This chapter turns now to explore theories of the lifecourse. This is fundamental to this thesis; volunteering in older age is approached throughout from a lifecourse perspective, understood not as a snapshot in time but as part of an on-going process (Dannefer and Sell, 1988; Bengtson et al, 1997; Johnson et al, 2011). Any activity undertaken in older age implicitly or explicitly reflects previous events and activities undertaken across the lifecourse, and this thesis argues that they need to be understood as such (Hareven, 1995). This section first explores how the lifecourse has been conceptualised over the past century as patterns of individual and family life have changed. It then looks at the current theoretical understandings of lifecourse, and how it has come to be understood as a means of analysing and exploring diverse and chaotic lives. Next it looks at the impact of significant events across the lifecourse, and how these occur at different times and in different ways for different individuals. While these events and the lifecourse processes around them are often highly individual, they occur within a wider social context, and this is explored next. Finally, this section finishes by looking at research into volunteering which has adopted a lifecourse approach.
2.4.2. From life-cycle to lifecourse
The term lifecourse is often used by academics to study individual and collective experiences from a longitudinal perspective (see Hareven and Adams, 1982; Katz and Monk, 1993). Scholars of the lifecourse reject the previously common term life-cycle, which is criticised for tending to assume a relatively rigid set of age categorisations, related to social norms about what activities and life events are expected at stages of life (Hunt, 2005). This has been rejected by many writers because of the way in which it assumes multiple turns, a presumed fixed or inevitable series of events occurring at certain chronological ages (Rossi, 1980;
Hareven and Adams, 1982; Allatt et al, 1987; Katz and Monk, 1993; Hunt, 2005).
Indeed, Bailey (2009) argues that;
“…a priori ‘life cycle’ categorizations of age and the deterministic timbre of stage and time are seen as normalized and politically problematic categories of analysis.” (407)
This occurred in the context of social change, as Saraceno (1991) outlines, exploring how the now disregarded life-cycle terminology reflects the time in which its use emerged, during industrialisation and a time when women generally only worked while young and/or unmarried, or once married only in times of family crisis. Figure 2.5, below, draws upon the work of Mayer (2001, 2004) to explore how over time changes in the nature of lifecourse have occurred, as the life-cycle
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Traditional Industrial Welfare State Post-Industrial
Unit Family Figure 2.5 Historical changes in lifecourse patterns (Adapted from Mayer 2001: 93, 2004: 171)
This echoes the view of Hockey and James (1993) who suggest that the change in terminology from life-cycle to lifecourse is made necessary by the changes to the way of life in most Western societies. What emerges from this table is that lifecourses, as argued above, have become increasingly fragmented and chaotic, a
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constantly changing and heterogeneous melee of social actors (Hunt, 2005). As Mayer (2004) states,
“The post-industrial, post-Fordist lifecourse regime… can be characterised by increasing de-standardization across the lifetime and increasing differentiation and heterogeneity across the population.” (172)
Current understandings of the lifecourse, therefore, have arisen from recognition that individuals’ lives are increasingly heterogeneous, with huge variation between different individuals’ rich social experiences (Hunt, 2005). While a small number of events in each individual’s life are inevitable – all will age, all will die – the nature and timing of even these events is neither linear nor predictable (Hunt, 2005).
Indeed there are few clear associations between chronological age and individuals’
activities; there are clear differences within, as well as between, chronological age cohorts (Katz and Monk, 1993). The study of the lifecourse then is concerned with the transitions that individuals go through as they age, and the pathways through life that individuals take (Katz and Monk, 1993). Hockey and James (2003) therefore state that the use of the lifecourse in academic work has,
“… been adopted as a way of envisaging the passing of a lifetime less as the mechanical turning of a wheel and more as the unpredictable flow of a river.” (290)
Therefore, where the life-cycle terminology tended to assume relatively fixed ‘rites of passage’ at particular chronological ages, in the analysis of life experiences, divisions cannot be made by chronological age alone (Laslett, 1989).
