institutional time scheduling.
Thus, age at entry into employment varies widely depending on the length of prior schooling. In many countries age at retirement is contingent on years of service rather than age per se. It is exactly the highly institutionalized and regulated intersection of education, vocational training and employment in Germany rather than age per se that imposes such a demanding developmental task. I would seriously question whether the category of chronological age-based constraints is a very effective way of introducing a socialstructural dimension into life span psychology, since it presumes an unrealistic degree of unmediated institutionalization of age differentiation.
The third type of sociostructural constraints are called age-sequential. By this Heckhausen (1999: 31/32) refers to the fact that states and events across the lifetime are not randomly distributed, but that the choice or experience of a prior transition or state narrows down options and probabilities for consequent steps. It remains unclear, however, how this kind of endogenous causation occurs. Heckhausen speaks of “segregated life-course paths demarcated by social structure” and “commonly shared notions of normal or desirable biographies” In this respect sociology (and economics) could offer more precise and elaborated concepts. Let us take as the most important example the area of employment and occupational careers. Continuities in occupational trajectories can come about via the individual investment in human capital and the accumulation of human capital in education, training or at work. Initial mismatches between acquired human capital and the job available on the labor market tend to lead to a series of job shifts until the level of skill matches what is taken to be an adequate reward in terms of status or income (Sørensen/Tuma 1981;
Carroll/Mayer 1986). Career contingency can also occur, however, as a result of restrictions on the demand side. When labor markets are true markets all market participants have in principle access to vacant positions. Everybody competes with everybody. But very often labor markets are segmented into submarkets defined by skills, sectors or organizations. Occupationally segmented labor markets require credentials for entry and often additionally impose career ladders like apprentice, journeyman and master. Firm-segmented labor markets tend to restrict access to positions to workers already in the firm and thus create well-defined internal career ladders. Gender-segregated labor markets restrict women from access to male-dominated jobs and occupations.

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The challenge sociology would pose to life span psychology would then focus on how adaptive tasks vary between different institutional frameworks and settings and how these select and modify psychological characteristics across the lifetime.
4. Life span psychology as a challenge for the sociology of the life course
Life span psychology poses a threefold challenge to the sociology of the life course. Firstly, it questions the usefulness of an exclusively or excessively sociostructural and institutional perspective on conceptualizing and explaining life courses. Secondly, it allows the hidden cognitive, volitional and emotional mechanisms to be revealed. By so doing, actors can be seen as translating structural and institutional constraints and incentives into their own behavior and can thus offer a more than rhetorical idea of how persons shape their own lives. Thirdly, life span psychology can offer concepts, theories, methods, and measurement which can supplement and modify sociological explanatory models. Let me elaborate on these three issues in sequence. Why would it be shortsighted and indeed misleading to restrict oneself to a view of life courses where these would be seen exclusively as the outcome of social role playing, structural constraints, institutional regulation, and the socio-economic circumstances of given historical periods? An initial answer is that as much as life courses are the products of culture, society and history, they are also the product of persons as natural organisms, individual decision-makers and personalities (Diewald 1999: 18-43). One might well argue, therefore, that the genetic, physical and personality constraints and the inter-individual variations resulting from them - on how people live out their lives - are not only non-negligible, but probably overwhelming in comparison to those determinants resulting from sociocultural differences (Rutter 1997). In this respect, however, one might at least tender the hypothesis that across evolution, social and cultural construction and elaboration would tend to increase in their relative weight and other factors would recede in importance.
Thus, it is obviously a long way from small segmented societies where the structure of life courses and the functional division of labor is intimately and immediately tied to aging as a trajectory of physical ability and of a sequence of reproductive roles (Linton 1939) and current societies where nurseries, schools and labor organizations, social security systems and welfare provisions intervene in this process.
In stark contrast, however, Heckhausen (1999: 33-37) develops a very powerful argument as to why psychological modes of regulation of the life course should become more important than structural or institutional constraints. She makes a distinction here between external and internal regulation. External regulation is equated with social conditions which might be legal sanctions, group pressure or organizational rules. Internal regulation is equated with relatively stable psychological dispositions with regard to modes of

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adaptation and coping or with regard to substantive preferences. Analogous to the theory of the civilizing

