Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A life-course approach offers a useful way of conceptualizing the ways
that people live their lives through time (Rigg, 2007). People pass
through a series of socially expected transitions, life stages or transfor-
mations from infancy to old age that varies in different places and from
one generation to another. Transformations in people's social position
over the life-course comprise socially expected (often highly gendered)
transitions and embodied changes associated with particular ages - such
as initiation rites marking the shift from childhood to youth, entry into
the labour market, marriage, childbirth and parenthood, grandparent-
hood, reduced work responsibilities and often increasing frailty in older
age. People's lives are also shaped by less predictable events over time,
such as illness or impairment, death of a family member, displacement
due to conflict or environmental disasters (Bowlby et al., 2010). These
life events may represent significant disruptions or reinforcements of
existing social ties, roles and identities in an individual's biography.
Furthermore, while stages of the life-course are associated with par-
ticular opportunities and restrictions, people also live through histori-
cal eras which may have a profound influence on such opportunities
and restrictions, as Rigg notes:
201
Consumption pressures, changing mores, better education, easing restric-
tions of female mobility, widening opportunities for employment and so on
will ensure that the vistas of opportunity open to a son or a daughter will be
different from those that were available to their fathers and mothers, let
alone their grandparents. (2007: 56)
This reveals the importance of analysing not only the life stage that a
person occupies, but also the generational cohort to which they belong
and intergenerational relations (Monk and Katz, 1993; Hopkins and
Pain, 2007; Rigg, 2007).
Generational transfers and intergenerational caring relations can be
theorized using the framework of a 'generational bargain' (Collard,
2000). The bargain is that the most economically active 'middle genera-
tion' makes transfers to the young with the expectation that resources
will be reciprocated to them in old age when they require care and sup-
port, while also fulfilling their obligations to support their older par-
ents. Collard (2000: 456) suggests that the intergenerational bargain
relies on each generation making 'such transfers as are consistent with
each cohort having a good life-prospect', which can break down if the
middle generation is unable to make the necessary transfer of resources
to the young and old.