How old an individual is does not define the roles they hold or the activities they undertake, nor are there clear relations between chronological age and significant life events such as marriage, child bearing or retirement (Katz and Monk, 1993). In the post-industrial lifecourse, these events and stages of life are dynamic and varied (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). This reflects a process by which,
“… a number of life transitions have been delayed, prolonged, and increased in age variance, and the degree of universality and of sequential orderliness has decreased.” (Mayer, 2004: 172)
Understandings of the significance of the lifecourse to an individual can only be gained by drawing upon individuals’ own perceptions of their life to date; the lifecourse is a “self-referential process” (Mayer, 2004: 166). Individuals act in the context of past experiences, and each individual’s understanding of their past therefore serve to inform their future (Mayer, 2004; Hunt, 2005). The nature of the events which occur across the lifecourse is considered in the next section.
46 2.4.3. Lifecourse events
The study of the lifecourse is in effect the study of the cumulative impact of a lifetime’s sequence of events, some major and some comparatively minor, which each individual is a part of (Elder, 1985; Hareven, 2000; Bailey, 2009). As such, lifecourse research is concerned with how individuals experience the range of events, states and stages which occur from birth onwards (Mayer, 2004). In constructing biographies of each individual lifecourse, it is possible to relate different elements of life together, to relate “careers” to work and residence and others to transitions such as leaving home, becoming a parent, divorce, retirement and others (Dykstra and van Wissen, 1999; Bailey, 2009). Understanding how all of these different events are ordered and overlapped, and how experience of them impacts on the lifecourse, is a major benefit of lifecourse approaches (Mayer, 2004). Having understood the ways in which an individual is the product of a lifetime of events experienced, and how at different stages of the lifecourse different events and elements impact in different ways, it is possible to look for what Rossi (1980) describes as the, “…social patterns in the timing, duration, spacing and order of life events” (7). An example of how patterns of the occurrence and timing of events changes, and how this impacts across the lifecourse, is given by Saraceno’s (1991) work on Italian women’s lifecourses. Here it is stated that two social phenomena have been observed – a decrease in marriage and a decrease in fertility rates – which have prompted changes in the ways in which Italian women experience the lifecourse (Saraceno, 1991). The paper concludes by arguing that;
“…women’s biographies and life strategies have become explicitly more diversified, as resources and options have opened up. Childlessness, celibacy, divorce, and remarriage increasingly are legitimate options.”
(Saraceno, 1991: 516)
These individual and/or family events – marriage, divorce, child-rearing – clearly exist in a wider context, of increased divorce, of starting a family later and of having fewer children as women increasingly work. As such, the next section considers the importance of the wider social and cultural context to the lifecourse.
2.4.4. The lifecourse in context
So far this section has considered lifecourse at the scale of the individual, and how patterns may be observed and understood over different individuals’ lifecourses.
Next, it addresses the impact of the social and cultural context in which an individual lives on the nature of the lifecourse and how it is experienced. Gielle and Elder (1998) advocate a lifecourse perspective which seeks to take into account both the individual stories of peoples’ lives and the “social surroundings” in which
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they take place (24). In doing so, a picture of how individuals’ lives are shaped by both the social structures they inhabit and by the individual agency which they are able to exert can be developed (Hunt, 2005). Therefore, while lifecourse theory states that individuals experience and interpret their own lifecourses through choices and actions, these choices and actions may be reactions to external events, constrained by the parameters of their circumstances (Elder et al, 2003; Bäckman and Nilsson, 2011). The approach therefore,
“… attempts to bridge the macro- and micro-levels of social-structural analyses by incorporating the effects of history, social structure, and individual meaning into theoretical and analytical models.” (Bengtson et al, 1997: S80)
The individual remains the unit of analysis, yet the approach cannot be totally individualistic, as an individual cannot separate their lifecourse of experience from the social context in which it occurred (Musson, 1998; Hardill et al, 2007). The lifecourse approach therefore allows for the study of the overlap between individual, social and institutional structures (Dex, 1991; Baines and Hardill, 2008).
Along with the impact of external factors on the lifecourse, the literature also points to the cohort to which an individual belongs as being significant in their experience of the lifecourse (Katz and Monk, 1993; Mayer, 2004; Hunt, 2005). Groups born in a similar place at a similar time constitute a cohort, and it is suggested that these individuals are likely to have been influenced by the same economic and cultural trends, and that as a result members of a cohort may hold comparable attitudes and have experienced similar events (Hunt, 2005). But cohort also illustrates one of the problems with adopting a lifecourse perspective; it is difficult to consider in a single analysis the wide range of contextual variables – social class, gender, race and more (Hunt, 2005) – which the theoretical basis of the approach suggests should be considered (Bengtson et al, 1997). Issues of cohort may be so implicit to an individual that they do not identify it as part of their lifecourse experience (Katz and Monk, 1993), and so analysing its impact may be beyond the scope of individual-based research. It is a weakness of lifecourse approaches that they, like any attempt to measure human experience, are not able to capture all of the huge range of factors impacting on individuals, and as such it is more common that only certain select elements of the lifecourse are studied (Bengtson et al, 1997). Having explored the theoretical basis of the lifecourse approach, and limitations of the method, the next section explores how papers on volunteering, ageing and other social science subjects have utilised a lifecourse perspective.