process of Norbert Elias (1969) she claims that: “...external enforcement via societal power has gradually, over centuries, been transformed into internalized rules and norms of conduct and behavior. This process of internalization renders the need for external societal enforcement obsolete ... modern anthropologists argue that social conventions become transformed into institutionalized ways of thinking. Social constructions of reality provide societal stability and predictability as well as subjective certainty about a mutually habitualized, and thereby institutionalized, foundation of individual action,” (Heckhausen 1999: 34/35).
Heckhausen’s position appears to be strongly supported by sociologists’ claim that life courses become deinstitutionalized, that cognitive biographical scripts about the normal life course become more important
(Kohli 1985), that institutions and traditional collectivities lose their binding power and that, therefore, individualization increases (Beck 1986), and that more subtle forms of psychological influence have replaced the crude mechanisms of physical force and material incentives in controlling behavior (Foucault 1977;
Pizzorno 1991).
Although one can hardly deny the historical thrust of the argument à la Elias and Foucault, I have many doubts as to its applicability to modern life courses as far as the role of normative orientations is concerned.
As John Meyer has argued that while internalized and strongly religiously based norms in guiding life courses may have been appropriate and widespread in the 17th to 19th century, they would be highly dysfunctional in present day societies where very flexible situational adaptation is required (Mayer 1988; Meyer 1986). The relative importance which persons and cultures accord to their lives as an overall developmental project is itself highly variable (Brandtstädter 1990). The debate on this issue is still very much open. On the one hand, we find good arguments in favor of increasing de-collectivization and individualization. In particular, increasing material resources should support the rise of individual life projects. On the other hand, however, we also see a decline in cultural expectations according to which persons are expected to be the definer and defendant of meaningful and coherent life designs (Jaspers 1979; Mayer/Müller 1986; Riesman et al. 1950).
This brings us to the second challenge life span psychology poses for the sociology of the life course, i.e. how to fill the black box of the actor. If at all, sociologists tend to rely on action models based on variants of rational choice theory (Coleman 1990; Braun 1998; Voss/Abraham 2000). The disadvantage of these models is that, on the one hand, they assume “modal” actors, i.e. they are more interested in average group behavior than individual behavior and, on the other hand, they assume that - apart from investment/consumption theories (Becker 1976) - the life course is nothing but a series of unrelated decision situations. Life span developmental psychology offers remedies to both of these deficits. It investigates a set of psychological processes which is of particular interest in the first of these two contexts: control and goal striving
(Heckhausen/Schulz 1995; Brandtstädter 1990), control beliefs (Bandura 1977, 1992) and selective

optimization with compensation (Baltes/Baltes 1990).1

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Control theories start with the basic assumption that persons want to be the masters of their own destinies; that they want to pursue their own goals and that they do so by exerting control over their environment.
Primary control strategies relate to the active shaping of one’s own development and to efforts to bring one’s environment into line with one’s own needs and goals. Secondary control are strategies of the person in accepting that certain circumstances are not easily changeable and that it is, therefore, wiser to adapt one’s desires and goals to that which can be realistically obtained (Elster 1983).2 Schulz and Heckhausen
(1996) assume that with increasing age external restrictions increase and that persons, therefore, employ more secondary control strategies at higher ages in order to protect their sense of self-worth and their belief in their self-efficacy, and thus their motivation for primary control.
The second group of psychological processes relate to the person’s beliefs in the efficacy of his own actions and the related degree to which persons invest in goal attainment and persist in their efforts. Numerous studies have shown that high self-efficacy beliefs lead to more intense and persistent efforts in goal pursuit.
The relation of such control beliefs to aging is less obvious. On the one hand, beliefs in self-efficacy and tenaciousness are the consequence of prior experiences and should, therefore, accumulate either positively or negatively across the life course. On the other hand, negative experiences will tend to become more frequent in advanced age and will eventually also affect self-efficacy negatively (Brandtstädter 1990). Finally, the behavioral strategy of selective optimization with compensation presumes a double mechanism of successful adaptation. On the one hand, goals are selected in view of their relatively good returns or remain theoretically undetermined. On the other hand, goals which cannot be obtained are substituted by others more attainable and resulting losses are covered by partially offsetting compensation. The latter model has been explicitly developed as a powerful explanatory and interpretative tool for adaptive behavior in aging.
This model rests on three assumptions about universally shared basic developmental goals: growth, maintenance and resilience, and the regulation of losses. Growth relates to behavior which is directed towards achieving higher levels of functioning or adaptive potential. Maintenance and resilience relate to behavior which is directed towards keeping or regaining prior levels of functioning in the context of new adaptive challenges and losses. The regulation of losses relates to behavior which has the aim of safeguarding functional capacity on a lower level, if maintenance is no longer possible . Physical and cognitive aging constitute per se major developmental tasks for persons across the life course. Growth creates potential which can be differentially realized or missed as opportunities in given social contexts.
Maintenance can be differentially successful. Decline may be compensated with specialization and increased effort or by changing goals (Baltes/Baltes 1990; Baltes in this volume).

