Restructuring Work and the Life Course (review)

Restructuring Work and the Life Course, edited by Victor Marshall, Walter Heinz, Helga Kruger, and Anil Verma is the product of an international symposium held at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1998. The book presents 29 short empirical studies and analytical chapters about economic activity in light of recent changes in the organization of work and in the state of employment and its interdependence with activities in other life domains. The book includes about one-third of the presented symposium papers (final versions) and is divided into three sections. The first section covers employment and work transition patterns from early adulthood to middle age, examining such areas as contingent job structures and delayed careers; overeducation and underemployment; work trajectories as shaped by educational tracks; the gender composition of occupations and women's employment; and work- family conflicts. The second set of chapters focuses on work in later life, including the effects of technology shifts, occupational gender segmentation, national social policy, and labor market restructuring on the adoption of bridge jobs and on retirement transitions. The third set of studies revisits the human agency (individualizing) versus structure (de/institutionalization) debate that is typically invoked to explain the current increasingly heterogeneous and unstable work and family career pathways, as compared to the mid-twentieth century period. But the discussion and modeling of agency and structure in the last section (and elsewhere in the book) generally transcends the usual either/or debates; a more nuanced treatment is presented that explores individual activity under particular sets of circumstances.

The studies do not privilege any single form of analysis but include qualitative, national case study, cross-national, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and multimethod designs. A range of countries is represented, including Canada (8 chapters), Germany (6 chapters), the U.S. (7 chapters), Britain (3 chapters), and Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, and South Africa (1 each). The range of countries covered may be somewhat narrow, but the intent of the book is to capture complexity in the joint evolution of the organization of work and an increasingly protean, or at least less predictable, life course. As Heinz notes in the introduction, ecological (cross-national) variation is necessary to explore the relationship, but it is not the intent of the book to provide a universalizing model and variables.

The collection, documenting the late 1990s, highlights still unresolved issues pertaining to rising wage and status inequality; gender conflict and a double shift; a shrinking number of "good jobs" and polarization in the distribution of work hours; the declining prevalence of employer/employee long-term contracts; and macroeconomic restructuring linked to global resource competition. Late-twentieth-century "work" assumes workplaces and production, hiring mechanisms, and intermediary preparatory social institutions such as schools and credentialing boards, as well as the aspiration and need to work, which is interdependent with family needs and life circumstances. Authors also generally localize work in specific times and places. Thus, each chapter presents a complex model that situates "work" — as life- course role, process or status — within a range of contextual and otherwise overlapping boundaries. This might be somewhat conceptually untidy without an organizing framework. But the life-course framework is a unifying theme that articulates well with the theories of political economy (welfare state typology); organizations (occupational, labor market stratification); social stratification (gender and class); and social psychology, which are also applied by the various authors. Beyond this, some chapters "round out" the picture of modern work by examining the effects of time (historical contingencies and social change), chance (discontinuities such as war and disaster), space (regional differences), and policy (cross-national studies) on work. Therefore, this volume is not just a set of stand alone papers, where each has its own framework and stylized model. The life-course framework acts as a constitutive template and so allows studies to become "special cases" in a greater whole, within a continuum...