48 2.4.5. Adopting a lifecourse perspective
A small number of previous pieces of research on volunteering have also argued for a lifecourse approach (see Hardill et al, 2007; Baines and Hardill, 2008; Neuberger, 2008; Brodie et al, 2011; Woolvin et al, 2011). Baroness Neuberger (2008) in her Report of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering states that the Commission saw viewing volunteering in terms of “volunteering journeys” (16) as a useful way to study the opportunities and challenges faced by volunteers. The conceptualisation of these journeys has two dimensions (Neuberger, 2008);
1. Throughout an individual’s life, volunteering will come and go, and will take on different forms and serve different purposes.
2. Each volunteer goes on a journey from when they first think about volunteering to the point where they are embedded in a voluntary role.
Decisions to volunteer therefore occur across the lifecourse, and any decisions made in older age need to be understood in the context of decisions, experiences and events which have occurred previously. As Neuberger argues,
“People may dip in and out of volunteering, doing more, less or nothing at all as volunteers at different stages of their lives, as a matter of choice or through circumstances.” (16)
Hardill et al (2007) justify the use of a lifecourse approach to volunteering research by arguing that it allows the researcher to …
“…understand the qualitative experience of volunteering, specifically why people create (emotional, temporal and physical) space for voluntary work, and how they juggle unpaid voluntary work with other ‘work’ (paid and unpaid) they undertake.” (400)
It should be stressed that notions of volunteering journeys do not suggest that participation in voluntary activity is in any way linear, nor that individuals progress up some sort of volunteering career ladder towards ever-greater involvement (Neuberger, 2008). Rather, participation in voluntary activity changes in nature, becomes more or less significant and plays different roles in an individual’s life at different stages of the lifecourse; this is what this thesis explores, to examine how this influences formal volunteering in older age.
2.4.6. Conclusion
This section has situated the lifecourse approach within changes to the broad patterns of social change, with a lifecourse concept argued for which takes into account the multiple turns, and concluded by briefly looking at some recent social science work and how it has justified the use of a lifecourse model of analysis. This section is fundamental to the analysis of the literature and of my data which makes
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up this thesis. All the elements of volunteering in older age are considered in the context of the lifecourse approach which this chapter has outlined.
50 2.5. Conclusion
This chapter has established the theoretical framework which underpins the analysis undertaken by this thesis. This framework is fundamental to the way in which this thesis sets about answering the research questions posed in Section 1.5.
It has directed the empirical research which is reviewed in the next chapter and guided how this previous research has been interpreted. Put simply, the research framework established in this chapter is as follows;
Volunteering is understood of one work role among many that individuals hold, and as an activity which is undertaken in different ways, in varying contexts and for changing reasons at different times across the lifecourse.
Having established this here, the next chapter looks at what has been previously found about the reasons why individuals volunteer across the lifecourse and into older age. The theoretical framework established in this chapter also underpins the methodological approach that this thesis has taken in designing, conducting and analysing primary research; as Chapter 4 will outline, methods adopted are holistic, considering volunteering in older age from a lifecourse perspective, in the context of the broad mix of work commitments that individuals negotiate over the lifecourse. The analysis contained in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 will again be undertaken within the theoretical framework outlined here. The heuristic established in Chapter 5 develops Davis Smith and Gay’s (2005) work, building on its lifecourse approach by considering not just the formal volunteering that individuals undertake across the lifecourse, but also the other work roles they engage in. Chapters 6 and 7 build on this by drawing on the distinction developed by Lukka and Locke (2007) and Woolvin (2011) between internal and external impulses to volunteer.
This chapter has been fundamental, then, in establishing the theoretical framework on which this thesis rests; it has set out the context in which the research questions will be answered.
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