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Bringing this ensemble of psychological processes into the framework of the sociology of the life course

would have a number of advantages. First of all, it quite clearly demonstrates that a pure “sociologistic” construction of the life course is untenable, since it would postulate that actors are largely influenced by external factors (or chance) and that they would also generally believe in the low efficacy of their own actions in comparison to external conditions. This would result in pervasive low self-esteem and low life satisfaction and is therefore inconsistent with the empirically well-founded assumption of psyches as positively equilibrating systems. It becomes rather both an explanandum and an explanatory variable which groups of persons tend to follow using primary or secondary control strategies; where various groups perceive the locus of control; how they differ in beliefs of self-efficacy and tenaciousness, and how good people are at shifting from primary to secondary control strategies and from unrealistic to realistic action goals. I have defined above the third challenge of life span psychology to the sociology of the life course to actually include psychological variables in its models and to test their gross and net influences. I see in this two major goals . One goal is to increase the proportion of variance to be explained in life course outcomes by the preceding life history by adding psychological variables measured at an earlier point in time. The second goal is to show how psychological characteristics themselves have to be seen as malleable outcomes rather than stable conditions in life course processes. There are relatively few good examples of either of these research strategies. One example are the studies by Diewald, Huinink and Heckhausen (1996) and
Diewald (1999). In the context of a study of life courses during the transformation of East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Mayer et al. 1999), Diewald et al. (1996) examined first how control beliefs, control strategies and feelings of self-respect varied between groups of different age and different occupational experiences before 1989 and between 1989 and 1993. Secondly, Diewald (2000) tested whether control beliefs had a net impact on unemployment, downward mobility, upward mobility and occupational shifts between 1989 and 1993. As in earlier research (Heckhausen 1999; Mayer/Kraus/Schmidt 1992) a number of significant covariations were found between age, other sociostructural variables and beliefs of control and self-respect. Most important and unexpected was the result that positive attitudes did not simply covary with age in a monotonic fashion, but that the oldest cohort groups which was about 60 in 1989 did best, while those of approximately 50 years of age in 1989 did worst. There are probably two complementary explanations. The first relates to the fact that the oldest group did - for historical reasons - experience superior career opportunities in the GDR before 1989 (Mayer/Solga 1994). The second explanation is based upon the circumstance that practically all of the oldest group lost their employment due to labor market policies of early retirement whereas the approximately 50-year-olds experienced the turbulent labor market after unification. The oldest group could externalize the locus of control and keep their sense of prior achievements and self-respect intact, while the group which found itself as the relatively oldest one

remaining in the labor market faced the relatively worst employment conditions and reacted accordingly.

15

It is noteworthy, however, that scrutinizing labor market experiences before 1989, gender and age, control cognitions (as measured in 1993 and presumed to be prior and stable) played an important role in preventing unemployment, but that they had no significant effects on upward and downward mobility. For the two variables already measured in 1991 - internal control and fatalism - only fatalism showed any effect at all and only on one of the four dependent variables, i.e. unemployment. In general, then, the evidence from these studies points on balance more to psychological dispositions as outcomes of (in our case dramatic) life course events rather than a strong selectivity of life course adaptation due to prior psychological dispositions. 5. Life course sociology and life span psychology - an agenda for research
Life span psychology and life course sociology concern themselves to a considerable extent with separate areas of interest and separate lines of research. Life course sociology aims to understand the evolution of life courses primarily as the outcome of institutional regulation and social structural forces. Life span psychology views development across the life span primarily as changes of genetically and organically-based functional capacities and as behavioral adaptation. In life course sociology and life span psychology, however, there is also a considerable overlapping of interests and a need for synthesis and integration. If my above assessment is correct then this common ground is mutually both poorly understood and underresearched. I, therefore, want to outline an agenda for joint research.
For life span psychology it would be crucial from my point of view to exploit sociology in order to gain a more refined and a more differentiated repertoire of institutionally regulated developmental tasks and their consequences beyond generalized notions of age norms, developmental goals and cognitions. In general, this will require cross-national comparative and longitudinal research in order to systematically vary the institutional contexts. One good example is the transition between general education and employment. In
Germany and other countries with an important segment of a dual system of vocational training, this transition involves a highly stratified linkage between school achievement and accessible training positions, a two - or sometimes three - step transition between school, training and early career positions and a highly differentiated system of certification. In Britain most young people transit from school to work directly within a very narrow age range and receive most of their training on the job. These two transition regimes require and reward different psychological resources and should have different consequences for psychological disposition and personality (Hillmert 2001; for a similar German-US comparison see AlfeldLiro/Schnabel et. al forthcoming).
For life course sociology, in contrast, the open agenda should aim to bring back the person. The questions to

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be addressed are: given biographical resources and structural opportunities, how are persons of varying

psychological makeup being selected; how do they cope differentially with given developmental tasks and what are the consequences of specific life course experiences for psychological dispositions such as developmental goals and control beliefs. This would involve measuring both objective life courses - as routinely done in sociological life history studies (Brückner/Mayer 1998) - as well as strategic psychological variables in prospective longitudinal studies.
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Notes
1. Brandtstädter (1990:339) makes the distinction between development-related perceptions and beliefs, developmentrelated goals and values, and development-related control beliefs.
2. An important aspect of control theories is attributions about the locus of control: oneself, external factors or chance.