Constructing the Life Course

Constructing the Life Course offers a social constructionist perspective on personal experience through time. The text shows the variety of ways people use life course imagery in their everyday lives and makes a useful addition to family studies or gerontology courses.

Constructing the Life Course offers a social constructionist perspective on personal experience through time. The text shows the variety of ways people use life course imagery in their everyday lives and makes a useful addition to family studies or gerontology courses.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 Perspectives on the Life Course
Chapter 3 Some Conventional Approaches to Life Change
Chapter 4 Behavioral Approach
Chapter 5 Psychoanalytic Approach
Chapter 6 Cognitive Approach
7 Covert Personality Approach
8 Symbolic Interactionist Approach
9 Functionalist Approach
10 Psychocultural Approach
11 Differences and Similarities
12 Putting Aside the Conventional
Part 13 The Constructionist Approach
14 The Analytic Framework
15 The Life Course Across Culture and History
16 Constructionist Assumptions
17 Bracketing the Life World
18 Situated Rationality
19 Documenting the Construction Process
20 Method, Emphases and Sources
Part 21 Typifying Life Change
22 The Typification Process
23 Typification in Process
24 Typification Shifts
25 Domains of Typification
26 A Lay Example
27 A Professional Example
28 Interpreting "Strange" Actions
29 Discerning the Adequately Normal
30 Being "On Time" or "Off Time"
Part 31 Predicting Futures
32 The School as Future Oriented Setting
33 Classroom Life
34 Schoolchildren's Futures
35 Predicting Growth in the Early Days
36 Constructing Tracks
37 "Practically" Adequate Solutions
39 Glossing Over Interpretive Practice
40 Assessing Potential
41 Assessing Potential
42 Producing Appropriate Answers
42 Producing Appropriate Answers
43 Negotiating Placement
Part 44 Constructing Competence
45 Situated Assignment
46 Imputing Readiness
47 Collaborative Accomplishment
48 Accounting for Incompetence
49 Interpretive Variability
50 Organizational Embeddedness
Part 51 Biographical Work
52 Biography as Work
53 Biographical Work Settings
54 The Use of Expertise
55 Images and Audiences
56 Interviewing as Biographical Work
57 Biography and Power
Part 58 Re-envisioning the Life Course
59 Interpretive Control
60 The Deprivatization of Experience
61 Narrative Malleability
62 Private Lives, Public Interpretations
63 Agency, Diversity and the Moral Order
64 The Utility of the Life Course