(Re)considering the Life Course as a Key Concept in Social Gerontology

Abstract

As a graduate student in the mid-1980s, I was captivated by the full-throated scholarly debate in the American Sociological Review between Dale Dannefer and Paul Baltes over the role played by social forces in structuring adult human development (Dannefer, 1984a, 1984b; Baltes & Nesselroade, 1984). Particularly impressive was the way this exchange clarified the distinction between ontogenic and sociogenic perspectives on the life course and for the intellectual vigor it brought to the issue. In the intervening years, applications of the life course concept have variegated such that the term “life course” has taken on a virtual Rashomon-like quality, a malleable concept shaped and given meaning through the eye of the beholder. Much like the myth of the blind man who touches a body part of an elephant and concludes that the animal it belongs to is anything but an elephant, the life course is a perspective that has, depending on one's point of view, either been abused beyond recognition or liberated to include diverse views on human development. Has the life course concept been used so broadly so as to lose its underlying meaning? Does the life course need to be reclaimed and have more discernible borders drawn around it? Such fundamental questions form the core of this symposium reappraising the life course as a set of integrated concepts that have become a key framework in social gerontology.

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